The Egyptian by Mika Waltari

Posted by admin_akashic on Mar 4th, 2022 in Stories

of quarrymen at a high price, so highly did they rate the pleasure she gave them. They said one to another, “Truly, we have never met such a woman, for her mouth is like melted honey and her breasts like ripe apples, and her embrace is as hot as the charcoal bed on which fish are grilled.” They begged her to return soon to the fish market and promised to reserve many stones — large stones — for her, and she smiled at them modestly, thanking them for their kindness and for the great joy they had given her. When in the evening she returned to the golden house, she was obliged to hire a sturdier craft to ferry across all the stones she had collected in the course of the day.

The following day, she took a bigger boat, letting the slave women row her over to Thebes and leaving them to await her on the quay as she made her way to the vegetable market. In the vegetable market, she spoke to the farmers who at dawn came from their farms to Thebes with their oxen and asses and whose hands were hardened by the soil and whose skin was rough from the heat of the sun. She also spoke to the street sweepers and the emptiers of latrines, and she spoke to the guards, who point everyone to their places in the market with their wooden spears, and she said to them, “I am princess Beketamun, the consort of Egypt’s great general, Horemheb. But he is a dull and slothful man, and there is no strength in his body, and he cannot bring any pleasure to me. He also holds me poorly and takes my beloved children away from me, driving me out of my rooms so that I don’t even have a roof over me. Come, therefore, and take pleasure with me, so that I may enjoy you, and all I ask in return is a small stone from each of you, and I doubt you can get cheaper joy even from black women in Thebes.”

Farmers and street sweepers and black guards were greatly frightened at her words and talked fervently amongst themselves, saying to each other, “There is no way she is a princess for never has any princess behaved like this.” But she tempted them with her words and bared her beauty to them and stepped before them, leading them to the reed swamps by the riverbank so that they abandoned their vegetable loads, oxen and asses and left the streets without sweeping and followed her. By the riverbank, they said to each other, “This kind of delicacy is not served to the poor every day, and her skin is not like the black skin of our wives, but her clothes are noble clothes, and her skin is noble skin, and she smells like a noble. We would be foolish not to benefit from the joy she is offering to us, and let her take the pleasure she lacks from us since she is a badly neglected wife.”

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So they rejoiced with her and carried her stones, and the farmers carried her stone thresholds from taverns and the guards pilfered stones from Pharaoh’s buildings to be able to rejoice with her. But after they had taken their pleasure, they became frightened and said to each other, “If she indeed is Horemheb’s wife, Horemheb will come and kill us when he hears about this, for he is more terrible than a lion — a vain man who is sensitive about his honour, even if he cannot bring joy to his wife. But if there are enough of us, he cannot kill us all, for he cannot kill all of Thebes for the sake of his wife. Therefore it is in our interest that she gets a lot of stones.”

Therefore they returned to the vegetable market and told about the joy they had experienced to all of their friends and acquaintances and took them to the reed swamps by the riverbank so that a wide path was treaded amongst the reeds that day, and by the evening the reed swamp was like a hippopotamus’s wallowing ground. There was great disorder in the vegetable market: several loads were stolen, thirsty donkeys were shrieking on the street corners, oxen bellowed, and masters of beer taverns ran around weeping and pulling their hair, having found their costly thresholds stolen. At sunset, princess Beketamun offered modest thanks to all the men from the vegetable market for their kindness to her and for the joy they had given her, and they helped her to load the boat with stones until it was so deeply laden that it was near sinking, and the slave women had much ado to row it across the river to the quay of the golden house.

That same evening, it was known to all of Thebes that the cat-headed one had revealed herself to the people and taken pleasure with them, and the strangest rumours ran rife around Thebes, for those who didn’t believe in the gods found other explanations. They said, “Perhaps the gods revealed themselves to people during the times of the pyramids, but the world is old, and the gods do not reveal themselves to people any more. Therefore this woman needs to be someone high-ranking, and she needs to be very high-ranking indeed to dare behave like this.”

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