The Blood of Kings

by John Michael Curlovich

  Again, it seemed an odd thing to say. But I put it out of my mind.

  I was alone in the room. There was something I had to do. Looking around to make sure no one was there, I crossed to the far end of the gallery, to the statue of the falcon-headed god Horus. Shining stone, twice life size, gazing into eternity with that timeless expression the ancient sculptors did so well.

  A bit afraid, or at least uncertain what to expect, I reached out and placed my hand on its chest, as I had that first time with Danilo. It was cold.

  I ran my fingers along the line of its chest. No warmth. It felt colder than the air in the room.

  When I had touched it that first time, with Danilo beside me, it had been warm as a living thing.

  It was class time. I climbed the steps and found the classroom. Not wanting my infatuation with Danilo to be too obvious, I sat at the back of the room. There were a dozen or so other students, a mix of guys and girls. They were chatting among themselves lightly, asking all the usual questions, are you in the dorms, what’s your major, do you know so-and-so… Danilo had his back to us; he was writing something on the blackboard.

  Everything about him—the way he moved, everything—was so sensual. Yes, I thought, he had a great deal to teach me. But I forced the thought out of my mind. A crush on my teacher. If anyone had known, I would have been so embarrassed.

  I watched him make some symbols on the blackboard, hieroglyphics. Then he glanced at his watch and turned to face us.

  He introduced himself, said he was pleased to see so many fresh faces in that dusty old building, all the usual kinds of things professors say on the first day of class. He asked a few general questions, trying to get a feel for how much we knew about ancient Egypt. Most of it came from silly TV shows like In Search Of… and sillier movies like The Ten Commandments. The course would fall into two parts, first a history of the ancient civilization, then an overview of its culture. Religion, mummies, hieroglyphics, the pyramids, King Tut’s tomb, all of them would get discussed, and a lot more besides.

  The time passed quickly. I found nearly everything he told us intriguing, and it sparked my interest to learn more. Finally he pointed to the symbols on the board. It was a rudimentary alphabet in hieroglyphics. Only a beginning, he emphasized; the way the Egyptians actually used the symbols was much more complex than mere transliteration. But he thought writing our own names out in hieroglyphs might be a good way to end our first session.

  Someone asked about cartouches, those oval frames you sometimes see around names.

  “No, you don’t need to worry about them. They’re strictly for the names of kings and queens.”

  Laboriously I copied out my name:

  jAMIIIDIoNN

  It took a moment, but when I got it done I found myself smiling. Danilo didn’t bother to check what we’d done; it wasn’t much more than a fun little exercise. He thanked us all for our attention and dismissed the class.

  Almost at once he came to my desk. “Do you mind if I see what you did with your name, Jamie?”

  “Of course not.”

  He looked. “Good work. But there’s something it needs.” He took the pen out of my shirt pocket and drew frames around it.

  89j9A9M9III9D9Io9N9N;

  “But you said those frames—”

  “Cartouches.”

  “You said they were for the names of kings.”

  He looked straight into my eyes. “Exactly.”

  Not for the first time, he left me wondering exactly what he meant.

  “I have to go down to the catacombs. I’m looking for a piece of New Kingdom jewelry that’s listed in the catalog but that no one can seem to find. I was wondering if you might like to come along. See a bit more of the place. Not many students get to go down there.”

  I didn’t hesitate. “Of course. I’d love to.”

  I didn’t know what I expected or why the invitation excited me. Maybe it was just that he was paying attention to me. Or that he was taking me to a hidden place… After all I’d been through, I needed that.

  I followed him down to the ground floor, then to another staircase nearby. We went down flight after flight of stairs. “How far down does this go?”

  “There are four basements, or sub-basements. I’ve never actually explored them all myself.” He looked back over his shoulder at me. “This building was part of the Underground Railroad. There are all sorts of alcoves and covered recesses and hidey-holes.” The slangy word sounded odd with his accent. “I’ve never actually explored them all myself. I’m not sure anyone has even found them all.”

  At the first sub-level he stopped. There was an impressive steel vault. He spun the combination and pulled open the heavy door. There was the glint of gold and silver; there were jewels. “This is where we keep our most valuable things. The missing tiara should be here, but it isn’t.” He smiled and pushed the door shut.

  We continued down to the second sub-basement. “All museums are like this. They need space for storage. At any given time, only a fraction of what they own is on display.” The stairs continued downward, into complete blackness, but we stopped there; I was a bit grateful we weren’t going any deeper. He threw a light switch just inside a doorway and led me along a corridor.

  There wasn’t much light. Bare, clear dull light bulbs strung every 20 feet or so. The wiring that linked them was exposed; it must have been nearly as old as the building itself. The walls were bare masonry. Here and there doors opened to one side or the other. Some of them were marked—“Animal Mummies,” “Canopic Jars,” “Middle Kingdom Magical Papyri”—but most weren’t. Anything might have been inside. Despite myself, and despite Danilo’s presence, I found myself a bit nervous.

  He chatted. “I’ve only been here two years, and the department has been accumulating things for more than a century. It could take a lifetime to learn where everything is down here. Or what everything is.”

  “Shouldn’t it all be catalogued?”

  “There are only four of us in the department, and two part-time teaching assistants. No one in America cares about the past. We’re all so loaded down with teaching duties, none of us has time to sort through all the collections. We’ve talked about hiring a research assistant to do it, or at least part of it, as much as one person could do. But we never seem to get around to it.”

  “I could use a job. “I’m not sure what made me say it. About Egyptology I knew nearly nothing. But I had been thinking a job might help take my mind off things. And I did find this interesting. And I found Danilo even more so.

  “I’m being a poor guide, Jamie. Let me show you what we have behind some of these doors.” He pushed one of them open; it seemed to be stuck. The sign stenciled on it read “Late Period Mummies.” Danilo laughed. “Who knows when someone was last in here. We’re explorers.”

  The door made a scraping sound as he forced it open. We stepped into a dusty, dark room. Danilo groped for the light switch and finally found it, up above the door lintel.

  The room was perfectly silent, almost unnaturally so, I thought. All around the walls mummy cases were propped against the walls. More were stacked in corners and against walls. Even through the layers of dust on them I could see that they were wooden and elaborately painted human faces, bright vibrant colors, even some gold, that saw nothing but death. “They made them this way? I thought they were made of stone.”

  “Only in earlier times. These people lived almost when the Romans conquered the country. Here. Let me show you.”

  He took one of the coffins from against the wall and laid it on the floor. Then he got down on one knee and very slowly, very carefully, he began to open it.

  “Should you do that?” I had seen enough movies to be nervous.

  He smiled. “How else could we see who’s inside?”

  He lifted the lid. Inside lay the mummy. Wrapped completely, the bandages crisscrossing in intricate geometrical designs. Even in the dim light I could see it was beautiful.

 
; “This was a young man named Ahmose the Merchant. It says so here.” He pointed to a line of characters on the case. “He died when he was not much older than you.”

  I got down beside him. “How do you know that?”

  “Because he’s been unwrapped then wrapped again, of course. His body is of a young man in late adolescence.” I think he sensed my reaction to that because he quickly added, “Or early adulthood.”

  “When they preserved them—”

  “Yes?”

  I wasn’t quite sure what I wanted to ask. “What does a mummy feel like?

  He stood up and said softly, “Touch it and see.”

  I hesitated.

  “Go ahead, Jamie. Touch it.”

  I looked from him to the mummy. Very carefully I touched it. It felt like dry cloth, nothing more. Again I looked at Danilo. “I feel a bit foolish.”

  “Don’t. It’s natural curiosity. Let’s put the lid back.”

  I helped him lower it into place.

  “I’m not sure why, Danilo, but a lot of this feels really familiar to me.”

  “Because you’re a movie buff?” I wondered how he knew. He smiled in the half-light. “I’m sure there’s a reason. Now come on, I still have to find that necklace.”

  He switched off the light in the room and we stepped back into the corridor. Something ahead of us moved. A pair of rats. When they saw us they froze; then they bolted quickly into a crack in the lower part of the wall. Startled, I put my hand on Danilo’s arm.

  He put his hand on top of mine. “It’s all right.”

  I relaxed. “Sorry.”

  “I mean it, it’s all right. You can find all kinds of unexpected things, prowling loose in a place like this. One of my colleagues found a garter snake once. No one could imagine how it got in here.”

  The electric lights flickered. For a moment I was afraid they’d go out and leave us in complete darkness. But they came back on again right away. Danilo walked on ahead of me and stopped at the entrance to another room. “Here. There’s something in here that will help satisfy your curiosity.”

  I followed him into the room, not at all sure what to expect. He didn’t turn on the light; the only illumination came from the hall, and there wasn’t much. I groped around for the switch, but this room, it seemed, wasn’t wired. Another coffin sat in the center of the room, a heavy rectangular one in black stone, much larger and more ornate than the first one. The lid was off, leaning against the coffin on the floor. Danilo rested a hand on the edge of it.

  “Basalt. One of the hardest stones known. Look at what they’ve accomplished with it.”

  In the dim light I could make out gods and demons carved into the stone, and rows of hieroglyphs. Very elegant, very beautiful. At the center of the lid was a magnificent falcon, flying toward the sun. “It’s wonderful, Danilo.”

  “He was a nephew of Ramses the Great.”

  I ran my fingers along the outside of the coffin. Cold smooth stone, beautiful carvings. I don’t know why, but I felt I had to touch them or they wouldn’t be real.

  Then I realized that the mummy was still in his sarcophagus and that he was unwrapped. The dead face gaped in the shadowed room. Eyeless sockets looked upward into near-darkness. Cold hands grasped nothing at all.

  Impulsively, I looked down at his groin. In the dark sarcophagus I could just make out pubic hair and his genitals; he was that well preserved.

  Very quietly Danilo said, “His name was Neferu-Ra.” It was almost a whisper, but in that room it seemed to echo.

  I looked at him. Why was he showing me these things?

  “Go ahead, Jamie.”

  I didn’t know what he meant.

  “Go ahead. Touch him.”

  “I… isn’t it fragile?”

  “He can withstand your touch.”

  “But I—”

  “Don’t be afraid. You wanted to know what a mummy feels like. Touch him, Jamie.”

  Slowly, carefully, I did. Touched the tip of my finger to his cheek. It was like old, dry, brittle leather. Again I looked at Danilo.

  He stepped to my side and put an arm around my waist. “If you want to work here, you’ll have to get used to the dead. They’re our constant company.”

  His touch felt so good to me. In that cold, shadowed place it felt unimaginably warm and alive. Quite deliberately I leaned against him, pressed the weight of my body against his.

  And he stepped away. Not far. He reached up and touched my hair, then brushed it with his fingers. “There’s so much dust down here. I should really get you back upstairs.”

  “What about that necklace you were looking for?”

  “It will keep. No, I think perhaps you’ve seen enough of this unpleasant little world for now.”

  I hesitated. My eyes followed the line of hieroglyphs. Men, women, gods and goddesses, birds, snakes, abstract symbols. There was an animal I didn’t recognize. It looked like a giraffe with a short neck and enormously long ears. I pointed at it and looked at Danilo. “What is this character?”

  He inspected it. “No one knows, really. It was sacred to the god Set. In early times he was one of the greatest Egyptian gods. Later he was demonized—literally made into a demon. Linguists think ‘Set’ may be the original root of Satan.’ Since no one has ever identified his animal, we simply call it the Set animal.”

  “It’s an odd-looking thing.”

  “Like no animal known to science. There’s a lot of reason to think the cult of Set lasted for thousands of years, cultivated privately by kings and their priests. Here is Set’s symbol on the coffin of a king’s nephew. In the Middle Ages the sacred fools were symbolized by a kind of donkey that may have its origins in this little symbol.”

  “You mean Satan worship?”

  “Not exactly. But it’s as good a name for it as any. But it’s time for us to go back upstairs, don’t you think?” He put a hand on my shoulder and we left the room. Something in the way he had talked about it made me think it meant something to him personally, not just academically.

  In the corridor I helped him pull the door shut and then went back the way we had come. Something else scuttled away from us at one point, I couldn’t see what. After a few moments we were back at the ground floor. Afternoon light dazzled my eyes.

  For a moment we stood awkwardly looking at each other. I tried to think of something to say that wouldn’t make me sound like a gosh-wow kid.

  “Are you serious about wanting to work here?”

  The question caught me a bit off guard. I had thought we were just making idle conversation before. “I think I would, yes. I do want to get a job, and I find all this really interesting. These last few months haven’t been easy for me. Something to help me take my mind off it all would… ”

  “I read about you finding that boy. It must have been terrible.”

  “Terrible doesn’t begin to describe it, Danilo.”

  We walked toward the front entrance. “Had you known him?”

  “Only slightly. His friend was a friend of mine. In fact we’re sharing an apartment now.”

  “Finding him that way… and on the night of your recital.” He smiled so I’d know he wasn’t being ironic.

  “It was one of the most horrible nights of my life. I don’t even remember much of it, anymore.”

  We had reached the door. Again Danilo smiled. “That’s really too bad, Jamie. To hear Chopin played like that. With that much feeling. I still cherish the memory.”

  “Thank you.” I looked away from him.

  “I had friends there too, that night. They all had the same reaction.”

  I felt flattered and a bit embarrassed at the same time. I was an 18 year old kid who’d played a college recital. I knew I wasn’t that good. “I just put what I was feeling into the music. That’s all.”

  “Perhaps that’s enough.”

  I wanted to feel his arm around me again. Instead he took a few steps away from me. “Let me see what I can do about getting you
a job here, all right?”

  “I’d really appreciate it.” I wanted him to make love to me. I wanted that. “I’ll see you at class on Wednesday. Thanks for spending so much time with me.”

  “It was my pleasure.” He started to go back inside. Then he stopped and added, almost like an afterthought, “Chopin was one of us, you know.”

  It couldn’t have been more unexpected. And I wasn’t at all sure what he meant. I didn’t think he was simply talking about the composer’s friend Tytus. He meant something more than that. What, exactly, was lost on me. “Thank you again. I’ll see you on Wednesday.”

  * * *

  When I got home there were police. Mrs. Kolarik was with them in her place, in a bit of a dither. “These gentlemen have been waiting for you, Jamie.”

  One of them was Detective Wellman. He had questioned me back when I found Grant, and had been in touch two more times, asking follow-up questions. I said hello and invited him upstairs to our place. Bubastis sniffed curiously at his shoes, and he rubbed her back. He explained he just had a few more questions, things I might have noticed that night but that slipped my mind. He tried to jog my memory about some things, but it was no good. I had told him everything I knew back then; maybe if my mind had been clearer when I found Grant, it would have been different. But that night was so… I felt useless.

  “Do you have any leads, detective?”

  “Nothing really, Jamie. We’re questioning everyone who might have seen or heard anything again. But as for leads… ” He spread his hands apart to express how little they had to go on. “The reason we’re here is, another body has been found, only a few yards from where you found that other one. One of the students who disappeared last autumn. We were hoping you might have remembered noticing someone or something, maybe something that slipped your mind before.”

  Justin came in. He was working at the library for the summer. He and Detective Wellman recognized each other from the investigation. There was a bit of hope in his voice as he asked, “Have you found anything?”