The First Heroes

by Harry Turtledove

  The Overseer dropped his voice, but not so much that Ankhtifi could not hear him clearly. “Thebes and Koptos have parted ways. Antef dares not come farther south than the Mount of Semekhsen, does not dare pass the boundaries of his district, for fear that Koptos will attack while he’s away. Come, in my boat or your own. Armant is not so very far.”

  Ankhtifi demanded of the sailors of other boats who had lately come from the north what they knew of this, but none could say. The lords of those districts were like lions, they said, and when lions gorged on a single kill, who was to tell at what moment they might argue over the choicest bits and part company?

  “I will not come,” said Ankhtifi.

  He sent the Overseer of the Troops of Armant back the way he had come; he knew that by nightfall the man would be back in the District of Thebes. It was not so very far indeed.

  Idy and Minnefer and his councilors came to him and, having learned the Overseer’s news, offered to ready the boats so that, if it was true, Ankhtifi might take advantage, in the name of the King.

  Ankhtifi shook his head. “I will not come,” he said, “but in my own time, I will go.”

  He offered loaves and a foreleg to the falcon that night. “It is your time,” he said to Ankhtifi, his eyes shining more brightly. “This is a boon I grant you: your opponents will always fall to you in battle. You have no equal.”

  And he went the next day, before dawn, with two boats and twenty men. They rowed with stealth, the spoon blades of their oars kissing the water and speeding the craft along faster than the flooding current. Here the river branched, and Ankhtifi’s boats slipped into the little channel that flowed nearest the Mount of Semekhsen.

  There were men at the hill, many men and a half-built fortified camp, with the standards of Thebes and of Koptos.

  “He lied!” Idy said, as if such a thing had never before occurred to him.

  “He lies, like a hippopotamus in the mud,” Ankhtifi said. He hefted his spear, the shadow of which grew longer in the morning light. “And like a hippopotamus in the mud, he dies.”

  They disembarked, having staked their boats out of sight. A shadow fell over them, winged, perfumed, like a moment of night that was not yet scattered by dawn. His troops did not question Ankhtifi, although he was leading them, a trustworthy band of twenty, against five, six, seven times as many, or more, as they counted by the growing light.

  They came to the boundary of the camp, which had stirred and began to break fast. Men scratched themselves and shoved bread into their mouths. The Overseer of the Troops of Armant walked among his soldiers, shoulder to shoulder with other overseers of troops from other towns. These men were the nose, the breath, of this army. The soldiers among whom they walked were the tusks and the flesh, lolling in the mud. Yet there was no sign of the heart, no sign of Antef of Thebes.

  “Stand beside me, my strong arms, my harpoons,” Ankhtifi said, “and I will pierce the nose.”

  Ankhtifi stood tall, like the sun suddenly birthed from the horizon, and the scented shadow fell away: the King, far away in the Residence, awoke and rose from his bed.

  Cries of terror rose from the troops of Armant and their allies. These quickly turned to whoops and they grabbed their weapons.

  “You! You there!” Ankhtifi called, giving them neither name nor title nor sobriquet. “I am Ankhtifi, Seal-bearer of the King of Upper and Lower Egypt, Lector-priest, Great Overlord of the Districts of Edfu and Nekhen. I have prevailed in the south over Khuu the wretch of Edfu. I am the hero without peer. By Horus and by Hemen I am here to fight you, all of you, and I will smite you, all of you, and I will carry north through your own districts your herds and your fleets and present them before King Neferkare in the Residence at Neni-Nesut! I will fight all of you. Who among you will fight me?”

  The Overseer of the Troops of Armant came forward and quieted his men. If he gave his name, now or ever, Ankhtifi has long ago forgotten it, perhaps at the falcon’s word. “Neferkare, so far as we are concerned, is as dead.”

  Ankhtifi laughed now, and laughed and laughed, for the Overseer spoke more truth than he could ever know.

  “Antef is our lord,” the Overseer went on, sounding something less than certain in the face of Ankhtifi’s laughter. “You would be wise to make him your own. Join Thebes and Koptos, Ankhtifi. Would you rather that Antef overrun Nekhen and Edfu and leave you and your heirs with nothing at all?”

  “Will you fight me?”

  The Overseer perhaps thought of Khuu, or perhaps he thought of the victorious troops of the Districts of Nekhen and Edfu. Or perhaps he thought of the god that had brought Ankhtifi unseen to the boundary of his camp. Whatever he thought of, at the end of it he said: “I will fight you. My troops will fight you.”

  And they did.

  At Ankhtifi’s signal the trustworthy troops of Nekhen and Edfu stormed the encampment, piercing it like harpoons. They brought down their axes upon the shields and the arms and the heads of Armant and Thebes and Koptos. Their slingstones smashed in eyes and tore off ears, their arrows pierced limbs and chests and skewered the very hearts of men, and their spears transfixed whatever they touched.

  What the spears did not transfix, and what could move eyeless or earless or with arrows feathering their arms, and what had lost merely hands and not limbs to axes, these fled north, like a single wounded beast. Ankhtifi pursued their leaders, the overseers of troops, and fixed them with his spear. He laid waste to their camp, destroying it utterly, carrying away whatever of value could be carried away, burning whatever would burn.

  Then Ankhtifi’s men went home, injured but valiant. They went against the current, and this time no wind filled their sails, but they did not care. Home was near, and all the way the trackers hauled while bleeding and singing, “Ankhtifi the Brave, the hero who has no peer.”

  “Seven, perhaps eight, perhaps nine, against one,” Idy says, marveling at the memory to which he himself was witness, of which he himself bears old scars. Ankhtifi is startled: has he been speaking? He thought the dryness in his throat was from crying battle-orders to his men. “You have no equal, my lord, my father.”

  Ankhtifi looks at his son, who stares at him wide-eyed, adoring, no different from the workmen. It is so now. But someday men will not question Idy, when he is overlord and the authority of Neferkare, of Horus, of Hemen, fills him.

  Ankhtifi steps away from the burial shaft in the spotless floor of his tomb.

  For some time no one came south from Koptos or Thebes. No one traveled south at all, unless they began in the District of Nekhen or Edfu and went upstream to Elephantine. Scouts dispatched by Ankhtifi through the desert to look upon the District of Thebes reported that Antef strangled the ways of the desert, that King Neferkare had but hard access to the mines and quarries in the east. When boats came again, their crews and passengers said the same.

  The falcon did not speak of these things. Ankhtifi wondered if they felt it showed some weakness the King did not wish to admit, or if he did not so keenly feel this loss, or if there were simply more pressing matters always at hand. And there were. The river was sluggish. Each year it rose as high as it had the year before, but it never seemed quite so high as the year before that. Ankhtifi ordered his treasurers to appropriate a little more than a fair share, and farmers complained to the treasurers. Ankhtifi sent men among them to tell them that this share was going into the granary like the rest, as proof against the fickleness of the river, and the farmers gave even more than they were asked.

  Ankhtifi marveled at this with the falcon as he laid before him offerings.

  The falcon said, “A king’s strong arm is his tongue.”

  “And the strength of the land is the river,” Ankhtifi replied. “It is low, even at its height.”

  “Horus grants the flood.”

  “You are Horus. You are Hemen. Grant us the power of the river. Give it away, make us, make yourself, thereby all the stronger.”

  The falcon blinked his brigh
t eye, then his brighter one. “Put my name into your tomb, just once, asking Horus to grant in my name what you most desire. There is power in that.”

  “Once only?”

  “It will be for your son to multiply my name, and for his son, and his son, they who will be overlords after you. Fear will be in them, and love and respect. Your tomb will be unpolluted until the end of time, because none will ever question your authority. Even as I have assured their inheritance, so they will assure mine. The Thebans would take this from me. They would take this from us both.”

  It startled Ankhtifi to hear the falcon speak of this now. It had been such a long time since the falcon had spoken of Thebes.

  “I have thought to go north,” said Ankhtifi. “My troops, I can call them from their fields for a little while. The time to plant comes earlier and earlier each year, yet the growing season is shorter and shorter. The river is quick to retreat from the land, and the drought of summer is quicker to descend upon it.”

  “Go north, then, hero,” the falcon said. “Go north and lay my hands about the throat of my enemy.”

  Before going north, Ankhtifi went to his scribes and told them what to write upon one wall of his tomb: “May Horus grant that the river will flood for his son Neferkare.”

  Then, over the course of ten days, he summoned his trustworthy troops from their fields and their barracks and from their labors. They rowed past the Mount of Semekhsen, where it seemed that the smell of burning staves and a whiff of incense lingered still. They slipped past the town of Armant on the great channel of the river. Those who were along the riverbank in the dark hours gasped in fear. They sent runners northward.

  Then Ankhtifi’s best archers made ready to shoot them. They were sure of their mark even in moonlight because confidence in their overlord filled them, but Ankhtifi stopped them.

  “Someone must tell Antef that I have come to challenge him. Let them go. Their fear will inform him well.”

  They rowed until at dawn they came to Tjemy’s fine estate on the west bank, whose fields were not so deeply flooded as once they might have been, whose quay was no longer so convenient as once it might have been. Soldiers stood along its walls.

  The fleet moored at the riverbank, and out poured the valiant troops of Edfu and Nekhen. Ankhtifi at their lead, they marched to the walls.

  “Come out, you! Come out! Who will fight Ankhtifi the Brave, the Great Overlord of Edfu and Nekhen? Tjemy! You, there! Who?”

  Ankhtifi raised his ax.

  None replied. Even a volley of arrows, aimed at the walls, did not stir the soldiers from their places. Shadows grew short and then long again, now stretching back toward the river. The runners from Armant at last came by and Ankhtifi let them pass.

  “Let them tell Antef of Thebes,” he said. “Let them proclaim in Thebes that cowardice perches like sparrows on the walls of Tjemy.” Then he turned to the walls again:

  “I thought Montu was the god of Armant and the god of Thebes! Have you abandoned the god of war for a cackling goose? This Hidden god of Thebes has hidden your courage!”

  When none replied he divided his troops. Southward again he sent them, with Idy and Minnefer. By foot and by boat they went, seeking villages and farms, estates and camps. For two days they scoured the western shore of the river, north and south, the muddy fields and the sandy hills. None came out to fight them.

  So they crossed the river and went to the north, to that place where one Imby had built his tomb. A camp had been made there not long ago. Warm ash from campfires still lay in little pits, and the tracks of men and donkeys were still fresh. The camp-men had come from the north, but they were gone now, headed south, and, on the river, Ankhtifi’s fleet followed while scouts marked the trail of footprints and hoof prints.

  They led to the plain of Sega.

  Here stood a small fort the height of four men, its merlons biting the sky like teeth. The bricks were new, forming plumb-straight faces violated only on the northern side, by a single doorway. Acaciawood planks, hewn smooth and joined tight, fit between thick jambs no battering ram had ever rattled. With a noise like thunder, that door was now barred shut from within.

  Ankhtifi stared at the wood and the brick. Not so much as a hair of a soldier, not the tip of an arrow, peered down over the walls at them.

  “I am Ankhtifi the Brave! Who among you will challenge me?”

  No one answered.

  “Who will come out to fight me and my trustworthy troops?”

  No one answered.

  Ankhtifi brought forward those who had axes and they beat at the door, but it was so well-barred that they could not break it.

  No one answered.

  So began the siege.

  Ankhtifi’s troops camped outside the walls, beyond bow-shot, beyond the range of a slingstone. Evening came and their campfires burned, and they could smell the fire and see the smoke rise from behind the walls of Sega.

  As he stood on a rise and surveyed the little plain and the fortress he thought he saw the falcon. Perfume carried on the night air and there was something in the dark.

  “My lord?”

  A great cackle, an enormous flap of wings—

  “My lord?”

  A goose flew up from the river, near enough that its wing brushed the top of Ankhtifi’s head as he threw himself to the ground.

  He whispered, “My lord?”

  No one answered.

  He went back to his campfire and lay on his side, even as he imagined the King, lying on a golden bed in the Residence, sleepless through the night.

  For ten days they camped at Sega, and for ten days they heard men behind the walls, smelled bread at the cook-fires, saw the smoke rise after dark, and heard the cackle of a goose. On third evenings Ankhtifi left khenmet-loaves and a foreleg, the latter wrapped in linen against the flies. Although the falcon never spoke to Ankhtifi at Sega, each of those mornings these were gone, only stained linen wrappings strewn about the ground.

  Each morning the men of Edfu, and each afternoon the men of Nekhen, scaled the walls, one atop another’s back because they had no ladder, and each time they were repelled by Antef’s men, though none ever could claim to have seen their weapons or their faces.

  Idy said, “So much do they fear you that they dare not show even their noses!”

  Three times Ankhtifi walked around the walls, seeing only his own shadow cast upon the bricks. West, south, east, north, there upon each face stood Ankhtifi’s shadow.

  His shadow was so strong that it cast itself upon all of Sega! Did those within the wall not realize this? Or perhaps they did, and were seized with the terror of it.

  “Bring out your goose and wring its neck before me!” Ankhtifi cried before the door of Sega, raising his ax as his shadow did likewise. “Do honor to Horus and to your King! Come out! Wring its neck! Roast it! We will feast together and then decide who will fight Ankhtifi the Brave!”

  A goose cackled. Like laughter. Noise from the throat that would not be strangled. Negeg-negeg-negeg.

  The troops of Nekhen and Edfu began to array themselves around the fort of Sega, drawn closer by Ankhtifi’s agitation. He directed them to bring the boats spars and rigging, which they fashioned into ladders that could be quickly climbed by two men abreast. Ahead of his troops, Ankhtifi would ascend one and, at his signal, the soldiers would scale the rest. They would clear the wall, they would defeat Antef’s men, and Ankhtifi himself would strangle the goose and offer it to the falcon with two khenmet-loaves.

  Idy climbed the rungs beside his father but Ankhtifi proceeded to the top alone. “They fear you,” Idy cried from below, echoed by the troops waiting at their ladders. They will drop dead the moment your face appears at the height of their wall!”

  Ankhtifi looked over the wall of Sega.

  And he slid down again, throwing his troops into confusion and chaos.

  “Go!” he yelled to his men. “To the east and to the west, apart from Sega, find those who will fight you!
Find them, find them and know that if they do not come out, if they will not fight you, it is through fear. It is not because they are obeying their hidden god! They cannot hide our victory.

  His trustworthy troops did as he commanded. Like flies they swarmed the district, challenging at every village, at every estate, at every fortification, but no one answered.

  And when they gathered again at Sega, before they went home Ankhtifi reaffirmed that it was fear that kept the Thebans behind their walls, because Ankhtifi was a man whose like had never been known before and would never be known again, not for this million of years.

  “You have never said, my lord, my father,” says Idy, “what you saw beyond the walls of Sega.”

  No, he never has. Ankhtifi does not deny it. He wonders if, like the name of Khuu, like the name of the Overseer of Armant, it is something he cannot remember but in this peculiar way because the falcon has made it so. He replies, “I saw the birthplace of languish, the cause of lack, the wellspring of privation.”

  Hiddenness, like a god who cannot be seen, unrevealable but for the goose that Ankhtifi saw and wished to strangle, laughing from a green field of barley and lentils and lettuce, negeg-negeg-negeg.

  When the falcon was not speaking of Antef of Thebes, and he often was not, or of the wonders of the God’s-Land, or of how he wished that all his court was as efficient and insightful and brave and trustworthy as Ankhtifi, he spoke of his pygmy from the Horizon-Dwellers. The gods delighted in his dance above all else, the falcon said. Nothing on the earth pleased them nearly so much, and indeed, the falcon himself had loved nothing better. “Not Ipuit, Wedjebten, not even Neith, favorite of my wives. Not even my dear mother or my brother.

  “My fiftieth year of kingship came, and I was as an old man, but not as a man who had sat upon the throne for so long. Feebleness was itself weak in my limbs. The pygmy from beyond Yam had taught me what to eat and how to pray and how to sleep and what spells to recite in what hours of the day on what days of the year. I might live forever, I thought. One day the pygmy came to me and asked if he might return home to the Horizon-Dwellers. ‘Soon,’ I promised, for he had served me well, though thought of his departure filled me with unutterable sadness, such was the depth of my love. Then the royal barber found a white hair growing among the black that he so carefully shaved from my head. I had him let it grow and then pluck it when it was the length of one finger. I showed this white hair to my pygmy. ‘No man may live forever,’ he said, ‘not even the King. From clay our bodies are fashioned, to clay they all decay.’ When he saw that this did not please me, he said, ‘But because I love you, and because you love me, I will teach you how to live again on the earth, after your ba has flown from your body.’ Over the next ten years he taught me these spells, and I learned them.