The Egyptian by Mika Waltari

Posted by admin_akashic on Mar 4th, 2022 in Stories

Merit said, “I don’t know any more what to believe, but if you lived in Thebes a month or a year, you would also believe, for many wonderful things have happened for the sake of the one whose name we cannot say any more. But I know that if the witch dies before the grain is ripe, then I will believe too. I have not heard she’s been sick.”

“Who do you mean ‘the witch?’” I asked fiercely, and she looked at me defiantly with her sorrowful eyes and said, “You know that well and you heard it in the story also, and no black has ever bought Egypt anything but misery.”

I withdrew my hand from hers, and my heart also, and the crocodile’s tail had long been cleared from my head, which now ached; and I felt ill, and her foolishness and stubbornness did nothing to cheer me. So we returned sulkily to The Crocodile’s Tail wine tavern, and I knew that what Pharaoh Akhenaten had said was true: truly Aten shall separate the child from its mother and the man from the sister of his heart until his kingdom is established upon earth. But I had no wish to be separated from Merit because of Aten, and so I remained in an exceedingly ill humour until I saw Kaptah early that evening.

No one could long remain sullen with the sight of Kaptah rolling in through the wine tavern door, huge and magnificent as a farrowing sow and so fat that he had to turn sideways to get in through the door. His face was as round as the moon and gleaming with expensive oil, and he wore a fine blue wig on his head and had covered his blind eye with a disk of gold. He had ceased to wear Syrian dress but was clothed in the Egyptian fashion of the finest garments the tailors of Thebes could produce, and his neck and wrists and thick ankles jingled with heavy gold rings.

When he saw me, he cried out with his arms raised in surprise and joy, then bowed low before me and stretched forth his hands to his knees, a posture his belly made difficult to achieve, and he said, “Blessed be the day that brings my lord home.” His feelings overcame him, and he wept, throwing himself to the floor on his knees to embrace my legs and making such a clamour in a loud voice that I recognised my old Kaptah despite the royal linen and the gold bangles, the costly oil

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and the blue wig. I raised him by the arms and embraced him and smelled his shoulders and cheeks, and it felt like hugging a fat ox and like smelling new bread, so powerfully did the odour of the corn exchange hang about him. Also he smelled my shoulders respectfully and dried his tears and laughed loudly and shouted, “This is for me a day of such great joy that I will offer every customer now sitting in my house a tail for free. Should they desire a second they must pay for it themselves.”

He led me to the back of the house and gave me soft mats to recline on and allowed Merit to sit beside me while slaves and servants brought me the best the house could offer, and his wines were comparable to those of Pharaoh, and his roast goose was a Theban goose — which has no parallel in all of Egypt, for it is fed with rotten fish, which imparts to the meat the finest, most delicate flavour. When we had eaten and drunk, he said:

“My lord and master, Sinuhe, I trust that you have carefully examined all reports and accounts prepared for you by the scribes at my bidding and dispatched to your house in Akhetaten during these past years. Surely you will also permit me to charge this meal and the wine and the goose to the expense account, and maybe I also charge to the expense account the crocodile’s tails that in my great joy I mistakenly presented to the customers. This will not be to your disadvantage but to your advantage for I have the greatest trouble in deceiving Pharaoh’s tax gatherers on your behalf, and this way I can steal something from them for myself too.”

I said to him, “Your talk is like black men’s lingo for I understand not a word of it but do what seems best, for you know I place full trust in you. I have read your records and accounts yet must confess that I understood but little of them, since they contain an inordinate quantity of figures and as many numbers as in the papers of Horemheb’s scribes when he tried to calculate how long would it take to bring all the men in the world before Pharaoh so that he could address each of them separately. His calculations failed, for he counted the new children that were endlessly born in all countries, and they would grow old before they could come before Pharaoh — and yet even more children would be born so that Pharaoh couldn’t possibly address everyone separately, even if he addressed each for the duration of half a heart beat from dawn till dusk. So was I also unable to come before you, Kaptah, while studying your papers and numbers, and my head ached long before I came to the end of the sums.”

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