In the Valley of the Kings: Stories (10 page)

Was there ever hope? Even now, I cannot imagine what they hoped, those who built that engine on the ice, what they dreamed of on their journey to the limits of Creation. I can only imagine what silence settled over that voyage, with us as their unquiet cargo. What did they think: that they could wrench the dead out of the ether, compel us, like electricity, to arc from their dreams into the world? Did anyone stop to wonder what might happen then?

What happened then. After everything went wrong, and it was I alone who stirred, only I who woke into a world more terrible than ever I had imagined. By then their hopes, whatever they had been, had died with them.

Or almost. The last of their earthly hopes survives, just as long as this story continues.

Words have only this power: they keep me here. I make an offering of myself to them. It is all that they deserve.

Somewhere above, a ship approaches. A few more days must pass before gravity and inertia bring them overhead. I can imagine them entering the station, encumbered in their spacesuits and their innocence. It will be dark, and cold. Will they recognize the darkness? Will they understand the cold? I know they fear what they will find. They should. But their fear is as nothing to what awaits them here. I would pity them, but what is the pity of a shade?

I would laugh, if I could. For all their fears, they will find at first only me, frozen here at this keyboard. They will wonder at it, and the very oddness of it will spare them, for a little while, from understanding what I still conceal. Even when they realize what they have found, it will make no difference, not in the end. No matter what they find here, Death will find them whether they understand it or not. I take some consolation in that, and hope the wish is not unfeeling. It is all I have left to wish.

Even at this last, I am haunted by a wish. If I could only it begins. If I could only have done—something. Could have imagined her more, imagined her better, transcended this poor flesh: done justice to her. To
her,
in her individuality distinct from my desire. But I could not, cannot now, and never will. I know this now: there is no justice of this kind. Imagination fails. The mystery refuses. In the very attempt I betrayed her again.

Still I wish. I wish they had not brought me back. That I could have resurrected her. I wish I could be done with wishing. I wish for the impossible. I wish for sleep.

I wish for this to end.

I GROW IMPATIENT
. Why has the power not failed? I find myself listening, knowing that days must pass before the ship arrives and I hear anyone attempting entry. Yet I am vigilant, my nerves on edge. And though I ought to laugh at thinking I have nerves at all, I rise, and on legs gone stiff with cold I go to watch outside my door.

The corridor is empty, and silent as the grave. I can no longer bring myself to sit here with so much silence at my back. I have closed the door and locked it, but even so, as the minutes pass I can hardly keep myself from turning. In the distance I imagine small sounds: a ticking of cold metal, a creak, a scratching at the limit of my hearing. I imagine them. I imagine them again.

I can no longer convince myself. It is too distinct now, even in the distance. I hear hammering. Steel strikes repeatedly on steel. How can they be here so soon? They cannot be, I tell myself: no vehicle can have brought them; the laws of physics, gravity and inertia all forbid it. But though these things are certain I can find no comfort there. The hammering continues, and now a shriek of metal excoriates the air. Its echoes fade. Silence falls again.

I hear my fingers tapping on the keys, and nothing more.

I have imagined it. They cannot be here.

Above the tapping of the keys, a muffled sound grows nearer, dull, persistent, nearer and still nearer, until unmistakably it is here. I cannot bring myself to turn, and with my attention riveted upon these words, with the frantic motion of my hands, I struggle to forestall what already has arrived. But these words and hands already have betrayed me. I hear it stop outside my door and in the silence I
know
, finally, that I am not alone. The worst is not yet come.

Beyond any doubt, beyond all imagining, at my back I hear a solid blow. And then another. And I do not need to imagine, because I know the sound. In a moment that teeters on the edge of eternity I
know
: this is the sound of someone knocking, knocking, knocking at my door, the sound of one hand I know better than any in this world.

It is the sound of my Eurydike returning. I need only look behind me. I need only turn to find you standing there.

T
hat there were tombs, great tombs, left undiscovered in the Valley of the Kings, I could not doubt. Long study in the chronicles of Egypt, where history lapses, time and again, into silence, had convinced me: some gaps in the record were not accident. The singular lack of artifacts from a particular period—I will not tell you which—the hush of the chroniclers—the break in the lineage of the Kings: even from a time five thousand years ago when one might think the silences of history outweighed the words, this silence: it spoke to me, insistently, of something withheld. It haunted me, as if out of that silence came a voice I could not hear, and it spoke only to me. But each attempt I made to trace the lineage, each name, each face, each line of evidence I pursued, all, when I traced them back to a certain decade in the Upper Nile, all vanished—cut off, as if the earth itself had swallowed them down.

There was a King: my conviction on this point is unshakable. But nothing I have culled from the collections in London and Berlin, the great libraries of papyri in Cairo and Paris—nothing I have found has given me a clue to the identity—the history, the image, even the name—of him I seek. An obscuration comes between us. I feel it: it is a lure and a taunt, beckoning me to throw over this wretched edifice of my career, to risk everything I have and am upon my faith that somewhere in the Valley of the Kings there lies a treasure beyond price.

Do not mistake me. I have no lust for gold, for lapis-inlaid chests, trumpets of silver, daggers of bronze, for amethyst, jasper, chalcedony; alabaster urns, where liver and heart, bowels and lungs have congealed to gum—these tempt me less. And still less the voyeur’s satisfaction in undressing the pathetic corpse. Child’ s play, peering through the probe-hole plunged into the sealed door, blinking into the breeze that always escapes. The slow rustling of linen hangings, echoes lingering in the darkened room. The endless tedium of tweezering beads from the gritty floor, the nights of cataloging, card on card of cedar splinters, ovoid jugs, crumbled detritus of nothing new. I have done this, done it fabulously well. Well enough to know: the prize at the center of the tomb is only a blind.

For I was present at the excavation of the richest tomb uncovered in this century: the most important find to come out of the Nile Valley in our time—or so, at least, I believe. And on this excavation, as the tomb gave up its secrets, even down to a mummy so well preserved that its face retained the three-days’ stubble of a sick man, the wrinkles around the eyes still holding an expression I could read (the eyes themselves glass now, a slice of white beneath the shrinking lids), and locked between his thumb and forefinger the lighter-than-feather remnant of an ink-stained quill, the pigment plain along the inner curve of his middle finger: as all this and more, much more in ordinary wealth—the costly bric-a-brac, gold and ghoulish dressings, silver and silent shrines, lapis and luxuries—all this with which they buried him, all came to light, at the end of the expedition, in the swept and perfect emptiness of what had been a tomb, I was unsatisfied. I knew there must be more.

A curious disturbance hastened the end of the expedition. When we released a photograph to the local press demonstrating the quality of the embalming, it showed a face apparently that of a contemporary Egyptian male, aged fifty years, eyes closed, cheeks screwed up as if in pain. The public protest almost shut down the site. It was all we could do to obtain permission to perform an autopsy before we were forced to turn the—not “mummy” now but “remains”—over to the authorities for re-burial. This autopsy we conducted, not in the ideally sterile conditions of a laboratory in Cairo, but in the field, with only the instruments and supplies we had on hand.

It is often difficult to determine the cause of death: the embalmer, for all his care with the externalities (that quill, for instance, was the mark of a master), so often destroys the evidence. But in this case we were hopeful—even the blood was identifiable, O-positive, with an elevated leukocyte count—but there was no sign of a pathogen there, nor was there any in the lymphatics. Our pathologist suggested, on evidence of the facial deformation, that we examine the nervous system.

We expected the brain to be missing, as is usually the case: external examination had found the nasal septum unusually damaged, indicating that the extraction had been difficult. But when we cut into the brain-case to sample the stump of the medulla, we found the brain still attached, and intact. No one breathed. It had shriveled into a hard, wrinkled sponge a walnut’s size. When the pathologist touched it with his probe it crumbled; a puff of pollen-yellow dust drifted up, lazy in the spotlight, swirling as we all exhaled, and I imagined I could smell something, imagined I felt something touch the back of my palate, and a hand brush briefly the base of my skull.

There was never any pathogen found. But even had there been, none of us could have known that the condition was still contagious.

Forgive the digression. It is not, of course, a digression. The disease that killed the steward Nur-Mar five thousand years ago has in the past twelve months become the central fact of my existence. There appeared last May, full fifteen years after the opening of Nur-Mar’s tomb, an obscuration—no larger than the full moon—at the center of my vision. At first, I ignored it. At night, as I tried to sleep, it would pulse faintly, tinged with red at its borders. At times it disappeared entirely. Now it is always before me, always there at the center of my vision, a pool of ink, a hole opened in the world, a tunnel toward which I constantly move. I know already where it leads.

Then this winter, around the turn of the year I began to hear the faintest sound, an echo, a whisper, a word murmured softly just behind my head. I began to notice a persistent smell, which I characterized as burnt wiring. This was only a metaphor.

I consulted a neurologist. He ordered tests: dye injections into my carotid artery, CAT scans, NMR sweeps that made my fillings shudder. The tests revealed nothing. The specialist was tactful, suggesting I seek alternative care. I ignored him. Nor did I seek a second opinion.

This was a difficult decision. I did not, finally, arrive at it out of despair: I like to think I am a realist. I am confident that whatever afflicts me is unknown to contemporary medicine, and that no cure exists. I do not know if it will kill me, but I suspect it will. All a doctor could offer me is morphine, and I will not have that. They could, I suppose, also offer guesses as to the date of my demise, but I will not have that, either. And most of all I will not have myself immured in a hospital or otherwise encrypted before my time. As long as I can work, I will continue to do so.

Do not mistake me. There is nothing of nobility about this. My dedication to my work, to knowledge, science, truth, or any of that large body of humbug at which we gesture when we lecture trusting undergraduates, apply for grants, or otherwise seek to present ourselves as something that we’re not—none of that matters now. I have lived among the Egyptians too long to deny my reasons. If I am to die, I will at least erect a fitting monument before I go. My monument? The King: of course the King. If I can find a monarch and a tomb that bring a forgotten period of Egyptian history to light, my name will live long after I am dust—our names will live, linked forever, as Carter’s is with Tutankhamen’s, Maspero’s is with Ramesses’. If my monarch and his tomb be greater than theirs, so much the better. I have reason to suspect they are. I have reason to hope even more.

I brought two secrets with me from Nur-Mar’s tomb. The first, of course, was hidden even from myself. The other I smuggled through customs. It rests on the desk before me as I write. An unprepossessing thing: a plain steatite urn, oviform, apparently IVth Dynasty, approximately thirty centimeters tall, twelve wide.

It was sealed elaborately when I first noticed it among some brittle clay replicas of bread, a great wad of pitch at its mouth, and at first I took it for an odd, fifth canopic jar—perhaps a spare (there are always, in an Egyptian tomb, spares). Then something pressed into the pitch caught my eye: it was a royal cartouche—and this was not a royal tomb. Then I noticed something more, and before I had time to think I had stooped, and concealed the jug inside my shirt. The cartouche was blank. Someone had scraped away the glyphs that once had named a King.

I neither slept nor let the bag out of my grasp throughout the stopover in Kennedy, the limo to LaGuardia, and the commuter hop home. I was exhausted, and it was foolish to attempt anything so delicate as a sealed jar at eleven at night—six
A.M.
Cairo time. But I did. My hand was shaking as I warmed the pitch, prized it up with a dental probe and spatula. It came away in a single mass, the scars in the cartouche made vague by the heating. A light in the jar showed me what I had suspected: a rolled scroll.

I almost had to break the jar to get it out. As it is, the papyrus cracked in five places. My left hand is red with steam burns. I do not feel them.

I believe it was not in good condition when the jar was sealed. Whoever had wanted to preserve it (and I am convinced that person was the steward with whom it rested) had been in haste: it had been rolled willy-nilly creased and possibly torn. It was also badly burned all along one margin. But it is enough. It tells me that the one I seek did live: the papyrus, I am convinced, is in his hand. He scribed a graceful, formal glyph, each figure fully delineated—archaic even for his time. The text describes plans for a tomb to dwarf the works of the Fourth Dynasty—too large even to fit into the plain at Giza. He sited it up-river, closer to the quarries, in the region that did not become the royal necropolis until centuries after. The scroll also lists more than seven hundred spells, of the ordinary kind that were popularly believed to guard the dead in the underworld of the Duat. And then, before the scroll breaks off (torn, not burned), the syntax, the diction—even the scribing hand—decay. There are many terms I do not recognize. This is not uncommon in hieroglyphs: many signs were invented as needed. But in this scroll the normal alphabet is gone—the abstract determinative is entirely absent, and I am not certain if what I read is code or gibberish. Only one word comes through persistently
en clair
. The word is rare—I think were I not already interested in the subject I would have failed to recognize it: it is the word for “word of hidden meaning.” It is the word for what I seek.

It is odd. Even now, when I am beyond the reach of ridicule—when not only my professional reputation, but shame and dignity are identically vain—when I am determined nothing will prevent my telling this story, I must pause. The Egyptians invented written language for one purpose only. Not what you think: not to count oxen, order slaves, predict the Nile floods—none of that. A notched stick, properly applied, will serve those functions better than half a thousand glyphs. The Egyptian language had a higher aspiration. Graven in the living rock of a tomb, words would endure when the last breath of the speaker had vanished: words in rock took on a solidity that their makers hoped they themselves would attain in the Duat. For the Egyptian death was not like ours. Their afterlife was physical, and the physical required names. Names gave power in the afterlife: knowing the proper names, and the spells in which to speak them, these were the keys to life everlasting. They persisted in this belief three thousand years at least. Who are we, with our three-hundred-year tradition of empiricism, to say them nay? Not I: what has empiricism done for me lately?

I have resolved to try the Egyptian way. Especially now, when what was once a nameless urge has become an urgent need, and I find—as if I had known a spell for finding—the King I seek, his dwelling place, and over five millennia begin to feel his agony. And find he has a word.

I seek a word of power.