by Anton Gill
Later, though he had no idea how much later, or even whether he had remained conscious all that time, he began to feel his arms and legs, his fingers and his toes, through the channels of his body. He found he could move them again, and extend them. He discovered that he could move his arms the extent of their reach. The legs were a more difficult matter. He bent the left one upwards, but found that he could not move his right. He lowered the leg again and repeated the experiment, bending his right leg. The effect was the same.
Now he felt his body with his hands. It was there. It had form. The passage of time was marked by the progress of his experience. He could even feel his kilt. His senses mocked him then by turning him around and over and over, so that he was swirling and tumbling like a leaf in the wind. The sensation was pleasant, and he gave in to it, though at the same time a part of his mind, far distant and barely acknowledged, was regretting that it had not been allowed time to complete the experiment — to reach down and try to touch whatever it was he had been standing on. If he had been standing. If he had been standing on anything. Then he came gently to rest. In another position. But what?
He held fast to one thought. He was in his body. He wondered if he should think about his past, and tried to, but then the effort seemed too great, despite the panic that seized him at the thought that he had forgotten. He did not even dare to say his name to himself, for they could hear unspoken words, and if they were listening, and learned his name, their power over him would be absolute.
So his heart spoke his name to itself, deep within its own fortress, where no one else could come: Huy.
He must be alive. Had he died, he would surely have come apart, into the Eight Elements. He revised his inventory of himself, more, strictly this time, but still without haste, weaving through the velvet fog as through a maze to form the thoughts. He was aware of his Khat — his body; he must be using his Khou to be able to think at all. He knew his name, his Ren, because his heart, his Ab, had spoken it. But the other Elements, those that did not have a counterpart in life, he could not feel within him. Were they out there in the darkness? Was he dispersing into them? His Ka, his Khaibit, his Ba, his Sahu. He wondered if the dead had any memory of their lives. Surely he would remember the preparation for the tomb? Would his Ka not have appeared to take him by the hand and abolish the pain as they dried out his body with natron, burying it in the white sands? But even before that, would he not have remembered the plucking out of his corruptible parts, the brain, the physical heart, the bowels, the liver, the kidneys, the bladder, the intestines? Would he not have felt the pain caused by the embalmers’ flint knives as they made the abdominal incisions, and then sensed the sweet agony of relief as they were drawn out of him by the long slender hooks, once decomposition had made them soft enough to be manipulated; taken out, the corruptible parts, to be dried in natron themselves and stored in the jars of the sons of Horus, to be replaced by packings of soft linen or clean resin to preserve his form? But what was this he was inhabiting now, if it was not the body he knew?
Who would have cared for him? Who would have paid the embalmers? He was alone. His own tomb was abandoned, half finished, back in the City of the Horizon. Already the sand would be blowing into it, already mice would have taken up residence there. Had anyone told Aahmes? Who would bring food for his Ka? An ache of self-pity racked him.
Then he wondered if he could make sound.
He hardly dared to break the silence, and a new thought fought its way through the fog which softly clouded and clogged his heart: what if the sound should give him away? Was this a silence made to be broken? Or were there things in it as blinded by the dark as he was, but more used to it, able to sense and feel their way through it to him, guided by sound?
Summoning the courage to make a noise, something to keep him company if nothing else, he stumbled upon a new realisation: to make noise one must be able to breathe. A renewed wave of panic. Had he — even for a moment — been conscious of the act of breathing since his fall? Something else he hardly dared to confront; for if he was not breathing, he was dead. His heart was still caught in the soft nets of darkness, not unable to produce thoughts but fighting an overwhelming lassitude in order to do so. What did it matter if he were breathing or not?
But he opened his mouth and through what seemed many miles of filament a message came through to him, sitting in the centre of his body, that air was coming and going, coming and going. He decided to clear his throat.
He did so before he could start to think about the action more, and so allow fear to creep in and prevent him; but still no sound was produced, beyond a suppressed click as the air moved upwards into his mouth. Even so, that was enough to make him crouch, all senses alert. They could have heard that; even that. It had, after all, been a noise.
But then, if they were so sensitive, why should they not be able to smell him, if he still existed, as Huy, as a man? He was aware of his own smell, the smell of sweat now as he became fearful.
The softness again. The lassitude. Could it overcome even the urgency of fear? What position was he in? He was not uncomfortable, not cramped; but somehow he did not want to stretch out — afraid of what he might touch, if he did. He would wait. What else could he do?
But there was no time to wait. More sensations. In addition to the dark and the silence, now sensed and accepted as external impositions, there was temperature. Only now that he could sense cold — and from a certain direction, too — did he realise that he had been warm. What did the cold mean? His heart asked itself the questions and simultaneously wearily rejected them. Why did he torment himself with
needless enquiries? Why didn’t he just accept and give in? Sleep.
The next thing he became aware of, though after how long an interval he could not tell, for his heart was fogged and still would not operate to bring forth his thoughts all the time, was another smell, not connected with him. The air was still cold, and the coldness was still coming from somewhere, as far as he could determine, beyond the direction in which his feet were pointing. The smell was faint at first, and hard to identify, beyond that it was unpleasant. It came from the same direction as the cold. It was the smell of rotten fish and sulphur.
Huy gagged and rolled away, pushing at the ground with his feet, feeling rough stones on his back, until he struck his head on an uneven rough surface behind him.
Suddenly the darkness had dimension. He was somewhere. He was in a cave! But did that mean he was still in the world? His head swam as he struggled to regain some measure of comprehension, if not control, of what was happening to him; but reason kept slipping one step ahead of him. He had to be content with clinging to the impression that it was there somewhere. He felt liquid in his mouth, and immediately, Time went into an elliptical course once more, and then not a course at all; Time itself, twirling and tumbling like a leaf in the wind. He was not aware of the darkness or the silence; they had fragmented, been invaded by blurs of colour and smudges of sound. Yellow, orange, brown, each colour flaring at the edges, each blending into the next and in turn taking up the whole universe; and mixing with them, blaring, like trumpets, but not trumpets, and fragments of speech that made sense while you listened, and none when you tried to remember immediately afterwards. Had he lost that ability? Comprehension is immediate remembering.
But then he did remember; and he trembled at what he knew must be before him. The crossing of the twelve halls of darkness to the Final Judgement. The Weighing of the Heart. But Thoth was lenient. No heart was thrown to Ammit, for the beast to devour. The forty-two judges never condemned. ‘Oh my heart, rise not up against me,’ he whispered, and felt for the scarab which the embalmers should have placed over his heart, to keep it from betraying his sins, folded into the bandages that wrapped him.
It was not there. His head felt light with panic as he scrabbled for it among the bandages. Where had they come from, he thought confusedly, as an age ago he had not been able to remember the process of his death. Bu
t now, he was wrapped as a mummy, he could feel the bandages; they were the one reality in this howling madness, where forces he could not identify were pulling, pushing, hurling him as the colours flared and the brutal cacophony of sound climbed to a scream that would not stop. Something was tearing at a part of him, at his hands, with rough claws and hundreds of talons — or were they teeth? Something was forcing his hands into the wetness of a mouth, and the teeth were closing round his wrists.
Jerking back instinctively, violently, twisting his body away in a horror that overcame every other sensation, Huy fell heavily, feeling as he did so another kind of pain, sharp but recognisable. Something was cutting into his chest; but it also cut through his confused consciousness. Shaking his head, he heard more sounds — but these, too, were familiar, and he struggled to recognise them. Voices. He could still distinguish none of their sense, but he was sure that they were voices. He opened his eyes. Instead of the darkness, a grey light swam into them. He couldn’t focus. Once more he became aware of his body. No part of it was touching the ground. But he wasn’t floating. He was being carried. They had lifted him off the ground and were carrying him somewhere. The grey light grew brighter, yellower, but still it was not bright. Evening then? Or dawn? Such times of day became possibilities again.
He knew that his chest was bleeding, and he knew why. He had fallen on the edge of his bronze amulet, his udjat eye. He could feel the slight pressure of its chain round his neck. As his heart clawed its way back to thought, he smiled inwardly. He would be as sick as a dog when he came round, when the drug had worn off; but his udjat eye had done its job; it had protected him, woken him up in time to realise what was happening to him. He lay as limply as he could. If they realised that he had come round, they would kill him. But where were they taking him now? Would they abandon him on the edge of the River, as they had with Amotju? Or had they other plans?
NINE
Aset was worried. For the third time in as many days she had knocked on the door of Huy’s house in vain, and now Mutnefert had once again crossed the gulf of coolness that existed between them to ask her if she had any news of him. At first Aset had bridled when the approach was made, thinking that the secret of their love affair must be out; but after only a few minutes’ conversation, in which she was able to plant two or three pointed questions, it became clear that Mutnefert had no idea that there was anything between Aset and Huy. It was simply that Amotju had heard nothing, and had suggested Aset as another possible source of information.
Aset told her brother’s mistress that she had no idea of Huy’s whereabouts, affecting a lack of concern; but added that she supposed he had had to go underground to find whoever had sent Mutnefert the death threats. Mutnefert had gone away, apparently satisfied with this explanation, but she asked that Huy get in touch with her urgently, as soon as he resurfaced. Aset agreed to pass on the message, but was careful to say that it was just as likely that Huy would contact Mutnefert directly.
‘It’s very important,’ Mutnefert had insisted. ‘I feel guilty that I may have endangered his life in sending him on a wild-goose chase.’
‘What do you mean?’
She hesitated before replying: ‘You know how things are, and I am aware that you do not like me because of it. We have never had a conversation about it because we have never…become close.’
‘The possibility was unlikely to arise.’
‘But I cannot explain to you without telling you something about the position I am in.’
‘I have heard something of it. What do you mean by a wild-goose chase?’
‘I have been trying to break with Rekhmire. He does not wish me to. As I — and Huy — already expected, the scarabs came from Rekhmire. He has now confessed it. It was an attempt to scare me, to make me throw myself on his mercy. So the mystery is solved.’
‘Why did he tell you?’
‘I don’t know. Perhaps he saw that his plan was not working — that it was more likely to drive me away than bring me back.’
‘What did you tell him?’
‘That he couldn’t force me to continue to be his lover.’ Mutnefert lowered her voice to a whisper, ashamed of the predicament she was describing.
‘What will you do when Taheb returns?’
Mutnefert replied evenly: ‘That depends on Amotju.’
Aset knocked at the house door again, but she knew from the hollow sound within that there would be no reply. The house felt dead. She furtively glanced around in the street. Huy had chosen his lodging well; in this district of floating population, no one paid much attention to anyone else. She had dressed down to come here, and come alone, but she could not completely disguise her status, and the city was not so large as to provide perfect camouflage for her indefinitely. She wondered whether she was not worrying too soon after all; Huy had not set a limit on how long his investigation would take, nor had he described what he would do. But she felt responsible for him — no one else, even Amotju, seemed bothered by his disappearance, and Mutnefert was only concerned because of her involvement as his client. Since Huy had come into Aset’s life, it had taken on a more exciting meaning. Her only regret was that he wasn’t better placed to be a serious suitor.
The door was locked, but Huy had shown her the trick of it, and, with a final glance round, she reached into the hollow where the stone bolt was, and withdrew it.
There was little or nothing inside to tell her where he might be. The last person to see him had been Mutnefert, who had assumed that when he left her he had returned home — wherever that was, for she did not know. He had not mentioned any other intention to her, and it had been late when they parted. It seemed unlikely that he would have gone either to Rekhmire’s house or office in the palace that same evening. The lower room here had plain whitewashed walls, somewhat scuffed. Hanging from a hook by the door was a cloak, and a low table carried two or three unused rolls of papyrus and Huy’s scribe’s palette, on which had fallen a thin layer of dust. Two chairs were drawn up neatly side by side. Upstairs, the room contained a bed and another table. In an alcove, four clean squares of linen lay folded, and below it on the floor was a pair of very worn plaited palm sandals.
After the gloom of the house, the sunshine in the street made her squint, but she grew used to the light quickly enough to see a man who had been standing at the corner of the building opposite quickly disappear around it. Something about the speed of his movement told her that it was not a coincidence, and she followed him. He was a tall man and, despite the throng, it was easy to keep him in sight, while she herself hung far enough back not to arouse his suspicions, though this seemed to be an unnecessary precaution, because he plunged hastily on, never once looking back, and it struck her that he might be as amateurish as she was at this business.
As if to prove her wrong, at the next turning she was held
up by an ox-cart, heavily laden with fish, lumbering across a little square where four roads met. She smelt the odour of fish on the men tending the cart, as they drove it on towards the salting sheds. Once it had passed, her quarry was nowhere to be seen. Her sense of disappointment was greater than she had suspected, but rather than give up, she followed her instinct and pushed on down the road which led towards the River. Jostled by the crowd, which increased in density as she approached the quay, she was rewarded by glimpsing the man again, the top of his head bobbing above the sea of people fifty paces ahead of her.
Earning one or two curses, she elbowed her way into the centre of the street, where she could move more quickly and freely, having only the carts and the occasional rickshaw to dodge around, and managed to keep the man in sight until they reached the waterfront. Once there, he turned left and made straight along the dock, past the barges loading and unloading, to where the ferries tied up.
There was even more activity here, and Aset was afraid that she would not be able to board the same ferry as the man she was pursuing, or, if she did, that he could not fail to notice her. She wondered f
leetingly if he had recognised her, or if he had merely ducked out of sight and run at the sight of anyone emerging from Huy’s house. She had not been aware of being followed on her way there, and over the time they had been together Huy had taught her to be cautious.
There were queues of jostling, gesticulating people, waiting in untidy lines for a confusing number of ferries. Aset was used to having her own private transport, and didn’t know which destinations these various boats were bound for: the west bank, or further up or downriver. Although the ferrymen were evidently calling out their routes, their voices were drowned in the hubbub of the crowd, and she was nervous of asking anyone. These people, whom she enjoyed mingling with, thinking it adventurous when she was with Huy, were frightening when it came to the question of talking with them. They smelt of sweat, of fish, of stale oil, of sulphur, and of the River. Their clothes were mud-coloured and dirty. Beyond them, the little black ferry-boats, with their precariously furled triangular sails, bucked dizzily on the flooding water — safe, she knew, and contained by walls built in her great-great-grandfather’s time higher than the highest known level of inundation; but nevertheless daunting in its power, like a giant muscle.
The tall man had manoeuvred his way to the front of a queue. He was separated from her by about fifteen people, but he might as well have been on the other side of the River already.
‘Excuse me,’ said Aset to her nearest neighbours, trying to coarsen her voice. ‘Can I get through?’
‘What for?’ a surly fat woman in front of her asked, pushing her back.
‘It’s my brother — I’ve got separated from him,’ Aset improvised desperately.
‘Where is he?’ More suspicion.
‘Over there.’
‘Go on, let the poor little bitch through. She’s not even queuing for our boat,’ said a small, bald man with a hooked nose and an enormous, shiny belly. He used it to nudge one or two people aside and Aset slid gratefully past, in time to jump into the ferry just as the boatman was casting off. One or two people still on the quay hurled abuse at her, but she could not make out what they were saying and ignored it, keeping her head down. When she did look up, the tall man, at the other end of the boat, was staring ahead, in the direction they were travelling. The ferry heeled over slightly as the sail was raised, then settled and moved forward and across the water at a surprising speed. Aset felt the pressure of her neighbours’ bodies all around her; someone’s elbow dug into the small of her back, and her own face was pressed close to another woman’s; their eyes kept meeting and flicking away.
