They were the words she desired to hear. She replied: “I believe in your love, Setne, but I would be surer of keeping it forever if Gaila remained with us...”
They fell silent. Setne, moved by gratitude, kissed Aoura’s little foot. Nothing could he beard but the cries of the sentinels calling to one another at intervals, the yapping of jackals and, occasionally, the thunderous clamor of a lion.
The hills were well-guarded; the Egyptian phalanges sheltered from any surprise. And the chief, indifferent to the nomads that were prowling around his army, was only anxious about the obscure tent where the woman he had possessed as a slave, and perhaps would never possess again, was asleep.
That was because she seemed, in fact, to have forgotten the old days. She did not flee Setne, but she greeted him with a strange gravity, and as she never quit her young brother, Eloh, any intimate conversation became impossible. Heaped by Thutmose with slaves and wealth, she marched in the midst of troops like a queen. And she lived as naturally in command as she once had in slavery. Her attitude, without her being severe, dominated the servants, the soldiers, and the chiefs. Even Setne was submissive to that elegant and strong majesty, which excited his passion to the point of delirium.
One morning when she had come to see Aoura, he waited on her route. Eloh was not with her. Only two slaves accompanied her. Then he approached her and said, in an imploring voice: “Have you forgotten me, Gaila?”
She looked at him seriously. “I have not forgotten anything. Have I not accomplished all that I announced to you?”
“Yes,” he said, with a tremor of his entire body, “you have accomplished more than I dared to wish. But you have withdrawn from me, Gaila, and you know that I love you.”
“I belonged to the King of Thebes.”
“You’re free now...”
“I will not be free until the vengeance is accomplished and Eloh is recognized by the chiefs of the Bene-Asher.”
Every day, Intar and his nomads brought back Bene-Asher dispersed in small groups in the solitudes. Since the conquest of their pastures by the warriors of Daour, they had wandered, poor and starving, in the plains where grass in sparse and in marshy lands. Fallen, they scarcely lived, on the milk of their thin cattle, the paltry plants that grow in the desert, hunting wild beasts, and booty captured from their enemies when they could surprise them in small numbers.
They retained the memory of their beautiful pastures bitterly; stubborn in faith, like all those of their race, they were awaiting the hour of vengeance. So, Intar found them credulous to the great news that he had announced to them secretly. They arrived among the Egyptians clad only in rough hides—for they had no longer woven wool or flax for some time—with large black horns on their heads, emaciated to the point that Thutmose’s soldiers, hardened to all miseries, were disgusted by them. They prostrated themselves before Gaila, swore obedience to Eloh, son of Rub, in whom they recognized not only the descendant of great chiefs but also the elect of prophecies, for whom the phalanges of the terrible King of Thebes were marching.
Meanwhile, Setne divided up his troops. Intar, with a thousand nomads, supported by twelve hundred light infantrymen, headed southwards by roundabout routes; they were to bar the way to fugitives. Eight phalanges veered to the south-east in echelons. Setne intended to lead the attack from the north himself. For several days the Daourites had been agitated. They knew that an Egyptian army was advancing toward their pastures, but, especially because of the size of the contingents, they could not believe that it had been raised against them. Even when they learned that a large number of the Bene-Asher had joined the arriving forces, they did not conceive any great anxiety, for the idea never occurred to them that King Thutmose would want to avenge a paltry tribe dispersed in the desert.
When Setne was no more than half a day’s march away, however, the rumor went around that he was bringing back Gaila, daughter of Rub, with her brother Eloh. Nevertheless, no one was certain of that, for Setne and Intar had sown contradictory stories among their own soldiers, and the Bene-Asher, alerted, did not betray the secret.
The Daourites sent messengers. They offered their alliance, and they came to ask the Egyptian chief whether he intended to pass through their lands. Setne did not want to receive them.
The nomads realized that it was war. Assembling their tents and flocks in haste, they commenced the exodus. Setne had hastened the march of his light troops. They reached the rearguard of the enemy, encumbered by cattle, cats and sheep. The rearguard prepared for battle, in order to protect the flight of the bulk of the army. The terrain was favorable to them, marshy and strewn with brushwood.
Sheltered, the Daourites seemed redoubtable. A frontal assault by the old Theban phalanges might have succeeded, at the price of immense sacrifices. Setne contented himself with a violent skirmish of archers and sling-wielders. In the meantime, the bulk of his forces moved up stealthily, some distance away, behind the dunes.
The nomads, defending themselves doggedly against what they believed to be the principal attack, did not perceive them at first. When they understood, the flanking movement was pronounced. Egyptian lances and bucklers glittered to their right. At the same time. Setne launched a new frontal assault.
Abruptly, the Bedouins decided to retreat, inasmuch as their center and their advance guard, with the women and children, ought to be safe. But they were unable to withdraw in order; many were obstinate in wanting to save the livestock; they were seen driving oxen and sheep. Their cries, mingled with the bellowing, disrupted them spontaneously. The long Theban trumpets sounded the charge. The phalanges closed up like immense pincers.
Only two or three hundred Daourites escaped. The rest fought energetically at first, but could not hold firm against the forests of lances. The indecisive lines collapsed; the bravest persisted vainly in hurling themselves against the wall of bucklers bristling with iron. Then, sensing their weakness, they threw away their weapons and begged the victors for mercy. One of their chiefs cried: “What have we done, men of Egypt? We live in peace with King Thutmose and we would not have refused to pay him tribute...”
But the others, their expressions bleak, were not astonished. They had never known anything but the war of tribes falling upon one another unexpectedly and snatching land and flocks at hazard. Vanquished, they no longer hoped for life.
Setne was having the weapons collected and the captives penned when great rumors and clouds of dust rose up. It was the Daourites’ center and advance guard returning; to the south, they had been driven back by Intar’s warriors; to the west they had encountered phalanges placed in echelons. Their rout was complete. They were fleeing in panic, seeking an issue among the brushwood and the dunes, careless of the fate of the women and children.
Very few broke the line of investment; it was sufficient for Setne to launch his reserves to terminate the battle. Almost the entire tribe was captive. In that quivering mass, parked between the marshes and the hills, the plaints of the wounded mingled with the shrill cries of women and children. Sometimes, moved by a sudden revolt or a vertigo of terror, a man launched himself against the guards; lances and swords nailed him to the ground. But almost all the warriors awaited destiny without a movement or a word.
Setne occupied himself with gathering the chiefs. He found nearly sixty of them, who were to appear before Gaila and Eloh. An hour before dusk, they were taken to a pasture where the Bene-Asher were assembled. Gaila and her brother were standing on a high platform hung with violent cloths. The vanquished chiefs understood their fate. Only one prostrated himself to beg for mercy. The others stamped their feet scornfully. The daughter of Rub had the oldest brought forward, and spoke to him in a soft voice.
“Do you remember, chiefs of the Daour? Ten years have passed since the night when you surprised our people. For ten generations our forefathers nourished their flocks on these plains. But you came; the night was not finished and our chiefs were dead. Five hundred warriors lay on the ground, my father pe
rished by fire after his entrails had been spread, and my mother had succumbed to your outrages. Now, it is said: Vengeance is holy; death will pay for death; torture will be the price of torture. Chiefs of the Daour, it will be done to you as you have done to ours; you will perish in the furnace, your warriors will be sold in the slave markets, your wives, after being raped, will be subjected to the same fate. Let anyone among you who believes that is not just raise his voice.”
The chiefs did not protest in the name of justice. They too knew that vengeance is holy. But they proffered threats. A giant whose eyes were blazing like carbuncles in the light of a torch cried: “Our race is not dead. Those who have escaped will roam the desert in their turn, until strength returns to them. The tree of the Daourites will be verdant again. Our sons will multiply like the fish of the Gulf. We will take back our pastures again. Your chiefs will be roasted in the furnace, your women raped, your warriors sold in the markets of cities!”
“It will be thus!” cried the others.
Gaila listened to them without anger. Now that she held them at her feet, her hatred had disappeared; she admired their courage.
“Bene-Asher,” she said. “Do to these men as they did to yours.”
With a roar of joy, the ragged multitude of the Bene-Asher fell upon the Daourite chiefs. It seemed that the massacre was about to commence. By means of their insults, the vanquished tried to summon a rapid death. But a strange order succeeded the initial fury. The convulsed faces resumed an apparent impassiveness, the clamors died down; of so many armed hands raised to strike, not one fell. The torture was organized.
Like good workmen, taciturn and laborious, men lit fires around the Daourites, while others built pyres on the plain. After sunset, those great sinister fires illuminated the slow and measured torture of the chiefs. They eyelids or their lips were cut off, or their teeth were broken, one by one, with a hammer. Sometimes their fingernails were torn out or their nipples burned. One eye was punctured, while their wives and daughters were raped in front of them. Only toward the middle of the night did they begin to perish. The entrails were withdrawn from some, but slowly, in order that they would not perish prematurely; others had their feet roasted first and firebrands were drawn over their bellies. Some were sprinkled with boiling water. Two old men, buried up to the neck on a mound that the fires rendered ardent, screamed like onagers.
Gaila had withdrawn. Her pious work was completed; the dead were no longer crying out for vengeance. As she was no longer taking pleasure in the suffering or the cries of agony she had had her tent and Eloh’s moved to behind the dunes, where the earth was silent.
The night was pure; the star of Isis had an extraordinary glare. It was blue, it seemed to be leaping, paling the little constellations around it. Gaila lingered there, considering it. That was the star chosen by Setne, and its brightness, on that evening of triumph, troubled the nomad. She sighed. Now that everything was done in accordance with her will, she felt a violent desire for happiness, which filled her with dread.
Her guards lit large fires. At times, the star of Isis became imprecise in the smoke or was confounded with the rapid edge of a flame. The breeze, curt and abrupt, stimulated or suppressed the red gleams. It brought the rumors of the camp and the field of tortures, but attenuated and murmurous.
Gaila sensed, confusedly, that for her, the time had come to live. Her gaze, surpassing the zone of the fires, strove to catch sight of Setne; for she knew that he would come. Every evening, after having checked the vigilance of the sentinels, he passed close to the nomad’s tent.
Finally, she perceived him. He advanced slowly, before his attentive escort. A dip in the terrain hid him, and then he reappeared between two fires, as visible as in broad daylight. He saw Gaila standing in front of her tent, and dread paled his face. She made him a sign to advance.
“Are you satisfied with your vengeance, Gaila?” he asked.
“Yes,” she replied, “you have done as I desired in capturing the chiefs. The blood of my people is no longer crying out to the heavens. And my last servitude is over. From this evening only, I am free.
And it seemed that she had changed again. The slave and the king’s concubine had disappeared. Something soft and indomitable shone in her splendid face, as if Gaila had never quit that naïve soil, and she was a new young woman, awaiting the caresses of a man. Then Setne realized that she was the foremost among all women; he prostrated himself before her.
“Do you remember,” he said, “that I loved you when you were a slave, and that your liberty never depended on anyone but yourself?”
“I remember. Then, again, I was not your slave any more than I was Ankhi’s or the others. I could have run away; I could have rejoined my vanquished tribe. Then vengeance would have escaped me. Only Egypt could give it to me, and the evening when you chose me, I read in your face that we ought to unite our stars. And see, we are victorious.”
“Gaila,” he said, in a low voice, “ought they not remain united?”
“They ought never to cease to be.”
He seized the nomad’s hand and tried to draw her toward him.
Gaila pushed him away gently. “But it is not indispensable that my body be given to you, Setne...”
“Is it forbidden?” he murmured, in a hoarse voice. “Gaila, my star cannot shine without you. If I have known you only to lose you, victory becomes odious and fortune miserable. You are destroying your work.”
“Let me look at your star,” she said, maliciously.
The breeze languishing, the flames of the pyres rose straight and bright. The star of Isis vibrated higher and brighter.
“Come,” said the nomad.
They found themselves in the shadow of the tent.
Then a small flexible hand seized Setne’s hand; he felt cool and amorous lips against his mouth; and in the profound tremor of his being, he knew that it was the supreme moment of his happiness.
Notes
1 Vespasian was Roman Emperor from 69-79 A.D. Campania, in southern Italy, had been colonized by the Greeks in the seventh century B.C., around the city of Neapolis (now Naples), and had been part of what the Romans called Magna Graecia, the region that retained a fundamentally Grecian culture while belonging of the Roman Empire.
2 According to a fourth-century commentary on the Aeneid by Maurus Servius Honoratus, the Etruscans designated their kings as Lucumons prior to their conquest by the Romans. The Etruscan civilization, whose heartland was in northern Italy but presumably extended as far south as Campania before the latter region was colonized by the Greeks, existed for an unknown length of time before 700 B.C., from which its first known inscriptions date, until its conquest by the Romans at the end of the fourth century B.C.—the effective commencement of what was eventually to become the Roman Empire.
3 The editor of the version of the text from which the present translation is taken adds a note here to record that the final sentence of this paragraph was replaced in the 1931 edition by the line: “Then he sang the nymph Syrinx pursued by the hairy god.”
4 The origins of the Etruscan civilization were a mystery to the Romans, various writers offering different opinions. Among the modern scholars whom Rosny probably consulted—although, as his advertisement makes clear, he felt free to invent—was the German historian of ancient Rome Barthold Niebuhr (1776-1831), who maintained that the Etruscans were a hybrid race resulting from a conquest by northern invaders he called Rasenas, who became the aristocracy of the compound culture.
5 Nestor, called “the Gerenian horseman” in Homer’s Iliad.
6 The Villanovan culture was the earliest Iron Age culture of northern Italy, predating the Etruscan civilization, named after a village in the vicinity of which the definitive archeological discoveries were made in the 1850s.
7 Vespasian’s name is curiously preserved in the name given to urinals in French and Italian, allegedly because of a tax that he levied on the collection of urine (employed in a process for the producti
on of ammonia).
8 “Diane-Étrusque” [Diana Etrusca] is the name Rosny uses to depict a goddess whose origins remain unclear, but whose worship appears to have been introduced into Campania when it was part of Magna Graecia; she would then have been named Artemis, whom the Romans fused with their own moon goddess and the moon and the hunt, Diana. Rosny assumes that the Greek Artemis was probably fused with a goddess whose worship was already native to the region, retaining some of her more brutal characteristics—hence the distinctive epithet.
9 Agamemnon, so-called in the Iliad.
10 Roughly, “As Diana schools the chorus on the banks of the Eurotas or the ridges of Cynthis….”
11 The constellation Coma Berenices.
12 The reference is to Prometheus in Aeschylus’ Prometheus Bound; Ananke is a personification of the Necessity to which even the gods are subject.
13 It is a quirk of Rosny’s work that the moon often rises in the west therein.
14 Rosny appears to have invented both names, presumably the gods of the fictitious Bene-Asher.
15 The reign of Thutmose III is nowadays reckoned to have extended from 1479-1425 B.C., although those dates include a period of regency when the effective ruler was his mother, Hatsheput the Great. In any case, Rosny must be using a vaguer chronology subsequently refined by further archeological discoveries, and he would have been unaware of many of the details of the king’s rein that were discovered during the twentieth century. Rosny renders the name Thoutmes, but I have substituted the now-familiar name, as I have substituted Ahmose for his Ahmes and Hatsheput for his Hatasou.
16 The word Hyksos, used to describe the rulers of Egypt prior to their defeat by Ahmose I and the beginning of the eighteenth dynasty, probably means “foreign rulers,” but the first-century historian Josephus offered a speculative etymology deriving it from Hekw Shasu, meaning “shepherd kings.” Rosny’s “Shous” is undoubtedly derived from Shasu; numerous late nineteenth century sources in English allege that the Egyptians called shepherds “shous.”
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