The Blood of Kings

by John Michael Curlovich

  Sub-level Three. I found the switch for the lights along the corridor there; they were so dim and so far apart that they gave practically no light at all. Something made me keep my voice low. “Danilo?”

  Nothing. The voices were from lower down still.

  I hesitated. I had never been so far down into the catacombs before. It was a bit frightening. I remembered how on edge I had been that first time. But I was being foolish. What could happen? Even if there were rats or a garter snake, they’d be more afraid of me than I would be of them.

  Down I walked, slowly, gingerly, as quietly as I could manage. The voices whispered, murmured, seemed to call me. At the fourth, final sub-level there was another light switch. It was lower on the wall than the others and I had to grope to find it. A row of dim lamps came on along the corridor, faint lights, 20 feet or more apart.

  “Danilo?” My voice was a whisper.

  My presence seemed to disturb whoever was there. Everything became still. I took a few steps along the corridor. Finding my resolve, I raised my voice again. “Who’s there?”

  Nothing. I began to walk. Slowly, cautiously.

  Doorways opened to my left and right as I moved along. There were no doors on them; they gaped, empty. The rooms were black as midnight. Anyone could have been hiding in them. Or anything.

  The corridor made a turn. I looked back the way I had come. I was quite alone in that gloom, and I was beginning to find it oppressive. I should go back.

  From ahead of me came a whisper. The words were almost inaudible. It seemed to me they whispered, “Come to us.”

  “Who’s there?”

  Another whisper, quite incomprehensible.

  “I said who’s there?”

  The corridor widened out into what I took to be a large storage area. The walls opened out, the floor became rough, or at least uneven under my feet. The lights were hardly any help in that huge black space, just faint glows along the bottom of the wall, far apart. But there was enough light for me to see that the room was empty except for some stacks of things in the corners and along the walls.

  Empty. There was no point staying there any longer. I turned to go back.

  There was a soft click. The lights went out.

  Everything was pitch black. Not the least glint of illumination.

  I froze. Involuntarily I dropped the scroll I had been carrying. The wiring was old, maybe as old as the building. There must be a loose connection. Maybe they would flicker back on. The blackness was absolute.

  Stay calm, Jamie, don’t panic. You know where you are, you know where you came from. You can feel your way back along the corridor till you reach the stairs.

  I inched carefully toward the wall; I reached out and touched it. Rough stone, cool, solid and reassuring. Slowly I reoriented myself in the darkness and began to move back the way I had come.

  Something touched me. Something tugged at my shoelace.

  A rat. It must be a rat. I kicked. There was nothing, my foot didn’t make contact with anything. I kept moving.

  Something grasped my shirt and pulled at it. I cried out and pulled free. Doing it, I spun around and away from the wall. Suddenly I had no idea which direction to move in.

  A hand touched my leg, ran along my thigh. I swiped at it with my fist and missed.

  A whisper. A voice out of the blackness. “Jamie. You are ours now.”

  I found the wall and began moving along it again, hoping I had chosen the right one, and the right direction. The thought that I might be heading deeper into that room almost paralyzed me with fright.

  There were more hands, running all over my body. Touching my face, my chest, my legs. One of them groped my genitals.

  Voices all around me whispered.

  “Jamie, be with us.”

  “Jamie, so lean, so beautiful.”

  “We will have you, Jamie.”

  I fought but there were too many of them. They pinned me against the wall. I felt lips touch my cheek. A tongue ran along the side of my throat. I swung my fist. And struck only empty air.

  “You are ours, now, Jamie.”

  A hand stroked my backside, another caressed my crotch. Unseen faces kissed me, licked me, caressed my cheek. I felt a tongue force its way into my mouth.

  Finally, I found the resolve to scream. “Danilo!”

  For a moment they all backed away from me.

  “Danilo!”

  The unseen whispering things laughed softly. “Danilo cannot help you, Jamie. You are ours.”

  Hands pushed me against the wall again; others worked at my belt, undid the button on my shorts. I pulled free of them and ran along the black corridor. And tripped, fell.

  They were on top of me, groping, fondling, touching, caressing, kissing. Despite my fear I felt myself becoming aroused. The realization sickened me.

  “Danilo! Please, Danilo, for the love of god help me!”

  I felt my t-shirt being torn off.

  And then, abruptly, the lights come on. Dim lights, but enough to dazzle my eyes. When they adjusted I saw the corridor, quite empty. My t-shirt lay on the floor not far from me, torn to ribbons.

  Someone was coming down the stairs.

  “Danilo?”

  It was Feld. He walked briskly down the corridor to where I was still sitting on the floor. “What exactly is the problem, Mr. Dunn?”

  “There was someone here. In the dark.”

  He smirked. “Of course. Get up.”

  Slowly I got to my feet and picked up what was left of my shirt. “Professor Feld, I’m telling you there’s someone else down here.”

  “Nonsense. The light went out and you panicked. Are you on something?”

  “No.”

  “Why don’t I believe you?” He was so smug I could have hit him. “I’ll have to tell Semenkaru about this.”

  “So will I.”

  “I warned him it was a mistake to take you on.” He turned his back and headed back the way he had come.

  Alone, I realized how badly shaken I was. To have been raped, or almost raped by… by… I couldn’t think about it. But I was trembling. I could hear voices again, snickering faintly at me. “Poor Jamie,” I thought I heard one say.

  I left as quickly as I could, headed back up the stairs without bothering to turn out the lights again. Somehow that would have been… I don’t know, inviting them to follow me, or something.

  At the second sub-level I heard Feld and Danilo talking, quite heatedly. I went back down a few steps and listened, hoping it would pass quickly. And it did. Feld shouted something and stomped up the stairs above me.

  I stepped up into the corridor. “Danilo?”

  From one of the rooms his voice came. “Yes, Jamie, I’m here.”

  I went to him. He was standing beside an alabaster sarcophagus, obviously waiting for me. He was not smiling. But he put his arms around me and held me.

  “Are you all right?”

  “I… I don’t know. I think so.” I was still shaking.

  “I warned you not to go down there.”

  “Yes.” I felt an inch tall. “But I thought it was because there were valuable things there.”

  “There are.” He looked me up and down. “Jamie, you’re crying.”

  I hadn’t realized, but I was. He stroked my hair. “Here. Let me.” He took the tatters of the shirt out of my hand and dabbed my eyes with it. Then he kissed me on the cheek. “You mustn’t again. Do you understand?”

  “What’s down there? What?”

  “You’ll understand in time.” He put his arms around me.

  “Danilo, I was almost…”

  “I know. They could have done worse than that. Promise me you won’t go there again till you’re ready. Next time no one may hear your cries.”

  I leaned against him. It felt so good to have him hold me. And yet… ”Danilo, I want to know what is down there.”

  He touched his lips to the side of my face. “In time.”

  “Now. I want
to know.”

  “No.” His voice was as firm as I had ever heard it.

  I let him hold me more closely. “Tell me I don’t have to be afraid. Tell me I won’t have dreams about this.”

  “Jamie, I wish I could.” He held me so tight. “Come home with me tonight. I’ll fix dinner, and we’ll talk.”

  “I think I need to be alone.”

  “No, you’ll feel better if you talk it out. And, Jamie, I’m the only one who’ll understand. You know that.”

  I stepped away from him. “I’m not sure what I know.”

  “Come upstairs. We can talk better in the light.”

  We went up to the museum. The large gallery was empty. Late afternoon sun fell on the statue of Horus. I loved Danilo so much, and now I was so afraid.

  “There are mysteries, Jamie. Deep ones. You’ll understand in time. In time you’ll have—” He seemed to think better about what he was going to say. The stone god looked down on us.

  Finally, I broke down completely. “When I was a boy, Millie’s husband used to fly into drunken rages and beat everyone in the house.”

  “You?”

  I nodded. “It was terrifying. I never thought I’d know anything worse. But today, down there—”

  “This is different. That, you couldn’t control.”

  It was such an unexpected thing for him to say.

  “Danilo, I don’t know what’s happening to me. I don’t know what’s happening between us. I’m so scared.”

  “As I told you, you have the blood of kings. In time you’ll learn to use it, and all the power it carries.”

  I kissed him. I wasn’t sure why, except that I needed human contact.

  “Come home with me tonight.”

  * * *

  His house seemed less strange to me. All the portraits and photographs… after the horrible day they seemed, I don’t know, reassuring.

  Danilo made me comfortable in the parlor, on the sofa, and went off to the kitchen to make dinner. I fell asleep almost at once. And dreamed.

  I was in a vast, dark, empty place, the kind that seemed to exist only in dreams. Everything was silent. I lay on an ornate divan. From out of the night came a man, short, thin, with huge whiskers. It was Frederic Chopin. He bent and kissed me.

  And I awoke. I had been asleep long enough for Danilo to have cooked an elaborate meal and set the table. When he saw I was awake he smiled and said, “Perfect timing.”

  There wasn’t much talk over dinner, and what little there was, was about everything but the museum and Egypt. He asked about Justin and Greg.

  “They’re the same, I guess. Greg really doesn’t like me.”

  “Is that a loss?”

  I laughed. “No, I guess not.”

  After dinner I helped with the dishes, as I had always done at… not “home,” but at Millie’s.

  We settled in the parlor and cuddled for a time. The talk turned to music. Danilo asked me to play for him.

  I moved to the Bechstein, adjusted the seat, tried a few notes. It needed tuning but it wasn’t too bad. I played the opening bars of the Schubert in C Minor allegretto. Danilo stood behind me, rubbing my shoulders as I played—not helpful but it felt wonderful. Then I played a few of Chopin’s nocturnes. He sat beside me and listened attentively.

  When I was finished, he told me, “Chopin never played them more feelingly himself.”

  I laughed. I had to be a joke. “How could you know that?”

  He avoided the question. “I have something for you.”

  “Really?” I’ve always loved getting presents.

  “Wait here.”

  While he was gone, I played a few more pieces of Schubert. Lovely tunes, easy to get lost in. The day’s tension was finally beginning to dissipate.

  Then he came back, carrying a sheaf of large old scrolls. At first glance I thought they must be papyri. But they didn’t quite look like any I had seen. He handed them to me, and I unrolled them.

  It was sheet music, but ancient. I had never seen notation like it before. It seemed to be a collection of songs; there were lyrics written under the notes. It must be centuries old; the ink had faded badly.

  “Love songs.” Danilo said it with quiet confidence. “I was going to give you this for Christmas, but today seems right.”

  “Christmas isn’t for five months. Thank you.” I kissed him.

  “Can you make out the script?”

  I studied it and shook my head. He pointed to a signature at the bottom of the last page. “Blondel.”

  “He was a poet and singer. The lover of Richard Lionheart.”

  I looked at him, startled. “This must be worth a fortune.”

  “He wrote these songs of unfulfilled love when Richard was held captive by the King of Austria.”

  “Is this… are these… in our musical notation?”

  “Something like it. Why don’t you try and play one, and see?”

  The notes were odd, rectangular things. The staffs were only partly there. There were no key signatures. But I thought I might just be able…

  The notes came. I played one of Blondel’s songs. It was sad, mournful, the way love often felt to me.

  “Transpose it downward.”

  I did. It sounded better.

  Danilo began to sing.

  “Though the universe part us

  “I am with you, sweet man.

  “Like the universe,

  “Like the gods,

  “Love is eternal.

  “Life without you is death.

  “Life with you never ends,

  “Like the universe.

  “Like the gods.”

  I knew that he was singing it to me. For me.

  Nothing else mattered.

  Chapter Six

  I wanted to learn more about the Set cult. It was more and more obvious to me that it was a large part of what drove Danilo, what gave him his passion. But equally I wanted to know more about the Kissing Kings. Why had Akhenaten had himself portrayed that way? Even in the ancient world, where human sexuality was understood and accepted so much better, it seemed… well, not quite the thing. And so I dug into the Egyptological stacks at the campus library, at the city library and online.

  I discovered that the portrait I knew was far from the only one. Akhenaten and his son Smenkhare were portrayed in intimate contact in one depiction after another. There was one in the Berlin State Museum that was quite frankly an image of a sexual embrace.

  And this was somehow bound up with the Set cult. I had a lot more trouble finding information about it. If what Danilo had been telling me about it was at all accurate, it had been kept quite remarkably secret for four millennia.

  I asked him about it one afternoon but, typically, he was evasive. Or at least not as informative as I’d have liked.

  “What do you want to know?” He smiled his professorial smile and settled behind his desk.

  “I want to know what Akhenaten really believed.”

  “It isn’t possible to know what anyone ‘really’ believes, is it?”

  “Don’t dodge the question.”

  He hesitated, then seemed to decide to be a bit more open. “They were lovers, yes. And they were both murdered.”

  “I know that.” Akhenaten died in secrecy; his fate quite unknown. His wife Nefertiti vanished from the historical record. Their son Smenkhare ruled briefly, continuing his father’s religious reforms, then died under mysterious circumstances. His body was found in an unmarked tomb in the Valley of the Kings. He was succeeded by his nine-year old brother Tutankhamen, who was dominated by a priest named Ay, and the revolution came to an end. It was all in the books.

  “Then what are you asking, Jamie?”

  “It was the Set cult, wasn’t it? What he really believed? The contrarian god, the god in opposition to the natural order as most people understand it.”

  Danilo smiled. “Is there a natural order? When I look at nature, I see chaos. Animals sire young, then devour
them. Plants grow filled with poison. Babies come with cancer. Galaxies collide and destroy one another.”

  “Danilo, will you please stop evading my questions?”

  “I’m not.” He said it emphatically.

  “Then I don’t understand.”

  He sat back. He was enjoying this more than I was, it seemed.

  “Have you ever been to the observatory, Jamie?”

  “No. What does that have—?”

  “You should go sometime. You should have them show you Mars.”

  “Mars? Danilo, this is—”

  “You wanted an explanation. I’m giving one.”

  It slowed me, made me stop and think. “All right, so I go and look at Mars. What then?”

  “You might see the canals.”

  “And?”

  “There are none.”

  I was completely lost.

  “People see canals on Mars, even though there are none. The eye takes random markings on the planet’s face and connects them, makes them into a coherent pattern. But there is none. There seems to be something inherent in the human mind that tries to find order in things. Even when there is none.”

  I thought I was beginning to understand his point. “And Set?”

  “Set is the god who represents that understanding.”

  “Chaos.”

  “No, not that. Simply the recognition that the patterns human beings see are illusions, or may be. The only nature we can ever really understand for certain is our own. Set is that.”

  It made a kind of sense, but… ”I’ll have to think about this.”

  “Please Do.” He picked up a sheaf of papers and riffled through them. “Have you ever read the Bible?”

  The abrupt change of tack caught me off guard. I laughed. “No. Of course not. Nobody does. I mean, Millie used to read it at me, but—”

  “You should.”

  “Be serious, Danilo. Nobody reads the Bible. I’ve never even met a practicing Christian who’s read the whole thing through.”

  “All the more reason, then. You might learn things about their beliefs that they don’t know themselves.”

  My impulse was to think he was toying with me, but somehow, I didn’t think he was.

  “The Bible is the best-preserved book from the ancient world, Jamie. It contains all kinds of things we’d never know otherwise. Myth and ritual, for instance. Sacrifice.”