He roared with laughter, smiting his knees till the wine slopped out of his cup.
“I must tell the King that! Perhaps even during your lifetime you may see a great coursing of hares, for the justice of the Hittites is different from the justice of the plains. In your land I believe the rich rule the poor; in ours the strong rule the weak. The world will learn a new lesson before your hair is gray, Sinuhe.”
“The new Pharaoh in Egypt also has a new god,” I said with feigned simplicity.
“That I know, for I read all the King’s letters. This god is a great lover of peace and declares that there is no dispute between nations that cannot be settled peaceably. We have nothing against this god; on the contrary we like him very well-so long as he rules in Egypt and in the plains. Your Pharaoh has sent our great king an Egyptian cross that he calls the symbol of life, and he will certainly have peace for some years to come provided he sends us plenty of gold, that we may store up still more copper and iron and grain, build new workshops, and fashion more and heavier chariots than before. For all of these much gold is needed, and our king has gathered together here in Hattushash the cleverest armorers of many different countries and rewards them lavishly. But why he does this I believe no doctor’s wisdom can divine!”
“The future you foretell may please crows and jackals, but it does not cheer me, and I find in it no cause for laughter. In Mitanni stories are told of your crimes in the border country-stories so frightful that I will not repeat them, for they are unbecoming a cultured people.”
“What is culture?” he asked, refilling his wine cup. “We also can read and write and amass numbered clay tablets in our archives. Our aim is to instill fear among the enemy peoples so that when the time comes they will submit to us without a struggle and so save themselves needless injury and loss. For we do not love destruction for its own sake; we prefer to annex countries and cities in as undamaged a state as possible. A timid foe is a foe half vanquished.”
“Is everyone then your enemy? Have you no friends at all?”
“Our friends are all those who make submission to us and pay us tribute,” he explained. “We let them live in their own way and do not interfere much with their customs and their gods so long as we are the rulers. Our friends are also all those who are not our neighbors-at least until such time as they become our neighbors, for then we tend to discover offensive traits in them that disturb harmony and force us into war against them. So it has been hitherto, and so I fear it will be henceforth, from what I know of our great king.”
“Have your gods nothing to say about this? In other countries it is often they who determine what is right and what wrong.”
“Right and wrong? Right is what we desire, and wrong is what our neighbors desire. That is a very simple principle that facilitates both life and statesmanship and that in my opinion differs little from the teaching of the gods in the plains. As I understand it, these gods hold that to be right which the wealthy desire and that wrong which the poor desire.”
“The more I learn about the gods the sadder I become,” I said dejectedly.
That evening I told Minea, “I have learned enough about the land of Hatti and have found what I came to seek. I am ready to leave, for there is a smell of corpses here, and it stifles me. Death broods over me like an oppressive shade while I remain, and I don’t doubt the King would have me impaled on a stake if he knew what I have discovered. Let us flee from this corruption; it makes me feel that I would rather have been born a crow than a man.”
With the help of some of my more eminent patients I succeeded in getting a permit to travel by a prescribed route to the coast and there to board a ship. My patients bewailed my departure and urged me to stay, assuring me that if I continued to practice among them I should be wealthy in a few years. However, no one sought to prevent my going, and I laughed and joked with them and told them the stories they enjoyed so that we parted friends and they gave me many presents in farewell. We left the fearful ramparts of Hattushash, behind which lurked the world of the future, and rode on our donkeys past the blinded slaves who turned the thundering millstones, past the corpses of sorcerers impaled on either side of the road. I made all possible speed, and in twenty days we arrived at the port.
4
We tarried there for a while-though it was a noisy town, full of vice and crime-for when we saw a ship bound for Crete, Minea would say, “That one is too small and will sink, and I have no wish to be shipwrecked a second time.” And when we saw a larger one, she would say, “That is a Syrian ship, and I will not sail in her.” And of a third she would object, “The master of the vessel has evil eyes, and I fear he will sell us as slaves in a foreign land.”
So we stayed on in the seaport, and I for one did not regret this. I had plenty to do there, cleansing and stitching up gashes and opening crushed skulls. The harbor master himself eventually came to me, for he was suffering from a pox. I knew the disease from my Smyrna days and was able to cure it with a remedy used by the physicians there.
When I had cured him he said, “What shall I give you, Sinuhe, for your great skill?”
I replied, “I do not want your gold. Give me the knife in your girdle, and the obligation will be mine; I shall also have a lasting gift by which to remember you.”
But he objected, saying, “The knife is a common one; no wolves run along its edge, nor is there silver inlay in the handle.”
But he said this because the knife was of Hittite metal, of which it was forbidden to give or sell any to strangers. I had been unable to buy such a weapon, not liking to insist for fear of arousing suspicion. In Mitanni such knives were to be seen only among the most distinguished persons, and their price was ten times their weight in gold-and even then their possessors would not sell them because there were but few of them in the known world. But for a Hittite such a knife had no great value since he was forbidden to sell it to a foreigner.
The harbor master knew that I was soon to leave the country, and reflecting that he could find better use for his gold than to give it away to a doctor, he did in the end present me with the knife. It was so sharp that it shaved hair more easily than the finest flint blade and could make nicks in copper without damaging its own edge. I was delighted with it and resolved to silver-wash the blade and fit to it a handle of gold as did the Mitannians when they had acquired such a knife. The harbor master bore no grudge but was my friend because I had wrought him a lasting cure.
In this town there was a field in which wild bulls were kept as was often the case at seaports, and the youth of the place were wont to display their litheness and valor in encounters with these beasts, hurling darts into their shoulders and leaping over them. Minea was overjoyed to see them and desired to test her skill. In this way I first saw her dance among wild bulls; it was like nothing I had ever seen before, and my heart froze as I watched. For a wild bull is the most terrible of all savage beasts-worse even than an elephant, which is gentle when not irritated- and its horns are long and sharp as brad awls; with one stroke it will slit a man’s body or toss him high in the air and trample him underfoot.
But Minea danced before them wearing only a flimsy garment, and she stepped lightly aside when they lowered their heads and charged at her with dreadful bellowings. Her face was flushed, and with growing excitement she threw off her silver hair net so that her hair floated in the wind. Her dance was so rapid that the eye could not follow all her movements as she leaped up between the horns of an attacking beast, held fast to them and then, thrusting with her feet against its forehead, threw herself upward in a somersault, to land on its back. I gazed spellbound at her performance; I believe her awareness of this urged her on to do things I could never have believed a human being could accomplish. So I looked on with my body streaming with sweat, and I could not sit still, although those who sat behind me on the benches swore at me and tugged at my shoulder cloth.
On her return from the field she was loudly applauded. Garlands were set upon her head and about her neck, and the other young people presented her with a bowl on which bulls were painted in red and black. All exclaimed, “We have seen nothing like it!” and the sea captains who had been to Crete said, as they blew wine fumes through their nostrils, “Even in Crete there is hardly such another to be seen.”
But she came to me and leaned against me, and her thin dress was wet with sweat. She leaned against me, and every muscle in her strong, slender body was quivering with weariness and pride. I said to her, “I have never seen anyone like you.” My heart was weighed down with grief, for now that I had seen her dance before the bulls, I
