The Western Lands (13 page)

"Looks like we'll be needing our blasters."

These are .10-caliber revolvers with a cylinder holding thirty three-inch bullets. The bullet is sharp at the point, which is hard metal, with a base of hard metal and soft metal between, that mushrooms on impact to the size of a half-dollar.

"Wouldn't penetrate human flesh, just flatten. But it enters and spreads in insect mush. Well, might as well get on with it."

The guns make almost no noise, like popping the cork on a bottle of half-dead champagne, but the effect is dramatic. The bodies are flying apart like rotten melons.

"Slip on this disposable mac, Laddy buck."

Clad in ankle-length plastic macs, they walk through the cavity opened by their blasters, the dismembered larval claws and mandibles still twitching. They drop their macs gingerly into a trash receptacle.

Flying centipede varieties buzz about, laying eggs in the unfortunate.

"Rum go when they hatch out . . . look there."

A naked man tears at his flesh, screaming as centipede heads break through the skin in gushes of blood and pus. The silent crowds walk by, faces blank, catatonic. The stricken man kicks convulsively as a centipede head breaks through the crown of his penis. Another is eating its way through an eye socket. Wilson kills the man with a single shot from his H&K P-7.

An area of narrow passages between rows of wire-mesh cubicles, six feet long, four feet deep, five feet high, four tiers. The upper cubicles are half empty, because few can climb up to them on the rope ladders and notched logs. The lower cubicles are jammed with the dead and dying, who have barely enough energy to pour their buckets of sewage into the mud paths between the warrens. The cubicles dwindle out in barren hills and ruined buildings.

They come to a small amphitheater, with limestone seats around a circular space twenty feet in diameter, paved with smooth marble. In the middle of the circle is a stone stele, covered with tiny script composed from centipede hair and eyes and legs and claws, the signs moving in jerks and spasmodic patterns that intercross and overlap, stop and scrabble. The stone writhes with hideous life. Below the stele is a naked man, bound to a couch with leather straps. The couch is made of hardwood and the legs fit into ancient holes in the marble floor.

The spectators are completely naked, except for exquisite centipede necklaces and bracelets in segmented gold, with opal eyes, lips parted, pestilent breath in the air, faces squirming and crawling on the skull, eyes dilated to shiny black mirrors reflecting a vile idiot hunger.

"We feed with the 'pede."

La jeunesse dorée
of Pedeville, obviously.

Neferti and Wilson push through to the front row. The timorous Pedes, as the natives are called, scramble out of their way.

There is the sound of running water. When the tank is full, it raises a bronze grid on one side of the theater. The head of a monster 'pede emerges, with a stink like a vulture shat out rotten land crabs. The man on the couch begins to scream as the centipede inches out. The 'pede lifts its head now, with a seeking movement.

Neferti stands at the head of the couch, one nonchalant hand on the stele, the other extended toward the monster 'pede, who now scuttles forward with hideous speed. Neferti's fingers are centipede legs in the air, ending in a smooth gesture of cancellation across the ancient writing that crumbles to dust under his fingers.

The centipede shrivels to a final spasm of reddish dust in the air, dust on the stone seats. The bound man pushes aside the leather straps, which shred into black powder.

Mission accomplished.

5

Neferti is moving through the alleys of a rural slum on the outskirts of Memphis. Dead eyes broken by poverty, disease and hunger follow his passage. People turn from him and the women cover their faces, for he is a Scribe, an elite class that is feared and hated.

Neferti had been born the son of a fisherman on the sea-coast. His family was poor, but not starving like these inland people. There is a certain crustacean—sea scorpions they are called—highly prized by the rich, and Neferti knew where to find these creatures, just as he always knew if there was a scorpion or a centipede in the house. He can feel it, the way he can feel danger. Sea scorpions gave off the same emanations, much weaker but still detectable.

"Stop the boat. Sea scorpions here."

Delivering this delicacy to rich clients, he was often propositioned. And he had already decided whether the offer was to his advantage. It was not long before he received the proposition he was looking for: to become a Scribe, apprenticed to old Sesos-tris, the pederast.

Neferti learned the glyphs with breathtaking speed. Sesos-tris had never seen such a student. Neferti knew that it was dangerous to depart from the norm in any direction, and most particularly in the direction of excellence. But he didn't have much time.

Neferti wrote each day in advance, whom he would encounter and how he would deal with the encounter. He took pains, of course, to conceal these experiments from Sesostris. He can think in glyphs as he walks, writing from the pictures he passes: a horned owl, legs, eyes, a mouth, an empty road waiting. And he writes as he walks: coming forth, his legs and eyes waiting in the road; a sheaf of wheat in a field, his erect phallus under his loincloth. Coming forth waiting for thee from of old: legs, eyes, a mouth, a road, a hand pointing, an erect phallus, a sheaf of wheat.

Individual glyphs can be delineated in many different ways. They can be incorporated into a picture, and the pictures can move. Panels of glyphs can be shifted into various combinations. Neferti devised glyphs of his own to indicate whole panels and ways in which they can be fitted together. Where the horned owl lights, a connection is made.

Abata's official position was Assayer of Scribes, and since the number of Scribes was far in excess of the work available, he still exercised considerable influence, his position being more or less similar to that of a modern art critic.

The Scribes were divided into a number of schools: the Traditional, the Naturalistic, the Functional, the Situational, the Punctual, the Random, the Picture Puzzle. Abata invariably chose the most stilted, conventional and banal scripts, so that schools of this lifeless garbage flooded the art market. But his position was precarious. Brokers were consulting their own as-sayers. Even the most tasteless and vulgar parvenus of the emerging merchant class complained of his boring murals, that always looked the same from any angle or in any light.

"We want Picture Puzzle scripts."

In Picture Puzzle scripts, the glyphs are incorporated into the big picture: an eye, a phallus, water, birds, animals spell out the story. At first it is just a picture with a special look, then glyphs swim out of clouds and water, pop out of swift lizards, run with the hare of hours, sit with the toad of a million years, spatter out of excrement thrown by an angry ape, trickle out of streams, a boy masturbates in the shadow of an owl's wing, a weather vane whirls in the wind.

Abata's power depended on keeping the other assayers in line to support his judgments. This he found increasingly difficult. It was becoming obvious that his poor taste threatened the market. The other assayers began to shun him, catching the contagious reek of failure, and the Old Man had a contract out on him. A knife could streak out of an alley or doorway. He had bodyguards, but any one of his guards could be Alamout's man.

These were troubled times. There was war in the heavens, as the One God attempted to exterminate or neutralize the Many Gods and establish a seat of absolute power. The priests were aligning themselves on one side or the other. Revolution was spreading up from the South, moving in from the East and from the Western deserts. Not only had the rich monopolized the land and the wealth, they had monopolized the Western Lands. Only the members of certain families were allowed to mummify themselves, and so achieve immortality.

Neferti aligned himself with the rebels and the followers of Many Gods. There was a new edict against sodomy, issued by the One God priests. The penalty was impalement. His relation with the old pederast scribe Sesostris was now highly dangerous.

His patron was a kindly, ineffectual man of a vacillating disposition. He could not bring himself to take sides in the fierce controversy raging over the One God concept. Gently Neferti pointed out that a neutral position was untenable, especially in view of the new edict. His enemies had waited for this chance. In Sesostris's attempt to make no enemies, he would succeed only in making no friends he could trust.

Neferti intended to obtain the secret Western Land papyrus. Scribes at his level were not supposed to know even that such a papyrus existed. He carried at all times an alabaster tube of poison, in case of arrest, and a thin dagger with a grooved tip dipped in cobra venom.

The apprentice Scribes were housed in dormitories, under strict discipline. Neferti had hitherto bypassed these onerous conditions through his relation with Sesostris. This exemption, together with his brilliance, made him a target for hate and envy, solid as the blow of a fist and sharp as an ax.

The glyph of the spitting cobra gives protection. He knows just where to spit his poison and what poison to use, and he has allies who think as he does. But now his position was extremely precarious. To continue his relationship with Sesostris, he set up rotating places to meet: a room in the village one day, hidden coves and caves another.

All Scribes study the Egyptian pantheon: Ra, Bast, Set, Osiris, Amen, Horus, Isis, Nut, Hathor. Many Gods are known only to a few initiates, like the Shrieking Scorpion: half cat and half scorpion, said to have been conceived by a union between Bast and the Scorpion Goddess. With her lashing tail loaded with deadly venom, her rending cat claws and insect mandibles, she is evoked only by the most terrible curses. And the Centipede God, with a centipede's body, the poison fangs sprouting from the glands of his neck, and a man's translucent head in which the brain glows white-hot behind red, faceted eyes. His bite causes death in terrible agony, the victim roasted alive. The Centipede God lives in red sandstone caves in the blistering Hot Lands of the South.

Neferti fashions little blocks of clay and hardwoods on which glyphs are delineated in raised outline, so that he has only to press the block into ink and then imprint the glyphs on papyrus. Demons and Helpers can be drawn into being and assigned functions and contexts. They have their special abilities, their weapons and means of access, their enemies and friends, their masters and servants.

One of the Helpers is characterized by an indentation on the upper tip of his member where the Creator left his thumbprint. It was a small thumb, no bigger than a finger but much longer, with three articulations. This Helper leaves behind him a smell of musk and thunder and the blue smell of the sea wind. Giver of Winds is his name. Fleet and light-boned, he can skim over swamps and quicksand, climb a sheer cliff or a palace wall. His long thin fingers can crush a man's neck or tear off an arm. He can parry the quickest sword slash and dodge an arrow. He is the Helper on perilous journeys and impossible escapes. He knows the Bang-utot cord of sperm that strangles a sleeping enemy, the smells of valor and danger, of ferrets and spiced lace stained by radiant journeys.

His Mayan counterpart is Ah Pook, patron of street boys, wanderers and outcasts: a face of green marble, thick round lips, flaring eyes like jade slits. He knows the slums of Tenochtitlân, the warrens and reeking alleys of the Centipede City. His phallus is a smooth, translucent green, and he gives off a smell of fungus and toadstools, of jungles and untamed wild cats and orchids, of moss and stone.

Another helper is the adolescent Ka of the god Amsu. Of a shining, dazzling beauty, he knows every nuance of sex and courtship. He is the only defender against the female goddesses of sexual destruction and orgasm death, the vampire Lilith, and Ixtab, the goddess of ropes and snares and sexual hanging. His phallus is a pulsing tube of opalescent pink light. His smell, sweet and heavy, burns through the body with prickles and shivers of delight. His hair is a brilliant blazing red. Even the goddess Bast quails before him, reduced to a lovesick drab.

The Healing Helper is a calm gray presence with a kind, unhappy face, for he has taken on much pain. But he is deft and quick. Pain dissolves beneath his fingers, and sickness loosens its hold. He brings a smell of clean bandages, dawn wind in fever dreams, sleep after sleepless nights.

For every Helper, there is a corresponding demon or adversary. Many play both roles. There are old demons wracked with the pain of toothless, impotent hate, who live only to injure, occupying evil old caretakers and doormen.

The Pharaoh is a One God believer, but he does not have the support of his Palace staff. Obviously he will be assassinated sooner or later. Neferti does not wish to associate himself with a lost cause which he opposes in any case, but he is still under the Pharaoh and his secret police. They are everywhere, watching and listening. One moves in stylized pantomimes of innocence.

At any hour of the day or night, the Pharaoh summons everyone in the Palace to an audience.