The Book of the Dead (3 page)

Ramesses gets what she means. He nods his understanding.

The scroll turns out to be a map. Ramesses’ gaze immediately seeks the river of his country and the green around it, but although he finds many rivers, none are the right shape. In fact, he doesn’t recognise a single geographical feature. He can’t even find the great waterfall that he’s heard outside.

He looks up and sees that Seth is smiling at him. “You got separated from your coffin book,” he says. “So I thought I’d show you our own
Book of the Dead
: a map of the United States, circa 1999.” He puts a cook’s relish into the pronunciation of each meaningless digit. “That’s what the locals call the Duat and that’s the year by their calendar. The Duat, you see, extends far beyond the walls of this building. In fact it only properly begins just south of here. We’re in its hinterland, another country.” His finger stabs down and down and down, faster than Ramesses can follow. “Over here’s the White House, here’s Disneyland, here’s Canaveral, here’s Graceland, here’s Nashville.” The finger spins. “In the air above it all, fear of the future, which is starting to crystallise as...” He spreads his palms wide to create a shadow with wiggling fingers on the map. “The Millennium Bug!” He laughs. It’s not a nice laugh. “What the future actually holds for them... well, that’s in the next drawer!”

Ramesses tries not to frown again. “You speak as though this is a real nation, with real subjects.”

“They do think of it in that way, yes,” he chuckles.

“So... if all this is the Duat...”

Seth nods. “You haven’t started your journey yet.”

“Why?”

“Because the Duat is the land of opportunity, a mirror of the mirror of heaven, and you’ve done nothing to take advantage of the opportunity you’ve been given. You were separated from your grave goods, which is where your ka goes back to during the day. And I’ve come back here night after night waiting for you to make your first move. In that time I’ve seen so many other guys get to where they’re going –”

“My people –”

“The ones who died after you did are in a holding pattern. They’re fine. The ones born after you died went on along after the next Pharaoh, your son.”

“Seti has already –”

“He has indeed. And many others after him.”

“What must I do?”

Seth gestures at the map. “I’ve let your ba go on ahead, as far as it can. Catch up to it, where it’s waiting for you, at the Weighing of your Heart.”

Ramesses leans closer, to where his thin eyes can see the words beside the geographical features, and he finally sees something he recognises. He finds he knows many of the inscriptions. They are familiar from the Books of the Dead he has seen prepared for others. So here are destinations. But they don’t suggest a path. He is aware now of the shadow of the rest of his people, falling on him from behind. He is not even on this map yet. He doesn’t know where he’ll enter or how. He looks up at Seth again. “If I open the doors and go out there...?”

“You’ll find your way. During your lifetime, you always had a map that led you along. But here, you’ll be lucky if you can get a few pointers. It’s all up to you. That’s the way we made it. Go out into the world of the day. Go to America.” And before Ramesses can take another look, he rolls up the map again, and puts it back in its cabinet. Then he looks back to the pharaoh. “You move on now.”

And the dog even barks in warning.

It’s winter here, he’s told, so the day of these people’s calendars will begin while it’s still dark. Ramesses will be able to leave when the doors are opened, when he would normally be driven back to his bed by the noise.

So Ramesses waits, standing around the halls a little awkwardly. Then, when the big doors are opened, and these pale people, who live, unknowingly, right next to the Duat, and are coloured fittingly for a life in shadow, start to flood in, he boldly marches towards them. Some of them scream and point, but some of them laugh, or even, more suitably, applaud. The eyes of children are shielded from him, but he suspects that’s not because of his magnificence, or his fearsomeness, but because of his tiny genitals.

He steps bravely out into this new world and winces. Oh, it’s a bit cold out here. He sees that the screams he heard are mostly the sounds of unusual vehicles. But under that is a bigger sound.

He goes to see the waterfall. He stands there for quite a while, letting the spray moisten his face. He finds a smile cracking his lips. This is great. And he’s full of hope, because he finally has a way.

A few passers-by actually ignore him when he asks which way America is. He’s not so bothered by that, just pleased that he can make himself understood. Eventually there’s one who points him in the right direction before hurrying away.

He spends several fruitless nights trying to get through customs. The guards at the gates turn him away and threaten him with arrest. He explains that he is the Pharaoh, that he is trying to save his people, but this does not impress them.

But he was not Pharaoh for nothing. He goes further away from the gates, into the streets and the buildings, and steals a coat. Then he tries the gates again, but is once more turned away. This is only to be expected. The journey through the Duat is all about getting past gates and those guarding them. During the days he sleeps in parks or in the gaps in the great stone palaces. Nobody bothers him. He wonders if this is part of his test.

He has an idea. He tries to find one of those urns he saw in the pictures. But those he sees are in strange contexts, unsuitable for his needs. Finally, he decides he can do without. That night, he steps over the low wall by the riverbank. He has never learned to swim, but it can’t be as hard as all that, and will not be required for the hardest part of this.

He floats, initially quite slowly, downstream. He is aware of cries from the bank as people notice him. The roaring of the great falls gets ever closer. He speeds up. He paddles a bit to make it faster. There are flashing lights by the side of the river now, but it’s too late, the spray is upon him!

He falls, laughing. He has passed the first gate!

He lands in the Duat in a deep pool. He waits. He does not need to breathe. He finally bobs to the surface a long way downstream, and is surprised to see the angry lights there too. He pushes at the water, and manages to head for where a group of trees stands beside the river, in some sort of park.

He struggles out of the river, and is away into the darkness before the guards can find him.

He is now in the Duat proper. The land of the souls that are free from their bodies. Not that they know it. He doesn’t need very much. He doesn’t get very much. He clothes himself by stealing, and drinks water from public fountains, merely to keep the power of speech. He expects the people here to be much more scared of him than they turn out to be. They can accept, it seems, almost anything. It helps that they will actually turn away from him rather than scare themselves by looking closely. It’s just as well they’re so hard to scare. But like animals that are hard to anger, Ramesses thinks, actually pushing them to that emotion might be a very bad idea.

He remembers a few things from the map. He knows where the challenges he must overcome can be found. And now he can look at other maps, and knows he is at the top, and presumably has to make his way to the bottom, as the country gets narrower and narrower. It is like being born again. And there was one name in particular that was meaningful to him on that first map, and so he must go there.

But there’s something that worries him. “The world of the day” was how Seth described this place. That sounds worryingly like sun worshipper talk. And everything Ramesses sees of religion here suggests that is indeed the case. The false belief has flown here and taken root! And of course it suits the Duat, all these souls on the edge of hysteria, every moment seeking escape, angry with their lot without fully understanding their situation. He passes gigantic fields of worship, open to the sky, shining huge lights upwards at night in hope of the sun, from which he can hear the cry of “Ra! Ra! Ra!” He allows himself a painful frown.

Ramesses initially assumes it’s his task here to once more drive the sun worshippers out, and so bursts into one of their temples and starts yelling, but he’s repelled by sheer force of numbers, and threatened with the arrival of the guards, and worse still, invited to submit to the embrace of these heathen ways. They say they want to listen to him, but having heard him, finally decide they don’t.

He falls onto a very finely cut lawn and is sprayed with water from something like a snake. He is gone before the guards arrive.

He’s not here to learn that sun worship is true, is he? That’d be awful. But one thing he has discovered is that he’s definitely not here to push the reeds down before him. Rather, it’s like he’s leading his people across a swamp. He must tread carefully and listen to local advice.

He makes his way down the country, night by night. He has to take many side-trips and excursions, dictated by the passage of the vehicles on rollers that he sneaks on board, or the wagons with drivers that he requests access to with a gesture. Those conversations are extraordinary. The drivers always assume he is something from their mythology, or something they can make money from. Because they have money here. When he tells them the true nature of their world, that’s it all in the service of something else, they simply don’t believe him.

He is not allowed access to the White House, where the guards tell him that instead of talking to the elected head of the peasants here, he should put his question in a net.

He asks around about that, and spends an evening with the god Thoth in a place that he is told is called Radio Shack. Thoth goes on a bit, but gives him a spell jar that is small enough to put in his pocket. He uses the spell jar to “download” and “update” all of the spells that are upon him, which he is pleased to see are still in place. One of them is a compass, which allows him to better navigate the Duat. Thoth’s whole tone suggests that a moral conversation is beneath him, so this time Ramesses doesn’t even try.

In Nashville, he wins a musical contest in front of an audience against a man in a wide-brimmed hat who, once backstage, identifies himself as the terrifying He Who Dances In Blood, a figure Ramesses is familiar with from many Books of the Dead. He tries to tell Dances that he’s learned a moral lesson about humility, but Dances just looks at him oddly.

At Graceland he fights an army of warriors, all dressed alike, flinging them into each other, delighting in his martial grace, taking their songs for his own. “What did you stand for?” he asks the fallen. “What can I learn from you?” They all start to answer, but their answers are all different.

At Disneyland, he meets with He Who Lives On Snakes, who has a giant orange and white head, and a fierce tail, and keeps insisting that the most wonderful thing about him is his uniqueness, which is hardly the case. Every question Ramesses asks him about what his next test will be is met with a reply formed in cryptic poetry. Again, Ramesses tries to suggest that he’s becoming a more moral character through these tests, but the answers he gets aren’t receptive to that idea.

At Canaveral he is spun round and round by the goddess Nut, who every now and then allows those who live here to pierce her body, and tries to persuade them that they exist in a world which has no meaning, while everything else here says the opposite, thus torturing them with doubt, a nuance Ramesses can’t help but think of as cruel. He tries to tell Nut he’s learnt an important lesson, but all he does is vomit.

Finally, he makes his way to the lower left coast of the Duat, where the kidneys should be, and there finds the building with the title he recognises: “the SETI Institute”. It must be named, he’s sure, in honour of his son. It is unfortunate that he gets there as the sun is coming up, and so Ramesses falls asleep on a chair in the waiting room. When he wakes, he is in a room festooned with the instruments of torture, and he shakes until he realises that there is nobody here, that they have taken him as a corpse, that he interested them. He is sure this must be where he is intended to be, that this must be an important test on his journey, and so he waits until the peasants arrive once again, and then announces himself.

This time, they scream and run. Which is pleasing. But then they slowly come back, and remain interested. And that is even more pleasing.

He scares and interests them in equal measure, not too much of either. This, he thinks, might finally be the lesson he’s meant to learn. He is only disappointed that his son isn’t here.

This is how Ramesses ends up on Eater of His Own Excrement’s chat show, carefully not quite explaining his mysterious origins, saying he’s “from time as well as space” and wearing, after an intervention by an anxious wardrobe department, a clean, over-the-shoulder set of what the Pharaoh gathers are bandages.

Eater treats Ramesses as if he knows the answer to everything, which suits him down to the ground. “I see... the Millennium of your people will pass without an attack from this creature you call the Bug.” This gets as much laughter as applause, which puzzles Ramesses, but he nods along, he’ll take it. He’s asked what his own beliefs are, and what he makes of the old time religion in the States. He lies enormously, saying he believes much as they do, and that all people should be free to worship as they wish. He manages to stretch out a gummy grin, which is really painful.

After the show, Eater shakes his hand and says that he’d be happy to send Ramesses on to his final destination by private helicopter. SETI will be angry, but with nothing but his own authority to go by, he’s decided Ramesses is a person, not property. Ramesses feels elated and terrified at the same time. He runs to the helicopter pad, turning down autograph requests as he goes, waving to a crowd that’s still screaming, but now not in fear.

And so he lands at the southernmost end of the country, in New Mexico, at the Acoma Pueblo, which, he is told, is “the town in the place that always was”. A figure stands tall under the whip of the helicopter blades, and Ramesses is relieved to see that it’s Anubis, actually wearing an appropriate head dress, dogs barking around his feet, and he’s carrying a Was Staff too.