The Egyptian by Mika Waltari

Posted by admin_akashic on Mar 4th, 2022 in Stories

Horemheb spat out an onion skin from his mouth and bit another bite of dry bread with his strong teeth and chewed it, until the troops began stamping and shouting, like children eager for another story. Then Horemheb frowned, saying, “In the name of Seth and all the devils, have the army suppliers baked rat droppings in my bread, or is it my hangover that makes this taste like dung in my mouth? Know this, my mud rats, I could not help getting really drunk last night out of plain joy when I thought of how the stupidity of the Hittites will bring them within the reach of your spears. But nevertheless, these rat droppings will have a few suppliers hung head downward on the walls. Yet I don’t do it for your sake so that you may dare to laugh and roar in front of me, but only for the sake of my noble mouth. What do I care if they make you eat plain cow dung with flour, since to me the dumps from the horses of my dung snouts are more valuable than your entire horde. You see, my only fear is that in your unworthiness you will let the Hittites slip through your fingers, since you are no soldiers but stinking mud rats only. I need to remark to you that those rods you hold in your hands are spears, and their heads are not sharpened to scratch back but you need to rip up the Hittite’s bellies with them. And to the archers I remark that you must think you are great heroes when you play with the strings of your bows and shoot your arrows up in their air screaming like children, ‘Look how high my arrow flies.’ You need to aim your arrows at the Hittites, and if you were actual soldiers and knew how to aim like actual soldiers, you’d shoot their eyes out with your arrows. But it is useless for me to give these counsels to you, and so I tell you to aim only at the horses since these are bigger targets, and you could never hit the men who stand in the chariots anyway. The nearer you let the horses come, the more certainly you will hit them, regardless of the lack of your skills, and I counsel you to let them very near indeed — for I will flog with my own hands every man who wastes an arrow, so that he wishes he was never born to this world to be flogged by me. We have not one arrow to spare. Remember that the heads of the arrows are forged from the brooches of the Egyptian women and from the harlots’ anklets, if that piece of information makes you happy. And to you, spearmen, I remark that when the horses approach, steady the butts of your spears

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against the ground with both hands and direct the points at the horses bellies so you will be in no danger yourself and can leap aside before the horses fall on you. Should you be flung to the ground, hamstring them, for that is your only chance to save yourselves before the chariot wheels run over you and crush your limbs. So be it, you mud rats of the Nile.”

In revulsion, he smelled the bread in his hand and threw it away, raising a jar of water to his mouth and drinking a lot to ease his hangover. Then he continued, saying: “It is actually a waste of my time to talk to you since when you hear the war cry of the Hittites and the thunder of their chariots, you will whimper and hide your heads in the sand, lacking your mothers’ skirts to creep under. I need to tell you that in case the Hittites break through and reach the water supplies in our rear, each one of you is lost and will be lifeless before nightfall, and in the best case, your skin hangs as market bags under the arms of the old women of Byblos and Sidon — or else you will scream from a wall, limbs crushed, or have your eyes put out, pushing the millstones in Aziru’s camp. This will happen if the Hittites break through, because then we shall be surrounded, and all retreat is gone, and we are all doomed. But let me remark you that in any case, there is no retreat. If we abandon the defences we have built and start marching back, the Hittite chariots will scatter us like a flood scatters dry reeds. I mention this in case any one of you should take it into his head to scuttle off into the desert. But in order to make it impossible for you to mistake where the enemy is, I will place five hundred of my brave dung snouts on your rear at a suitable distance so that they can have a good laugh seeing you fight — for indeed they have earned that laugh — and they will kill with their knives or perform that small operation which turns wild oxen gentle on anyone who tries to escape or makes a mistake where the enemy is. Be aware then that even if there might be death in front of you, there is an even more certain death behind you, but there also looms victory and honour in front of you, for I have no doubt that we will defeat the Hittites today if every man does his best. You see, my beloved dung rats, we have all been dumped in the same porridge and have no choice but to defeat the Hittites, and there is no other way to defeat them than to attack them and cut their skins with the various

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