How Balaam Seized a Throne With Snakes and Sorcery

The King Who Trusted the Wrong Man

King Kikanos of Ethiopia was preparing to put down a rebellion in a distant province, and before he left he made the decision that would cost him his city. He trusted the most capable administrator he knew: Balaam son of Beor, a man with a reputation for intelligence and supernatural ability, whose two sons Jannes and Jambres served as his deputies. Kikanos left his capital in Balaam's hands and marched out with his army to fight a war he expected to win quickly.

He won the war. The rebellion collapsed. He turned his army around and marched back toward home.

He found his capital sealed against him.

Balaam Takes the Throne

Balaam had moved the moment the king's army was far enough away that news traveled slowly. He had gone among the people of the city and made his case. Kikanos was not coming back. The war had turned against him. If they wanted stability, if they wanted safety, they needed a king who was present and capable and already trusted by the people who mattered. They needed Balaam. The people of the city, cut off from news and frightened by the absence of their army, had listened.

He was not stupid enough to think the persuasion would hold when Kikanos returned. He needed the city to be physically inaccessible to a returning army. He sent to the Egyptian border and imported a force of mixed mercenaries to guard the walls. Then he turned to his other resource: the supernatural ability that had made him valuable in the first place.

The Magic That Sealed the Walls

On the eastern side of the city, the side most vulnerable to a returning army, Balaam placed snakes in the earth. Not ordinary snakes arranged as a deterrent. Living magic, worked through whatever power of sorcery Balaam had developed in his years of practice, which made the eastern approach impassable. Any force that tried to advance through the eastern gate encountered the serpents before it reached the walls.

On the western side, the approach across water, he worked a different operation. He used his sorcery to make the river itself hostile to any army trying to cross. The western approach, which under normal conditions offered a second route to the walls, became as dangerous as the eastern approach by different means.

Kikanos arrived home to find a city he could see but not enter. He had won a war against an external rebellion and returned to discover that the rebellion worth worrying about had been inside his walls the entire time.

Nine Years Outside the City

He camped outside. His army camped outside. The tradition records that Kikanos and his men sat in the field outside their own city for nine years, unable to take back what had been taken from them by a man they had trusted with the keys. The snakes held the east. The sorcery held the west. The mercenaries held the walls. The city that had been Kikanos's for his entire reign sat a short distance from him, visible every morning when he woke up and every evening when he lay down, and unreachable.

Kikanos died outside his own capital. He died of the illness that comes from nine years of cold and damp in a military camp, an old man who had ruled a kingdom and lost it to cleverness while he was away fighting. His army was still camped in the field. His kingdom was still held by the man he had trusted. The soldiers sat in the field and waited for something to change, and eventually something did: a fugitive arrived from Egypt with a story about having killed an overseer, and the army that had been waiting for nine years recognized in this stranger the kind of person who might be able to solve a problem that had resisted every conventional solution.