Khai of Khem

by Brian Lumley

  The Nubian’s hands seemed full of rings, golden bands that caught the glow of the brazier and threw it into Manek’s eyes. Without realizing it, the general found himself closing his eyes against this glittering coruscation, and as he did so the mage’s low-spoken gibberish took on a more readily recognizable form. Now he was telling Manek what he must do in his next incarnation, repeating over and over a list of careful instructions, demanding utmost obediance, indelibly imprinting his subject’s mind. . . .

  Somewhere, as the glow in the east increased and the brazier’s fire dulled to a sullen glow, a cock crowed.

  The Nubian straightened up, went to one of the partitioned areas of the marquee and drew the curtains back. There his six colleagues waited, all seated cross-legged in a circle. Their instruments of magic lay close at hand: bronze censers, golden wands, high-domed wizard’s caps and capes embroidered with golden glyphs. Imthra was with them, but sat apart from them in a chair.

  As the seven mages silently took their paraphernalia to set it up about the silent form of Manek Thotak, so Imthra left the marquee and went to the tent of Ashtarta’s handmaidens which stood nearby. Moments later, he led the Candace, her eyes still full of sleep, back to her marquee.

  Now the eastern horizon was aglow with subdued light and soon the sun’s disk would show its golden rim above the edge of the world.

  Ashtarta’s heart quickened and the roots of her raven hair prickled as she followed Imthra into the incense-scented cavern of her royal tent. . . .

  part

  TWO

  I

  THE DREAM LOVERS

  He was lying on a bed of rich furs in a room whose walls were huge sheets of purple linen. Above, glowing golden through the thin linen ceiling, a bloated moon slowly slid across the night sky. A brazier burned, sputtering slowly, emitting puffs of incensed, mildly narcotic smoke. If not for a warm current of air from beyond the bead curtain of the entrance, which brought pine-sweet mountain air to the room, the atmosphere would be heavy with these heady fumes.

  Used to the dark, his eyes wandered about the room. Close to the thickly piled furs where he lay, an old and intricately carved camphorwood chest from the east lay open, spilling flashing jewelry on a floor of pure white sand. The walls had pockets sewn into their lower edges which, filled with sand, anchored them firmly to the floor. He knew that this room was but a segment of the greater whole, which itself was a great summer tent, a royal dwelling-place. That it was summer was obvious: the heat welling from—from everywhere—would be suffocating were it not for the breeze from outside. The night was young, however, and it would grow cooler as the night grew older. Toward dawn it would be quite cold.

  He had bathed earlier (he seemed to remember that), in a cold mountain pool beneath a waterfall, but he was uncertain how he came to be here on this bed of fine furs, with flickering, brazier-cast shadows leaping on the linen walls and glowing on his tanned, hard-muscled warrior’s body. It bothered him mildly that he could not remember his name or his coming to this place, but he was drowsy and his eyelids were heavy, and it seemed a great bother to have to worry about or concentrate upon anything but the pleasure of simply lying here.

  If only it weren’t so hot!

  Ah, but the heat had come with the Khamsín blowing from the great western deserts beyond the land of the Hyrksos, that scorpion wind of madness that dried up men’s brains and drove them to monstrous excesses. He made a mental note that tomorrow—or the day after, he could not remember for certain—when his polyglot army went into battle, then that he would do well to wait for the hot breath of the Khamsín before striking.

  Before striking at what, at whom? Once again he was at a loss to say. He could not remember. Perhaps it was the Khamsín which had stolen his memory, making his mind weary. And was it also the Khamsín, he wondered, which had driven her to invite him to her tent, whose husband he would be when the war was done? He hoped not. But in any case, the scorpion wind was gone now, flown down into the valley of the river to deposit its furnace heat in the lands of the enemy. And here he was in her tent, having crawled beneath its colored walls until he found the purple of her bedroom.

  Ah, now he was remembering!

  Her tent, yes, the tent of the woman whose bed he now lay upon. . . . But who was she? And why must he sneak like a thief in the night, who was a great general in the army of . . . whom? Slowly, he shook his head. He had only remembered her after hearing, tinkling from somewhere beyond many walls of linen, the voices of her handmaidens.

  Handmaidens?

  She was royal, then. And he was to be her husband. And she had bade him come, but not in at the door for that would be to shame her, whose pride was fierce. . . .

  She must surely have finished with her bathing by now. What was she doing and why were they all laughing? Did she have a confidant among the girls, he wondered, who already knew that he was here? Did they all know? Well, what of it? He was who he was, and—

  And who was he?

  “Who am I?” he asked himself in a whisper, frowning. Before he could begin to seek for an answer, there came a flitting shadow, an outline seen in silhouette against a linen wall; then, the rustle of a bead curtain as a figure stepped through it into the room.

  He had not known what to expect . . . but certainly it was not this. She was dressed—no, she had been dressed—in a sheet that wrapped her from head to toe; but now, on entering the bedroom and seeing him lying on her bed, she had discarded it, stepping from its folds naked as the day she was born. The purple of the walls and gold of the fire in the brazier were reflected from her skin, which shone with scented oil. Slippery as a fish she looked, sinuous as a snake. And like a snake’s, her half-shuttered eyes were hypnotic as she began to dance, hardly ever leaving his own eyes for all her body’s rapidly mounting gyrations and sensuous undulations.

  Somewhere, as she danced, a drum seemed to take up the beat and now she matched its pulse. Perspiration began to mingle with the oil on her body until she gleamed with droplets of colored light like some queen of ancient magic. Spinning, her feet sent the white sand of the floor flying as she whirled round the heaped furs where he lay watching her. Her body was sweet and glistening, shapely and firm. A girl’s body, narrow-waisted and round in the hip, with breasts thrown out now by the speed of her spin and dark nipples erect in the passion of her dance. For this was a nuptial dance old as the nation itself, the dance a bride performs for her man before she gives herself to him on the bridal bed.

  As she whirled closer, he reached for her, his pulse pounding with that of the unseen drum, catching her wrist and pulling her off balance. He could not hold her for every inch of her body was oiled; but even as she slipped from his grasp, she tripped and fell panting, breasts heaving from her exertions and round thighs agleam with oil so heavily applied that it stained the furs beneath her body. Fully roused, he kneeled over her, his skin pale by comparison, his now harsh breathing matching hers in its passion.

  Suddenly, seeing him poised, panic or fear flashed in her eyes. Where the heat of the Khamsín had burned in her veins, now chill mountain streams ran, taking the fire from her blood. A cooling breeze, rising up from nowhere, set the walls billowing and caused the brazier to sputter and its flames to burn a little lower.

  She made to swing her legs past him, but he caught her knees and moved in quickly between them. Arching her back for purchase, she tried to wriggle backwards across the furs. Cruelly, he gripped the soft flesh of her thighs, drawing her to him. She sobbed and beat at his face, her shoulders on the furs but her lower body held up by the strength of his arms. Now he threw an arm under her supple body, his other hand seeking her breasts. Lifting her higher, he lowered his head and kissed her belly, his tongue finding the hollow of her navel and tasting the oil gathered there.

  And abruptly she stopped fighting him. Beneath the fingers of his free hand, he felt her nipples stiffen. He lifted his head from her belly and looked at her. Her own head had fallen back onto t
he furs, where her shoulders took the weight of her upper body; and gradually he felt her weight lift from his arm as, one at a time, she drew back her feet to tuck them under her thighs.

  He leaned back momentarily, reached out both hands now to her breasts. Her breath came in harsh gasps as she began to move her head from side to side, faster and faster. And although the hot wind from hell was long gone, still the Khamsín seemed to have taken her back into its spell. His eyes went to her gleaming belly, to the dark, tightly-curled mass of hair where her legs came together. Like a strange, sentient orchid, slowly her body opened for him, moist, hot and inviting. He gave a choked cry to match her moaning, and—

  —And started awake!

  The alarm! The damned alarm!

  His arm sought the clamoring, clattering alarm-clock, swept it from its position on the small table beside his bed, sent it flying across the room to bounce off the wall and fall, still ringing, to the floor. With the action, pain shot through his body and he felt again the brace that held his neck rigid. Sweat bathed him from head to foot and his bedclothes were a tumbled mound on the floor beside his bed, thrown there by his dreaming struggles.

  And already his dream was receding, as it always did, fading into mists of subconscious mind. “No!” he cried out, then cursed and fell limply back onto his pillows. “God damn!”

  Her name . . . if only he could remember her name! But no, he had not even known it in his dream, so how might he now hope to remember it in the waking world? She was gone, and the dream too, returning to wherever it is that dreams are born.

  Outside, the morning traffic rumbled in London’s streets, and the tent of Paul Arnott’s temptress was suddenly thousands of miles away. Thousands of miles and thousands of years away, lost in unknown abysses of space and time. . . .

  II

  PAUL ARNOTT OF LONDON

  Wilfred Sommers made his way from the hospital reception and enquiry area through double swinging doors and down a corridor lined with children’s wards. He passed through a second set of doors out into the hospital gardens, where he followed a path between a landscaped clump of shrubs and a rock outcrop toward the gymnasium. The latter was the physiotherapy center where Paul Arnott, the man Sommers sought, was half-heartedly complying with his doctor’s orders that he help toward his own rehabilitation.

  Sommers entered the gymnasium complex, made his way past a small pool where handicapped children swam under the careful guidance of specialist nurses, through one more door and into a room of wall-bars, weighted pulleys and all sorts of similar therapeutic apparatus. There, lying on his back on a rubber mat, Paul Arnott pumped small dumbbells, one in each hand, grimacing as his efforts put strain on his neck and back. His neck was braced front and rear by a sort of girdle affair which was laced up one side. It sat stiff and uncomfortable on his chest. Looking up at Sommers, Arnott nodded a painful welcome.

  “Physiotherapy?” Sommers grinned.

  “What?” Arnott grimaced again. “Good heavens, no—uh!—Wilf!” He slowly pumped his weights. “I’m—uh!—a masochist, didn’t you know? Anyway, what brings you here?”

  “Two things,” Sommers laughed. “First, it’s been a week or two since I last dropped in, and—” he paused.

  “And?”

  “And I’ve brought something to show you.” The smile passed from Sommers’s face as swiftly as it had come.

  “Oh?” Arnott prompted. “Well, then, why so hesitant about it? Show me.”

  Sommers nodded. “Put down those weights and sit up.”

  “Hmm? All right.” Arnott gritted his teeth and forced himself upright. Bending at the waist, he allowed the dumbbells to thump down onto the rubber mat. “I have to admit, they were starting to get a bit heavy,” he said ruefully. Then he looked quizzically at his visitor. “All right, what’s your big surprise?”

  For a moment Sommers said nothing, just stood and looked down at his friend. For all that Paul Arnott was an Englishman of a long line of Englishmen, no one meeting him for the first time could help mistaking him for a “foreigner.” Even knowing him as he did, Sommers still occasionally regarded him that way. His looks were proud, hawkish, dark . . . Arabic. A man of the sands, a chief of wandering desert tribes, the son of a sheik, perhaps, or an educated emissary of the new, oil-rich Middle East—but surely not an Englishman.

  He was English, however, and quite well-to-do; but much more important where Sommers was concerned, they shared a common interest. Along with the fact that they were both fairly young men, their mutual interest was the one thing they did share, for in everything else they might almost be opposites.

  But in the three years of their acquaintance, a mutual fascination with Egyptology had made of them firm friends. Wilfred Sommers, following in the footsteps of his famous Egyptologist father, Sir George Sommers, was by profession an archeologist specializing in the Nile Valley; by contrast Paul Arnott was an “amateur” Egyptologist, albeit the most amazingly knowledgeable and controversial amateur one could possibly imagine. Certain of his theories concerning Ancient Egypt were, to say the very least, “unorthodox.”

  “Well?” Arnott prompted his visitor again, staring up at him.

  “Paul—now I mean this,” Sommers said. “I’m not joking at all. This thing might shock you.”

  Arnott’s eyes searched the other’s face, then went to the large manila envelope he carried. “Is that it?”

  Sommers nodded. “It is.”

  “What’s in it?”

  “Just a photograph.”

  “A photograph is going to shock me?”

  “It might. Certainly it will fascinate you.” Sommers handed the envelope over. “There you are, see for yourself.”

  Arnott opened the envelope’s flap and pulled out a colored photograph. Sommers watched his face as he studied the picture, a photograph of a beautifully worked funerary mask in glowing gold. At first Arnott’s face portrayed surprise—a little shock—then astonishment and disbelief. His mouth fell open and he turned his gaze once more upon his visitor.

  “Paul?” Sommers crouched down and gripped the other’s shoulder. “What is it?”

  “Sh’tarra!” Arnott finally gasped.

  “What? What did you say, Paul?”

  “I said—” Arnott shook his head. His eyes were very wide, misted almost. For a moment, they seemed to shine on another place, another time. Then they cleared. “I said . . . Sh’tarra!”

  “Is that a name, a place?”

  “I . . . it’s a name,” and again he shook his head. “Wilf, where did you get this?”

  “You’ve noticed the likeness, obviously.”

  “Likeness? To Julie, you mean? My God, man, I’d have to be blind not to notice it!” He made to get to his feet and Sommers helped him. “And yet—”

  “Yes?”

  Again Arnott seemed to gaze into space and time. “It wasn’t just the likeness that stopped me. I don’t know what it was, really.” He shrugged half-apologetically. “Give me a hand, will you?”

  He wore tracksuit trousers. Now, with Sommers’s assistance, he began to struggle into the jacket. Holding the jacket for him, his friend considered Arnott’s remarkable powers of recuperation (his accident had been a very bad one) and thought back on what he knew of the man, particularly of those unconventional “theories” of his.

  For instance: Arnott shared the Russian magus Gurdjieff’s belief in an unrecorded, sophisticated pre-dynastic civilization which was as ancient to the Ancient Egyptians as they themselves were to the Greeks; and his firm conviction, without a shred of hard evidence, that indeed Egypt was the forgotten source of all Man’s wisdom, must surely place him alongside the most exotic or esoteric of theosophists and half-baked cultists and their apostles. And yet, Sommers knew that Paul Arnott was no crank.

  His education and background alone were such as to preclude any suggestion of irresponsible quirkiness; his instinctive and deep knowledge of the accepted areas of his subject fully demonstrated hi
s credibility as an authority; Sir George himself had made him a standing offer of work in the field based on his own estimation of the man’s ability, and accepted Egyptologists of more than merely perfunctory note had found occasion to seek his advice as an expert. All of which only served to highlight those areas where Arnott’s beliefs were less than orthodox.

  He himself insisted upon his purely amateur status—no, not even that, he professed himself to have merely “an interest” in Ancient Egypt—but certain so-called “masters” in the field would give their eyeteeth to be able to learn those things which Paul Arnott seemed instinctively to know. He had his detractors, of course, and if he had ever attempted to project himself as a professional, then these would certainly have made profit of those peculiar anomalies in his reasoning concerning a much earlier Egypt.

  Sommers could readily understand why. . . .

  III

  MEMORIES OUT OF TIME

  For example: Arnott was emphatic in his belief that the wheel had not been developed as a work tool but as a true wheel for use in conveyances and vehicles of war, specifically the chariot. Its war use, he said, must have preceded any domestic application by many centuries, though certainly it had been lost to Egypt’s armies by the time of the Hyrksos invasions.

  He agreed that the entire area now falling within the boundaries of the Sahara, including all of Egypt and lands adjacent, had once been a green and fertile belt as recently as 7,000 years bc, but disagreed with current concepts which relied upon gradually changing weather conditions and declining rain patterns to account for the rapid encroachment of the deserts. According to Arnott, the dessication of the land had occurred much more speedily than that—in a matter of weeks or even days—when vast herds of elephants, ponies, buffalo, hippos, perhaps even Bos primigenius had been surprised by the sun no less rapidly than the Siberian mammoth, equally mysteriously, had once fallen prey to the ice.