by Cliff Graham
He rode off, ending our conversation abruptly. Before I could think about it any more I was surrounded again by admirers of my victory and tried to nod and acknowledge their praise. I looked for the Hebrew woman. She was gone. I never discovered what became of her.
I had killed the men at the well, and those had been the first deaths at my hand. The giant was the next. Only now did I finally feel the remorse of it. Of course he deserved to die, as did Bochba’s guards. That changes not. But killing a man is killing a man. He had a mother somewhere. He knew emotions like I did, had thoughts like I did. It’s different from killing an animal, and it took me a few wineskins in a tavern to get past it.
It became easier and easier after that.
Even that night, as I lay down in my quarters and the roads outside bustled late with activity and the scent of dates and spices and livestock wafted through my window, I felt the first pangs of yearning.
The decisiveness of my victory! The speed of it! The admiration of the crowd! I quickly forgot what had led me to attack in the first place—an injustice perpetrated against the Hebrew husband and wife.
I saw only the eyes of the beautiful Egyptian girls in the crowd who lusted for me, and heard only the sound of men yelling with admiration for me.
5
Training Master Horem
I would still carve, of course, and design with my charcoal sticks on papyrus my ideas for submission to build the temple of Horus. But after making his inquiries, Akan had heard that the selection for chief designer of the temple was to be made at the next year’s Nile Festival, which celebrated the inundation of the river into the valley and covering it with the following season’s silt. I had time to make the regiment and finish my designs in order to submit for it.
Akan had scrolls drawn up that secured a place for me to try out for the Red Scorpions regiment. I packed up what I thought I would need and it all fit into a single shoulder pouch. I only needed my money bag, my drawing supplies, and my dagger. The rest of my belongings I left in Akan’s possession.
I took the journey by boat from Thebes to Memphis. It was an army ship that sailed with the standards of what I was told were the Hippo and Isis regiments fluttering above us in the hot breeze coming down from the desert.
“We have to travel with the Hippos because of Hapi,” an officer growled next to me.
“What?”
The man glanced at me. “You’re a foreigner.”
“Yes.”
“Hapi. The river god. The patron of the Hippos is Hapi. We cannot travel the river without a blessing from the priests of Hapi, who are funded by the nobility patrons of the Hippo regiment. We never travel together normally, but they were low on available ships.”
I nodded politely, not understanding why this man was taking the time to inform me of these matters. My curiosity eventually got the better of me. “You are rivals?” I asked.
“The Hippos are the putrid, rotting flesh of Seth.”
I had heard this curse before. Seth was their most despised god, the lord of the traitors and reprobates.
“I am joining the army,” I announced naively. The man, whose face was heavily marked and scarred from years of hard living, looked at me with a smirk.
“Indeed? Which regiment?”
“The Red Scorpions.”
“You jest.”
“No. I had the papers drawn up by a noble. I am endorsed.”
He studied me a moment, then laughed. “Make sure you enjoy your last night before entering the underworld. Most who try out for the Red Scorpions die long before they make it in.”
I had heard that the Red Scorpions were selective, but I had not heard this. “They . . . die? They don’t simply drop out?”
“They are the elite regiment, the pride of Pharaoh. The selection is so difficult that many die even when they are trying to quit. They have a training master named Horem, who is the most ruthless goat you can imagine. He doesn’t allow anyone in who isn’t hewn from rock and fire itself. He will especially hate you because of how you have bypassed the normal selection process.”
“What process?”
“Most who join the Red Scorpions are required to have served in the regular ranks for three years before they are even considered for selection. No one is hated more than he who finds a way to avoid the process. I tried out for the Scorpions once when I was younger and prayed for death every hour until I dropped out.”
He was a formidable-looking man, and it did nothing for my confidence to think that if he dropped out, how far would I get?
The desert had almost swallowed the sun by the time I finished climbing the long, rocky path from the Nile up to the top of the Giza plateau. I passed several Bedouin girls, who were carrying stacks of water pouches down to the river and filling them. They looked at me with hollow, gaunt eyes. Their lives were the hardest that I could imagine, worse than even that of slaves.
Many slaves in Egypt who weren’t Hebrew could own land, conduct their own business affairs, even eventually purchase their own freedom. But these Bedouins would never see a life apart from the searing dunes of the west, where I would only sentence an Amalekite to perish among.
When I reached the top of the cliffs, the white tents of Pharaoh’s army spread before me, gleaming in the golden evening sunlight in a vast ocean of martial order and precision. Oh, but the Egyptians knew how to encamp their men! Nothing like the filth we live in. The sanitation, the clarity of the ground, all of it was perfectly organized.
Men did not amble and wander through a forest of ropes and tent pegs; they walked down clean alleys and wide berths. The colors of each battalion and their patron god adorned the canvas, so I was seeing crocodiles, leopards, bulls, every animal in the world painted in exquisite detail. The tents of officers had standards mounted atop them that fluttered in the light desert breeze.
It had everything that would make it a city, and it stretched forever to the horizon in orderly rows. The only places where disorder seemed to reign were the civilian precincts. Pharaoh allowed the people from along the Nile to come to the camps to support their markets. Soldiers were not necessarily paid well, but their pay was direct from the coffers of the king himself and therefore steadier than the common riffraff, and that put them in the elite status.
Prostitutes did enormous business, as did bakers, menders, bronze workers—officers were expected to pay for their own weaponry maintenance—and falconers, for desert hare was a favored dish.
Cooking fires and slaves to man them, table merchants selling pastries, jewelers hammering at gold pieces and squinting at them to determine their weight and worth. Far to my left was an enormous oval, and I saw several dozen chariot teams swarming one another in mock drills.
I stared at the chariots and horses, awed by them just as I had been the first time I saw them.
Above it all were the pyramids, as white as lightning and tall enough to scratch the sky. Nearby too was that monstrous, hideously beautiful half-man, half-lion carving they called the Sphinx. It was said to be over a thousand years old, but it was well-maintained and glowed in the sunlight. It leered at us like the pagan idol it was.
I was at a loss as to what to do next. All I owned was in the pack on my shoulder: a bag of gold and copper rings, my drawing supplies, my dagger, my carving blades, a pouch of date cakes, and my water pouch. That was all.
As I wandered near the camp, I was confronted by two roving sentries. These men wore only linen loincloths and carried their bronze swords in their hands. Nothing else, in order to be as light as possible in the event they had to pursue a spy peering in on the camp from a distant spot. Their chests and arms were as carved as the sculptures of the gods I had been creating.
“Where are you going?” one of them asked me.
“I am here to join the ranks. I am a foreigner. I was told to report here.”
“Show your orders.”
I handed over the papyrus scroll and waited while they read it. My referral had
come from a house of nobility so I did not expect to wait long.
They stared at me hard a moment after reading it, then the other one handed it back to me and said, “The tent nearest the well is where your division will be assigned.”
I thanked them and made my way into the camp with no idea as to how to search for the well apart from wandering to the center, assuming that was the logical place for it.
I found it and presented my scroll. The receiving officer studied my orders very thoroughly. So thoroughly that after a while I could not stop myself from asking, “Excuse me, sir, but what is written on there that is taking so long?”
As you have seen before, these were the days prior to my learning respect and humility. I deserved much of the punishment I received.
His head snapped up, and he stared at me with pure hatred. “I am checking to make sure you are not the actual son of a noble lord or have family connections that would prevent me from killing you.”
Again, I had not yet learned martial discipline, so I replied, “I do not need powerful family members to protect me; I can do fine on my own.”
The officer glared at me, glanced down at the papyrus, then, faster than I could have ever expected, he jumped from his stool and punched me savagely. I swung a blow at him but he avoided it, much faster than the brutish, untrained giant had been.
My next feeling was a crushing blow across the back of my head. I went slack in the officer’s arms, my world a daze of lights and pain. I felt kicks in my ribs, a fist across my jaw, relentless beatings all over my body.
A group of the Egyptian officers had joined in and were crushing my body in every way possible. My receiving officer yelled, “You will learn respect! You will learn it!”
After a while I passed out. When I revived, I could barely see out of my swollen eyes. Even my teeth hurt. I coughed, and blood erupted from my throat. Horrible pain in my chest. I knew I had several broken ribs. It hurt to even take a breath, and I coughed so hard that I nearly passed out again.
My eyes opened enough to get my first glimpse of a face that I would come to hate, and respect, above all others.
Training Master Horem seemed old to me even then, though he could not have been past his fortieth year. Like every other Egyptian soldier, his head was shaved to the scalp and he had no beard, but he had so many scars on his face that the white marks resembled one. The remnant of an old infection on his brow that had spread down his face left a horrific mark on his cheek, a black-and-red cavernous pit that seemed to burst into flames when he yelled, which he was doing now.
“Get up! Get up! Get up!”
I winced at the noise. Felt a hard punch to my face. I gagged and would have vomited if I had eaten any food that day, but instead I lay there heaving air from my gut while this new monster yelled at me and landed blows.
Somehow I found my way to my feet and tried to stand upright, an attempt that the man quickly ended with a punch to my gut.
“My name is Training Master Horem. Say it.”
I tried to open my mouth but could not. My jaw had swollen shut.
“Training Master Horem. Say that name or I will cut out your tongue and feed it to the crocodiles.”
“Tr . . . aining Master . . .”
Another punch.
“What is the matter with your speech? Say the full name.”
“T . . . training Master Hore . . .”
This time the blow knocked me to the ground, and I could only lie there and bleed into the sand.
“Get my name wrong once more and I will slit your throat! By order of the mouth of Pharaoh, I have that privilege! You show up for my regiment without spending three years in the armies? A piece of worthless foreign dung? How did you bribe Lord Akan into getting you that letter? I will make sure you die with a lungful of sand and my foot in your—”
I squeezed my eyes shut and concentrated on saying his name correctly, searching my memory for it. All was a fog. A blur.
“Train . . . ing Master Horem.”
No response from him. Perhaps I had said it right. I think I passed out again, because next I realized there was a wet linen rag on my face. It revived me somewhat.
It was Training Master Horem, kneeling beside me with a basin of water. He scrubbed my face roughly. It would not be mistaken for a bath given by a sensuous handmaiden.
“You have until tomorrow to report to the Red Scorpions regiment, first battalion, ready to train with the others. If you are not there, your name will be removed from the roster. If I get bored one day I might even hunt you down and kill you anyway.”
After beating me nearly to death, and now personally wiping my face of the blood he had beaten out of me, I did not yet know what to make of Training Master Horem. I suppose I ought to have hated him on the spot, but I didn’t sense that it was personal between us. He was doing his job, which was tearing out the rotten bones inside of a man and replacing them with fresh ones.
6
The Valley of Ra
I went to bed that night staring at the ceiling of my tent, believing I had made the worst mistake of my life. I was homesick. I knew I had the skills to fight desert bandits and other riffraff, but the orderly, disciplined fighting I saw displayed that afternoon on the training pitches was both intimidating and disheartening. I knew I could make it through the end of training if I did not quit, but the day was far off still. I could only see the endless weeks and months ahead of me. I did not know then how to see my life one day at a time, one challenge at a time, knowing that as each day and challenge was confronted, one more step had been taken toward the day of victory.
The next day at noon, I found myself standing with the other recruits and already exhausted. There were many ranks of us from foreign lands. We had been thrown together into a clash of languages, cultures, and personalities. On this morning, I am certain that every one of us felt as I did: that we had made the worst decision of our lives.
About fifty training masters prowled our ranks with whips. When there was not adequate response to their questions they cracked their whips across our flesh. If one was punished, all were punished.
We had been running across the hot sand, swum through crocodile-infested lagoons, and carried rocks up a sand dune that seemed to be as high as the pyramids, and that was just the first morning.
Now we stood at attention, sweaty and with multiple whip marks, our backs straight and our hands clasped to the hems of our loincloths.
“Forty days,” Training Master Horem was saying as he paced in front of us. “Forty days and you will understand the meaning of suffering. You will know what it is like to peer into the depths of your ba and see what your fate will be. You will know which of the gods favors you and which of them wants you dead. If you are favored by a weak god”—he grinned widely—“your death will be painful, slow, and fun for me to watch. If you are favored by a powerful god, you will have riches and women beyond what your worthless mind can grasp.”
Training Master Horem stood near me and glared into my eyes. I returned the stare, my eyes flickered to the red pit scar on his face, and suddenly I felt a heavy fist crack the back of my skull, delivered by another training master who had snuck up behind me.
I lost all vision and sound. I felt my face slam into the sand as my knees gave out.
My ears rung loudly.
He was saying something, but I couldn’t understand it. I tried to lift my face to see his lips. Sound began returning, the ache from the blow flaring up.
“. . . when I am looking at you. I vow by Ra and all the gods that if you ever dare to look in my eyes again, you rotting pus-filled baboon, I will have your . . .”
I lost the rest of it. My mind was swimming and surging as though it were caught in a current.
I felt the sole of a sandal on my back, pushing me down when I tried to stand up.
“. . . this worthless sack of camel dung, this piece of . . .”
I turned my head and opened my eyes at last, and the effo
rt was filled with agony.
“. . . all spend the rest of the day barefoot, because you will fight barefoot on the sand. It will burn, and you will want to have your legs cut off, but find your manhood, because there is an enemy who hunts you . . .”
I felt the foot come off my back and, still groggy, stood up and felt myself pushed forward. We were running, my feet no longer had sandals, and it was bearable at first as the sweaty, reeking mass of us sloshed through the heavy sand for an hour until we got to a wide, flat plain that stretched from horizon to horizon. The sand had disappeared, and the dirt was compacted and smooth, as though ages ago there had been a floodplain here and this was all that remained.
We were overjoyed at first, because it meant we no longer had to trudge through the sand, but within a few steps on this new surface we shouted in pain.
The white ground was like an infinite baking stone, reflecting the heat from the sun so severely that our eyes clamped shut. The flesh on the bottom of our feet felt as if we had thrust them into a bed of coals.
Every man there, despite what he would admit to later, shrieked and cried like a woman as the soles of our feet blistered in the heat.
“This is the Valley of Ra!” Training Master Horem said gleefully as he ran alongside us, barefoot just like we were but utterly unfazed by the fire below us. “It is the hottest place we have found in the Upper and Lower Kingdom, an inferno without measure! Half of you will be dead before the day is out! Give my greetings to Lord Osiris and his pet Ammit for me when he devours your heart!”
They pushed us on in our ranks. I declare to you that that old jackal Horem was telling us the truth. I have never in the decades since experienced suffering like that day, nor have I felt heat anything like the Valley of Ra.
Men began to drop dead by late afternoon. The first one fell in front of me and went facedown in the sand and did not move. We simply stamped our feet on his back as we ran over him. Not a single one of the training masters even looked back at him as we left his body behind.
