Ancient Evenings

by Norman Mailer

  “There came a day when I could direct my chariot through turns others found hard to follow, and now I no longer needed to speak to the horses. My thoughts had entered my reins. There even came the hour when I wrapped the reins around my waist and showed the troop you could drive a chariot without hands. To prove the value of such a skill I galloped around the compound with a bow in my hand and let fly arrows into bales of straw. A new practice began. Soon all the sons of noblemen, my fellow charioteers, were trying to drive with the reins around their waist, except they did not learn it so quickly as myself, and the accidents were numerous. They did not live in the mind of the horse as well as I did.

  “That was the way I learned my skill, and in the practice of it I soon ceased to think of horses as men or women. By the end, in truth, I thought more about my reins than anything else. Horses could be changed, but the reins were mine and had to be properly treated. In the end I looked only for good blessings to put on the oil. My reins grew so wise, I had no more than to drop them lightly on a horse’s back, and the animal was listening to me.”

  My great-grandfather looked up at us now, and it may have been the glow of light from the cages of fireflies, but his face looked as young as the strength he must have felt in his youth, or at least in that first of his four lives when he was a Royal Charioteer. He smiled then and I thought for the first time that my great-grandfather had a beautiful face. I had only lived for six years but it was the strongest face I had ever seen.

  “Shall we proceed,” he asked the Pharaoh, “to the Battle of Kadesh?”

  “No,” said Ptah-nem-hotep in a light and much-pleased voice, “I confess I now want to hear more of your early adventures in the army. Did it all go so well?”

  “It went poorly for longer than You would think. I was still ignorant of envy. I could not keep my mouth shut. So I told everyone in my troop how I would yet be First Charioteer to His Majesty. I had not as yet learned how one’s advancement into high places owes much to the ability to conceal your ability. That way your superiors find it comfortable to advance you. Having been, as I say, untutored to such wisdom, I can only remark that I am still heedless of it tonight.”

  “Dear Menenhetet, you will soon be irreplaceable,” said the Pharaoh.

  My great-grandfather bowed to the remark. I could see that he hardly wished to stop. “In those days,” he said, “I used to dream of great conquests in foreign lands, and hoped our success would be due to me. For if a driver could be taught to guide a vehicle with the reins lashed to the waist, then he might also hold a bow, and each of our chariots could ride into battle with two archers. We would be twice as strong as our enemies who rode with one driver and one archer, or, as in the case of the Hittites, given their heavy three-man chariots, a driver, an archer, and a man with a spear. Our two men could be the equal of their three in arms, yet our chariots would be faster, and turn in a smaller circle. I could not sleep for the excitement of this idea. Soon I could not sleep for vexation. So soon as certain noblemen had become curious to test my suggestion, it was declared by the Chariot-Major that, in his opinion, only a few of the best would ever be able to control two horses with the reins around their waist. Finally I was told that my argument was offensive to Amon. Our God had already brought victory to Egypt by way of one archer and one driver.

  “I had, however, not learned too much. I still bragged that I would become First Charioteer and lead a troop of two-bowed chariots into battle. For such vanity, I was sent away. An officer who was much my enemy, and by one rank my superior, took care to have me assigned to a wretched oasis in the middle of the Libyan desert out there”—and he pointed with his thumb over his back in the direction of some land far beyond the Pyramids—“a domain of such endless boredom that a mind so brilliant as Yours, my Pharaoh, could not live there for a day. In truth my own mind felt as if it had turned to oil. It smoked in the desert sun. We had virtually no duties, and no wine. There were twenty soldiers in my command, surly mercenaries, village idiots. There was beer that tasted, as we used to say, of horses. But I cannot remember many stories of that unhappy time. I do recall a letter I dictated by way of our scribe, a frail little fellow whose pretty buttocks were raw from the practices of my soldiers—I may say he was as desperate to escape from the stench of this oasis as myself. So I had him write a letter to my General. ‘Make the words look handsome,’ I told him, ‘or we will never get out of here, and then the hole in your seat will be larger than the one in your mouth.’

  “My scribe giggled at that. He was not altogether miserable with such a use of him. But then he saw the look in my eye. It said, ‘Get me out of Teben-Shanash.’ That was the name of this oasis, and well named, a perfect circle of stench. The odor surrounded our tents. We had, may I say, no huts. There was not any straw to make bricks. The flies were intolerable. I would lie for hours under the date-palms and look down a long sandy road to the horizon. Nothing to see but the sky. I fell in love with the flight of birds. That was all there was to love. The food was atrocious. Bitter dates, and our sacks of corn, so near the moisture of the oasis, were filled with vermin.”

  “What is the reason to tell all this?” asked Hathfertiti.

  “There were dogs. I think there were three hundred dogs, and not one failed to go with me on a walk. Their teeth stank. So did mine. The worm was biting a rotten tooth in my head. There, in the stink of that oasis, where the beaks and muzzles of the scavengers were purple with blood and caked by the sun, there on those dusty roads where these hideous creatures fought over the last maggots on the hot carcass of a donkey, I dreamed of feathers on horse’s heads leading the point of a parade. You may conceive of the letter I dictated to my scribe. ‘Lead me to Memphi,’ I exhorted, ‘let me see it in the dawn.’ I thought I would die in Circle-of-Stench. I did not know I had a career before me, then another, then a few more. Never in the length of my life, even if it be measured by the length of four lives, did I feel so low.”

  Menenhetet stopped and ran a finger around his lips as if to recover the memory of an old thirst.

  “In composing that letter,” said Menenhetet, “I came to witness the power of the God Thoth, and prayed to Him to give my scribe good and proper words, since my own strength was useless for such a test. While the scribe did his utmost to express my desires in a language fit for papyrus, I kept telling myself in terror that the letter had to deliver me. Nothing could be worse than another year in Teben-Shanash. Yet, when I read the letter I was ashamed. I would perish or I would endure, I told myself, but I would not whine to the General, nor beg to see Memphi in the dawn. No, I thought, I will make my request with dignity. So I sent another composed in more calm, and to my surprise I was soon ordered back to the city.

  “I have never forgotten that lesson. One must never surrender to desires that damage one’s pride. How I sang when the call came for me to return. It seemed my fortunes were in a dance. For not half a year later I encountered the great Ramses the Second in Memphi. He was on a visit from Thebes. My true story of the Battle of Kadesh can begin here.”

  TWO

  Even by the light of the fireflies, I could recognize in the eyes of the Pharaoh that look of anticipation which comes at the ascent of a long hill when a view famous for its splendor is waiting; my great-grandfather would tell us at last of the King Who was greater than all others—for so I had heard Him described from the time I learned to speak.

  “Yes, I was to come before Him,” said Menenhetet, “at the Pillars of Amon in Memphi. It was at that temple He had gone to worship, and out of courtesy was going later that day to visit the Temple of Ptah. I must say that although I had heard of the magnificence of His bearing and the radiance of His face, I was little prepared for what I saw. He was taller than any of us, and His eyes were green like the Very Green of the immense sea beyond our Delta.” Menenhetet here debated with himself before he spoke again. “Except to describe Him closer, and You will not believe me, His eyes were not green but blue. I have never seen
another man with eyes that were blue.”

  “Blue?” said my mother. “That cannot be. Gray or green or clear as water, yellow as the sun, but not blue.”

  “Blue as the sky,” said Menenhetet. “And He had a skin dark as ours, yet different and more beautiful, more of a golden-red of early evening was on His shoulders. He looked as if He had lived in the sun like a bird in an oven roasted into red, a lovely and remarkable color. He wore garments of pleated white and the pleats rustled through His long skirt like reeds in the wind. His skirt was white, and yet it had the gleam of silver minnows in the lights of a pond.

  “What is most extraordinary is that His hair was more yellow than the sun. A light-gold like flax. Like a Mede, His hair danced in the wind faster than the pleats of His skirt.”

  “He had golden-yellow hair?” asked Ptah-nem-hotep.

  “He did then, at the beginning of His Reign, hair as yellow as the pale sun, but it turned dark in the years He ruled, and His eyes went from blue to green to yellow that had hues of brown. And His eyes were dark by the time He died.”

  “Even as are the colors in every painting I see of Him,” said our Pharaoh.

  “Yes, but the artists were forbidden to paint His true colors. He believed, as He imparted to me once, that His hair would mourn and grow dark if truly painted, and indeed He wore a dark wig on all public occasions except when going into battle or visiting the Temple, that is the truth.”

  “And you saw Him first at the Temple of Amon?”

  “I saw Him first with difficulty. I had just come back to Memphi after two weeks of duty in one of our forts, and only as I reached my quarters, did I recognize by the babble of strangers rushing past in the opposite direction, that the young Pharaoh had not only arrived in Memphi on the same morning as myself, but was now at the Temple. By the time I arrived, I could only stand with the mob in the outer court under the full sun and look through the pillars, but the young Pharaoh was lost to view in the Sanctuary. It was like trying to peer across a field into the darkness of a cave.

  “When the Pharaoh emerged with the High Priest, however, I knew I was looking at the son of Amon-Ra. Never did a Ramses possess, if not for the exception of Your lineaments, Divine Two-House, a face so close to those noble Gods we see in dreams.”

  And our Pharaoh at this instant did look splendid in His beauty. I could not cease staring at the chiseled wing of His nostril, or the changing bow of His mouth. He was more exquisite to my eyes than a beautiful lady.

  “I am honored at the comparison, but know it is only one more way of proving yourself indispensable,” said Ptah-nem-hotep.

  Menenhetet bowed with grace, and exclaimed, “My Lord, He was beautiful in the way twenty birds are one bird in the instant they turn. He was as beautiful as the full moon when it lowers its head to go behind the veil of the smallest cloud, and as beautiful as the sun when it rises and is so young we can look into its face and know the God is young. For the first time in my life, I fell in love with a man. It is the only time. I knew I was born to serve as His charioteer.

  “From that moment I understood the meaning of a young man’s love: It is simpler than other emotions. We love those who can lead us to a place we will never reach without them.”

  Here, he stopped to nod to the Pharaoh and then to my mother.

  “Our Pharaoh had been conducted to the Temple of Amon by charioteers from my own barracks. Seeing them emerge out of the Sanctuary, you may be certain I quit the Temple gate in their company, yet once outside I had to go rushing for my chariot since I had been obliged to leave it with a boy on the other side of the Temple walls. Now, much behind the others, it took a considerable use of my whip on all who wouldn’t let me through, plus a few judicious lashes for the horses and one poke of the heel of my hand into the nose of a fool who tried to hold on to my wheel—I still see his face and wonder why he tried to hold me back—then I broke a passage through the crowd and galloped up to the tail of that fast-moving procession of which Ramses the Second was the head.

  “What a race began to the Temple of Ptah! In Memphi, rumor had lived among us for a year on the prowess of our new Pharaoh with a chariot. Now I saw that He could race, no question, and He went at such a heat over good roads and bad that the feet of Amon must have guided the hooves of the horses. His animals could have overturned in an instant on many a hole. Beside Him, as calm as if Her ladies were arranging Her hair, was His Queen, Nefertiri, Whose beauty of body was the talk of us all, and is equaled now only by the beauty of my granddaughter, I drink to her here with us tonight,” said Menenhetet raising his wine.

  “But I know the body of Nefertiri well,” said Ptah-nem-hotep, “since there is certainly a statue of this Queen at Karnak where She stands by the right leg of Ramses the Second, not a quarter His size, but famously voluptuous.” He now also drank to the health of Hathfertiti, and my face flushed. In my great-grandfather’s house, there was a drawing on one wall of Queen Nefertiri standing nude by the right leg of Her husband, and Her breasts were high and full and considerably larger than other Egyptian women; Her belly, if narrow, had a swell; Her thighs were prominent—I had kept thinking for days of this drawing. So now I blushed to think others might look upon my mother’s nakedness in the same way.

  “Tell us more of this Queen,” said my mother.

  “Oh, I was not to know anything of Her then,” answered Menenhetet, “although later I would know more, but I felt true respect while looking at Them in the chariot ahead. There are few people who do not show a weakness when seen from behind, even men of great strength or women of grace. Some little clumsiness of the hips or shoulders will be revealed, especially when they know they are being watched. This King and Queen, however, stood on the chariot like two leaves from the same stalk and swayed in the same winds, except it was not wind They met but ruts, and He rode His Chariot so hard it flew from bump to bump. Yet His Queen was there beside Him, standing erect with no more than two fingers curled into His biceps, bending no more than Her knees at each great shock, and all the while They were both smiling at the populace.”

  “How could you see Their smiles?” asked Ptah-nem-hotep, “if you were traveling to Their rear?”

  “As the Good God has just demonstrated to me, I did not see Their faces. Yet I knew They were smiling, for I saw the expression of the crowd, and the people had the happiness of those who have seen the flashing teeth of a great King and His Consort as They go by.”

  “Of such wisdom as yours, are the best ministers made,” Ptah-nem-hotep said.

  For the first time I saw how Menenhetet might have looked on a chariot, for the light of an old chase was in his eyes.

  “I must tell my Pharaoh,” he went on, “that this Ramses the Second, Foundation-of-existence-in-the-Sun, was riding so fast He soon left all other charioteers behind. But then there was no way for the others to keep up at His gallop. Queen Nefertiri was not equal in weight to a sturdy nobleman with shield and spear, nor would our horses be equal. But then neither was our daring. Who could hope to be so brave? Any charioteer who demolished his cart would have to make up the damage. If a horse fell and broke his leg, there were worse punishments. It was folly to try.

  “Yet it was also a humiliation to let Him get too far ahead. I was alone in my chariot, and unencumbered by another man’s weight. Therefore, I pulled ahead of the Honor Guard, and gained on the Pharaoh at the near loss of my teeth. My lower jaw kept slamming like a catapult into my upper jaw on every unexpected jolt. I gained, however, and soon was riding directly in their dust. Although the young Pharaoh never looked around, nor His Queen, They must have had a glimpse of me around a turn, or could hear my chariot, for as we emerged into the great boulevard that leads to the Temple of Ptah where there was now room for ten to ride in one rank, so did the Pharaoh raise His arm, and with a little movement of three curved fingers, like an adze scraping at the sky, did He wave me forward. As I drew up alongside, He shouted, ‘What is your name?’

  “When I
told Him, I must, in the clamor of the ride, and my great fear of His Presence, have spoken in the peasant tongue of the village where I was born, for He did not hear clearly, and said, ‘What does it mean?’ and I answered, ‘Foundation-of-speech, Great God, is what Menenhetet means,’ not knowing enough to recognize I should have said Good God, not Great God, but I was looking for the largest words I could find—Most-overwhelmingly-blessed-by-Ra was what I needed, and I could not remember His other names for trying to keep my horses apart from His. They were furious that other steeds had come near. All the while Queen Nefertiri kept looking at me with distaste. I could feel the dust with which I was covered, and Her annoyance at how it smoked out of my wheels toward Theirs, so I pulled away a few feet, but not before gathering the first knowledge I would always have of that Queen. She adored Her Pharaoh, and wanted to be alone with Him. Here was I, my face sweating through a shield of dust, my white teeth grinning like a crocodile.

  “ ‘If your name is Foundation-of-speech, why do you talk so indistinctly?’ asked Ramses the Second, bringing His Chariot near again. Once more, I drew away so as not to cover His Queen with dust, and shouted into the din, ‘In the village where I grew up, there were more animals to talk to than people, Great God!’

  “ ‘You have risen through the ranks?’ He asked. When I nodded vigorously, He said, ‘You must be a splendid driver. Draw ahead and show Me tricks.’ I did. I took the chance of wrapping the reins around my waist on that boulevard of long ruts, whereas before I had done it only on parade ground or in fields with few holes, but I took the chance, and leaned forward on my toes so the bit was slack in the horses’ mouth, and merely called them. They were off in a new gallop that I proceeded to steer to the left and right of the ruts and then crossed them in a beautiful quick circle to come up again by His side. But Ramses the Second merely said, ‘What do you know about the Temple of Ptah?’