Night Magic

PROLOGUE:
The Sorcerer

CHAPTER ONE:
Saskia in Tears

CHAPTER TWO:
Michael into Frog

CHAPTER THREE:
Slide Show

CHAPTER FOUR:
Kindred Spirits

CHAPTER FIVE:
Up on the Roof

CHAPTER SIX:
The Retentive Host

CHAPTER SEVEN:
Stakeouts

CHAPTER EIGHT:
The Mechanical Man and the Disappearing Duck

CHAPTER NINE:
Dreams and Revelations

CHAPTER TEN:
The Eye of Horus

CHAPTER ELEVEN:
Lost and Found

CHAPTER TWELVE:
Face to Face

CHAPTER THIRTEEN:
Help Wanted

CHAPTER FOURTEEN:
Night School

CHAPTER FIFTEEN:
All Hallows Eve

CHAPTER SIXTEEN:
The Sorcerer's Apprentice

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN:
Come into My Parlor

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN:
The Incident in the Garden

CHAPTER NINETEEN:
Hail and Farewell

EPILOGUE

About the Author

And Moses and Aaron went in unto Pharaoh, and they did so as the Lord had commanded: and Aaron cast down his rod before Pharaoh, and before his servants, and it became a serpent.

Then Pharaoh also called the wise men and the sorcerers: now the magicians of Egypt, they also did in like manner with their enchantments.

For they cast down every man his rod, and they became serpents: but Aaron’s rod swallowed up their rods
.

I maintain that this is possible. It is not possible, you reply. Obviously one of us is wrong.

W
HO WAS GREATER IN
all the world than the pharaohs of Egypt, and of these who greater than great Cheops, he who was building the Great Pyramid at Giza? Pharaoh was blessed with sons, and one of them, Prince Dedefhar, was a harmless dabbler in magic for the amusement of his family and friends, and because of his prestidigitatorial talents the prince found himself a popular fellow indeed. How had he learned these things? As all magicians do, from another wonder-worker—a case of sleight-of-hand-me-down. But from which magician? For there were many such in the two kingdoms of the Nile, some of them white magicians, and some black, capable of terrible powers and great sins.

At that time, when the pharaoh ruled from Memphis, there was an old Canaanite who worked the marketplace. He came, it was said, from the coastal city of Byblos in the Lebanon, whence arrived the cedar wood for Cheops’s tomb furniture and funerary boat. But he had wandered far indeed from the coast of Canaan, past the fortified walls of Jericho, across the lands of the sand-dwellers, which fringed Pharaoh’s kingdom on the northeast, and down through Akkad to the ancient cities of Sumer. He had drunk from the waters of the Euphrates, he had seen the Great Palace and the Royal Tombs of Ur, he had visited Uruk of the strong walls and heard the tale of its mighty King Gilgamesh, whose beloved friend Enkidu went down to the land of the dead and whose bitter tears and dangerous quests could not avail to bring him back.

It was further said of the old Canaanite that he had been a mendicant throughout the Kingdom of the Lower Nile; but now, amid the dust, the flies, and the camel dung, he had found gainful employment as a potter, throwing clay vessels on a wheel and producing prodigies of gracefulness and character. Or for the children he would fashion little clay hippopotamuses or crocodiles, which he would fire and paint. One of these little figures, it was reported, had been given life through incantations and black magic, and the beast grew to a fearful size, twelve feet long and more; it had seized a man in its jaws, carried him off to the river, and drowned him. (Nobody cared; the man was bad, they said, good riddance!) Such were the tales concerning the Canaanite magician, who, while he worked at his potter’s wheel, would mumble disjointedly in a language no one understood; people whispered that he was a sorcerer, rehearsing his spells.

When he was not muttering over his labors, he would amuse the crowd with conjuring tricks and feats of juggling. He could behead a dove and make it spurt blood, then instantly restore it to flight. He kept a cat called Thoth, for Thoth was the god who had invented magic and made the tarot. And he could make painted balls seem to hang in the air while he tossed and caught them.

Surrounded by thin-ribbed dogs and thin-faced children, he could pull yard after yard of colored silk from his rags, or bring forth from nowhere flocks of birds aflutter. Sometimes he would leave his wheel to read fates and fortunes in the tarot of Thoth, and he stood in the dust in a circle that he claimed was charmed.

When he returned to his pots at the wheel, mudding up the clay with his fingers and using a peculiar metal stylus to inscribe spiraling rings around the outside surface, he muttered and mumbled like an old fool, as if he were talking the pots into existence. Still, it was said he was a sorcerer, a man to beware.

But how had a member of the royal family happened upon so disreputable a figure as this magician? It was simply done: one day, proceeding in pomp through the marketplace, the young prince chanced upon the Canaanite juggling his wooden balls, and the prince was amused. That, he declared, was something to learn, to juggle wooden balls so cleverly, and he asked Pharaoh that the magician be brought to the palace to teach him. But the magician proved to be an eater of pork, an abomination, who rightfully should not even have been admitted into the marketplace but kept outside the gates altogether. Still, Prince Dedefhar persisted, and at length the magician was admitted to Pharaoh’s presence, where he was ordered to instruct the prince as the prince desired; and before long the magician had the boy tossing up the balls adroitly, and next had him bringing forth pigeons as if from thin air.

Still, when he had accomplished these tricks the prince remained unsatisfied, desiring now to lay out the tarot cards of Thoth and tell fates and fortunes; but this was not so easy to teach, for it was a skill requiring much thought and patience. Nevertheless, having been enjoined by Pharaoh so to instruct the boy, the magician brought out his tarot deck and had him shuffle the cards and showed him how to lay them out on the table, and when the boy had studied the colored pictures and had learned their various meanings, the magician gave him an amulet that would help him interpret their significance. This amulet was an Eye of Horus, painted in azure on faience, and a present worthy of royalty, for it was an amulet with an interesting history, possessed of strange and wondrous properties. Horus, the great celestial falcon-god who personified and ruled the sky, had for eyes the morning sun and the evening sun (though some said the sun and the moon), and a replica of his divine Eye was a mighty charm for making offerings more acceptable and rituals more potent. Such an Eye, it was said, could see both the future and the past and was an invaluable aid in matters of necromancy and in prophecy.

The prince wore the Eye of Horus about his neck and learned the tarot well, and in his turn and for the sake of practice he laid out the cards as he had been taught and proceeded to tell the magician’s own fate.

The first card he turned up was that of the Hanged Man, and the magician blanched, for he had taught his pupil well. The card of the Hanged Man meant but one thing: death upon the gallows. And both prince and magician were filled with fear.

There was at that time an even greater magician (so it was said) living at Ded-Snefru, farther down the Nile, who, having heard of the Canaanite in the marketplace who had so charmed the prince, became jealous and vowed to do away with his rival. The sorcerer’s name was Dedi; it was whispered that he practiced the black arts and was capable of all manner of horrors that affrighted all who saw them. It was said that this Dedi could go to the House of the Dead in the great necropolis and call forth the spirits that had departed from the dead, and that he could perform other prodigies of necromancy, bringing the dead to life and delving into their secrets. Being forced to take note of this upstart Canaanite from Byblos, Dedi was filled with hate and malice, and resolved to rid himself of so contemptible an adversary.

The manner of revenge chosen by Dedi was wicked indeed. Many spells were cast, many incantations chanted, and before long the old Canaanite’s pupil, the young prince, fell ill. On the orders of his father and mother, Dedefhar was removed from the company of the magician to that of the court physicians, who labored desperately to save the boy’s life. Their efforts failing, the prince succumbed to his malady, though the cause of death was not immediately determined. Since the disease was, however, first manifested by an insidious form of scrofula, Dedi caused to be repeated the rumor that the prince’s contact with the Canaanite magician had brought him low. Dedi rejoiced when Cheops, believing the story, banished his rival from all the lands of Egypt.

Meanwhile, the young prince’s body lay for some weeks in the House of the Dead, forbidden by ancient custom to be touched by other than those individuals and priests certified to prepare it for burial. Once this was accomplished, it was bedecked with an array of jewels, talismans, amulets, and medals, not for the sake of ornament but to give the deceased strength and possessions while wandering in the underworld: a gold ring for the little finger, a bracelet around the wrist, and, on the chest, that same Eye of Horus whose occult properties the prince had become so fond of. After the body was smeared with more magic oil and henna paste, the wrapping was begun, with each resin-soaked strip carefully and traditionally placed, forming a warp and weft of ancient configuration, the strips inscribed with prayers and marked in ink with holy symbols. To do all this properly required a goodly time.

During this period, with the stench of asafetida rank in the gloom, the corpse was watched over night and day by priests who, sleepless and unrelieved, were held responsible for its safekeeping until it might be entombed. On the night before the remains were completely wrapped, the guardian priests fell one by one asleep, until only the last of them remained awake. Having extinguished the burning incense, this man removed the cotton wadding from his nostrils and approached the corpse, whose linen swathes he unwrapped until he exposed the Eye of Horus lying upon the prince’s chest. This he sequestered, then took up a position close to the corpse, holding its hands pressed between his own and laying his shorn head upon its breast, as if absorbing what remaining life currents might still emanate from the dead. Thus embracing the prince, he continued through the night, and thus was he found the next day. Accused of defiling the holy dead, the culprit was brought before Pharaoh, where he was recognized as the magician from the marketplace who had taught the king’s son to juggle and to bring forth blue pigeons from the air.

How he had breached the sacred precincts of the House of the Dead disguised as a priest never came to light, though it was said before he was sentenced to hang that he claimed to have been born during the reign of Menes himself, an unbelievable allegation, since Menes, the first Pharaoh of all Egypt, had reigned some four hundred years earlier. Such talk enraged Dedi, who was resolved to put an end to this charlatan-beggar for once and all. But first there were the rites to be performed, that Prince Dedefhar might be properly laid to rest.

No such rites awaited the magician, only the unmarked grave of the pariah; in retaliation for the theft of the Eye of Horus he was blinded in one eye and hanged before the populace, and within a month no one even recalled the charlatan who had performed tricks amid the dust and dogs and dung of the marketplace.

And Dedi, king of conjurors, ruled supreme in the Upper Kingdom and in the Lower as well.