Khu: A Tale of Ancient Egypt (22 page)

That had been long before Khety’s features were hardened by the tragedies that would come later in Khety’s life. Even then, he was the kind of person with a strong presence and a magnetic aura which attracted attention. His sharp gray eyes sparkled with intelligence as he took in his surroundings. Wherever he went, people stopped what they were doing to turn and stare at him. They couldn’t help it, for he had that effect on others.

W
hat struck Mentuhotep most at the time was that Khety actually looked like a god—a god with perfectly proportioned features, exquisitely carved in granite, limestone and alabaster, with pale slate eyes. It was an impression that stayed with Mentuhotep all these years.

And it was intimidating.

The peace forged by Khety and Intef III on that day long ago had been transitory; for after Intef’s death, Mentuhotep had to crush a few small skirmishes which erupted along the southern perimeter of Middle Egypt, though he did not come face-to-face with Khety again.

Mentuhotep wondered how much Khety had changed over the years.
He wondered how much his father’s opinion would have changed as well. He still imagined the Nen-nesian king to be the very same as he had last seen him so many years ago. But he knew that
that
had been the impression of a young child, and that Khety would have changed since then.

Mentuhotep
had heard of the king’s tragedies, and had also kept abreast of his activities over the years. But he could not help feeling apprehensive about meeting him in person. And for all his childhood impressions of the godlike man who claimed Lower Egypt’s Deshret Red Crown in the north, Mentuhotep had to remind himself that Khety was just another pretender who had risen to power from a transitory lineage—a lineage he intended on crushing for good.

Mentuhotep hoped that would happen today.

***

Khu and Nakhti had jumped into the
frantic churning mass along with the rest of Mentuhotep’s men. They fought side by side, guarding each other’s backs as they defended themselves against Ankhtifi and Khety’s men, who showed no fear in their blazing eyes. Some of the enemy had been lulled by the festivities, which had been going on for many days, while Mentuhotep’s army was still fresh, having arrived only a few hours before. And although Ankhtifi’s men had been warned that the Theban king might be surprising them with a visit, their initial caution melted away during the long ceremonial processions, and with the heqet they drank to keep from dehydrating under the glaring sun.

Nakhti was eager to draw blood. All his natural impulsiveness gave him a courage he might otherwise not have felt. But Khu could not shake the malevolence he had sensed earlier. There was something disturbingly familiar about it. He tried burying those thoughts as he scanned the large public square in front of the temple. He saw people huddling under tables whose contents had spilled on the ground. Others were limping away, or trying to drag off loved ones into safer surroundings. Some people had been trampled to death in the havoc, while others lay unconscious from their wounds. All about the town, skirmishes had broken out between groups of his father’s soldiers and the enemy.

Khety had long disappeared within the confines of the massive
temple structure, along with his entourage. His guards had warned him of Mentuhotep’s men scouring the streets. They had seen the Theban army rounding up or killing anyone involved in the revolt. They had seen the priest’s guards also join in the battle, siding along with the Theban soldiers.

R
egardless of Khety and Ankhtifi’s combined forces, they were still outnumbered by Mentuhotep’s troops. Without the support from the pilgrims and general public, Khety knew he did not stand a chance. He needed the people’s support to help him push south and take the Theban crown by force. He had counted on their sheer numbers to overcome resistance from Upper Egypt’s ruler. And since the people had panicked, he had no choice but to flee.

I
f he wanted to get out of Abdju alive.

Khety and Ankhtifi’s
soldiers were a mismatched assortment of solitary, masterless men from all over Egypt and the foreign lands lying to the east. They were hungry for power and plunder. Especially Ankhtifi’s men. Like the lean jackals hunting in the shadows, the men under Ankhtifi’s command were opportunistic marauders and ruffians whose experience was largely drawn from raiding small settlements. Many of them were not battle-hardened warriors, but rather bullies whose strength lay in their penchant to trample innocent, unarmed men, women and children.

Mentuhotep’s men were skilled
soldiers, and Khu and Nakhti had the agility and speed of youth. The adrenaline coursing through their blood, flooded their veins with an indestructible mettle. All their years of training had led up to this point. So as they were weaving their way through the scattering crowd in search of the radical supporters of the northern king, one man stepped out from behind a column to lunge at Khu with a dagger meant to split him open.

Khu did not think twice before
parrying and pivoting away. He slashed back at the man who had someone else’s blood smeared across his broad chest, but the man sidestepped and hissed, baring his teeth in a growl.

Khu
lost all his initial reserve. Any last traces of nervousness had evaporated like water from the scorching desert. He moved with the lethal grace of the blade, his face a taut mask of concentration, as he traded strikes with his opponent. Then he stepped to one side, tricking the man into thinking he was trying to catch his breath. And that was when Khu delivered the deadly strike to the man’s neck. The man clutched his throat as blood poured down through his fingers. He sputtered and gargled a final protest as he slashed feebly at the air one last time before going down like a felled ox.

Khu darted a glance at Nakhti just in time to see two men approaching his brother. One was armed with a battle ax
dripping with fresh blood, from someone he had killed moments before. The other held a dagger in each of this fisted hands. Seeing the young warriors made the men grin.

“This will be easy,” one
boasted to the other.

They sensed the boy
s’ inexperience. But Nakhti leaped toward the first man, shrieking as he whipped his blade in the air, like a demon from the Netherworld. The man jumped backward and spread his arms wide as though welcoming the assault. 

“
Behind you!” Nakhti yelled, as another man ran toward Khu, roaring as he swung with a downward cut of his blade.

Khu sidestepped
, but not quickly enough, and in the clangor of blades his own dagger broke in half. The man sneered, his yellow teeth gleaming in the fading light. Khu thought he smelled heqet on his sour breath as the man lunged for Khu’s chest. But Khu dodged the blade and thrust his knee into the man’s groin. He snatched the dagger out of his opponent’s hand, and stabbed him in the throat as the man bent forward, grimacing from the pain. Khu kicked the dying man backward as he pulled the blade free, then turned to find Nakhti.

Nakhti was holding his own against two men.
One of them slashed Nakhti’s forearm and had drawn blood, but it was not deep. The man moved like a weasel, fast and slippery, as he came in with a succession of quick short swipes. His attacker then tossed both his daggers into the air, and for a moment time stood still as the blades caught the dazzling light of a torch fire burning from the wall of an abandoned shop, reflecting it back like liquid gold. The blades whirred in the air as they spiraled back down before the man caught them by their hilts. He was showing off. But his confidence made him careless.

“
Kill the whelp,” his partner spat.

Nakhti swung then. He ducked low and
swept the blade of his dagger before him, slicing into the man’s ankles, crippling him at once. The man shrieked as he fell, letting go of the daggers which fell to the ground. His partner immediately stepped forward, driving his battle ax down over Nakhti’s prone head. But Khu rammed his blade into the man’s belly, and he dropped the ax, stumbling back with a look of utter shock on his contorted face. The man gripped the hilt of the dagger embedded in his gut, ripping the blade free from his flesh, just before Nakhti finished the job with a death blow to his throat.

On went the fighting as
smoke spread over the settlement like a gray cloud, deepening the darkness that reeked of death. Blood soaked the ground where colorful flowers had been strewn before. All the singing and dancing accompanying the religious ceremonies and festivities had turned into shrieks and wailing. Time passed in what seemed like an interminable stretch of violence, with screaming and shouting that told of pain and death. Black smoke choked the night air from scattered fires, whose flames danced red and gold like giant burnt offerings to the gods. The blaze scorched parts of the marketplace and public areas, smearing soot, burning the vegetation, and charring the structures throughout the cult settlement.

Mentuhotep’s army drove the enemy back from the town
’s center. Those pilgrims who had joined in the fray were the first to be subdued, and were bound in reed ropes to await justice. Many of them pleaded for mercy, claiming to have been swayed by Khety’s glittering promises and their own passionate desire for change, which was true. They professed their allegiance to the Theban ruler, but were still rounded up and herded away along with other prisoners to an open field lying adjacent to the town.

Khety’s and
Ankhtifi’s men were shown no mercy. They were promptly beheaded and left in a clearing before being thrown into a shallow pit, which would be dug in the desert, far beyond the fertile plain. The temple priests who had not been ambushed in the tomb, and those clerics who had been elsewhere in the town, led their own guards against Khety’s and Ankhtifi’s men. They managed to seize some of the officials who had betrayed them by siding with the Nen-nesian king, including Mdjai—the friend of Odji—who had boasted about his position to the power-hungry gatekeeper. They too were shone no mercy, and they were put to death in a manner that would also banish their souls from the Field of Reeds, damning them for eternity.

After the mob had disintegrated into a
state of panic, Mentuhotep had immediately embarked on a search for Khety.

“
They have retreated into the temple,” he told Qeb. “Do not let them get away. I want to confront Khety myself.”

They left the shrine where they had been spying on Khety
during his speech. Only Qeb and a few others had stayed behind to accompany Mentuhotep, who was wearing the blue-stained leather
Khepresh
royal war crown with a gold rearing cobra fastened on the front. The king and his men skirted around the southern part of the large public square leading to the Temple of Osiris. The colonnaded arcade, parks, gardens and open halls were mostly empty now, except for the fallen and injured whimpering in confusion or lying in a pool of blood.

Most of the fighting ha
d moved farther away by the open marketplace of the village, and closer to the Nile where some of Khety’s men were attempting to flee. People ran screaming on the narrow streets which were shrouded in darkness, like black
kohl
smeared in thick brushstrokes across the land. A few rogue fighters pounced from the shadows to lunge at the Theban king and his men like feral cats. But they were quickly subdued, mostly by Qeb’s scimitar which the Kushite warrior wielded expertly as though it were a mere extension of his own hand.

The
torch fires burned brightly along the deserted Avenue of Sphinxes. The human-headed monsters seemed to scowl at the night, daring man to rise above his baser instincts and join the immortal ranks of the gods. The regal heads rose imperiously from leonine bodies made tense by a barely checked urge to crush and devour the evil crawling throughout the earth. They symbolized the power of mind over matter, of spirit over flesh, the godlike human head controlling the bestial body, and the never ending battle of good versus evil.

Mentuhotep and his men approached the Temple of Osiris with great caution, touching their amulets in a silent plea for protection
and aid from the gods. Shadows wrestled on the smooth, paved ground like battling beasts in the eternal struggle of mankind. Smoke writhed around them, and dogs barked in the distance, from the town which had been turned into a battlefield. The king kept his hand on the hilt of his dagger, while Qeb held his scimitar protectively before him, ready to strike at the enemy. With every tentative step, they neared the nest of vipers. Arriving to the pylon, they pressed their backs against the walled entrance rising intimidatingly toward the black sky. No sound emerged from within.

Qeb gestured to the others to wait as he
moved slowly around the colossal sandstone statues of Osiris flanking the pylon, where the god stood guarding both sides of the entrance with the crook and flail in his arms which were crossed over his chest. The massive stone entrance was carved in heavy relief. Osiris watched them from the colorful painted walls, seated from his otherworldly throne, with the crook and flail also held in his crossed arms; and again from where he was standing with a spear in one hand, and a dagger in the other, as he was depicted in several carved poses, battle-ready and menacing, with the war crown on his head—the same blue
Khepresh
war crown that Mentuhotep wore. The others followed slowly behind Qeb, stepping soundlessly through the rectangular opening and into the empty hypostyle courtyard.