Pyramids

by Fred Saberhagen

  Scheffler put out a hand and touched its stones, still hot from the day's sun. Then he moved through shadow along the east face of the pyramid's base, until he reached and turned the northern corner. The north side was still tenuously in shade. Almost in the center of the north side and about forty feet above the ground—still quite near the bottom—was a small dark gap that undeniably looked like an entrance. The entrance. It was certainly the only one in sight. He couldn't remember if the model back in the apartment had more than one.

  He climbed to the mouth of the dark, open hole, scrambling up the giants' stair of beautifully fitted limestone blocks, each tier four feet high or higher. When Scheffler reached the entrance, he found it was too small for him to walk into it erect. He felt reluctant to go into it at all. The passage was filled with darkness and went down and into the pyramid at an angle of thirty degrees or so.

  Scheffler had his flashlight in his backpack. But he didn't feel like trapping himself or confining himself inside a cave. First he wanted to see more of this world.

  He walked along the same tier of stones until he reached the ramp that went up from the northeast corner, and then stood looking up the long gentle slope of the ramp, no more than ten degrees or so, he estimated. The narrow roadway—it was hardly wider than one of the sledges that it carried—extended for about seven hundred feet, climbing diagonally across the giants' stairway of stone blocks, before reaching its first sharp corner. The ramp was built of much less carefully finished stone in smaller blocks, topped with mud bricks and surfaced with clay. The dried crust of its upper surface had, like the roads below, been smoothed and slicked into two almost glossy ruts, spaced to accommodate sledge runners. At several places along the ramp, groups of the loaded sledges were now jammed together. It looked as if some had slid down into others, like motor-vehicles on an icy hill. But here all the drivers had simply walked away.

  Between the ruts the clay crust of the ramp was rough and hard, offering a good grip to climbing feet. Scheffler went on up. All along the way there continued to be pottery fragments, as of broken water jars. And here and there, as on the road and pathway below, some of the jars had fallen without breaking. Or they might have been set down carefully, intact, in that last moment before the work force vanished.

  An interesting question: how, why, to where in this desert, would an army of men vanish and not take their supply of water with them? It would only make sense, perhaps, if they were going to the canal, then to the river. But in that case you would think they'd at least take their boats along.

  Scheffler, trudging slowly upward, climbing the Great Pyramid, began to realize that if he stayed on the ramp he'd have to walk about a mile to get to the top. Besides, that roundabout route would bring him back into the sun, whereas if he stayed on the northern and eastern faces of the pyramid he could continue in the shade. So when he was about halfway along the northern face, he deserted the ramp and began to climb the great stair made by the side of the pyramid itself. Still each tier of blocks was something like four feet high. It wasn't easy going, but Scheffler was in good shape and he kept at it, with an occasional pause to rest and look about and sip at a canteen. One of his canteens was completely emptied by this time, and he'd made a good start on the second.

  When he came to the next leg of the ramp, running diagonally athwart his path, he used the hunting knife he'd borrowed from Uncle Monty to dig small grips and toeholds into the clay portions of the construction, and so went on up.

  The climb between ramps was harder than he'd expected, and for a time he went back to trudging along a ramp again, coming out into the sun when he'd turned a corner, but forging ahead anyway. By now he'd totally lost any sense of how long he'd been here. Even the heat could almost be forgotten, as the world below him spread out farther and farther with his ascent.

  Sometimes he stopped and looked around. There was never anyone to see.

  Anxiously he kept an eye on the sun, not wanting to be caught here after dark. The sun was getting lower. But he couldn't bring himself to turn back yet. He went on up.

  Working his way around another cluster of stalled sledges, he came upon a discarded leather sandal, plainly made and badly worn. He picked up and turned over in his hands the morsel of blackened, hardened hide. The thong that had once attached it to a human foot was broken. The outline still to be seen on the inner surface of the sole showed that the wearer's foot had been considerably smaller than Scheffler's; in fact it was hardly within what he would have considered the adult range of size.

  He tossed the relic behind him on the ramp. Then, after a moment's thought, he turned around and retrieved it, stuffing it into one of the side pockets of his pack. What he still wanted was evidence, evidence of the reality of this place to take back with him, even though he wasn't sure what he was going to do with the evidence when he got it home. Maybe he just wanted to be able to look at it in Chicago.

  He snapped another Polaroid, catching the shadow of the pyramid falling across some of the workers' shacks below.

  Then he once more moved on, and up, through the enveloping silence and the heat.

  The triangle of the east face was narrowing noticeably around him now; the pointed summit was much closer than it had been. At the very apex, the topmost stone, smooth and sharply pointed, glinted as if its surface were pure gold. The upper few yards of the pyramid, already sheathed in the smooth casing-stones, were pale and smooth and gleaming. The ramps stopped at the lower edge of the finished portion. Evidently the plan was to remove the ramps from the top down, as the last stage of the building progressed downward.

  Scheffler paused to try the binoculars once more. From this height, which he estimated at forty or fifty stories above the river and its valley, he could look over the stone walls of the settlement on the near bank, and see down into its empty streets. In one place there, color and movement caught his eye. He looked for a full minute before he was convinced that it was only a couple of bright banners, stirring in a feint breeze.

  He could still see no one in the city. Or anywhere else. No one at all.

  He let the binoculars hang on their sling around his neck, and wiped his forehead. He looked down.

  He froze.

  There was a cigarette butt, a genuine, filterless cigarette butt, flattened as if by a careful shoe, on the rock right at his feet.

  Scheffler looked up, and around. He could feel this almost-pristine world trying to turn into a giant movie set before his eyes. As if there were, or could be, anyone in the world who was able to build a movie set like this.

  He wiped his forehead. The heat was getting to him. He decided not to go on all the way to the top today. Time and water were running out on him. Stooping, he picked up the butt, and buttoned it carefully into his shirt pocket.

  Enough for today. He would have to call it enough, unless he was prepared to spend the night. He wanted to get home and think.

  He was halfway down the enormous slope again, moving faster on the descent, when the voice from below, hailing him, broke jarringly into his thoughts.

  "Hallooo!" It was a high voice, thin and piercing. It had to be that of a woman or a girl.

  Scheffler looked down, to see a tiny helmeted figure in khaki, waving its arms at him. Mechanically he returned the wave. Why not? It was certainly too late now to avoid being seen.

  "Yoouuu! Come down here!"

  He couldn't tell if the words that the thin, imperious voice was shouting at him constituted a warning, or an order, or something in between. Anyway, he had no intention of doing anything else but going down.

  Changing the angle of his descent, he went down the giant shadowed stair at a good pace, one short jump after another. Meanwhile the tiny figure below, evidently eager to meet Scheffler at close quarters, began to struggle its way up. The advantage of speed being naturally with the descending party, the two of them were fairly close to the ground when they met.

  It was indeed a young woman who had hailed him. She wa
s wearing somewhat more formal exploration garb than Scheffler's, but it was worn and dusty. She was about his own age, he thought. Her face, despite the lightweight pith helmet that shaded it pretty effectively, was burned and cracked around the lips. Eyes of a startling shade of blue looked out from that band of shade. Her hair, black or dark brown, had been tied up under the helmet, but it was coming loose, and Scheffler could see how sand and dust had been ingrained in every strand. She was wearing a light khaki jacket with long sleeves to protect her arms, and the kind of riding pants—jodphurs, he seemed to remember they were called—that puffed out at the thighs. Battered and dusty leather boots enclosed slim ankles. A large canteen hung from her webbed belt at one hip, and a large pistol holster held a large revolver at the other.

  She stood with her arms folded, waiting suspiciously until he was only four tiers above her. Then she demanded: "Who are you?" And, in almost the same breath: "Where's Monty?'

  Scheffler came to a stop three tiers above her, gasping in the heat. "He's, uh, he couldn't come. He asked me to kind of look after things for him."

  "Damnation." She tapped a couple of times, impatiently, with the toe of one boot on the stone. "You're one of his students from the university, I assume." At close range and low volume the young woman's voice was still high, but it was well-controlled now and not unpleasant. It carried to Scheffler's ears a trace of some indefinable accent, possibly some variety of British. Australian, maybe? He was no expert on accents. Perhaps she was, after all, a few years older.

  "That's right. A student. Tom Scheffler." He intended to let the lady retain as many of her assumptions as possible.

  By now her eyes had fastened on the camera case hanging around Scheffler's neck, and her indignation was rising. "What's that? A camera? Damn it, did Doctor Chapel tell you to come here and take pictures?"

  "Uh, yes. But I haven't taken any yet."

  "You'd better not. God. Pictures. I'll have to talk to him, I don't know what he's thinking of." The young woman, tilting her head back to look up at him, and squinting even in the shade, took off her pith helmet long enough to struggle briefly with her long, damp hair. She really was uncommonly good-looking, Scheffler thought.

  She asked him, sharply: "And why couldn't the good Doctor Montgomery make it here today?"

  "Well. He didn't really tell me why." Scheffler realized that he probably sounded like a hopeless idiot. Not that he minded, as long as he could learn something.

  Her blue eyes glared at him. "And I suppose he's promised you a share."

  Ready to be agreeable, Scheffler nodded.

  The young woman's wrath was slowly building; though, as Scheffler observed gratefully, it did not appear to be aimed so much at him as at the absent Monty. She said: "Well, you're in it now, and there's nothing to be done about it. That's that. Your share will have to come out of his, not ours. And for God's sake don't take any pictures."

  "Okay."

  "And what were you climbing way up there for?

  "The view? We don't have time for that kind of stuff just now."

  "Okay."

  "You can carry back an armload of artifacts, we've left some near the timelock. And we've got an inventory of that batch." The last sentence seemed to be intended as a warning.

  Scheffler nodded. "I saw them there in a kind of pothole when I came—"

  "And for God's sake, next time come armed. We even heard lions last night. It won't be long before they're bold enough to come right up here to the pyramid. And did Monty tell you about the water?"

  "I… no."

  "You can drink from the river, or the canal, if necessary, as long as you're returning within a couple of hours—because, you see, the lock itself will take care of any bacteria you might pick up. If you're staying here longer than a few hours, I wouldn't chance it."

  "Uh, no, of course not."

  Once more she looked at him suspiciously. "You're keeping quiet about this." It was more a statement than a question. "I assume that Monty made it very clear to you what will happen if you don't."

  "Sure. I'm keeping quiet."

  "Well. All right, get to work, then. We do need the help. Take back that stuff we left in the pothole, and get rid of that camera. Stop, wait a minute. Is Monty coming through tomorrow? He's not sick or anything, is he?"

  "Doctor Chapel looked fine when I saw him. As far as I know he's all right."

  "I see you're carrying his binoculars."

  "He loaned them to me."

  "All right, then, get on with it." She waved her hand in dismissal. "We'll have more stuff for you by tomorrow morning."

  Scheffler nodded, and made his way past her down the great stair of the unfinished pyramid. He moved along about as quickly as was feasible in the heat, heading for the elevator—he would have to start thinking of it as the timelock now.

  Halfway to the canal he looked back once. The nameless young woman was still watching him.

  He hastened on his way, listening for lions.

  EIGHT

  The great Pharaoh—unchallenged Lord of the Two Lands, beloved of Osiris and Ra, Isis and Horus, peer of a multitude of lesser gods than those—was dead. Khufu's unexpected passing, after an illness of only a few days, had taken his entire kingdom by surprise. Caught unprepared were priests and generals, nobility and peasants—all of the circles of intrigue within the Palace, as well as all of Pharaoh's worshippers and friends, within the Palace and without.

  And all of Pharaoh's secret enemies.

  Since that shocking day when Great Khufu had breathed his last, Aah the moongod had twice passed through his cycle of unceasing change. The final steps of the embalming process had been finished only three days ago, and only today had the Pharaoh's funeral procession completed its slow and majestic progress from one temple to another, in the vicinity of Memphis and the Palace. Only today had those last rites reached their culmination with the entombment of the Pharaoh's mummy, along with the bulk of his personal treasure.

  His stupendous tomb, the pyramid upon which a generation of his people had spent long seasons of their labor, was still not entirely finished, but on the day after Khufu's death the Chief Builder had pronounced it ready to receive and to protect the Pharaoh's body.

  "Perhaps," said Ptah-hotep to his friend Thothmes, "we built too quickly and too well."

  It was late in the afternoon on the day of Pharaoh's burial, and the two men were sitting together on a small terrace on one of the higher roof-levels of the Palace. It was a secluded place and free of eavesdroppers.

  The inhabitants of the Palace had been especially affected by the prolonged rituals of mourning. Even now those ceremonies had not quite ended. As Ptah-hotep and Thothmes talked, they could hear the endless wailing of the women in a distant courtyard. And in a closer courtyard, almost directly below them, the two men could see the slow steps of the dancers beginning the celebration of the Feast of Eternity.

  "Whether we built too well or not," said Thothmes, "we were certainly promoted at the wrong time." With the notable exception of the Chief Builder himself, none of the officials who had supervised the construction of the passages inside the lower and middle levels of the pyramid had been allowed to remain in the same jobs while the upper third of the structure was completed. Shortly after that day some years ago when Ptah-hotep had arranged for Sihathor to see into the pyramid's heart, both Ptah-hotep and Thothmes had been given positions in the Palace.

  Nominally both changes had been promotions; but from that day to this, neither man had been able to learn anything more regarding any final changes that Pharaoh might have decreed in the design for his tomb.

  "Tomorrow the funeral singers will be silent in the Palace," said Ptah-hotep. "And the dancers will be still at last." Despite the fact that his secret plans of many years were not about to be brought to fruition, he felt an emptiness. Khufu's reign had endured for twenty-three years, and Ptah-hotep, like many another subject, could remember no other Pharaoh.

  "And
tomorrow the preparations for the new Pharaoh's coronation will begin," Thothmes offered. "Already everyone's thoughts have turned to that."

  "That is all to the good if we are going to act this very night," Ptah-hotep said.

  Thothmes signed agreement.

  From their high vantage point the two friends could see the mourning city of Memphis spread out below them, and part of the broad river. They could also see, at least two miles away, the almost-finished pyramid. From where they stood the great mass of stone lay partially in shadow, and faintly blue with distance. Ptah-hotep was thinking that there was no telling how long it might take Sihathor and his expert crew to break their way through all those granite plugs and deadfalls, or alternately tunnel around them through the softer limestone. Of course the job would be—or ought to be—enormously simplified by the secret information Sihathor had already been given. But at best forcing an entry would be far from easy�and it would be complicated by alterations in the design made during the last few years. Certainly to reach the burial chamber would take many days and many nights for even the most skillful and industrious grave robbers.

  "Our rendezvous with the stonemason is set for midnight?" Thothmes asked softly.

  "Yes. If you and I depart by boat from the Palace docks at sunset, we should have ample time to reach the place."

  "I foresee no problem. No one now attends the docks." From where the two men sat they could observe the deserted piers lining the canal. A multitude of small boats, all sizes and all shapes, were waiting to be used.

  The news of the Pharaoh's death had spread rapidly to the ends of his kingdom, and for the past two months all but the most necessary work had come to a halt across the land. Artisans, priests and laborers of every kind had turned away as much as possible from their usual tasks, and for two months many of them had been working to their capacity in preparation for the greatest funeral procession in history.

  Even the last phase of construction on the Horizon of Khufu had been halted temporarily, two months ago. The finishing touches could be given the pyramid, the remainder of its outer sheathing of finely polished stones set into place, the great construction ramps torn down and the rubble from them cleared away, just as well after the funeral as before. As a consequence, Thothmes and Ptah-hotep, as well as the officials who now directly supervised the construction, had been able to take time out from their administrative jobs for an extended period of official mourning.