The Book of the Dead

by Carriger, Gail

  Certain recollections shine from the fog of memory like the star-jewels that adorn Nut’s belly, or like the glitter of gold under the torches of the tomb breakers. Others are long forgotten, lost to the profligate centuries.

  He moves on. Other objects resurrect other memories.

  He continues his circuit of the gallery, passing skulls showing evidence of perforation of the ethmoid bone, where embalmers removed the brain of the deceased through the nose before mummification of the body began. He passes cases filled with figures of the gods carved from wood, intended to protect the mummies as they slept; another level of defence against any evil power that might seek to penetrate the tomb.

  Egypt is sand and it is sacrifice, it is blood and it is honour. It is life and it is death.

  And he remembers…

  Aegyptus, the upper and lower kingdoms were called then. The name would remain long after the Romans left, even after the fall of Rome itself, once a city as mighty as the city that is yet to be – a new Rome, capital of a new Aegyptus.

  A time of strife and division, with battle after battle, as the occupying Romans sought to cede control of the Nile nation from the Ptolemaic line, control of the country passing from one side to the other and back again. A time when Sekhmet remained well fed.

  Trying times. Times when to protect the sleeping priestess he had to take another’s life, and more than once, whilst avoiding being maimed himself. Carrying out his duty for all time was a blessing the Lady Henutmehyt herself had bestowed upon him long before, but to continue down through the years in a body made useless by injury would have been an intolerable curse.

  Four Canopic jars and wooden chest

  This jars which contain Henutmehyt’s internal organs were made from the wood of the sycamore fig. The lid of each jar represents the head of one of the sons of Horus. They were placed inside a large black-varnished wooden chest, also of sycamore fig.

  His eyes linger on the cracked, lacquered storage box. Beside it stand the four canopic jars, which in turn have been the resting place for the priestess’s lungs, liver, stomach and intestines for more than three thousand years.

  On one of the boards is a photograph of a plaster painting credited as:

  Decoration from the tomb of Pairy

  (late 13th century BC), at Thebes

  He remembers Thebes. It was in Thebes, in the triple-temple complex of Karnak, that he had laid eyes upon the goddess – his Lady Henutmehyt – for the first time. And the last.

  How could he ever forget…?

  It had been dark inside the temple, and despite the heat he had felt cold with dread. Cold with fear. His world was ending. The Lady Henutmehyt was dying.

  She was no longer the beautiful young woman he had first fallen in love with, but that mattered not. What he felt for her now was beyond love. It was duty and devotion. Adoration. Adulation.

  She was his sun, his sky, his world. She was his universe, his beginning and his end. Without her he was nothing, as formless as the chaos that came before creation. Nothing could exist within his world without her.

  The ‘Opening of the Mouth’

  The most important of the rituals performed at the funeral was the ‘Opening of the Mouth’. It originated as a ritual to endow statues with the capacity to support the living spirit, and was adapted to restore to the corpse its bodily faculties. The ritual enabled the deceased to pass into the afterlife seeing, hearing, breathing and able to receive nourishment to sustain the ka.

  He stops and looks up into the face of the Lady Henutmehyt, preserved forever in the golden death mask that adorns her coffin still. That is how he remembers her, although she was in life more beautiful than all the gold in Nubia.

  This was the face he saw when he made his promise to her. Having been her servant in life – worshipping her from afar, having her within his reach and yet forever out of reach, having loved her for so many years, watching as the sickness took hold, unable to do anything to help her – what she asked of him then was a little thing compared to what he would have done to save her, if only he had been able.

  He would have given his life for her a thousand times over, so to give his death was nothing.

  For one day she will complete her journey to the Fields of Yalu, when the gods see fit, and he will be waiting for her there, just as he waits with her now, ready to heed her call and do her bidding when she speaks his name again.

  He puts a trembling hand to the glass as he gazes into the sightless alabaster eyes of the coffin. There are tears in his eyes, distorting his vision so that he could almost believe she is smiling at him again, the way she smiled when he pledged to serve her in death as he had done down through the long years of her life.

  “I am here,” he says, his voice barely a whisper as he kisses the glass, “and will come wherever you bid me.”

  The words spoken, his vow renewed, the silence of the tomb returns to the gallery. The only sound that disturbs the sombre silence is that of his footsteps as he crosses the marble floor of the Lady Henutmehyt’s sepulchre.

  He takes his seat by the door once more, ready to keep watch over her tomb, as he has kept watch down through the decades, the centuries and the long millennia. As he will continue to do until Apophis swallows the sun and the world returns to a state of primordial chaos or until they are reunited once again – slave and mistress, the Lady Henutmehyt and her most devoted servant – in the kingdom of Osiris, in the city of the dead.

  Spell 472 of Chapter 6 of the Book of the Dead

  Oh Shabti,

  If I be called to do any work that is done there in the underworld, let the judgment fall upon you instead of upon me always, in the matter of sowing the fields, of filling the water-courses with water, and of bringing the sands of the east to the west.”

  Then, o Shabti, you will answer, “I am here and will come wherever you bid me.”

  Akhenaten Goes to Paris

  Louis Greenberg

  Uncle Menny assured me that there wouldn’t be a problem getting onto the plane. “Just smile and act normal and they’ll wave you through,” he said. I don’t think Uncle Menny’s travelled for a long time.

  I stood in the queue, shifting my eyes to the reflective steel on the escalators, and I thought I might make it. My djellaba covered most of my body and, as far as I could see, I looked like several other of the men lining up to board. The sight of the guards bristling with bored rage and weaponry dotted along the queue, spot-checking passports and scrutinising faces, was enough to raise a sweat and tingle the nerves of anyone with a beating heart. For my part, I concentrated on not flaking too much.

  As they made a show of examining the other passengers, I shifted my weight from foot to foot, easing my muscles gently. It’s not good for me to stand too still in one place without sufficient strapping. I was wearing one of the elasticised cotton body stockings Tadu’s maids had prepared for me; they make travelling a lot easier, but they’re not as supportive as full funereal binding. I took a small sip of honey infusion to keep my vocal cords moist in case I needed to talk, but not enough to get my insides too dank.

  You might think I’d be used to waiting. You’d think, since I’m over three thousand years old, that forty-five minutes in a boarding queue would be as the blink of an eye. No. You reach a saturation point. I was speaking to Kiya about this the other day. She said she thinks humans have a finite amount of patience, a certain number of hours that they can put their lives on hold for the whims of others. I agreed. So many of you entirely lose your patience well before your allotted eighty-odd years, so you can imagine what it’s like for us. Or maybe you can’t. Anyhow. It’s of no consequence.

  By the time I got to the head of the queue, I had passed two spot checks. I was already looking forward to sitting back and pressing my face to the window, watching the land and the delta reel away from us. There was only the final guard remaining, one with unnaturally pale eyes and a moustache in a style that has never, to my knowledge, been fa
shionable. His glare was enough to send a tic through my thigh muscle.

  I’d gone through this. I’d prepared. I thought I looked fine. I had on a wig of natural hair and had slathered my face with bees’ wax to make it look less… dead.

  “Passport,” the man said.

  I fished inside the robe and, allowing only my gloved fingertips to protrude from the sleeve, handed the booklet to the guard, praying that the scribes had forged the appropriate document.

  The man looked at the picture, then up at me, several times.

  I should have held my nerve – well, my sinew – but just as the man was about to hand back my passport and wave me through, Uncle Menny’s words ran through my head: Smile and act normal.

  It was the smile that did it.

  I parted my lips and hoped the man wouldn’t hear the crackling, but as I did, the honey infusion chose that moment to equalise itself with a bubble of gas from my interior.

  The guard jerked his head away as if struck. He covered his face with his hands and staggered backwards. Eyes watering, he crossed to his colleague, fanning his face and histrionically clutching at his throat, darting me looks of revulsion. I knew I had spoiled my chances of boarding, but I couldn’t just turn and leave, knowing that in this climate I might be shot in the back if I tried. I had to wait through the humiliation of being formally interrogated and rejected before I could simply return to the terminal and call for a lift home.

  To cut a long story short, I eventually had to be shipped to Paris in a crate.

  I was unloaded at Charles de Gaulle airport’s cargo wing in the middle of the night and, once I heard the porters move away, I uncrated myself, dusted off my djellaba and pulled myself into a truck bound for a gallery in the 4th arrondissement.

  There are some critics among my people, especially from the older families, who think that modern society descended into an underworld of teeming incivility. They sit cloistered in the deepest, driest chambers, huddled around their dingy fires, muttering their plaints to Osiris and Anubis, Nephthys and Neith, whomever might assist them to erase the vermin from the face of the land and usher in the next age, but of course it doesn’t happen. In my opinion, the elders would be less disgruntled if, instead of complaining about the awfulness of contemporary society, they had a double scoop at Chercher la Crème on the rue Vieille du Temple.

  Now, when your entrails have been removed and placed in jars and your orifices sewn shut, you need to be careful about what you eat, knowing that you will have to clean yourself out later, tamp yourself dry, then pack your innards with dry natural fibres, natron and the right sort of sawdust. You shouldn’t really have anything that will spoil before you are able to perform these ablutions. Nefertiti reminds me of this regularly, but sometimes I can’t resist. I was on an adventure, and would treat myself to ice cream.

  Ah, Paris!

  I hadn’t visited in a long time, and much had changed. I know Baron Haussmann had his detractors but the broad boulevards he cut through the clutter appealed to me. When I was in charge of commissioning buildings back in the day, I was all for grand-scale monumentalism, even if my erections were somewhat subtler than those of certain families that came before. The citizens of Paris are able to see the sky. They can plant deciduous trees in great rows along the streets. Just marvellous.

  But standing there on the pavement, finishing my cherry-rose and orange ice cream under the turning plane trees on the Place Baudoyer, fine spring rain filtering onto my retardant face, I knew I was avoiding the real purpose of my visit. Mother had sent me here for an important reason. Signs up the rue de Rivoli towards the Louvre, the Tuileries and beyond kept drawing my eye, and I forced my gaze away, feeling that familiar melange of guilt and irritation. I didn’t have to see him until tonight. Why shouldn’t I take in the sights, I thought, and have some fun while I’m here?

  I shook off the guilt and strolled on. One thing I’d been very keen to do was try the metro. I’d been on the London underground back when it was newly built, and of course the Cairo metro, convenient as it was, hardly compared. Once in your veins, the speed and whoosh of the tunnelling machines becomes addictive. I made my way to the closest stop and looked at the map. While I was tracing the longest of the lines, I was shoved in the back and my face hit the plasticised covering of the map. Happily nothing fell off. I turned to see three youngsters in puffed-up jackets and large trousers skipping down the stairway into the station, chortling mirthlessly.

  “Reviens à l’Arabie, vieillard!” one of them shouted out as they descended.

  Only the smallest boy, one with pink skin and short-cropped yellow hair, looked back, and his face changed somewhat as he glanced at my visage under my cowl. Was it a look of pity? Despite myself, I thought back to when I had reigned. Children had looked at me in an altogether different way back then. I remembered how the plains would roll endlessly ahead of me, submitting below my pleasantly coloured feet. How industrious the children had been back then; how respectful.

  I was starting to sound like the elders, but my job here was to communicate a more tolerant attitude. I regarded the map. At the end of the line was La Defense, which suited me perfectly. I had read about the swathe of modern monoliths Pharaoh Mitterrand had built on the outskirts of the city, and I was interested to see if his Grande Arche and his monumental concourse would live up to the hype it had fleetingly inspired among my family some years ago. “See!” Uncle Menny said at the time, trying to win over the elders. “There is still grandeur in the world.” They wanted none of it, muttered back at him, called it “a playground for plague-bearing rat-babies” or something similar in their degraded archaic vocabulary. But I thought it would be worth a look, and besides, I thought, tapping the terminal yellow dot on the metro map, the further the trip took me from where I had to go, the better. I could mute the call of the ages by immersing myself in a brash and modern place, if only for an hour or two.

  I bought a ticket from a woman in the booth. She didn’t look up from her magazine as she pushed my change back at me through the slot. I descended deeper into the tunnel and was caught by an unexpected panic. I have come all this way, I thought, only to be buried again. I had an urge to escape up the stairs, to feel the rain and see the grey sky and smell the trees and the fug of the thick air, but the promise of Pharaoh Mitterrand’s broad concourse kept me where I was, waiting with the throng of citizens for the next train.

  A wind rose out of the tunnel to our right and the train, liveried in soothing marine hues and informal hieroglyphs, pulled up at the platform. Hurried as they were, most of the passengers kept a respectful distance from me as I pulled myself into the carriage. The doors were already closing as I found purchase on the steel pole. I felt something crackle as the train jerked off and I splayed to keep upright. A young woman with headphones smiled up at me and stood, gesturing me into the seat. I was about to decline her offer when the carriage swung about a bumpy turn and I ended up sprawling into the space she had just vacated.

  I suppose I am old, but it still hurts to admit it.

  The commuter next to me, talking on his phone, shifted away from me as I straightened myself.

  At the next station, three men with accordions and a loudspeaker squeezed on and entertained the citizens with jolly music. It wasn’t much to my taste, but I admired the men’s civic spirit. When we arrived at the La Defense stop, it took some effort to stand and make my way out of the carriage. The passengers jostled past as I hauled myself up the stairs by pulling on the banister. Gradually I started warming up again and the going was easier. Near the top of the final flight, I felt a hand on my arm. I wanted to pull away but the grip was firm and I was wary of disconnecting a joint. I turned to look at my assailant. It was the same woman who had ceded her seat.

  “Are you all right, sir?” she said in English. And then, “I’m sorry, I don’t speak much French.”

  I speak several languages. “Thank you. I am,” I said, trying to suggest with subtle motions
that she let go of my arm.

  “Let me help you.”

  “That’s not necessary,” I said. But still she held onto me, and she didn’t let go until I was out of the station. When I looked around, I had to gasp. If we’d had pliable steel and glass and copious water, this grand clearing might have sprung from the imaginations of several of the pharaohs. I stared upwards at the gargantuan columns, gleaming blue and silver even in the subdued light.

  “Where are you from?” the woman asked.

  “Egypt,” I said.

  “Have you come on holiday?” she asked.

  “Uh, yes. Some sightseeing. I also have a meeting.”

  She eyed me. “Well, good luck.”

  “Thank you for your help,” I said, rubbing my arm where she had grasped it. “It was gallant.”

  “Any time. Enjoy your trip.”

  I watched the young woman walk away, considering how things have changed over time, and also how they are much the same as they’ve ever been. I remembered the kindness of my maids when I was small, those who didn’t make it, those who weren’t so well preserved. I strolled on, up the stairs of the Grande Arche, a hollow cube, lopsided but monumental. Towards the top, I thought about sitting on the steps but they were littered with cigarette filters and discs of ground-in chewing gum. I wanted to keep my garments clean for the meeting. I turned and looked along the avenue all the way to Napoleon’s Arc de Triomphe, whose splendour Mitterrand’s mimicked and mocked, and beyond, to my real destination. I had to face him today, and time was running out.