In the Valley of the Kings: Stories (14 page)

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 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.

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.

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 make 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.