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take Ramses’ hand, all the while smiling at him with a mixture of contempt and respect—or so it seemed to Moses, who had seen his mother smile so rarely of late. In any case, it gave him back enough of his courage for him to ask,
    â€œAnd what is the matter with my name, Lord Ramses, my father?”
    â€œSee, Enekhas-Amon,” he said, waving his golden sickle, “the lad has a tongue and uses it smartly, if I may say so.” And to Moses, “Nothing is wrong with your name as a name, sir, but it’s only part of a name, and where is the other part, we ask ourselves? I am amused, not at you, but at my royal sister who does things that no one ever thought of doing—a disturbing quality in a woman, Moses. As for your name—what it says is fine—a child is given.” He turned to the woman now, “But where is the rest of it, my sister?” a note of gentle mockery in his voice. “In all Egypt—there is no other Moses—because Moses is not a name at all. It is a question, my sister—and a rather insolent one, at that.”
    Enekhas-Amon shook her head, her eyes narrowing dangerously. If Moses had been watching her now, all of his fear would have returned, but he was staring fascinatedly at the king, who shrugged and said,
    â€œI’m just making a little jest, lad. If you were Tut-Moses, Amon-Moses, Anubus-Moses or any one of twenty other Moses, no one would raise a brow. As a matter of fact, I like Moses—as it is. A child is given, and that’s enough. Stop looking at me that way, my sister—because I had the feeling that we had both cleansed our hearts of that sort of thing. Kneel down, Moses, and I will give you the blessing of the gods of Egypt. They will look kindly upon you, and they will turn arrows from your neck and knives from your heart. And perhaps they will even fear you a bit, so that when you cross over into their land they will not deny you the life everlasting which is the heritage of a prince of Egypt.”
    As Moses knelt and felt the king’s hand on his head, he could only sigh inwardly with profound relief that it had ended as well as this. He was too young to be concerned about life everlasting, but old enough to want to live at least until he got out of this unpredictable man’s presence.

[4]
    IT WAS SURPRISING how quickly he forgot his fears. A boy, even in the palace of a god, remains a boy, and for Moses there was more happiness than unhappiness. His life then was a full one, and if at times from the walls of the great palace he saw and envied the peasant lads, the street urchins, the river waifs who ran as wild as leaves tossed in the wind, who went as they pleased and slept where and when they pleased, he also had enough wit to sense that their abandon was short lived and that his own lot, whatsoever lay behind it, was a lucky one. And even for the royal progeny there were hours of abandon and aimless play, though there were more hours of school, of endless instruction in the use of the tools of war, of rigid instruction in the art of making and using hieroglyphs, of composing poems according to the classical style, of memorizing those spells and rituals from the Book of the Dead considered necessary for the cultural equipment of a prince of Egypt; of likewise committing to memory the psalms and prayers considered most salutary, of learning the process of mathematics and the elements of astronomy, or practising the measured precision of five dances, of becoming expert in the hundred rituals of manners that would always reveal in an instant who was highborn and who was lowborn—and finally, of instruction in the development of that strange and jealously held property of Egyptians, their macaat , which Egyptians would hesitate to render into other languages, holding that the quality existed only in Egypt and was therefore unintelligible to foreigners, but which Moses would translate in later life as the word