The Battle Roar of SekhmetA Story by Brandon PilcherIn 1350 BC, an Egyptian warrior must defend her beliefs---and her little niece---from persecution by the upstart Pharaoh Akhenaten.Egypt, 1350
BC I entered
the sanctuary area at the back of our hut with a bowl of gazelle meat. Beside
me my niece, little Nebet, hugged her miniature drum as if it were a doll. The
likenesses of our forefathers and mothers watched our passage with painted
eyes, their altars adorned with weapons and the gold flies their valor had
earned them in life. But it was the gilded likeness of Sekhmet, she of the lion
mask and blood-dyed gown, who awaited our arrival against the wall. Despite the
dimming of the sunlight through our hut's narrow windows, Sekhmet's amber eyes
blazed with the same fire that had emboldened generations of our ancestors. Many times
I had knelt before her as I did now, lighting the meat I laid at her feet. The
scent of its burning recalled battle after battle of blazing tents and enemies
being speared, shot, or cleaved into pieces. The warmth channeled the sun’s
blazing heat, which glossed my dark brown skin with perspiration. Even the
crackling of flesh breaking down into ash became the cracking of bones and
shields as I yelled the battle roar of Sekhmet in my memories. This
evening I would consult our matron for a different battle. This time, our
enemies were not Kushites with ochre-reddened hair and leopard-belted kilts.
Nor were they easterners like the Hittites or Babylonians, with light-skinned
faces and loosely curled beards. No, they were Egyptians like ourselves, fellow
children of the Black Land who had fallen under the influence of the false
Pharaoh Akhenaten. Already
they had dragged little Nebet’s father away to slave away in the lair that
tyrant had built for himself and his cult of lies. I did not even want to guess
what his minions had done to her mother. Only I remained to protect and teach
the girl over the past year, and never would I let her suffer the same fate as
her parents. I gave her
a nod and she pounded her drum with more unbridled passion of a temple
ensemble. Together we sang our prayer for Sekhmet’s vigilance, for her
guidance, for the courage with which she would imbue us in the face of war and
persecution. The fire on my offering continued to flicker on our ancestors’
faces as their spirits’ voices joined ours in a greater chorus. The thumping of
my heart became a rhythm complementing Nebet’s drum, as did the war drums that
had thundered before all my past battles. Alongside the music’s growing fury
there rose an energy within me that flamed as hot as Sekhmet’s gaze. As she
opened her jaws to bare her fangs in my vision, so did I. It built up
from my breast to my throat, ready to be released over a climax of cracking
drums and shrieking cries. Instead
came the hoarse bray of a royal trumpet. Then followed silence, and finally the
rapping of a bony knuckle on our door. Nebet
embraced the drum with shivering arms. I murmured to her that it would turn out
all right, for you could never tell a frightened child anything else. Even I
didn’t want to believe otherwise. Outside the
door, as expected, awaited Vizier Ay with his leopard-skin mantle, accompanied
by royal guards with spears and cow-hide shields. He greeted me with the usual
sneer on his dark, wrinkled date of a face, and the night-black dreadlocks of
his wig clashed with the scruffy white stubble around his mouth. But judging
from the way his eyes ran up and down my figure, he had more than uppity pride spreading
that filthy smile of his. “Well,
well, if it isn’t Egypt’s distinguished champion, Takhaet,” Ay croaked. “I
understand you’ve earned yourself a whole swarm of flies, yet your beauty
remains unworn after so much combat.” I scoffed.
“Most men say my beauty is enhanced by that. But maybe strong women are too
much for you to handle, old Vizier.” “Don’t you dare
disrespect a servant of Pharaoh, young lady!” The Vizier spat into my face and
banged his staff against the dirt road. “This business is so important, may I
inform you, that defiance could cost you your very life---or your adorable
little niece’s. Tell me, O Takhaet, was it to our Aten that you were praying
to?” If I were
to lie, I could spare myself and Nebet whatever this ancient monster and his
master had planned for us. But I could not deny our lyrics had named Sekhmet
rather than Akhenaten’s pet demon. Nor could I deny that our drumming had
spoken in her favorite rhythms rather than any other god’s. And even if it
would save my family, I could never betray the men and women of my village by
pointing to them. A painful truth was better than a lie that hurt others. “No, but
it’s neither your business nor Akhenaten’s! You can prostrate before that devil
you call Aten all you want, but you can never claw out your subjects’ deepest
beliefs, no matter how you try!” The sneer
returned to Ay’s face. “But I can silence them. And I have, many, many times.
Why, I must’ve…disciplined more commoners like you than all the barbarians you’ve
ever slain, Takhaet. But, this time I’ll be diplomatic.” I was not
surprised when I saw one shriveled hand of his glide back and forth over his
crotch. That gesture wrung my stomach like a wet rag inside. “I know
what you’re thinking, withered son of a jackal’s b*****d. And I could rip out
what remains of your manhood with my bare fist!” The Vizier
stepped back, cackling like a sickly hyena. “Excuse me, I didn’t mean that kind of deal. I meant something
that would strike closer to your heart. Get the child!” One of his
soldiers shoved me aside, by happenstance touching the back of my hip, and
marched into our hut. Nebet screamed and flailed her arms when he yanked her up
between his arms. “Isn’t this
a sweet, plump young piece of crocodile bait!” he said. “Hopefully they’ll
leave one piece for my supper!” “You
savage!” I lunged after him, but one of his comrades wrapped his arm around my
neck and pulled me away. “So what
shall it be, O Takhaet? Your little Nebet or your loyalty to dead gods?” I could not
allow my niece, all that remained of my blood-kin, to fall into the clutches of
men viler and more wretched than any Babylonian or Kushite I ever slew. Too
many children, probably thousands, must have already been tossed to the
crocodiles at Akhenaten’s behest. If either her father or mother still lived,
only knowledge of their child’s survival could keep them going. Caving into
Ay’s demands would keep her alive. It would also further fuel his swollen
Vizier’s pride and embolden him to seek out more victims, more children to
threaten and kill. Sekhmet could never die, but both Nebet and all the other
children of Egypt could. I answered
his dilemma with a kick of my heel into my arrester’s shin. Breaking
myself free of his chokehold, I tore the knife out from under his belt and
chucked it into the brow of Nebet’s captor. My niece hopped and clung onto my
back even as I caught the soldier’s fallen spear and used it to pole-vault over
the rest. On the other side waited Ay’s personal chariot. After knocking the
driver out with the spear’s butt, I grabbed the reins and whipped the horses
into a neighing gallop. Driving the
chariots was always my favorite part of battle. Huts, villagers,
and trees blurred past me. The wind blew in a cool gale against my face. I
couldn’t help but yell with girlish glee as I relived the thrill of a chariot
chase, even with all its bouncing jolts and veers. Nebet, much
to my joyful surprise, squealed and laughed with me. “Can we do this again
sometime, Aunt Takhi?” “Next time
he comes, I promise!” I said. Our fun
ended with the bang of a thrown spear against the chariot’s wheel. It threw us
into the sky over the skidding horses until we crashed onto a hut’s thatched
roof. Only by the mercy of the old gods did I catch Nebet before she hit
something harder. Ay’s thugs encircled
the hut and hurled more spears at us. As I dodged their throws with Nebet on my
back, I observed we had reached the village’s edge. Beyond the outer palisade sprawled
a grassy field with scattered acacias, which in turn gave way to forest on the
horizon’s edge. The shelter under those trees would be our only hope. I picked up
another spear and vaulted from the roof, over the palisade, and into grass that
stretched higher than my knees. I sprinted as if I were racing a cheetah, but
Ay’s cursing guards were closing behind me. My calves and thighs flared like a
bush fire under my skin. A slung stone grazed my hip, but it made me stumble a
couple of steps. Ahead
grazed a herd of wildebeest. I ran straight through them, and they scattered in
all directions. I hoped their stampede would run over my pursuers, or at least
that they would lose us among the panicking animals. I did not hear any men
scream death cries, but neither did I see them behind me anymore. It was better
than nothing. I had
burned away so much of my energy that evening that I slowed into a panting
stagger upon entering the forest. I put Nebet down and collapsed into the low
crotch of a sycamore fig tree, letting out a relieved exhale. The darkness
under the treetops would be our sanctuary this night, because I had worn myself
out for the day. “Cower all you
want in those woods, traitor!” Ay’s croaky voice, muffled as it was by the
foliage, was unmistakable. “The leopards shall do our work instead!” Nebet
buried her head in my bosom like a baby nursing her own mother’s milk. Her
teary eyes and cheeks reflected even the little waning sunlight that shafted
through the canopy. “We’re never going back, are we, Aunt Takhi?” I stroked
her disheveled puffs of hair and gave her my most motherly smile, because I
could not give her anything else. Not even a lie. “Only the gods know what lies
ahead, my sweetheart.” “But they
failed us. Sekhmet failed us, they all failed us! That old guy was right, they
are dead!” “But his
never existed. Why else would we be able to get away from him? We even killed
at least one of his minions!” I wrapped my arms around my niece. “Besides, our
prayer got interrupted. What if we were to finish it? This time, we’ll pray on
behalf of all Egypt against Akhenaten’s oppression!” “But we
don’t have my drum. Or her idol!” She was
right, we could not go home to our hut’s sanctuary. And Akhenaten had robbed
all the temples in Egypt of the gods’ likenesses in favor of that Aten
monstrosity. Or rather, all the temples still in use. Egypt’s history, with all
its chieftains and kings with their various works, ran many centuries further
in the past than those. Many of those past works lay buried under wilderness
like the forest around us. “We may not
need them,” I said. “I can think of something even better. And it shouldn’t be
far from here at all.” ## The white
gaze of the moon, surrounded by innumerable stars, had replaced the sun in a
blackened sky. Its light, faint as it was, guided me and Nebet through the maze
of sycamore and palm trees. She tightened her grip on my breast with every bird
squawk, monkey hoot, or coughing roar of the leopard. I myself felt cold
serpents of fear slither up my spine despite the balmy humidity. A twig
cracked. Nebet yelped, and I spun around with hands clenched onto my spear. Across
a nearby clearing bolted the shadow of a small antelope. Wait, once we had
found what we were looking for, I might need that. With a singular throw, I
managed to spear that duiker through the head. “Is that
for us?” Nebet asked. “It’s for
Sekhmet,” I said while hauling the carcass onto my shoulder. “Keeping hanging
on there, little one. We’re almost there.” From the
corner of my eye I spied paw-prints bigger than most leopard tracks on the
leaf-littered ground---tracks almost as big as a lion’s in fact. But lions were
creatures of the open plain, not the forest, and Nebet had been scared enough
times as it was. We passed a
vine-entangled falcon sculpture with a disc and a cobra mounted on its head.
This was the likeness of Ra, the god of the sun which Akhenaten’s devil Aten
tried to usurp along with all the other gods. Behind it a stout limestone obelisk
towered up into the treetop canopy from a high slanted platform. Between them
and the statue of Ra rose overgrown walls with a gatehouse bisecting them. “This is a
Temple of the Sun, like those built during the Fifth Dynasty,” I whispered to
Nebet. “That would make it, what, over a thousand years old?” “Whoah,
that’s even older than Grandmother!” Nebet said. We chuckled together. “It’s older
than any of our grandparents, little baboon. Now these were built in honor of
Ra, and was Sekhmet not born from Ra’s eye? We might speak to her through him!” We pried
open the temple entrance’s door and entered an open courtyard blanketed with
undergrowth. The giant obelisk reared on its platform at the court’s opposite
edge, with another likeness of Ra chiseled into its based. This time Ra was not
all falcon but instead a man with a falcon mask who tread the python Apep
underfoot. He did not watch his temple alone, but shared it with other
animal-masked gods standing along the courtyard’s sides. I recognized Anpu the
jackal, Sobek the crocodile, Hetheru the cow, Khnum the buffalo, Sutekh the
aardvark, and Djehuti the ibis. And then
there was Sekhmet, she of the lion mask. Her
representation was over thrice the height of the one back in our hut. Not even
centuries of erosion, or the creepers wrapped around her, could hide the glint
of her ivory fangs or inlaid amber eyes. Under the moon, her glare blazed with
more predatory brilliance than I had ever seen on her images. “Look
here!” Nebet had run over to a niche underneath the surrounding wall and was
tapping on something wooden. “Drums!” And she was
right. Drums of all sizes had been cached in there, some as small as her own
miniature one and others big enough for a grown woman like myself. My niece and
I could drum together now! I laid my
duiker kill at Sekhmet’s feet and lit it with a makeshift torch. It blossomed
into a huge ball of flame that made my previous offerings look miserly for the
comparison. And with both Nebet and I holding drums between our legs, we
recited our prayer with the full force of our voices. All our
ancestors must have been among the chorus that chanted with us, but the gods
around us sang loudest of all. The beats came in many rhythms from both our
drums, from my heartbeat, and from my memories. Entire armies thundered beside
us, hooting and roaring, women shrieking and whooping like hyenas on the
warpath. And as our larger offering crackled under the fire, so too did whole
hordes of our enemies have their bones cracked and shields split asunder. Again, it
was building up from my lungs into my throat. I was ready to let it out like I
never could at home. What came
was a roar. But not from myself, or Nebet. It wasn’t even Sekhmet’s roar, but
that of a real, mortal feline. There were
three of them that had bounded into the temple’s courtyard. They were big and
heavily built as lions, but had the hides of leopards, with two having spots
and one a pure black coat. The larger of the spotted ones had a short mane like
a young male lion’s. I had heard stories of rare crosses between lions and
leopards, but had never seen one in all my hunts. Never mind a pride of three! Blocking
the way between Nebet and these half-bred cats, I jabbed my spear at them with
a hiss and snarl. The male of the trio bared his fangs and answered with a
deep, coughing roar that froze my flesh to the bone. At his sides his mates
crouched, rolling their shoulders with glowing green leopards’ eyes on my
niece. We were
outnumbered, but even I could not outrun half-lion, half-leopard felines in the
woods at night. All I could do was teach them the fear of humanity. So I chose
to charge them head-on. The male
cat met my challenge with the lightning quickness of his leopard parentage and
the lion’s brute might. He had me pinned back-first under his paws, the weight
of his muscles nearly crushing mine. He would have split my bones had I not
gotten one stab of the spear into his flank. It did not fell him, but in his
roar of pain he relaxed his pressure enough for me to roll free. I jumped to
make another thrust, aimed at his skull. Again his mixture of lion’s strength
and leopard’s reflexes defeated my attack with a swat of his paw that took off
the spear’s bronze head. The sudden force of his blow threw me off my footing
into one of the statues’ bases. Nebet’s
scream of terror and pain pierced into my heart as well as my eardrums. The
spotted female cat had already caught her by the skirt in her fangs! I threw my
decapitated spear into the beast’s shoulder, saving my niece from the crunch of
death, but the male of the pride had sprung for me. I darted out of his way,
letting him collide with the statue behind me, and put Nebet onto my back. I
beat away the spotted female half-breed’s next attack with the duiker’s charred
corpse and hurried for the temple entrance. From the head
of another idol, the cat with the pure black coat shot down paw-first in my way
and slashed its claws across my breast. I reeled back until all three of the
pride were circling us like vultures over a kill. I had been a fool. There was
no way to beat these cats in battle. The best we could do was break out of
their trap and shut them in. After one
kick into the male half-breed’s face, I rushed past him through the entrance’s
doorway. Together with Nebet, we slammed the old door closed. Though it
throttled back and forth with the felines roaring behind it, the hard wood it
had been hewn from withstood their attacks with resilience belying its
antiquity. I scooped
my whimpering niece up and mumbled thankful prayers that the night’s violence
had not inflicted fatal damage on her. “It’s all right, my sweetheart. We’re
safe now.” “Not any
longer, O Takhaet!” Ay and his
squadron of soldiers had found us after all! Ringed by all their spears and
axes, I had spent too much energy to defy them any longer. “This time,
I’ll make it simple. Surrender your dead faith or die!” Ay’s sneer had widened
to an open grin of malevolent joy. “Choose rightly, and we’ll bring you home
and act as if this never happened!” It would
have meant defeat for my cause, for the traditions I and all the people of
Egypt had followed before Akhenaten’s ascent. But Sekhmet and her brethren had
failed us twice. No, if those three half-lions were any sign, she must have
turned on us, never mind all that we’d done for her. And as long as my niece’s
life was no longer at stake, it no longer mattered whether we swore by Aten
rather than the gods who had deserted us. “How about
this, old man?” It was Nebet who spoke. Not even the tears in her eyes could
extinguish away the determination in them. “You tried to kill us, so why don’t
we do the same to you?” She tugged
the handle on the door. I helped her, and we ran straight through the confused
soldiers the moment it banged open again. The clamor
of feline roaring, splintering spears and shields, and the screams and death
cries of men echoed between the trees. So did our laughter together. “You are a
clever little baboon, aren’t you? How’d you hatch that one so quick?” “They came
when we prayed to Sekhmet. She must’ve summoned them for something. And
besides, you used wildebeest on those men earlier.” Nebet was beaming with the fierce
pride of a triumphant warrior, a beam I had shown myself many times in my
career. Like aunt, like niece. “All right,
you win!” A gagging Ay, with wig fallen off and a blood-sprayed leopard-skin
mantle, had tripped off his cane behind us. “I’ll tell Pharaoh you surrendered,
and have your whole village left alone. Truth be told, that bloated fool would
rather laze around in his new ‘palace’ than run his kingdom as he should. Sole
representative of Aten’s will, my smelly wrinkled a*s!” After helping
him up, my niece and I nearly exploded from the hilarious irony of it all. ## When we
returned to our village after daybreak, the people welcomed us with cheers,
hoots, and songs of praise. The headman thanked us for driving back the tyranny
of Akhenaten and his false god, promising to reward us with the greatest feast
the village had ever known. And so it
was held that evening. Hundreds of drums cracked and rumbled as we roasted
whole cattle and antelopes in Sekhmet’s honor, firelight dancing to the many
rhythms. Hundreds of men, women, and children sang her praises, adding to the
drumbeats with clapping, stamping feet, and the banging of spear butts and
walking sticks. This time, I did not need memories or imagination to enhance
the music. It was real, it pulsed all around me, and it even made me dance
beside the flames. Finally I
could let it flow from my lungs, up my throat, and out of my mouth. And for
once, it was my own voice from whence came the battle roar of Sekhmet. © 2016 Brandon PilcherFeatured Review
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Added on March 5, 2016Last Updated on March 5, 2016 Tags: africa, ancient egypt, warrior woman, historical, fantasy Author
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