Vengeance of Orion

by Ben Bova

  Aramset was waiting for me at the ship's rail.

  "Return to me at Wast, Orion," he said.

  "I will if I can, your highness."

  Despite his newfound dignity at being a true prince with an army at his command, his youthful face was filled with curiosity. "You have never told me why you seek to enter Khufu's tomb."

  I made myself smile. "It is the greatest wonder in the world. I want to see all its marvels."

  But he was not to be put off so easily. "You're not a thief seeking to despoil the royal treasures buried with great Khufu. The marvel you seek must be other than gold or jewels."

  "I seek a god," I replied honestly. "And a goddess."

  His eyes flashed. "Amon?"

  "Perhaps that is how he is known here. In other lands he has other names."

  "And the goddess?"

  "She has many names too. I don't know how she would be called in Egypt."

  Aramset grinned eagerly, the youngster in him showing clearly through a prince's seriousness. "By the gods! I'm half tempted to come with you! I'd like to see what you're after."

  "Your highness has more important business in the capital," I said gently.

  "Yes, that's true enough," he said, with a disappointed frown.

  "Being the heir to the throne is a heavy responsibility," I said. "Only a penniless wanderer is free to have adventures."

  Aramset shook his head in mock sorrow. "Orion, what have you done to me?" The sorrow was not entirely feigned, I saw.

  "Your father needs you. This great kingdom needs you."

  He agreed, reluctantly, and we parted. I saw Menalaos peering over the gunwale as I clambered down the rope ladder to the waiting punt. I waved to him as cheerfully as I could. He nodded somberly back.

  One advantage of a mammoth bureaucracy such as administered Egypt is that, once you have it working for you, it can whisk you to your goal with the speed of a well-oiled machine. The bureaucrats of Menefer had been given orders by the crown prince: convey this man Orion to Hetepamon, high priest of Amon. That they did, with uncommon efficiency.

  I was met at the pier by a committee of four men, each of them in the long stiff skirt and copper medallion of minor officials. They showed me to a horse-drawn carriage and we clattered across the cobblestoned highway from the riverfront to the temple district in the heart of the vast city.

  I was ushered by the four of them, who hardly said a word to me or to each other all that time, through a maze of courtyards and corridors until finally they showed me through a small doorway and into a modest-sized, cheerfully sunlit room.

  "The high priest will be with you shortly," one of them said. Then they left me alone in the room, shutting the door behind them.

  I stood fidgeting for a few moments. There were no other doors to the room. Three smallish windows lined one wall. I leaned over the sill of the center one, and saw a forty-foot drop to a garden courtyard below. The walls were painted with what I guessed to be religious themes: animal-headed human figures accepting offerings of grain and beasts from smaller mortal men. The colors were bright and cheerful, as if the paintings were new or recently redone. Several chairs were grouped around a large bare table that appeared to be made of polished cedar. Other than that, the room was empty.

  The door finally opened, and I gasped with shock as the hugely obese man waddled in. Nekoptah! I had been led into a trap! My pulse thundered in my ears. I had left my sword, even my dagger, on the ship in Lukka's care. All that I carried with me was the medallion of Amon around my neck and Nekoptah's carnelian ring, tucked inside my belt.

  He smiled at me. A pleasant, honest-seeming smile. Then I noticed that he wore no rings, no necklaces, no jewelry at all. His face was unpainted. His expression seemed friendly, open, and curious—as though he was meeting me for the first time, a stranger.

  "I am Hetepamon, high priest of Amon," he said. Even his voice sounded almost the same. But not quite.

  "I am Orion," I said, feeling almost numb with surprise and puzzlement. "I bring you greetings from Crown Prince Aramset."

  He was as fat as Nekoptah. He looked so much like the high priest of Ptah that they might be . . .

  "Please make yourself comfortable," said Hetepamon. "This is an informal meeting. No need for ceremony."

  "You . . ." I did not know how to say it without sounding foolish. "You resemble . . ."

  "The high priest of Ptah. Yes, I know. I should. We are twins. I am the elder, by a few heartbeats."

  "Brothers?" And I saw the truth of it. The same face, the same features, the same hugely overweight body. But where Nekoptah exuded dark scheming evil, Hetepamon seemed at peace with himself, innocent, happy, almost jovial.

  Hetepamon was smiling at me. But as I stepped closer to him, he peered at my face, squinting hard. His pleasant expression faded. He looked suddenly troubled, anxious.

  "Please, move away from the sun so that I can see you better." His voice trembled slightly.

  I moved, and he came close to me. His eyes went round, and a single word sighed from his slack mouth.

  "Osiris!"

  Chapter 42

  Hetepamon dropped to his knees and pressed his forehead on the tiles of the floor.

  "Forgive me, great lord, for not recognizing you sooner. Your size alone should have been clue enough, but my eyes are failing me and I am not worthy to be in your divine presence . . ."

  He babbled on for several minutes before I could get him to rise and take a chair. He looked faint: His face was ashen, his hands shaking.

  "I am Orion, a traveler from a distant land. I serve the crown prince. I know nothing of a man named Osiris."

  "Osiris is a god," Hetepamon panted, his chubby hands clutched to his heaving chest. "I have seen his likeness in the ancient carvings within Khufu's tomb. It is your face!"

  Gradually I calmed him down and made him realize that I was a human being, not a god come to punish him for some self-imagined shortcomings. His fear abated, little by little, as I insisted that if I resembled the portrait of Osiris, it was a sign from the gods that he should help me.

  But he talked to me, too, and explained that Osiris is a god who takes human form, the personification of life, death, and renewal.

  Osiris was the first king of humankind, Hetepamon told me, the one who raised humans from barbarism and taught them the arts of fire and agriculture. I felt old memories stirring and resonating within me: I saw a pitiful handful of men and women struggling against the perpetual cold of an age of ice; I saw a band of neolithic hunters painfully learning to plant crops. I had been there. I had given them fire and agriculture.

  "Osiris, born of Earth and Sky, was treacherously murdered by Typhon, the lord of evil," said Hetepamon, his voice flat and softly whispering, almost as if he were in a trance. "His wife Aset, who loved him beyond all measure, helped to bring him back to life."

  Had I lived here in an earlier age? I had no memory of it, yet it might have happened.

  Forcing myself to appear calm, I said to Hetepamon, "I serve the gods of my far-distant land, who may be the same gods you worship here in Egypt, under different names."

  The fat high priest closed his eyes, as if still afraid to look at my face. "The gods have powers and hold sway far beyond our ability to comprehend."

  "True enough," I agreed, silently adding that I would one day comprehend them in their entirety—or die the final death.

  Hetepamon opened his eyes and took a great, deep, massively sighing breath. "How may I help you, my lord?"

  I looked into his dark, dark eyes and saw honest fear, real awe. He would not argue when I told him that I was mortal, but he remained convinced that he was being visited by the god Osiris.

  Maybe he was.

  "I must go into the great pyramid. I seek . . ." I hesitated. No sense giving him a heart attack, I thought. "I seek my destiny there."

  "Yes," he said, acceptingly. "The pyramid is truly placed at the exact center of the world. It is the sit
e of destiny for us all."

  "When can we enter the pyramid?"

  He gnawed on his lower lip for a moment. His resemblance to Nekoptah still unsettled me, slightly.

  "To go to the great pyramid would mean a formal ceremony, a procession, prayers and sacrifices that would take days or weeks to prepare."

  "Isn't there a way we could get inside without such ceremony?"

  He nodded slowly. "Yes, if you wish it."

  "I do wish it."

  Hetepamon bowed his head in acquiescence. "We will have to wait until after the sun sets," he said.

  We spent the day slowly gaining confidence in one another. I gradually got over the feeling that he was Nekoptah in disguise and, bit by bit, Hetepamon grew easier in the presence of a person whom he still suspected might be a god in disguise. He showed me through the vast temple of Amon, where the great columned halls soared higher than trees and the stories of creation and flood and the relationships between gods and men were carved on the walls in pictures and elaborate hieroglyphs.

  One of the things that convinced me he actually was a twin of Nekoptah was his foolish habit of chewing on small dark nuts. He carried a small pouch on a belt around his ample waist and constantly dug his hamlike fists into it to feed himself. His teeth were badly stained by them. Nekoptah, despite his other shortcomings, was not a nibbler.

  From Hetepamon I learned the history of Osiris and his beloved wife/sister Aset, whom the Achaians called Isis. Osiris had descended into the netherworld and returned from death itself to be with her, such was the love between them. Now the Egyptians saw Osiris in the disappearance of the sun at the end of each day and the turning of the seasons each year: the death that is followed inevitably by new life.

  I had died many times, only to return to new life. Could I bring my Athene back to life? The legend said nothing about her death.

  "These representations are not accurate portraits of the gods," Hetepamon told me as we stood before a mammoth stone relief, carved into one entire wall of the main temple. His voice echoed through the vast shadows. "The human faces of the gods are merely idealized forms, not true portraits."

  I nodded as I gazed at the serene features of gods and—smaller—kings long dead.

  Leaning close enough for me to smell the nuts on his breath, he whispered confidentially, "Some of the gods' faces were actually drawn from the faces of kings. Today we would consider that blasphemy, but in the old days people believed the kings were themselves gods."

  "They don't believe that now?" I asked.

  He shook his fat wattles. "The king is the gods' representative on Earth, the mediator between the gods and men. He becomes a god when he dies and enters the next world."

  "Why does your brother want you under his power?" I asked suddenly, sharply, without preamble.

  "My brother . . . ? What are you saying?"

  Taking Nekoptah's carnelian ring from my waistband and showing it to him, I said, "He commanded me to bring you to the capital. I doubt that it was for a brotherly visit."

  Hetepamon's face paled. His voice almost broke. "He . . . commanded you . . ."

  I added, "He is telling the king that you are trying to bring back Akhenaten's heresy."

  I thought the priest would collapse in a fat heap, right there on the stone floor of the temple.

  "But that's not true! I am faithful to Amon and all the gods!"

  "Nekoptah sees you as a threat," I said.

  "He wants to establish the worship of Ptah as supreme in the land, and himself as the most powerful man in the kingdom."

  "Yes, I believe so." I said nothing about Prince Aramset.

  "He has always felt badly toward me," Hetepamon muttered unhappily, "but I never thought that he hated me enough to want to . . . do away with me."

  "He is very ambitious."

  "And cruel. Since we were little boys, he enjoyed inflicting pain on others."

  "He controls the king."

  Hetepamon wrung his chubby hands. "Then I am doomed. I can expect no mercy from him." He gazed around the huge, empty temple as if seeking help from the stone reliefs of the gods. "All the priests of Amon will come under his sword. He will not leave one of us to challenge Ptah—and himself."

  He was truly aghast, and seemed about to blubber. I saw that Hetepamon was neither ambitious nor ruthless. How he became chief priest of Amon I did not know, but it was clear that he had little political power and no political ambition.

  I was certain now that I could trust this man who looked so like my enemy. So I calmed him down by telling him how Aramset was returning to the capital with power, and the burning ambition to protect his father and establish his own place as heir to the throne.

  "He's so young," Hetepamon said.

  "A prince of the realm matures quickly," I said. "Or not at all."

  We left the great temple and climbed a long flight of stone steps, Hetepamon puffing and sweating, until we reached the roof of the building. Under a swaying awning I could see the sprawling city of Menefer and, across the Nile, the great gleaming pyramid of Khufu standing white and sharp-edged against the dusty granite cliffs in the distance.

  Servants brought us chairs and a table, while others carried up artichokes and sliced eggplant, sweetmeats and chilled wine, figs and dates and melons, all on silver trays. I realized that we had never been truly alone, never unobserved, all through our wanderings through the temples. I felt sure, though, that no one had dared come close enough to overhear us.

  I was amused to see that Hetepamon ate sparingly, almost daintily, nibbling at a few leaves of artichoke, avoiding the meats, taking a fig or two. He must eat something more than those nuts he carries with him, I realized, to keep that great girth. Like many very overweight people, he did most of his eating alone.

  We watched the sun go down, and I thought of their Osiris, who died and returned just as I did.

  Finally, as the last rays of sunset faded against those western cliffs and even the gleaming pinnacle of the great pyramid at last went dark, Hetepamon heaved his huge bulk up from his chair.

  "It is time," he said.

  I felt a trembling through my innards. "Yes. It is time."

  Down the same stairs we went, through the vast darkened main temple, guided only by a few lamps hanging from sconces in the gigantic stone columns. Behind a colossal statue of some god, its face lost in shadows, Hetepamon went to the wall and ran his stubby forefinger against the seam between two massive stones.

  The wall opened, the huge stone pivoting noiselessly, and we stepped silently into the chamber beyond. A small oil lamp burned low on a table next to the door. Hetepamon took it, and the stone slid back into place.

  I followed the fat priest through a narrowing corridor, our only light the small flicker of the lamp he held.

  "Careful here," he warned in a whisper. "Stay to the right, against the wall. Don't step on the trapdoor."

  I followed his instructions. Again, farther down the corridor, we had to keep to the left. Then we went down a long, long flight of stairs. It seemed interminable. I could barely make them out in the flickering lamp's flame, but they seemed barely worn, although heavily coated with dust. The walls of the stairwell pressed close; my shoulders grazed against them as we descended. The roof was so low that I had to keep my head bent forward.

  Hetepamon stopped, and I almost bumped into him.

  "It becomes difficult here. We must skip over the next step, touch the four after that, then skip the one after those four. Do you understand?"

  "If I miss?"

  He puffed out a long breath. "At the least, this entire stairwell will fill with sand. There may be other punishments that I am not aware of; the old builders were very careful, and very devious."

  I made certain to follow his instructions to the inch.

  Finally we reached the bottom of the stairs and started along a slightly wider corridor. I was starting to feel relieved. The worst was over. No more warnings about trapdoors or steps
to avoid.

  We stopped and Hetepamon pushed against a door. It creaked open slowly and we stepped past it.

  Suddenly light glared all around us, painfully bright. I threw an arm over my eyes, waiting to hear the mocking laughter of the Golden One.

  Then I felt Hetepamon's hand tugging at me. "Have no fear, Orion. This is the chamber of mirrors. This is why we could not approach the tomb until after sundown."

  I lowered my arm and, squinting, saw that we were inside a room covered with mirrors. On the walls, on the floor, on the ceiling, nothing but mirrors. They were not flat, but projecting outward at all sorts of weird angles, everywhere except for one zigzag path across the floor. The light that had shocked me was merely the reflection of Hetepamon's lamp, dazzling off hundreds of mirrored facets.

  Pointing upward, the fat priest said, "There are prisms above us that focus the light of the sun. During daylight hours this chamber would kill anyone who stepped into it."

  Still squinting, I followed him across the polished, slippery path, through another creaking door, and back into a dark narrow corridor.

  "What next?" I growled.

  He replied lightly, "Oh, that's the worst of it. Now all we must do is climb a short staircase and we will be in the temple of Amon, beneath the pyramid itself. From there it is a long climb to the king's burial chamber, but there are no more traps."

  I felt grateful for that.

  The temple was a tiny chamber, buried deep underground, barely large enough for an altar table, a few statues, and some lamps. Three of the walls were rough-hewn from the native rock; the fourth was covered with faint carved reliefs. The ceiling seemed to be one enormous block of dressed stone. I could sense the tremendous weight of the massive pyramid pressing down upon us, oppressive, frightening, like a giant hand squeezing the air from my lungs. A shadowed alcove hid the flight of almost vertical steps that led upward to the king's burial chamber.

  Wordlessly, Hetepamon lifted his lamp over his head and turned toward the wall of carved pictures.