by Nick Drake
Then we heard another high, echoing cry, this time from another direction. Thoth turned and tugged on the leash, urging me to follow. I let him lead me down a side passage. At the end, it divided into two. We listened, vigilant, every nerve sharpened, every muscle tense. Another cry came, this time to the right. We hastened along the passage, past still more low chambers crammed with pots, most of them smashed now, with small bones and bits of skull sticking out at odd angles, as if they had been here for a very long time.
Every time the cry came echoing up to us, it led us deeper and deeper into the catacombs. It occurred to me then how impossible it would be, even if I could save my son, to find our way out again. And the thought followed: this was a game. He was trapping me. I stopped. When the next cry came I shouted out: ‘I will go no further. Come to me. Show yourself.’
My voice echoed down the passages, resounding and repeating throughout the labyrinth, before fading to nothing. Thoth and I waited in the vast obscurity, in our small circle of weak, propitiatory light. At first, there was nothing. But then the faintest glow glimmered in the darkness. Impossible to gauge how close or how far away it was, this tiny point of light. But we watched it bud and flower, as it lit up the sides of the passageway, I saw within it: a shadow, walking.
48
He wore the black mask of Anubis, the jackal, Guardian of the Necropolis. His painted teeth were white in the dark. I saw a ceremonial gold collar around his neck.
‘You have brought your baboon,’ he said, in his low, grey voice.
‘He insisted on meeting you.’
‘He is Thoth, Recorder of the Dead. Perhaps he deserves a place at this gathering,’ he replied.
‘Take off that mask, Sobek, and look me in the eye,’ I said.
The great catacombs, with their labyrinth of darkness and silence, seemed like the vast, echoey ear of the Gods. Were they listening to every word? Slowly he removed the mask. We faced each other. I stared with hatred into his stone-grey eyes.
‘You have my son, and I want him back. Where is he?’ I said.
‘He is here, hidden. I will return him to you. But first, you must give me something.’
‘I have it but I will not give it to you until my son is safe, with me.’
‘Show it to me.’
I held up the leather bag so he could see it in the lamplight. He gazed at it hungrily.
‘We have an impasse. I will not tell you where the boy is, until I have the bag. And you will ensure I do not gain possession of the bag unless you have the child. So let us be intelligent, and think about this in another way,’ he said.
‘And what is that?’
‘The price of your child’s life is nothing more than a little conversation with me. I have long thought of you as an honoured colleague. We are very like each other, after all.’
‘We have nothing to discuss. I am nothing like you. All I want is my son. Alive. Now. If you have hurt him, if you have hurt any particle of him-’
‘Then to get him you must be patient, or I will tell you nothing,’ he replied coldly. ‘I have waited for this moment. Think, Seeker of Mysteries. You, too, have questions. Perhaps I have answers.’
I hesitated. Like all murderers of his kind, he was lonely. He desired to be understood.
‘What do you want to talk about?’
‘Let us talk about death. For this is what fascinates us both. Death is the greatest of gifts, for it alone offers transcendence and perfection from this hopeless and banal place of blood and dust,’ he said.
‘Death is not a gift. It is a loss,’ I replied.
‘No, Rahotep. You feel most alive when closest to death. I know you do, despite the sweet little world of your family. All those dear children, and your loving wife…But mortals are mere bags of blood and bone and vile tissue. The heart, the famous heart of which our poets and lovers speak, is nothing but meat. All shall rot.’
‘It is called the human condition. We make the best of it. What you do is also very banal. You kill helpless, drugged boys and girls, and small animals. You skin them, you break their bones, and you pluck out their eyes. So what? That is nothing special. In fact, it is pathetic. You are no more than a schoolboy torturing insects and cats. I have seen much worse. I don’t care why you killed them in the way you did. It doesn’t matter. It was some kind of freak show of death done for your own benefit. You speak of transcendence, and yet here you are, deep in the catacombs, a lonely, frustrated little man, despised, a failure; and desperate for what is contained in this little leather bag.’
He was breathing faster now. I needed to goad him.
‘Did you know that one of the boys did not die? He is alive. He described you. He can identify you,’ I continued.
He shook his head.
‘A witness with no eyes? No, Rahotep, it is you who are desperate. It is you who are the failure. The King is dead, your career is finished, your son is in my power.’
I struggled not to slam him up against the wall of the catacomb and smash his face with the lamp. But I must not, for how then would I find Amenmose? And I still needed answers.
‘As for those absurd objects you left for the King; your strange little gifts. Did you really think they would frighten him?’
He scowled.
‘I know they caused him terror. They showed him, and that girl, everything they feared; all I had to do was to hold up a mirror to their terror of death. Fear is the greatest power. Fear of the dark, of decay, destruction and doom…and above all, fear of death; the fear that drives all men. The fear that underlies everything that we have made, and everything we do. Fear is a glorious power, and I used it well!’ Sobek’s voice was tighter now.
I moved closer to him.
‘You are a pathetic, sad, twisted old man. You were sacked by Ay, and in revenge you found a way to make yourself feel important again.’
‘Ay was a fool. He did not see what he had before him. He dismissed me. He betrayed my care! But now he regrets it. Everything that has come to pass, all the chaos and the fear, has been caused to happen by me! Even you, the famous Rahotep, Seeker of Mysteries, could not stop me. Do you still not see? I called to you. I laid a path for you, from the beginning, to this moment. And you have followed like a dog, fascinated by the stink of corruption and death.’
I had known this, and denied it to myself. He saw it.
‘Yes. Now you understand. Now fear touches you. The fear of failure.’
I kept moving to ward off that fear.
‘But why did you hate Tutankhamun? Why did you begin to attack him?’
‘He was the seed of a declining and deteriorating dynasty. He was not fit. He was not virile. His mind was weak and his body imperfect. His fertility was blighted, and offered only a progeny of twisted, useless things. He had no prowess. I could not permit him to become King. That had to be stopped. Once, in the time of wisdom, before this time of fools, there was a sacred custom of killing the king when his failures jeopardized the health and power of the land. I have restored that noble ritual. I have followed the old rites. His bones were broken, his face was cast away, his eyes were cast out, his death mask was composed of rotting things, so that the Gods will never recognize him in the Otherworld. I have renewed the kingship. Horemheb will be King. He has power and virility. He will be Horus, King of Life. And as for the boy King, he will vanish into the obscurity of oblivion. His name will never be spoken again.’
At last, he had mentioned the general. I pushed on.
‘Why Horemheb?’
‘This is a land of lamentation. Our borders are harassed; our treasuries and granaries are empty; whores and thieves and fantasists govern our temples and palaces. Only Horemheb has the authority to restore the Two Lands to glory. I am he who has power over the living. I am he who sees the Gods. I am the dark sun. I am Anubis. I am the shadow!’ he shouted.
‘And so everything you did was on Horemheb’s orders? The objects, the carving in the Colonnade Hall, the murder of Mutnodj
met? And in return he promised you glory and power?’
‘I do not take orders! Horemheb recognized my gifts and he commissioned my acts. But he is a soldier. He has no comprehension of the greater truths. He does not yet know the extent of my work, for it goes far beyond the power and politics of this world. What use is this world if the Otherworld too is not within our grasp?’
I walked around him with my lamp. I knew there was more.
‘Thank you for the gift of the box of eyes. I suppose they came from the victims I found.’
He nodded, satisfied.
‘They were gathered for you. A tribute. And a sign.’
‘Eyes are everything, are they not? Without them, the world disappears to us. We are in darkness. But as in an eclipse, the darkness is itself a revelation. “The Sun at rest in Osiris, Osiris at rest in the Sun!”’
He nodded.
‘Yes, Rahotep; at last you begin to see, to see the truth…’
‘In your workshop I found some glass phials. What did they contain?’ I asked.
‘You have not solved that either?’ And he suddenly barked with contempt. Thoth growled and stirred at my side.
‘I tasted salt…’ I said.
‘You did not think far enough. I collected the last tears of the dead, from their eyes as they saw their approaching deaths. The secret books tell us that tears are an elixir that contains the very distillation of what the dying witness in their last moment, as they pass from life to death.’
‘But when you drank the tears-nothing. Just salt and water, after all. So much for the mysteries of the secret books.’
He sighed.
‘There were compensating pleasures in the act.’
‘I suppose you drugged your victims to make it easier to commit your barbarities? I suppose they did not struggle. I suppose you were able to show them the agonies of their poor flesh in great detail,’ I said.
‘As always you fail to see the deeper meaning. I left them as signs of warning for the King. But I wanted something else, something more profound.’
‘You wanted to watch.’
He nodded.
‘Death is the most glorious moment in life. To behold that moment of passing, as the mortal creature yields up its spirit, from the greatest of darkness into the light of the Otherworld, is to behold the finest elation this life can offer.’
‘But your experiments failed, didn’t they? All the broken bones, and the gold masks, and the dead faces turned out to be just ridiculous props. There was no transcendence. The drug gave illusions, not visions. The dead simply died, and all you saw in their eyes was pain and sorrow. And that is why you need this.’
I dangled the leather bag before his fascinated eyes. He reached out for it, but Thoth suddenly leapt at him, and I held it away.
‘Before I give it to you, and you return my son to me, tell me one thing. How did you obtain the opium poppy?’
I was gratified by the flash of surprise in his stony eyes.
‘It is easily obtainable,’ he replied, carefully.
‘Of course it is, medicinally, in small quantities, for a physician such as yourself. But there is more to it than that; there is a secret trade. I think you know a great deal about that.’
‘I know nothing about it,’ he muttered.
‘Nonsense. The demand for the luxury of its pleasures is so strong now that no number of desperate girls and boys, used as traffickers, could satisfy it. But that remains a useful way to distract the city Medjay from the bigger plan. Let me tell you about that plan. The opium poppy is grown in the Hittite lands, and then its juice is smuggled into Thebes by ship, through the port. The drug is stored and sold through the clubs. All the officials, at every stage-from the border guards, through the port officials, to the bureaucrats who approve the clubs-are bribed. Everyone needs to survive, especially in these tough times. But what fascinates me is this: how do the cargoes manage to pass from the land of our enemies, the Hittites, in a time of war, through the border security of the army? There is only one answer. And that is: the army itself is complicit in the trade.’
‘What an extraordinary fantasy! Why would the army connive in such a thing?’ he scoffed.
‘The treasure from such a secret trade enables Horemheb to achieve economic independence from the royal treasury. This is the modern world. The days of primitive looting and plundering and pillaging are long gone. And an independently financed, well-equipped and highly trained army is a very dangerous monster.’
For a long moment he was silenced.
‘Even if this outlandish fantasy were true, it has nothing to do with me.’
‘Of course it does. You know all of this. You are the physician. Your knowledge of hallucinogens makes you very valuable. Horemheb employed you not just to administer to his mad wife, but as overseer of the business here in Thebes. You oversee the arrival of the cargoes at the port, and you make sure it is transferred reliably to the clubs. But I don’t think Horemheb knew the full extent of your nasty private activities. Did he?’
He gazed at me with his empty eyes.
‘Very good, Seeker of Mysteries. My works of art were personal tributes to Horemheb. They were a contribution to his campaign for power; my offering of chaos and fear. But how does this knowledge profit you? Rather, it now condemns you. I cannot let you go. You are trapped in this underworld of darkness. You will never find your way back to the light. So now I will tell you the truth. And I will watch you suffer. The vision of your misery will more than compensate me for the loss of the other vision. I am no fool. Who is to say whether what you carry is real, or fake?’
And then he uttered a cry, imitating my lost boy, exactly. The obsidian knife of fear slipped between my ribs and pierced my heart. Was Amenmose, my son, dead? I sensed I was too late. He had won.
‘What have you done with my son?’ My voice was cracked.
I took a step towards him. He took a step backwards, raising the light of the lamp to dazzle me and disguise his face.
‘Do you know what Osiris cried to the Great God when he arrived in the Otherworld? “Oh what is this desolate place? It is without water, it is without air, its depth is unfathomable, its darkness is black as night. Must I wander hopelessly here where one cannot live in peace of heart or satisfy the longings of love?” Yes, my friend. I have made your son a little sacrifice to Osiris, the God of the Dead. I have hidden him far, far away, in the depths of these catacombs. He is still alive, but you will never find him, not even with all the time in the world. You will both starve here, lost in your very own Otherworld. Now, Rahotep, your face has been truly opened in the House of Darkness.’
I lunged at him, Thoth rose on his hind legs, snarling and baring his teeth, but Sobek suddenly threw his flaming oil lamp at me, and disappeared into the darkness.
49
I released Thoth’s muzzle, and he bounded into the darkness. Red light flared from the burning oil that had splashed from Sobek’s lamp, and spread across the wall behind me. I heard barking, and then, gratifyingly, screaming. But I needed Sobek alive, to give evidence, and above all to return my son to me. I shouted an urgent order to the baboon as I ran along the dark gallery towards the figure huddled on the ground. I held my lamp up. Thoth had bitten deeply into Sobek’s throat; there was a great gash down one side of his mauled face, tearing his eye from the socket, and the ragged flesh of his cheek hung loosely from the face, exposing bone and vessels. Black blood was pulsing from the neck wound. I knelt down and dragged his ruined face close to mine.
‘Where is my son?’
Blood gurgled in his mouth as he tried to laugh.
I pressed my thumbs down on his eyes.
‘What do you see now?’ I whispered into his ear. ‘Nothing. There is nothing. You are nothing. There is no Otherworld. This darkness you see is your eternity.’
I pressed harder and harder, forcing his eyes back into their sockets, and his legs kicked in the dust like a swimmer drowning on dry land, and he squea
led like a rodent, and I felt blood under my fingers, I kept pushing until his vicious heart pumped the last of his black blood from his body, and he was dead.
I kicked his useless corpse, over and over, stamping on the remains of his face until I lost all strength. Then I collapsed on the ground, sobbing in defeat. For his death had achieved nothing. I had done wrong. The oil lamp was dimming fast. I no longer cared.
And then-I heard something. Far, far off: the sound of a child, waking from a nightmare to find himself alone in the darkness, weeping and screaming…
‘I’m coming!’
Amenmose’s screams came back louder.
Thoth bounded ahead of me, into the greater depths of the darkness, but sure of himself as he moved left and right, making the choices for me. And all the time we cried out to each other, father and son, screaming for life.
Thoth found him at the end of one of the deepest galleries. His small head stood out above the rim of a pot large enough for a fully grown baboon. His face was sticky with tears and dirt, and his cries were inconsolable. I scrabbled around for a stone with which to smash open the pot without hurting him. And I kissed the howling boy, and tried to calm him a little, calling ‘Amenmose, my son’ over and over. The first blow did not crack the pot. He howled louder still. Then, with another surer blow, the pot split open. I dragged the shards apart, the dirt cascaded out, and at last I held my son’s shaking, cold, filthy body in my arms.
The lamp was guttering now. We had to try to find our way out before we lost the light. I shouted a command to Thoth. He barked as if he understood me, and bounded ahead. I held the boy under my arm, and ran after him, unable to protect the flame at the same time.
But too soon, it flickered and died.
Utter darkness. The boy whimpered, and began to cry again. I shushed him, tried to comfort him.
