The Egyptian by Mika Waltari

Posted by admin_akashic on Mar 4th, 2022 in Stories

look at me, boy. I left in the desert my youth, robbed of by starvation, privation and hardship. There, the flesh melted from my limbs, my skin toughened, and my heart hardened to stone. Worst of all, the parched desert dried my tongue, and I became the prey of unquenchable thirst, like every other soldier who returns alive from foreign wars. And life has been like the valley of death since I lost my arm. I need not so much as mention the pain of the wound and the agony when the meat cutters scalded the stump in boiling oil after the amputation, like your father well knows. Blessed be your name, Senmut, a just and good man — but the wine is finished!”

The old man fell silent, panted a little, and sitting down upon the ground again, he sadly turned the earthenware bowl upside down. The wild fire dimmed in his eyes, and he was once more an old, unhappy man.

“But a warrior need not know how to write,” I dared to whisper, frightened.

“Hm,” said the old man and looked sideways at my father. My father took quickly a copper bangle from his arm and handed it to the old man. He called loudly, and soon a dirty boy ran up, took the ring and the bowl and started for the wine tavern after more wine.

“Don’t buy the best,” shouted Inteb to him. “Get the sour — they’ll give you more of it.” He looked at me again, reflectively. “You are right,” he said. “A warrior need not know how to write, he only needs to know how to fight. If he could write, he would be an officer with command over even the most valiant and send the others before him into battle. Anyone who can write is fit to command soldiers, but a man who cannot scribble so much as a pothook will never have even much a hundred under him. What joy can he take in gold chains and honours when it is the man with the reed pen in his hand who gives the orders? But thus it is, and thus it will be. Therefore, my lad, if you wish to command soldiers and lead them, learn to write first. Then those with the golden chains will bow down before you, and slaves will carry you in a chair to the field of battle.”

The dirty boy came back with a jar of wine and had the bowl full of wine as well. The old man’s face shone with joy.

“Your father Senmut is a good man,” he said amiably. “He can write, and he tended me in my halcyon days when wine was plentiful, and I started seeing crocodiles and hippopotamuses. He is a good man, though he is only a doctor and cannot handle a bow. He has my thanks!”

I stared frightened at the wine jar to which Inteb plainly meant to turn his full attention and began to tug at my father’s wide, drug-stained sleeve, fearful that so much wine might result in our waking, bruised and beaten, on some street corner. My father Senmut looked at the jar also, sighed a little and turned to lead me away. Inteb lifted up his shrill old man’s voice in a Syrian battle song, and the naked, sun-blackened boy laughed.

So I, Sinuhe, buried my martial dreams and no longer resisted, when my father and mother took me the next day to school.

My father naturally could not afford to send me to any of the big temple schools where the sons — and sometimes daughters — of rich men, nobles and priests of the higher order were taught. My teacher was the old priest Oneh, who lived not far away and held classes on his worn-down veranda. His pupils were the children of artisans, merchants, dock foremen and non-commissioned officers whose ambition sought to open a scribe’s career for their sons. Oneh had in his time been a storage accountant of the Celestial Mut in the Temple and was therefore well fitted to give elementary writing lessons to children who later on would be keeping tally of merchandise, measures of grain, head of cattle or provisions for the army. There were hundreds of such little schools in the great city of Thebes. Instruction was cheap, the pupils merely having to maintain the teacher. The charcoal seller’s son replenished his brazier in winter, the weaver’s son kept him in clothes, the corn chandler’s boy saw that he never ran short of flour and my father treated his many aches and pains and gave him herbal anodynes to take in his wine.

His dependence upon us made Oneh a gentle teacher. A boy who fell asleep over his tablets never had his ears boxed; he had but to filch some titbit for the old man next morning. Sometimes the corn