5
Training Master Horem

I would still carve, of course, and design with my charcoal sticks on papyrus my ideas for submission to build the temple of Horus. But after making his inquiries, Akan had heard that the selection for chief designer of the temple was to be made at the next year’s Nile Festival, which celebrated the inundation of the river into the valley and covering it with the following season’s silt. I had time to make the regiment and finish my designs in order to submit for it.

Akan had scrolls drawn up that secured a place for me to try out for the Red Scorpions regiment. I packed up what I thought I would need and it all fit into a single shoulder pouch. I only needed my money bag, my drawing supplies, and my dagger. The rest of my belongings I left in Akan’s possession.

I took the journey by boat from Thebes to Memphis. It was an army ship that sailed with the standards of what I was told were the Hippo and Isis regiments fluttering above us in the hot breeze coming down from the desert.

“We have to travel with the Hippos because of Hapi,” an officer growled next to me.

“What?”

The man glanced at me. “You’re a foreigner.”

“Yes.”

“Hapi. The river god. The patron of the Hippos is Hapi. We cannot travel the river without a blessing from the priests of Hapi, who are funded by the nobility patrons of the Hippo regiment. We never travel together normally, but they were low on available ships.”

I nodded politely, not understanding why this man was taking the time to inform me of these matters. My curiosity eventually got the better of me. “You are rivals?” I asked.

“The Hippos are the putrid, rotting flesh of Seth.”

I had heard this curse before. Seth was their most despised god, the lord of the traitors and reprobates.

“I am joining the army,” I announced naively. The man, whose face was heavily marked and scarred from years of hard living, looked at me with a smirk.

“Indeed? Which regiment?”

“The Red Scorpions.”

“You jest.”

“No. I had the papers drawn up by a noble. I am endorsed.”

He studied me a moment, then laughed. “Make sure you enjoy your last night before entering the underworld. Most who try out for the Red Scorpions die long before they make it in.”

I had heard that the Red Scorpions were selective, but I had not heard this. “They . . . die? They don’t simply drop out?”

“They are the elite regiment, the pride of Pharaoh. The selection is so difficult that many die even when they are trying to quit. They have a training master named Horem, who is the most ruthless goat you can imagine. He doesn’t allow anyone in who isn’t hewn from rock and fire itself. He will especially hate you because of how you have bypassed the normal selection process.”

“What process?”

“Most who join the Red Scorpions are required to have served in the regular ranks for three years before they are even considered for selection. No one is hated more than he who finds a way to avoid the process. I tried out for the Scorpions once when I was younger and prayed for death every hour until I dropped out.”

He was a formidable-looking man, and it did nothing for my confidence to think that if he dropped out, how far would I get?

The desert had almost swallowed the sun by the time I finished climbing the long, rocky path from the Nile up to the top of the Giza plateau. I passed several Bedouin girls, who were carrying stacks of water pouches down to the river and filling them. They looked at me with hollow, gaunt eyes. Their lives were the hardest that I could imagine, worse than even that of slaves.

Many slaves in Egypt who weren’t Hebrew could own land, conduct their own business affairs, even eventually purchase their own freedom. But these Bedouins would never see a life apart from the searing dunes of the west, where I would only sentence an Amalekite to perish among.

When I reached the top of the cliffs, the white tents of Pharaoh’s army spread before me, gleaming in the golden evening sunlight in a vast ocean of martial order and precision. Oh, but the Egyptians knew how to encamp their men! Nothing like the filth we live in. The sanitation, the clarity of the ground, all of it was perfectly organized.

Men did not amble and wander through a forest of ropes and tent pegs; they walked down clean alleys and wide berths. The colors of each battalion and their patron god adorned the canvas, so I was seeing crocodiles, leopards, bulls, every animal in the world painted in exquisite detail. The tents of officers had standards mounted atop them that fluttered in the light desert breeze.

It had everything that would make it a city, and it stretched forever to the horizon in orderly rows. The only places where disorder seemed to reign were the civilian precincts. Pharaoh allowed the people from along the Nile to come to the camps to support their markets. Soldiers were not necessarily paid well, but their pay was direct from the coffers of the king himself and therefore steadier than the common riffraff, and that put them in the elite status.

Prostitutes did enormous business, as did bakers, menders, bronze workers—officers were expected to pay for their own weaponry maintenance—and falconers, for desert hare was a favored dish.

Cooking fires and slaves to man them, table merchants selling pastries, jewelers hammering at gold pieces and squinting at them to determine their weight and worth. Far to my left was an enormous oval, and I saw several dozen chariot teams swarming one another in mock drills.

I stared at the chariots and horses, awed by them just as I had been the first time I saw them.

Above it all were the pyramids, as white as lightning and tall enough to scratch the sky. Nearby too was that monstrous, hideously beautiful half-man, half-lion carving they called the Sphinx. It was said to be over a thousand years old, but it was well-maintained and glowed in the sunlight. It leered at us like the pagan idol it was.

I was at a loss as to what to do next. All I owned was in the pack on my shoulder: a bag of gold and copper rings, my drawing supplies, my dagger, my carving blades, a pouch of date cakes, and my water pouch. That was all.

As I wandered near the camp, I was confronted by two roving sentries. These men wore only linen loincloths and carried their bronze swords in their hands. Nothing else, in order to be as light as possible in the event they had to pursue a spy peering in on the camp from a distant spot. Their chests and arms were as carved as the sculptures of the gods I had been creating.

“Where are you going?” one of them asked me.

“I am here to join the ranks. I am a foreigner. I was told to report here.”

“Show your orders.”

I handed over the papyrus scroll and waited while they read it. My referral had come from a house of nobility so I did not expect to wait long.

They stared at me hard a moment after reading it, then the other one handed it back to me and said, “The tent nearest the well is where your division will be assigned.”

I thanked them and made my way into the camp with no idea as to how to search for the well apart from wandering to the center, assuming that was the logical place for it.

I found it and presented my scroll. The receiving officer studied my orders very thoroughly. So thoroughly that after a while I could not stop myself from asking, “Excuse me, sir, but what is written on there that is taking so long?”

As you have seen before, these were the days prior to my learning respect and humility. I deserved much of the punishment I received.

His head snapped up, and he stared at me with pure hatred. “I am checking to make sure you are not the actual son of a noble lord or have family connections that would prevent me from killing you.”

Again, I had not yet learned martial discipline, so I replied, “I do not need powerful family members to protect me; I can do fine on my own.”

The officer glared at me, glanced down at the papyrus, then, faster than I could have ever expected, he jumped from his stool and punched me savagely. I swung a blow at him but he avoided it, much faster than the brutish, untrained giant had been.

My next feeling was a crushing blow across the back of my head. I went slack in the officer’s arms, my world a daze of lights and pain. I felt kicks in my ribs, a fist across my jaw, relentless beatings all over my body.

A group of the Egyptian officers had joined in and were crushing my body in every way possible. My receiving officer yelled, “You will learn respect! You will learn it!”

After a while I passed out. When I revived, I could barely see out of my swollen eyes. Even my teeth hurt. I coughed, and blood erupted from my throat. Horrible pain in my chest. I knew I had several broken ribs. It hurt to even take a breath, and I coughed so hard that I nearly passed out again.

My eyes opened enough to get my first glimpse of a face that I would come to hate, and respect, above all others.

Training Master Horem seemed old to me even then, though he could not have been past his fortieth year. Like every other Egyptian soldier, his head was shaved to the scalp and he had no beard, but he had so many scars on his face that the white marks resembled one. The remnant of an old infection on his brow that had spread down his face left a horrific mark on his cheek, a black-and-red cavernous pit that seemed to burst into flames when he yelled, which he was doing now.

“Get up! Get up! Get up!”

I winced at the noise. Felt a hard punch to my face. I gagged and would have vomited if I had eaten any food that day, but instead I lay there heaving air from my gut while this new monster yelled at me and landed blows.

Somehow I found my way to my feet and tried to stand upright, an attempt that the man quickly ended with a punch to my gut.

“My name is Training Master Horem. Say it.”

I tried to open my mouth but could not. My jaw had swollen shut.

“Training Master Horem. Say that name or I will cut out your tongue and feed it to the crocodiles.”

“Tr . . . aining Master . . .”

Another punch.

“What is the matter with your speech? Say the full name.”

“T . . . training Master Hore . . .”

This time the blow knocked me to the ground, and I could only lie there and bleed into the sand.

“Get my name wrong once more and I will slit your throat! By order of the mouth of Pharaoh, I have that privilege! You show up for my regiment without spending three years in the armies? A piece of worthless foreign dung? How did you bribe Lord Akan into getting you that letter? I will make sure you die with a lungful of sand and my foot in your—”

I squeezed my eyes shut and concentrated on saying his name correctly, searching my memory for it. All was a fog. A blur.

“Train . . . ing Master Horem.”

No response from him. Perhaps I had said it right. I think I passed out again, because next I realized there was a wet linen rag on my face. It revived me somewhat.

It was Training Master Horem, kneeling beside me with a basin of water. He scrubbed my face roughly. It would not be mistaken for a bath given by a sensuous handmaiden.

“You have until tomorrow to report to the Red Scorpions regiment, first battalion, ready to train with the others. If you are not there, your name will be removed from the roster. If I get bored one day I might even hunt you down and kill you anyway.”

After beating me nearly to death, and now personally wiping my face of the blood he had beaten out of me, I did not yet know what to make of Training Master Horem. I suppose I ought to have hated him on the spot, but I didn’t sense that it was personal between us. He was doing his job, which was tearing out the rotten bones inside of a man and replacing them with fresh ones.