Ancient Evenings (38 page)

“And were our chariots at all different then?” asked Ptah-nem-hotep.

“They were beautiful, as now. Unlike our shields, the present chariots do not differ from the ones I knew, not by one bend in the wood, but they were not yet a familiar sight in those days. The oldest man of my village used to talk of how the oldest man he had known when he was a boy could remember the first horse he saw, for that was when they began to bring horses into Egypt from the lands to the East. How it terrified him! But then who would not have been frightened by such strange animals? They heard only the voices of foreign Gods, and spoke in loud snorts, or with a long screaming of wind in their cries. This old man of my village used to say that to approach a chariot with its two horses, was the closest one could get to the Pharaoh. To us, charioteers were soldiers sent from the Pharaoh! They may as well have been dressed in gold. For when they got up behind those four-legged Gods and went off at a gallop, we respected them more than the captain of a great barge going down the Nile. You can see how it was still a rare skill to a common soldier in the years when I was trained, and You may know I dreamed of becoming a charioteer. To decide the one common soldier among us who would be selected, we were put in a race, and it was the greatest contest we ever knew. Because we were told that the winner would yet ride a chariot like a nobleman. Since we were ignorant and could not command horses, we were made to hold a chariot over our heads and run up one side of a mountain and down the other, carrying the cart with us, wheels and all. The chariots were as light then as they are today, no heavier than a ten-year-old boy, but it was not easy to jog up that great hill with the vehicle on your shoulder and come down the other side unscratched. You did not dare to fall. Be certain if you broke anything, they would break your own back with their sticks.

“We set out at a trot. The fools among us tried to go as fast as a horse and soon collapsed on the first slopes, but I set out as if I were the son of Amon and could draw new strength from every breath. I stepped along as if Nut fed my nose, and Geb my feet, while Maat took care of the nausea in my stomach by instructing me not to go faster until I could find a balance between the utmost effort of my body and the demons in my lungs. Still, the earth turned blue, and the sky was as orange as the sun and sometimes became black to me. Then the sand of the desert also turned black and the sky became white. The rocks of the mountain, as I went up, step after step, were no longer rocks to me, but fierce dogs with open teeth and some rocks were beasts large as wild boars—one great stone was a hippopotamus to me—and my heart was before my eyes as I came over the summit, and I thought I would die, but I was over the top, and still ahead of everyone else. On the trip down, another soldier came near to passing me for his legs were long, and he took great bounds and came closer and my perspiration was cold. I shivered in the heat and the chariot weighed on my shoulders like a lion. I swear it had claws that tore into my back. Some of my strength was returning, however, and my breath with it, and I even saw the sky and earth as they were supposed to be, but the spear remained in my chest and the crown of pain around my head. I knew I could not hold off the other fellow unless I tricked him. He was long and thin and built to make this kind of race, but I knew he was vain, so I summoned the last of my legs and leaped with one great bound after another down ten rocks in a row. He was right behind and would soon have passed, for I had nothing left after those ten leaps, but he could not bear the audacity of such long jumps, he must be more daring than me, so he tried to better what I had done, and fell and cracked his chariot. I came down the last slope of the hill by myself.

“That was how I became a charioteer, and went to the Royal School of Charioteers of King Thutmose the Third, and You may be certain I became the best. Although not so soon. First, I had to be taught the care of a horse, how to speak to them and clean them, and horses were mysterious creatures. For the longest time I did not know if they were beasts or Gods, I only knew that they did not like me. They would rear up as I approached. I could not understand their intelligence nor whether they were stupid. By the delicacy of their lower legs, I could see they were animals of some refinement, and the light in their eyes made me believe their minds must travel as fast as an arrow. Given the long curve of their nose I supposed they took their knowledge of what to do next by what they could smell over the next hill. Yet by their teeth they were flat and stubborn. So I did not understand them. But then I was a village boy. Although I did not know it, I was like a horse myself. I did not think, and could barely obey strange commands.

“Learning to guide the reins and turn the horse smoothly became a turn in my own life greater than winning the chariot race,” said my great-grandfather, “for the more I attempted to overcome my terrible clumsiness with these horses, the more I became the recipient of much laughter. The noblemen’s sons, among whom I now found myself, were born graceful, I used to think, and still do—as witness the beauties of my beloved great-grandson Menenhetet the Second,” which he said with a little nod in my direction—“but that only made me more determined to learn. I found myself thinking of a saying we used to have in the fields—it will sound crude to You—but it is a phrase on every farm. ‘Know your animal’s smell,’ we say. It was then, working in the stables, that I understood how much I was in awe of the peculiar odor of horses. Their stables smelled different and better than the fields and coops around our farm. It seemed almost a blessed smell to me, full of the odor of the sun on a field of wheat. Yet part of my fear of horses was that I thought they were more like Gods than other beasts.

“The animal I curried in our stables was a stallion, and particularly fierce to handle. Yet the scent of his hide on my finger proved sweet and friendly, like the odor of the first village girl to whom I made love. She had smelled more of the earth than of the river and most of all she smelled of wheat fields and her own good sweat, strong as a horse, so I had the thought with such a smell on my hands that horses were not Gods but rather might be like men or women who had died, and come back as horses. So far as I knew, no one ever had a thought like that before, and I was sure it was blasphemous. Yet, fortified by the smell of that stallion’s soul, as I sniffed it clearly through all the mash of grain and straw, I could feel near to somebody who lived in my horse—whoever it was—that might be a little like the girl to whom I had made love. That morning I began to change the way in which I spoke to the horse. I no longer tried to placate the animal, nor pray to the God in him, and this saved much trouble. For how did one offer prayers to a strange God? On the other hand, I no longer tried to beat this horse like a beast. Not often. No, now, I thought rather of the man who was in the animal, and comprehended that this stallion was envious of me. I spoke and walked upright as he once had done—so I could feel how a punishment had been visited upon a strong soul. In my thoughts, I began to say to him, ‘You want to be a man again? Try listening to me. I can be your friend.’ Do you know? The animal heard my thoughts. I could tell by the difference in the handling.

“Now, in the beginning of our training, we did not use chariots with two steeds, but small carts suitable for one horse, and they had thick wooden wheels and made a terrible clatter. The sound was atrocious on one’s ear, and the jolts of the cart were ferocious to the spine. Only a peasant as strong as myself could have taken such blows as it took me to learn to steer one horse properly. The other students had passed on to chariots long before I could get out of my work-cart. Yet, in the last week, I amazed my drill-major. I had learned how to do tricks with that heavy cart and could even coax my stallion to move it backward. So they promoted me to two horses. Immediately my troubles began again. I had to learn that I was now not like a friend or a brother nor even a man telling another man how to live but more like a father who must teach two creatures to act like brother and sister.” He stopped for a moment to clear his throat in the way common people do when their voice is husky. “One cannot build a chair without a saw to cut the wood, one needs one’s tool, and I had it now. I lived with these horses and spoke to them with my voice and sometimes with my thoughts, and I taught them how to move together.

“There came a day when I could direct my chariot through turns others found hard to follow, and now I no longer needed to speak to the horses. My thoughts had entered my reins. There even came the hour when I wrapped the reins around my waist and showed the troop you could drive a chariot without hands. To prove the value of such a skill I galloped around the compound with a bow in my hand and let fly arrows into bales of straw. A new practice began. Soon all the sons of noblemen, my fellow charioteers, were trying to drive with the reins around their waist, except they did not learn it so quickly as myself, and the accidents were numerous. They did not live in the mind of the horse as well as I did.

“That was the way I learned my skill, and in the practice of it I soon ceased to think of horses as men or women. By the end, in truth, I thought more about my reins than anything else. Horses could be changed, but the reins were mine and had to be properly treated. In the end I looked only for good blessings to put on the oil. My reins grew so wise, I had no more than to drop them lightly on a horse’s back, and the animal was listening to me.”

My great-grandfather looked up at us now, and it may have been the glow of light from the cages of fireflies, but his face looked as young as the strength he must have felt in his youth, or at least in that first of his four lives when he was a Royal Charioteer. He smiled then and I thought for the first time that my great-grandfather had a beautiful face. I had only lived for six years but it was the strongest face I had ever seen.

“Shall we proceed,” he asked the Pharaoh, “to the Battle of Kadesh?”

“No,” said Ptah-nem-hotep in a light and much-pleased voice, “I confess I now want to hear more of your early adventures in the army. Did it all go so well?”

“It went poorly for longer than You would think. I was still ignorant of envy. I could not keep my mouth shut. So I told everyone in my troop how I would yet be First Charioteer to His Majesty. I had not as yet learned how one’s advancement into high places owes much to the ability to conceal your ability. That way your superiors find it comfortable to advance you. Having been, as I say, untutored to such wisdom, I can only remark that I am still heedless of it tonight.”

“Dear Menenhetet, you will soon be irreplaceable,” said the Pharaoh.

My great-grandfather bowed to the remark. I could see that he hardly wished to stop. “In those days,” he said, “I used to dream of great conquests in foreign lands, and hoped our success would be due to me. For if a driver could be taught to guide a vehicle with the reins lashed to the waist, then he might also hold a bow, and each of our chariots could ride into battle with two archers. We would be twice as strong as our enemies who rode with one driver and one archer, or, as in the case of the Hittites, given their heavy three-man chariots, a driver, an archer, and a man with a spear. Our two men could be the equal of their three in arms, yet our chariots would be faster, and turn in a smaller circle. I could not sleep for the excitement of this idea. Soon I could not sleep for vexation. So soon as certain noblemen had become curious to test my suggestion, it was declared by the Chariot-Major that, in his opinion, only a few of the best would ever be able to control two horses with the reins around their waist. Finally I was told that my argument was offensive to Amon. Our God had already brought victory to Egypt by way of one archer and one driver.

“I had, however, not learned too much. I still bragged that I would become First Charioteer and lead a troop of two-bowed chariots into battle. For such vanity, I was sent away. An officer who was much my enemy, and by one rank my superior, took care to have me assigned to a wretched oasis in the middle of the Libyan desert out there”—and he pointed with his thumb over his back in the direction of some land far beyond the Pyramids—“a domain of such endless boredom that a mind so brilliant as Yours, my Pharaoh, could not live there for a day. In truth my own mind felt as if it had turned to oil. It smoked in the desert sun. We had virtually no duties, and no wine. There were twenty soldiers in my command, surly mercenaries, village idiots. There was beer that tasted, as we used to say, of horses. But I cannot remember many stories of that unhappy time. I do recall a letter I dictated by way of our scribe, a frail little fellow whose pretty buttocks were raw from the practices of my soldiers—I may say he was as desperate to escape from the stench of this oasis as myself. So I had him write a letter to my General. ‘Make the words look handsome,’ I told him, ‘or we will never get out of here, and then the hole in your seat will be larger than the one in your mouth.’

“My scribe giggled at that. He was not altogether miserable with such a use of him. But then he saw the look in my eye. It said, ‘Get me out of Teben-Shanash.’ That was the name of this oasis, and well named, a perfect circle of stench. The odor surrounded our tents. We had, may I say, no huts. There was not any straw to make bricks. The flies were intolerable. I would lie for hours under the date-palms and look down a long sandy road to the horizon. Nothing to see but the sky. I fell in love with the flight of birds. That was all there was to love. The food was atrocious. Bitter dates, and our sacks of corn, so near the moisture of the oasis, were filled with vermin.”

“What is the reason to tell all this?” asked Hathfertiti.

“There were dogs. I think there were three hundred dogs, and not one failed to go with me on a walk. Their teeth stank. So did mine. The worm was biting a rotten tooth in my head. There, in the stink of that oasis, where the beaks and muzzles of the scavengers were purple with blood and caked by the sun, there on those dusty roads where these hideous creatures fought over the last maggots on the hot carcass of a donkey, I dreamed of feathers on horse’s heads leading the point of a parade. You may conceive of the letter I dictated to my scribe. ‘Lead me to Memphi,’ I exhorted, ‘let me see it in the dawn.’ I thought I would die in Circle-of-Stench. I did not know I had a career before me, then another, then a few more. Never in the length of my life, even if it be measured by the length of four lives, did I feel so low.”