Alhazred

by Donald Tyson

  He spoke in Greek, presumably so that his words would not be understood by the two boatmen in sleeveless vests and linen skirts who stood as his elbow, hoisting the sail on a wooden pulley badly in need of grease. I answered in the same language.

  “What do the boxes contain?”

  He merely smiled.

  The ferry master was the elder of the two, a short man with a bulging belly and a black beard that bristled down his chest. He hugged the tiller and barked orders while his more agile companion handled the trim of the linen sail. For all his ill humor, the short man was competent at his task. He guided the boat upriver on the light breeze and let the current carry it back toward its landing place on the western side.

  Four horses stood restlessly pawing the ground on the slope of the bank, their reins held in the hand of a patient servant boy. As our boat glided to the dock, a group of a dozen or so laborers tied it up and immediately began to wrestle the boxes and jars off the deck. They worked silently, without the usual jests and curses. We mounted and left them behind, riding westward away from the river.

  “It surprises me that servants are permitted beneath the Sphinx,” I told Dru when our horses chanced to walk close.

  “We are all men of wealth, who could scarcely be expected to labor with our own hands, even in the sacred chambers.”

  “Each brother is allowed a single servant,” said Feisel, who overheard my remark.

  “Then you spoke in error when you said that each brother is known to only two others, for surely his own servant knows him.”

  “True, but a matter of no significance,” said the elder man. “Once the servants enter beneath the Sphinx, they never leave its chambers.”

  I saw Martala’s spine stiffen in the starlight.

  Before approaching the Sphinx, we stopped in a small gully and changed into our order robes. It was with regret that I put Gor’s polished skull into the travel pack, wrapped inside my blue coat. I had worn the skull so long, it felt strange not to have it dangling at my hip, but it would be instantly recognized by any brother who might have seen me walking in Memphis or Bubastis. Almost I put my dagger into the pack along with my other possessions, then thought better of it and slid its sheath into the top of my right boot, where it fitted snugly against the outside of my calf. The hem of the black robe fell to the ground, and even when I tied its sash around my waist, it was not pulled up enough to reveal the toes of my boots.

  Martala pulled a white robe over her head, evidently the standard servant garb of the order, then folded and tied her long hair behind her neck as she had been instructed so that it hung in a kind of lobe, held into place by several silver pins. She approached and pretended to assist me in tying the sash at my waist.

  “I don’t want to be trapped under the Sphinx for the rest of my life,” she hissed in my ear.

  “Patience,” I murmured.

  She wound the caul of silk around my face, and I flipped up my monk’s hood, just as Feisel emerged around a boulder in similar attire. I recognized him by his erect posture.

  “Once we enter the chambers beneath the Sphinx, we do not speak. We communicate only by gestures of the hands. It is an ancient language known only to our order. You and your servant will learn it as you dwell among us.”

  The horses were left in the gully, tethered to stakes that had been driven into the earth. We continued on foot to the base of the great monument just as the first rays of morning light were striking its face. Its head seemed curiously small for its crouching lion body. I mentioned this to Dru as we walked across the sands toward the front paws of the beast.

  “The statue has suffered many indignities over the centuries,” he said. “It is reported in legend that when the Egyptian pharaoh Kephren dug it from the sands that had buried it, long before the coming of the Christians to this land, he found its head so worn by the wind that its features were unrecognizable, and had his own likeness carved in their place.”

  “To judge by your tone of contempt, I would say that you believe the legend false.”

  “When Kephren uncovered the Sphinx, its face was as clear as yours or mine. He had it chiseled away because he could not bear to look upon it.”

  “Why is that?”

  “You will learn it in time. Have patience.”

  Although I had said much the same thing to Martala, it was irritating to hear it myself. Patience has always been one of my virtues. I contented myself with studying the serene profile of Kephren in the red morning light as we walked around the paws of the beast and approached its hindquarters. He had a fine nose for an Egyptian.

  We stood in the chillness of the shadow beneath the buttocks of the monster and looked at the featureless, weathered stone. It was impossible to believe that a door existed, even though I knew this to be so. When Feisel made the gesture that dispelled the glamour, and the door appeared, I had to suppress an impulse to cry out in amazement. Martala caught her breath so suddenly, it made a noise in her throat. She stared at me, face pale, body shaking with terror. Dru pressed a stud in the doorjamb that opened the portal, and we watched it swing soundlessly inward. The flicker of torchlight beckoned from the corridor beyond.

  Feisel entered, followed by Dru. I made a motion with my hand for Martala to follow. She hesitated and glanced across the desert, and I saw that she was considering a dash for freedom. This would surely prove fatal to both of us. Gently, I laid a hand on her shoulder. This touch steadied her nerves. She eyed my veiled face and took a deep breath, then stepped into the Sphinx. I followed behind her. Feisel, who waited for us, pressed a stud of stone on the inner edge of the door frame, and the massive slab swung shut, making a sound like the tone of a great drum as it sealed out the morning light.

  Chapter 22

  Ornate torches of cast brass flamed in iron brackets on either side of the door. The fluted design on their shafts had an ancient look, and was worn almost smooth by centuries of handling. Dru took one from its socket and led the way down a passage with a flat ceiling of unadorned stone. In a few steps we left the feeble glow at the entrance behind us and walked through complete darkness in the wavering pocket of torchlight between featureless stone walls. Only a faint gleam at the far end of the tunnel provided a sense of direction to our progress.

  The passage appeared level, but the backward slant of our bodies as we walked showed that it sloped downward. I found myself raising my gaze, even though there was nothing to see on the ceiling apart from the marks left by the tools of the masons. The weight of the great creature crouched on the desert above our heads was palpable. It pressed on my chest like the hand of a god.

  “When you leave this entrance tunnel, you must not speak,” Feisel told me in a low voice. “Observe with attention all that you see. Tonight, I will teach you some of our hand language.”

  At the end of the passage, two brass torches burned in brackets of black iron on either side of a double door sheathed all over its surface in beaten gold. I looked back the way we had come, and saw only a tiny square of faint light. We had walked the full length of the Sphinx, and must be standing somewhere beneath its paws. Dru set his torch into an empty socket. With a light touch, Feisel pushed the doors inward. They swung open to reveal a long chamber illuminated by oil lamps along both walls.

  We walked forward down a central aisle of green stone paving blocks the surface of which was raised a fingerbreadth above the slate-colored stone on the rest of the floor. On each side of this aisle rows of black columns supported the low flat ceiling. They were not the lotus columns so common to Egyptian temple architecture, but were square in shape and of massive thickness. I counted eleven pillars on each side. The ceiling was painted the deep blue of lapis lazuli, with numerous stars in gold leaf scattered across its surface.

  As impressive as these features of the long chamber were, my gaze was immediately drawn to small plaques o
f gold mounted in the sides of the pillars facing the central aisle. Each was no larger than the flat of my hand, yet they were strangely compelling. I paused and leaned close to examine one of them. Its surface had been chased and carved into an illustration that showed a great tower struck by a blast of lightning. The crown of the tower crumbled to the earth, carrying with it the flailing bodies of a man and a woman. Flames licked up from the ruin.

  Each of the black pillars had an image on its gold plaque, and all depicted scenes pregnant with allegorical meaning. I had time only to glance at the others, but resolved that when I found leisure, I would study them in detail.

  Feisel stopped before a door of cedar wood. In contrast to the imposing double doors of gold through which we had entered the pillared hall, it was unadorned, and no larger than the entrance to the most humble of houses. Either it was formed of a single piece of wood, or the joints between its boards were too cunningly made to show themselves. Beside it stood a tall man in the black hooded robe of the brotherhood, his arms folded across his massive chest. The index finger and thumb of his right hand wore a harness of leather straps that held a curved steel blade. It jutted out from the tip of his index finger like the talon of a hawk. His cauled face betrayed no sign of his intentions.

  With his right hand, Feisel made a series of gestures. I observed them with interest, and discovered that they were familiar. This was impossible, since I had never seen such gestures before, yet I understood their meaning. The desiccated flesh of the wizard Nectanebus had given me the gift of this strange tongue that was not spoken with the voice.

  The master of the order conveyed through his gestures that I was a new member seeking admission to its inner chambers. The impassive sentry made a sign signifying that I should approach. I gave no indication that I understood, but waited for Dru to motion me forward. From the corner of my eye I saw Martala shift about on the balls of her feet like a nervous fawn, and wondered where her little dagger was hidden in her white servant robe.

  The slender curved blade on the tip of the sentinel’s finger gleamed with a blue luster in the lamplight. It could only be poison that caused the azure hue. He laid his right palm over my heart, and I felt the faint pressure of the tip of the blade against my chest. With great care, I raised my right hand and drew upon the air the sign of passage Dru had shown me the previous evening.

  The guard did nothing, and fear chilled my heart that I had made a mistake and had inverted the symbol. After what seemed an eternity, but could have been no more than a few moments, he turned and took up a key that hung at his sash on a chain. Inserting it into the brass lock of the cedar door, he pushed it open and stepped aside to allow us to pass. Martala was not challenged, or even noticed. She stepped quickly around the guard, her eyes never leaving the tiny blade on his finger.

  A strange smell hung in the air beyond the door of cedar. It was unlike anything I had smelled before, having something of the sweetness of incense smoke and something of the sourness of a leather tannery. We stood in a spacious square chamber, gawking upward at a lofty ceiling unsupported by pillars. It rose in the shape of a narrow vault, each level of stones along its sides stepped in further than the level below, their meeting place lost in shadow high over our heads. The sheer height of the roof inspired awe.

  The unobstructed slate floor beneath the vault was dominated by a recumbent stone block half a dozen paces long and as high as my shoulder, upon which rested a replica of the Sphinx that was around ten cubits in length from its extended paws to its hindquarters. Flaming lamps on brass posts illuminated each corner of the pedestal. The idol crouched facing the cedar portal, so that it confronted all who entered the chamber as though in challenge. I looked at it more closely, and realized it differed in its details from the great statue above. Unlike the larger monument, its head was in correct proportion to its body, and did not bear the features of the pharaoh Kephren.

  I stared at its face, trying to make sense of its pattern of curves and planes. In some obscure way they eluded my comprehension. I saw the face, yet did not understand it, and when I looked away it left no memory, only a vague unease that crawled at the base of my spine.

  Two members of the brotherhood entered through a side passage as we stood before the idol. Ignoring our presence, they knelt on the slates beneath its extended paws with their arms crossed on their breasts, and murmured prayers in such low voices that I could not discern the words, periodically bowing their heads to the floor. They jerked open the fronts of their robes to bare their chests, and drawing small daggers from sheaths at their hips, slashed themselves between their nipples, then fell gasping forward so that their blood dripped between their hands. Only then did I notice the dried rust stains, imperfectly cleaned from the cracks between the slates. The pair pushed themselves to their feet with their black robes still gaping. Touching their right hands to the wetness on their chests, they then reached up to daub blood on the paws of the idol.

  I would have continued to watch, but Feisel motioned us to follow and walked around the idol and through an archway on the opposite wall of the chamber. Beyond it stretched a corridor with numerous openings along both its sides. He took us into one of the rooms, where several oblong wooden boxes similar to those unloaded from Dru’s ship lay on the floor. A bald man of middle years and a young woman whose hair was bound behind her neck with silver pins, both wearing the white garb of servants, knelt over one of the boxes, and with practiced skill opened its lid with hammers and chisels. The wooden pegs that secured the lid released their hold with a groan, and the lid clattered aside to reveal the linen-wrapped form of an ancient mummy, still covered with a thick layer of dust from its tomb.

  Without ceremony, the man began to unwrap the bandages from the body. I saw that in addition to the corpse, the box held dried and blackened objects that had the look of human organs. After the final strip of linen had been pulled away, the man seized up an ax, and while the woman held the corpse in place, began to hack it into pieces. When the corpse was dismembered and beheaded, he lifted the parts, including the detached organs, with care from the box and transferred them to a large copper bin set on a two-wheeled cart. After them were thrown in the linen bindings. The pieces from the body were dropped into the bin with no regard to how they fell, but when the box had been emptied of the larger pieces, the servants took scrupulous care to transfer every tiny fragment that remained from the box to the bin.

  With a gesture, Feisel indicated that we should follow the pair as they pushed the cart from the room and along the corridor to another larger chamber, in which four gigantic copper kettles filled with greenish-gray liquid bubbled over low fires. The kettles were round on the bottom, and rested on the rings of tripods inset with little metal wheels that allowed the kettles to be tilted. A dozen or so servants moved purposefully about the kettles, supervised by two black-cauled members of the order. The shaved heads of the male servants gleamed in the lamplight. Oil fed the flames beneath the kettles, giving off no smoke. Above each, a square vent opened into the stone ceiling to carry away the fumes from the burning.

  The servants who had dismembered the mummy stopped their cart before the first kettle, which was being stirred by a short, fat man using a wooden paddle almost as long as the oar of a boat. Without speaking, they began to transfer the pieces of the corpse into the steaming liquid, having a care to let them slide in gently so that none of the liquid splashed onto their skin. The reason for this caution was at once apparent, when the floating body parts began to soften as though they were lumps of wax held to the flame of a candle. Even the linen bandages were added. All the while, the bald servant with the paddle never ceased to stir this stinking brew.

  At another kettle that had evidently been boiling for an extended period, since its thickened liquid filled only half its volume, servants used metal rods to fish out bandages that had been whitened by the scalding water, then wrung them with iron pinchers
to extract every drop from them before discarding them into an open barrel. One of the brothers watching over the second kettle took from a wall shelf a slender vial of red glass and a small tin cup, and carefully poured a measure of the dark potion held by the vial into the cup. He sprinkled this over the top of the kettle, just as though he were a master chef seasoning a stew.

  Surely the brotherhood did not consume these ancient corpses, I thought as I watched. I felt no reluctance at eating human flesh, but the smells rising from the kettles turned even my strong stomach and made the gorge rise in my throat. I licked my lips and swallowed my saliva to keep myself from gagging, and behind me I heard Martala cough against her hand.

  Feisel led us back along the corridor into an identical chamber where four round-bottomed kettles sat on tripods over fire places, but no fires burned beneath them. We watched servants tilt one of the kettles onto its side, and I saw that it was empty save for a scum of white powder that clung to the bottom. A brother of the order knelt with a wide-mouthed bottle of green glass in his left hand and a small spatula of lead in his right. He scraped with great care at the crusted whiteness and transferred it into the bottle. When not a trace remained in the kettle, he closed the bottle with a lead stopper and took it with him from the chamber.

  We followed him into a long hall lined on both sides with shelves that were cut into the rock of the walls. Hundreds of similar green bottles, their tops sealed with lead plugs, rested on the shelves, each bearing a label of papyrus. With surprise, I recognized the room as the same that I had seen in my dream. I leaned close, and in the dim lamp light saw that the labels on the bottles were lettered both in Greek characters and in Egyptian hieroglyphics. The one I looked at bore a name, but it was unfamiliar.

  Feisel led us down a narrow passage off from the main corridor into what I took to be the private living quarters of the brotherhood. We entered a large and well-furnished living hall. The servant who admitted us had a head so closely shaven that his hair resembled the stubble on the chin of a man just returned from the barber. He closed the door, shutting out the rustle of movement from the public passage. Feisel and Dru threw back their hoods and unwrapped the scarves from their faces with evident relief.