The Shining Cities: An Anthology of Pagan Science Fiction

by Lauren Teffeau

  Djehuty was carrying a reed pen and a scroll case. She blotted the sweat from her forehead with her sleeve, then pulled on a pair of nomark gloves and tried to open the case. Lifting the cap didn't work. She tried turning it, first one way, then another. Several minutes were spent prodding it looking for hidden catches. She tried wiggling the reed pen to see if it would open anything, then tapped the case with a stylus. It didn't sound hollow. Any further investigation would risk damage. Djehuty seemed to be a dead end, and she moved on to the Ptah statue.

  Ptah was wrapped up tight in the typical mummiform garment, with his wrists and hands sticking out. There was nothing that looked like a hidden compartment. She looked him in his green face and asked "You don't have the scroll, do you?” Ptah was silent, looking back with that knowing smirk of his. She moved on.

  Aset was holding an infant, presumably Heru. She looked the statue over carefully, but again, nothing looked like it could hold a scroll. Aset was another strong goddess of heka, but Tasheen was reluctant to touch her. She remembered a plaque on the wall of a Kemetic office that showed Aset poisoning Ra to trick him out of his secret name. "Don't Mess With Aset!” it had read. If anything in this tomb contained a poisonous trap to kill a would-be thief, it would be the statue of Aset.

  The statues of the tomb owner and his wife proved to be dead ends as well. She turned around and huffed in frustration. There was no time to go through every single item in this tomb looking for the scroll, and she refused to believe that something as valuable as a magical papyrus written by the god Djehuty would be stuck in a corner somewhere like a spare pair of sandals. It must be Djhehuty, it must!

  Returning to the first statue, she looked more carefully at the base, and this time she noticed some tiny gaps. Pulling gently on the sides, it slid open to reveal a drawer. Success! Filling it was a large box of iron. She carefully lifted it out and opened the lid. A box of copper was revealed, inset with semi-precious stones. After a few tries, she was able to slide the side of the copper box open.

  Inside that was a box of sycamore wood painted with colorful interlacing geometrics, and nested inside that was beautiful box of ivory and ebony. All this was fitting the legend perfectly! Nested inside those was a box of silver, containing a box of gold! She held her breath as she lifted the lid, and inside, miracle of miracles, was a scroll!

  “Em hotep! I understand you want to see me?” She spun around and faced a man in late middle age, with a bit of a pot belly, standing in front of the interior false door. "I was visiting my wife in Coptos, and it took a while for me to fly back here.”

  “AKH, you were supposed to alert me if anyone came within a kilometer!”

  “He just appeared. And I detect no life signs.”

  She looked at the man in shock. Then she noticed that he was slightly transparent, and she could see details of the false door behind him. A hologram? But how, and why would .... She suppressed her outrage that someone would have broken into this tomb without a permit, just to challenge or trick her. But given the expense and the necessary hoops to jump, the possibility of it being a prank was nil. Could it really be the spirit of the dead magician? Her instinct was to play along and keep her eyes open, a strategy that had served her well in the past.

  The image was looking at her expectantly.

  “Ii-wy em hotep!” Welcome in peace was a good way to start. "Do I have the honor of speaking with the legendary magician, great of heka, Naneferkaptah?”

  He inclined his head and she thought she saw a brief smile. "You do indeed. I assume that you are the person who made the voice offering. No one has done that in a hundred years. And I must ask you about the small cake that you ....” His eyes had finally landed on the golden box and scroll in her lap. "What? You have taken my scroll! And you have damaged something!” He strode down the narrow aisle between treasures, looking to the right and left, his feet not quite touching the floor. "My alabaster stele! You have broken it into a thousand pieces!” He whirled on her, extended his hands, and a pair of black snake-shaped wands appeared in them. He shook them in her direction and began to chant. "O Despoiler of Tombs, Servant of the Chaos-Snake, Sworn Enemy of Khentyamentiu ....”

  “Wait. Stop. There is no need for curses. For one thing, I told you twice that I had something to barter, but you gave no answer. For all I knew, you had completely ascended and had no more use for an earthly tomb and possessions. I apologized for the stele as well, if you had been listening, but it was left leaning in a precarious position, and was bound to topple eventually. In addition, as you mentioned, I made a voice offering, and I gave you the Most Delicious Cake In The World, free and without condition. Even the Gods and Goddesses have not tasted its like before. Is that the behavior of a mere thief and vandal?”

  At the mention of the cake he lowered the wands, paused for a moment, then raised them and pointed them at her, his forehead wrinkling in concentration. "I see you are speaking the truth. That is quite fortunate for your sake. Sit, and let me consider this for a moment.” He pointed to an ebony and gold chest next to her.

  She cleared a space, moving several small statues to a nearby senet table, and sat. "My time here is limited. I don't think either of us would like the necropolis guards to interrupt us.”

  “I assure you, they will not come near unless I allow them to.” The image closed its eyes and appeared to think for a moment longer. "It might have been possible to exchange my papyrus for yours, but the broken stele creates a problem of balance. Tell me, do you possess more of those cakes?” The last question was asked with such a studied nonchalance that she had difficulty avoiding laughing.

  “Sadly no. I only brought the one for myself as a snack.” She thought about promising to return with more snack bars, but the idea of lying her way out of a problem that she'd created wasn't her way. And, the instant the idea of a lie crossed her mind Naneferkaptah gave her the sharp, predatory look of a hungry crocodile. Swimming in a Nile nature preserve wearing a necklace of bloody sausages was beginning to seem safer than dealing with this man.

  “Lord Naneferkaptah, as I said, I have come here honorably to offer you a valuable trade. A skilled magician such as you must have already memorized the contents of your papyrus. In fact, I expect you also copied it, dissolved the copy in beer, and drank the resulting potion to make the spells part of you. By this point, the actual papyrus is a mere trinket. A pretty glass bauble you might give to a serving girl. Am I correct?”

  “Ah, so you do know something of heka. You aren't an ignorant thief. Perhaps an educated thief instead.” He raised a finger to silence her protest. “Nonetheless, with any other papyrus you would be correct. In this case, however, this “bauble” was written by the Great Ibis himself, the god Djehuty. Something produced by a god must be of incalculable value.”

  “Truly?” She blinked at him in mock surprise. Bargaining with a vendor or engaging in an academic debate: either was fun, and this was showing aspects of both. His mannerisms triggered a memory of games played with her Dad, in which she was a clever merchant from A Thousand and One Nights. “Then I have the solution to your problem. I can bring you something god-created which is a hundred times greater than your papyrus and your regrettably damaged stele, naively charming though it might have been. But wait! In addition I'll give you my papyrus!” She pulled her document tube from her satchel and waved a hand over it dramatically: a gesture learned from a thousand commercial vids in her childhood. “This is a magical papyrus that none has yet seen. Not even the gods have beheld it! The only two eyes that have caressed it, from the beginning of time until now, are mine. And yet, I can tell you with absolute certainty that it is fit to grace the tomb of a great king. One who rules from the Delta all the way to Abydos, and beyond. I swear by Jackal-headed Yinepu that this is the truth. If you can detect lies, you know that there is no untruth in my offer. Do we have an agreement?”

  He narrowed his eyes in concentration, his lips a thin line. “You do speak the truth ... and y
et ... and yet ... something tells me that there is a hidden scorpion.” He tapped his lips with a knuckle. “Something that is valuable to one man might be worthless to another. A cup of cool water to a man in the desert would be a welcome treasure, yet to a drowning man ... I notice you declined to mention just what this hundred-times-more-valuable item ....”

  “NA! NEF-FER!! KAW! PTAH!” A discordant caw erupted from the back of the tomb. Tasheen turned to see the red face of a woman, framed by an elaborate black wig, protruding from the middle of the false door. She was twin to the statue of the magician's wife Ahwere, but without a trace of the beaming serenity of the pale sculpture. “What ... what, what, what is happening here? You rush off without a word, while I am in the middle of telling you something. I will not tolerate bad manners from my -- ”

  “Again, no life signs. Subject appears to -- ”

  “Shhh.” Tasheen thumped the AKH. Too late. Ahwere's head snapped around to pin her with a hostile glare. The head jerked further into the tomb, and Tasheen noticed she was wearing a brilliantly-hued collar of feathers.

  “Skraah! An intruder! A wretched foreigner! What is this ... female ... wearing such dull, terrible clothes and chopped hair doing here? Most improper!” The woman hopped out of the solid stone door. She wasn't wearing a feathered collar; her head was attached to the body of a person-sized bird, with blue and black iridescent feathers. She looked exactly like the bird-bodied Ba-souls of the dead, straight out of Egyptian mythology. Tasheen would have snickered at the avian mannerisms and discordant squawking if the woman hadn't radiated viciousness.

  The bird-woman’s head jerked about as she surveyed the tomb, then fixed on Tasheen. “You, evil one, are a thief. You have smashed your way into my husband's tomb, intending to strip it of its treasures. You have already smashed a funerary stele with his name, which I had specially commissioned! No doubt you plan to destroy his body and his Ka-statue, so my dear spouse will vanish as if he had never been born. You will not succeed! No you will not!”

  She turned on Naneferkaptah. “Why have you not killed this creature? I refuse to believe that a foreigner could have ensnared the mightiest of the mighty. What have you to say for yourself? If you won't destroy her, then I shall!” Ahwere lifted her wings threateningly and began to pick her way through the heaped treasures, her head bobbing. Tasheen wondered if a ghost could possibly harm her. The bird-woman seemed confident that she could.

  Naneferkaptah had been cowed by his wife, but now he commanded: “Ahwere! Hold! Stop where you stand!”

  “Mmmph!” she answered, continuing to stalk Tasheen.

  “You will stop interfering in my business, or you will face the consequences!” That had no visible effect. “Very well.” He raised the snake wands and thundered a string of nonsense syllables that must have been the great-great-grandaddy of “Abracadabra!” The iron snakes began to hiss with increasing fury, but still Ahwere advanced. He brought his chant to a climax, smashing the snakes together with a ringing clang that echoed in the mud-brick tomb, and beyond. The bird-woman squawked “Nan --” and vanished in what Tasheen could only describe as a flash of blackness.

  After too many seconds spent blinking, her vision started to return and she stared at the magician. “Is she ...?”

  “Harmed? No. I would not hurt my wife of three-hundred years over so trivial a matter. I have sent her to the Lake of Jackals, a thoroughly delightful place that she and her sister love to visit. If she persists in interfering, she will need to fly all the way to her tomb in Coptos, and then fly all the way here. I've taken the precaution of temporarily blocking her ka statue here,” he gestured at the serene sculpture, “so she cannot return that way. In this world, she is limited to ba-bird form when she's away from her tomb, since she lacks the words and wisdom of heka.”

  “I see.” Tasheen mused, thinking that her potential murder had been described as a trivial matter. “Before your wife tried to kill me, we were just about to conclude our agreement. Shall we trade?” She waved the document tube.

  He laughed. “I seem to remember that you were about to conclude our agreement, but I was not. I will not consider trading with you until you tell me what this 'god created, hundred-times-more-valuable' marvel is that you are offering. Otherwise I will take your scroll in exchange for the damage you have caused, and you will go on your way empty-handed.”

  Tasheen considered her options. She couldn't leave the second papyrus, because two papyri left in the tomb would alter history, and put her in serious trouble. Worse yet, she didn't think she had enough time to check other tombs, and there was no guarantee that there would be anything significant enough to appease the grants committee. Assuming there weren't more pesky ghosts, or whatever they were, waiting to challenge her in the other tombs. Lying to this man didn't look like a safe option either. “Well ... what I had in mind was sand from outside. As much as you wanted. You have to agree that it's god-created; it's even possible that a few grains of it were part of the original mound that emerged from the waters of darkness. And it is used in purification, rituals, and offerings to the gods ....”

  “Sand? You were going to trade me ... sand?” His hands clenched, his face tightened, his eyes squeezed shut, then his shoulders began to quiver. Tasheen braced herself for an outburst; finally the storm broke. He collapsed into a gilded chair, his fists striking his thighs. “Measure upon measure of sand,” he snorted. He began to laugh helplessly. “I was almost snared by your net. My name would have lived for thousands and thousands of years, as an object of ridicule by scribes and harpers. Tellers of tales in the marketplace! A mixed blessing, but ... I would have no legitimate cause for complaint. None whatsoever. No magistrate in the whole land would rule in my favor.”

  “If it had worked, I certainly wouldn't have told tales about it. Your secret would have been safe. You can't blame me for trying ....”

  “Would you consider adding your ostracon as part of the trade, as recompense for the stele?”

  She looked around. An ostracon was a piece of broken pottery, and was the standard writing material in Egypt. Recycling in action. Papyrus was made by a laborious process, and was rarely used for anything that wasn't funerary or sacred. “What ostracon? I didn't bring one.”

  “There.” He pointed at her AKH. “I've heard it speak more than once, and it seems to talk of its own initiative, not simply answering questions under your magical control. It would make a worthy object of study.”

  “That would not work.” How could she explain that it would self-destruct without a trace if there was a chance it would contaminate the timestream? “It's bound to me. If I left it behind, it would miss me terribly and burn itself into nothingness. Besides, it isn't just an ostracon, it's my AKH. Isn’t that so, AKH?”

  “Tasheen is essentially correct, sir. If she were to leave me behind, I am honor-bound to end my existence, and it would be as if I had never been in this world. Naturally, I have a strong preference for avoiding that. It would be quite unpleasant for any entities in the vicinity when that regrettable event took place. You may consider 'quite unpleasant' to be an ironic understatement, in the sense that being eaten alive by crocodiles would be an inconvenience. And yes, I am her AKH.”

  He clapped his hands, and made a praise gesture with his weathered hands. “Fascinating! You have an ascended ancestor talking directly with you, and he can talk to others as well! I could hear him quite distinctly, and through an icon that doesn't resemble a person in any way! Truly unique and unprecedented! Even stranger, I cannot tell if he is telling the truth, or if he is lying to me. Normally I would know that, even from an animal. Is the spell for this among those in your papyrus?”

  “No, there are many wonderful spells in it, I can assure you, but that one is sadly absent. If you can sense my truthfulness, I can tell you that everything the AKH said is correct.”

  “Hmmm, yes. Could you dictate the spell to me, so I can record it? I would consider trading my Djehuty papyrus for that secre
t!”

  “Tasheen does not have the knowledge of that spell, nor does any other individual. Hundreds of people, widely separated, put their hands to it, and no living human knows even a fraction of the whole. If I were to begin to reveal it to you, the same unfortunate dissolution would be triggered, exactly as if she had left me behind. In addition, there is no chance whatsoever that you could obtain most of the vital ingredients, even with your, admittedly considerable, abilities.”

  “That is a terrible shame, though the idea of breaking a spell into pieces to maintain secrecy is brilliant. I would have loved to see the workings of a spell so powerful that it prevents even an Akh from revealing it. So, young lady, if you have no more of the offering cakes, and nothing beyond your papyrus to offer, I am afraid we are at an impasse.” He folded his arms across his chest and gave her a challenging look.

  “Lord Naneferkaptah, as I said earlier, it was only the purest accident that the stele was damaged. Not malice, not carelessness. If you look outside, you can see that I stacked the bricks with extreme care so I could replace them exactly as they were. My goal has been to leave no trace, no hint of my visit other than to trade papyri. It was fate, or divine chance, and you can't blame me for that.”

  “Fate. Divine chance ....” He tilted his head in thought and looked past her at something. Then his face brightened. “Chance. Yes! There.” He pointed.

  Twisting around, she scanned the piles. “The senet board?”

  “If you are willing to trust to your skill, and to chance, I see a way out of our dilemma. Will you wager your papyrus on a game of senet?”

  Senet. Of course she'd played senet. Any Egyptology student had. She had relentlessly pestered her playmates about it as a girl, crazed with anything she could reenact from the ancient culture. She'd even mummified a chicken from the grocery store as a science project. When she was old enough to challenge distant people on her tablet, she was able to find more willing players, but there weren't many. Most preferred the game's great-great-great grandchild backgammon. Normally she'd match her play against any other, but playing Naneferkaptah .... Not only did the ancients play senet when they were alive, they were also shown as playing the game in the afterlife. He might be trying to trick her in revenge for her sand gambit.