Ancient Evenings (45 page)

“It took me a while to reach the ledge, long enough to learn that living on the side of a wall is not so different from walking on the ground, no more different than sleep from daylight, and I gave a whoop as I joined Him, and received a quick embrace for the pleasure of our accomplishment. I must say I liked Him then as much as any soldier I had known, and thought of Him as my friend, not my Pharaoh.

“ ‘Here,’ He said, ‘this ledge is like any of a thousand ledges, yet there is none like it. For see what is behind the corner of this boulder.’

“It was a stone almost as tall as Himself, of a good thickness, and it nearly divided the ledge in two, but at the rear was a hole large enough for a man to crawl through, and when at His nod I tried it, a lizard went clawing up the walls of a cave inside, and I was in blackness but for the little light that entered.

“In the next instant, Ramses the Second was there beside me, and we sat in the heat, trying to rest despite the scratchings and wails of every creature we had disturbed by our entrance. Bats flew past like whips, and I heard that cry they make so close to the sound of a dying man’s breath—that whistle of panic. They spewed us with dung, yet the odor was forever altered by my nearness to the Pharaoh. In the dark, I could feel the nobility of His Presence, and that was as large as the cave, by which I mean His nearness was like a heart beating in the cave, and so the mean smell of bat dung was made sweeter by my Pharaoh’s own odor full of royal sweat from the climb. To this day, over all my four lives I cannot despise the odor of the bat altogether since it always recalls to me the warm generous limbs of that young Ramses. Yes.

“We did not sit on the floor of the cave for long, however, before the luminous strength of His body gave vision to my eyes, and I could see better in the gloom, and recognized that this cave was more a tunnel than a chamber, and He laughed at the ingenuity of His scheme, for He would build a tomb of twelve rooms here. Then He added, ‘All this is true if I return from the wars to come,’ and we were silent within this cave. The lizards still scuttled away from us in a clatter and I knew their Gods were terrified of smelling the sunlight on our limbs.

“ ‘It is the Hittites we will meet,’ said Ramses the Second sitting beside me on the floor, ‘and they fight with three men in each chariot. They are strong, but slow. They fight with bow and arrow, and with the sword and spear and,’—He took His time to say the next—‘sometimes they fight with an axe. They live in a country that has many trees, and they know how to use the axe.’

“In this darkness, I could not be certain of His expression, but I felt a new kind of fear. How wonderful is a new fear! It is like a face one has never seen before. It gives a thrill to new parts of one’s flesh. While it was one thing to be killed by a sword, and that was bad enough, there were now lamentations along my back and in my arms and thighs at the thought of being mangled by an axe.

“ ‘The Hittites have long black beards,’ said my Ramses, ‘and there is old food in such growth, and vermin, and their hair is matted on their shoulders. They are uglier than bears, and cannot live without the blood of battle. If they capture you, they are the worst foe of all. They will put a ring through your lips to jerk your head as you march, and some will flay you alive. So, of the Hittites I capture, I will bring back a hundred, and they will build My tomb.’ He smiled, and while He did not speak His thought, I saw those Hittites as they would look when the work was done, and they were without their tongues. ‘Yes,’ He said, ‘it is better than using Egyptians.’

“Now He stopped, and looked at me, and on His face was the same smile He had when He saw the peasant girl. If I could have moved, perhaps He would have done no more than smile, but I did not wish to, I could not, and He stood up then and seized the hair of my head even as His Father Seti held the head of captured slaves, and His member was before me. Then He came forth into my mouth from the excitement of looking into my face. No man had I allowed to do this to me before. Then, still holding my hair, He threw me to my knees, grasped me about the waist, and with not a scruple, thrust up the middle of me tearing I know not what, but I heard a clangor in my head equal to the great door of a temple knocked open by the blow of a log carried forward at a run by ten good men, it was with the force of ten good men that He took me up my bowels, and I lay with my face on the stony soil of the cave, while a bat screamed overhead. I heard Usermare cry out, ‘Your ass, little Meni’—even though I was near to His height and could equal His weight—‘your ass, little Meni, is Mine, and I give you a million years and infinity, your ass, little Meni, is sweet,’ wherefore He came forth with such a force that something in the very sanctuary of myself flew open, and the last of my pride was gone. I was no longer myself but His, and loved Him, and knew I would die for Him, but I also knew I would never forgive Him, not when I ate, not when I drank, and not when I defecated. Like an arrow flew one thought through my mind: It was that I must revenge myself.

“ ‘We shall never be destroyed in battle,’ He said. ‘We are now the beast that moves with its own four legs.’ And He gave a last kiss and sighed as if He had eaten all of a banquet. But I knew the taste in my mouth of the Very Green and the blood of my bowels kept knocking on my heart.

“We climbed down and walked back in the moonlight, watching the clouds pass over the stars. I could hear their voices. You can hear the voice of a cloud if you are silent enough on a quiet night although that whisper is near to the most quiet sound of them all. In the dawn as we came back with our chariot to the boat on the riverbank, we stopped to watch the flight of a hawk, and I knew that bird of Horus was most intimate to the sun, for it would see the first rising to the east while we still breathed in the dark to the west.”

FIVE

Menenhetet was well aware of how we felt. The smile on his lips was thin when Ptah-nem-hotep looked away. I had seen a thief’s face once just before his hand was chopped off in a public square—Eyaseyab having rushed to the sight in the heat of curiosity. The thief gave a smile, that peculiar ridiculous grimace we offer when we have been caught in a trivial act.

The thief lost his smile when the blade came down. I woke up screaming on many a night at the look of bewilderment in his eyes. For the thief looked like he was falling to his death.

Now I saw just such a look on my great-grandfather’s face, and I knew he was still living in the dust of the cave of Usermare’s tomb. Nonetheless he shrugged. He had the look of a donkey laboring beneath bags of grain he had carried every day of his life.

“I knew,” he now said, “that I would never forget. And I did not. But I have never spoken of it until this evening. Now, I will speak of it again. For I have never known more shame than in the days that followed. Yet a great part of this shame was for the joy of remembering. My bowels felt gilded. The light of a God was in my chest. A God had entered me. I was not like other men, although I felt more of a woman.”

It was true. As he spoke, the woe lifted from my parents, and from Ramses the Ninth as well. They felt troubled, and I could know their shame—it was not unlike the way I would feel when still too young to control myself in bed, I would soil my linen. Yet I also felt their respect for Menenhetet and it was different now, and not without the finest awe. For he was no longer alone before us. Another presence was with him.

“I remember,” he said, “that I did not sleep for two days, and thought the moon had entered my heart. I saw nothing but a pale radiance within. I vowed I would never allow Usermare-Setpenere to enter me again, and that was equal to admitting I was terrified of seeing Him, I, who had never been frightened of any man. Still, if He were to make the attempt, I would have to resist, and that would be my death. So I wondered how to avoid the presence of my Majesty, and kept wondering, until I realized that He, by His turn, was avoiding me. For no sooner had we returned on that dawn to Thebes than my King was occupied with mobilizing His troops for the march into Syria against the Hittites, and messengers were sent to bring up troops from Syene and others went north to Memphi, and Busiris in the Delta, and Buto and Tanis, to inform the garrisons how many men would be called. All the while, we were busy in Thebes collecting our own stores.

“Then, we embarked on boats, some three thousand of us from Thebes, plus a thousand horses, a total of thirty boats, and we took five days going down the river to Memphi. Our bodies sat so close to one another on the deck that when fights commenced from the fretting of one chin on another’s back, there was not room to reply in any better way than to bite the other man’s nose, and twice I did. They carried the mark on their face until they died. Let me say, and it is obvious, I should think, that I was not on the Falcon-Ship. On most days, that Royal Barge was so far downstream we could not even see the reflection from the gold of His mast, although I could hear the sounds of laughter. That came back over the water. In fact, I did not see my King again for Fifteen days until we came to Gaza where the army was at last assembled, but even there I was never near Him alone for we camped on a vast plain full of dust from the drilling of new detachments, and the clouds left by our chariots. It was, all the same, preferable to the boat. There, two hundred of us had been packed in, the support for your back no more than the knees of the soldier behind you, and no way to feel sorry for yourself, because on either side of our rank of six men was a poor oarsman pumping on the oars even as he pumped his life out. They say it is easier to row downstream, and it is, but not much when you are rowing steadily, and besides, the pace is faster. Pressed together in the open hold with the red mainsail spread over us as an awning, we were not able to see the sky—just as well in that heat. We had nothing but the gasp of those fellows pulling on their lungs to the creak of the oars, and I never saw more than the bodies in front of me, or the naked sweat of the oarsmen to either side, their raised benches blocking all view of the horizon. Nor did I even feel the thousand limbs of the river passing beneath, nor hear the rustle of the water, no, in the hold of that boat with two hundred other soldiers, we heard nothing but grunts, and were fed nothing but grain and water until we farted like cattle. With so much fermentation in the gas, you could get drunk from breathing it. There was a monkey that belonged to the captain and I believe the monkey did get drunk, or maybe it was his excitement at being handled by so many of us, whatever, he was the only entertainment we had. He would make me laugh until the veins in my head came near to breaking, for when the captain would stand in the bridge near the bow, his fat buttocks squeezed together, his hand shielding his eyes against the glare of the river, so would the monkey do the same, and we would roar. Yet all the while I was laughing, I was also sitting on my sore seat, not knowing if I had a wound in which to take pride or shame, and so feeling like the lowest servant of the Gods. Like the monkey among us.

“In Gaza, I never saw the city. They said it was now an Egyptian city, but we camped out in the desert and drank goats’ milk, which did not reduce our gas. To travel is to break wind—as our saying goes—and in the tents we talked of nothing but fresh food. Once our legs were back, for I could hardly walk after two weeks on the boat, we charioteers went out foraging and even ate some goose. We roasted it near a grove of dead trees and the wood of the fire was silver and blazed with a heat like the sun from the fat that dripped on it. There was a happiness in that fire as if the wood, drier than bone, had slaked its thirst at last.

“Then the King called a great council of all of us together in His leather tent which was as large as twenty tents, and more than a hundred of us sat in a council of war in a large circle about Him. Our Ramses the Second never looked more magnificent, and had made a new friend since last I saw Him. A lion, on a short leash, stood by His right side.

“This lion, Hera-Ra, was a remarkable beast. How it had been tamed, I do not know—it came in tribute from Nubia—but the Pharaoh received it only the week before we left, and it was said that neither the King nor the animal could now bear to be without the other. That gave me the first jealousy I ever felt. I did not know whether I had been treated lately like the lowest of charioteers because Usermare-Setpenere had lost respect for me, or just found the lion more attractive. I even wondered if the King dared to treat the buttocks of the lion in the way He had mine. It was not an absurd thought if you knew Ramses the Second. Left to yourself, your will might feel strong as rock, but when He looked in your eyes, or seized you, like His Father, by the hank of your hair, then your will flowed away into the thousand limbs of water. Certainly, there was an understanding between Him and this Hera-Ra. Face-of-Ra indeed, the lion had a head more like a God than a man, and looked at everyone with a large and intelligent calm that had much friendliness in it, something like the way a two-year-old noble will think of all who come near as bearers of great pleasure for himself. The noble, of course, is spoiled, and flies into a rage so soon as the first wrong sound offends his ear—like this, was the lion. Like this, for that matter, was Usermare-Setpenere. They both looked at you with the same friendly interest.