In the Valley of the Kings: Stories (20 page)

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.

Only then did the enormity of the thing bear in on me at last. It was a trap. As though laid down long ago for me and me alone, through five millennia it had led me, across the continents and decades of my own life, to this empty ending. And I, driven by a need I had not stopped to question, a credulity that even now makes me grimace in the darkness with embarrassment, though there is no one here to see—freighted with all this burden of desire and dread, I had come. I had answered the call. I am here.

Unconsciously, I had started to back away from the blank cartouche, as though I suspected in it some power to ensnare me still, to wind me deeper in extremities of self-love and self-deceit. I backed away. My feet scraped sound from the floor, cutting through the silence that had swathed my thoughts numb, letting in flashes of fact: the certainty that the door behind me had locked; the conviction that I would find in it no mechanism of release; the faint but definite indications that my flashlight was failing; all the long distance at my back, of corridor and chamber, unscalable wall and empty sky; and beyond that sky, over the ocean my life in ruins behind me; and before me a darkness pulsing, deeper, blacker, until the real darkness closing in seemed only the ashen shadow of despair. My heart stood on my shoulder, shouting. Against the darkness I saw, repeated in flashes that came to me with the vivid immediacy of lightning, the leathery stare of horror in the face of Nur-Mar’s Answerer; I remembered how we had found him crouched, head furled close to his drawn-up knees: I felt the same urge tightening in my chest, struggling to curl itself around the void left by my soul.

I do not know—and even now some fugitive spirit of curiosity will not let the question alone—just what it was that made me stop. Perhaps it was the panic seizing me at last. Perhaps it was despair. But I suspect, rather, it was the perverse spirit that has led me so infallibly to this place. It had not finished with me yet. I was to be its toy some hours more. Whatever it was, it prevented me from taking the final step backward, which would (I think of it now with regret) have been my last. It would have been much easier to tumble in blindly backward, not knowing until too late just what my feet had done.

Air breathed up the back of my neck. The hairs there stirred. A smell—not damp, not dry but infinitely corrupt—penetrated finally through my terror. Some sense for which I have no name registered emptiness behind me. As if in a dream, or acting out in waking life a dream I had long ago forgotten, I turned, knowing already just what I would find: a pit some ten feet across and immeasurably deep occupied the center of the room. In the same uncanny doubleness I teetered, caught in the centripetal pull of the pit but unable, finally, to allow myself to fall.

I fell back instead to lie in darkness. Ghostly chuckling echoed upward from the mortar my foot had dislodged, loosening more echoes from the depths of the well. I heard no impact.

I lay for a long time before lighting the torch again. The ceiling was low, and marked, above the center of the well, with a small gathering of glyphs:
Akha
, it read: enter, go. But when I looked more closely, I saw that the word was incomplete: the last sign of the glyph was broken. Either the engraving was shaved plane, or the stone had fallen into the well, but I knew, as plainly as if it had been spoken aloud, as if I had always expected to find it here, what the entire glyph would be.
Akha-t
, the glyph had said, still echoing over the empty centuries the pride and despair of a King, and a cynicism deeper still. The glyph gestured to the well at my feet, embracing as well the immense edifice around me, the King’s death, my own life, and all the world of light that I had lost long, long ago:
Akha-t
: a disease of the womb.