Kraken (20 page)

It rained, briefly. When it rains, Dane quoted his grandfather, it’s a kraken shaking the water off its tentacles. When the wind blows, it’s the breath from its siphon. The sun, Dane said, is a glint of biophosphor in a kraken’s skin.

“I keep thinking about Leon,” Billy said. “I need to … I should tell his family. Or Marge. She should know …” It was nearly too heavy to articulate his feelings like that, and he had to stop speaking.

“You ain’t telling no one,” Dane said. “You ain’t talking to no one. You stay underground.”

The city felt like it was hesitating. Like a bowling ball on a hilltop, fat with potential energy. Billy recalled the snake unhinging of Goss’s jaw, bones jostling and a mouth with precipitous reconfiguration a doorway. Dane drove past a small gallery and a dry cleaners, a market collection of junk, tchotchkes in multiplicity, urban twee.

•   •   •

I
N FRONT OF THE
B
RITISH
L
IBRARY, IN THE GREAT FORECOURT, A
little crowd was gathered. Students and other researchers, laptops clutched, in trendy severe spectacles and woolly scarves. They were gaping and laughing.

What they stared at was a little group of cats, walking in a complicated quadrille, languidly purposeful. Four were black, one tortoise-shell. They circled and circled. They were not scattering nor squabbling. They described their routes in dignified fashion.

Far enough away to be safe but still startlingly close were three pigeons. They strutted in their own circle. The paths of the two groups of animals almost overlapped.

“Can you believe it?” said one girl. She smiled at Billy in his foolish clothes. “You ever seen such a well-behaved bunch? I love cats.”

Most of the students, after a minute or two of amused watching, went past the cats into the library. There were a very few among the crowd, though, who looked not in humour but consternation. None of these men or women entered. They did not cross the stalked lines. Though it was early and they had only just arrived, on seeing the little gathering they would leave.

“What’s going on?” said Billy. Dane headed to the centre of the forecourt, where a giant figure waited. He was uneasy being out. He looked constantly to all sides, led Billy with a kind of cringing pugnacity toward the twenty-foot statue of Newton. The imagined scientist hunched, examining the earth, his compass measuring distance. A tremendous misunderstanding, it seemed, Blake’s glowering ecstatic grumble at myopia mistranslated by Paolozzi as splendid and autarch.

A broad man stood by the figure, in a puffy jacket and woolly hat and glasses. He carried a plastic bag. He looked to be muttering to himself. “Dane,” someone said. Billy turned, but there was no one in earshot. The hatted man waved at Dane, warily. His bag was full of copies of a left-wing newspaper.

“Martin,” said Dane. “Wati.” He nodded to the man, and the statue. “Wati, I need your help—”

“Shut your mouth,” a voice said. Dane stepped backward in obvious shock. “I will talk to you in a sodding minute.”

It spoke in a whisper, with a unique accent. It was between London and something bizarre and unplaced. It was a metal whisper. Billy knew it was the statue that spoke.

“Uh, okay,” the man with the newspapers said. “You’ve got stuff to do, I’m going to split. I’ll see you Wednesday.”

“Alright,” the statue said. Its lips did not move. It did not move at all—it was a statue—but the voice was whispered from its barrel-sized mouth. “Tell herself I said hi.”

“Alright,” the man said. “Later. Good luck. Solidarity to that lot.” He glanced at the cats. A nod good-bye to Dane, and one to Billy too. The man left a paper between Isaac Newton’s feet.

Dane and Billy stood together. The statue stayed heavily sat. “You come to me?” it said. “To
me?
You have got some nerve, Dane.”

Dane shook his head. He said quietly, “Oh, man. You heard …”

“I thought there’d been a mistake,” the voice said. “I got told, and I was like, no, that’s not possible, Dane wouldn’t do that. He’d never do that. I put a couple of watchers on your place
to get you off the hook
. Understand? How long I known you, Dane? I can’t believe you.”

“Wati,” said Dane. He was plaintive. Billy had never heard him like this before. Even arguing with the Teuthex, his pope, he had been surly. Now he wheedled. “Please, Wati, you have to believe me. I had no choice. Please hear me out.”

“What do you think you can say to me?” the Newton said.

“Wati, please. I ain’t saying what I done was right, but you owe me to at least listen. Don’t you? Just that?”

Billy looked between the hunching metal man and the kraken-cultist. “You know Davey’s café?” the statue said. “I’ll see you there in a minute. And as far as I’m concerned it’s to say good-bye, Dane. I just can’t believe you, Dane. I can’t believe you were scabbing.”

Noiselessly, something went. Billy blinked.

“What was that?” he said. “Who’ve we been talking to?”

“An old friend of mine,” Dane said heavily. “Who’s rightly pissed off. Rightly. That fucking squirrel. Idiot I am. I didn’t have time, I didn’t think I could risk it. I was racing.” He looked at Billy. “It’s your bloody fault. Nah, mate, I’m not really blaming you. You didn’t know.” He sighed. “This is …” He gestured at the statue, now empty. Billy did not know how he knew that. “That was, I mean, the head of the committee. The shop steward.”

Readers approached the library, saw the little groups of animals, laughed and continued or, those who looked as if they understood something, hesitated and left. The presence of the circling creatures barred them.

“You see what’s going on,” Dane said. Miserably he ran his hands over his head.
“That
is a picket line, and
I
am in trouble.”

“A picket? The cats and birds?”

Dane nodded. “The familiars are on strike.”

Chapter Twenty-Five

F
ROM THE
E
LEVENTH
D
YNASTY, THE DAWN OF THE
M
IDDLE
Kingdom, many centuries before the birth of the man Christ, the better-off dwellers by the Nile were concerned to maintain their quality of life, in death.

Were there not fields in the afterworld? Did the crops of the nightlands, the farms of each of the hours of the night, not need harvesting and tending? Were there not households and the tasks that would mean? How could a man of power, who would never work his own land while alive, be expected to do so dead?

In the tombs, by their mummied masters, the shabtis were placed. They would do it.

They were made to do it. Created for those specifics. Little figures in clay or wax, stone, bronze, crude glass, or the glazed earthware faience, dusted with oxide. Shaped at first in imitation of their overlords like tiny dead in funeral wrappings, later without that coy dissembling, made instead holding adzes, hoes and baskets, integral tools cut or cast as part of their mineral serf bodies.

The hosts of figurines grew more numerous over centuries, until there was one to work each day of the year. Servants of, workers for the rich dead, rendered to render, to perform what had to be done in that posthumous mode of production, to work the fields for the blessed deceased.

Each was inscribed at its making with the sixth chapter of the Book of the Dead.
Oh shabti, allotted me
, their skins read.
If I be summoned or decreed to do any work which must be done in the place of the dead, remove all obstacles that stand in the way, detail yourself to me to plough the fields, to flood the banks, to carry sand from east to west. “Here I am,” you shall say. “I shall do it.”

Their purpose was written on the body.
Here I am. I shall do it
.

T
HERE IS NO KNOWING BEYOND THAT MEMBRANE, THE MENISCUS OF
death. What can be seen from here is distorted, refracted. All we can know are those untrustworthy glimpses—that and rumour. The prattle. The dead gossip: it is the reverberation of that gossip against the surface tension of death that the better mediums hear. It is like listening to whispered secrets through a toilet door. It is a crude and muffled susurrus.

We gather, we intuit or think we have heard and understood, that there was effort in that place. There in Neter-Khertet, the flickered, judged dead of the kingdom had been trained into belief, strong enough to shape their post-death life into something like a cold unstable mimicking of their splendid eschatology. A vivid tableau imitated in stones, electricity and gruel. (What function of that post-dead stuff coagulated and thought itself Anubis? What Ammit the Heart-eater?)

For centuries the shabtis did what they were tasked.
Here I am
, they said in the dark unsound, and cut the uncrops, and harvested them, and channelled the not-water of death, carried the remembrance of sand. Made to do, mindless serf-things obeying dead lords.

Until at last one shabti paused by the riverbank-analogues, and stopped. Dropped the bundled shadow-harvest it had cut, and took the tools it was built carrying to its own clay skin. Effaced the holy text it had been made wearing.

Here I
am, it shouted in what passed there for its voice.
I shall
not
do it
.

“I
T NAMED ITSELF
W
ATI
,” D
ANE SAID
. “‘T
HE
R
EBEL
.’ H
E WAS MADE IN
SetMaat her imenty Waset.”
He said the strange place carefully. “Now called Deir el-Medina. In the twenty-ninth year of Ramses Three.”

They were in a new car. There was something giddying about the new accoutrements they ferried with each theft: the different toys, books, papers, debris ignored on each back seat.

“The royal tomb-builders weren’t paid for days,” Dane said. “They downed tools. About 1100 BC. They were the first strikers. I think it was one of them builders that built it. The shabti.”

Carved by a rebel, that
ressentiment
flowing through the fingers and the chisel and defining it? Made by the emotions that made it?

“Nah,” said Dane. “I think they
watched
each other. Either Wati or his maker learnt by example.”

S
ELF-NAMED
W
ATI LED THE FIRST-EVER STRIKE IN THE AFTERLIFE
. I
T
escalated. That first revolt of the shabti, the uprising of the made.

Insurrection in Neter-Khertet. Murderous fighting among the constructed, the smithed servants, split between rebels, the afraid, and the still-obedient, slave armies of the loyal. They shattered each other in the fields of the spirits. All confused, none used to the emotions they had accreted by some accident of agency, their capacity to choose their allegiance bewildering. The dead watched aghast, huddled among the ash-reeds of the river of death. Overseer gods came running from their own hours to demand order, horrified by the chaos in those bone-cold agricultural lands.

It was a brutal war of human spirits and quasi-souls made out of anger. Shabti killing shabti, killing the already dead, in heretic acts of meta-murder, sending the appalled souls of the deceased into some further afterlife about which nothing has ever been known.

The fields were full of the corpses of souls. Shabti were slaughtered in hundreds by gods but they killed gods too.
The crude features of comrades no one had bothered to carve with precision making their own expressions out of the indistinct impressions given them, taking their axes and ploughs and the fucking
baskets
they were built carrying in a swarm over bodies the size of mountains with jackal heads howling and eating them but being overrun by us and hacked with our stupid weapons and killed
.

Wati and his comrades won. You can bet that meant a change.

It must have been a shock for succeeding generations of highborn Egyptian dead. To wake in a strange fogged underworld scandalously off-message. The rituals of posthumous hierarchy to which their corpses had been piously subjected turned out to be antique, overthrown mummery. They and the worker-statue-spirit household they had had made to come with them were met by disrespectful representatives of the new shabti nation. Their own figurines swiftly recruited to the polity of that shadeland. The human dead were told,
If you work, you may eat
.

C
ENTURIES AND SOCIAL SYSTEMS GO, AND IMMIGRATION TO THAT
afterland slows and ceases, and piece by piece and without complaint the shabti and those human souls who had made their peace with the rough democracy of the shabti deadland farmers fade, go out, move on, un-be, pass over, are no longer there. There is not much sadness. It is history, is all.

Wati will have none of that.

Here I am. I shall not do it
.

He moved too, at last, but he moved not beyond nor to any dark or light but sideways, through borders between belief-worlds.

An epic trek, that curious passage through foreign afterlifes. Always toward the source of the river or the beginning of the road. Swimming
up
through Murimuria, passing
up
through the caverns of Naraka and the shade of Yomi, crossing the rivers Tuoni and Styx
from the farthest shore back
, to the ferrymen’s consternation, through a kaleidoscope flutter of lands, passing psychopomps of all traditions who had to pause with the new dead they were escorting and whisper to Wati,
You’re going the wrong way
.

Northers in bearskins, women in saris and kimonos, funerary glad-rags, bronze-armoured mercenaries, the axes that had killed them bouncing bloody and politely ignored in their pretend-flesh like giant skin tags, all astonished by the militant inhuman statue-shade ascending, astonished by this contrary wayfarer of whom
bugger-all
was written in any of the reams of pantheon-specific wittering about what the dead would face, all staring frankly at this intruder, this unplaced class-guerrilla in the myth, or glancing from under brows and introducing themselves politely or not, depending on the cultural norms they had not yet learned were for the living.