Valley of the Kings (12 page)

9

Sunset. The lotus flower closed. The sun god Ra grew old, and his power dwindled, until all that was left was his red swollen eye, watching Egypt from the western rim of the world, and the least beggar could look on him with impunity.

Hapure the mason thought with longing of his village, where now his daughter would be stirring the dinner in the pot, and the aroma of beans and bread would welcome the workmen home. Hapure was not going home. A stocky man, short and strong, he carried his tools in a sack over his shoulder. As he walked along the road, he kept watch around him. In this troubled reign, thieves and murderers were common on the roads after dark.

Behind him lay the river Nile, bearing on its breast the reflected lights of the great city sprawled along its eastern bank. Hapure was walking into the west, putting each foot higher than the other. The road was climbing up from the valley into the desert; he was leaving the place of living men and entering the realm of death. He kept his fingers on the amulets that he wore around his neck. He thought of his wife, sick and sleeping in their house in the village. For her sake he had given his name to the overseer for the work that waited at the end of his journey.

The path twisted and turned along the uneven ground of the desert. Hapure glanced over his shoulder. The valley of the Nile was out of sight behind him. The desert had shut him in. Like a sudden gust of wind a gust of loneliness came over him. He gulped; he thought of his wife.

In the night sky the first stars shone. He went on toward the west.

At last he reached the rim of a narrow gorge, running like a knife slash across the body of the desert. With his sandaled feet, he felt out the thread of the path that led down the steep side.

He knew this gorge. He had been here often enough, nearly every day of his working life, at some task or another. This was the Royal Valley, where the eternal houses of the kings of Egypt were built. Hapure was a mason in the crew that made those houses. But he had never come out here before at night.

Halfway down the side of the gorge he paused to catch his breath. Below him the narrow bed of the valley was drowned in darkness. Ahead the sharp edge of the clifftop cut across the starry night sky. He blinked his eyes. The darkness was growing lighter; the moon was rising behind him in the east.

He went down into the valley and paused, wondering which way to go. A low voice called, “Hapure.”

His hair stood on end. He spun around, the amulets gripped in his fist. A man in a white garment stood on the path a few yards away from him.

“I am Hapure,” the mason said, in a low voice.

“Then come,” said the stranger, and gestured that he should follow.

Hapure went after the stranger, keeping hold of his amulets. He tried to calm himself. Diligently he forced his gaze straight ahead. But his mouth was dry with fear, and the moonlight tricked his eyes. A shadow crossed over him, and he flinched and threw back his head, staring wild-eyed at the moon, but the sky was clear.

The stranger in the white garment stopped to let him catch up. They walked side by side along the floor of the Royal Gorge. The stranger said nothing. Hapure's mind teemed with questions, yet he was afraid to speak.

The path followed the curve of the valley, and they came into a place where the floor widened out between steep cliffs fluted and worn by the wind. The moonlight gleamed on the stone. At the widest part of the valley were two doorways cut into the rock, one on either side of the path.

Hapure's shoulders settled an inch, and he drew air deep into his lungs. This place he knew. He had worked on these two tombs; he felt at home here, even in the night.

The stranger turned to him. “You are here to do work in secret,” he said. “You were chosen because you are known to be trustworthy. Will you swear to keep the secret of this place?”

Hapure glanced around him again, puzzled. As far as he could see, only he and the stranger were in the valley. “Yes,” he said. “Of course.”

“Then it will not be necessary to seal up the secrets in you with a knife,” said the stranger. “Go there, and wait.” He pointed to the doorway on the left.

Hapure hitched up his sack of tools on his shoulder and climbed the short path to the opening in the rock. A corridor led back into the hillside. Letting down his sack at the threshold, he went a little way down the passageway, until the darkness closed around him and made it impossible to go farther. He turned and went back and sat down in the threshold of the doorway.

He had brought a loaf of millet bread and a little jar of beer; he made his dinner of them. The moon had risen high in the sky. Ra's pale afterbirth, it symbolized the mysterious cycle that united all truth. Hapure was fond of the moon; he liked to consider its meanings of surge and ebb, life and death, power and weakness. He munched the millet bread and drank his beer and told himself that as long as the cycle was uninterrupted Egypt and he would remain.

A faint silvery jingling reached his ears.

He lifted his head, his mouth still full of bread, and strained to hear. It was the wind. A stone falling. No. He heard it more clearly: the music of sistra and flute.

He got to his feet and drew back into the doorway, trying to keep out of sight. He put his head around the corner of the doorway to see. The music seemed stronger now. It came from down the valley, and it was approaching him.

A low cry escaped him. Around the curve in the valley a procession was winding.

Three by three, musicians circled around the bend in the trail and walked down toward the two tombs. Some held sistra in their hands, the branches hung with tiny silver and gold leaves that shivered together when they were shaken. Some carried flutes, and some played on little drums. Their feet kept time. Their song was sweet. Women followed after them with urns and boxes. As they marched, the women chanted ancient laments for the dead; they bent to scoop up dust from the road and scattered it over their garments.

Hapure flattened his body to the inner wall of the passageway; he craned his neck to see. The first of the musicians had reached the doorway across from the one where Hapure was hiding, and still the procession wound back out of sight around the bend in the valley, with more people rounding it every moment.

The musicians surrounded the doorway. Bending from side to side, they combined the delicate voices of their instruments into music as sad and various as the wind. As each group of women reached the tomb, they drew up to one side or the other. Their voices keened. Their bodies swayed from side to side.

Hapure shivered in the passageway, his arms wrapped around himself. His breath had stopped in his throat.

Six oxen trudged into sight down the valley. They dragged behind them a sled hung with the trappings of Osiris, god of the dead. On the sled lay a body. Behind him more women walked, lamenting, their white garments rent and stained with dust, and their arms raised in mourning.

Slow-pacing, the oxen drew the dead man on his bier down to a stop on the path, midway between Hapure's hiding place and the tomb entrance on the opposite hillside. The men came forward to remove the dead Osiris and bear him into his house of eternal life.

One of the women behind the sled rushed forward. She threw herself on the breast of Osiris and cried out in anguish. Hapure wrung his hands together. Her grief stirred him to the tenderest pity. The men lifted her up; they bore off her dead husband into his grave.

Singing and sighing, the women followed into the dark passageway. Hapure shook himself out of his daze. His heart was pounding. He understood now what secret he was to carry in his heart.

The stranger in the white robe who had brought him here was climbing the slope toward him. Hapure collected his wits. He rubbed his sweating palms together.

“Come,” the stranger said.

Hapure took his sack of tools on his shoulder and went after him down to the trail and past the oxen and up the steep rise to the other tomb. The moonlight seemed cold. He shivered a little when the wind touched him. He walked between the rows of musicians whose sistra and flutes graced the air with song. The stranger led him into the tomb.

At the far end of the long, sloping corridor was a lamp, lighting a square-cut doorway. Hapure lowered his eyes. He was afraid of what he knew. The stranger guided him down to the lamplit door and into a wide empty room hollowed in the rock.

Two doorways led from this chamber into other chambers. The stranger took Hapure across the room to the farther of the doors.

“You will stop up this doorway. Here are the bricks.” The guide indicated a stack of bricks with his hand.

Hapure fell to work. He kept his eyes lowered. He tried to seem ignorant, as if his knowledge did not burn in him.

But he saw, almost against his will, into the chamber he was blocking up; he saw the great sarcophagus there, hewn of stone as old as the world, which now contained the body of Osiris.

He laid brick on brick evenly across the doorway, spacing them with an expert eye so that they filled the door exactly. They had mortar ready, and an urn of water, and he mixed the water into the mortar and layered it onto the bricks. Gradually he became aware that another person had come up behind him and stood there beside his guide, watching.

He set the last brick in place, and from behind him came a sigh, so soft he scarcely heard it.

Adding more water to the mortar, he stirred it well with his stick and began to spread it over the face of the bricks. He worked as fast as he could. The only sound now was the sound of his trowel dipping into the wet slip and slopping across the brick wall. He covered the whole of the brickwork, smoothed the edges, and stepped back. Already the slip was drying.

A slight, tail figure stepped past him, knelt, and pressed a seal to the drying plaster. It was a woman. She rose to seal the door again at eye level. Her only garment was of sheer linen, torn and stained with mourning. Hapure licked his lips, his eyes upon her. She wore no sign of her rank, but he knew her, as all Egypt knew her, for Nefertiti the Beautiful One Who Comes.

She turned, the seal in her hand, and her eyes met his. For an instant, his whole attention fixed by her beauty, he could not look away.

“Thank you,” she said.

He went down on his knees, his head bent.

A hoarse voice spoke softly behind him. “Shall we bring in the furnishings, O Lotus of the God?”

“Let it be done,” she said.

Then the servants of Osiris began to file into the chamber, and each of them brought some object for the comfort of him in his life beyond the grave. Hapure, on his knees, bit his tongue to keep from gasping. He saw them stack up chairs and couches as if they were fuel for the fire—priceless things, gleaming with gold and jewels in the light of the lamps. They brought in jars of food for Osiris, and little statues of themselves, to serve the god in his eternal life as they had served him in this. They brought in little boats that he might sail on the eternal river, and nets to catch his fish, and fowling nets; they brought caskets of jewels and piles of clothing, and laid it all down and left. The room that had seemed so large when empty shrank with each new offering until at last there was no space left save that where Hapure knelt and Nefertiti stood.

They went out, and Hapure shut up this chamber in its turn with bricks, and Nefertiti sealed it.

On the surface the musicians still played their timeless song. Hapure stood off to one side, his hands clasped together. One by one, the women knelt down at the doorway to the tomb and kissed the threshold, taking leave of him who now dwelled in eternity. They rose. They moved around Hapure as if he were a stone; they took no heed of him at all. The musicians went off down the valley. Their music grew fainter. The women followed with empty arms. The oxen dragged away the sled.

Hapure stood watching until they had gone. He passed his gaze once more around the valley. Nothing moved. It was as lonely as before. At the threshold of his hearing, the last whisper of the music played, and then was gone.

The stranger came to him. “You may go,” he said. He gave him a sack of money. “Speak of this to no one.”

Hapure closed his fingers around the purse. He knew he would not be able to keep secret the knowledge that burned in his heart. On quick feet he hurried away down the path that led to his village.

“The Queen,” said Sennahet, derisive.

“It was Nefertiti herself whom I saw! Oh, she is beautiful—more beautiful than her images, alive, and warm—” as he spoke, Hapure laid his hand over his breast.

They had met in the crowded street at the foot of the ferry stage. Every few moments a passerby brushed against Sennahet, or trod on his foot; he stood braced against the swarming people around him. Hapure was facing him, his expression intense. Sennahet scratched his chin. Hapure was usually a truthful man, but this story was fantastic, that he had spoken with the Queen Regent.

“Come to the beer yard,” Sennahet said. “Tell me the whole story.”

They walked single-file through the crowd. Hapure went first. Over his shoulder, he said, “I shall only drink one jar with you—my wife is still very sick.”

“In the hands of Isis let her lie,” Sennahet said.

Ahead two palm trees held their tasseled heads above the crowd, their slender trunks bracketing the gate. The two men went between them into the alehouse. The stone benches that lined the yard were all sat upon, and Hapure and Sennahet took their jars of beer to a corner of the wall and stood in the shade there.

“Now tell me your story,” Sennahet said.

“But you—am I keeping you from something?” Hapure stroked his chin with thumb and forefinger, his eyes shrewd.

“No, of course not,” Sennahet said. “I am looking for work. There is no work. Therefore I shall go to the temple and beg for beans and bread. Tell the story, my uncle, and take my mind from my unpleasant future.”

“Well, then,” Hapure said.