by Paula Guran
El-Kafir el-Sheikh ran on, looking back over his shoulder. He turned to face front again, but the tree was right there—he could not avoid the collision. He didn’t even have time to bring his hand up; he just ran smack into the trunk, recoiled and fell back, his face stinging.
He got somehow to his feet, blinded and stunned. With his right hand he wiped water from his face. The wolf was standing directly in front of him, snarling, his teeth like rows of sharp horns in a mouth long as a canoe. This was it: death. But nothing happened. Only then, gasping and agonized by anticipation, did el-Kafir el-Sheikh look to his left.
The Tollund mummy was standing there: large as life and twice as ugly. Water ran down his dark brown leathery skin, and his withered skeletal arms moved in slow circle. There was nobody holding him up. However this magic trick was being performed, it was not obvious. El-Kafir el-Sheikh took a step, unable to stop himself recoiling. But looking back at the wolf he could see the beast’s attentions had been distracted by this apparition. The beast began snarling.
The rainfall was dying away.
The wolf leapt and el-Kafir el-Sheikh shrieked, holding his right hand, the only one that worked, in front of his face. But the beast had jumped the mummy, not him. Through his fingers el-Kafir el-Sheikh saw the dead man hold out a dark brown arm—saw the wolf’s jaws snap on it—saw the hand come clean away. When the wolf landed, it was holding the mummy’s hand in its mouth.
The rain had stopped. There was only the sound of water dripping from the trees all around, and the panting of the wolf. It wasn’t the wolf panting; it was el-Kafir el-Sheikh himself. Gasping, gasping. A strange clarity possessed the air. The Tollund mummy stood there, so vividly present it seemed almost to pass beyond real into some dreamlike state beyond it.
The wolf coughed. It spat the mummified hand from its jaws, and it put its long snout down and it coughed again. It placed a paw over the top of its nose, a peculiar, strangely human gesture. Then it barked, or coughed, and leapt backwards. Red fluid gushed copiously from its open mouth. It danced and gamboled. Its gray fur darkened, and a black ooze slicked through its covering of hair. In moments it lay dead on its side.
Breathing in, and out. The sound of el-Kafir el-Sheikh breathing in and out, like surf; and the drips and drips of water from the wet trees.
The mummy was looking at him.
“To touch you is poison,” el-Kafir el-Sheikh told the mummy. Sunlight, swept by the broom-end of a retreating cloud somewhere far above them, rolled through the trees. The water on the mummy’s skin gleamed like jewels.
“Yes,” the creature replied. “I regret to say.” Its voice was creaky but strong. It spoke Masri with a thick northerner accent; but el-Kafir el-Sheikh could understand it perfectly well.
“You killed the boy,” el-Kafir el-Sheikh said. “And Bille. And poor old Gurbati! And now you will kill me!”
“I will not,” said the mummy. “Attend! Here is a word. Nanomachine.”
How el-Kafir el-Sheikh’s left shoulder hurt! He breathed, breathed. “I have never heard such a word,” he said.
“Of course not. But you must learn it.”
“What does it mean?”
“It means,” said the mummy, “the means by which I am animated. We are sorry about your friends. It seems that the nanomachines have been altered by their passage. Many things are not as we expected them to be! I believe the alteration in the nanomachines to be a form of friction, although of a temporal rather than a physical nature.”
“You are talking some sort of gibberish,” said el-Kafir el-Sheikh, taking a step back. A twinge of pain ran along his limp left arm.
“You are a scientist!” the mummy called, in a great, dour voice. “You must understand!”
“I am a specialist in old northern languages, and runes,” el-Kafir el-Sheikh returned, in a quivery voice.
“Do not run!” commanded the mummy, holding out both its arms. The left had no hand, and the severed bone-end looked like a chopped-through wooden stick. “It is all science. It is not magic.”
El-Kafir el-Sheikh took another step back.
“I am animated by nanomachines. There are millions of these machines, but they are miniature in dimension, and you may not see them, except perhaps with powerful magnification devices. They have been fed backwards through time; for time-backwards is a road machines may travel where human beings may not.”
“Gibberish!” exclaimed el-Kafir el-Sheikh.
“It is hard for us, where we are, to monitor. We did not expect the nanomachines to have the effect they have had, when they entered living flesh. In our time, it is possible for the nanomachines to enter a body without harming that person, and then the person might speak, or write, or pass on our message to others, as the machines might prompt them. That is all we intended, we swear! We seek only to communicate with your time!”
“Communicate?” scoffed el-Kafir el-Sheikh. He took a third step backwards.
The mummy stumbled toward him. “The passage is one hundred and sixty-nine years, and that passage appears to have energized the nanomachines in unpredictable ways. They are too energetic for ordinary metabolisms to contain. We attempted, at first, to situate the nanomachines in likely subjects, but their bodies disintegrated as soon as the nanomachines were inserted into them.”
“Nonomachine,” said el-Kafir el-Sheikh. “No-no.”
“The nanomachines ran wild, passing from membrane to membrane, and we are sorry that some people died. So we have tried again, with a second batch. But they are just as bad. It is imperative we communicate with your people, in 1912. The disaster may still be averted, if we can only communicate!”
“You have the year wrong, my friend,” said el-Kafir el-Sheikh.
“The world is not as we expected it!” the mummy screeched. “The past is not as we expected it! The timelines are contaminated! We intended to alter the timeline only from 1913 onwards, but we discover the world has already been altered at an earlier point!” The stretched skin over the mummy’s jaw was starting to tear, and the jaw to hang lower. With weird detachment el-Kafir el-Sheikh thought, If it keeps talking, its jaw will simply fall off. “We do not know why,” the mummy was saying, “or how—unless our attempts to alter the timeline have set up resonances that reached backwards as well as forwards from the point you presently inhabit! We sent a second batch of nanomachines. This body—” And the mummy slapped its own chest with the stump of its left arm. “This body is able to withstand the insertion of the nanomachines, and they are able to bond together to animate it. Its skin is tough enough, its metabolism is already dead and cannot be made deader. But the nanomachines malfunction! In a living machine they malfunction. It is the friction of temporal passage! They have become hyper-energized. They spread, like a disease, from membrane to membrane. To touch me is to absorb them, and they react in living flesh with catastrophic suddenness. This body—” and, thump, again on the chest “—is tougher, because it is dead and leathern. But you must not touch me.”
“I intend not to,” sobbed el-Kafir el-Sheikh. “Truly, I intend not to.”
“You must listen. We meant no harm to your fellows. But you must listen! We must somehow undo the damage we have done!”
“Poor Gurbati!” el-Kafir el-Sheikh said. “I was at university with him, you know!”
“The automobile is another machine-system, just as a human body is a machine-system. The contagion passes from organic to inorganic, and back. You understand that I am talking from the perspective of the nanomachines?”
“I understand nothing!” el-Kafir el-Sheikh snapped. He turned and ran—ran hard and long. Behind him the mummy was calling out, in its deadly voice. “Wait! Wait! We must communicate. Everything is wrong! You can carry our message, and save the future! But everything is wrong!” When he looked back, el-Kafir el-Sheikh could see the mummy stumbling after him; but slowly and awkwardly, and it was not hard—even with his useless, hurting arm—to outpace it. “Everything is wrong,” h
e gasped, as he ran. And on he went through the trees, not knowing the direction and not caring, so long only as it was away from the monstrous leathern form of death that staggered, slowly, after him.
The protagonist of Will Hill’s story is extremely old. He is slightly younger than his pharaoh, Ramesses II, and we are fairly sure Ramesses ruled sixty-seven years and died around age ninety. At death, Ramesses was suffering from severe dental problems, arthritis, and hardening of the arteries. He may have fathered as many as ninety-six sons and sixty daughters, but he probably outlived most of them—as he did his favorite wife, Nefertari. His successor was his thirteenth eldest son, Merneptah, who himself may have been in his late sixties or early seventies when he inherited the throne.
Three Memories of Death
Will Hill
When they came, the old man was ready.
His daughter and her children were surprised to see him up and dressed in his finest robes, but he saw no reason why they should be. It had been seventy days since the God-King, the Light of Ra, the Pharaoh Ramesses II had breathed his last, but the old man had been waiting longer than that.
He had, in truth, been waiting for this day for most of his life.
Amun shuffled slowly into the main room of the small home on the edge of Thebes he had taken for himself when his time in the temple had come to a close, carrying a linen sack in his gnarled hands. Vast, splendid dwellings had been offered to him, as befitted his standing and long service, but he had rejected them all. He had agreed to the construction of the temple that bore his name only at the insistence of the pharaoh himself, and needed no reminders of the duties he had performed with such diligence.
His memories were more than sufficient. Standing in the center of the room, being fussed around and cooed at by Amun’s daughter and grandchildren, was Prehotep, the vizier of the North and second most powerful man in the empire. His robes gleamed red and gold, and his retinue could be seen lurking just beyond the threshold, ready to attend to his every need, no matter how tiny. Prehotep was feared for a thousand miles in every direction, but when Amun appeared before him he broke into a wide smile, and embraced the old man with great tenderness.
“Hery Sesheta,” said the vizier. “It is good to see you.”
Amun carefully unwrapped the arms from his shoulders, and returned his old friend’s smile.
“I no longer wear the mask, as well you know,” he said. “I am a humble servant of Ra.”
“The God-King continued to believe otherwise,” said Prehotep. “The time has come, Hery Sesheta. The embalming is done, and the wrapping is complete. Only one thing remains.”
“I am ready,” said Amun, his voice sounding stronger than it had in many years. “Take me to him.”
“Father?” asked Anahita. “What do you mean? Where are you going?”
“To finish my work,” said Amun. “You will stay here.”
“Your work is done, Father. You are supposed to be at rest.”
“I’ve rested long enough,” said Amun.
Anahita frowned deeply. The thought of her father traveling, even in the company of the vizier, made her deeply uneasy. He was entering at least his eightieth year, and his eyes were deteriorating almost as rapidly as his ears and his equilibrium.
“Are you sure this is wise, Father?” she asked.
“It is neither wise nor unwise,” replied Amun. “It is my duty. Prehotep, if you would take my arm, we can be on our way.”
“It will be my honor, Hery Sesheta,” replied the vizier.
He reached out and took hold of Amun’s arm with a tenderness that raised a lump into Anahita’s throat. She watched the vizier lead her father toward the door of his home, and as they passed beneath the arch, she found her voice a final time.
“Goodbye then, Father.”
Amun turned back, and Anahita gasped. The light of the morning sun illuminated a smile that was wider and more beautiful than she would have believed him capable of producing; a smile that stripped years from his weathered face, decades even. For a single, suspended moment, her father looked like the man she had never known, young and proud and vital.
“Goodbye, my child,” said Amun. “May the eye of Ra warm you.”
Then he stepped through the door, and was gone.
Amun’s father slid the blade into the side of the dead man with well-practiced ease, and stepped back. The ceremonial Anubis mask of the Hery Sesheta, the Overseer of Mysteries, the high priest who directed the entire burial process, was heavy and cumbersome, and greatly limited its wearer’s vision; it prevented Amun’s father from carrying out the wet, slippery work for which he had become renowned.
“Continue,” said Ahmose, from behind the blue and gold jackal’s head that covered his own.
Amun looked up at the mask and felt a familiar shiver run up his spine. The jackal’s mouth hung open, its eyes were empty ovals, and its ears stood up tall and pointed, as though it had heard something in the distance; to Amun, the mask always looked hungry.
At his father’s command, the Hetemw Netjer, the priest who assisted with these first stages of the process, scuttled forward. At the edge of the Ibu, the purification tent that had been hurriedly erected after Ramesses I’s short reign had come to an end, the pale sand that covered the Valley of the Kings blew steadily around the ankles of the Hery Heb as he recited an endless series of incantations and prayers, his voice barely audible. His tone didn’t alter as the Hetemw Netjer, a man named Bes who Amun had known his entire life, who had once wept when a flock of birds, bewildered by a sandstorm, had thrown themselves against the walls of the temple, carefully widened the incision in the dead pharaoh’s side, and reached into his mortal body.
Amun forced himself not to look away; it would be inappropriate for the son of the Hery Sesheta, a boy who would one day be expected to follow in the footsteps of his father. He focused instead on the smells that filled the tent, the fragrant palm wine and the fresh Nile water that had been used to wash the body of the pharaoh, the acrid scents of sand and animals that would have informed him he was in the desert even if his eyes were covered, and kept his gaze fixed straight ahead.
One after the other, the pharaoh’s liver, stomach, and intestines slid out of the incision Amun’s father had made. The organs were handled with the reverence that befitted them, and set carefully into bowls. The Wetyw, the army of the most junior priests, who Amun was certain were every bit as nervous as he was, scurried forward and moved them to a second table, where they were washed and packed in natron. The intestines uncoiled as they were released from their tight confines, translucent purple snakes that squirmed and writhed. The Wetyw took extra care with them, working the glistening ropes between several pairs of hands, keeping clear of the abrasive sand below.
As they set about the cleaning, Bes reached back into the body with his knife, and sliced the lungs free, taking the utmost care not to so much as nick the heart; the thick muscle was the center of all the dead man had been, and would be needed in the afterlife. He drew out the lungs, set them down, and stepped back into line alongside Amun and the rest of the priests; they filled one side of the Ibu, silent and watchful.
On the other, their attention focused on the rapidly emptying body before them, stood the family of the pharaoh, a long line of somber men and women in the splendid dress of royalty. Amun had been around death since his birth in the Anubis Temple at the center of the Theban Necropolis, and had seen the wives and sons of merchants and traders collapse in storms of sobbing and chest-beating on a number of occasions; he had even seen one particularly distraught man throw himself atop the body of his wife, a violation of the burial rituals so profound that the Hetemw Netjer had taken the man by the neck and thrown him out into the desert.
The family of the pharaoh was clearly not inclined to any such public displays of emotion; there was nothing to suggest that they were even slightly upset by what they were seeing. Ahmose had told his young son that he was not to speak to any of th
e royal party under any circumstances, not to even look at them if possible, but Amun found himself unable to resist; there seemed to be some great weight to the line of mourners, a solidity, as though they were statues rather than human beings. Their faces were pale and smooth, without the work-lines and blemishes of the men who toiled in the Valley of the Kings or the deep-set eyes of the priests, eyes that had beholden both glorious wonder and great horror; they seemed unreal, as though they inhabited a different world.
“Boy.” It was a male voice, even and full of authority.
Amun’s eyes widened, and he snapped out of the thoughts that had momentarily distracted him. He returned his gaze to the body of the pharaoh, but it was too late; his loss of focus had clearly been noticed.
“Boy,” said the voice again. “I am speaking to you.”
Slowly, as though it was painful to do so, Amun turned his head to the left, and sought out the speaker. Shame was bubbling up within him; a reprimand inside the Ibu, from one of the royal mourners no less, would see him punished with great enthusiasm by his father when the ceremonies were complete. Ahmose was a man who believed that children learnt from their mistakes most effectively when the lessons were punctuated with the crack of a bamboo cane.
The man who had spoken was not a man at all. Standing at the center of the familial line was Seti, the man who would become the new pharaoh when his father was safely sent on into the afterlife and his mortal remains were interred. At his side, his face remarkably similar to that of the dead man lying on the stone, was Seti’s son, who also bore the name Ramesses, and was looking directly at him.
“Yes, Your Highness?” said Amun, his throat as dry as the desert that surrounded them.
“Come here,” said Ramesses.
Amun stared at the boy, acutely aware that activity in the tent had ceased; the priests were now all watching him, the pharaoh’s family watching Ramesses, waiting to see what the young royal’s intentions were toward the apprentice. Amun swallowed hard, and crossed the tent. He stopped in front of Ramesses, his head lowered respectfully.