The Mammoth Book of the Mummy

by Paula Guran

  Perhaps I am a bit jaded. I have recently lost my own mother to the prevailing customs.

  Our freshly designed family cartouche bears the Eye of Horus, a symbol of theft and restitution. In one of those gory tales religions the world over seem to favor, the Egyptian god Horus’s eye was stolen by his jealous brother Seth, but was restored by order of a court of gods. Perhaps this is where the “eye for an eye” adage I have heard in my travels came from. Or perhaps this is where the expression, also heard in my travels, “gypped” came from.

  Since my mother and I were apparent imports to this land, being as black as a ceremonial wig rather than the usual burnt-cinnabar shade of both the people and felines who inhabit the Nile valley, we occupied an unusual place here.

  The Egyptians called us by unpronounceable syllables we ignored whenever possible, but my moniker translates to “Heart of Night.”

  I suppose the title is a comment on our family’s ebony good looks. My mother was known as Eye of Night, since it was her job to keep a vigilant watch on the persons and events surrounding the pharaoh, and to warn him of any untoward acts, such as attempted assassination.

  It was obviously in her personal interest to keep our pharaoh alive as long as possible.

  Unfortunately, he died of indigestion, an internal affair my mother could have done nothing to prevent.

  So passed his servants, including my esteemed maternal parent, in a paroxysm of the embalming arts that left the linen supply of Thebes in a severe shortage.

  Not being a member of the pharaoh’s household, I escaped the general weeping and winding to live to mourn my mother’s passing.

  Unfortunately, I have lost not only a mother but also my sole connection to the palace, where once I had visiting privileges as the offspring of a member of pharaoh’s bodyguard.

  This has meant I must make my way in the City of Cats near the Necropolis. I do not refer to fabled Bubastis where Bast Herself, Eye of Ra and mother of all cats, reigns. No, I am journeying to a feline colony that forages in the shadow of the pyramids, catching vermin unhoused by the constant construction and begging food from the artisans and slaves always laboring on the massive tombs that give the term “work in progress” an entirely new dimension.

  Since I am suspected of being a foreigner and am now also an orphan bereft of parental protection, life after mother’s death has not been easy.

  The resident feline in Irinefer’s rooms beyond my doorway shelter swats me on the posterior.

  “Out of my house, familyless foreigner. Positionless beggar!”

  Like ill-tempered master, like servant, I think.

  I ebb before a paw gloved in sphinx-colored fur, a lean Abyssian with a revolting kinship to the metalwork feline statues scattered about the royal city. Even the commonest felines here, being considered Sacred, think that they are to the linen and bronze born.

  I slink away, contemplating another tasty repast of locusts and cactus-cider.

  If only I could demonstrate that I possess some of my mother’s superb hunting instincts, I could win a place in the palace and sleep on an ebony-and-ivory inlaid chair with a zebra-hide pillow.

  I would look very well against zebra-hide.

  A hiss erupts from behind the mud-daub wall of another house.

  I arch my back, preparing for defense. But this sound is a pssst! for attention rather than the usual hssst! of hostility.

  An aged Abyssinian who wears a palace collar is escorted by a pair of husky Necropolis cats, commoners, but uncommonly large.

  “Heart of Night, I wish a word,” says the old one.

  “You are Ampheris, Counter of the Royal Vermin.”

  As an “outside” cat, Ampheris was not considered part of the royal household and thus escaped the recent bagging, binding, and burying.

  “True. A pity that your revered mother has passed to the Underworld. She was a peerless hunter. Have you any talent along that line?”

  I edge into the shade they occupy as if they owned it.

  Ampheris nods at his bodyguard. They push a shallow bowl of sour goat’s milk toward me. I lap delicately inside the scummy outer ring and consider. This is a serious matter if I am being offered drink. My whiskers twitch more at the scent of opportunity than at that of rancid milk.

  We all crouch on our haunches.

  “What is up?” I ask.

  One bodyguard growls, as if I had made a jest.

  The old man answers. I doubt his henchmen can talk. “It is what is up . . . and walking . . . that is the question, Son of She Who Sat Beside Pharaoh’s Sandal.”

  The royal groundskeeper is so old that his whiskers never stop trembling.

  “Something walks here,” I ask, “in the Valley of the Kings? Or in the palace within the city?”

  “Here,” Ampheris hisses, his whiskers quivering anew. “Have you not heard?”

  “I am not exactly persona grata in this Necropolis.”

  “I see why you are held apart. Perhaps it is the foreign words you employ, such as this ‘persona grata.’ What language is that? Manx? Mesopotamian?”

  “No, nothing edible. Something I picked up on my travels among the uncivilized tribes in the lands across from where the Nile empties into the sea.”

  “There is nothing solid beyond where the river Nile empties into the sea. But there is something . . . semi-solid . . . here on the Necropolis under the shadow of the pyramids.”

  I keep mum; that is the best way to learn things in the Eye of Horus game. My mama told me that much.

  “I have seen it,” one bodyguard growls, sounding ashamed. “In all my seven lives I have never seen anything so terrifying. A mummy that walks.”

  I nod to gain time. How can a mummy walk? The first thing the embalmers do is wrap every limb up tighter than the pharaoh’s treasure. A dead mummy cannot even crawl. And they are all decidedly dead.

  I tell these Sacred ninnies so.

  The old guy nods. “Yet this apparition has been seen by others of our kind here. It walks . . . upright. It . . . gleams linen-white in the moonlight.”

  “Has anyone attempted to question this restless mummy?”

  One bodyguard catches my ruff tight in nail-studded paws. “Listen, stranger, you would not be so glib if you encountered this abomination. You would draw back and slink away and count yourself lucky to do so.”

  I shrug off his big mitts. “Maybe I would. And maybe I would not. Especially if there were something in it for me.”

  Their six amber eyes exchange glances before returning to confront my green ones.

  “Should you banish this restless spirit,” Ampheris says slowly, “the Sacred Breed of the Necropolis would deign to accept your unworthy presence. We would allow you to live and hunt among us.”

  “As if I would want to! No, I seek a more fitting reward. My mother’s old position at the palace.”

  “Impossible! That is awarded at the discretion of Pharaoh.”

  “Perhaps you could trot indoors and put in a good word for me with Nomenophis Two.”

  “For what?” snorts one of the bodyguards.

  Ampheris nods and trembles. “Put this unnatural mummy to rest and we will see.”

  “It might be Nomenophis One, has anyone considered that? He is the most recently dead human of note.”

  Ampheris wrinkles his already creased forehead fur into a semblance of sand dunes. “But the mummy that has been glimpsed is not human.”

  “Of course it is not human if it is mummified, yet walking. It may be a demon, or a god. One never knows.”

  “Idiot foreigner!” scoffs a bodyguard. “This mummy is of our own breed.”

  “You mean that a mummified cat stalks the Necropolis?”

  “Exactly,” Ampheris says. “I fear that Pharaoh would not be sufficiently grateful for your laying such a thing to rest, as it is not his royal sire. The most reward you can hope for is a better toleration of your presence among the Sacred Breed.”

  I shrug. Any impr
ovement in my status is a step up, and I come from a long line of high-steppers.

  By the time the sun-god’s boat is sinking slowly in the west, I have accosted and interrogated most of the individuals whose names were given to me.

  It has not been easy. I have had sand kicked in my face and tail, and have been spit at and hit. I have even had to resort to pinning my witnesses against a wall until they burp up their stories like so many hairballs.

  My last victim . . . I mean, witness, is Kemfer the jeweler’s companion. He is a wiry but cowering sort who wishes only to be off the streets before night falls and “it walks” again.

  “How tall?” I ask.

  “T-two tail-lengths. Let me go, please. My master is calling me home for supper.”

  I do indeed hear a human repeating “mau, mau,” the Egyptian word for cat. “You say it walks upright on two legs, like a human? Then why do you think it is a cat?”

  “The upright ears, you imbecile! Oh, sorry, I did not mean to call Your Honorableness names. Please let me go. It darkens.”

  “But you saw it by night?”

  “Yes, and I will go forth by night no more.”

  “Are you sure you did not see the ears of Anubis?”

  Now the creature trembles like old Ampheris. “The jackal-headed embalming god? Say not so, for then we are all doomed!”

  “Well, I could use the company,” I reply sourly. At least this sorry specimen of the Sacred Breed has a home to go to by night.

  The creature whines when I relax my grip and kicks up a dust-devil of sand as he streaks away.

  I shake my head, only partly to dislodge the stray grains from my ears. My dear departed mama, foreign-born or not, was worth twenty of these craven Necropolis cats. I see my only option is to hunt this apparition myself. And since pale funereal wrappings are its hallmark, I shall have to do so by night. At least it will not see me first.

  I head down the mean streets that twist and turn past houses warmed by window-squares of lamplight toward the deserted valley where only the dead keep each other company.

  I do not believe in risen spirits, mummified or not, but I have heard ample testimony that something unnatural prowls the Valley of the Kings. I call upon the protection of Bastet as I move alone toward the artificial mountain range of tombs glowing softly gold in the last rays of the departing sun-god.

  The hot sands are already cooling beneath my pads and night’s sudden cloak blends into my despised dark fur. I am unseen but not sightless, silent but not mute, uncertain but not fearful.

  Once human habitation has been left behind, only sand and stone stretch around me. I pause to listen to the skitter of the night, the scratch of verminous claws, the sinister hiss of scales slithering over sand, the distant call of a jackal.

  I hear a sudden scramble behind a broken pyramid stone left to mark its own grave in the desert. This may be some nocturnal drama of stalk and kill, dueling beetles, anything normal to the night, but I hasten over, leap atop the cut stone and peer beyond.

  My keen night vision sees sands swirling up, a mouse in their midst, eyes gleaming red, and a stiff, plunging, ghostly white figure lurching after it.

  The hair lifts along my spine and tail.

  For this creature indeed walks upright on two legs, yet its head has a distinctly cat-like profile. Were it more than two tail-lengths tall, I would take it for the mummified form of Bastet herself, She of the human female body and the feline head.

  But all statues I have seen of Bast cast her in a gigantic mold, three human-heights high. Even if the sculptors exaggerate in the way of men personifying gods, Bast must be at least of human height.

  Whatever this monster’s composition or identity, I must challenge it, or fail.

  As I dive into the fray below, my arrival frees the desert mouse to retreat into a crack in the stone block. I am left facing a furious monster, a growling, spinning, spitting dervish of aggravated linen. Funereal wrappings whip around the figure like human hair. I snag one with a claw and begin pulling. Perhaps the apparition is disembodied beneath the wrappings. Perhaps I will free a trapped spirit . . .

  A dust-spout of linen knocks me on to my back. Then a weight crushes me to the desert floor until my spine is cradled by sand. My claws keep churning, snagging in linen and pulling, cutting, until loosened wrappings fall over my face, smothering me.

  I fight the toils of the funereal art, digging my own grave deep into the sand, providing my own shredded cerements. My strength ebbs, and the monster atop me has grown no less heavy with the loss of its linens.

  Yet it tires too. I finally open my grit-caked eyes to discover we have both ground ourselves into a sand-trap, our contending bodies frozen from further motion by the sand our fight has kicked up. I feel matted fur sprouting like grass between the rows of savaged linen. Only the creature’s face remains shrouded, emitting faint, eerie, and still-angry moans.

  Heaving upward, I dislodge drifts of sand over my foe. After moments of furious kicking, I am upright and my exhausted opponent is encased in sand from neck to foot. Talk about a mummy case.

  Now is high time to solve the mystery of the resurrected mummy. I start pawing delicately at the facial wrappings, loose but still intact.

  I am beginning to suspect exactly what the mummy is.

  A few dreadfully crumpled whiskers spring out from the unwinding linen. Then a spray of sand from a choked mouth. Finally I unveil an eye, which reflects gold in the moonlight, and I now know who it is.

  The eye is green.

  “Mummy!”

  A hiss and spit are my only reward.

  I unwind further, at last revealing the sadly abused fur and face of my supposedly former mother, Eye of Night.

  “But you are three-days dead!” I tell her.

  “Close,” she agrees, struggling upright.

  Her once-sleek black fur is matted into curls by the linen’s long press. Her poor tail has been bound to her body like a broken limb. Her mouth is dry with sand.

  She pants. “And three days starved. See what you can get me.”

  I turn to the crack.

  Later, after a desert buffet of fare far below the palace menu, my mother sits licking her lackluster fur in the moonlight and tells me her story in a voice hoarse and shaking with rage.

  “First,” she says, “I have been prevented from joining my master in the afterlife. I will not sit beside his royal sandal on guard for eternity. Whoever has done this shall pay.”

  “Still, I am glad to see you alive.”

  “I will not be able to enjoy my additional life unless I find the person who has done this.”

  “Then the one behind your resurrection was human?”

  “In word and deed. I was taken to the embalmer, where I was . . . hit upon the head. I naturally assumed the blow would be fatal to my earthly body and that I would awake in the underworld at the court of Pharaoh, in my rightful place of Pharaoh’s Footstool.”

  I nod.

  “But when I awoke, I was . . . alone. Wrapped in linen, it is true, but with my insides intact. I was neither here nor there but in some blasphemous in-between state that I knew immediately. Though I could see that, I could not see past these blinding bindings you have removed.”

  She paws the piled linen strips. “Why? Why was I not permitted the ritual death and resurrection in the underworld? Was this some way to harm my master after death? It is a great puzzle.”

  “The greater puzzle is that you are still alive, honored parent. You were abandoned in bindings in the waste between the Valley of the Kings and the Necropolis. You should have died of hunger, heat, or thirst, or been easy prey for some jackal. Yet you fought to free yourself from the bindings, and your struggles were seen by the Necropolis cats, who feared you as a demon.”

  “I was hungry. Hungry! As if I was alive. I could barely move at first but finally my writhings loosened the linen and I could flail along like a fish spit out of the Nile to the shore.”

  �
�No doubt you bewailed your lot.”

  “I screamed to high heaven.”

  “No wonder they took you for a monster.” I stood up and began to dig in the sand.

  “Excuse me, lad, but I do not think now is the time for a bathroom break, not when we face a conspiracy of great umbrage and import to all of Egypt. Pharaoh must not be cheated of his attendants in the afterlife. It is sacrilege.”

  “Perhaps,” I say, still kicking sand, “but I think it is also something else far more common to this world than the next.”

  She finally sees that I have contrived to bury her wrappings under a mound of sand.

  “You conceal the evidence of this outrage?”

  “You must take on a new identity. You are not known in the Necropolis except by name and position. I can introduce you as my aunt from . . . Sumeria.”

  She rises weakly to her feet and stamps one. “Can you not understand, Heart of Night? My duty to Pharaoh is not over so long as whoever has separated us for eternity lives.”

  “Oh, I see that perfectly well, Auntie . . . Jezebel. That is why we must keep you dead and buried until we can expose the criminal.”

  “How?” she wails in a fit of maternal exasperation.

  “First,” I say, “we must discover what and why. Only then will come the ‘who.’ ”

  My mama is no shrinking lotus, but even she pauses when she realizes what our next step must be.

  “You wish us to disturb the dead? To break into the tomb and desecrate the royal resting place?”

  I have led her to the base of the Necropolis for a long drink from the potter’s jar where he keeps water to moisten his wheel. Not a soul, human or feline, has stirred. Ordinarily the Sacred Breed overruns the Necropolis night and day, but the mummy sightings have driven them indoors.

  “It is necessary. There is something I must see for myself in Pharaoh’s tomb.”

  “I suppose,” she says glumly, trying in vain to uncurl her whiskers by wetting them in the jar, “that is the place that I was meant to be.”

  “Exactly. Taking me there only fulfills your disrupted destiny. Besides, I know little of tomb construction, and I imagine you must have heard the plans discussed in the palace.”