To Visit the Queen (31 page)

Ouhish had stopped to let them catch up: he put his whiskers forward at Rhiow. "Interesting," he said, "but Hwallis says something very like that. Come on: I want you all to meet."

He hurried down the hallway nearly to its end, then turned left suddenly and showed them a wood-paneled side door, which was open a crack. Ouhish put his paw into it and pulled it open. "In here," he said.

He led them into what turned out to be a warren of little offices and storage spaces behind the exhibition halls. It was a strangely homely place after the grandeur and silence of the outer halls. Other statues were here, pushed carefully up against the walls, some being repaired for cracks or broken noses; near one doorway a bucket and some mops and brooms stood handy; another small room had a sink and some cleaning rags and solvents, and buckets of different kinds of grout for polishing stone. Other rooms were stacked and piled high with books: one was filled with crates that held piles of papyrus rolls and books.

And in one room they came to, there was an
ehhif
bent over a long table. The table was covered with something that might have been dust, and the
ehhif
was working, slowly and carefully, to unwrap something that lay in the midst of the dust. As they came in behind him, he sneezed.

"Hwallis," said Ouhish in Ailurin, very loudly so that the
ehhif
would be able to hear him, "there are guests here."

The
ehhif
turned. He was young: maybe no more than eighteen, Rhiow thought— a tall, dark-haired, long-faced young man, dressed in a shirt with its sleeves rolled up, and long dark pants with suspenders. He looked at the doorway, and at Ouhish, and he said, in Ailurin, "Where?"

The People glanced at each other, surprised. "It's all right," Ouhish said, "you can unsidle."

They did. The young
ehhif
looked at them with some surprise, and said to Ouhish, with very passable intonation, "Are these the People you asked to come?"

Rhiow was very impressed. She said, in the Speech rather than in Ailurin, "Young sir, since you plainly know that our kind exists, then I tell you that we're wizards on errantry, and we greet you. I'm Rhiow: here are my colleagues Urruah, Auhlae, Arhu, and Siffha'h. Ouhish says he sent for us, and though we came on other business originally, he thinks you have need of our services. So tell us what your problem is, and we'll help if we can. But speak your own language, if you like: we'll understand you well enough, and we can help Ouhish to do so too if there's need. We have complicated matters to discuss, I think, and there's no need for any of us to guess at what we mean. Even if you do have a good accent."

The young
ehhif
opened and closed his mouth, and then said, "Good heavens. Well, allow me to introduce myself. I'm Edward Wallis Budge."

The others waved their tails at him in greeting. Urruah sat down, looking around him. "What exactly do you
do
here?" he said.

Wallis smiled slightly. "I have the honor to hold the position of honorary assistant to the keeper of the mummied cats."

Urruah put his whiskers forward. "Boy," he said, "they don't make job titles like
that
anymore." He peered up at the table. "I suppose that if the museum needs a keeper for mummied cats, there must be a lot of them."

"Hundreds of thousands," Wallis said.

"Sweet Iau in a basket," Auhlae murmured, "what would anyone want
hundreds of thousands
of mummied cats for?"

"Please make yourself comfortable, and I'll explain," said Wallis, and he pulled out a creaky-looking ladderback chair and sat down in it. The People sat or sprawled as they pleased, and Wallis indicated the shelves and racks all around the room, all full of boxes with numbers and letters scrawled on the ends of them. "I expect you know something about the civilization of ancient Egypt," he said.

Rhiow put her whiskers forward. "They knew something about
our
civilization," she said, "which is why so many of their carvings feature our gods."

"The
neter-teh
," Wallis said, and nodded, "the Powers That Be. Yes. Well, you'll understand that the Egyptians were very partial to cats, considering them at least partially divine, since they looked like the gods the cats had described to my people, the
ehhif
."

And suddenly he burst out laughing.

"I'm sorry," Rhiow said, "have we missed a joke?"

"No, no..." The young
ehhif
wiped his eyes, still trying to get control of his laughter. "It's just this situation. You here, and me explaining this, and... oh my." He wiped his eyes again. "I'm sorry. Anyway, the Egyptian
ehhif
back then loved their cats very much, even before someone got the idea that the cats' semidivine status might mean they would make good intercessors for humans. To the gods, the Great Gods, I mean: to the One, and the Powers. So when their cats would die, the Egyptians would have their bodies mummified, with amulets and words of power wrapped in among the bandages, the intent being to give the cats power in the Next World." He turned to the table and lifted from it one of the strips of bandage that he had been removing from the cat-mummy he had been working on. Faintly, on the linen, in a brownish ink, were written the pictogram-letters of the "hieratic" writing of old Egypt. "Then they would send the mummies to the great cat-burial ground at the city of the Queen-Cat, Bubastis."

"Some of this we knew," Auhlae said, "though I was always a little vague about the whys and wherefores."

"The idea was that the cats would tell the Gods how well their
ehhif
had treated them," Wallis said, leaning back and folding his arms, "and the Gods would be nice to the
ehhif
in return. Well, this went nicely for some centuries. The mummies got more elaborate— see, this is a fairly late one: the mummy cases had become quite ornate." He turned to the table again and lifted down the case that had enclosed the mummy on which he had been working. It was in the small shape of a Person, but with its forefeet crossed together over its chest, the way a human mummy would have had its arms crossed: its hind legs were stretched out straight, and the whole business stood upright on a little pedestal, which was gilded, so that the Person's image stood upright as well, the way an
ehhif
would have. The image of the cat's face was inlaid with lapis lazuli whiskers, and around the cat's neck was a tracery of gold, a collar, jeweled with shining bits of colored glass.

"It's beautiful workmanship, isn't it?" Wallis said. "They took a lot of trouble over some of these. Equally, the spells and amulets buried with the People became very involved indeed; and the cemeteries at Bubastis got fuller and fuller. There were at least three hundred thousand cat-mummies at the cemetery at Beni-Hassan alone: probably there were many more. But then the Egyptian
ehhif
's religion changed, or was supplanted by others, and that cat-mummies and the cemeteries were forgotten."

Wallis leaned back farther in the chair, uncrossed his legs, crossed them again. "Well. Their language became lost over time, and it has taken us a long time to start getting it back again. My old teacher was one of those who became involved with trying to recover it, and I went with him to Egypt, a couple of years ago, to start trying to translate some of the texts in the Pyramids. Some of those texts were very peculiar, and my teacher could make very little of them: but I came at the translation from a slightly different angle... and realized what some of those wall carvings meant."

"Spells," Urruah said. "They were wizardry."

"Yes," Wallis said. "Some of them. It was knowledge I kept to myself. I am no wizard, not as I understand the term is usually meant. But I know a little of the language— Hauhai, the Great Speech?—some words of it were carved inside the Pyramids. And from other such carvings, and a great many of the papyruses we recovered, I know a fair amount of Ailurin, which was well known by the priestly class in the Old Kingdoms period. This has helped me with some of the mummies, since I've been able to tell genuine spells of protection from simple prayers, or lists of things to have the cat ask the Gods for when it gets to Heaven."

He smiled slightly, but after a breath or so, the smile turned grim. "The matter that has been troubling me," he said, "is that over the past couple of years, someone seems to have been going to great troubles to destroy as many cat-mummies as possible— especially at the old burial grounds at Bubastis, near the modern city of Alexandria in the northern river delta. No one has made any attempt on our collection here— we have several thousand cat-mummies— but the cemeteries at Bubastis are being systematically destroyed."

"By whom?" Rhiow said. "And why?"

"By British nitrate wholesalers," said Wallis, "for fertilizer."

"What?"
Auhlae said.

Wallis looked uncomfortable. "You'll understand that, even as dry as Egypt is," he said, "sooner or later, if you simply bury things in the sand, they'll decay: and if you mummify them and bury them in the sand, they decay in a very controlled manner, so that finally very little is left but material that is very high in nitrites. Some bright lad got the idea of bringing huge cargo ships down there, digging up the mummies, or what was left of them, and shipping them home to England to be sold as fertilizer for
ehhif
gardens and farmland."

"Dear Iau," Auhlae said, "how— " She broke off, apparently unable to think of a word strong enough to describe her feelings.

"Now, as I understand feline thought from the writings of the old priests," Wallis said, "once you leave the body, there's no great concern for it: you've another life waiting, and you go to it and get on with it. So in that regard, whether one ends as fertilizer or food for some scavenger is probably moot. But what troubles me is how many of those mummies were buried with a specific kind of protection. Most of my fellow translators have rendered it as a charm against extreme heat and cold. But I'm not sure they're right in this. I read it as a spell, a piece of wizardry intended to protect against the Great Fire and the Great Cold that the spell insists will follow it. Some kind of destruction, 'like the Sun falling,' that's the usual phrase— and then 'a winter without end.' "

"Iau,"
Rhiow said softly.

"And now," Wallis said, "suddenly all these mummies, many of them with one version or another of this spell in place, are being taken away and destroyed. Ground up and thrown on people's gardens," Wallis said, with a grimace of distaste. "Whatever else we know about the Egyptians of that period, we know they were not foolish people. Their priests in particular. I am sure some of them were wizards— possibly wizards of great accomplishment. I don't believe that anyone would be so careful, over a space nearly fifteen hundred years, to make sure that all these cat-mummies had one version or another of this particular spell written in their bandages. And there are some disturbing hints in the carvings in the great tombs that suggest that removing these massed spells would be dangerous. There are mentions of some great destruction that would come. First fire, a terrible fire that will devastate the world. And then ice, ice forever..."

Urruah looked at Rhiow: the others all exchanged glances. "There were visionaries among those
ehhif
," Arhu said, "and they worked with the wizards of other species who lived then. Almost certainly with our people, too. What did they see?" He looked at Rhiow. "What
we
came to try to prevent?"

"It's not beyond probability," Rhiow said softly. "They might not have understood the science behind the idea of a nuclear winter, but they might have foreseen it, all right, and devised a defense. It wouldn't surprise me that it would involve our people, either:
ehhif
always connected us with warmth and the Sun... with reason. We told them often enough about Aaurh the Mighty, and how she warred the world free of the cold at the beginning of things, something for which sa'Rráhh always hated her." She looked up at the young
ehhif
. "Hwallis," Rhiow said, "how much of this spell against the Great Fire do you know?"

"Most of it," he said, "but not all. The whole thing, the master version of the spell, was only rarely written out because it was so long and complicated. Most often it was sketched on the bandages in an abbreviated form. Even in the earliest days of the mass mummy burials, few mummies contained it, or the carved version of it on an amulet, again because of the complexity. I had hoped to lead another expedition this year to go back to Bubastis and hunt specifically for the full form of the spell, which the carvings in the Pyramids suggested could reconfirm its protection of the world if it was pronounced by a 'person of Power,' in the right time and place. But now the cemeteries are almost empty: their contents are in the holds of cargo ships, ground to powder. Even if I went now, I wouldn't likely find what I'm looking for. What I fear is that protection against this Great Fire, this Great Ice, whatever they may be, is being lost... and that the way is being opened for something terrible to happen. So I asked Ouhish to see if he could get in touch with some wizards, people who might know what to do." He shrugged. "And here you are."

"It sounds like the Lone One has been purposely dismantling this protection," Urruah said. "Using pawns, as usual, to do Its work.
Ehhif
, and their innocent greed." He glanced up at Wallis. "Sorry. Nothing personal."

"No offense taken," Wallis said.

"So what do we do?" Siffha'h said.

"I would imagine try to find the whole spell," Rhiow said, "and reinstate the protection. It could very well help with other matters." She glanced at the others. "It might even make those other occurrences impossible."

"Might," said Auhlae.

"I take your point," Rhiow said. "Hwallis— would it help if we were able to look for your full version of the spell, the master spell of which these others are fragments, in other museums?"