Ancient Evenings

by Norman Mailer

  “Now, when we learned who would be invited this year, I knew the blow to her heart. ‘It is a small matter,’ Honey-Ball said, ‘and yet the pain is not small.’ I felt her true woe. In this year with the Festival of Festivals approaching to celebrate the Thirty-Fifth Year of His Reign (and who among us did not know it was going to be the largest festival in anyone’s memory?) some little queens, of whom Honey-Ball was most certainly one, had needed an invitation to the Grand Councils to make certain that one would not be passed over at the Festival of Festivals.

  “I must say her fear of missing this far greater occasion was not without basis. Most of the little queens would be able to leave the Gardens each day to mingle with many nobles in the newly built Hall of King Unas, or in the Great Court—a rare occasion for a little queen to invite her parents to Thebes. It all depended, however, on being one of the mothers of His children. His sons and daughters would be present to see their Father in His Godly Triumph. On the consequence, there being a great many such children, any little queen who had not borne His child could not with any confidence expect to be invited. Hence the Grand Councils might open the way. Honey-Ball’s dejection was deep.

  “I think it was the failure of her magic that hurt her so. With our growing familiarity, she had become more modest and did not always seek to display her powers, indeed, there were nights when she was my sister, and spoke of small pains and miserable little sorrows. So I began to hear from her lips the old saying one heard often in Thebes about people in the Delta: ‘Those who inhabit the swamps, know not.’ The meaning had always been so obvious that I never questioned its truth—to live in the swamps was to be wet, pestered with insects, and weak with heat. Everything grew too easily. The balance of Maat was missing. One lived in stupor and knew not.

  “ ‘It is true,’ said Honey-Ball. ‘It is true except for those about whom it is not true.’ And she went on to tell me how her family, of twenty generations in the city of Sais, had had the pride to overcome the apathy of their swamp country. ‘Our desire,’ she said, ‘is to stand in balance to our neighbors who know not.’ Then I would be obliged to listen as she pondered the depth of the Nile and the height of the stars, the Gods of the deep water in the river channels, and the Gods of the shallows near the banks, the warnings of the stars whose eyes never closed, and the stars who blinked. How it annoyed her that I did not even know the month of my birth. She would unroll a papyrus to show me charts that could measure the date of one’s death by the hour one was born. ‘How long will you live?’ I asked her, and she replied, ‘For many years. My life is long.’ Then she sighed and said, ‘But I will lose more than my little toe, and soon enough. So say the stars.’ Her sigh was heavy.

  “Even after the Grand Councils were past, and I could assure her that it was not a grand affair, and neither Queen Nefertiri nor Queen Rama-Nefru had even been present, Honey-Ball’s spirits did not improve. For Oasis and Mersegert spoke of it as full of light and wonder, and said they received many attentions. Honey-Ball said, ‘Sesusi does not value me because I am from Sais.’ The pit of this drear mood was that in the last few days, to avenge herself against Usermare’s indifference, she had given much to her rites, and received little. Each night, she had performed a ritual to turn-the-head-of-Usermare, and had cried forth the names of Gods Who had much weight, her voice quivering with exaltation. But next day, the sum of all she had exhausted in herself, was most visible on her face.

  “I began to ask myself how any magician could turn His neck? Usermare was able to call on a thousand Gods and Goddesses: He had a myriad above, and now, after His marriage to Rama-Nefru, a Hittite myriad of Gods below.

  “Yet, each night, as I lay beside her, much as if her magic was able to turn my neck far better than our Pharaoh’s, I was not bored with her unhappy moods, and loved her. We could each drink in the other’s sorrow. I would lie beside her, my face between her breasts, and steep myself in the solemnity and deep resolve of her heart until I did not think she was silly for suffering over the Grand Councils, but understood that she saw it as one more injury to her family. It would be a true misery if she could not invite them to the Festival of Festivals. I was coming to understand that this family was raised higher in her heart than Usermare. In her two great breasts lived all that she would cherish, her father, her mother, her sisters, and myself. Feeling myself in her flesh, I thought that if she was slow to stir, and I might never again enjoy the liveliness and wickedness and love of the dance that women with pert breasts might bring to bed, that could not weigh against our sweet deep silence, its warning in one’s flesh that the love I would find in this massive bosom would not be small nor soon pass. Listening to the secret intentions of her heart as its beat came to me out of the depth of her flesh, I knew she had decided against all caution to trust me—which could only mean that she must work her spells from out of my heart as well as her own, bind us so closely that an error in the magic I learned could cause a great rent in hers. So I also knew that if I did not stand up straight away in the dark and leave her room, never to be alone with her again, I would lose the power to command what was left of my will. Yet so strong was the power of her heart that I felt no panic to move, and indeed, was a slave already, and close to her.

  “That night she initiated me, and I took my first step toward Horus of the North. Of course, these matters are full of treachery and peril. Now, looking upon the result, I do not know if I was set properly on my way to the power and wisdom of a magician.”

  FIVE

  “In that square chamber which held her altar, there were no windows. The ceiling was as high as the floor was long. In the center, she had had inlaid on the stone, a broad circle in a narrow band of lapis-lazuli, while against all four walls, low tables of ebony held her boxes, and high chests her costumes. Other than the door, the only opening was a wind-catcher on the roof into which smoke from the altar could rise.

  “On the night she initiated me, I remember every act, but I will not relate it now in the exact order for fear it could be abused. I know that You, Good and Great God, may not be pleased if I fail to tell You all that is true, and in its proper place, yet there is no truth in a magical ceremony but for the performing of it. Even as I have trusted You, and confessed to matters that no one in my fourth life has known before, so must You now trust me and know that in all I say, my first desire is to safeguard Your Throne and the Two-Lands upon which it sits.”

  Ptah-nem-hotep inclined His head. “Your words are polite but have a rude edge, for they assume that we are equal and must trust each other, whereas you know better. It is for you to trust Me. However, I will listen to the way you tell it and may ask for no more. The magic I seek is of a higher nature than the one you now relate. To the measure that you bring the secrets of the past forward into My thoughts (so that the past lives in My limbs like My own blood) you will have performed an honorable work of the highest magic. I do not object at this moment, therefore, if you conceal the exact order of your ceremony of initiation.”

  Menenhetet touched his forehead seven times. “I thank the great wisdom of Your mind,” he said. “This much is safe to tell: Honey-Ball had purified her circle of lapis-lazuli with many preparatory rites, and invoked friendly Gods to be our witness (although some had names I never heard before). Then, before we began, she asked, ‘Are you ready to join my Temple?’ When I said yes, I could feel a swelling in my chest larger than the clamor of battle, so she asked again, and once more, and after listening carefully, as if the beating of my heart could tell her more than my voice, she said at last to her Gods, ‘He was asked three questions, and three times he knew the same answer’

  “Now we stood within the circle of lapis-lazuli and she blessed my naked body in an order that was most precise. This I also tell: She passed incense by my navel and my forehead, by my feet and my throat, by my knees and my chest, and gave a last pass to the hair of my groin. Then she anointed the same seven places with drops of water, with pinches of salt, by the flam
e of a candle that she brought near enough to warm me, and last with drops of oil. I was now blessed and prepared.

  “From the altar she took a knife with a fine white marble handle and a point so sharp your eye would bleed if you continued to look at it. Now she removed her gown of white and stood before me naked as myself. With this knife, she pricked me on the belly just below my navel, and mixed my blood with hers, for she did the same thing to herself, and in the same place. From there, she repeated each step of the blessing, taking a drop of blood from my forehead and hers, from my big toe and hers, out of my right breast and hers, and a drop of blood from each of us just above the hairs of the groin. And each drop of blood clung like a tear to the point of the knife until it was brought to the same spot on her body so that when we were done, our blood was mixed in these seven abodes and we stood together by the altar, grave, naked, and equally marked.

  “Now, I was ready for the consecration to her Temple. Within the circle, with only a burning wick in a saucer of oil for illumination, she had me lie down on the stone, raised high a scourge, and struck me twice, four times, then fourteen times.

  “I had been whipped often as a boy. I had been left to crawl away and look for mud to staunch the bleeding. In my first life, no matter how high my rank, nobody could ever have mistaken me for a noble—I had too many welts on my back. A whipping had no strange taste for me. Yet to be scourged by Honey-Ball was unlike other lashings. She laid on the strokes with a lightness of touch that carried far. If you were to toss a pebble into a pond and succeed on your next attempt to drop a second pebble into the center of the first circle, and at just the right instant (so that you would create no confusion on the going-out of the wave but would deepen the ripple) then you would be close to Honey-Ball’s art. Pain permeated me in the way that scented oil will reach into every corner of the cloth. On other nights, she had taught me much about how to kiss, and I lived in the wealth of such embraces, and knew why kissing was a sport for nobles: Now, I came to pass through the vales of the scourge. A vertigo close to intoxication came into my thoughts, which is to say I passed into an adoration of my own pain, for I felt as if it purified me of all disgrace. While I could nearly not endure it, and might have leaped into the sky out of the very torture of the touch of the flail, a tenderness nonetheless came from her. How can I explain such a clash of sentiments? Let me say she laid on the scourge with perfect strokes, once to the cheek of each bare buttock, then twice to each buttock, then once to all the fourteen aching parts of the body of Osiris that for all I knew was now my own as much as it belonged to the God. She scourged me once upon my face with my eyes closed, and once with my eyes open, once to each of the soles of my feet, upon each of my arms, and each of my fists, on my back, and on my belly, on my chest and my neck. At the last it was once upon my testicles and once like a snake did the scourge whip around my limp worm. High in clouds of fire I even listened while Ma-Khrut recited in the clearest voice after each slash, ‘I consecrate you with oil,’ and oil she laid on every one of those flames from the fourteen strokes of the scourge until the fires cooled and were more like the warmth of my own body. Then she said, ‘I consecrate you with wine,’ and brought the astringent of wine to the fourteen flames, and my skin shrieked again. To which she bathed me lightly in cool water until the steam rose out of my heart from the quieting of the blaze, and said, ‘I consecrate you with fire,’ but she merely passed the smoke of the incense bowl by each sore place. Then she said at last, ‘I consecrate you with my lips,’ and kissed me on the brow with my eyes open and again with my eyes closed, kissed me on each of the soles of my feet and on the large muscle in the crook of each arm, kissed the knuckles of my fists, and my back, and my belly, my chest, my neck, and then finished by licking me long around the circle of my testicles, and most gently on the head of my sword which rose out of the soft swamp of my loins until it was as mighty as a crocodile. Then she said, ‘I make you First Priest of the Temple of Ma-Khrut Who Dwells in Osiris. Vow that you will be loyal, vow that you will serve,’ and when I cried out that I would (for this was the last of fourteen vows she had demanded through each of my fourteen parts) why then she lowered herself upon me like a wondrous temple of sweet shuddering flesh, and whispered my Secret Name, and with a welling-up of every one of the fourteen oases where I had swallowed the sweats of pain, my river came forth in flood.

  “That was the end of the rite but only the beginning of the pleasures of that night. Now, it was I who scourged her buttocks, and they were as large as the moon and as red as the sun by the time I finished, and I say it, I learned the art of the stroke, for it was not my arm that held the scourge, but her heart drawing it in upon herself, so that I felt as if I were beating upon the swell of her heart itself, and then to my astonishment and to my horror, since I had never done this for anyone before (not even for Usermare) I grasped those great mounds of her much-whipped buttocks, and put my face into the fold of her true seat, and with a mighty voracity kissed her in the place where all that is soon to die is most redolent. And what with all these exertions, she smelled stronger than any horse. She did the same to me, and we rolled about with our faces buried in the ends of each other, and were married by this ceremony, and would never be the same. Then she gave so many kisses to the gates of my buttocks that by way of her caresses, I came to feel like a Pharaoh lying on His back, and did not know whether to claim I was the husband or wife of all Egypt. Carried on such lovely currents, I could feel again how there were purposes of which she did not speak, and I was becoming the servant of her vast intentions.

  “I use the word vast, and it is proper. In nights to follow I could lie beside her as happy as a man asleep on a boat, yet dreams would stir in those great breasts that left our boat on a ledge of the highest cliffs, and we would come awake, clinging to the rock. For I knew the intent of our magic—it was our magic now—could be no less than to take away the strength of Usermare, and often when I looked at her face I would see the fine intelligence that lives in the eyes of that most austere God, Osiris, and that would make me feel much like Horus of the North. Indeed, staring into one another’s eyes (and like Queen Hat-shep-sut, she would often wear a long and narrow chin-beard) Ma-Khrut had all the bearing of the Lord Osiris.”

  “What,” asked Ptah-nem-hotep, “was your Secret Name?” I did not expect my great-grandfather to be quick to give this answer, yet to my surprise he did. “Why,” he said, “it was ‘He-who-will-help-to-turn-the-neck-of-Usermare,’ and the name soon rebounded on me. I had to give it up.”

  “And you will tell us of that?”

  “I will. But later if I may. Indeed I knew it was a dangerous name. However, she was most frank about that. If I was to be the great servant of her magic, I must be ready to die. That she told me often, and always added, ‘But no longer like a peasant.’ No, now I must learn to die in the full regalia of embalming. Like the art of learning to kiss, death belonged to nobles. I used to laugh at her. I need this strengthening of the will?—I, who had looked at a thousand axes—but she knew better. She understood, as I would soon, that to die peacefully can be the most perilous way of all, since one must then be ready for the journey through Khert-Neter.

  “Over and over, she wished to assure me that no servant of her body and heart, certainly not I, would lose Ma-Khrut’s protection. Neither in this world nor in the next. I told her that in my boyhood, in my village, we knew it was only nobles and the very wealthy who could travel in the Land of the Dead with any hope of reaching the Blessed Fields. For a poor peasant, the serpents encountered were so large, the fires so hot, and the cataracts so precipitous that it was simple prudence not to try, indeed never to think of it. Easier to rest in a sandy grave. Of course, as I also began to remember, many of our village dead did not accept such a rest, and came back as ghosts. They would pass through the village at night and talk to us in our dreams until the burial practice in my region became so harsh as to cut off the head of a dead person and sever the feet. That way a
ghost could not follow us. Sometimes, we would even bury the head between the knees and put a man’s feet by his ears to confuse him altogether She gave a silvery laugh when I told her this. The light of the moon was in the tenderness of her thoughts, whatever they were.

  “It was then she rose from our bed, and picked up a sarcophagus no longer than my finger, yet Ma-Khrut’s face and figure were painted upon the lid. Within was a mummy the size of a short caterpillar, so carefully wrapped in fine linen that it needed no resin, indeed, its touch was as agreeable as the petal of a rose. I was holding the carefully embalmed mummy of her little toe. Yet before I could so much as decide whether it was of great value, or disagreeable to behold, she began to speak of the travels of her little toe through the gates and fiery courses of Khert-Neter, and when I babbled that I did not know how any part of the body, much less a toe, could travel by itself, she gave her silvery laugh once more. ‘By way of a ceremony known only in my nome,’ she said. ‘Sometimes those who are from Sais do not know so little,’ and she laughed again. ‘My family had the Ka of this toe betrothed to the Ka of a fat and wealthy merchant from Sais. Yes, they even provided him with the appropriate rolls of papyrus.’ I knew her well enough to understand she was serious, and at last she told me the tale. On receipt of a letter from her mother, Honey-Ball learned that this merchant died on the same night she lost her toe. So, even as her toe was lying in its small bowl of natron, so was the merchant lying in his bath, and both of them to be steeped for seventy days. Messages were exchanged to make certain they were wrapped on the same afternoon, and installed in their separate sarcophagi, the large and the small, and both on the same evening, the toe in Thebes, the fat merchant in Sais ten days’ travel away on the river, yet such is the natural indifference of the Ka to any measure of distance that her toe was ready to take the voyage to Khert-Neter with him.