The Egyptian by Mika Waltari

Posted by admin_akashic on Mar 4th, 2022 in Stories

the palaces of the nobles all amongst the splendour of flowers and the green of the grass. Then we breathed in deeper, and the oarsmen sank their oars into water with fresh excitement, and Horemheb’s soldiers started shouting and yelling, forgetting the sorrow that Pharaoh’s death had forced upon them.

So I returned to Thebes and resolved never again to leave it, for my eyes had seen enough of man’s evil, and there was nothing new beneath the old sky for my eyes to behold. Therefore I resolved to remain the rest of my days in Thebes and live out my days in poverty in the old copper founder’s house of the poor quarter — for all the wealth I had acquired through my healing skills in Syria during the war I had spent on Aziru’s burial sacrifice, that being wealth I had no desire to keep. In my nostrils, this wealth had the smell of blood, and using it to my betterment would not have brought joy to me. So I donated to Aziru everything I had gathered in his country, and returned to Thebes impoverished.

But not even then had I got my cup full for yet a task was allotted me that I did not desire and that filled me with dread, but I could not evade it, and once more, after only a few days, I departed from Thebes. Ay and Horemheb believed that they had spun their webs with wisdom and carried out their plans and thought the power was in their hands, but the power slipped through their fingers before they knew it, and the destiny of Egypt was to hang on a woman’s whim. So I still need to tell about Queen Nefertiti and princess Beketamun, before I can finish my story and have my peace. But to tell about them I need to start a new book, and may this book be the last I write, and I write it for my own sake to explain why I who was made to cure people became a murderer.

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Book 15: Horemheb

In accordance with the agreement struck with Horemheb, the bearer of the crook Ay was to raise Pharaoh’s crowns to his head when Pharaoh Tutankhamun’s funeral rituals were over. To reach his goal, he hastened Tutankhamun’s embalming and his burial and stopped further quarrying of his tomb and left it small and insignificant in comparison with the tombs of the great Pharaohs and kept by himself most riches which Tutankhamun had planned to take with him to his tomb. But by the same agreement, he was to convince princess Beketamun to marry Horemheb, thus enabling Horemheb to make a lawful claim to the crowns of Egypt once Ay was dead, despite being born with dung between toes. He had arranged this with the priests so that princess Beketamun would appear in Sekhmet’s temple before Horemheb in the guise of Sekhmet and surrender herself to Horemheb when Horemheb celebrated the festival of his victory and the period of mourning was over, so that their union might be blessed by the gods and Horemheb himself would become divine. Such was Ay’s plan with the priests, but princess Beketamun had made her own plan and prepared it with much care, and I know Queen Nefertiti had encouraged her to make this plan, hating Horemheb and calculating she would become the most powerful woman in Egypt next to Beketamun, if the plan was successful.

Their plan was godless and terrifying, and only the guile of an embittered woman could have conceived it; and their plan was so incredible that it came near to succeeding, merely for the sake of being so incredible that no one would have thought of it, and even if someone had thought of it, he would have regarded it as impossible. Only when this scheme became known, could it be understood why the Hittites were so eager to make peace and had yielded Megiddo and the land of Amurru and made concessions in the peace-making. The Hittites are wise men, and they kept in their quivers an arrow which Horemheb and Ay had no idea about — and during the peace process, they believed they had lost nothing when agreeing to concessions. Their readiness

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