by Gene Wolfe
Soldier of Sidon
( Latro - 3 )
Gene Wolfe
Gene Wolfe
Soldier of Sidon
THE AETHIOPIANS WERE clothed in the skins of leopards and lions, and had long bows made of the stem of the palm-leaf, not less than four cubits in length. On these they laid short arrows made of reed, and armed at the tip, not with iron, but with a piece of stone, sharpened to a point, of the kind used in engraving seals. They carried likewise spears, the head of which was the sharpened horn of an antelope; and in addition they had knotted clubs. When they went into battle they painted their bodies, half with chalk and half with vermilion. – HERODOTUS
FOREWORD
SOME YEARS AGO I gave myself the fascinating task of translating two ancient texts in the possession of my friend D.A., scrolls of papyrus discovered in the basement of the British Museum. When I had completed my (admittedly tentative) translation of the second, I declared my work at an end.
A year ago, I received a letter from another friend, the Egyptologist I will call N.D. As is generally known, the ruins of the ancient nation of Nubia now lie almost entirely under the waters of the lake created by the Aswan Dams. Prior to the construction of the dams, strenuous efforts were made to salvage Nubia's archaeological treasures, particularly the famous temple of Isis on the Island of Philae. At that time, the science of underwater archaeology was in its infancy.
It is not so today. Underwater archaeologists, N.D. among them, are probing the depths of the lake and bringing to light many items of interest.
Among these was a sealed vase of post-Pharaonic times. Opened again after two and half millennia, it was found to contain a papyrus scroll written in the Egyptian style with a reed brush, but written not (as was first supposed) in hieratic characters but in archaic Latin. When the first sheets had been translated, N.D. kindly sent a copy of the entire scroll to me.
In translating the whole, I have assumed that the narrator was that of the earlier scrolls. The abundant evidence favoring that assumption will be apparent to every reader. Further, the style is the same, if it can be called that. The narrator (who refers to himself as "L") abbreviates almost every word, creating manifold opportunities for error. He does not punctuate or divide his text into paragraphs, much less chapters. All such divisions are mine. As previously, I have employed the first words of each chapter as its title, and have tried to re-create conversations he summarizes.
The modern reader is cautioned to lay aside all preconceptions concerning ancient Egypt and Nubia. We tend to think the Egyptians morbid, for example, after viewing so many collections of grave goods. It is the opposite of the truth. They loved life, and took loving care of their dead in expectation of a general resurrection.
As the narrator himself was told (as he writes, by a god), the Egypt of the classical period fairly swarmed with divinities. These cannot be organized into a single rational system. Their powers, and importance, varied by place and date, while the priests of each glorified the god they served at the expense of all the rest. Be warned that books purporting to list all the gods of ancient Egypt do not. Be warned also that there is no such thing as THE Book of the Dead. Books of the dead were what today is called a publishing category. Certain elements are common to all; many more depend on which is consulted. Note too that Egypt (which had no more wolves than any other African nation) had a wolf-god, presumably imported at an ancient date from the Near East.
Readers of this third scroll should keep in mind that the Egyptians were famous throughout the Mediterranean world for hard drinking. They seem to have been the first nation to brew beer and the inventors of the beer joint. Beer, the beverage of the Egyptian working class, was drunk from bowls through straws of baked clay. Each drinker was given his straw with his first bowl. When he left, he broke the straw so that it could not be given to another patron. Archaeologists have found millions-literally millions-of these broken straws.
Dancing in taverns and at private parties was segregated by sex. Unmixed wine was drunk at upper- and middle-class parties, which often lasted all night. Egypt produced great quantities of good wine and imported more from Greece. Without the papyrus scrolls that were traded for Greek wine, we would know little or nothing of Homer, Pindar, Sophocles, and scores of other ancient authors. Nor would we have had the first two scrolls written with such desperate clarity by the brain-damaged mercenary who called himself Latro.
Marriage in ancient Egypt was casual in the extreme. Polygamy was common in both the middle and upper classes. A man's chief wife, his hemet, was usually, although not always, his first. A queen of Egypt-Nefertiti is a famous example-was the chief wife of the pharaoh. Our puritanical Egyptologists frequently characterize lesser wives as concubines, but this is incorrect; they too were wives (hebswt). A man of wealth spoke of his wives, not of his wife and his concubines.
No ceremony, religious or civil, was required for marriage. Marriage contracts were negotiated only when property was involved. Marriage normally required the consent of the bride's parents or her guardians, as well as that of the bride herself. Many girls married at twelve.
The "singing girls" who figure so largely in this scroll are ignored or disguised by most of our writers on ancient Egypt. A famous picture found in a Theban tomb shows a half-dozen richly dressed women singing, clapping, and playing musical instruments while two naked girls, smaller in the picture because they were less important, dance. The books that reproduce it, or more often some part of it, rarely explain it. The well-dressed ladies are guests at a party. The naked dancers are singing girls, hired entertainers.
Another picture, not as widely reproduced as the first, depicts a naked singing girl with her instrument. Long-legged, large-breasted, and slender, this Egyptian miss would have fit neatly into any show in Las Vegas. The cleansing passage of thousands of years has reformed the singing girls; they are called exotic dancers, go-go girls, or strippers now, and have been stripped of their priestly protection. Morality is satisfied.
Slavery in ancient Egypt was legal but rare, perhaps mostly because of the many protections afforded slaves by the law. Aside from galley slaves, such slaves as Egypt had were nearly all servants in upper-class households. If a free man married a slave, their children were slaves; to forestall this, the bride was often freed before marriage.
Many writers on popular Egyptology dwell on Egypt's supposed isolation and peaceful character. These suppositions are erroneous to the point of absurdity. The delta lay open to the Mediterranean and seaborne invasion. The as-yet-unidentified "Sea Peoples" struck by sea and overland (from the east) in the time of Ramses the Third. The date would have been approximately 1176 B.C. To the west, the Libyan nomads were numerous and warlike. To the east, Egypt's immense border beckoned any army with sense enough to follow the coast, as the Persians did-twice.
To the south lay the valiant, half-savage nation we call Nubia. The Nubians conquered all Egypt at one point, giving it an entire dynasty of Black pharaohs that lasted from 780 to 656 B.C. The mysterious Hyksos (although often translated as "shepherd kings," this name probably meant "foreign rulers") had overcome Egypt a thousand years earlier, around 1800 B.C.; their rule endured for 150 years.
Not only was Egypt open to foreign invasions, it was subject to internecine fighting of every kind. When the monarchy was weak, local governors behaved as local governors have elsewhere.
A rational discussion of Egyptian history and military organization requires an understanding of Egyptian geography. Above the delta, Upper Egypt was little more than a river valley stretching south along the Nile for about five hundred miles. Borders are always dangerous, and Upper Egypt was all border. Prudent statesmen draw the borders of nations along seacoasts-or when
that is not feasible, down the channels of rivers. Egypt's river was the spine of the nation, not its border.
Small wonder then that Egypt had history's first standing army, for centuries not merely the best but the only standing army in the world. (The gripes so characteristic of infantrymen were first recorded in hieratic script.) This army was a large force organized along startlingly modern lines, with disciplined units similarly equipped. It consisted of two corps, one of infantry and the other of chariots. A third corps might be formed of mercenaries, most often from Nubia, less often from Greece or Libya. In one well-nigh incredible instance there was a fourth corps, of students from the Egyptian equivalent of West Point. The ships of the Egyptian navy were commanded by soldiers, and were considered a part of its army.
It would be easy to fill an entire book with details of Egyptian weapons and military practice. Two very different swords were in use, for example. One, apparently of Egyptian design, was a sharply curved scimitar. The other was long, straight, and double-edged; it seems to have been an importation, probably from Nubia.
Writing of the Sudanese more than two thousand years later, Kipling said, 'E 'asn't got no papers of 'is own,
'E 'asn't got no medals nor rewards, So we must certify the skill 'e's shown
In usin' of 'is long, two-'anded swords…
After describing these weapons, which are far older than Christianity, modern commentators sometimes theorize that they were copied from swords brought to Egypt by the crusaders. Spears, maces, angled war-clubs like that used by the narrator, daggers, hatchets, and broad-bladed battle-axes were in common use as well. Armor was light, and worn almost exclusively by the soldiers and officers who manned chariots. The Egyptian infantryman rarely had any protection beyond his big shield.
There were two areas in which Egyptian military capability was notably deficient. Although the upper class (which furnished the army with chariot commanders) boasted fine archers, the use of the bow was almost unknown to the middle and working classes. Further, the Egyptians were charioteers, not horsemen as that term is usually understood. Their army needed cavalry and more archers; both these deficiencies were made up by enlisting mercenaries from Nubia whenever Egypt and Nubia were not at war.
To picture Egypt and, particularly, Nubia at the time this scroll was written, the reader must understand that North Africa has been drying up for thousands of years. Twenty thousand years ago, the Sahara was a damp plain dotted with shallow lakes, the home of great herds of hippopotamuses. Rock carvings in the pitiless desert west of the Red Sea show men and dogs hunting giraffes.
The term "Nubia," so often employed by the narrator, is itself interesting. It was only just coming into use in his day, and he may well have introduced it. If so, he presumably picked it up from his Phoenician friends and Latinized it. The original Phoenician probably meant "Land of the Nehasyu." This is the riverine tribe the narrator most often calls the Crocodile People.
The ancient Greeks called Nubia Aethiopia-"Land of Burnt Faces." Note that some ancient geographical terms such as Nubia, Aethiopia, Kush, Nysa, and Punt were very vague and meant different things in the mouths of different speakers. Nysa may sometimes have referred to the area around Lake Nyasa in Central Africa.
People speak carelessly of Egyptian darkness and the Riddle of the Sphinx. The facts are that the Riddle of the Sphinx is Greek, not Egyptian, and that we know a great deal about ancient Egypt. We understand its language and possess thousands of inscriptions and documents, up to and including love songs and love letters. (Some are charming. In one letter a young man stoutly avers that he would wade a crocodile-infested stream to be with his beloved. In a love song, a young woman yearns "for him to send word to my mother." He may have preferred the stream.)
Nubia, however, is a genuine enigma. At the time this scroll was written, its people did not speak Nubian, but the largely unknown language that we call Merotic. Because they wrote it in Egyptian hieroglyphics as well as in what we call Merotic script, we know how it sounded, the names of some kings, and a few other words. But no more than that. There has been no Nubian Rosetta Stone.
Both the Nehasyu and the Medjay, the principal Nubian tribes, were expert archers and horsemen. Nubian kings paid enormous prices for fine horses from Arabia Felix. (Fortunate Arabia-Arabia, too, was better watered in those days.) Favorite horses might be buried with great ceremony in elaborate tombs.
The Medjay, the narrator's Lion People, were nomads who drove their cattle and horses wherever the grass was long. Employed originally to fend off raiding parties from Libya, their duties were soon enlarged. By late Pharaonic times they were Egypt's police. Many Nubian mercenaries married Egyptians and settled in Egypt.
Allow me to note in closing that the ancient Egyptians, who invented and discovered so many things, never had a coinage of their own. The gold pieces with which the Phoenician captain fees the priest of Hathor, and no doubt most of the other coins mentioned in this scroll, are those of the occupying Persian Empire.
PART I
1
RA'HOTEP SAYS
I AM TO write everything that takes place on this scroll, as concisely as I can. I will try. I must read this every morning, too. Muslak will tell me. I must have Myt-ser'eu tell me also. Let me begin with the first things I remember.
We left the ship and searched for an inn, ate and drank there, and slept in the same room. It was crowded and some of us returned to the ship to sleep, although I did not.
I woke when the others did, awakened, I think, by their footsteps. We ate again, and Muslak told me his name and that he is the captain of our ship. "We're in Kemet, Lewqys, with a cargo of hides. This was where you wanted to go."
I said, "I have been trying to remember my name. Thank you."
"You couldn't remember it?"
I shook my head.
"That's bad. Your memory comes and goes. Now it seems like it's gone. Know why we're here?"
I said, "To sell the hides, I suppose."
"But what about you? Why are you here?"
I had thought myself one of his ship's crew. Clearly I was not, so I shook my head again.
"That settles it. I'm taking you to a healer. They have the best healers in the world right here, and you're going to see one." He rose and motioned to me, and I followed him.
We spoke about healers with the innkeeper and set off for the House of Life, near which they are found. Here I should say that this bustling city is called Sais.
It is of great interest. First, because it seems so strange. Second, because I feel that I have seen such a place long ago. It is familiar, in other words, yet seems very foreign.
The houses of the poor are thatched mud huts, so small that most of the things other peoples do in their houses must be done outside. They have no windows. Only a few are painted.
The houses of richer folk are very different and are gaily painted, most often green, blue, or both. Some are of mud brick, though their paint deceived me until we had walked some distance. Some are wood. Some are of mud brick at the bottom, with wood higher up. All are surrounded by walls that prevented me from seeing what was in their courtyards. Often these walls are yellow or ocher, though a few are orange or red. At first I thought there were windows on the second level alone. Then I recalled the room in which we had slept, how high it was. I think these rooms are like that. The doors of the houses are small and low, the windows small and near the ceiling. It must be because the sun is so hot here.
Before I write of the healers, I should say that all these houses have flat roofs, and that some of the houses really are of two levels, both lofty. There are gardens on the flat roofs. I have seen many flowers there, and even some palms. These must be planted in tubs. There are also triangular sails, or perhaps tents, always two and always back-to-back. The sailcloth is as bright as the houses. I wanted to ask Muslak what they were, but was afraid he did not know and did not want to embarrass him.
The first healer we spoke with was a t
all, lean man, as many men are here.
"This fellow," Muslak said, indicating me, "is a mercenary officer who has served the Great King. He's a good man and a fine fighter, but he cannot remember his name. Every morning we must tell him who he is and where he is, and why he is here."
The healer rubbed his jaw. "Why is he?"
(I should write that this was not said in my own tongue, in which I write it, but in the speech of Kemet, which Muslak knows much better than I.)
"He saved me from slavery," Muslak explained. "The price he asked was to be returned to his home in Luhitu."
"You did as he wished?"
"I did, and the next time that we put in there I looked him up to see how he was doing. I hoped he had his memory back and would remember me. He was as bad as ever, but he had written 'Riverland' above his door. I talked to his wife, and she said it was to tell him he must go there again to find out what had happened to him. I asked some other people what it meant, and it is their name for your country."
"Ours is the Black Land," the first healer said. (Kemet is black in their speech.)
"I know. But other people have other names for it. Anyway, I told him we would go there to trade, and he was welcome to sail with us if he wanted to. His wife wanted to come along, too. I told her it was impossible-a ship has to have special arrangements for women, and we didn't have them. She said she would come anyway. I told her she would be in a lot of danger. You understand."
The first healer nodded.
"Somebody would lift her skirt, then kill her so she couldn't tell Lewqys. Because Lewqys would kill him sure. He's a terror with that crooked sword. When I was to be sold, they had two men guarding us, and he killed them both before they could draw breath."
"His wife is not with you?"
