In the Valley of the Kings: Stories Read online

  Another sigh. At my ear I heard impatient whispering, but I lingered at the door, listening, as if the sounds coming through the door were smells and I was hungry.

  —Dear? I’m terribly sorry to have left you with all this. I can see what a bother. Well I’m done now, you know. Yes, just this morning, yes, and you should see! You’d like that? Yes, I can, but what I wanted to say was I can take all this household-packing—Yes, all of it, of course. Tonight? Oh, that would be lovely, yes. I’ll make the reservations. Celebrate your emancipation, yes. And my success, all right if you insist. Well then: until this evening?

  A brief, intimate kiss against the receiver, and then the sound of the one kissed being cradled. Another sigh. I knocked.

  —What? What?

  Furniture moved, journals falling slapped the floor, and then the door opened wide. Budge was in the doorway waving his limbs, beside himself with anxious hospitality.

  —Oh,——, it’s you, so glad you could come I’m terribly sorry I heard it on the grapevine don’t you know, no don’t sit over there it will fall over sit here, yes, I think it’s a terrible thing but don’t get excited I happened to call the Foundation this morning to clear something up and I asked, naturally, after you, assuming you had one too, just wanted to spread the jolly around, you know, and imagine my surprise. I was quite cool with him, but I gather there’s no appeal, nothing to do until next year, hmm? anyhow I say are you all right?

  A cold blush had flowed up out of my chest as I sat down. For a moment, Budge vanished in a gray, humming haze. Words may have come out of my mouth, something about the stairs.

  —Those infernal elevators again. Stuck on the sixteenth floor I don’t doubt. Always carting something in or out up in plasma physics, though why they need both at once I can’t understand. Keeps you fit, though, climbing up and down, don’t you think?

  He waved his arms and inhaled.—Feeling better?

  I leaned back, feeling the resentment that had brought me in evaporate, diffusing into that chill sweat fuming off my scalp. I waved a deprecatory hand.

  —Good. He bounced up from his chair again, caromed off the corners of the room.—I’m so glad you made it over, you see. I’d almost forgotten. Up to here—he sliced a palm-edge across his neck—with packing and such.

  He ricocheted to a storage cabinet, drummed resonantly within, emerged trailing wires like mummy-cloths.

  —Oh yes of course you, you’re the lucky one, none of this domestic clutter, just jetting off to the Nile whenever—He stopped, clapping a hand over his mouth.—Oh dear fellow I’m sorry of course you can’t. I mean you think you can’t now, don’t you?

  His voice dropped to a whisper.—But that’s what I want to talk to you about.

  With an absurd pantomime of caution he eased his short, round form over to the door. Closing it softly, turning his back against it, arms spread from jamb to jamb, he leaned out toward me, and hissed,—Mum’s the word. Eh?

  I must have goggled at him, apparently the correct response, for a look of satisfaction, turning his ordinarily pleasant face into something terribly reminiscent of a fed pig, spread upward from the discrete knob of his chin until his eyes half closed. He scampered back to his desk, spread a trough through the mounded printouts and journals, and funneled a conspiratorial gaze down its length.

  —Your grant: What were you going to spend it on? What’s the expensive part? Eh?

  Before I could think, he answered for me.

  —Labor, eh? Equipment, eh? Time. All that digging around. And why? Because you don’t know where to look.

  I drew back, wondering suddenly how much he knew: with Nur-Mar’s scroll, I did know where to look—within five miles or so. With proper funding, with luck, I might have found the site within four seasons.

  —But what if you knew?

  His face was lost in darkness, his arms waving around a pulsing void.

  —What if you knew, I say? Knew exactly.

  I may have murmured something weakly. I felt weak.

  —Precisely. Budge surged on, caught up in the glory of his idea.—Where. To. Look. I’ve read your work. There’s always an entrance passage, yes? With a door, heaped up with rubble, just a few meters below the surface. Right?

  I nodded.

  —And what if you could point at a spot in the ground, and tell your man,—There: right there. You dig down until you strike a door, and then let me know. Eh? And it was really there? No guessing? You just go back to your tent and fan yourself while they dig a simple little pit. Do it yourself, if you had to. None of that trenching this way and that, all that blind rooting about. Eh? What then? How much will your expedition cost then?

  I didn’t believe a word of it—he was babbling from the abysmal depths of ignorance, I knew—but even so I was terribly excited. What would such an expedition cost? If I could find the entrance right away? I could hire a single fellah for a month for less than the cost of a night in Cairo.

  And once I was in?

  —Oh, I know, once you’re in you’ll need equipment—I know you you fox, you’re on to something big I can tell—once you’re in you’ll need your local bearers, trucks, all that preservation gear.

  He waved a hand airily toward the door.—But that’s the beauty of it, don’t you see? Once you need all that, the bloody foundations will be falling all over each other with their money. Hah! Let ’em! You know what we can tell them: Put it where the sun don’t shine! Eh?

  The vision of it opened up before me then, exactly as if the door had rolled away: not prized down stone by stone, but hinged, noiselessly opening for me—for me alone. Budge was right: if I only knew where to start, I wouldn’t need the elaborate support an exploratory dig requires. But he was wrong as well. Once I was in that door, I would need no help from anyone, ever again. Let the trash and glitter go to ruin. I would be—

  I would be a damned fool, I realized, to go on thinking this way. I could no more tell the exact location of the entrance than I could speak the name of the King.

  —Ah, I know. You’re thinking old Budge has dropped a bearing somewhere, am I right? Fused my logic circuits, yes? Ho ho, my friend, just you wait and see.

  He straightened, and glanced around the cramped and cluttered office.

  —But remember, he hissed.—Mum’s the word.

  The Papyrus of——, who draws the horizon over him a living god: the Papyrus whereby he stab-lisheth his name, whereby all names before his are naught: where

  While the nurse’s back was turned, I snatched the folder, vanished through the door. An empty corridor; an elevator at my elbow gaped, the doors quivered and I leapt in. Dim in brushed chrome, my reflection hunched over a brown square of manila. The thing itself was in my hands. Pink carbon sheets, a sheaf of gray transparencies: I recoiled.

  What had I been thinking of? Did I really think that doing away with the evidence would help me now? And if I was caught, what better way to make it public—to spread it far beyond my doctor’s office? Had he returned yet, and found me missing? Had he summoned the police?

  The elevator halted: I stepped out, alone in a long hallway. Doors opened on blank corridors; down one hall they all stood open, and in each a small child lay inside a bird-cage, suspended above the floor. At the end I faced a wall of glass, and beyond it cribs and incubators, the dreaming reach of small arms, of feet thrust out falling slowly down.

  My anxiety returned. The nurse had discovered the theft; police were seeking me at this moment. I turned, walking quickly, blindly down inconclusive corridors, the envelope clutched at my chest. At a door labeled NECROPSY I shied away, clattered down a flight of stairs (the elevators were a trap), and out into bedlam.

  Three ambulances crowding the entrance, hatches open and disgorging three clusters of pale green attendants, flash of chrome and white, an arm asplay, a shocking blot of red. As I watched, my back against the door through which I had emerged, more figures in green converged on each sprawling form until the red was obscur
ed entirely, and each cluster started moving, like a swarm of bees deciding, of a moment, to fly in my direction.

  And in the center of the nearest swarm, pale and deathly still, I saw the face of Budge.

  The air in the viewing room was immaculately cool, faultlessly clean, perfectly unperfumed. There was a gathering of family seated by the door, receiving the murmurs of the guests. A gloved hand lay limp in mine a moment, some words may have passed. The hand, the words, and I drifted along the edges of the room.

  I looked back at the mourners. None seemed substantial, compared with the mountain of gleaming flesh heaped on the dais. Budge shone beneath the sourceless light, so bright he seemed some cinematic trick of projection: I half expected him to dissolve as I approached. But he remained, the husk of him, eyes stiffly shuttered, lips pursed as if disdaining their overlay of rouge. Absolutely still, absolutely absent.

  There was a beating somewhere in my skull, a dry pressure about my eyes. The image of Budge’s face vanished into a pool of darkness.

  I am——the great one, son of no one, to whom was given his head after it had been cut off. I have knit together my bones; I have made myself whole and sound; I have become young once more; I am——, Lord of Eternity.

  I uttered mine own name and I was born, Khepera-Thoth, who rolls his own name before him, lord of divine words, lord of books and master of speech, possessor of all knowledge human and divine.

  I will do away the evil by the word of my mouth: Obey me, demon of sickness, demon of blood, abomination of the unclean. I possess my own name, mightier than thine. Yea, the secret of my birth I hold in my mouth. Obey me!

  Begone, unclean thing of filth and pus! Begone, for my ba is stablished by the word of my mouth, yea, before my mouth it stablished my mouth.

  Unclean thing of blood and filth, thy name is nothing.

  I awoke in the dark, the bare room around me awash in whispers.

  I could not see.

  I heard the curtains sigh, felt them brushing my face where I lay. I could smell; there had been rain in the night. With a rush of fear I thought it might be morning, light lying all around me blind, and I sat up in bed, flung my arms out before me. The curtain passed again across my face, and this time I could see its pale folds. Against the dim angles of the walls, beside the darkness of the open closet, I could make out the faint, flurried pulsation of that deeper darkness, still constricted to a moon-sized disc.

  What had awakened me?

  There had been a voice, speaking close in my ear a single word that took forever to announce.

  I imagined it was the voice of Budge, but I knew it was not: no ghosts trouble my sleep. But there is something other than ghosts. Something older, perhaps, of which ghosts are but an echo. I am certain of this, although I know not what it is. I know only that a voice was speaking, close in my ear, a word whose syllables I might almost recall. But what the word, and whence the voice, still I cannot say.

  What profit hath a man of all his labor which he taketh away under the sun?

  One generation passeth away, and another cometh: but earth abideth forever.

  All the rivers run into the sea; yet the sea is not full; unto the place from whence the rivers come, thither they return again.

  All things are full of labor; man cannot utter it: the eye is not satisfied with seeing, or the ear filled with hearing.

  The voice of the preacher rustled at graveside, withering in the sun that glared down on the thin, dark figures gathered around. In the heat they wavered as if about to fall. Iris Budge stood nearby; her eldest son, a thinner, taller, pale caricature of Budge, held an umbrella over his mother’s head; he had neglected to shelter himself, and in the premature June heat his red hair clung limp on his forehead; a drop of moisture gleamed at the pinched nose; his eyes were slitted in the intense, inward brooding of adolescence. Not Mrs. B.: throughout the service (saving only the moment when she raised her eyes to stare at me) she gazed, a bit vaguely, on the gleaming shell before her. I blocked her behind a disc of black, the better to compose my face.

  The small gathering dispersed, threading outward through the maze of stones and obelisks, leaving behind them the unbearably sleek casket. I stopped, and let the few mourners behind me pass. Back at the grave, the casket had vanished into its socket; the vivid yellow of a backhoe shimmered, its single arm gesturing toward the grave. A half-dozen figures remained, looking from the distance like a group of clay figures. The urge to walk back almost got the better of me, but I stood, held by the shreds of civility that linger, even at the graveside. I knew I could not wait, but I could not imagine how to phrase my request. It would sound selfish. But I was dying: surely they would—

  How long I might have wavered there, shimmering in indecision, I do not know: two figures, a short and a tall, detached themselves and walked toward me.

  Vaults quiver,

  Earth’s bones tremble,

  At seeing——rise as power,

  Whose mother knows not his name;

  Who eats her entrails where he had his name,

  Who eats the elder gods when they come, their bodies full of magic,

  From the Isle of Flames.

  I have another memory of Professor———, dead now these twenty years. He was old when we first met, five years away from retirement, but still hale enough to climb with me on Khufu’s pyramid when he took me with him on his annual expedition to the el Amarna site. My first trip to Egypt was his last; a stroke the month after our return left one side of his body useless, and made his last ten years a cage, in which he struggled to organize the notes of his last dig.

  The last time we met the month was May my dissertation was back from the bindery, and in a week I was to be a doctor of philosophy. I had emerged from the library startled to find the sun warm on my head, the air alive with spring, and my feet reluctant at the turning of his gate. To spend an hour or two of a day like this indoors in the company of an invalid seemed suddenly odious.

  His attendant, an old woman (so I thought—she may have been fifty) who silently dusted his notes without dislodging them, who pushed his wheelchair, and, I suspected, shared his bed, led me to his study. He was shriveled on the sagging vinyl slings of the chair, slumped over to his dead side, examining, under an illuminated magnifier, an ordinary page of print. He had gone almost entirely deaf as well, so I do not know by what means the old woman caused him to turn as we entered. Then she was gone and he was fussing with the switch to turn off the magnifier.

  He was embarrassed as I found it for him, and to get past the moment I shouted,—I brought you something. I produced a copy of my dissertation. The smile that had tugged painfully at half his face softened, and his good eye wandered.

  —Thank you, he whispered, slurring.—I can’t read it now, you know.

  —You read most of it.

  —Yes. But it’s done now. It’s—He groped for a word, the hand on his lap twitching.—Finished.

  He sank farther into the chair, air escaping from somewhere. His hand passed vaguely over the chaos on his desk, the typewriter, dust-covered, beside him.

  Embarrassed at the implied self-pity, I shouted at him,—But you didn’t read all of it.

  The eyebrow on the good side rose. I wondered if that had always been a gesture of his, or if behind the nerveless face he was trying to raise them both.

  —Before I bound it I added one more chapter. The committee never saw it.

  I placed the book on his desk; it slid an inch or two down a slope of index cards, then lay still.—I’ll tell you what it says.

  With his good hand he reached across his potbelly, retrieved his left from where it had fallen. He folded them together and closed his eyes.—Tell me. The voice seemed to come from a distance.

  —It’s only a theory, really. An appendix to my thesis, with a research program to prove it out: sites, classes of artifact, periods, all that. But the theory’s the thing—

  I stopped myself from adding,—And it will mak
e me famous. I told my suspicions instead, and my voice was shaking as I spoke, quivering with the relief that at last I had called up the courage to tell. I told him of the conviction that had grown in me, over the two years of my dissertation research, through the waste hours when the labor was painful. I told him of my vision of a king, my first, naive conception of the King: a builder perhaps, who rescued his people from a period of chaos, brought the Black Land out of darkness. His people worshipped him, but then something happened. Some tragedy struck: madness, perhaps, the particular curse of kings. Madness, and his benign rule turned to tyranny, his people’s awe now underwritten by fear. Perhaps he had closed the temples, as the heretic Amenhotep IV would a millennium later.

  He nodded slowly once, without looking up, just before a spasm passed silently over half his face. I stopped, wondering what it meant, unable to guess what emotion might be stirring in a man about to die, alone and in obscurity, listening to a young man outline a program for professional immortality.

  —Obviously, I went on, my voice already assuming the tone of the incipient lecturer,—there must be more to the story. Apostasy, even in a king, is not enough to drive his survivors to efface all record of his rule: our picture of the Nineteenth Dynasty, after all, is clear enough. He did something, this king, that so outraged or frightened them that they felt even his name to be a menace, not to be suffered to survive. And finally all memory of him, everything he had done or touched, seen or heard—everything was destroyed. Not an echo of his reign comes down to our time. Only this complete break in the record. But what was it? What dangerous madness could so seduce a king?

  I stopped, my mouth a desert. His face was carefully neutral. I took a breath, and then I launched out upon the silence.