Star of Egypt (9 page)

“Shit.”

“That’s what all the applicants say,” intoned Slayton.

“Grounded before I even took off,” she said, petulantly yanking the trenchcoat belt out of its loops and throwing it on the
floor. She whipped off the coat and tossed it over Slayton’s head.

She did not have anything on underneath the coat, and Slayton recognized the essence of her final condition—Board Number Four,
as it were.

“Wait a minute,” she said as he pulled her down into the sofa. She unfastened his shirt and pants in record time.

“What is it?” he said against her mouth, trying to work at two or three things at once.

“The pictures,” she said, dropping the folder to the floor. “Don’t want to crush them.”

He was already mostly stripped. “Good thinking, Mister Bond.” Her body melted onto his, and they fit together very well indeed.
Practice was everything.

Slayton managed to fulfill all of Wilma’s conditions.

The uncrated artifacts were fabulously beautiful. They glowed, unlike rotting shards of pottery or dead silk, centuries old.
Some of the items looked newly minted, as gleaming and dazzling today as forty centuries ago. Slayton caught his breath in
fascination.

And through the tableau moved a figure from another time, an enchanting woman with flowing dark hair. She might have been
a court dancer from the Pharoah’s stable, or some kind of concubine indoctrinated in the arts that drive men wild and cause
thrones to fall. Here, she touched a golden jug in passing; there, caressed the flank of a glittering sarcophagus.

Slayton saw how easily Shauna Ramsey fit into the strange jigsaw of Egyptology. It had the power to hypnotize beautiful women,
to fascinate them in the
real
sense of the word, perhaps through the cat god, Bast, and the basilisk gaze that that particular daughter of Isis offered
the mute world.

“See how it all shines!” She was enraptured, enthusiastic. “This is the general arrangement, though everything is still scattered
around. Finishing touches come up until the last moment—Professor Willis is forever rearranging things in the interests of
historical accuracy; then Maggie changes them around to fit her concept of a more effective presentation.”

“The mummy goes here?” indicated Slayton, somewhat like a perturbed housewife unable to decide where to place the new piano.

“The sarcophagus area. The multiple coffins go inside, and the whole package goes here. Now—” she looked around, “—near the
sarcophagus go the Canopic jars; those are these.” She lifted an ornate jug to the light and it glittered. “Important for
several reasons. First, almost all the
mast
ă
bas
found previously were pre-Dynastic, which means they date to an era that wasn’t known for flashiness and ostentation.”

“All this elaborate, throw-away stuff came in with the pyramids, then? Disposable gold?”

“Roughly, yes. You know what Canopic jars are, don’t you?”

What was taking place was a quiz every bit as elaborate as the tomb furnishings Slayton was inspecting. His rudimentary Egyptological
knowledge was having its limits tested by Shauna—since Slayton had dropped a ringer on Willis earlier—and Slayton was in turn
quizzing Shauna, rationalizing that he had not yet pinned
her
to the wall, testing her in his subtle fashion to see if she was in fact what she claimed to be. It was time, and the touchy
game proceeded.

“Supplied for the storage of the intestines of the dead,” said Slayton. “Literally, guts. But heart, liver, and so on, too,
all supposedly to be restored in the Afterlife.”

“But
these
Canopic jars indicate that Seth-Olet was treated to the most expensive form of
qes
, because under the cheaper methods, the organs were dissolved.”

“How expensive was all this?”

“One talent of silver. In 1904, that equalled about £240, or… I’m lousy at mathematics….”

“Around six hundred bucks. Six hundred 1904 bucks,” Slayton said. “Still pretty costly. What did you get for your money?”

“You got your brain removed through your nose with a pair of iron forceps,” said Shauna. “Then you were slit open—by Guild
practitioners, of course, all this being done strictly according to law—with a sharp Ethiopian stone. Your intestines were
removed, cleansed in palm wine, salted with aromatic gums that had been beaten into powder, and placed in the jars.”

“Good idea,” said Slayton, who knew from bitter experience what a freshly slit-open corpse smelled like.

“
Then,
” Shauna said, moving to several jars decorating a counter top, “your body would be filled up with myrrh and cassia—and anything
else that was astringent and smelled good—and then laid in natron for seventy days. Natron is a sodium carbonate, hydrated,
and it certainly killed any odors that were left. But after they removed you, they washed you again anyway. Then you got wrapped
up in linen strips smeared with gum—three or four hundred yards-worth of bandages. That’s just for openers.”

“Do tell,” said Slayton.

There was mischief in Shauna’s eyes. “Okay, you asked for it. Come over here, I want you to see this stuff so you don’t think
I’m making this all up.”

Slayton obliged, and found himself at a desklike table scattered with yet-uncataloged odds and ends. He held up a small, heavy
image of a man in repose.

“I think this is called a
cartonnage
, isn’t it?” The work appeared very intricate. “What’s it made out of?”

“Twenty to forty layers of that linen, glued together, a lot like pasteboard, then covered with stucco. The coloring is tempera;
the inscriptions are the names of deities and things from the Book of the Dead. You find the Book of the Dead everywhere;
apparently, the more times you mentioned it on your burial items, the better chance you had at the Afterlife.”

“What do you do with this?”

“It goes inside the wrappings. You find all sorts of things wrapped up with the mummy—porcelain bugles, images of gods, and
of course, chapters from the Book of the Dead.”

“An ominous title, like the
Necronomicon.
”

“Actually closer to a combination of
Frankenstein
and the Bible. It was called
Per em hru
, ‘the chapters of coming forth by day,’ a collection of burial-related chants. Sort of a hymnal of chapters regarding the
dead.”

More little figurines like the
cartonnage
lay to one side, and Slayton browsed over them.

“Those are
Ushabtiu
figures, old kings, generally—to do services for the dead. They were made out of everything—wax, clay, stone, wood, porcelain—and
the inscriptions—”

“More Book of the Dead?”

“Right. They were placed all around the coffin, like the Canopic jars. But the most important little guy was this one, placed
in the coffin with the mummy, or actually wrapped up in the bandages.”

Slayton lifted a wooden figure carved onto a thick base, almost like a coffee-table statue.

“That’s a
Ptah-Seker-Åus
å
r
figure. A triune god—do you know the components?”

“Uh—” Slayton wracked his memory; the names were familiar from his quick research. “Uh—
Ptah
… the creator.
Seker
was the god of death.
Åus
å
r
was another name for… um, Osiris, god of resurrection and therefore, immortality.”

The little figure wore horns, a sun disk, and plumes on its tiny head to verify each of Slayton’s descriptions.

“There’s a little drawer there in the base,” said Shauna. “That’s the special part; it contained a papyrus roll with colored
vignettes of the mummy’s life and—”

“And more Book of the Dead,” Slayton added, obviously pleased with himself as well as with his vindication of the woman doggedly
describing everything in detail to him. Somehow she had sensed that he needed convincing.

“As for the other stuff near the coffin—” She indicated it with a sweep of her hand. “—those are all vessels of one type or
another, to hold food, wine, unguents, whatever viands the mummy might need… you must include items that the mummy used while
living, or prized, or just liked, and in Seth-Olet’s case that means we have a lot of ancient weaponry cluttering up the coffin
area… then you have gifts from the relatives and friends, which include little insignificant things, like chariots—of which
we have one, right over there—battle armor, pets—which means everything from mummified dogs and cats to horses…”

“God, if we did this that way today,” said Slayton, “it would mean about half the gross national product would go underground
every year.”

“It’s a fad that’s difficult to explain to a starving population,” offered Shauna.

“Spectacular, though. And much more involving for the people who knew the deceased. But I’m afraid I don’t have that many
friends who’d be willing to chant and sing at my funeral.”

“I don’t have that many friends, period,” said Shauna. “But, according to the beliefs, your Afterlife was literally in their
hands. Your friends and the priests were supposed to compose prayers and short litanies, all of which made reference to your
‘future life.’ The readings of these were all-important; they guaranteed you unhindered passage to God in the next world,
allowed you to overcome ghostly foes, would allow your corpse to resist corruption, and ensure you a new life, in a glorified
body, up there.” She jerked her thumb toward the ceiling.

“God help you if your friends wanted to screw you up,” summarized Slayton.

“It’s all a classical romantic notion,” she said. “A lost age. You’ll pardon my rambling. Sometimes I wonder if I won’t end
up like Professor Willis.”

“Bloody impossible,” said Slayton.

“I like the way you handled it,” she said, her face turned so that it was in darkness and the light shone on her cascade of
hair. “It took you about ten minutes to get over my body and start talking to me professionally.”

Slayton came to attention. “It’s not a routine, and I’m not that mechanical. I haven’t gotten over your body
yet.
”

“A battle between the physical and mental
personae
. My apologies. We’ve been working a lot. The last thing I expected to have on this tour was a sexual identity problem. There
was room in the Egyptian god-hierarchy for women, you know—every important god had a female counterpart or alter ego. They
were sexually interchangeable, unlike the Greeks or Romans where the distinction between god and goddess was sexist.” Her
words had dwindled into a kind of frustrated bitterness.

He said it too fast, but got it out: “Shauna, can I help at all?”

There was a long and decisive silence, then: “Yes. Yes, I think you might be able to.” She reached across the table, taking
his hands, pulling him toward her, wrapping her intoxicating body and scent in the warmest of embraces. Slayton held her that
way for several minutes, and when she had dammed back brief tears, she brought her head up from his shoulder and kissed him
thoroughly and hungrily, as though she were drawing sustenance from his body. It lasted quite a long time. She made small
sounds of pleasure.

And when she looked back at him her eyes were shining blackly, promising dancer’s eyes, and she said softly, “I’d like to
see Washington, now.”

By ten o’clock that evening, Ben Slayton had managed to shake the untidy notion that Rashid Haman might be Shauna Ramsey.
The new possibility that Haman might be a gestalt personality—that is, several people instead of a single man—was his new
theory, but it, too, was quiokly discounted. Haman’s blueprints, and gimmicks, bore the stamp of an individual. To Slayton’s
perception, egomania was easily added to the incomplete picture of that personality. Besides, if Haman were more than one
person—a group, say—then someone still had to make decisions, give orders… he could not visualize a terrorist phalange being
run like a San Francisco commune of the late 1960s, with community decisions overriding everything.

No, these notions were annoying sideroads, tossed into Slayton’s path to force him to waste time in fruitless pursuits, while
elsewhere, plans were being laid and actions taken. Misdirection was Haman’s forte. He seemed to be a man of many parts.

“A man in ancient Egypt was composed of nine distinct parts,” said Shauna, intruding on the subtext of Slayton’s thought.

“That sounds like a dirty joke.”

“No, it’s true. There’s your
khat;
that’s your physical self. Your corruptible body.”

“Leave my corruptible body out of this,” he said, waggling a Groucho Marx eyebrow. “I don’t have many faults, but I make the
most of the ones I
do
have.”

The devastated remains of their dinner filled the table before them, and periodically their waiter recharged their glasses
and kept them happy. The food at Haskell’s had always been secondary to the service, but all in all it was an entertaining
choice.

“Now, there’s also your
sāhu
, spiritual body, and
ăb
, your heart—heart in the sense of the seat of life and thought.”

“Sort of like id, ego, and superego.”

“Rather, yes. Then there’s your
ka
and your
ba.
”

Slayton could not hold back the laugh that welled up. “I’m sorry,” he said, going for his napkin.

“This is serious business,” she chided. “
Ba
is literally your soul.
Ka
is your double, an abstract sort of essence of individuality.
Ka
is endowed with your personality, all of your characteristic attributes—in your case, that redolent sense of humor—and it
has an
absolutely independent existence
. They thought one’s
ka
could inhabit a statue of the deceased, another reason for all the figurines.”

“But, if I get blown away by someone, I don’t even have a statue. The closest thing I have is an inflatable doll in the bottom
drawer of my dresser.”

Shauna cleared her throat like a teacher admonishing a naughty schoolboy, continuing, “You also have a shadow, a
khaibit;
a wispy sort of intelligence or similitude called
khu
—a ‘shining’ is a good word for it—and a
sekhem
, a divine form.” This time, Shauna laughed.