by Tanith Lee
This was not the end of the world, but another planet.
At last—but when?—a sort of night fell. It was preceded by a turquoise sunset, when a blue sun seemed to sink away. And after this the sky was still like crystal, but now navy blue, with some banks of luminous clouds visible in it.
Andrew looked up at vagrant stars.
He said, ‘Sagittarius.’ And then, perhaps not so incongruously, ‘Mum’s Gemini.’ And then, ‘She’ll come soon. But she won’t like the cold.’
It was true, the cold was terrible, who could like it? It was so ceaseless, remorseless. Often Anna shut her eyes to close it out, but then, she looked again. This land made her look at it.
They went more slowly in the dark, but they did not stop. She had expected that they would.
Remnants of the drugs given to her, or only stress, caused her to fall eventually asleep, and when she woke the plane-man was supporting her against his body. She moved away, disturbed. She had felt no prolonged masculine physical proximity, save her father-mother’s, Althene. Memory made her want to cry. And, as had happened when she had cried before, it seemed to her she had never been able to cry until that moment. That to cry was limitless, yet soon over. Meaningless. All tears spent.
Dawn was coming.
It was like green amber, and against the blows of it, over the carpet of the ice, she beheld the heads of three mountains, white as individual deaths, yet outlined as if drawn in by thick pencil—the protrusions of bare and ancient rock.
The mountains smoked.
‘Is it—’ she said.
The plane-man said, ‘Volcanoes.’ Then he said, ‘But not on any map.’
They drove in through hills of whiteness and, rising, the snow sheered away from the runners like wings. Andrew’s llama grew frosty. The dogs gave a sudden concerted howl as the sun rose on a column of light.
Above, blue ice-falls glistened.
And then, the ultimate peak appeared.
At once, she knew, and the child also, although no one had told them—and Andrew waved his arm and raised the llama to see. ‘That’s where Uncle lives.’
It was incredible. A mountain, that was in the shape of the most antique and mummified of tombs, a white pyramid, cloven with steps of dark rock, towered into a sky that now was mazarine blue. And as they came up between the slopes of ice, Anna saw below the pyramid, reflecting it, a river of glass.
‘But the water should be frozen,’ she said aloud.
‘Further off it is. Not here. The heat from the generator,’ said the man.
The base of the pyramid, on the desert of snow, above the liquid river, was black.
Anna expected to see an Egyptian boat, with tilted sail and upraised prow, gliding on the river.
But there were no boats, and no sign of life but their own. It might only have been some freak of nature.
The dogs, eager and grunting now, recognizing and glad the haul was coming to an end, galloped down and down into the valley beneath the mountain, and so beside the cold blue river, in which slates of white ice lay like scales, and then away, to where the freezing had come back, and here they crossed, and so went into a tunnel like the hollow of a glacier.
The dogs barked, and phantom dogs barked back.
A door of steel, very tall, like something in a factory, opaque from cold, barred their way.
She had never really seen anything like this. Not in life. Not in dreams. Surely, never in memory. But then she did not know what she had seen. Someone had brought her here. Someone who remembered her, who knew her as she did not know herself.
The door would open and they would go in.
Or would the door stay shut?
The door opened on blackness. The gate into Death or Hell... Black Dis—the Underworld.
And then, staring, you perceived there was a faint flavour of light visible inside. The generator of Hades had supplied electric lamps.
It was not magical, or esoteric, the first interior.
It was metal, with trackways, the gut of the primitive factory suggested by the steel door, that smelled of rubber, paraffin, ozone. But quickly they were removed from this, as if she should not have seen it, or the boy.
The new heat was nearly unbearable and, in a type of alley, some of their outer garments were taken off by a woman.
The dogs had run the sled one way, and the woman, who was in dark ordinary clothing, a sort of uniform, put Anna and Andrew and the llama into a lift. The woman pressed the buttons.
The lift did not rise into the mountain. It descended.
But of course. Hell lay below.
When the doors opened they were in another place. It was so strange that Anna smiled, as later the zipper would make her laugh.
Another woman stood in a corridor, and she and it were out of time. At least, in another time.
The corridor was not metal, and was warm with light that was not made in lamps, but was fire. Torches burned above, and they had a scent, of incense, very sweet, smoky and intimate. It was like the smell of Christmas, the tree and the candles and the perfume Althene wore, mingling. And not like this.
The woman, pallid on the hot glow, wore a white wrapped skirt, pleated and Egyptian, instantly recognizable. One breast was bare, and round her neck was the Egyptian collar, blades of gold, and red beads. Her hair was either cut to or hidden in an indigo clump, a wig perhaps, that just touched her shoulders.
She crossed her hands over her bosom and bowed from the waist.
Anna and the little boy stepped out of the lift, and heard the doors closed, and the lift drawn away. It seemed unwise to look back, for such a dichotomy of scenes might produce an explosion.
The woman did not speak. She gestured them forward once. Then turned.
‘We’ve got to go with her,’ said Andrew impatiently when Anna did not move. ‘Come on.’
He was not dismayed.
But then, it was only like walking into a great film set, or better, maybe, into the world of dreams.
The corridor went on some way, and there began to be paintings on the walls. Blue hippopotami, and black jackals—Tauret, Anpu-Anubis. Picture-writing, hieroglyphs, fans and eyes, trees and suns.
Presently there was a succession of doors, which the woman opened, as if in the Bible, by knocking on them.
Presumably they were automatic, for at first no one was behind them. Then the doors were opened by pairs of men, in linen tunics, with shaven heads. They looked, as did the woman, like extras in the film. For they were not especially Egyptian, or even Eastern, in appearance. Their bodies were pale. They had, she saw, black eyes. Black, black, old eyes, veiled over, as if blind. And Anna thought of Michael, the servant in the Scarabae house in London.
These too were Scarabae.
The corridors went on, and other corridors opened away from them. All painted, and with torches.
Then came a corridor with lamps of alabaster—she knew these from books, their cream material blushing red from the fire inside them. They were on stands of bronze, as in the books, again.
And at last there were doors that were opened into a wide space, a relief after the narrowness, and the oppression of fire-lit heat.
It was a court or yard, and at the centre lay a stone tank. Alabaster flame-light glinted in dark water. Lilies grew, or were they lotuses?
There were four statues. Anubis in black obsidian, and Bast, the cat goddess, in green, but there a Roman hero slaying a snake of white marble, and there a white goddess, lightly coloured over, Greek possibly, with long carved tinted curls.
Anna looked up. The court, which might have been expected to be open to the sky, obviously was not. Instead there was a mosaic in the ceiling. This, unlike the other things, looked very old, and was partly broken. It showed a chariot race.
Aside from the entry point, two separate black doors led elsewhere. A second woman, dressed for Egypt, came forward and held out her hand to Andrew.
The little boy went with her at once. He only
said, This is my llama. He’s wet. But he’s washable. It’s all right.’
And the woman said, ‘Yes, Master Andrew.’
As in the best American epic, they had all spoken in English, and now rather unsuitably: Master Andrew.
But Andrew and his llama and the other handmaiden were gone through a door. And now the first woman led Anna to the farther door, which gave this time at a simple touch.
In the short corridor beyond stood an Egyptian statue of a man or god, Anna did not know. It held a spear crossed over its hard, flat body. It was old as time. It stank of ages.
The woman moved around it to another door, and on the door was a clay tablet.
‘I will break the seal,’ said the woman.
Anna stood, watching. And for the first time in a long while, she felt the tourmaline ring Rachaela had given her, on her left middle finger.
Then the woman struck the tablet and it broke.
The door gave on to an apartment fashioned perfectly for the film. An ebony chair, a round bath, a bed in gilded curtains.
‘Here’s your room, Miss Anna. There are two servants to attend to you, who will arrive shortly. Anything you wish.’
The woman had an accent, but surely not of ancient Egypt. Her eyes were not dark, but greenish—yet glazed over, dusty. Michael’s eyes. Worse than Michael’s eyes.
Later, the two women entered.
They bowed before her, as the other one had, hands crossed on their bared breasts.
Anna had seen no naked breasts save her own. Rachaela—reticent. Althene—Althene’s breasts had been fashioned and were not flesh.
These women had black eyes and black hair to their shoulders. They gave names: Mesit, Shesat.
‘You’re Egyptians,’ she said.
They only looked at her.
Anna sighed and looked away.
They had brought her, the Egyptians, a pot of coffee and some dainty sandwiches. Ham, they seemed to be.
And she laughed, then, as with the zipper.
In the morning—was it morning or night?—after she woke, on the sloping bed, they came, the women, and bathed her. She let them for the strange foolish reason that, less than two years ago she had been a baby, an infant, and then she had been bathed. They also washed and combed her hair, and clipped on to the ends little silver beads. Then they put on her the dress, the Greek, zippered dress, over white silk knickers and bra with Paris labels.
And Anna thought, Cecil B. De Mille insisted even the underclothes were authentic.
It was not a film set. It was a new world composed of a hundred different times. As convenient.
The furniture was recent because otherwise it would collapse. The statues were new to replace older ones which had been subtracted or lost. And, in places, was utter ancience.
And here was she, Anna. Save that, this morning or evening, Mesit—who looked just like Shesat, as if they were twins, and maybe they were, why not?—called Anna by another name.
Chapter Twenty-Three
There was a dream.
It happened after the dress and the meal of chicken. She had sat in the ebony chair and put up her feet, now in sandals trimmed by silver and red stones, on the crouching lion stool.
Anna had thought, again, Here I am.
But she slept. Upright and silent, like a dead queen in a chair at Alexandria.
The River was golden with the weight of barges.
The sun glistered on the water and on oars tipped by gold and scarlet and blue. They rowed downstream.
Under the green awning, as if in spring reeds, the girl Ankhet waited, in marvel and terror, afraid to move.
The priestess sat in the centre of the boat on an upright seat of gold and ivory. Like a queen. But she was more.
Ankhet had seen statues, drawn downriver. She did not move. A girl with a fan kept the heat and the stinging insects of the River from her.
The River seemed invincible now, its liquid muscles towing the three barges. And the soldiers, in their kilts of metal, stood outside the awning, silently enduring the sky, Ra’s power.
Above, the gong gave the stroke to the oars.
The maidens sang. They were bare-breasted, like goddesses.
Their song was curious, and seemed to make no sense, consisting of disjointed words.
Spring, spring. The birth, the swelling.
We. The lion mother.
Mother and queen.
We, spring, the cat, we...
On and on.
Ankhet trembled. They had brought her from her village. She had known nothing else. But now—
Her fear rose and fell. Like the oars.
And scaled backs showed in the river and sank. Flights of birds shot like arrows from the straight green reeds.
Spring, spring, gold and silver.
A great curve was coming in the bank. The oarsmaster stilled the gong. The oars lifted, like wings. In the forward boat, as in this one, and the one behind.
They had stopped, only the muscles of the River still tugging at them. They drifted.
And coming about the River’s curve, Ankhet saw the baskets floating at the edge of the reeds, and in every basket a baby lay. Some slept and some wept and kicked. They were secured by straps not to fall into the River. Brown burnished babies like dolls.
‘There,’ said the priestess. And she pointed with a golden finger. Her nail was long and blue.
One of the soldiers moved along the boat and shouted to the boat ahead. ‘That one. There.’
Another soldier on the forward boat hastened to excavate from the River the indicated basket. Its child did not cry or sleep, it lay wide awake. It was, from the look of it, scarcely two months old.
‘That’s all. We will take no other,’ said the priestess.
The soldier on her boat shouted to the forward barge, ‘No other.’
Then the oarsmaster bawled, and the oars went down with a heavy silken splash.
They moved vigorously again, and passed the crying, bundled babies, like turtles in the River, and moved on between the barricades of the green reeds.
The lioness, silver and gold...
Ankhet was six or seven. To her the babies had looked very young; unreal. She did not care about them. She knew the custom.
That male would be destined for the temple of Ptah, the Artisan and Maker. (The rest would drown. Or perhaps other women, barren, would fish them out.)
He did not cry.
But, nor did she.
The Lady Nefertun says you will stand up. At the next bend we approach the City.’
All the maidens had risen. They raised also their arms, so their breasts and their singing lifted to a joyous quivering clash.
The River was bronzen with the westering sun, and a haze lay on the banks, the farther of which was smudged away.
They rounded the shoreline, and Ankhet, standing in the boat of the Lady Nefertun, the priestess, saw before her the City, a shining bank on the air, formed of incredible slopes, but dimmed by distance and the light.
This City was an island. It was white as nothing in the world.
Men-Nefer.
Nefertun, rising from her chair, raised now her own arms, before the sinking sun.
And Ankhet rose too from the ebony chair, and lifted her hands—and woke.
Here I am.
The room looked almost crude, its youth.
She tasted the name on her tongue.
‘Men-Nefer.’
White Walls. ‘Beautiful’.
And as if they had waited for her to finish dreaming, the woman Shesat walked in at her door.
‘You will come with me, Lady Ankhet.’ (The new name. Lady not Miss.)
But it was a question.
Anna said, ‘Do they call this house White Walls?’
The woman Shesat looked blank.
It was the easiest solution, merely to go with her.
She would never be able to find her way in these corridors, unless someone led her, as Shesat did.<
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The walls were sand-coloured, painted, flicked by lamp-fire.
And then came a stretch of darkness. The passage had opened into a huge stone vestibule. It was like the entry to a palace or temple. Black stone pillars rose, and the ceiling was a mile off. The floor shone below.
They threaded through.
And so, after black dark, an oblong of rosy red darkness.
It was the opening to another enormous hall.
‘I mustn’t go further,’ said Shesat.
‘Why not?’
This is the central place. Unless I serve here, I can’t go in.’
‘What is it?’
‘The Hall of Nuit.’
And Shesat pointed upwards.
Anna looked. It was astonishing, even after all the other astonishments.
The ceiling was a great curved sheet of iron, and over it stretched the goddess of the Beginning, Nuit, the sky. She was purely Egyptian, her face in profile, black in the iron height, but on her forehead was a star of gold, that gleamed. And on her breast were the golden sun and the golden moon, the crescent and disc together on her belly. And her lower limbs too, where they were lost in the distance of the further wall—how many hundred feet away—were also scattered with tiny stars.
As in the myth, she touched the earth with foot and hand, arched over Heaven.
Enormous columns of cornelian red went up to her, and the cupped flames burned near their tops, making them into crimson candles that reflected in the glimmering shadow of the polished floor.
And there were flowers too set in the floor, that sparkled. Jewels? It might be. Green jasper winked, blue glass paste, milky crystal.
All these gems glittering were like points of fire, like a sea of fireflies.
Anna looked up again at the curve of Nuit. The gold lights of lamps hung also out of her belly, her stars.
‘You must go on,’ said Shesat.
But it would be terrible to step alone into that burning vastness, under the giantess above.
And in the shade behind the pillars, things stood and watched.
Anna did not move.
And Shesat said, ‘She waits.’
‘Who?’
‘The Mother.’
Then Shesat turned round and flitted back into the dark of the dark vestibule.