by Paula Guran
This time, they scream and run. Which is pleasing. But then they slowly come back, and remain interested. And that is even more pleasing.
He scares and interests them in equal measure, not too much of either. This, he thinks, might finally be the lesson he’s meant to learn. He is only disappointed that his son isn’t here.
This is how Ramesses ends up on Eater of His Own Excrement’s chat show, carefully not quite explaining his mysterious origins, saying he’s “from time as well as space” and wearing, after an intervention by an anxious wardrobe department, a clean, over-the-shoulder set of what the pharaoh gathers are bandages.
Eater treats Ramesses as if he knows the answer to everything, which suits him down to the ground. “I see . . . the Millennium of your people will pass without an attack from this creature you call the Bug.” This gets as much laughter as applause, which puzzles Ramesses, but he nods along, he’ll take it. He’s asked what his own beliefs are, and what he makes of the old-time religion in the States. He lies enormously, saying he believes much as they do, and that all people should be free to worship as they wish. He manages to stretch out a gummy grin, which is really painful.
After the show, Eater shakes his hand and says that he’d be happy to send Ramesses on to his final destination by private helicopter. SETI will be angry, but with nothing but his own authority to go by, he’s decided Ramesses is a person, not property. Ramesses feels elated and terrified at the same time. He runs to the helicopter pad, turning down autograph requests as he goes, waving to a crowd that’s still screaming, but now not in fear.
And so he lands at the southernmost end of the country, in New Mexico, at the Acoma Pueblo, which, he is told, is “the town in the place that always was.” A figure stands tall under the whip of the helicopter blades, and Ramesses is relieved to see that it’s Anubis, actually wearing an appropriate headdress, dogs barking around his feet, and he’s carrying a Was Staff too.
“This is where they keep what they think of as the truth,” the god explains, leading him into a small pueblo hut. Ramesses looks around for a moment before he ducks inside, and sees the faces of the Acoma tribe, with all sorts of expressions suggesting interest and lack of it, involvement and lack of it, as real as life.
Inside the hut stands Osiris, green-skinned, his legs wrapped, holding his crook and flail in the posture of a Pharaoh. Ramesses relaxes. It really is time, and he’s ready. “We’ve had your ba here for some time,” says the god, unrolling a scroll and raising an eyebrow. “And when we heard you’d finally gotten around to gracing us with your presence, we sent ahead for your heart.” And there it is, in his hand, a tiny shriveled apple of a thing.
And now Ramesses is afraid again. For himself, and his people, and that he won’t see his son. He can hear movement outside, a siren again; a shadow is cast through the door onto the wall. It’s Ammit, the devourer, the end of the world, ready to take him.
Osiris produces the scales, and puts the heart on one of them. Ramesses gets out his spell jar, and switches it on, fingers fumbling with the tiny glyphs on the screen. Osiris makes a movement of his fingers, and produces a feather from the air, that is the goddess Maat, also represented by a glyph. It’s good to see Mattie again. The green god puts the feather on to the other pan of the scale. The heart starts to grumble. Ramesses is fearful that it’ll tell tales about the anger and cruelty of his life. So he quickly activates the spell he’s been told will silence it. He lets out a long breath as the heart subsides. Osiris smiles at him. Well done.
The feather and the heart remain in balance. Osiris produces another scroll, and compares it to the ba. Then he asks the first of the forty-two questions. “Have you committed a sin?”
Ramesses makes sure the right spell is activated and quickly replies. “No.”
The list includes having slain people, terrorized people, or stolen the property of a god, all of which Ramesses knows he’s done, but the spell lets his lies go unchallenged. One of the questions is whether or not he’s felt remorse, which makes him feel particularly vindicated. He may not have changed the Duat, but it has not changed him.
Osiris reaches the end. The feather has remained in balance with the heart. He smiles again, and holds up his own spell jar to show Ramesses. On it is a communication from a museum in Atlanta, who have bought him intending to set him free.
The transition finally happens on one of these people’s flying machines, somewhere over the ocean. The context changes between the Duat and the mirror of heaven. Ramesses finds himself standing beside the crate containing his body, and here is Seti with him!
He laughs and cries, hugs his son to his breast. They are both themselves again. “The things the gods have put in place!” says Seti.
“I liked your Institute,” says Ramesses.
“They do their best,” says Seti, stroking his father’s hair.
Terry Dowling mixes historical fact with supernatural and steampunk elements in “The Shaddowwes Box.” The West’s hunger for ancient artifacts, the looting of tombs, the abundance of mummies, Gaston Maspero’s 1881 discovery of a cache of thirty-six mummies (more than a dozen of which were probably pharaohs), Victor Loret’s find (fourteen mummies, nine of them kings): all quite true. Although references to the practice have been and are still repeated by many reputable sources, the belief that mummies were used as locomotive fuel is not true. It arose from a joke made by Mark Twain in The Innocents Abroad (1869).
The Shaddowwes Box
Terry Dowling
On the fourth night the dream remained the same: our train ran along the banks of the Nile, its locomotive fired by the mummies of cats and kings. There was Akhmet, yet again, insisting that it was true, leaning forward, bright-eyed, gesturing wildly in our hard-won compartment. A new tomb-pit, shallow but vast, had been unearthed in the sands south of Cairo, he was telling me as if he never had before, hundreds of mummified cats to one side, dozens of human pauper mummies to the other.
“There had to be kings among them, Mr Salteri,” Akhmet said, eyes flashing with the fine joke of it, exactly as they had on the momentous day itself six years earlier when I had made the fateful journey to the Wadi Hatas. “It’s what the Re-interment Commissions did back in the New Kingdom. They feared looters, professional tombaroli such as you, so they moved the royal mummies, hid them. This field had a small precinct to the west. Probably special mummies there, possibly nobles, queens, even kings! But so many mummies. Too many, you understand? What to do? Sell to the Americans? They pay well and take everything, but there is no time. The excavation supervisors search for amulets, jewelry, then dispose of the remains with the railway factors before the authorities arrive. Everything goes into the fireboxes. Whoosh! We ride on the burning dead.”
“You can’t be serious,” I said, those words again, then as now, largely because Akhmet wanted me to, and once again fancying our own late great Queen Victoria, or even the recently crowned king, giving their all like this, blazing away to help complete the run south from Saqqara.
“Very common now, Mr Salteri. The moumia burn like sticks. It’s the pitch.”
“Akhmet, Mr Minchin is aboard, you say?”
“Of course, sahib. Even now he will be making his way here. The carriages are crowded. A few moments more.”
And, as if the words were indeed a cue, the door opened and Charles Minchin eased into the compartment, short and florid, grandly mustachioed, looking impossibly crisp in his suntan and solar topee.
In the dream I stood, now as then, allowing that any archaeologist this well turned out might be a stickler for the niceties. “Mr Minchin, it’s a pleasure.” We shook hands.
“Lucas Salteri, the pleasure is mine. I’ve long admired your work.”
I had to control my smile. To what did he refer? My most recent work had been looting Etruscan tombs outside Veii and Norschia in western Italy. Before that ten years as a West End stage magician, and eight as an engineer before that. My career echoed the great Giovan
ni Belzoni’s in so many ways. “Our arrangement stands?”
“Of course. We have camels waiting. We will be at the site by early afternoon.”
“But between stations—?”
He consulted his timepiece. “The train will stop in a few minutes. It has been arranged.”
And indeed the train did begin slowing.
Ten minutes later, we stood by the Nile amidst a cluster of date palms, watching swifts and martins darting over the fields of maize and sorghum as the train disappeared into the south. Ten more and we were mounted, and Minchin’s three fellahin assistants—accomplices they would soon prove to be, Akhmet, Moussa, and Sayeed, nondescript then but made vivid by subsequent events and the dream’s repetition—had finished loading the pack camels and we were heading off into the western desert.
And that was where the dream ended, always ended, even in the earliest hours of this new momentous day, not at the tomb itself, not when Minchin played his hand, not at the betrayal.
Herbert Kray arrived almost precisely at three o’clock. The bells of St Paul’s across the Thames had just finished sounding when he knocked at the door, and I heard Mrs Danvers, my only human servant, hurrying to answer.
I sat waiting in the large, elegant drawing room, secretly pleased that the day had turned chill and overcast again beyond the heavy drapes, and watched Ramose. There were fourteen things that he could do really well and tending the fire was one of them. He propped and stilted in his best penny dreadful/Boys’ Own Paper mummy fashion over to the grate, poked it several times, then set down the poker and moved to the side, waiting for his next task.
Mrs Danvers ushered in my guest and left us without saying a word, just as I had instructed. Dr Kray was very well presented, a tall handsome man in his early to middle forties, with a neatly trimmed beard and wearing a suit of the finest tweed. The golden watch-chain in his waistcoat pocket had a fob in the shape of a Horus falcon, proclaiming something of his trade in antiquities. I had no doubt that the Horus was genuine.
I stood, crossed to him and shook his hand. But before we could exchange more than a few of the usual pleasantries, I had the distinct if modest pleasure (modest given what was to follow) of seeing his eyes go large at the sight of my favorite manikin.
“Good Lord, Trenton!” Kray said. “Bendeck mentioned that he’d heard one or two odd stories about you, but I would never have thought this! Tell me that you haven’t revived one of them!”
“Hardly, Dr Kray. It’s a construct, nothing more, made to resemble one of the partly unwrapped mummies from Maspero’s 1881 DB320 cache from Deir el-Bahri.”
“It certainly looks authentic to me!”
“You’re kind to say so. But listen and you will hear the clockwork. It’s all Bryson gears and a rotating oriete of my own design. A fairground diversion, nothing more. Still, if I time it right, you will think it is responding to my commands. But please do be seated.”
There were three armchairs arranged before the fire, two in a semicircle facing the cheerful blaze, my own somewhat to the right so I could survey the whole room: the single door, the heavily fastened drapes that deadened most of the street noise, the darkly shrouded shape over by the southern wall.
Even as Kray took the armchair nearest my own, I called, “Ramose, the port, if you please,” and the mummiform stirred, moved forward once more, propping and stilting, half-toppling along, very much like one of those clever mannequins you sometimes saw in the better klatches and salons mécanique off Fleet Street.
The port had been poured out earlier by Mrs Danvers, of course, three sets of glasses on three separate trays, all placed carefully out of sight of where Kray now sat (Ramose was far from having the dexterity to actually pour drinks from a decanter). This way the bandaged form needed only lean forward and bring up the first tray, then do a slow turn which put it close by Kray’s elbow.
With an admiring chuckle at the cleverness of the whole thing, the antiques dealer took a glass, crying, “Bravo! Truly marvelous!”
Ramose straightened, moved behind the semicircle of chairs and brought the tray and the other glass to me.
Herbert Kray sipped his port, then set his glass on the small occasional table before the chairs. “Dashed clever. I’d love to know the trick of it. But to business, Mr Trenton. Your message said that you might have a prime antiquity to sell.”
I too set aside my glass. “Let us let Ramose do his other party trick first.” I made sure Kray saw me take out my timepiece, seem to be consulting and calculating an exact timing. “Ramose, please show our guest the WH38.”
Again, as if responding to the spoken command, the mummiform jerked into life. With a whirring of gears and the distinctive click-shift-lock of the Bryson armatures, he stiff-legged to the shrouded shape looming behind the curve of the armchairs. Kray craned about to follow the whole thing, showing the same wide-eyed delight as before, watching as the mummy stopped, raised one bandaged, hook-clawed hand and seized the black velvet dust-cloth covering the tall shape beneath. The claw-hand closed, clenched, pulled. Ramose took one, two steps back, tottering slightly as the shroud came fully away.
In my mind, I applauded silently. Exactly as rehearsed.
“Ah my!” Kray said, and yet again stared in wonder. Before him—behind him more correctly, though by now he was out of his chair and standing once more—was an unadorned wooden Egyptian burial casket propped upright, held at a gentle eight degrees in a gleaming brass frame consisting of rods, brackets, intricate clamps, and gears, all fitted close, keeping it secure.
“Wonderful!” Kray said. “But that frame. I see clockwork. What on earth—?”
“Just some new conservation techniques I’m trying, Dr Kray. Precautions against the local humidity, vibrations caused by traffic, doors closing, that sort of thing. I keep my guest in the drawing room here to offset the effects of damp. Hence the heavy drapes I’ve had installed. The subdued lighting.”
“Of course. Of course. Has it been opened?”
“It never has. Please feel free to examine the seals, if you wish. They are Twentieth Dynasty.”
Kray did so, moving in close. His zeal was impossible to hide. He was seeing a lost king, a queen, another of the marvelous re-interred royal mummies of the kind officially discovered by Maspero in 1881, or those from the Loret cache seven years later. “You are prepared to sell this?”
“Dr Bendeck and yourself are reputable experts in this business. I thought I should come to you first.”
“Yes, yes. Capital! But contents unseen? Hm.” Kray made as if to be deep in thought, frowning slightly, stroking his neatly bearded chin with one hand.
“Just as I found it, Dr Kray,” I said.
“Which was where, Mr Trenton, if I may ask?”
“You will understand that this must remain undisclosed for the present.”
“Of course. Of course.” Kray was examining the casket again, carefully, so carefully, spending long minutes studying the wood, the mixture of pitch and resins keeping it still airtight after so many centuries. He was no doubt imagining a new royal cache, one not yet made known to the Arab Bureau, the Antiquities Service, or the British High Commission, or possibly even more: the barely imaginable wonder of a new sealed tomb, possibly that of Herihor or Tutankhamun, for heaven’s sake, a continuing stream of artifacts finding their way into the special holds of ships using the Suez Canal or reaching England by way of the old contraband routes out of Morocco and Spain. “I’m sure we can reach an agreement, Mr Trenton. But please. Why have you invited me here ahead of Dr Bendeck? We are business associates. He said he was asked to call on you at four o’clock, yet your invitation to me specified three and asked for strictest discretion. Surely we might have called on you together. Unless . . . May I assume . . . ?” Kray hesitated a final time, daring not say it.
I spread my hands. You understand how it is. Make an offer if you wish. “I know you are a man of discrimination, Dr Kray. A man of letters. A scholar as well as
a collector and a dealer. I merely wanted to give you time to examine this piece, make an unhurried appraisal, form your own conclusions.”
“Yes, yes, I see. I thank you for that.”
“And give us a chance to talk. Let me be frank. When Dr Bendeck arrives, it will be different.”
Kray returned to his armchair, seated himself again. He took another sip of port and gave me a shrewd look. “Very well,” he said finally, setting down his glass. “May I be equally frank? This is an unadorned casket. It possibly contains the mummy of a nonentity like those unidentified individuals Maspero discovered among the fifty kings of the DB320 cache. The controversial Unknown Man E, for instance, possibly a disgraced royal prince, possibly a murdered royal suitor for Tutankhamun’s widow, but, equally possible, nothing more than a favorite servant, even someone the overzealous re-interment officials accidentally included in their haste to stay ahead of the looters.” Kray leant forward, well-manicured hands on his knees. “If there were the occasional relic of—not to put too fine a point on it—actual intrinsic as well as archaeological value, say, of gold or silver, gemstones, of the finest craftsmanship, I would be happy to reach some mutual accommodation on a more—personal—basis.”
I smiled and nodded to indicate that this was exactly what I had had in mind, as if, all going well, there would indeed be such intrinsically valuable pieces on offer.
“Excellent,” I said, raising my glass. “This is precisely why I made so bold as to ask you here ahead of your, so I’ve been told, more officious colleague. As you can appreciate, I prefer not to deal with a consortium.”