Exodus

by Cliff Graham

  Amek and Senek bowed down low before him. They had not had the chance yet.

  “Majesty, if I may ask, how do you know this?”

  “They knew I would be here. That means someone told them,” Thutmose answered simply. “Normally I use a decoy, so they would believe I did it again. And I certainly do not look like Great Egypt right now,” he said with a grin.

  “We need to move. They will discover us if we do not get back,” I said.

  “Follow me,” Amek said as he stood.

  Amek and Senek were not tired from running the Breath of Horus and moved easily over the ground. Pharaoh Thutmose and I struggled behind them, my leg bleeding heavily.

  “Ra departs from the heavens. We will not be able to make it back before dark,” Thutmose said.

  “We will press on through the night, your majesty,” I said.

  And as the sun set we kept moving onward into the desert until night was full and the stars appeared. Over knobs and across narrow wadis we followed that ridge. I do not know how many hours we traveled. Our hearts were heavy for the dead and wounded we had left behind, but our mission was indisputable: get the king to safety.

  It was late. I remember that we had been walking in silence for an hour or more, anxious that we would be discovered, when we heard a clattering of rocks below us on the ridge. We all dropped instinctively to our chests and held still.

  I closed my eyes and strained my ears. A light breeze dusted the rocks, but nothing else. We kept waiting.

  Another clatter, a small one that we would not have heard if we had been walking, but there it was plainly ahead of us.

  I turned and made eye contact with Amek and Senek. With hand signals we communicated:

  Men?

  Yes.

  How many?

  Many.

  Somehow the Amalekites had gained on us. Perhaps they discovered that the king was not in the middle of the squadron faster than we hoped. Which meant that all of our brothers were . . .

  I shook my head. Time to forget them.

  The others waited for my orders. I looked around and squinted my eyes to focus them in the dark. The ridge we were moving on stuck up like a spine in the desert, and we had been moving along its crest. Not on the very top in order to avoid being silhouetted against the sky, but high enough to be able to hold the high ground in any engagement.

  But if they had somehow encircled us, we were doomed regardless. How had they moved so fast? Were there so many that we were encountering a separate group?

  I thought hopefully that perhaps these were more of the Red Scorpions from the camp, come to search for the king. But that could not be true; reinforcements would be coming from the road, not stealthily along the ridge.

  I wanted desperately to act. Hold still, though. I needed to hold still until I knew more. How many? Could we fight through them?

  A clattering noise again. Why were they moving so carelessly?

  They were not moving carelessly. They were signaling each other.

  A cry rose up from all around us as dozens of Amalekites emerged from the darkness and swarmed our position.

  Amek and Senek started sending arrows while I grabbed the king and pulled him in the only direction I could spot that had no enemies advancing on us.

  “We must fight them!” he protested.

  “We will, your majesty, but from a better position. Amek! Senek! This way!”

  I had seen a break on the ridge, a dark spot that could mean what I hoped it meant . . .

  The Amalekites rushed toward us furiously. They had to run across loose shale and slid and stumbled on one another, slowing their attack and giving us time to make it to the black shadow that grew larger as we approached.

  The king fell, and I heard his wrist snap as it wedged between two rocks. I cursed. He did not cry out in pain but was back on his feet instantly. I pulled him along, admiring him in spite of our situation. But he would now be of no use in defending our position.

  We could not outrun them all. We had to find a position of strength where our small number would be an advantage, a position like a cave . . .

  . . . which was what we saw open up in front of us. I shouted, “Inside!” to the others as I helped his majesty along and Amek and Senek released their arrows with steady, disciplined aims.

  I was the first through the cave entrance. It was as wide as three men standing abreast, and the roof was two or three cubits over my head. It was completely dark, so I could not determine how far it went into the mountainside. Larger than I preferred, yet it would have to work.

  “Lord king, stay behind us and use your good hand to stab through our gaps. You have learned infantry?”

  “Yes.”

  “Attack low. Hit their ankles and the tendons below the knee.”

  The Amalekites were getting closer. We could hear the rocks and pebbles sliding as they neared the entrance. Amek and Senek took their positions on the left and right side of the entrance and pulled out their short bronze blades and readied their small crocodile-hide shields.

  “Ignore the more tempting targets like their torsos or heads,” I continued. “They will be guarding those areas, and every blow matters.”

  Figures were just outside the entrance now and closing in.

  “We will grow tired and so you have to fight with anger!” I shouted as my time ran out and the first few Amalekites burst into the cave in a full charge. Amek and Senek braced themselves against either wall and drove their blades into the two men closest to them while I knelt and hacked at the legs of the one in the middle.

  Three Amalekites down at once. They screamed in pain, their blood spraying our faces from the arteries severed. And it flared up in me again: lust for killing. Death in my taste. Anger at who would dare attack me. I roared in hate and picked up a nearby rock and came down with it with all my strength to crush the Amalekite’s face, silencing his screams.

  The Amalekites must have realized that we had a defensible position because they then tried to kill us with hails of arrows from the outside of the cave. We ducked back against the walls of the cavern and winced as the tips clinked and snapped against the rock. One hit my knee, but it was only a graze.

  The arrows ceased, then came another charge. Ten this time, stacked up against each other. They had a smart commander. He did not want to send them in in small groups at a time to be cut down by the pharaoh’s elite troops.

  Thutmose leaned forward and put his hand on my back to balance himself. Amek and Senek crouched. I held the blade up, felt the darkness around us, listened as feet struck the gravel at the entrance. They were upon us again, and I stabbed with hard, steady thrusts.

  The first one collapsed after three cuts, but he kept fighting as he fell and even after he hit the ground. The second was a huge man who stepped on the back of his comrade and hacked at us with a club, catching Amek on the shoulder before swinging toward me.

  I blocked it, but another man appeared behind him, then another, until soon we were surrounded by them in the tight space, elbows flying and breaking against teeth, blades stabbing. I kept finding flesh to penetrate, then panicked because it was too dark to see who was who. The smell of sweat from everyone, and blood, blood everywhere. My head scraped against the stones, and I cried out for Thutmose, yet he did not reply.

  Cries of meaningless words, grunts, and shouts filled the cramped space. They would not die easily, these wicked men from the desert with their tattoos and self-inflicted scars on their faces, which made them look like monsters of the afterlife.

  I remember that it was so very dark and hot in that cave, and somehow I kept surviving and cutting at legs, and then somehow I found a way to shoulder myself next to Amek, shouting one of our regimental war cries “Sting and move!” to let him know it was me. We fought them back to the entrance, tripping over corpses and wounded men, who bit at our ankles and gashed their teeth deep into our legs.

  Men do not die easily or quickly. You learn that.

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nbsp; In the confusion, Senek lowered his head, grabbed both Amek’s arm and mine, and shouted, “Shove them out! All together!”

  I lowered my head alongside his, and we pressed forward with all our remaining strength. The Amalekites were fearsome, but they were thin, worn down by the ravages of a barren desert diet, and we were able to push them back through the entrance until they stumbled over the bodies of their dead, and we laid into them, hacking at their flesh till it quivered and shook from the death tremors.

  An order in their tongue was shouted and the half dozen remaining in the cave suddenly withdrew outside into the desert night and disappeared.

  Amek, Senek, and I gasped for air, our muscles shaking with exertion, our eyes wild and searching the opening for any sign of an arm or a leg we could attack, but none emerged.

  “They . . . are regrouping,” I said between breaths.

  “How long until they return?” Thutmose asked.

  “I . . . do not know. They will not leave while you are here, though.” I shook my head. “They did not anticipate us giving them such a fight. We are isolated and far from our army. They know they can just wait until we come out in surrender because we are nearly dead from thirst, then cut us down while they take you captive, your majesty.”

  “We will not surrender. We will wait and see what fate the gods have for us. If it is to begin our journey on the Duat, so be it,” Thutmose said calmly.

  Amek and Senek smiled, as did I. Finally, a warrior to lead us! After years of being led by a false pharaoh. A woman, even!

  “Grab those bodies and stack them at the entrance,” I said.

  The entrance was narrow enough that it only took a pile of seven of them to block the passage to waist level. One less defensive posture we had to worry about. Now the Amalekites had to attack us by climbing over the pile, and we had free lines of sight on their legs.

  “Why do you attack the legs?” Thutmose asked as we piled bodies. I was impressed again at his willingness to get his hands dirty with the work.

  “A wounded man is far more valuable to us than a dead one. He screams in pain and makes his comrades upset as they listen to him. He writhes and thrashes about and gets in the way of their attacks.”

  “You mentioned the other targets on the body.”

  “It is instinct to stab a man in the torso. That is also where his armor tends to be if he is wearing it. You may get lucky and kill him after a single blow, but”—I gestured to the corpses at our feet—“most men take multiple wounds before they die. Better to hamstring them and make it impossible for them to fight, and then listen to them squeal and frighten and get in the way of their friends.”

  We waited and watched until late into the night. We could hear voices outside in the harsh, guttural Amalekite tongue.

  Thirst. That was the horror that soon became everything to us. We had lost our water pouches when our chariot was attacked, and we had been on the run in the heat of the day and then fighting off attacks all evening in the suffocating cave. I even considered drinking the blood of the dead, but I had learned that it would only make me thirstier.

  In the middle of the night, the tension was broken when Amek said in a weary, cracked voice, “If I survive this I am going to drink myself to death.”

  We all laughed.

  “I will provide the wine,” the king said.

  “What about your woman?” I asked. “What use are you to her as a drunk?”

  “She drinks more than I do.”

  It continued this way. No one wanted to think about how we were eventually going to die. That we did not have a prayer at withstanding another attack.

  Just before dawn, Amek died.

  He had been silent for a while. The rest of us had carried on our conversation and assumed he was sleeping. We had divided up the watch, though no one could sleep and so we kept each other company by talking about old things.

  When I reached over to prod Amek, he did not move. I poked him harder, then smacked him with the flat of my blade. Nothing.

  When I touched his neck I knew instantly he was dead.

  I pulled my fingers away and exhaled heavily. “He is gone to the Duat.”

  Senek sat up. “What? How?”

  “It is too dark. I cannot tell. Perhaps he had a deep wound and bled out without our knowing.” I said these things as though I were describing the weather. I felt numb. Hollow. A shell of myself.

  Amek had been almost flesh to me. He, Senek, and I were closer than brothers. I would grieve bitterly when this was over.

  In the dark, I heard Senek draw a sharp breath. I knew this sound from him. It was rage.

  “Senek, do not do anything—.”

  But he was up and running for the cave entrance. I leaped up and tried to catch him, shouting, “Wait, you fool! Wait!”

  I managed to seize him by the legs and trip him as he was climbing up the stack of bodies to get outside.

  “Do not! You will be cut down!”

  “Come at me!” he screamed as I tried to hold him. “Your mothers are all whores! I will have every soldier in the regiment ravage your women and take the very rags on your back! I will feed your naked carcasses to Nekhbet!”

  He ranted and yelled, his voice echoing loud in the cave. Thutmose joined me in holding him down.

  “I command you to silence!” the young king said, and Senek was startled at this. He regained himself. He nodded to me, and I released him slowly.

  When he spoke, he had great pain in his voice. “Apologies, my king. Amek was our brother.”

  Thutmose nodded. “I will make a sacrifice for him and give him gold for his journey to the afterlife.”

  Silence returned. We waited. All I could think about was finding something to drink. We’d already scoured the corpses for any water pouches, but Amalekites were known for fighting all day with no water and so none were carrying any. They would have a supply camel nearby, a tactic we also used.

  “The gods are testing me,” Thutmose said after a while, and his voice cracked with thirst.

  Senek and I did not know how to respond. In the fighting, I had almost forgotten that we were with the son of Ra himself, the god-man who communicated with the divinities. In spite of my suffering, I was worried I had not been showing him the proper amount of deference and respect due him.

  “They test me and they will find me in the full measure of manhood,” he continued in the darkness. “And when I have survived this insult, I will ensure that every man of Amalek will have his eyes cut out and forced down his throat. They will be tied to oxcarts and torn apart, and their entrails will be used to smear their blood on my throne. I will send their women to my loyal Red Scorpions to be ravaged for the entire Nile feasting season, and then they will be impaled on spikes until Nekhbet comes and devours their eyes under the hot gaze of Ra as my sacrifice to my brother gods. Their children I will torture to death one by one. They will be thrown into pits of cobras and lagoons of crocodiles after they have been ravaged by my army like their mothers. I, Thutmose, the third of that name, declare this to be so.”

  With the king being as weak as we were, his words did not resound in the cavern like they might have in his throne room. But his conviction was chilling to me nonetheless.

  At some point that night I was stung by a scorpion. The irony of it was not lost on me. It got me on the ankle as I was pulling Amek’s body to the back of the cavern.

  “By Seth’s rotten breath!” I shouted, then swatted the insect. The pain was intense and irritating.

  “What happened?” Senek asked.

  “Scorpion,” I said with a grimace. It was a small one, yet those are what cause the most damage internally. I could even now feel my lungs closing and my face swelling. “I will be all right,” I added dismissively.

  Oh, how the gods must have enjoyed that comment, because right after I said it, we heard the sudden thumping of feet on bodies. Instantly the cavern was filled with Amalekites who had rushed in, taking us by surprise, and
as my breathing became more labored I felt the jolt of panic energy that comes when your life is threatened. My sword flew up. I could see the outlines of the men against the pale gray light of early morning.

  A blow struck me. I tried to counterattack the figure above me, but two more appeared next to him. I could not even shout orders, the surprise was so complete.

  I blinked away the tears that my treacherous, swelling eyes were producing. Thought about pulling back further. No. No advance for the enemy! The king. Where was he? I rolled to my left. Feet kicked at my ribs, blades cut downward, but by some unknown power they kept missing me. I was completely vulnerable. There must have been a dozen of them inside the cavern with us. My eyes were swelling shut now from the scorpion poison. Helpless, I waited for the killing blow to my chest, thinking how I had failed my god-king and my comrades, how my journey into night would be filled with terrors, and how Ammit would devour my soul when it was found wanting.

  But why had they attacked? Why risk more dead when they could just wait—?

  Then I heard it. Outside the cave.

  The roar of the khamsin.

  I barely had a moment to glimpse through the bodies at the gray morning sky before it was swallowed by sand.

  They had seen it coming and were searching for any shelter they could find. I imagined their forces outside scrambling over each other, wrapping heads in blankets, desperately seeking anything that could shield their mouths and eyes from the terror all were familiar with.

  Like the breath of Horus himself, sand rushed into the entrance on the wings of the wind and flooded our cavern, pelting our bodies with such ferocity that the Amalekites, who had been standing over us, were blown forward and on top of us.

  Darkness. Roaring. Screaming.

  I acted without thinking, already nearly blind from the swelling, punching my fist into any flesh nearby that I could find.

  I sensed that I struck a neck with one blow and then kept striking that spot until I felt the windpipe break under my knuckles.

  Another man was stabbing wildly at my thigh with his dagger. It penetrated my flesh twice deeply before I caught the hilt and tried to shove the tip back toward my attacker.