7
Kiss of the Scorpion

Over the next forty days, we knew only suffering. We ran endless distances. We carried things until our arms nearly fell off. We were thirsty. We slept nights under the stars with no shelters—even when the khamsin blew through, its wall of sand and darkness and wind obliterating everything in sight. Training Master Horem stalked me like a devil after the black stone incident. But he was hard on everyone, not just me.

I will not bore you with the rest of it. Our armies have done the same, more or less. I have trained them much like the Egyptians trained me.

There were two more experiences that I will tell you about before I made it to the end. They taught me much about myself. About my ability to endure, to handle fear and pain, and therefore the lessons that I apply to our own troops as we conquer our promised land.

About halfway through the forty days, I found myself in the ranks at full attention near the chariot pitch. There was a tent canvas fully stretched out on the ground in front of us. We were standing around it, waiting for the training masters to appear.

Training Master Horem emerged from his tent and walked to the edge of the canvas.

“This is the Kiss of the Scorpion,” he said, as easily as if he were telling us it might rain later. We looked at him, then at the canvas. There was nothing there. I laughed to myself.

Training Master Horem heard me laugh and walked over to me. He leaned in and touched his forehead to mine. I stared straight ahead and did not move.

“Caleb will be our first volunteer,” he said, leaning against me as he shouted loud enough for all to hear. “We will see if he is indeed favored by the gods.”

I had not been able to lose that hated title. The others used it to mock me, none more gleefully than Training Master Horem. They were convinced I had cheated somehow.

He stepped back and gestured for me to walk into the middle of the canvas.

I stepped cautiously onto the canvas and walked to the middle. Everything about this experience was warning me that danger was extreme and imminent, but the scene could not have looked more tame and unassuming.

I crouched into a fighting stance and waited for whatever was going to happen. My short sword was up and poised. Were they going to attack me all at once? I looked at the line of faces around the canvas, some of them my fellow recruits, some of them training masters, and above them all on his platform like an enthroned god himself, Training Master Horem stood with his arms crossed.

At one edge of the canvas the group parted. Two men carrying a wide brass basin walked forward.

They turned the brass basin over on its side and dumped out the contents. I squinted to see what it was . . . and then felt my insides grow cold with dread.

Hundreds and hundreds of scorpions, that fiend of the desert, crawled over each other in a pile. Immediately the training masters took hold of the edge of the canvas and pulled it up, then jerked it down quickly, snapping the cloth and sending the entire mass of scorpions flying toward me. I turned and tried to run out of the way, but all of the men were lifting their end and I found myself facing a slope of canvas all around me that I could not climb. I slid backward—right into the middle of the canvas where the scorpions awaited me.

Hold still, I begged myself. Hold still.

It did no good. Their tails reared up and lashed out at me, and I felt a dozens stings on my legs and torso. One stung my forehead before I could stand.

Rivers of pain. Oceans of it.

Their poison flooded into my blood and I knew I was a dead man, but I did not care because death was far preferable to this pain.

More stings.

I somehow got to my feet. My mind was dim.

The sword. I still had it.

I plunged the tip down into the canvas and ripped a hole in the bottom while the men continued shaking the edge of it, bouncing the scorpions all around me.

I could feel myself blacking out. I knelt and crawled through the hole I’d cut, swatting away scorpions with my hand. I crawled under the canvas handbreadth by handbreadth. My eyes were now swollen shut, my throat constricting.

Without seeing it, only feeling it, hands finally grabbed me and pulled me up.

My breath rattled and wheezed. It felt as though my lungs were being crushed. The stings were like smelting rods from the furnace that had been shoved under my skin.

I heard someone saying, “. . . has more of them on him! Get them off—”

I felt a splash of water hit me, then another. Someone was throwing it on me.

I felt rough bristles of some kind of brush scraping against my torso and face. My eyes were still too swollen shut to see anything. A burning hot oil of some kind splashed down my head onto my shoulders. The pain was so intense that I finally had to kneel down.

Then I passed out.

I remember dreaming. It had to be the scorpions’ poison, but it was a dark nightmare that I began having in those years, and it was always the same. I have had it from time to time ever since, but I understand it differently now.

In the dream, there is a blood-red sunset in the west. I am walking into a lagoon of the Nile. The water is perfectly calm and warm. I make no ripples as I submerge, still walking forward, the liquid covering my ears.

I hear the underwater sounds of reeds swaying. Hippos shuffling through mud. Crocodiles splashing as they enter to hunt. I continue walking.

Deeper underwater I go. I do not feel the need to breathe. No, air is meaningless down here. Only darkness matters.

The water grows colder. Something massive passes nearby, but I do not see what it is, only feel the current ripple in the black.

There is no light anymore. I move forward willingly.

Soon I am standing on the bow of a boat. It is built with black wood and is draped in black linen. But the boat is underwater, like I have been, and not on the surface where it should be.

Why? I do not even think about it. I only stare ahead as we plunge the depths, the dark ship passing through darker waters.

Into the night we go, and I begin to see strange things. The water turns a deep red around me, it smells foul and I wince at it, suddenly realizing that I am underwater and feeling the urge to gag and gasp for breath and claw my way to the surface. What is the red water?

But before I know what it is, the water turns black again, and I am passing through . . . frogs. Endless hordes of them kicking past me and scurrying to the blackness behind. Then smaller creatures, tiny insects, I cannot tell what they are, suffocating me. Then larger insects, black as the water, their buzzing dimmed and muffled by the water.

The insects pass, and the river is filled with immense shapes swirling in the current. I hear the sounds of lowing and bleating . . . the sound of suffering. But it is too dark, I cannot see them, but they are there. Cattle? Sheep?

Then my skin is on fire with pain, the pain of the scorpion stings, the pain of hot coals pressed into my flesh, and eruptions of disease appear everywhere on my skin and in my eyes, and when the agony cannot get worse, the water bursts around me with flame and cold.

Flame? Underwater? But there it is, everywhere, a river of red and orange fire that is consuming all. The boils are gone, my flesh now burning from the flames. I will die soon, I know it.

But it is relentless, this ship, taking me where it must.

It occurs to me vaguely that I must be in the Duat, the Place of the Dead, the River of Night the Egyptians always speak of. I am on the journey of Ra, god of the Sun, crossing through the trials. But none of these trials are familiar to me.

The flames are upon me now, burning me alive. Things strike me. Sharply. Solid objects like rocks being hurled are gashing me. I swing at the blackness wildly. Fire rages. I feel my flesh tear from the rocks, which are icy cold.

Then the fire is gone, and more insects come, and the ship sails ever darker. Their buzzing overwhelms me, their legs crawling in my ears and mouth. Locusts? Here?

They are everywhere, and eternal. They have no end or beginning. The locusts will devour me even before I get to Ammit, the destroyer of souls, who waits for me at the end of the Duat under the watchful eye of Osiris, god of the dead.

But then they are gone. The locusts disappear, and the silent darkness of the flowing river returns. I sense nothing. Feel nothing but the pressing of the water against me.

The darkness grows. Profoundly it grows, until it is everything. Too black and too dark for me to breathe. Too oppressive to be borne. The river has become night swallowing night.

What is this part of the Duat? It is nothing like the priests have described!

Darkness. Blackness. All is one.

And then the worst of it comes.

Low, in the distance, I hear the screaming. It is one voice, a woman, muffled by the water but clear enough to hear her suffering. It is not the cry of pain. It is the cry of ultimate loss. The piercing wail of the underworld, of spirit wraiths, scarcely human. Her voice is joined by others. All women. Who are they? For whom do they weep?

Their screams well up in my ears, and the ship plunges into them with determination, the black sails rippling as we pass deeper and deeper. Suffering is all I know. Suffering is all I see. The sound of . . . mothers. Mothers weeping for their lost children. That is the only sound it can be. Nothing else is as terrible.

Rumbling ahead. The water is shaking. I stagger for the first time, grabbing the railing of the ship to remain standing.

The water is roaring now, sloshing me and the ship back and forth, until I feel the ship breaking apart beneath me, its black wooden planks ripping away and disappearing, and I am flailing in the deadly current, suddenly gasping for breath, not realizing until this very moment that I cannot survive under water and must breathe now, immediately.

I thrash for the surface, but the water roars louder.

And then it parts.

Yes, it parts.

As though a blade has sliced toward me and cut it in half, the water splits away and I am hanging in the nothingness of an endless night . . . and then my feet stand on solid ground.

I gasp for breath. I am in the desert. Nothing else is around me. Cold stars twinkle overhead.

In the distance I see a light on the horizon. It shimmers and dances, and it looks small from here, but I realize that it is larger than the sky itself, I only have to move toward it. Red flames and golden flames. It moves off, and I find myself following it into the vastness of the wilderness. . . .

It was this dream I was having, and it was the first time I had it, when I finally roused after being attacked by the scorpions.

The swelling around my eyes had lessened, and I could blink them open. My face still felt heavy. A dull ache throbbed everywhere in my body. Every joint felt stiff and mortared into place. My very eyes hurt to move.

I was in a tent. Nearby sat Training Master Horem. Instantly I wanted to sit up and come to the position of respect, but my body was sluggish and I ended up only lurching onto my side.

“Lie still,” Training Master Horem said. I obeyed.

“What god do you worship?”

I didn’t answer. I had no answer.

“I asked what god you worship,” he repeated, very calmly.

“Marduk,” I said. It was the first god name that came to mind. Training Master Horem frowned.

“I do not know this one. Where is he?”

“The north, Training Master Horem.”

The scarred man studied me a while longer. “No one has ever thought to cut through the canvas. That was clever.”

I did not know how to answer. Was this a trap?

“You also did not die, even though you were stung over fifty times that we could count.”

My curiosity got the better of me. “Do many men die when they do the Kiss of the Scorpion?”

“We only do it to one recruit, because he always dies. It is supposed to strike fear into the others. We usually pick out the recruit none of the training masters like. But you lived.”

I could not tell whether he was setting me up for something else or actually engaging me in conversation. I remained silent.

But he simply stood and walked out.

I was puzzled at his behavior. I was even more puzzled at my dream.