The Egyptian by Mika Waltari

Posted by admin_akashic on Mar 4th, 2022 in Stories

She hung the symbols of my rank back about my neck and set the doctor’s wig on my head, stroking my cheeks as she did so, so I had no wish to leave Merit and go to the golden house though I had become greatly frightened when I had remembered my visit to the Queen Mother. But I urged my slaves to run, and I urged them with my stick and with silver, and I urged the oarsmen of my boat with my stick and with silver so that water rushed at the bows of my ship when we rowed toward the walls of the golden house. My boat touched at the landing stage just as the sun was setting behind the western mountains and the first stars appeared so that I did not put myself in shame.

Before I speak of my conversation with the Queen Mother, I must mention that only twice during these years had she visited her son in the city of Akhetaten and each time upbraided him for his madness, thereby troubling him sorely, for he loved his mother and was blind to her character —as sons often are blind until they marry and their eyes are opened by their wives. But Nefertiti had not opened Pharaoh Akhenaten’s eyes, for the sake of her father. I have to admit openly that by then, priest Ay and Queen Mother Tiye lived freely together and no longer attempted to conceal their joy but made their appearances together and followed each other’s steps like guarding each other, and I do not know whether the royal house had ever before witnessed such open shame, but it well may have for these things are not written down but they die and get forgotten along with the people witnessing them. Yet I cast no slur on Pharaoh Akhenaten’s origins, for I believe them to have been divine since if he had not had his royal father’s blood in his veins, he would have had no royal blood in his veins at all for he inherited no royal blood from his mother, and then he would truly have been a false Pharaoh as the priests claimed, and everything that happened would have been yet more meaningless and mad. Therefore I do not want to believe the priests, but I prefer to believe my heart and my reason.

The Queen Mother received me in a private room where many little birds hopped and twittered in their cages with clipped wings. She had never forgotten the trade of her youth but still loved to catch birds in the palace garden, by liming the branches of trees and casting nets. When I entered before her, she was braiding a mat of coloured rushes and addressed me sharply and rebuked me for my delay and asked, “Is my son at all recovered from his madness, or is it time to open his skull for he makes far too much ado about his Aten and stirs up the people, which is no longer needful, since the false god is overthrown and there is no one to compete with him for power.”

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I told her of Pharaoh’s condition and of the little princesses and their games and gazelles and dogs and of how they went rowing on the sacred lake of Akhetaten until Queen Mother was mollified and, bidding me sit at her feet, offered me beer. She did not offer me beer from miserliness but because she preferred beer to wine like common people do, and her beer was strong and sweet, and she could drink several jars a day so that her body swelled from beer, and her face swelled too and became repulsive — and then her face indeed reminded one of black people though it was not entirely black. Seeing her now, no one could have known how this old and swollen woman once had won the love of the great Pharaoh with her beauty. Yet the people say she had won it with black magic for it indeed is rare that Pharaoh elevates a fowler’s girl from the river as the great royal consort.

As she drank, she spoke to me frankly and gave me her full confidence, which was but natural since I was a physician and women tell their physicians much they would never think of confiding to other people, and in this respect Queen Tiye was no different from other women. But often a person who knows death approaching him starts talking to strangers more openly and confidently than to those close to him, without even knowing he’s doing so. She was so terrifyingly open when she spoke to me that I felt a cold sting in my heart and asked about her ailments, but she laughed at me and said she had no ailments except those caused by beer and gas in her stomach — but it was futile for me as a doctor to tell her to give up beer since she wouldn’t give it up anyway and thought it was not harmful and did not yet see hippopotamuses in her dreams.

Her tongue loosened by the beer, she spoke to me and said, “Sinuhe, you to whom my son by some foolish whim gave the name of The Lonely One, though you truly do not appear to me to be lonely at all, and I bet that in Akhetaten you rejoice with a different woman every night for I know the women of Akhetaten. Well, you Sinuhe are a tranquil man and perhaps the most tranquil of all the men I know, and your tranquillity downright irritates me so that I’d fancy sticking a

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