In the Valley of the Kings: Stories (15 page)

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.

—What if this king had set out to learn the Word of Power, the word Thoth whispered in the ear of Ptah when between the two of them they made the world? I am convinced it happened, inevitably in a land so obsessed with the supernatural: one rose up among them who personified their dream. And though of course—

My voice cracked. I knew what I must say here, but even then something in me rebelled.

—Of course there could be no such word, no power to create a world, not really. So there must have been something else, some physical sign for such a word, a substitute. By that material logic they always used to deal with the abstract, he must have built that world himself, a tomb-burial to beggar all the tombs since Menes founded the First Dynasty. That must have been it, you see: it would follow from all the Egyptian practices we know, only raised to such an extreme—an inevitable extreme, you see—that he had to ransack the kingdom to supply it. We can imagine the rationale. The Word of Power needs its own perfect seat, the proper circumstances, a temple within which its own prophet-priest the King would guard the Word, and finally at the appointed time utter it, and then the world would change, all Egypt would be transported bodily into the afterlife and death’s dominion would become the King’s.

—Imagine what power such a fantasy would give him over his people. How great an effort he could have extracted by the mere promise alone: if the nation had bent all its efforts toward the construction of a mere pyramid, not once but repeatedly in the preceding dynasty, how would they devote themselves to a sovereign who promised to bring them all within his horizon, and make the gates of death turn back upon themselves? How hard they must have worked!

—And how violently, in the end, they rebelled. The labor was too great, even for the promised end. Or perhaps they revenged themselves upon him only after he died, and they realized that he had failed? Maybe that explains the revulsion: among a people for whom belief in magic was essential to life, what if one of them set out to put that magic to some ultimate test? How savagely would they have turned to tear him when he fell?

—I have only to look, and I know I can find it, the one thing absolutely necessary. The tomb. The greatest tomb in the history of Egypt: the greatest find in the history of Egyptology. For it must be there. I am convinced it was not rifled. That’s the beauty of it, you see: if the tomb had been found, if such a quantity of goods and artifacts as it must have contained had been released, the world would be littered with evidence of his reign—and we have none! And even had there been some attempt to destroy them, the signs would still be there: records of Radedef survived the destruction of his monuments, and he was nothing to this one. I am certain of it: the King was sealed in his horizon, and they threw away the key. Perhaps they even imprisoned him in it still living. Who knows—

I stopped, finding myself teetering again on the verge of something disastrous, recognizing something in myself trying to make itself heard. I had wanted to go on, to explain where I thought this tomb might be, how best to start the search. But in the midst of that explanation I sensed a desire I had theretofore not known: a desire, almost a conviction, that in his tomb I should find the King himself, still living, and from his lips would hear—everything. The truth about everything Egyptian, about a world lost long before I was born, the truth about—even then I did not know just what I hoped to hear.

I held my tongue. Silence, like a thickening of dust. Professor——was still, his hands carefully motionless, his expression inscrutable: I felt myself teetering, a scale waiting to tip with the next weight placed upon the pan.—Imagine evidence, I cried.—Texts, artifacts, everything perfectly preserved, from a crisis early on, at the very heart of the Egyptian social, political, and religious complex. At the origins of our own—

I was shouting, I realized, a foot from the old man’s face, as if volume could give substance to my words; shouting into a face that seemed, more and more as I peered into it, too uniformly relaxed.

—He’s dead, I whispered, and my voice fell hoarse among the echoes fading in the quiet room. I reached out and laid a hand upon his shoulder. His head lolled, his jaw opened, and a rattling snore escaped.

He recovered, one half of his face blinking and rewrinkling as he tried to lift both hands to rub his eyes.—xcuse me. He muttered at last.—m sorry. Sleep again. No reflection, please blieve me.

He settled his glasses on his nose and his living hand upon his paunch.—Would you mind terribly much repeating?

I put the cassette in the slot, and clunked its hatch down:

Budge’s voice emerged, attenuated, as if it really were a spirit’s voice.

—Sorry to leave this to last minutes,———, but I’m all at sixes and sevenses with this and that. I’m packing books with both hands while I talk. I don’t know, Lester, ask your mother. Now. Assuming the beastly custodials haven’t changed the locks overnight, you should find the thing on the shelves to the right of the door as you face it. From inside, that is. It’s about the size of a carry-on bag. Black leatherette. Do you have it? Careful when you lift it down: it’s not terribly fragile but it is heavy, and I don’t want you to break your foot. Now.

Now. Budge’s voice went on, brightly and (I could tell) well pleased with himself—with his packing, his ingenuity, his casual belief that somewhere he was still alive. In his empty office, the familiar clutter had been reduced to stripped shelves, a few mounds of equipment catalogs and boxes of bright electronic shards. His voice was almost unbearably real to me, bouncing sharply from the bare walls as I acted out his instructions, levered down the heavy case and thumbed up its hasps, muttering to myself the instructions from the tape. My hands were trembling too much to attach the power lines to the battery, and I had to stop, shutting off the tape-player with more effort than necessary.

Sitting at the bare table beside the open case, for a long time I could not catch my breath. I was near to crying. Not for Budge: do not mistake me, it was none of that. A wordless despair had seized me, and was long minutes vanishing back into whatever pit it had crept out of.

I had started to believe in Budge’s absurd promise.

When I could take a breath without its catching, I eased down the button on the recorder, and turned again to my inheritance. At his direction I flipped three switches, waited for the screen to light and settle, a flickering void, then set two dials at his instructions.

The screen shuddered.

I was looking at a luminous floor plan of the lobby, six stories below my feet: there was the ugly aluminum sculpture, there the three broad granite steps up from the entrance, the inscribed marble benches, the men’s and ladies’ with their pipes and porcelain off on either side. At my ear, Budge was explaining how it worked, but I couldn’t hear: my eyes were full, and my heart was beating loudly. At the center of the screen, a darkness beat as well.

There were small rites to perform. I carried my files—on the King, on myself—out into the backyard. There was a barbecue pit there, relic of an earlier tenant.

I had thought so much tinder would flare in an instant, flash and vanish, but the burning was slow: one page at a time caught at the corners, the blue flame flickering as it read over, consumed, and curled each up to reveal the next: I saw a story roll up like the sky at Judgment Day, blacken to ashes before my eyes. This was on Wednesday.

On Thursday I drove to the school where I had taken my doctor’s degree. My thesis was shelved among a thousand like it in the doctoral papyrus dump. As I pulled it from the shelf and felt again its ungainly mass, like no other book in the world, in the solitude of the library I felt as if my adult life had been a dream: here I was carrying my new dissertation into the library, about to walk to Professor——’s.

The circulation clerk took my name and address, and accepted my alien faculty ID. I hoped urgently she would not notice the names on the card and the book were the same. As she opened my thesis to stamp the date due, she spoke.

—You’re the first one to check this out in…thirty years.

—Someone else checked it out?

—Sure. See? She showed me the dim, purple date, two weeks after I had received my degree.

—Who?

A laugh.—Thirty years ago? I wasn’t even born.

I stood facing the house that had been Professor———’s.

The housekeeper-nurse had inherited, I remembered. I had never learned her name. Was she still there? In the bowels of the house, a bell rang; footsteps approached; the door swung back. An ordinary woman, far too young, holding a wide-eyed infant.

AND ONE OTHER
thing: as I drove out of town, over the bridge where the breath of the sea blew in through the window, over the rail I heaved the black flapping shape of my thesis. It dropped from sight, and I could only imagine the splash.