The Egyptian by Mika Waltari

Posted by admin_akashic on Mar 4th, 2022 in Stories

“The more I hear about gods, the more weary I am of gods,” I said dejectedly, but Suppiluliuma’s Keeper of the Archives only laughed and leaned back on his chair, full of wine and his thick nose red. “If you are farsighted,” he said, “you stay with us and start worshipping our gods for all known countries have had their moment to rule the known world, and now is our moment. Our gods are very powerful, and their names are Power and Fear, and we plan to build them great altars from whitened human skulls. I do not even forbid you from telling this to anyone if you are stupid and leave us, for no one would believe you because they know how the Hittites only love their meadows and are a poor, dirty, nomadic people who live on the mountains with their goats and sheep. But I have spent too much time with you, and I have to leave to keep my scribes in check and push cuneiform signs in soft clay to assure other countries of our good intentions like my office requires.”

He left, and that evening I told Minea, “I have learned enough about the land of Hatti and have found what I came to seek. I am ready to leave this country with you, gods willing, for there is a smell of corpses here, and it stifles me. Death broods over me like an oppressive shade as long as we remain, and I don’t doubt their King would have me impaled on a stake if he knew what I have discovered. Whoever they want to kill, they do not hang him on the wall head downward, like all civilised people do, but impale him with a spear until he dies. I have pain in my stomach as long as I stay within the border stones of this country. All that I have heard makes me feel that I would rather have been born a crow than a man to this world.”

With the help of some of my more eminent patients, I succeeded in getting a permit to travel by a prescribed route to the coast and there to board a ship and leave the country. My patients greatly bewailed my departure and urged me to stay, assuring me that if I continued to practice among them I should be wealthy in a few years. However, no one sought to prevent my going, and I laughed and joked with them and told them the stories they enjoyed so that we parted friends and they gave me many presents in farewell. We left the fearful ramparts of Hattusa, behind which lurked the world of the future, and rode on our donkeys past the blinded slaves who turned the thundering millstones; and past the corpses of sorcerers impaled on either side of the road, for anyone teaching unauthorised arts in Hattusa was killed as a sorcerer, and there was only one art authorised by the state. I made all possible speed, and in twenty days we arrived at the port.

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Many ships from Syria and from all islands in the sea arrived to this port, and it was not unlike any port in the world, even if the Hittites guarded it and taxed the ships and checked the clay tablets of those who planned to leave the country. But no one from the ships attempted to go inland, and the captains, coxes and sailors didn’t know the land of the Hittites except for this port and the same taverns, pleasure houses, the same girls and the same frenetic Syrian music they knew from all ports anywhere in the world. They felt at home and enjoyed their stay and did not hasten their departure and, to be sure, worshipped also the Hittite gods, the Sky and the Earth Mother, without forgetting their own gods, kept by captains in their closed cabins.

Buzzing like a cloud of flies, they gathered to harbour piers to suck beer through straws from clay jars so that around a single jar there could be ten or twelve men from different countries racing to suck beer. The beer of the Hittites was strong and went to the head like smoke, so that by night they broke down the doors of pleasure houses and kicked down the potters’ wheels and struck wounds in each other with knives and clubs and forced girls to their boats until the Hittite guardsmen arrived and calmed them down with the shafts of their spears. Whatever damage they caused, they needed to pay and compensate with copper and silver, and this came to them as no surprise for they already knew the price of a split skull, a pierced eye and an open wound in the body. They laughed loudly and said, “This is a great country, and we will return here.” And if they happened to see a sorcerer impaled by the wall, they said, “Sorcery is an evil matter, and this man has conjured his bowel open.” The Hittites recruited the most skilled sailors and made them run away from their ships, because they were not a seafaring people; and while the other countries hire warriors, they hire sailors and pilots and shipbuilders and treat them well so that they would loudly brag about their pay and good conditions, tempting others to leave their ships as well.

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