Ancient Evenings

by Norman Mailer

  “Yet, I believe He had now offended His Father. For if the Gods spoke more quickly to Amen-khep-shu-ef than to the Pharaoh, there was cause for rage.

  “ ‘You talk,’ said Usermare-Setpenere, ‘with a voice worthy of a King-yet-to-come-forth. But You are a young bird. You must break out of Your egg before You fly. When You are older, You will have learned more about the battles of Thutmose the Third. You will follow the campaigns of Harmhab. Maybe You will know by then that it is not wise to speak with certainty about a battle that has not begun.’

  “A heavy sound came out of all of us, a grunt, indeed, of the satisfaction uttered when a truth is deep. ‘Hear the Pharaoh, He has said it,’ we all said. And Hera-Ra roared for the first time in this council.

  “I saw a flush on the face of the Prince, but He bowed. ‘May-Your-Two-Houses-be-great, would You give us Your desires?’

  “Usermare said that He had decided to break camp and march from Gaza to Megiddo. From there, He would go down the valley to Kadesh, but He would not advance more rapidly on any road than His detachments on the ridges flanking the march. He would also send scouts by other routes to Kadesh. One squad of charioteers would cross the Jordan. Another would take the road to Damascus. I—and I looked up as He spoke my name—I would be sent on the road to Tyre. I could take a squad, He told me. But when I looked into His blue eyes, I knew that until I had been alone long enough to follow each of my thoughts down to the bottom, I would have weakness in my belly, not strength. Indeed, I wondered if I could lead men well with the scorn of the Pharaoh still smarting on my buttocks. So I bowed and asked if I could travel by myself. It would be quick, I said, and He had need of His troops.

  “A hoarse murmur came forth from more than a few of the Captains and Generals around me. A man by himself on strange roads would have to face new beasts without a friend. He could meet new Gods. My Pharaoh nodded, however, as if I had said the right thing, and I wondered if He wished to respect me again.”

  SIX

  “On the journey, I learned, however, what it is to be lonely. I had never been so much by myself before. Now that I am coming to the end of my fourth existence, I am left with memories of people who lived near to me once and now are dead. But in my first life, I had always found myself among many people, and that permits but one kind of thinking. Others talk; we reply. It is usually without thought. On important occasions, it is true, a voice might come into my head and speak for me and sometimes it was so powerful a voice, I knew it belonged to a God or His messenger. But now, going to Tyre, there came an hour when I could no longer listen to my two horses, nor to the complaints that came from the frame and wheels of the chariot, and I became alone in such a way that whole processions of thought passed through me, as if I were no longer a man but a city through which soldiers were marching.

  “Of course, these were not my feelings on the first day, nor the second or third. In the beginning, there is such terror to find oneself alone that no thought has the liberty to speak—it is rather as if you walk beneath the walls of a fortress waiting for the first stone to drop. My eyes, I remember, were like birds, and flew from sight to sight, never resting. Nor were the horses comfortable. I was not traveling in my own battle chariot which was agile and weighed little. For the rigors of this trip I had chosen a training cart used to much abuse and newly repaired. I had also selected two strong but stupid horses who would be able to work all day even if they were much confused by commands they had heard in a hundred voices. I was sure I could train them to my purposes, and did, but my first request was that the horses not wear out, and these were born with stamina.

  “One was called Mu, an old word for water, and it would have been an odd name for a horse except that Mu never failed to urinate at every halt. The other was Ta. He was close to the land and always fertilizing it.

  “I set out by riding across the long flat valley that leads from Gaza to Joppa, and it was near to familiar country for me. The soil was as black as our own after the Nile recedes, and the heat was no different, nor the look of the villages and huts. Except I did not see a face on all of the road, not for all of the morning and afternoon of the first day. Of course who would be about to approach me? I rode with the reins around my waist, my spear in one quiver, my bow and arrow in another, my shield hooked to the prow of the chariot, and my short sword in its scabbard. I had a scowl on my face, a helmet on my head, and a coat of mail on my chest and back. I must say that in those days we did not know how to make a coat of mail from metal. Mine was of thick quilted stuffs with strips of leather, a coat so heavy you paid for its protection as your strength wilted in the heat. Still, I wore it like a house around my heart. Although I may have looked fierce, my tongue was as dry as an old piece of meat salted in natron and I could hardly breathe. The horses and I passed through nothing but these empty villages, their silence also breathing in my ear. Since we had already pillaged everything, you could find nothing. No food, no flocks, no people. Nothing in these empty huts but the spirit of each abode. I rode on, looking to the hills on either side of the valley, and in the night, when I made camp, I could see fires in fortified towns high on the ridges, and knew that the villagers who had fled were up there standing watch on the walls. In the valley beneath, I stopped just off the road and tried to sleep and heard my heart beating beneath me all night. Then in the morning I set out to the same silence. Even the blue of the sky was like a wall above, so much did I feel alone.

  “Still, it was familiar ground, and that was better than what came next. The black soil gave way to a reddish-brown country full of sand and clay, colors common enough, but then some trees began to show themselves on the low hills, and soon there were more of them, then considerably more. They were nothing like our high palms, but short trees with thick, stunted trunks and twisted limbs, the most unhappy looking creatures, as if the wind had been a torture every day of their lives. I did not feel comfortable with these woods, nor did the horses, and soon we were in our first bad place. Brush had begun to grow, and you could not see anything but the road. A thicket more dense than any of our Egyptian swamps settled in next to the trees. Sometimes we crossed little streams and hardly knew it for the road was so muddy that water was always flowing in the ditches. Now I dismounted from the chariot as often as I went up on it, and kept pushing the wheels through the mud until in one swamp of this low forest, I saw a crocodile go sliding away. That put me back on the chariot again. In the marshes I was devoured by insects.

  “I felt I was not only in a strange place, but at war. There was a most unfriendly spirit in these low trees, and I wondered at the animals I might find, the bears and the boars, and remembered talk of a hideous hyena native to these parts. The forest made me feel as if I voyaged through the maw of a beast. I perspired from the gloom and heat and felt the absence of Ra, and wondered what foreign Gods were here in such dark marshy land. Every time a small branch snapped across my face, the horses gave a lurch. My fears went through them like arrows. On we went, bumping from rut to rut and back to the mud again. Often I had to get out and dare the crocodiles.

  “Then this narrow road mounted above the wetlands and the thicket diminished, the trees grew taller. Now it was easier to ride, except for great roots that grew across the road and near upended my vehicle whenever I put the horses in a trot. The height of the trees grew awesome, and I could no longer see the sun very well but merely felt Him above. My head was full of the oppression of all these bowers of leaves, and then I passed a terrible place where a great tree had fallen over. I could see that the roots were nearly as long as the branches, and the cavity left in the ground was as large as a cave and ugly like the mouth of a serpent. I knew the entrance to the Land of the Dead must look like this hole. Even the worms that crawled at the base were odious to me, and I began to shiver with fright at the thought of the battle to come. The naked roots of this tree made me know how my shoulder would look if my arm were chopped off by an axe.

  “What fear I knew of such w
eapons. The Overseer of Carpenters in our squadron of charioteers was a wizard at working with wood and now I remembered him telling me that black people in the jungles would never cut down a tree unless they sacrificed a chicken first, and its blood was dripped on the roots. Then, after the first blow of the blade, you had to put your mouth to the cut and suck the sap until you were in brotherhood with the tree. But I knew I would never dare to put my tongue on the sap of these strange trees. They were too fierce. My horses trembled when we stopped, and Mu could no longer urinate, or did not dare.

  “Still, I began to think of the goose we roasted on those dry silver boughs in the desert. Ra had held each branch in His hand and given heat to it. If I died in the sand, I might become as dry as my bones, but I would not burn for much. Yet each one of these trees would blaze with flames as high as themselves. It was then I had a vision of all the fire that lived in the forest, and felt again like a city through which soldiers were marching.

  “By evening, I was completely out of the marshes and crossed my first ridge which gave me a sight I had never known before. Ahead were nothing but mountains covered with trees. These lands ahead must be as much unlike Egypt as a Syrian with his thick beard is different from our clean cheeks, and that made me sigh at the weight of this view. I could not believe how alone I was. For two days, no caravans had passed me in either direction—no merchants, it was evident, dared to be on the road—and every village through which I went was empty. What fear they kept of our army!

  “On the next day, I learned much for I came to a place in the mountains where three roads could be taken to Megiddo, and it brought back the voice of my Pharaoh telling me of Thutmose the Third. For He was the Monarch who had come to this same fork with His armies only to learn that He could approach Megiddo by the long route to the north through Zefti, or by the open southern road through Taanash. There was also the Pass of Megiddo between, but that went over the Ridge of Carmel to the gates of the city itself, a dangerous trail, and narrow. ‘Horse will have to pass behind horse,’ said His officers, ‘and man behind man. Our advance guard will have to fight their armies on the other side while our rearguard is still here.’ I, having brooded so long on the nature of these strange trees and forests, must have come to live in the echo of the voices of these long-dead officers of Thutmose the Third, for I knew I would choose the route taken by Thutmose. ‘I shall go forth at the head of My army,’ Thutmose had said, ‘and I will show the way by My footsteps,’ and He brought most of His army through the pass before the Kings of Kadesh and Megiddo were ready to meet Him since they had thought He would go by the long southern road to Taanash.

  “Now I had to take my own way through the pass. If I had not known that an army had gone through already, I might have given up. The hills were steep and the trees grew as high as the columns of the Temple of Karnak. So, it was cool in this forest, and strange. The road kept climbing upward and the hill on one side of the trail was high above, but to the other it fell away so steeply I could see the tops of trees beneath me, and that was different from what I expected, and soft to the eye like pillows. I felt faint and wished to fall upon them so powerful was the spirit of those trees calling me down to them (and I did not even know the names of the spirits!). I had only been in this kind of forest for a morning, yet I felt as if I had lived here half so long as the years of my life in Egypt, and my heart never stopped beating in fear, not for a moment, as I rode through. There was no place where you could feel close to the sun. Instead of the pale gold of the desert, everything was green, and even the sky, where I could see it, looked more white to me than the blue of our sky above the Nile. How twisted were the spirits of this forest. The horses kept crying to one another.

  “Then we came to a place where the hill fell away on one side; on the other it rose straight up. I could see the sun at last. We had climbed above the trees. The trail was now so narrow I did not know if I could take the chariot through. To the one side was a wall of rock, by the other a precipice, and the horses would not move. I had to free Mu, who was nearest to the fall, from her harness, and then tied the tail of Ta to her bridle so that Mu could walk behind. The chariot I pushed myself. In that way we proceeded, step by step, the outside wheel of the chariot hanging—it happened—over the abyss. I, at the rear, leaned all my weight to the side of the chariot that was near to the wall. You may be sure I cursed in terror whenever a rock made us stop, and I had to lift the chariot over. Before we were through, I knew why Thutmose the Third was a great King.

  “Yes, it was difficult. Never once, may I say, did I think of that other wall in the Place of Truth where we climbed up to the tomb of Usermare, nor did I want such memories, although I believe the fear in which I lived on this trip, a fear so great as to make me think of myself as another person, and a weak one—came from my abject silence when He took me by the hair. No matter, I was one sweating charioteer by the time the horses and I came through and reached a rise from which I could see ahead. Below, the pass widened, and there on a hill in the distance up the other side of the valley across green forests and plowed fields was the town of Megiddo. I saw it through the battlement of the mountains.

  “Thutmose the Third had descended this pass, and gone into battle, and captured chariots of gold and silver and left the champions of the enemy ‘stretched out like fish’—such was the word of Ramses. Thutmose took thousands of cattle and two thousand horses and much gold and silver. Hearing of such plunder I had supposed the city would be a rich sight with white marble palaces like our own Memphi, or temples of gold, or, at the least, wooden mansions painted in the richest of colors. Yet, on the next day, as I came near, it was only a poor town, and dirty in appearance. Maybe it had been poor ever since Thutmose had conquered it. All the same, it was a fort, the first Syrian fort I had seen, and it was not built square like ours with our straight brick walls. These palisades were made of rough stone, and went up and down with the land, the walls following the hills. Every few hundred steps was a high tower so that you could not charge the doors of Megiddo without a hundred arrows shooting down. A mean place. You would look to starve it out. I began to see the argument of Amen-khep-shu-ef.

  “On this day, however, the gates were open and the market was busy. I did not enter. There was no need. The King of Kadesh would not be hiding an army inside the walls of Megiddo when you could walk into the city and look about. So I knew that Monarch was not here with his men. Besides, Usermare would reach Megiddo in a few days, although by an easier road, and He would ask the questions that receive good answers. Whereas one dirty soldier with a battered chariot and two unseemly horses was more likely to be tortured himself than coax any truth out of strange tongues. So I drove around the walls of the town which took a long time, for the lanes were muddy, and it was a big town, but then I found a road on the other side that some had spoken of in Gaza. This road was easy to recognize, for it had paving stones and oak trees planted on each side, a royal road straight out of Megiddo to the north, yet I was the only vehicle on it.

  “I soon knew why. The paving stones ended on the other side of the first hill and now I was on a wagon trail that had to be renowned for its ruts. Soon the fields disappeared and the forest grew in on me, and the horses and myself were afraid again. We were on the direct road to Tyre, but it was not direct. It curved like a snake and even coiled back and forth on itself to climb the higher hills. In the dark of late afternoon, I thought again of all I had heard of this road and its bandits. Even before I left Gaza, I listened to stories of how they raided caravans, and any merchant who did not know them well enough to pay tribute, was sold as a slave. Usually a merchant could write, and thereby serve as a scribe—a valuable slave! Then the bandits kept the horses and sold the goods. There were so many thieves that it gave occupation to the men of Megiddo. They could always hire out as an armed guard on a caravan.

  “All the same, I was more afraid of the forest than the thieves. It would take four or five such robbers to bring me down. Af
terward, one would be without an arm, another a foot, and maybe a third would never see again. I would die with my thumbs in somebody’s eyes. They would gain nothing but a body, two mediocre horses, and a chariot they probably could not sell. The cart was close to coming apart. Unless I was carrying a sum of gold—which I was, but hardly looked so prosperous—I was not worth attacking. They would see me as a soldier who was lost, or a deserter ready to join any pack of thieves, or even as the scout I was indeed. And if they saw me as the last, why, they could do worse than offer a favor to an Egyptian scout in the army of Ramses the Second. Among our allies in Gaza had been a few Asiatics from nearby tribes, and by what they said, I knew there was a large fear of the new Pharaoh. Syrians might be used to Egyptian garrisons living among them, but in a quiet year no more than a few envoys would arrive from Thebes to collect tribute and talk to the Prince of the territory. They did not try to change the laws, nor interfere with the foreign temples. We Egyptians had a saying, ‘Amon is interested in your gold, not your God.’ A sensible arrangement. Usually there was no trouble.

  “When a new Pharaoh ascended the Throne, however, it was different. The young Princes of Asia were more defiant. So, in all these lands of Lebanon and Syria had come the word: Ramses the Second was arriving with the largest army ever to march out of Egypt. If I were a thief, in that case, hiding in these dark hollows, with many a merchant offering a bounty for me, I would look to make an Egyptian my friend. Therefore, I did not hesitate. I took the most dangerous road to Tyre. Maybe I would fall in with a few brigands who could give me information. My fear of travel might be great, but even larger was my fear of rejoining Usermare-Setpenere with no information to offer.