The Sleeper in the Sands (40 page)

Then there came a sudden slithering of pebbles, and panting gasps, as the guards emerged from the entrance to the tomb. They were carrying a chest the size of a man, and Tyi saw that the seals upon its side had been broken. ‘This was what they wanted,’ reported one of the guards as the chest was laid down carefully. ‘It lay within the innermost of the Pharaoh’s coffins. When we found it, the lid had been only half set back in place.’

King Amen-hetep glanced down at Inen, who began suddenly to laugh - not wildly as before but with an insolent menace. Tyi marked how the blood had drained from her son’s face, and for a moment she thought that he would strike his uncle; but then he turned back to the chest and nodded to the guard. A heave, and the lid was pulled away. King Amen-hetep gazed down, then at once looked away. However, as Tyi stepped forward to see what lay inside, he joined her again in inspecting the contents, and the two of them, for a long while, stood together in silence.

‘Fourteen pieces,’ said King Amen-hetep at last. He turned back to Inen. ‘You have sawn him, like Osiris, into fourteen pieces. But why?’ He seized Inen; he shook him. ‘Why?’

Inen did not reply, but Tyi could already feel the answer deep within her stomach. ‘Look,’ she said, pointing, ‘the flesh beneath the wrappings -- how it seems to stir -- how it seems still alive!’ She reached for the head and raised it to the sun.

Even beneath the blackened swathes of linen wrapping, a very faint flickering could be seen from the eyelids, and when Tyi pulled the wrappings away from the mouth she saw how the shrivelled tongue still seemed to move. She gazed at it dumbly and then passed it to her son, who shuddered with mingled revulsion and disbelief.

‘Truly’ he exclaimed, ‘never have I seen such a horror before, nor anything stranger nor full of darkest mystery!’ Reverently he laid the head within the chest, then turned, still shaking, to stare back down at Inen. ‘What is the nature and the meaning of this sorcery’ he demanded, ‘this evil so loathsome that I dread to learn your answer?’

Inen smiled but still did not reply. It reminded Tyi, watching him, of how he had smiled at her before, standing in the shadows of the temple of Amen, listening to the mewling of the mutilated cat.

‘I can tell you,’ she said slowly, stepping forward.

‘No!’ For the first time since being brought down from the stake, Inen spoke. ‘No!’ he cried out again. ‘No, you must not!’

‘Why not?’

‘The secret must remain ours.’

‘No.’

‘But surely . . .’ Inen gazed at his sister in disbelief. ‘You will not . . . not turn down the offer I have made? Come!’ He rose suddenly to his feet and sought to take her by the arm. ‘We must leave now, leave here, the moment has come!’

But Tyi shrank away from him, shuddering violently. ‘Never!’ she cried out. ‘I would rather die than leave with you!’

Inen froze. ‘Rather die?’ he whispered. All the emotion, all the life seemed to bleed from his face. Then suddenly he laughed, as he had laughed before, with a mockery compounded of bitterness and rage. ‘But you will never die,’ he whispered. ‘Not you, nor him’ -- he gestured to her son -- ‘nor any of your blood-line, you will never die! See!’ -- he reached for the severed head of Tyi s husband -- Witness the fate you have chosen for yourself!’

‘So it is true’ -- King Amen-hetep gazed down at the segments of his father’s body - ‘he is still alive indeed?’

‘Were he to be sliced into an infinite number of particles, were his blood to be mingled with the waters of the world, were his bones to be crushed and ground into a dust, even so -- the essence of his life would remain.’

Tyi gazed at her son with undisguised fear, yet King Amen-hetep’s expression remained perfectly calm. ‘How can that be possible?’ he asked.

‘By the will of the gods.’

‘I do not believe you.’

‘Yet even so, it is the truth.’

‘How?’

‘It was ordained and achieved by the Lady Isis, most cunning of the immortals, mistress of the secret wisdom of the stars, who bred from Osiris a line of deathless kings. What magic such kings might then possess, what qualities of sorcery were flowing through their blood, was suggested by the actions of the goddess herself, when she ordered her husband to be sealed within a chest and his body dismembered into fourteen parts.’

‘No,’ Tyi cried out, ‘no, no, that was Seth!’

Inen laughed. ‘So it is taught. But do you truly think that we who guard the wisdom of the gods would betray our deepest and most ageless mysteries, and reveal them to the ignorant prying of the masses? No, for were the truth to be wholly understood, then all would be immortals, for all would eat the flesh of the line of living gods, preserved and dismembered as the rituals have taught us.’ He gazed down again at the corpse within the chest. ‘Food for the gods, formed from the gods.’

King Amen-hetep gazed at him impassively, then stared down into the chest. ‘And all my forefathers,’ he asked softly, ‘you have served in this same way?’

‘As I said,’ answered Inen, ‘the ritual demands it, that the bodies be preserved within the coffins for seventy days, and then dismembered into fourteen parts.’

‘So that was why you broke into my father’s tomb. Yet why have you been disrupting the other Pharaohs’ tombs?’

‘To remove the bodies and replace them, so that no one would ever know they had been taken. Yet now it matters little, for they have all -- save this one -- been safely transported.’

‘To where?’

‘To an older temple, far within the desert, which marks the place where the gods first arrived from the stars. Do not ask me for its location, for I shall never reveal it, nor will you ever discover it for yourself

‘Yet why do you need so desperately to flee there?’

‘Because, O great Pharaoh, we feared what you might do. You may take it’ - he inclined his head -- ‘as a compliment. Yet do not think’ -- he paused, to gaze again into the chest -- ‘that we shall never return, for in time you will grow to be a withered, ancient thing, a breeder of monsters like your own father here. Until that moment, as the rituals demand, we must leave you to rule upon the throne of your forefathers -- and yet in the end,’ he smiled, ‘do not doubt that I shall feed upon you. Yes’ -- he glanced at Tyi - ‘and upon your living flesh as well.’

‘Yet still,’ said Tyi slowly, ‘you are not immortal after all.’

Inen breathed in deeply as though suddenly winded, and gazed at her silently through narrowing eyes.

Tyi smiled; she turned to her son. ‘Pierce his heart. Then you will see him die.’

For a long time no one spoke. ‘Is this true?’ said King Amen-hetep to Inen at last.

Inen met his stare; then he looked away.

King Amen-hetep smiled crookedly and, shielding his eyes, raised his gaze up to the sun. ‘I am sworn,’ he murmured, ‘not to slay any living creature.’ He glanced back at Inen. ‘Not even you.’

Tyi gazed at her son in disbelief. ‘You will set him free?’

‘Cruel, to live for ever with a face marked like his.’ King Amen-hetep gazed at his uncle’s noseless face, at the still bleeding wounds where the ears had been, then turned back to Tyi. ‘Even crueller, O my mother, to live for ever without love -- to live for ever without you.’

Inen bowed low, and seemed almost to spit with contempt. ‘Yet not so cruel, O Pharaoh, as to live with the knowledge of what must happen to you.’

King Amen-hetep gazed again into the brightness of the sun. ‘All things, we must trust, are possible to the All-High.’

‘It may be. And yet the solution lies before you already, in this chest.’ Inen reached for a portion of the withered arm. ‘Eat it,’ he whispered, brandishing it slowly before both Pharaoh and Tyi. ‘It is not too late. You may both yet be saved. It does not need your god in the sun to help you now’

Tyi gazed at the flesh with a sudden desperate longing, and Inen smiled as he interpreted the gleam within her eyes.

She turned to her son. Even he, she realised, seemed filled with an eager, wavering doubt; then, as she watched him, he reached out for the morsel of flesh. ‘And yet . . .’he whispered suddenly. He stared up at the sun. ‘If we eat this, what a curse we may prove to be to man. Dangerous enough, even as we are -- yet how much more so if we never wither or decline. No!’ He placed the portion of flesh back in the chest. ‘Take it away! We cannot endure the temptation of its presence here.’ He paused, then gazed down at the severed portions of his father. ‘See how he proves what he always said - that the world is nothing but a pattern of destruction. And yet I vow -- I pray -- that all shall be reversed.’

So saying, he turned and walked away, leaving Tyi for a moment standing rooted by the chest. Her eyes met Inen’s; then she too turned and left. Neither looked behind as they rode down the path, but continued on their way until they came into the temple. Once arrived there, they passed into the innermost sanctuary and then beyond, past the pool and into the darkness. Set far back in the wall there was a tiny door, and beyond the door one further, final room. A statue stood there with the crown and robes of Isis, and a form that Tyi could recognise by glancing at her son; and yet, in truth, the statue seemed barely to have a mortal form at all, so hideous, so deformed the sculptor had made it, more loathsome than anything that Tyi had ever seen.

‘No wonder,’ King Amen-hetep whispered, ‘that they kept it hidden in this place of darkness. For it is dangerous for mortals to endure such a sight.’ He paused a moment -then heaved at the statue, which toppled and shattered into fragments on the floor. King Amen-hetep trampled the pieces into dust beneath his feet.

It was later that day that Kiya gave birth. The child was a boy, and it was not stillborn. He was given the name of Smenkh-ka-Re.

It was also on that same day, when King Amen-hetep lay down to rest, that he saw in his dreams a burning image of the sun.

But at this point, Haroun saw the approach of morning and broke off from his tale. ‘O Commander of the Faithful,’ he said, ‘if you would care to return here tomorrow evening, then I shall describe to you the nature and the fruit of King Amen-hetep’s dreams.’

And so the Caliph did as Haroun suggested; and the following evening he returned to the mosque.

And Haroun said:

Every night the dream would be the same, a vision of a blazing, infinite sun, of a brightness impossible for mortal eye to bear; yet King Amen-hetep found that, as the months began to pass, so the brilliance of the light grew easier to endure. He would imagine that he was starting to see, almost imperceptibly through the wheeling golden rays, the outline of something else, something other than the sun. ‘O Divine Lord of all,’ he would cry out in his dream, ‘mighty living Aten, grant me the strength to glimpse what is veiled’; and then he would stare into the very heart of the sun. But the brightness would fade, the dream melt away; and King Amen-hetep would wake alone in his bed, as the dawning of the true sun filled his room with morning light.

How he would long then, in the bitterness of his disappointment, for Kiya, his Queen, to be again by his side. He knew, though, that he could not permit it - had not permitted it, indeed, since that afternoon when he had first learned the full truth about his state. What other hope did he have, after all, of destroying the curse, of damming the ages-old flow of tainted blood, save by being the last of his long line to bear it? Already he had a son; and when he gazed upon Smenkh-ka-Re, suckling at Kiya’s breast, or lying asleep, he would dread to think that even such a child, so lovely to behold, and so innocent, might bear poison in his veins. Sometimes King Amen-hetep would seek to put the terror from his mind; yet he knew, in the end, that he could not afford to do so, for it was that terror alone now which served to keep his will alive. Without it, he knew he would have slept with Kiya each and every night, for his desire seemed to grow the more his body came to change, flickering and scorching through his limbs like a desert fire -- urging him, taunting him to put the flames out.

So it was that he came to hate the very sight of Kiya, as the reminder of a happiness forever lost; and he banished her from his presence, and lived with her no more. And so it was that he grew to hate all his favourite pleasures -- the calm of the lake where he had once sat with his grandfather, the walks through the fields to see the blooming of the flowers, the voyages along the stately curving of the Nile, where the wealth and the beauties of life lay spread before him -- all that he had ever valued and most adored; for everything now seemed as though turned into dust. Desperate were King Amen-hetep s prayers to the Aten -- but ever looming the temple of Amen still rose. For all that he had toppled the idol in its heart, King Amen-hetep feared to touch that vast edifice of stone -- in dread, perhaps, though he would not admit as much, that the power of the Aten was indeed an illusion, that nothing could succeed against the ancient, deathly gods. As though it were a veil of sands upon the winds, scalding the fields and the cooling lakes, the temple’s shadow spread wide and dark across Thebes, so that King Amen-hetep imagined it even in his soul.

Yet still there were his dreams; and in those the blaze of the sun remained undimmed, and with it, perhaps, a token of the power of the Aten. So at least King Amen-hetep prayed, for as time slipped by so the glimpse of some vision beyond the blazing sun, seeming to grow stronger with each succeeding night, tantalised the dreamer with a gnawing sense of hope. He began to distinguish, still faintly, a crescent of cliffs framing what appeared to be a dusty plain of sand. Soon, as the vision grew clearer, he saw that a river was flowing by the plain, very wide, with a fringe of reeds along its bank, and he knew when he awoke that such a river could only be the Nile. In great excitement he summoned his uncle, Ay, and described to him the vision of the scene from his dream, then ordered that men be sent along the Nile, to the reaches of both Upper and Lower Egypt, to see if such a place might indeed be discovered. Impatiently King Amen-hetep waited, for still, every night, the scene grew clearer in his dreams, and he was certain that it could only be a message from the heavens, filled with a strange and terrible promise. Then it happened at last that a messenger returned and, having bowed low before King Amen-hetep, looked up at him with joy. ‘O happy King,’ he cried, ‘for many days I did as you commanded, and followed the river as it flows out to the sea. I saw how, all along the eastern bank, the cliffs rose up sheer and inhospitable, and I despaired of discovering the scene you had described. But then it happened at last that the cliffs curved away, and I saw a plain in the shape of a circle cut in two, and marshes fringing the river bank.’ And King Amen-hetep, hearing this, raised up a prayer of exultation; then he left that same day upon his barge down the Nile, until at length he arrived at the place found by his servant, and he knew, as he gazed at it, that it was the place from his dreams.