Aegypt

by John Crowley

  And then, all unexpectedly, he took a turning he recognized; on a certain day he topped a certain sudden hill and, astonished, raised his eyes to a view he was familiar with, the frontiers of a country he knew.

  A country he knew; a country he had once known a lot about, though he hadn’t thought of it in years. A country on whose frontiers he had at one time seemed often to stand, through long summer evenings when the false geography of Kentucky’s northern hills, to which he had been unaccountably exiled, would melt, and that more real country come to be, not a long walk away; the country to which he truly belonged.

  Spring had come, the new world’s first, and summer was returning the nomads to the streets – until it was stolen, Pierce had watched on his TV the masses of them, the children’s crusade strung out through the streets of cities, or pressing up against the obdurate front of some public building; watched them ridden over as by a car of Kali wreathed in skulls and tear-gas smoke.

  Little Barnabas, in spite of or perhaps because of its trimming, had been marched over as by an Oriental migration or Iberian transhumance, almost without resistance, and now Pierce was spending the hottest day of summer session locked in his office while the children laughed and sang and painted the halls, clamoring for peace. He listened for the sounds of breaking glass and sirens and ate Saltine crackers, a box of which he had found in a desk drawer; he read Huizinga’s Waning of the Middle Ages, which he thought he had been assigned to read once at Noate, had even once passed a test on, but did not remember having actually read:

  The people force their way in at daybreak into the great Hall where the feast was to take place, ‘some to look on, others to regale themselves, others to pilfer or to steal victuals or other things.’ The members of Parlement and of the University, the provost of the merchants and the aldermen, after having succeeded with great difficulty in entering the hall, find the tables assigned to them occupied by all sorts of artisans. An attempt is made to remove them, ‘but when they had succeeded in driving away one or two, six or eight sat down on the other side.’

  There it was, sirens, both the moaning kind and the imperative Klaxon. The kids within began to break the windows, and the kids without, barricading the steps, cheered exultantly, defiantly: Pierce could hear them, though he could see nothing through the blind window of his office, which faced onto an airshaft.

  He flipped the pages of the little book.

  . . . many an expelled prince, roaming from court to court, without means, but full of projects and still decked with the splendour of the marvellous East whence he had fled – the king of Armenia, the king of Cyprus, before long the emperor of Constantinople. It is not surprising that the people of Paris should have believed in the tale of the Gipsies, who presented themselves in 1427, ‘a duke and a count and ten men, all on horseback,’ while others, to the number 120, had to stay outside the town. They came from Egypt, they said; the Pope had ordered them, by way of penance for their apostasy, to wander about for seven years, without sleeping in a bed; there had been 1,200 of them, but their king, their queen, and all the others had died on the way; as a mitigation, the Pope had ordered that every bishop and abbot was to give them ten pounds tournois. The people of Paris came in great numbers to see them, and have their fortunes told by women who eased them of their money ‘by magic arts or in other ways.’

  Louder just for an instant than the clamor of the New Age around him, Pierce felt the sensation of an answer, so suddenly that it took him a moment to think just what question it was the answer to. He searched the passage again:

  They came from Egypt, they said

  Oh. Oh yes: oh yes of course. Egypt.

  A simple answer; Barr had said it was. A simple answer, one he had even sort of known in fact, only he hadn’t known this one essential piece of information, but now he had it, now he knew.

  How do you like that.

  Egypt: but the country they had brought their magic arts from would probably not have been Egypt, would it, no it would not have been, not in the story Pierce had once known. It would have been a country like Egypt, a country near Egypt perhaps, but not Egypt at all.

  How do you like that: now how do you like that.

  The pages of the little book fluttered closed in Pierce’s hands; the high-pitched chanting of the students was being drowned out by insistent bullhorn commands. Then there came a mingled groan and wail of horror, and the thud thud of tear-gas canisters fired. Pierce was to be liberated.

  Elsewhere, ahold of a simple answer, before the bitter fumes reached his hall, Pierce only sat and stared, thinking: Now how do you like that.

  Pierce had been an only child, nine years old, when his mother had left his father forever in Brooklyn (for reasons which became obvious to Pierce over the years but which had not been clear to him then at all) and brought him to Kentucky to live with her brother Sam, whose wife had died, and Sam’s four children, in a ramshackle compound aloof above the single brief street of a mining town. Sam was a doctor down in town, at a little Catholic mission hospital which treated the miners’ lungs, and couched their child-brides, and wormed their children. Sam’s own children – and that would include Pierce – didn’t attend the squalid local school; they were given lessons at home in the morning by the priest’s sister and housekeeper, Miss Martha.

  Not Joe Boyd, though, Sam’s oldest son. When Pierce came to live there, Joe Boyd was already too old to be compelled to go to school with Miss Martha any longer, too old and mean to be compelled to do anything at all he chose not to do. He was a fox-faced boy who rolled the sleeves of his short-sleeved shirts above the lean muscles of his arms; he was supposed to be taking a course of reading with Sam, but he was coming to love only cars. He frightened Pierce.

  And Hildy, the year after Pierce arrived, left Miss Martha’s tutelage too, to go attend Queen of the Angels School in the mountains above Pikeville, five days a week, gruel for breakfast and patched sheets and litanies. The fact that years later she became a nun herself, of the tart, disparaging, at bottom selfless and brave kind, never kept Hildy from relishing and retelling the horrors of that red brick mansion, the rose of Sharon, the lily of the valley.

  So classes from then on were for Pierce, and quiet, private Roberta called Bird, and then Warren the baby, a shapeless lump to Pierce when he arrived, who only later grew a stolid, intelligent character. They sang for Miss Martha, recited for Miss Martha, they listened to Miss Martha remember their sainted mother Opal Boyd, they fled Miss Martha at noon into games Miss Martha would never hear of, and could not have imagined. Pierce’s mother, Winnie, when she came, tried to get them all together to teach them French in the afternoons a couple of days a week, but they soon wore her down and out. From noon to morning, from May to October, they were free.

  Such was the family Pierce was to make his way in; in their isolation they were like some antique family of gentry, in the specialness of their circumstances like foreigners living within a pale. It was only the Oliphant children who were taught by the priest’s sister; only the Oliphants (as far as Pierce knew) who every month received from the state library in far-off, bluegrass-green Lexington, a box of books. Opal, Sam’s wife (herself once a schoolteacher, and formerly her children’s indulgent tutor, they cherished her memory fiercely), had found out this was possible to do, to request that boxes of the state’s books be sent to this bookless fastness, and Winnie continued it: every month the read books were packed up and shipped back, and on receipt another box would be sent, more or less filling the vague requests on the Oliphants’ list (Mother Westwind, more horse stories, ‘something about masonry,’ anything of Trollope’s) and picked up at the post office, and opened in excitement and disappointment mixed, Christmas every month. Pierce remembering his confusion and contempt before this bizarre system – bizarre to a child who had had the vast, the virtually illimitable reaches of the Brooklyn Public to wander in, his father went every two weeks and Pierce had always gone with him and could have any book he poin
ted at – Pierce remembering those battered library boxes wondered if perhaps it had been they, those librarians or whoever they were who had filled them, who by sending him some book full of antiquated notions and quaint orthography had first suggested to him the existence of that shadow country, that far old country that was sort of Egypt but not Egypt, no not Egypt at all, a country with a different history, whose name was spelled too with a small but crucial difference: it was not Egypt but Ægypt.

  On an impossible city night, too hot to sleep, too hot and loud with sirens and music and the parade endlessly passing, Pierce stood at his window with a handmade cigarette between his fingers, and that country once again seemingly before him, still there in the past: Ægypt.

  Why do we believe Gypsies can tell fortunes? Because they came not really from Egypt, but from Ægypt, the country where all magic arts were known. And still carry with them, in however degraded a form, the skills their ancestors had. Pierce laughed aloud to think of it.

  And why were they wandering the earth, and why do they still wander? Because Ægypt has Fallen. It exists no longer. Whatever country occupies its geography now, Ægypt is gone, has been gone since the last of its cities, in the farthest East, failed and fell. Then its wise men and women went forth carrying with them their knowledge, to remember their country and yet never speak of it, to take on the dress and habits of the countries they went out into, to have adventures, to heal (for they were great doctors), and to pass on their secrets, so that they would not be lost.

  And so these Gypsies (’Gyptians! Sure, the same word) were probably not really from there, only pretending to be, for those who were really from there were vowed to silence and secrecy.

  Which is why it had been so hard for Pierce to discover them, hidden in history, in the upside-down adventures they had got themselves involved in down the centuries since then. Seen from the outside, dressed in mufti so to speak in the dense pages of the encyclopedia, in Miss Martha’s history textbook, they blended into the background, their stories could be misread; seen from the outside, they didn’t seem to be mages, or sworn knights of Ægypt.

  Seen from the outside, neither had he and his cousins seemed to be: in old snapshots they were just scruffy kids in a degraded landscape, eastern Kentucky, coal trains chugging endlessly past their mountaintop, their mountaintop not different from any other mountaintop, not obviously quartered and labeled by secret geometries. Of course not. You had to be inside to know; you had to be told. And they too were sworn to secrecy.

  The Invisible College.

  Why, Pierce wondered, if they were all alone there and never out of one another’s company, had they always been making up clubs, associations, brotherhoods, pledging their faith to one another? When he had first come from Brooklyn to live among them he had had to wait long for initiation into Joe Boyd’s Retriever’s Club; Joe Boyd, the eldest of his cousins, its permanent president. The Invisible College was Pierce’s own invention, to counter that exclusion; wittily, with careful vengeance, he had not excluded Joe Boyd from membership, but instead had elected him president – his presidency, his membership, the very existence of the Invisible College however being kept a secret from him, a secret to which all the other Invisibles (all the kids but Joe) were pledged forever.

  His own invention? No, the Invisibles had always been; Pierce had only learned, from hints in books, of their immemorial existence; they were knights older than Arthur’s; Arthur’s had in fact, perhaps, probably, been only a chapter of theirs, as all the wise and good and brave were in some sense chapters.

  Who else through the ages had been members? It was difficult to know for sure, but Pierce when asked by his cousins seemed able to decide, from a certain response he himself (general secretary after all to his own chapter) had to them. Gene Autry, almost certainly, knew much that his moon face concealed.

  Sherlock Holmes and Sir Flinders Petrie. Ike? He thought not, though considering the question raised a problem he had never been able to solve with certainty: it was possible, of course, to be of that College without anyone else knowing it, without the fact ever coming to light, not for centuries; but was it possible to be one of the Invisibles without ever knowing it yourself? His cleverness about Joe Boyd’s membership seemed to prove (especially to Hildy, legalistic and logical of mind and somewhat skeptical about Pierce’s College anyway) that it was.

  Well, perhaps it was. It wasn’t for him to decide, as it might have been if he had in fact made it all up; but he had not, he had only entered into it, as into an empire, and was himself as surprised to find out its shape and its stories as his cousins were: it wasn’t make-believe but History. Once the initial discovery had been made – that there was this country, had once been this country, which was somehow the country where the pyramids were and where the Sphinx was but not exactly that country – then it was a matter of decoding what further facts came to his attention, to discover whether they descended from de Mille’s Technicolor country of pharaohs and suntanned slaves and Jews, or from the other shadow country: Ægypt: the country of those wise knights, country of forest and mountain and seacoast and a city full of temples where an endless story began.

  An endless story: a story that continued in him and in his cousins, a story that continued in Pierce’s discovering it and elaborating it in the meetings of the Invisible College at night after they were all supposed to be asleep, arguing questions which that story raised, questions his cousins put to him in the dark. Would they still be in this story even when they were grown up? Of course they would; it was a story about grownups. Would they ever go to Ægypt themselves, and how? They might, if the story ever came to an end. For in the end of the story (as Pierce heard it or imagined it) all the exiles would return, to the city in the farthest East, gathering there from every clime and time, coming upon each other in surprise – You! Not you, too! – and reconstituted at last, to tell over the story of their adventures. And why not they, then, he and his cousins, and maybe Sam and Aunt Winnie, Pierce’s mother, and yes Axel his father too, going by boat or train or plane secretly to

  ‘Adocentyn,’ Pierce said aloud.

  Looking out his slum window he felt a funny gust, like wind in his hair. He hadn’t heard the name of that city spoken for years, years. When he went away to St. Guinefort’s the game had come to a sudden end. There were no more stories. He had outgrown them, put them away, his younger cousins dared not ask him – newly serious in a school tie and a crew cut – to continue it. Did they ever think of it now, he wondered. Adocentyn.

  Now how by the way had he come up with such a name? Where had he stolen it from, what book had yielded it up for him to adopt into his imaginary country? It sounded to his grown-up ear as totally invented as a name could be, as outlandish as a name heard in a dream, a name that, in the dream, means something it doesn’t mean at all when you wake.

  He wondered if he could find out where he had got it. If some index to some book (what book?) might yield it up. If there were other stories like the Gypsies, stories that he would discover had also proceeded from his own shadow-Egypt, Ægypt. There might be. Must be: after all, he had got the stories he had told from somewhere. From History, he had told his cousins; since the time he had stopped thinking about it all, he had begun to assume that he had simply made it all up out of his own big head, but perhaps he hadn’t. That is, for sure his Ægypt was imaginary; only perhaps it hadn’t been he who had invented it.

  If he could return there, and find out; somehow turn back that way, and return.

  ‘Pierce?’ Julie’s voice, from within the dark bedroom where the fan whirred. ‘You still up?’

  ‘Yup.’

  ‘Watcha doing?’

  ‘Thinking.’

  Not that it would be easy to find again; no, it was just the sort of country that, once left, is not easy to return to. The effort seemed immense and futile, as though it weren’t he but the world itself in its socket that would have to be turned against the thread.

 
‘It’s the dope,’ Julie said sleepily. ‘Come to bed.’

  Adocentyn, Pierce thought. O Ægypt.

  A breeze was rising now at last, as dawn approached, a wind from the sea; Pierce inhaled its brackish coolness gratefully. He would turn back: go on by turning back. Perhaps, like Hansel, he had dropped crumbs along the way he had come; perhaps those crumbs had not all been eaten.

  Set out, then, Pierce thought. Set out.

  His cigarette had burned down to a brown fragment, and he pitched it into the street, a brief meteor. On the fire escapes of the building opposite him, people had made up beds, hung with colored cloths and lit with candles. Down the street, a fire hydrant was open, and gushed into the gutter, washing out beer cans, condoms, matchbooks, newssheets. Wind chimes, camel bells, dogs barking, a tambourine idly shaken. The sweltering caravanserai all awake.

  If he thought there was no story in history, just one damned thing after another, Barr had said, it was only because he had ceased to recognize himself. He had ceased to recognize himself. And yet every story that he had once been inside of lay still inside him, larger inside smaller, dream inside waking, all there to be recovered, just as a dream is recovered when you wake, from its latest moments backward to its earlier.

  He began by looking into Egypt: poking into the ruins, lugging home from the Brooklyn Public big folios, sniffing at indexes, settling down to browse. In none of them was what he was looking for. The topic was vast, of course, and Egyptology took up long shelves at the library, having its own Old, Middle, and New Kingdoms: antique multivolume studies from whose ancient silt poked up etched plates, and then newer mytho-graphical analyses clinker-built and obdurate as pyramids, and lastly decadent popular works chock-full of color photos – in none of them was the country he sought. He felt like someone who had set out for the Memphis of crocodiles and moonlit temples and wound up in Tennessee.