In the Valley of the Kings: Stories Page 14

  Something haunts the lips. After centuries of silence, as the process of desiccation stretches the slackness of death, do these lips purse, do they part again, to deliver the secret they have lingered so long on life’s after threshold to tell? This is what we come for: not science, not gold. Only this: the promise of a voice that knows.

  Fabulous things. A pandemonium of things. A chaos of things, and everywhere the gleam of gold, the glint of silver, sparks of ruby, amethyst, emerald receding infinitely into darkness. All of this reflected in a single slow sweep of light. So much I had expected. So much I had seen before, and I relaxed, slightly. Only slowly did the significance bear in on me of what the light did not show.

  There were no walls.

  I struggled to my feet, slashing the beam about. Light fled over inconceivable heaps of footstools, hassocks, chairs, couches, a throne with the gold head of a lion: off dimly in the distance a ship, full-rigged, oars feathered, its sail dark gossamer, motionless. All of these I saw, but no sign of an end: only an endless expanse of dull gold beneath no canopy of utter black. At an impossible height above the floor the darkness seemed to roll, as if black clouds gathered there, but not a breath of wind stirred my hair, although the hairs themselves were stirring.

  Had my eyes been damaged by the fall? Was this the time I had been dreading, when the disease would eat into something essential, and all appearance of reality would be torn finally away? I felt my occiput for signs of damage, but no damage could I find: for all I knew I was not hurt, and so this must, for all I knew, be real.

  I felt for something solid at my back. The blank, polished wall down which I had fallen sloped steeply up into darkness. For a distance of seven feet above the floor, and as many to the right and left, no sign of a join or crack could I find. The face of the wall was itself peculiar: of a stone polished like obsidian and as dark, it presented to my eyes and fingertips an absolutely smooth and seamless surface, of a temperature indistinguishable from my skin. Touching it, I could barely convince myself that I felt substance. And something more: though polished to a glassy smoothness, and of the most flawless ebony, it gave back no reflection of my light, seeming to swallow up the beam within itself. The light appeared to penetrate the thickness of an inch or so (though a lunatic portion of my mind, which intermittently set the blood to pounding in my ears, insisted that the distance was far greater) before fading, as in dense smoke. Slight security to have it at my back, as the heaps of treasure grimaced and edged closer to me, unless I held them back with the light (and in the light they receded endlessly, which soon unnerved me more than their approach).

  It was after this inspection of the wall, when I turned back to face again the vast cavity of dead air, that the helplessness of my situation came near to defeating me, and for a moment I was convinced that the fall had killed me, and that I must start out now on the journey of the dead, seeking the gateway to an afterlife that must, perforce, be the Egyptian one.

  But my feet beneath me were unnerved; warmth had deserted me, and my breath seemed sticking in my throat. I could no more move a step into that darkness than I could—I could not think of an alternative. In the jittering beam of my light, the mountains of carved faces—eyes and open mouths—edged closer.

  I picked up a rock and hurled it at them; in a shower of glittering sand the darkness swallowed it down.

  The soundlessness was terrifying, a vertigo, like the horror one feels at one’s own emptiness while looking over the rim of a high cliff.

  If I stood much longer at this wall, I knew, the soundlessness would wash me over in a black flood, press me against—into—the black rock, where behind me dim shapes moved. I turned and saw my face, fading, and turned my light again to frieze a grinning serpent, carnelian-eyed: a ceremonial staff. I knew that if I remained here, in moments terror would strip me of whatever power of conscious action I yet possessed.

  I stepped out among the burial offerings to the King.

  So I thought them: burial offerings. As I walked among them, a familiar voice revived within me, commenced cataloging, dating, guessing dynasties, proveniences, and there seemed at first no qualitative difference from the tombs of ordinary mortals I had rifled. But as I walked among mounds of treasure heaped in places to five times my height, strewn so thickly that at times I must abandon the floor to clamber on shifting cracking crumbling stacks of gilded chairs, panniers of bread, unguent-cups, burnished braziers, sphinxes, anubises, amulets, maces, trumpets, candlesticks, fans, every uncountable object of inscrutable intent, I began to doubt. These were no offerings: no nation, not even Egypt, could give up its wealth so wantonly, not to bury it forever with a dead King. The entire land had been stripped.

  I knew now why no trace of him remained above the ground. There had been no silence. There had been no stilling of Egypt’s voice in the years of the King. It was all here. He had collected it all.

  And then I knew also, with a certainty that made me gasp again in the still air of—not a tomb—I knew how wrong I had been, how utterly wrong from the start. The work of effacement, the revenge I thought his followers had wreaked on him: the silence that had swallowed him had been his own. He had set himself beneath his own horizon, then sealed shut the door, leaving no memory of himself behind. The word of power—if such there was—was a word to enforce oblivion.

  So I told myself, but as I wandered through a wilderness of wealth, I knew it must have been far more than that. But what, and how, or why, still I did not know. What certainty I had once possessed was gone now, shattered by the force of my fall into—into something I could not even name: no single name seemed adequate any more. I could only walk, and, in the brief flashes I allowed myself of light, wonder.

  I wandered at first through a warehouse of furniture, all made in the form of fabulous beasts.

  When I turned on the light again I was neck-deep in pottery, blue glass jugs and bronzed ewers, faience flasks, bowls, vases, oviform urns.

  I switched on the light again: towers of awls, adzes, augurs; saws, plumb lines, spatulas, trowels and glowing copper knives.

  Out of darkness softness brushed my face, dropped down a clinging web about my head: linens, dyed in the geometries of Phoenicia, dim blue and rust.

  I walked in a dry harbor of barges, feluccas lateen and square-rigged, galleys of fifty oars.

  Baskets of grain, fields of wicker heaped high, receding to a dark horizon.

  And in the distance, a dim reflection of my light: a wall.

  I ran, scattering grain about me. I ran past endurance; stopped, small cries fluttering around me. I fed myself on fists full of grain gone soft as dust with age, and slaked my thirst from sealed jugs, smashing off their lids with unechoing blows, the liquid splashing across the floor, running under earthenware into darkness.

  I ran, and drew no nearer to the light, no longer seeing what blocked my steps, familiar now with the unspeakable variety of the unfamiliar. I smashed it and ran over the remains.

  I no longer ran. I stumbled, and as the time—minutes or months—passed, the wall grew higher, and lowered above me. And still it was beyond my outstretched hand.

  I slept, atop pads of linen, a roll of bandage cloth beneath my head, the smell of age in my nostrils, and in my sleep a voice ran on, chanting names I did not know.

  THE WALL OF the world I would have thought it, so high it climbed into what should have been the sky. To left and right my flashlight showed it vanish into darkness, as if it turned a corner into night. The wall was white, alabaster I thought from the warm, almost fleshly glow in my light. At the base of the wall, an empty cartouche, inlaid with gold, defined the outlines of a doorway. Beyond that door, the empty cartouche promised, I would find the King’s own name, and take it for my own.

  A glyph, in gold, was centered above the door. It was a word of command: Uba. Open. Was I supposed to speak? I tried to say Uba, but my mouth was afraid. I approached closer, hoping I would see somewhere about it a polished hemisphere of sto
ne. Behind me the darkness grew deeper. The old, familiar chill blew through me, and I was afraid.

  There was no polished stone. I shone the beam upward in a spreading cone of light. There, five or fifty meters above my head, a dim suggestion of white on white, I thought I saw a protrusion, perhaps a dome of smooth stone. Perhaps the height was an illusion, I told myself, and reached. My hand stretched out, my arm pitifully short: it reached not even to the top of the door. I let it fall upon the door then, thinking that I would pound an answer from beyond, although I knew no one would answer.

  My hand fell, but the door was not there: my arm swung an arc through empty air.

  I was dizzy with the illusion, and almost fell into what I now saw plainly as an open archway. The space beyond was a tunnel, leading sharply down, its interior formed of the same blank white stone. The milky substance held no shadow, annihilating perspective: it was uba—open— what I had read as a command had been a description.

  Steep stairs descended to a lower level, a low passageway through which I was forced to move on all fours. I hesitated, uneasy at the thought of all that darkness at my back.

  I crouched low and crawled, the torch in my mouth.

  A strange smell permeated the corridor: familiar, but alarmingly unplaceable. It raised gooseflesh on me before I had gone a dozen yards into the corridor.

  The tunnel gave out high in the wall of the room that breathed the smell, and as my head emerged in open air I knew it, and was afraid again. The smell was damp: never in my life had I smelt water in an Egyptian tomb, where it could only mean something horribly amiss, indistinguishable from the fetor of death. But smelling it here, so strongly that my face seemed drenched in it, unnerved me for another reason as well, and more than anything I had seen in the great hall. The myriads of artifacts gathered there, the size of the construction—those had been mere logistics and engineering. But maintaining water in a tomb for over four thousand years: this was magic. This was something terrible, beyond my compass, a mystery of life-in-death.

  From my perch high in the wall I shone the light around the cavern. At one time I might have thought it large: twenty meters, perhaps, in its longest dimension. Now it seemed uncomfortably cramped. Featureless, but for the water that filled it to a height perhaps a dozen feet below my downturned face. Only reluctantly did I shine the light down on the still surface (a mirror of obsidian, I might have thought it, were the smell of it not sending damp fingers over my flesh), and with an unreasoning horror of what I might see in its depths.

  I saw only a bright disc of light. A disc of deeper darkness floated at its side. Between the reflection of the flashlight and the darkness in my eyes I saw only my own face, a dim-lit ovoid pale upon the water.

  There was no ledge around the chamber; the floor was given over entirely to the pool, nor were there steps or rungs or cleats of any sort leading from my perch down to the surface. A dozen feet or so: not much to dive. And if the water is only inches deep? I will suffer a slight fall, nothing worse, I told myself. And if it is deep? I will swim. But neither falling nor drowning held me there, despite the terror I felt gathering in the constricted darkness at my back. The water itself: it frightened me. What might be in water that old? What slime? What smells? What—Before the panic could take me, I took one breath and swung out into the center of the pool.

  I have no way of knowing how deep the water was: only that I fell; the water struck cold into my groin, and then closed over my head. My eyes were shut tight. I sank, and while my pulse was loud in my ears the water swirled about me and, disoriented, I imagined that I continued to descend. Then my hand broke into air, a scum at the surface clinging as if I had pierced a membrane, and my head was free and I could breathe. I trod water, hearing a whimpering in the darkness, magnified against the lowering roof. I lifted the hand that held the flashlight, fumbled for the switch, terrified lest it should slip from my hands and I be lost forever in the dark, unable to find any exit from this pool.

  I swept the beam around, and no sign of an opening could I find. I berated myself: I had known of pits in passageways, knew why they were placed, yet more credulous than any ignorant grave-robber I had flung myself in this one. I was treading water much too energetically: the voice in me remarked that I would be exhausted in a minute, but I did not care. In a series of leaps, I flung myself half into the air, the awful water closing viscous over my head each time I fell back down, filling my mouth and nose with a taste of black brackishness.

  I swam to one end of the pool, and found there only slick stone, repulsive to touch. I swam toward the other end, and abruptly my feet found something solid. I was afraid of it, but my arms were lead, and my legs were lead, and my chest was a stone dragging me down. I stood, and the thing in the water did not move.

  The water shelved toward the far end; the walls converged, the ceiling lowered, and there, in an angle of the room, I found six steps that took me to a door.

  A real door: no trickery here. But what a door: silver doorposts (their name is ah-ti, I told myself), golden panels (at, ati-t, I called them) burnished to a skin-like finish; and the panels were inlaid in tourmaline, sodalite, carnelian and jasper, the gems agleam in the light of my torch, all inlaid in the form of Horus-eyes. Beka-ti, the voice within me whispered. Beka-ti: beg, begg, beg-t, bagaau. The eyes gleamed as if moist.

  Before I could touch it the door buckled, one hinge breaking away from the doorpost: the sound of its fall boomed loudly around me.

  I started back, wavering over the water. A ripple ran through the pool, out, then back, then out again.

  The door hung askew now. Wary without knowing why, I kicked at it: the lower hinge twisted, tore free, and the door crashed inward, sending out a cloud of dust. I coughed, the smell of it filling my nostrils, thick on my tongue. I spat it out at once.

  No one who has worked with them can forget the smell of mummy. The door seemed to have fallen onto one, possibly several of them, breaking them to bits. I shone the flashlight through the opening. The door lay across half a dozen shrouded forms, stuffed within the chamber apparently without ceremony. The wrappings were plain, the workmanship of the lowest quality. I wondered what I had stumbled into, and turned the beam about the room.

  Mummies. Mummies everywhere.

  Piles of them, arms clenched tightly at their breasts, linen wrappings dissolving, falling away into cobwebs: leather and sticks protruding, and here and there the bright gleam of tooth.

  The proportions of the chamber were odd. The flashlight shining over the banks of dead, the perspective seemed strangely askew. I could only tell, from the numbers of the dead I saw, and the vague masses extending beyond the limit of the beam, that the space was large. But the dimensions of the chamber were not so great as those of the hall above. The beam of the torch fell finally on a wall, far distant beyond stacks of brown. Once I had found the limits of the vault, I could guess the number of dead piled here, and another of the mysteries of the King was plain to me. I had wondered about the workers, the tens of thousands of mutes employed in the construction of the tomb. They had disappeared from the accounts. I had found them.

  Ushabti? Or the kind of men who tell no tales? Or was there something else about this display of—I could only call it wealth. The corpses were stacked, scattered about in utter disregard for funeral rites, but they were here, they had been embalmed at who could guess what expense. There was something more intended than mass murder, more than the convenient disposal of inconvenient labor.

  The far wall looked very far away. Behind me the water still sloshed, and I realized now what the taste in it had been.

  I soon found why the proportions of the chamber had seemed so odd: the roof sloped, or the floor rose, and before I had gone a dozen meters I was forced to proceed upon my hands and knees.

  There was another chamber, a small room that held only a smell, a small smell, but it made me vomit until I thought my viscera would come up.

  And another chamber that held
only a portrait, in some kind of pigment, on the long side wall.

  I had never seen its like. Done in profile, it was of a woman, somewhat between youth and middle age, looking sidelong into the room. Looking at me, recognizing me, knowing me and my purpose there, regarding all with an expression poised at the moment when amusement turns toward contempt or grief or fear. There was that about her I cannot explain, only that it made me weep again, with an anguish I thought could never abate.

  I faced another door. On it the familiar, empty cartouche. It stood half-open onto darkness. I pressed it, and it swung, soundlessly, as frictionless as dream. Beyond I could see nothing, only the infinitely deeper darkness that I carried with me: it pulsed in the center of the floor.

  The portrait smiled down on me as I entered the room.

  A very barren room. A very dead end. A blank wall curving away to the left of me, another away to the right. And on the far side, where the walls recurved and met, completing a circle, I saw what I had come to find: a royal cartouche.

  It was empty.

  I barely looked back as the door swung to behind me, nor cared when I heard something snap at its close. I only stood, and stared, knowing that I had reached my destination, and there was nothing here.

  I could not accept it. I could not believe it. I could only think that there was some trick here, some secret I was missing, something I had overlooked. Perhaps the glyphs were there, shallowly graven, and in the pallid alabaster my flashlight failed to shadow them. I moved cautiously to my left, hoping that the oblique rays of light would shade a shallow relief; I circled around the room, tethered to the empty cartouche by my flashlight’s beam, by my own gaze that would not let the emptiness go, by the dark circle that pulsed there—now pulsing harder, now almost audible in the extraordinarily silent air. I edged to my left, circling, but the wall remained a blank. When I stood before the cartouche and ran my fingers over its cool, indifferent surface, I felt nothing.