Ancient Evenings (48 page)

“Unable, therefore, to move, I told myself I could hardly approach the campfire if I did not have my strength.

“One thought, however, did come. If I was in a strange land, why did the Gods who lived in these trees offer Their confidence to me? Why did They not give it to the thieves by the campfire? It was their country. Maybe it was because those two good fellows—I could hear now that there were no more than two—were drunk, and so their minds were like a swamp and seeped out in all directions. Such is the power of wine. It is, after all, the juice that comes from a dying grape—to get drunk is to know how it is to begin to die. So they were far away from nearby Gods. But I was close, as close as the touch of the leaves overhead. It was then I understood that the Gods of these trees were offended by the rudeness of those who dared to get drunk among Them. So I might not need to touch a tree if I thought less of the task ahead and stayed close instead to the spirits of the nearest branch. At this moment I felt blessed by the forest. I could even smell those trees who were happy, and know those who were not well—what a difference! One complained of its roots which were growing between many rocks, another was fresh and young but shadowed by a taller tree. Still one other had been split by lightning and grew to a great size after being struck. It stood there like a crippled giant and inspired silence. I bowed my head as if truly passing a giant of a fellow who now stared only at the sky. Now I could understand that these trees would give me their good force if I showed respect, and I paid attention to each step before me. Feeling, thereby, a fine peace, I passed through what these trees had to offer me (and their thoughts were so pure they came to my senses like perfume) and at last I reached the edge of a very small clearing where the fire burned. I saw two drunk thieves. They were wrestling with each other in a kind of dance, and laughing, and wet from the heat of the fire, each with his member sticking out through the old animal skins they wore.

“They gave a shriek when they saw my sword, then flew apart, a wise move. Now I could not attack one without showing my back to the other. Yet it gave the choice of who to attack first. Both were tall, but one was slender and sly as a quick animal while the other was rich in his muscles, a body I could recognize as near to my own, and on the calm instinct, the wisdom, if I may speak of it so, that the trees had offered, I nodded to both, smiled, and with a speed of arm faster than any I had shown before, put my sword through the slim man’s chest and felt his heart go right up my arm. I blazed within as if touched by Usermare-Setpenere. Until then, never, not even with my King had I known such a moment, equal to lightning, I would say, if lightning were bliss, and then the slim thief’s face began to change. The tricks he had played on others came over his expression one by one—thievery, betrayal, and ambush were his hidden faces—but by the end, I saw a good man, not without bravery, and he died with a peaceful look.

“The other thief could have run away in the time I took to look at what I had done, but he seized a rock instead, and threw it at my head. I ducked, and by then he had two more rocks, and I laughed in the happiness that we would have a contest, and advanced on him. He threw one rock. Again I ducked. Then he hurled another at my chest, which I caught with my free hand. As he reached to the ground to pick up another, I knocked him flat with the stone I held, a good blow to the neck that finished his fight. As he lay on his knees, groggy as a cow given a blow in preparation for the knife, I took my sword and with the flat beat him on the back until he was soft like a steak that is pounded, very much alive, I promise you, for he yowled like a wounded beast, but soft. He had no will to send to his muscles.

“It was then I discovered the gift Usermare-Setpenere had left in my bowels. Gift it was. I had known from the time He seized me by the hair and took me by the place no other man had ever reached, that something new had been left in me and I did not know how to use it, but then I had never had such an hour before. Now, I could feel the gift. It was nothing to take a boy from the rear, or a man, for that matter, if he were weak enough. I had done as much ever since I was a boy myself—weaker boys, animals, girls when I could find them. You had to find a girl whose father and brothers were more afraid of you than you of them, but, in any case, it had all been nothing, I was a soldier, not a lover, not even a soldier but a river. A flood rose, and I rose with it.”

Here, Menenhetet paused before he said: “I would make it clear again, Good God, that I speak out of the innocence of mind I knew in my first life. In those years I never had a thought for the body I entered. Rather I did it to find the peace that comes from the Gods. An animal knows as much. I may say that I have seen such light in an animal’s body. So there was nothing new about this thief except that he had a back and ribs that would have looked like my own if not so thoroughly marinated by the flat of my sword. Yet I never enjoyed a buggery so much. My hand flew into the thick hair at the back of his head, and I felt my member swell to the size of a King. I was large with the gift of Ramses the Second. No door could have withstood my horn. The thief shrieked like a beast disemboweled. The first slash of the butcher has gone wrong and the poor animal runs around the shop with its tripe falling out while the customers scream and the butcher curses. Those were the sounds this fellow made beneath me and I even felt the last of his strength—that power which is attached to each man’s Secret Name, if so I may put it—for it came right into my belly, as if my loins were drinking it from him, oh, how I loved his ass. It belonged to me. I could hardly take air through my nostrils so thick were my feelings. I had used holes before, but only to give me peace, as I have said. This time I was ready to steal the seven souls and spirits of this wretch, and when I came forth it was with all that had been put into me by Ramses the Great, the very message He inscribed on the walls of my insides Even as the very center of me had been stolen by my Pharaoh, so did I steal it from another, and knew it could never stop. I had an appetite as strong as the color of my blood and knew I would keep trying to steal the seven souls of all I met, indeed when I was done, I kissed this fellow on the lips, and wiped my prick on his buttocks as a courtesy for the pleasure he had given me, then slapped it into his mouth in order to grow hard again.

“But you need no more in the way of such description. I took him through the night as if I possessed the Royal Member of Ramses the Great—may I speak with the truth that is found in the balance of Maat—I came to know the strength and the bravery and the cheap treacherous shit of this cutthroat whose name I never asked (I spoke none of his language and he knew fifty words of Egyptian) but before I was done, I had acquired all of his character that I would care to use and a few of his bad habits as well, or so I would have to think when I would find my fingers looking into the possessions of others, yes, I took him so thoroughly that there was a thief in me for the next ten years, yet by the time I left him sobbing on the ground, grateful for the tenth time that he was not dead, he was also mourning all those qualities in himself he would never know again, and I had learned one matter of interest about the King of Kadesh—it was that he had a woman on the Street of the Jewelers in the city of Tyre, of New Tyre, not the Old, and she was his secret whore. Of the armies of the King of Kadesh, this thief knew nothing except that there were armies.

“I speak of this knowledge as if the thief and I both owned the same language and had met in a beer-house for a drink, but getting him to tell me took half the night, and a few tortures of the hair on his head. I ripped away half his scalp before all desire for him was out of me, and even then he stammered forth whatever words he had. Maybe he would have answered sooner if not for his lack of Egyptian words. They have narrow ears, these Syrians, so it took long. I would ask a question, but then I would enjoy the power of my body over his body so much that he could not even try to give the answer. I felt as if I had grown a tree out of my crotch and it was on fire and this tree was being rammed into those secret turns of the bowel where the Secret Name is held.” He paused for breath and I felt my own Sweet Finger stirring.

“I always knew that men took a great deal of pleasure in each other,” said my mother, “but I never understood the price.”

“It is not always like that,” said Menenhetet. “Indeed, the night was unusual.”

Ptah-nem-hotep said: “Perhaps our good Menenhetet also takes pleasure from the recollection.”

“One must,” said Menenhetet. He shrugged. “In the morning, I kissed that poor thief again and sent him limping back to Megiddo, and worked the horses toward Tyre. I was over the worst of the mountains and it was a quick trip down—too quick—coming out of one of the ravines, we were going fast around a turn, hit a rock, and spilled. I went leaping off the road but landed on my feet with no more than a bruise for the bone of my heel. The horses were screaming in their traces and the shaft that goes from their harness to the cart had split at the fastening. In my pouch I had two hardwood spikes and leather thongs, but still lost half the day. Let me say I was no carpenter.

“By the time Mu and Ta were harnessed again, the sun was overhead. What a ride was ahead of me! The road became no smoother and the chariot groaned through every one of its fastenings. I did not know if I could get it all the way to Tyre and hardly knew why I wanted to. At this point, it would be faster to travel on one horse with my weapons on the other, but then no charioteer wants to lose his cart. Mine, of course, had little to distinguish it—just a wood wagon. Still, it had the lines of a chariot, so my sense of what was proper did not suffer. While only a few specks of paint still stuck to the wood, and it certainly looked—with those thongs around the shaft—as though it was waiting to fall apart again, I liked it enough to laugh, for my own post was sore at its root. ‘Better you than me, old soldier,’ I said to the chariot, and we went on.

“The road dipped, it climbed, it turned, but the forest began to open into fields, and around a knoll I could look down through the ravines to the sea. There was air in my lungs of a sort I had never breathed before, not even on the Delta, a smell—it had to be—of the Very Green itself, and wholly composed of fish, with an odor refreshing to my nose, not like the fish that rotted on the mud flats of the Nile. No, this good smell that came up into the hills from the loveliness of the Very Green was amazing to me, as clean as if I were breathing the very scent of Nut when She holds up the sky, so dainty, so different from the meat that gets into the sweat of men and some women. I began to cry because I had never known a lady like that. I do not mean that I wept like a child nor in weakness, but with a healthy longing now that my pride (because of what I had done to the thief) felt much restored. Besides, the water went out to a great distance, extending beyond the strength of my eyes until I could not find the place where the sky overhead came down to meet the sea and that was part of why I wept, as if a sight of the greatest beauty was being withheld from me. Then there were the ships. I was used to our own sailboats on the river, and the royal barks with their huge red and purple sailcloth, and their gold and silver hulls that gave more show of our great wealth than watching a royal procession, but these boats here on the Very Green—so far away I could not even see the color of their hulls—had white sails, and that was also a sight I had never known before. They rode through long curves of water that almost buried them, and their sails spread out like the wings of white butterflies. I could not believe how many I saw, and some by their direction were rowing away from Tyre and some were sailing to it, although, as I descended, I could not see Tyre itself, only the stones by the shore.

“Now, riding by the rocky coast, the road would sometimes climb over a spur of mountain that moved right into the sea like an arm in front of your nose, and sometimes our wheels would wobble along a trail that almost came down to the rocks of the sea, and these low roads were wet. I had never before seen such streams of water to come at you. The sea was like a serpent rolling down a hill, if a serpent were to do such, then smashing on the rocks. I was covered with spray from the Very Green and what a taste it had—of minerals and fish and the soft little devils that live in shells and something mysterious as well—maybe it was the smell of everything I did not know. All I can say is that the feel of the Very Green as it sprayed on me still had much to do with a lady for it was also light and contemptuous and playful, but could leave you chilled.

“Then it grew dark and I realized there were many Gods and Goddesses in this sea, and Their feelings could shift. Certainly the serpents that rose from the water now smashed with more force on the shore, and left a noise like thunder. The spray began to sting my eyes. I was happy to climb a hill that lifted me above such spite, but realized even as I got out of the chariot to lift the wheels from one smooth bump to the next that here the hill was of solid rock, and workmen—back so long ago as Thutmose the Third, or was it nearer to the beginning with Khufu?—must have labored for years to cut these steps on the road to Tyre. It was truly a stairway and would have impressed me more if not for our Egyptian works that are so much greater. Still, I learned another truth about the sea. For in the dark, the water struck the wall below the road, and this shock was like standing on the parapet of a fort while a siege army pounds on your gates with a battering ram. The spray flew up here to the height even of fifty or a hundred cubits above the sea, and when I looked down in the near dark, the Very Green had a million and infinity of mouths with white spit on all of them, and it growled and sucked at the ledge like a lion tearing at its prey. Even while I watched, came one massive blow of the largest serpent of water I had yet seen, a snake as large as the Nile, and it smashed the cliff so well that a full slab of rock gave a groaning sound, wrenched forth from its socket and fell into the sea. I was trembling so much at this encroachment on my road, and at the endless anger I could feel in the true Gods of the Very Green, that I wondered how I would even dare tomorrow to embark on a ship and ride over such serpents to the Island of New Tyre. I can only say that so soon as we were past the hill, the road, to my relief, moved inland, and I made camp, ate some wet grain with the horses, then slept shivering in my damp clothes.