The Egyptian by Mika Waltari

Posted by admin_akashic on Mar 4th, 2022 in Stories

I and Horemheb followed all this from the Avenue of Rams, but the confusion, noise and commotion in front of the Temple was so great that we hardly saw what was happening, and it was only later when we learned about it. And Horemheb said, “I have no power to interfere in this, but seeing all this, I think I learn a lot.” He climbed on a ram-headed lion and surveyed everything that was going on from there, chewing the bread he had taken when he left the tavern.

The royal commander-in-chief Pepitaten grew uneasy as time passed and the water clock beside him gurgled away and the roar of the people met his ear like the rushing of an angry torrent. He summoned again his officers and rebuked them for the delay and said, “My Sudanese cat Mimo is to kitten today, and I am anxious about her because I am not there to help her by her cage. In the name of Aten, go in already and overturn that accursed image that we may all go home, or by Seth and all devils, I will snatch the chains from your necks and break your whips, that I swear.”

When the officers heard this, they knew that they were betrayed, whatever the outcome, and they consulted each other and called all the gods of the underworld and resolved at least to save their honour as soldiers. They reformed their men and charged and hurled the people aside like dry chaff before a flood, and the spears of the black men were reddened, and blood flowed over the square, and a hundred times a hundred men, women and children perished that morning before the Temple in the name of Aten. For when the priests saw that the soldiers were attacking in earnest, they closed the pylon gates, and the people fled this way and that like stampeded sheep, and the black men, wild from blood, pursued them and slew them with arrows, while the charioteers stormed through the streets transfixing every fugitive with their spears. But in their flight, the people forced their way into the temple of Aten, overturned the altars, and slew such priests as they caught them while the pursuing chariots thundered in after them. Thus the stone pavement of Aten’s temple was soon filled with blood and the bodies of dying.

But the walls of Amun’s Temple blocked the way for Pepitaten’s troops, for the black men were not accustomed to storming fortifications nor did their battering rams avail to force the copper gates, however easily they broke the gates of pole-walled villages in some southern

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jungle in the land of giraffes. The soldiers could do no more than encircle the Temple, and from the walls the priests yelled imprecations upon them, and the Temple guards let fly at them with their arrows and hurled their spears, so that many a painted black man fell, and to no purpose. From the square before the Temple rose the thick reek of blood, and flies from all over the city gathered there in swirling clouds. Pepitaten came in his golden chair and turned grey in the face at the hideous stench, and he bade slaves burn incense about him, and he wept and rent his clothes at the sight of the countless dead. Yet his heart was full of uneasiness on account of Mimo the Sudanese cat, so he said to his officers, “I fear that Pharaoh’s wrath will be most terrible, for you have not overturned the image of Amun, but instead the blood flows in streams along the gutters of the square. But what is done, is done. I must hasten to Pharaoh to report on what has passed, and I shall try to speak on your behalf. At the same time, I shall be able to call at my house, to see my cat, and change my clothes, for the smell here is fearful and soaks into the very skin. Calm down the black men and give them food and beer, for there is nothing we can do to the Temple walls today. That I know for I am an experienced commander, and we are not prepared for breaking walls. But this is not my fault since Pharaoh never said a single word about besieging the Temple. Let Pharaoh himself then decide what is to be done now.”

Nothing further occurred that day, but the officers withdrew their men further from the walls and the piles of dead and caused the supply wagons to be driven up so that the black men might eat. Sherdens who were wiser than the black men and did not like the sunshine, took over all houses in the vicinity of the Temple and banished their inhabitants and plundered their wine cellars for they were houses of the rich and noble. The bodies on the square swelled, and the first ravens and vultures flew in from the mountains to Thebes where they hadn’t been seen in living memory.

By that time, I had already long ago left Horemheb, for a small boy with his nose bleeding passed us, trying to drag along his moaning father whose leg had been driven over and broken by chariots. I helped him and then I helped the others who escaped wounded, and again I heard the angry whining of arrows in my ears but I was not afraid since

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