The Egyptian by Mika Waltari

Posted by admin_akashic on Mar 4th, 2022 in Stories

He continued his silly talk, until we were conveyed to a pavilion in the House of Justice, where the Keeper of the Seal dispensed justice; in front of him forty leather scrolls with the law written on them. Armed guards surrounded us, so that we could not escape, and the Keeper of the Seal read the law to us from a leather scroll and told us that we must die since Pharaoh did not recover after his skull had been opened. I looked at Ptahor, but he only smiled when the executioner stepped forward with his sword. “Let the stauncher of blood go first,” he said. “He is in a greater hurry than we are, for his mother is already preparing pea pottage for him in the Western Land.”

The stauncher of blood took a warm farewell of us, made the holy sign of Amun and knelt meekly on the floor before the leather scrolls. The executioner swung his sword in a great arc above the head of the condemned man, till it sang in the air, but stopped short as the edge just touched the back of his neck. But the blood stauncher fell to the floor, and we thought he had swooned from terror, for there was not the smallest scratch upon him. When my turn came, I knelt without fear, and the executioner laughed and touched my neck with his blade without troubling to frighten me more. Ptahor considered he was too short to be required to kneel, and the executioner swung his sword over his neck, too. So we died, the law was accomplished, and we were given new names engraved in heavy gold rings. In Ptahor’s ring was written He Who Is Like a Baboon and in mine He Who Is Alone. Then Ptahor’s present was weighed out to him in gold and mine also, and we were clad in new robes. For the first time I wore a pleated robe of royal linen and a collar heavy with silver and precious stones. When the servants tried to lift the blood stauncher and revive him, they found him stone dead. I saw this with my own eyes and can vouch for its truth. But why he died, I do not know, unless from the mere expectation. Simple though he may have been, a man who can arrest the flow of blood is not like other men.

Amongst the news of Pharaoh’s death, also spread the news of the strange death of the stauncher of blood, and those who heard it, could only laugh. They hit their knees with their hands and laughed, for that indeed was a comic event.

Henceforth, being officially dead, I could not sign my name as Sinuhe without adding He Who Is Alone, and at court I could be known by no other name.

When I went back to the House of Life in my new clothes and with the gold ring on my arm, my teachers bowed before me. Yet I was still a pupil and had to write a detailed account of Pharaoh’s operation and death, attesting it with my name. I spent much time over this and ended it with a description of the soul of Pharaoh flying from his nostrils in the shape of a bird and passing straight into the sun. I was asked, didn’t Pharaoh wake up on his last moment and sigh, “Blessed is Amun,” like many other witnesses assured he did. Thinking back carefully, I considered it best to confirm this to be true, and I had the satisfaction of hearing my report read to the people on each of the seventy days during which Pharaoh’s body was being prepared for immortality in the House of Death. During the whole of this period of mourning, all pleasure houses, wine shops and taverns in Thebes were closed so that to buy wine or hear music one had to enter by the back door.

But when these seventy days had passed, I learned that I was now a qualified physician and could start to practice in whatever quarter of the city I chose. If on the other hand I preferred to pursue my studies in one of the specialty branches —the dentists or ear doctors, for instance, or the obstetricians, layers-on-of-hands, surgeons, or in any other of the fourteen different subjects in which instruction was given at the House of Life under the surveillance of the royal doctors — I needed only to choose my branch. This was a special mark of esteem, testifying how amply Amun rewarded his servants.

I was young, and the learning in the House of Life no longer absorbed me. I had been seized with Thebes fever and desired wealth and fame and I desired to profit from the moment when everyone still knew the name of Sinuhe, He Who Is Alone. I had gold, and I purchased a small house on the outskirts of the fashionable quarter, furnished it according to my means and bought a slave as my servant, a scraggy fellow with one eye, but good enough for me. His name was