Ancient Evenings

by Norman Mailer

  “The Princess is wise,” he replied.

  “But that is not all of your concoction?”

  “Great Princess, there is one hair of a black dog, fierce as a wolf, in the bottom of the vase, and if the hair is not removed, so will the strength of your own hair not leave,” he managed with considerable stammering to assure Eater-of-Shadows. I was giggling because the young merchant did not look at my mother but spoke to ugly-faced Eater-of-Shadows (who had an enormous nose) as if he were the Great Princess.

  “I thank you for protecting the strength of my hair,” said Hathfertiti, “but there is a strange odor in your mixture as well.”

  “It is the ground powder of horses’ hooves,” said the young man.

  “Horses’ hooves,” said Eater-of-Shadows.

  “Horses’ hooves,” said Hathfertiti, and after a pause laughed merrily.

  “Hooves for the roots of your hair, Princess, and the health of your scalp.”

  She purchased the oil, and my father gave a small ring worth five copper utnu in payment. The young man bowed in recognition that he had not been obliged to haggle for his price, and when we drifted away, he continued to look in our direction with such admiration as to wish to remain with us forever.

  My great-grandfather grunted. “A pretty boy,” he said.

  “Looks full of the love of his mother,” said my father.

  Menenhetet nodded. For once, he found agreement with my father. “I would advise him to stay out of the army.”

  My father guffawed. It was a coarse sound to come out of his elegance, but the thought of the young merchant rudely used by the troops made him laugh, and most suddenly.

  “I don’t believe,” said Hathfertiti, “that I will use his oil for my hair. But it will go well on my breasts.”

  “Bound to,” said Menenhetet. “All those horses’ hooves.”

  My father guffawed again, and Menenhetet offered a warm and malicious look.

  Around the bend we left the foreign quarter. Now, the white walls of Memphi were shining on the bank. We floated past the marble splendor of the Temple of Ptah and its sacred gardens, but only a few priests in white were to be seen on the paths. Then, the Temple of Hathor appeared around another bend.

  Here, if my mother had had her way, would the town of Memphi have made its first appearance. These temples and parks told of the magnificence of our city. The serpentine wall was as delightful to the eye as a necklace of white stones, and behind was a view of high columns on two successive hills with a garden between. That was the last fine space we were to see. The river spread out around the next bend until it was as wide as a lake, and to the left was all of Memphi before our eyes, the harbor, the stone wharves for unloading cargo, the shipyards, the jetties, the causeways, the canals, the granaries, and every crowded house on every rise of ground, yes, there was our white city so recently red with dust in the dry season, now a bit muddy. It hardly mattered. Coming around this last bend was like entering the gates. Before I could even pick out the faces of workers on the docks, or soldiers guarding the marketplace, not yet close to the clamor of the shops or the cries of traffic on the avenue, I still knew the air on the river was different and full of messages. How splendid the city looked in this sunlight. Even the dust of the quarries shimmered. The water pails of a thousand shadufs kept rising and falling at the end of their poles, lifting water into sluices above them that passed the water to other shadufs on up to higher sluices until there was water for the fountains of the city in every square. Were there a thousand—or was it five thousand slaves?—cranking the long poles of these shadufs to raise our water? I know as we looked from our boat across that hot shimmering river, I could hear shadufs creaking near and far, and the sun blazed like a sword each time water splashed into a higher sluice.

  In the basin of the harbor of Memphi, we came to a mammoth eddy between the jetty and the docks. Our boatmen unlashed their oars and began to row us by a short route through a canal that went behind a long promontory of the harbor. That way, to my pleasure, took us through a part of the city I did not often see, and I passed close to temples built—as my mother exclaimed—“a thousand years ago.” They now sat in the depression of old damp holes. These temples were made of stone and therefore had endured after the wooden buildings that once swarmed around them had collapsed, and the brick buildings (molded from mud and straw) had washed away in one or another of our terrible rainstorms, the kind that came once every fifty years. My mother told me of how she saw such a storm when she was a child, and the roofs of palm thatch in poor houses came apart like old wet cloth. So the houses around these old temples kept being rebuilt until the new on top of the old reached to half the height of the temples, and left them in damp hollows, dark old gray stone, mournful as hippopotami fallen into pits. Around them, on each side of the canal, was all the din of the workshops, and our local markets. Quickly, for the boatmen rowed hard through many a smell of sawdust, and leather, manure, rotting papyrus and stone dust that blew over the canal from the masons’ shops, past every whiff of bleaches that scored my nose, we went by the woodworking shops, and matting shops, past the sandalmakers, and a shop for the repair of harness and chariots, went by a forge, and a stable, and the linen factories of the weavers, past the embalmers, the shops of the undertakers and coffin-makers, past a woman at a loom working in the open air at the front of her shop not five feet from the edge of the canal, and next to her a currier was scraping the skin of a leopard, an awful odor coming up from the big dead cat to make my mother gag. Farther along we came to the back of a furniture shop and I saw two workers carry out a chest of ebony inlaid in silver, beautiful enough for the Pharaoh. It was being placed now, even as we went by, on a barge, and White-Teeth, the handsomest of our boatmen, called out, “Is that for Two-Gates?” and the worker on the dock replied, “It goes south, to the estate of the Great Menenhetet,” which left a ripple of laughter on our gilded barge and even the oarsmen dared to join, for at that moment it was as if all of us on the boat belonged to the same family.

  At the end of this short canal, as we came back to the harbor, the shops of the perfumers sweetened the air, and there were larger markets, and a school for priests, one long low building with white wooden pillars. Just past was a wig shop, and I saw one for a small boy, a beautiful blue, and would have asked my mother to get it for me as a gift, but the boatmen were rowing hard, and I felt an uneasiness in our boat, and recognized then that my great relatives were thinking of how soon they would see the Pharaoh.

  At the end of the canal where we joined the river again, there was a plaza, and it was filled with every kind of priest and noble, soldier, boatman, and foreign trader, artisan, peasant, slave, water-carrier, caravan-hand, donkey-driver, and many women of all kinds, even a few ladies. To look at all these people from our boat never failed to please me. I felt so safe. It was another matter to walk through them. Then Eyaseyab was full of fear because every drunken soldier and vendor stared at her thighs (and I, walking beside her, at just such a height, had to look into their eyes). On the water, however, I could feel more cheerful. Each wine-shop and beer-house had its colored awning up, drumming and flapping like sails in the breeze off the harbor, and I could see people waiting in front of one, famous for its roast goose, to take home a cooked bird.

  On the far side of the plaza, near the streets and the canals behind, in an open space guarded on three sides by newly built high walls and on the fourth by a line of soldiers with their arms linked was a new open-air shop set up by an edict of the Pharaoh. It had caused more talk in Memphi—at least to measure by the amount of conversation in my family—than any of His decisions in some time. For at this shop, some of the silver ingots His boats brought back from Tyre, and even a fair amount of the gold His caravans returned from the Granite Mountains near the Red Sea, were now being fashioned by royal artisans into amulets, breast pieces, gold collars, bracelets, scarabs, uraei, even gold and silver shabti, while jewelry and such other foreign t
reasures as scented woods and gums, coral and amber, linens and glasswork and embroideries were for sale to the few people on this plaza who could afford the price. Everyone who could not pressed nonetheless against the line of soldiers for a look. Until now, such ornaments had always been made in the shops of the Palace, within the workrooms of the Temple of Ptah, or on estates as large as Menenhetet’s. So eager was the crowd, therefore, to see these treasures being worked upon by the Royal Craftsmen that some knelt to have a peek between the guards’ legs, and groans of admiration went up whenever a foreign trader or some wealthy local official was admitted through the line of soldiers, for he would be able to touch the objects themselves. And each night, to prevent theft, the products, the tools, and even the precious dusts of the metalwork were gathered up in velvets, locked in boxes and carried away under guard to a royal vault. Next morning they were returned to the plaza again.

  Now, as if the gleam of such valuables at the end of the plaza brought a glimpse of the end of our journey, the boatmen began to lean on their oars, full strength coming from Stinking-Body and White-Teeth, Eater-of-Blood, Eater-of-Shadows, Head-on-Backwards and He-of-the-Nose—they all began to weigh on their oars, and Bone-Smasher called the cadence. Our heavy barge picked up the current as we came out of the eddy and our prow lifted in the water and the river began to sing with the speed of our effort as we came around the last point past the plaza and saw in full display along the curve of the next bank, the limestone walls of Two-Gates which rose as high as the three stories of Menenhetet’s house. Sentries stood on the parapets above.

  Before our boat was even tied to the mooring, a suite of sedan-chair carriers resting in the shadow of the wall came running toward us across a long open marble plaza down to the stone steps by the river. “Have use of our services, Great Lord,” their leader called to Menenhetet. At a signal, the others knelt, bowed, and struck their heads to the marble floor.

  “Who has need of your poor chairs?” said my great-grandfather. “The legs of my family are young.”

  “O, my Lord, there is great weight in every step that takes you nearer to His Presence.”

  “I cannot bear to think of the woe my body would put on your crooked back,” replied Menenhetet.

  “Great Lord, the chair weighs less when a noble lord like you is in it. Look, I lay my face on the seat before you sit down,” said the leader, and was immediately copied by the other bearers who embraced the seat of their sedan chairs.

  “And do you still kiss it after you are done carrying me?”

  “Then I must kiss it twice,” said the bearer.

  “For your courtesy,” said Menenhetet, “take us through the Red Gate, and to the end of the courtyard.” And my mother, my father, my great-grandfather and myself all sat down in separate chairs and were lifted and carried across the marble plaza between the river and the walls of the Palace.

  But even as we came nearer, we saw frightful sights. By the wall was a wretch with his neck manacled to a collar, then chained to a post. His hands must have been cut off but a few hours ago and the stumps of his forearms were bound with leather thongs to keep him from bleeding to death, yet his blood still dripped on the stone.

  Leaning forward in his chair, Menenhetet asked, “What did you steal?”

  “He—the-Great-God-Nine-among-us—is kind to let me live, because I stole too much,” the wretch replied. It was not easy to hear him. As the price for an old crime—lying to a judge might be the reason—he had had his lips cut off. Now, his grin was like the exposed teeth of a skull.

  Next to him stood a woman leashed to another post. In her arms was a blue baby. My mother looked away, but my great-grandfather asked, “How did you kill your child?”

  “By suffocation.”

  “Was there food enough?”

  “There was food enough,” said the woman, “but the child’s wailing left no breath in the house.”

  “When will you be released?”

  “In another night.”

  “May your punishment prove too heavy.”

  Before us, were two great rectangular doors in the wall, side by side: a red granite gate with a papyrus plant cut into it for the Land of the North, and a limestone gate of white with a lily engraved above the door for the Land of the South. Now, a trumpet sounded. The huge red granite door began to open. “Enter Great Lord and General Menenhetet. Enter the honored family of Menenhetet,” a herald cried out, and then intoned: “Here, in the Year Seven, under the Majesty of the King of the South and the North, the Beautiful Ka of Ra, Beloved of Amon, Son of the Sun, Si-Ra Ramses the Ninth, Horus-the-strong-bull-Who-lives-in-the-truth, welcomes you here.”

  “We enter in honor to His Life-Health-Strength, our Pharaoh, the good Ptah-nem-hotep,” said Menenhetet, and turned to Bone-Smasher who had been walking on guard beside the sedan chair. “An extra ration of bread and beer for your men and their oars,” he said as we were carried into the Palace ground. Geese were flying overhead, and pigeons scattered before us. Three hawks—I counted them—watched from a perch on the parapet.

  THREE

  The longest courtyard I had ever seen was before us. If a grown man took a stone and hurled it as far as he could, picked up the Stone and hurled it again, he would not have reached the middle.

  Nor was it a handsome place. There were no pools nor statues, and the road of paved stones down the middle by which the sedan-chair carriers brought us was no wider than would be needed for four chariots abreast. On either side, an open red-clay square stretched to the walls, and I remember my mother speaking of how the Pharaoh paraded thousands of troops on this hot ground. Then, even as I looked across the space, a portal opened in a low barracks at the other end of the courtyard, and a company of Sherdens in heavy blue capes marched out to practice maneuvers. In the other corner of the courtyard were armories, and storehouses and sentry boxes, and even a huge cauldron of soup on a great fire, the smell of its broth passing to us across the clay.

  As if Menenhetet’s entrance had stirred activity, I could see targets of straw being set up against the wall to the side of the barracks, and archers were flexing their bows. A troop of chariots began to form and reform their lines. From four files of seven they would elongate into two files of fourteen, then wheeling, shift into two ranks of fourteen, then extend into one long and near-to-perfect line of twenty-eight chariots galloping on the instant across the field, no wheel ever more than a few fingers ahead of another. On a sharp cry, they came to a sudden stop, dust rolling off like a wave toward the river wall, and it may have been fortunate for their captain that the cloud did not come near us, since Hathfertiti turned with annoyance in her chair, and said to my great-grandfather, “Promise we do not stay here watching them.”

  He shrugged, but I saw his eye reach to the captain of these charioteers across the distance of the parade ground, and in response, that man raised both forearms in salute, and came galloping toward us, the soldier by his side trying to maneuver his leather shield against imaginary arrows, a set of gestures that took up all his balance, while the captain of the charioteers, having wrapped his reins around his waist, was now turning the horses to left or right by leaning from side to side. Pressing backward, he would slow them; coming forward, he let them gallop, swaying his body to make the horses wheel, stop, turn, or charge, and if one could not foretell what his next maneuver would be, all were nonetheless smooth. Meanwhile, his arms free, he unsheathed his bow, and put an arrow in it. When the captain swept around us in a flourish, that gave my father a stir.

  “Fool,” he shouted. To which Hathfertiti gave a chill laugh. “I think he’s charming,” she said.

  “If the horse tripped, he could send the arrow in our direction,” said my father.

  The captain, having circled away from us, returned in a leisurely trot, came to a halt, leaped out of his vehicle and touched his forehead to the dust. He and Menenhetet began to speak to each other in a strange language, strange as the language of the Sherdens I soo
n guessed, and after a minute or two—with a last phrase in Egyptian: “As you say, General”—the soldier raised his arm in salute, smiled at all of us, at my mother most particularly, remounted, and walked off slowly with his horse in order not to raise the dust.

  “I told him I’d watch maneuvers later,” said my great-grandfather.

  “Thank you,” said Hathfertiti.

  Now we came to a smaller gate. A sentry let us through without a word. We had reached another courtyard.

  “It is splendid how they use their reins,” said Hathfertiti.

  “But it is our grandfather who developed the style,” said my father.

  “Not really,” she exclaimed.

  “Certainly,” said Menenhetet. “In the years before the Battle of Kadesh. That is why we triumphed on that day.”

  He said this with such pleasure that my mother could not resist saying, “I thought Ramses the Second was the victor at Kadesh, not your charioteers.”

  “The Pharaoh always wins the battle,” said Menenhetet.

  We were passing through another courtyard, immense perhaps as the first, but I did not know how large since it was divided by walls of trees into more than a few courts and enclosures. Wading pools were surrounded by gardens. To our left was a brightly painted wooden building, and I could see women pass from time to time along its covered balcony on the second story, while a murmur of curious laughter came back to us from their sight of Hathfertiti. We were carried now to a white wooden wall on which were painted enormous portraits of a hawk, a scorpion, a bee, a lotus, and a papyrus plant, all so lifelike that I was afraid to pass through, indeed I trembled at the nearness of the scorpion.