The Egyptian by Mika Waltari

Posted by admin_akashic on Mar 4th, 2022 in Stories

At the sight of him, I was reminded of our plight and became terrified, saying, “You drunken bat, you should have cheered us with good counsel and helped us out of this, for we shall soon all three be hanging heads downward by the heels in a row, but instead, you drank yourself sodden and snored face downward like a pig in the mire. Say quickly what is to be done, for the King’s soldiers must already be in pursuit in their boats to slay us.”

Kaptah did not panic, but said, “If it is true what you said, the King does not expect to see you for the next thirty days and promised to drive you out from his house with sticks if you untimely appeared before him. Therefore I do not see any reason to haste, but if things have gone wrong and the porters have reported your flight or the eunuchs in the women’s house have messed up their affairs, then we cannot help it. However, I still trust the scarab, and I think it was most inappropriate for you to make me drink poppy juice so that my head pained as if shoemaker’s needles were stuck into it, for had you not rushed things, Burnaburiash would surely have gotten a bone in the wrong way or stumbled on his own feet and broken his neck so that I would have become the King of Babylon and the lord of the four corners of the world, and we would have nothing to worry about. So firm is my trust in scarab, but I forgive you for you are my master and you did not understand what you did. I also forgive you how you put me in a jar where I almost suffocated, and which hurt my dignity. All this forced me to cure my head first before giving you any advice, for in the morning a rotten root would have given better advice than me. But now I am ready to give all my wisdom to you for I well know that in this world you cry like a lamb lost from its mother.”

I told him to stop his never-ending babbling and say what he thought we should do to escape from the land of Babylon. Kaptah scratched his head and said, “This boat is indeed too large for three of us to row upstream. To speak truth, I have no love for oars for they raise blisters on my hands. We should therefore go ashore and steal a few donkeys on whose backs to load our bundles. Let us dress in shabby garments so as not to attract attention, and we must bargain and haggle at the inns, and you must not let it be known that you are a physician but feign to be someone else. Therefore let us be a company of jugglers, entertaining the rustics in the evening on the threshing floors for no one chases jugglers, and thieves think them not worth the trouble of robbing.

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You can tell the yokels fortunes in oil, as you have learned to do, and I can tell them funny stories without end, like you know, and the girl can dance for her bread. But we could as well hire some oarsmen and ride this very boat all the way to the border for at the end of the day everything is in the hands of the scarab and he can protect us in the river as well as on the road. However, certainty is best, and it would not be nice to steal the boat from its poor oarsmen, who are no doubt lurking somewhere in the reeds, waiting only for darkness to kill us. We should be wise to set off at once, and if the oarsmen try to urge King’s guards after us, I don’t think anyone will believe their stories, since they will talk about raging devils in clay jars and other miracles they experienced so that the soldiers and judges will send them to Temple’s priests without bothering to examine their stories.”

Evening was upon us, and there was no time to be lost. Kaptah was certainly right in supposing that the oarsmen would conquer their fears and return to fetch their boat, and they were ten strong men against us. We smeared ourselves with their oil and soiled our clothes and faces with mud, then divided the remains of my gold and silver between us, hiding it in our girdles and other garments. My medicine chest, which I was unwilling to leave, we rolled up in the mat and laid on Kaptah’s back, despite all his protests, and then after wading ashore let the boat drift in amongst the reeds. In the boat, we left food and a couple of wine jars, Kaptah believing that the men would settle for that and stay to get drunk, after which they would not trouble to pursue us. If they tried to accuse us before the judges when they were sober, they would give conflicting evidence, and their story would be so confusing that the judges would drive them away with sticks — or so I hoped.

Thus we began our wandering and came to cultivated areas and found a caravan route that we followed all night, though Kaptah cursed the day he was born to this world because of the weight of the bundle that sat askew on his shoulders. In the morning, we reached a village whose inhabitants greeted us warmly and with respect because we had dared to travel by night regardless of devils. They gave us porridge made with milk and sold us two donkeys and held festival when we left them, for they were simple folk who had not seen minted gold for many months but paid their taxes in grain and cattle and dwelled in mud huts amongst their cattle and animals.

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