The human and animal heads on the jars directed a stare like a current of energy at the ball. Karoy ran harder, straining every wooden grain of muscle in his legs. He was making ground. But he must reach it soon.
One more bound and he caught the ball. He met it on the right and gave it the weight of his shoulder. The stone ground against him and he smelt a whiff of burning wood, but it was changing course. It swung away from him.
Then he lost balance, fell sprawling and the ball was gone.
Now he lifted his head. He saw panic jump into the faces of the jars.
The ball struck the side of the human headed jar and the edge of the baboon and the force threw them against the dog and bumped the falcon too. Three of them went over. The falcon rocked, but did not fall. It gave a screech of triumph that died when one of the barrel shaped jars spun in a circle and clipped its base, tipping it over.
The spearmen and the boatmen cheered.
A path lay open between the scattered jars.
Karoy and his men raised their hands in the air and exchanged what looked a lot like high-fives.
The doorway opened up into the main entrance hall.
They found themselves running across a vast marbled floor like a chequered game board. They saw the shadowy doors of an elevator against a wall near and beside it a dark void of a stair well.
Were these the stairs to the dreaded basement underworld? Karoy recalled Heka's words and tried to veer wide of it, but it was too late. An animal-headed creature sat up in his path.
It had black, flaking skin and a single horn on its head and it gave a ringing laugh. The spearmen and boatmen stopped, colliding together with a sound like wooden skittles.
"Where are you going in such a hurry, little men?" said their new challenger. "You think that you are going out into the world of the living, but instead you are going down into the world of the dead. You are coming to join me in the darkness of the underworld where you will stay for all eternity."
"No thanks," said Karoy, darting aside. But now another underworld creature reared.
"S-s-s-stay little men," it hissed. A cobra with a broken cowl, reared, poised to strike. "Come with us-s-s-s now or taste my poison!"
Karoy swung away. Now a hideous scorpion with the head of a goddess scuttled across the floor and lifted her head.
"You are surrounded, little men. Down into the darkness of the stairs, before you feel my sting!"
"We are ambushed," said Planki. "They are trying to drive us to the stairs."
"To a place whence none returns," said Hefti.
"And where we will have these fiends for company forever," said Weji.
"We must fight our way past," said Karoy. "Remember your training, Spearmen. They will try to separate us, but stay together. Link shields - spears at the ready. Face the horned one first. Forward!"
The four spearmen advanced on the black creature. Of the three underworld attackers, this one seemed the least dangerous, since the other two had poisonous bites. But he was mistaken. It sprang to its feet, gave a bellow and charged, its neck bent and its single unbroken horn angled cruelly to gore them. Now the scorpion scuttled in from the side to join the attack too, her tail curling over her back and a drop of venom hanging from the tip.
"Weji, guard our flank!"
Karoy struck at the horned creature with his spear and so did the others. It bellowed with rage, lunged with its horn, but their linked shield held. Weji blocked the scorpion goddess with his shield. While he was engaged in stopping her advance he did not see her tail came up and arch high over his head.
Karoy moved to block its strike with his shield, but changed his mind in a heartbeat for the horned beast was charging again, its neck bent and the wicked horn ready to gouge.
"To the right - jump aside!" Karoy ordered the men.
They leapt. The poisoned tail curled over and missed them. Instead it struck the neck of the horned one. The black beast's bellow turned into shriek as it skidded on the floor right into the scorpion, knocking her flying.
Now the snake streamed towards them.
"Wait until it is upon us then use your spear handles to vault over its head and attack its blind side. Not yet, not yet!"
The snake's jaw's were open, the fangs unsheathed. It was aiming to strike at Karoy's legs, below his shield.
The snake's eyes were like two shiny moons and its tongue like forked lightning.
"Now!"
They vaulted, sailing over its head. The snake struck at fresh air. The spearmen turned. All four struck with their spears at once. The snake writhed and twisted its body into a figure of eight.
"Onwards to the doorway!"
They fled from the ugly, broken things that had come up from the world below, leaving them a little more broken than they were before.
They reached the cover of shadows near the museum entrance and now they decided to wait, four tiny Egyptian spearmen and a group of fishermen carrying a reed boat. The fishermen put down their load with relief.
"Ferrying this boat is like carting a pyramid block on our backs." "You need only carry it as far as the stream," said Karoy, "then ferry us across and wait to bring us back again."
"That will be the easy part," they said.
The community of little models had left this museum only once before since the day of their arrival here over fifty years before. As part of a travelling exhibition called 'Model Egypt', they had been loaded onto a truck and taken around the country. But on that occasion they had gone in airtight cases.
This time they would have nothing to protect them, but their wits.
What dangers lay in wait for them out there in the open, in the darkness speckled with distant lights? From their display cases in the Egyptian galleries that had seen activity in the park, late night walkers with dogs, an owl that swept past the window, an old man who slept on a bench. At certain times of the year, they had even seen fireworks lighting up the sky like exploding jewels.
"How will we get out through this door without being seen by the children?" said Hefti.
"We must make a distraction. The guide will send the children out of the doors ahead of her. She will stay behind to lock the doors. Before she locks up, we will make some noise to distract her."
"What sort of noise?" said Hefti.
"Drum your knuckles on your empty wooden head," said Weji.
That's when Karoy remembered that Hefti had lost his spear and been left with just a shield.
"Throw your shield across the floor," said Karoy. "That should do it. Getting rid of the shield will also free your hands so that you can help carry the boat, but remember to collect your shield again when we come back."
The boatmen brightened at the idea of help.
"We could use his muscles."
"What if there are steps outside the building?" said Planki, thinking ahead. "It will make it hard with the boat."
"There will also be a ramp," Karoy said. "Think of the people who visit the museum while sitting in chairs with wheels," said Karoy, reminding them about wheelchair visitors.
A good leader always studied the terrain and standing around in a glass case for decade after decade, had given him time to notice many things.
"I wish we had wheels for this boat," said a fisherman, "but your muscle-bound friend will lighten the load."
"Sh-sh," Karoy whispered. "See -lights coming. They are here."
The doors opened on groaning hinges and let in a blast of night air laced with traffic fumes from the street.
The children went out chattering with excitement and with just a little relief at being released from the gloomy world of the museum.
It was the time for the spearmen to make their break.
Just before the assistant keeper locked the doors, Hefti made a twirl like a discus thrower and launched his ox-hide spear into the dark.
It landed with a clack and bounced two more times, clack clack, before skidding with a faint screech like dried leaf over a pavement
.
The guide flashed her torch around.
"What was that?"
Thankfully the spearman had thrown the evidence out of the range of her beam. While she was looking, they scurried through the opening.
They were free, spilling out into the terror of open spaces after confinement for hundreds of centuries in first a tomb and then in a museum case.
They paused in the shadows of a column outside the building until the guide led the children away, then they went down a ramp and out into the world beyond.
Karoy drew in a gulp of air. The night air was like a dash of cold water on his skin. He looked up at an open sky. A vault of stars wheeled overhead. His head spun too. This was just like the painted ceiling of their tomb where he had spent the first three thousand years of his life, standing within view of the Lady Tiy. The stars in the tomb were painted in yellow on a midnight blue sky. He had thought that he and the Lady Tiy would spend all eternity together beneath that sky.
Now this. A real, limitless sky and a real, unbounded world. Beautiful, but vast and giddying and deadly to their ancient wood.
"We are coming Lady Tiy," he sent a message from his heart.
They crossed a road sealed with a strange, pungent black surface and now they were running in a park, going across springy grass between shadowy smudges of trees.
Dew had fallen and made the grass cool, the blades wrapping wetly around his ankles. Not good for my paint, he thought, but there is no time to worry about that now. It would be a long trek across the park to the house of the girl named Mish.
He was glad of the survival value of the spear in his hand and the shield, but both grew heavier with every step. After three thousand years, I am not the young sapling I used to be, he thought.
The procession of little figures running in the moonlight reached a pathway. This was risky. People used these paths at all hours. As if to remind them of this fact, the slatted shape of a park bench loomed. Just what he dreaded. Something moved on the bench.
The bleary face of an old man lying under a newspaper raised itself, goggling in disbelief at the little ancient procession.
"What in God’s creation..?” said the old man,
Karoy changed course and led his force into the cover of rhododendron bushes.
"I've heard of animals escaping from the zoo. But this?"
He had never expected to see a break-out from a museum, Karoy guessed. The old man threw a leg over the side of the bench, but even though he was awake, his leg was asleep and he tumbled.
They ran harder and came out on the far side of the bushes and headed back into open grassland.
Karoy looked up at the moon, said to be the eye of the ibis god Thoth, then up at the stars.
Up there, it was said in ancient Egypt, that there were ancient dead pharaohs sailing the sky for eternity in their boats, journeying among the imperishable stars in the company of the gods. What did the sky travellers think as they looked down on the miniature procession going through the parklands? Did they appear to be a stream of small, scurrying animals?
The procession must have looked this way to a grey owl that came on muffled wings to dive on the front man -Karoy.
Karoy looked up to see a flash of yellow eyes and a flurry of grey feathers descend in a swooping rush. The big bird's talons bit into his shoulders, paralysing his arms and making him release his shield and spear.
Karoy felt a rush of wind hit his body and he heard cries from his soldiers that grew swiftly fainter to his ears.
Chapter 27
“REMEMBER what I said to you at your lecture in Washington?” the New Age Neith said. “You don’t go far enough.”
Neith’s voice sounded bottled in the corbelled vault of the Grand Gallery as they climbed to reach the King’s Chamber.
“I’ve come this far.”
“I mean connecting with higher divine energies. Are you up for it?”
She was appealing to his flexibility reflex.
“What do you have in mind?”
The head guard of the Great Pyramid led the shuffling line of visitors, bending low, through a gap in the stone.
They straightened inside a chamber of red granite. The walls had a sooty-looking patina and looked damp as though they were sweating under the pressure of millions of tonnes of stone.
The place must have been cleaned recently, leaving a tang in the air that reminded him of carbolic in an old fashioned men’s ablution block.
The guard dimmed the lights. Neith passed a gratuity into his fluid hand. He withdrew from the chamber, leaving the group alone.
“Open yourself up to the Neteru. Will you do it?” she said to Anson. She glanced at the empty stone sarcophagus at one end of the chamber. “Lie down in there. Don’t hold back on the experience. Really let go.”
The others were already gathering to form a circle in the centre of the chamber.
“Trust me, I’m a pagan. Is that what you’re saying? I’m an Anglican, you know, of a sort. Although God probably wouldn’t agree.”
“If your God comes, then that’s who comes.”
“And what if he doesn’t attend New Age ceremonies in the Saqqara night?”
“Then he doesn’t.”
Anson shrugged.
He had stretched out his frame in many a tomb and temple, so why not here?
He stepped over the damaged rim.
“Feels like a bathtub,” he said his voice hollow as he sank back into the granite.
If nothing else, the rest would be welcome. He’d forgotten what a tiring, sweaty ascent it was up the passageways to reach the King’s Chamber.
“Lie still,” Neith said in a murmur to him. “Feel the vibrations.”
He closed his eyes and the chamber fell silent. His breath steadied and his pulse slowed. The granite box felt like the singularity of a black hole in space.
The silence was soon split by a pure female voice, a reverberating ‘om’ that seemed to make the dark air tremble and then a second chantress joined in and the full company and now the men’s voices added a sinister undergirding.
He could almost imagine his body being lifted by the sound, suspended above the hard rectangle of granite through sonic power.
The chanting voices ran up and down sacred vowels and as they did so he felt a chill running up and down his spinal column, the acoustics twisting the harmonics so that it seemed at one moment to be coming from infinity and at the next to be brushing against his ears.
He had a momentary fear that he might fly out of his body and shoot up into darkness, perhaps along one of those shafts that linked the chamber with the imperishable circumpolar stars where he would remain, stuck forever.
The bracing scent of carbolic that he had smelt earlier transformed into something softer, sweeter, like a mystical web of incense.
Mind tricks.
What was Neith trying to do?
He’d often speculated about pyramids being more than just tombs and playing a role in terrifying ceremonies of rebirth and divination during a king’s lifetime and certainly many of the pyramid texts had an ecstatic, experiential quality that could only come from those who had lived through real events.
Had Pharaoh Khufu’s back, living, or dead, pressed against this very stone? Anson felt coldness seep through his shirt as he explored the notion of contact with a god king.
To be reborn, the king had to undergo a death. Do I?
Is that she wanted him to do, to let his beliefs die so that he could take that great step in human consciousness that she had urged upon him?
Was she throwing the metaphysical weight of the Great Pyramid at him?
Out in the freshening night, with golden dust of the lights of Cairo in the distance, Neith said.
“Did you feel any presence in there?”
“Just the memory of Khufu’s back.”
“No other beings, entities, divine ones?” She sounded disappointed. “Never mind. The divine may come at the temple of Isis at Phil
ae. The spirit of Isis will hopefully reach to you in the holy of holies. We’ll be staying there till dawn when we can watch the sun rise from the roof of her temple.”
Neith was like a female Satan taking him up on high to show him the metaphysical glories of the world and tempting him to cast himself down into a pagan abyss, he thought.
Chapter 28
Anson Hunter’s Blog – The Other Egypt “Soldiers of an Endless Night” Final
KAROY was swinging up towards the stars, under the softly flapping wings of the night owl.
"Foolish bird, let go of me. Unless you are a woodpecker, I am of no interest to you!"
But the owl, for all its keen sense of hearing, did not seem to hear him and continued to climb.
'Am I dead?' thought Karoy. 'Is this great bird carrying me up to the imperishable stars to meet my creator in a greater space beyond?'
Who was his creator?
Was my creator the priestly craftsman who, thousands of years ago, carved my form out of acacia wood, painted me and placed me in the tomb after uttering magical blessings and spells for the afterlife? Or was it the creator god Ptah, the god of all craftsmen?'
Or perhaps he should look even higher to the great High God himself, the one who could never be seen?
They were flattening out.
The silent, feathered attacker, bearing him in its grip, took him to a line of shadowy trees at the far end of the park. Karoy felt the bird go into a dive and saw the dark form of a tree approaching and now a hollow in the trunk and the moonlight spilling into it. The bird's talon's opened and dumped him on a nest in a wooden cave. He was on his back in a place that stank of damp feathers, bird droppings and dead mice.
The bird came in for the kill, eyes like scorching, yellow headlights. It went for his soft underbelly, or what it expected to be soft. Karoy saw the bird's beak flash in the moonlight. The result sounded like a rap on a wooden door.
"Ha, what did I tell you? Not too tasty, am I? And you owls call yourself wise!" he said.
The bird could not believe its ill fortune and tried a few more pecks. No tasty warm flesh. Just a knock, knock, knock on a wooden belly.
THE HATHOR HOLOCAUST Page 16