The sky was yet dark to the west; the east was just giving birth to the sun, which had yet to warm the moist morning air. Baboons, stirred into worship of the sun as shadows crept away from the hills, barked across the river.
Ankhtifi broke his men into four ranks and placed himself before the first. He led the first up the riverbank through the fields that were green with bindweed and cornflower, clover and vetch. His eldest son, Sobekhotep-the-younger, led the next line, Hotep-the-younger the next, Sanebi the last, and Idy held the rest of the troops back along the river, guarding the boats.
They came upon bodies along the way: a man and young girl, left there to rot, fly-blown father and sister to the stinking, swollen forms that had floated by on the river.
Smoke rose from beyond the wall of Edfu. A dog yapped, a bitch answered. The high voices of children carried in the still morning air. Such ordinariness in a day when the dead lay unburied troubled Ankhtifi deeply.
Where were the men to tend the fields? Callous and lazy, too, the grip of the rebel had made them. Truth had been overthrown and abandoned like the corpses. Evil spread like a weed in the fields.
“Khuu!” Ankhtifi called. “Where is Khuu?”
For an hour, like an eternity, Ankhtifi and his troops stood there before the wall. Living in the shadow of a rebel had made even the soldiers slothful. They would rather drink beer and chew melon seeds.
“Ankhtifi of Hefat has come to Khuu! In the name of the King!”
Now Khuu’s men took notice. They whooped and ran to the walls, pouring through the gate while others crouched atop the walls.
“Halt, you of Khuu!” cried Ankhtifi, raising his battle-ax. “In the name of the King of Upper and Lower Egypt, Neferkare, put down your spears, lay aside your bows, and drop your slings!”
The men of Khuu did halt, and although they did not put down their spears, nor lay aside their bows, nor even drop their slings, they did not immediately press their attack. Instead, they laughed.
“Neferkare is not king here,” cried an archer from the wall. Others took up the reply like a chorus, weaving into it insults: “Neferkare-who-has-lost-his-testicles is not King here, Neferkare-who-drinks-urine is not King here, Neferkare-who-eats-filth is not King here.”
“Then,” Ankhtifi replied, “there can be none here who can stand against me, because the only one who can best me is a man worthy of Neferkare, King of Upper and Lower Egypt. Lay aside your weapons and take up Truth once again.”
The troops of Edfu who were assembled before the gate made way for a man. This man wore a starched-white kilt, heavy rings and armlets of Nubian gold and precious stones, and carried a fine battle-ax of bronze. Ankhtifi thought he saw red hairs among the black of his head.
“Khuu, I have come to weed your fields,” Ankhtifi said.
Khuu laughed. “I would not trust a man of Neferkare with a sack of barley on his back.”
“Why have you made a wasteland of your district?”
“There will be a harvest of grain after the next inundation. This year it has been necessary to winnow the chaff that covers my district. No doubt you have seen stray bits lying about. Like the wind I will take you out, too, Ankhtifi of Hefat, unless you prove yourself to be other than straw. There is a new lord in Egypt, and he performs in Truth before the gods. Let him lay mud upon your fields, Ankhtifi, let him bless the District of Nekhen.”
“The District of Nekhen is already blessed, by Hemen, by Horus, by Neferkare. We are civil in Nekhen and do not leave our dead for the carrion-birds and the flies, nor let the fish nibble upon their backs. This is not Truth. This is chaos. The stench of it fills my nostrils, Khuu. You and your name and your district, they reek.”
Khuu raised his ax, and as he did so, slings and arrows and spears came up in the arms of his men.
“Beware, Khuu, for Horus himself—your own god!—brings me to Edfu. I am the hands of the King.”
“Then I will deprive this so-called king of his hands and of that shriveled sack of skin that hangs empty between his legs.”
Khuu overtook the distance that had separated them, and Ankhtifi took up his shield. With a yell from Khuu, arrows rained from the walls and slingstones came like bees to chicory. Ankhtifi’s men stood still until, in the moment after, Ankhtifi gave the order to defend, and they raised their shields.
Khuu pressed his shield against Ankhtifi’s, trying to bring him to ground. “You’re a fool,” he said between his teeth as Ankhtifi resisted. “Beside Montu of Thebes, god of war, another god stands behind the new lord, a Great Cackler, one self-created, the Hidden.”
“Have you seen this god?”
“No one has. No one can see this Amun.”
“I have seen Horus, spoken to Hemen, and he stands behind no one but Neferkare! But—” Ankhtifi pressed harder now “—but—” to give room to his ax “—but this god flies above me!”
His ax bit hard into the stiff cowhide of Khuu’s shield, which was torn away by this blow. At that strike, and one word from Ankhtifi, the troops of Nekhen broke from their defense and returned the assault.
In the end, Khuu and thirty of his troops lay dead. Khuu’s sons were slain, and all of his brothers. And so were Ankhtifi’s sons, all but Idy, who had remained behind to guard the boats.
Ankhtifi, wounded but standing like many of his own troops, summoned together the men of Edfu. His heart ached to strike blows at these men who had killed his sons, but he had to do otherwise, in the name of his King, lest civil strife burn forever across the District of Edfu. He would take his sons home and give them good burials and mourn them and miss them and rule justly over their slayers.
“Now embrace your neighbors. You will bury all of your dead,” Ankhtifi said, wiping the blood from his ax but ignoring that which spilled down his thigh. “There will be no more filth upon the land. Cleanse the District of Edfu.”
The men of Edfu complained bitterly. “He killed my brother,” said each man, pointing to another.
“And you,” replied Ankhtifi, pointing at them with his clean ax and they shied away, “have killed my sons. I will deal with you, the slayers of my sons, as you deal with the slayers of your brothers.”
Leaving Minnefer behind to implement his orders, Ankhtifi went home to Hefat.
“And so you won Edfu,” Idy says. “Great Overlord of the Districts of Edfu and Nekhen.” He pronounces this dual title as if he can taste it in his own mouth at once with his own name.
Ankhtifi’s mouth is too dry to taste anything. Sasobek is sweeping again, and it is as if he has brushed away all the moisture from Ankhtifi’s tongue. His thigh aches.
Ankhtifi says, “Edfu was given to me. By Horus, by Hemen.”
Why? He would ask the King but the falcon is gone now. In the Residence far downstream the King has awoken.
“Because,” says Idy, as if Ankhtifi spoke his question aloud, “you are the hero without equal!” And he goes about pointing to where the texts say this very thing, here and here and here.
Ankhtifi-nakht. The Brave. Ankhtifi-nakht. The Hero. Ankhtifi. He-Who-Shall-Live.
The fields grew a little better in those days than now, but only a little. The days when the floodwaters reached all of the good fields and blessed them with new black mud were generations past, the memories of forefathers long ago laid into the tomb. Ankhtifi dispatched scribes to account for the grain in the granaries, not only in the District of Edfu but likewise in the District of Nekhen, so that he knew his resources to the smallest detail. He ascertained what was in Khuu’s treasury, and made note of mines and the places of good clay and the herds of cattle in Edfu. He became aware of the smiths and the potters, of the fishermen and the hunters, of the scribes and the priests. And he noted what goods came down from Elephantine and Nubia beyond it, and what goods came up through the Districts of Thebes and of Koptos and from the Faiyum far beyond them. He noted what came from the Sand-farers of the Eastern Desert and what came from the Libyans of the Western Desert.
/> He appointed treasurers to oversee the granaries, ordering them to take a fair measure of each harvest and set it aside. No one questioned his demands because Ankhtifi ever took but a fair measure.
Ankhtifi marveled that his power stretched so far from the District of Nekhen, and that he was well-loved, even by those whom he had made to bury the murderers of their brothers. As Ankhtifi gave an order, so it was carried out by those far distant from him, his judges and his treasurers and his troops. And it was always well done, because he was well-loved.
Every third night, even as a few hungry men watched after him, he went out to the pyramid of a mountain, where he set out two khenmet-loaves and the foreleg of a calf for the falcon. And every third morning, unlike any other offering Ankhtifi had ever set out for any other god, these were gone, vanished from the earth, devoured in their entirety, the basket clean and undisturbed.
“This is the secret to power,” said the falcon one evening when Ankhtifi again met him on the pyramid-mountain with these offerings, “its judicious giving-away. I was profligate in my youth, before I flew to the sky, and I gave too much to too many. The kingship suffered and so Egypt is now in such a state that rebels defy Truth. I diluted rather than tempered. This is not a mistake I will make again. You are well-chosen, Ankhtifi.”
“I am touched by the trust you have put in me, my King.”
“As I give to you, Ankhtifi, so you give to me. That is the agreement between us. I give you authority, for I am the arms at the end of which are you, my hands. And in turn you give me effectiveness, for you are the hands upon my arms.” He blinked his eyes, the bright and the brighter, toward the offerings in the basket.
“There has never been another man like you, Ankhtifi. Not even Harkhuf, who so dutifully brought me my pygmy from beyond Yam. You have no peer. You are to be my sole receptacle, you, and yours ever after, in ways that not even my favorite general from the days of my first youth could ever be. In the earth beneath my perch, within this pyramid-mountain, build yourself a tomb, which I will guard with spells taught to me by the pygmy of the Horizon-Dwellers. He knew these spells as well as he knew life.
“No, he knew them better than life,” the falcon said, thinking perhaps of the eight short reigns that had been his after the first lengthy one. “This is my boon to you. By the hand of men your house of eternity will be hewn, by the spells of gods it will endure and protect you and yours. Even as you and yours will protect me.”
And the falcon described the tomb as it was to be, hewn from the earth itself, columns growing thick like reeds in the swamp on the day of creation, a roof of stone, a great copper door, a burial shaft sunk into its floor. The threshold must be of stone brought from Elephantine, the architrave carved with uraei, like the cobra that guards the King’s brow. Ankhtifi took due note of everything and planned for how to acquire it.
“Everything must be honestly gotten, in accordance with Truth, and maintained in Truth and purity,” said the falcon. “That is why I have chosen you, Ankhtifi, for you are not only brave but trustworthy. You are unique and have no peer.”
Ankhtifi bowed before his lord, his god, his King.
Subsequently he took a fair measure of the fair measure of the harvest for himself, and he did the same with every trade-good that came into his districts and the livestock and the catch of the hunters and fishermen, the products of the mines. Carefully he apportioned the labor of stonecutters and masons, and when they might be spared from erecting defensive walls, he set them to hewing his tomb exactly as the falcon had dictated. They did precisely what they were told, for to do otherwise would be disobedience, and they loved Ankhtifi too much for that.
Traders did not complain of what they had to give to Ankhtifi, but they voiced bitter opinion of what they had to give to others, even when it was less. Ankhtifi listened carefully to what they had to say, to learn what was happening in Elephantine and Nubia, in Thebes and Koptos.
“The Great Overlord of Thebes,” travelers said, “he claims control of the ways of the Eastern Desert. The King may not pass to the God’s-Land.”
At this Ankhtifi might have laughed, for every third night the falcon came to him perfumed with incense of the God’s-Land, but matters were too serious for that. He spoke of this to the King.
“With Thebes and Koptos together, Antef grows,” the falcon replied. “He threatens to fill up the land with his vile seed. The House of Khety is not big enough to contain him.”
“Khuu called him lord and spoke of a Great Cackler, a Hidden god.”
“Khuu is a wretch and dead, deader than you will ever know, boiled in the lake of fire, which was all too good for him. His name, Khuu, means baseness and wrongdoing. You do not remember, but that was not always his name. You will never remember that name given him by his mother.” And indeed, such was the strength of the King’s words that Ankhtifi could never remember any name but Khuu.
“Be judicious, my hands, my precious hands. Make peace with them to the south, make war with them to the north, and make your tomb here exactly as I told you. Now I will tell you what must be written within it. This is Truth, all shall believe, there will be no doubt:
“You are the beginning of men and the end of men. Such a man as you has never before been born and will never after be born. You will have no peer in the course of this million of years. You, Ankhtifi, are the hero without equal.”
The falcon flew into the air, circling Ankhtifi’s head, filling his nose with perfume.
“And as for any overlord who shall be overlord in Hefat and who commits a bad deed—”
Ankhtifi breathed in the perfume, memorizing and wondering at the terribleness in the falcon’s next words and not for a moment doubting the truth of them.
In the following days Ankhtifi gathered his scribes and his overseers about him at the necropolis. The mountain where he had first met the falcon swarmed with men, smelling sharply of salt and urine, a stink that obliterated the lingering trace of the incense-terraces. But these were the strong arms of the Districts of Nekhen and Edfu. That smell should be as a perfume to me, Ankhtifi thought.
And he told his scribes everything the falcon had ordered inscribed within the tomb. They agreed with every word, peerless, beginning and end, the hero.
Three times they had him repeat the last of the falcon’s words: “As for any overlord who shall be overlord in Hefat and who commits a bad deed or an evil act against this tomb—” and then the butchery that would be performed upon him in the netherworld, an arm struck away for each offense. “Hemen will refuse his offerings on his festival-day, Hemen will not accept any of his offerings, and his heir will not inherit from him.”
The scribes took note, collating their copies in order that the text might be perfect, murmuring approval of its thoroughness and efficacy.
When the scribes had gone off to their work, Minnefer came to Ankhtifi. “Your troops are eager to go north, my lord. Every sailor who comes from the north with tales of Thebes and Koptos only blows his breath across the fire in their hearts. They would fight and defeat Antef for you and the King.”
Ankhtifi told Minnefer what the falcon had said, that together these two districts made Antef too great to fight at this moment. “And to think that once you said that I was too eager to fight, Minnefer!”
Minnefer made no jest in return, as once he might have. He only smiled and obeyed.
As Ankhtifi bided time, earth came away from the tomb like the swollen river receding from the fields, and the smells of labor became Ankhtifi’s perfume.
It did not go as well with the river, which he watched with hope. It had not risen well, and this was the second month of Inundation. With offerings farmers tried to coax the waters to rise a little higher, to stand a little deeper, on the fields to lay down more precious, fertile mud. One might as well have tried to coax a flood down from the sky. Ankhtifi even dared to hope that while digging the burial shaft in the floor of his tomb-chapel the workmen would strike water and so ma
ke a well. But they did not. Peerless that he might be—peerless that he was, the falcon had so said—such things were not within the purview of Ankhtifi’s authority.
Boats yet came and went with little trouble along the river, and one windless morning a boat tracked from the north by six men put to shore at Hefat. There was nothing special with regard to this: boats tracked by six men or four came and went by Hefat every day that the wind did not blow exactly right. This boat had a round-topped cabin woven of reeds, with shields of cattle-hide covering its windows. From this cabin emerged a man with a quiver of arrows and a good bow. Sailors of other boats who were at the riverbank called for Ankhtifi, for they recognized this man as the Overseer of the Troops of Armant. Armant was a town of the District of Thebes, its Overseer a follower of Antef.
“Come!” the Overseer called, waving his arms.
Ankhtifi watched from the apex of his pyramid-mountain. The Overseer’s voice was small to him.
“Come!” the Overseer called again.
Because he did not nock an arrow or leave his boat, Ankhtifi did not come. He went about his business at the tomb and then, after a time when the Overseer had finished shouting and sat down at the bow, Ankhtifi made his way to the river. When he came to the shore, the Overseer leapt up.
“Come, you hero!” he said, swinging his bow like a sickle. “I have come to bid you north to our camp.”
“Have you come or have you been sent?”
“You are bade to Armant,” the Overseer replied evenly. “My lord Antef would speak with you.”
“This Antef may speak with me here, at Hefat. His district is not so very far. Even your sailors have scarcely beaded their brows with sweat.”
The First Heroes Page 20
