by Chris Turner
DENIBUS AR
Chris Turner
Copyright 2011 Chris Turner
Cover Design: Chris Turner
Published by Innersky Books on Smashwords
Discover other titles by Chris Turner at Smashwords.com
This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in these stories are either fictitious or are used fictitiously.
… there is no country like Egypt that possesses so many wonders, nor any that has such a number of works which defy description.
Herodotus (ca. 490- ca. 425 BC)
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Prologue
I : Sleeping curse, Egypt 3025BC
High along the southern mantle of a line of rugged hills, five ragged figures crouched. These were lean, hardened men, tomb robbers, wary of an instant’s sound. Limned in the feeble light of the crescent moon, a ghostly pyramid loomed behind them, more a sentinel guarding the vale than a stepped monument of a thousand chiselled blocks. A solid stone wheel stood before them, leaning against the crumbly slope, five inches thick and almost as tall as a man himself.
A vagrant wind brushed at the thieves’ feet. It tossed sprinkles of sand and desert-weed. Chilled, the five squatted on their heels. Grimy robes were wrapped tightly around their bodies like mummies.
No dialogue passed amongst these men. They had trailed fifty or so members of the camel-laden caravan for the last four days. The prey now slept scarcely three hundred yards away in the sacred stillness of the valley below.
They worked away at their task with speed. Two fell on their knees, digging with frantic fingers under the scabbed, rounded portal. Three others scrambled down the slope in hurried search of an object.
The latter returned, heaving a gusty breath, bearing a long tapered rock. They wedged it underneath the portal, the first man pleased at the sight of the narrow trench dredged underneath the stone’s left side.
The two diggers rose, departed on swift feet to secure a largish rock which they used as a fulcrum, and with the pry bar, levered open the portal.
The portal rocked sideways, scraping along the rock and sand. A light winked on in the valley below. The men stiffened, thrust themselves on their bellies, hardly daring to breathe. To be caught here meant death. The light bobbed closer, revealing a white-robed, shaven-headed priest wrapped in a thick camel-hair blanket. He hastened to investigate the peculiar sound with lantern raised high. A hundred feet away, the men clenched their teeth, returning his gaze with an enmity of their own, preparing to leap from the hiding place and bludgeon the priest if necessary. Others gathered below, maybe forty.
The thieves relaxed; the suspicious priest had retreated.
The light was extinguished; all was silent. The valley was pitched in Anubian darkness.
For a good hour the men waited on their bellies. Satisfied that the priest would not return, they resumed their clandestine labour, with infinitely more diligence.
Rocking the stone wheel, they managed to insert pebbles in the gaps: one…two…three. Soon a gaping hole lay bare.
The obvious choice for the plundering was Qapseth, a brash young man, spry of limb and of large dreams. His skin was burnt dark with years of sun, his dark hair wavy. His almond eyes held a dogged determination for looting and adventure. He was the youngest of the crew and too new to this profession to harbour any keen appreciation of pharaohs’ curses and traps. Ignorant of the perils withal facing him upon entering that forbidden tomb. That fact alone made him superior in choice to the others who nourished deeper superstition for elements of the supernatural.
With jabs and grunts, they prodded Qapseth to the portal, hissing their brief instructions: “Locate the treasure! Bring back a sampling. Nothing more. Return as quickly as you can.”
They squeezed him through the dark, thrust a burning oil lamp in his hand and wished him the best of luck.
* * *
Despite the sheltered crypt of his new surroundings, Qapseth felt his body shiver. He was awed to find himself in a crude passageway, hewn steeply down into murky, dusk-ridden depths.
He drew his breath, made delicate steps to the lip of the descending stair. Never before had he imagined himself on such a mission. His young heart beat with the pulse of hope. The prospect of emerging solo with wealth was a thrill.
Crouching on the first polished steps, he raised his lamp with wide eyes and attempted to grasp the nature of this precipitous declivity leading down. The ponderous, flickering glow was barely strong enough to penetrate the sepulchral gloom staring back at him.
He shifted his weight, took his first tentative step down the snaking corridor. The rock held his weight. With care he groped his way down the steep stair—into the bowels of the hill, glad of the feel of real stone under his feet.
The passageway rose to head height. Roughly hewn, a corridor bare of carvings and paintings stretched ahead, which afforded no regular steps—only a natural jagged shelf of sandstone rock sporting footholds.
The air was extremely stuffy. The reek of ancient antiquity hung about this place, thick as webs.
The passageway halted at a level space carpeted with sand. In a half circle, Qapseth followed it, which turned back on itself to plunge in a direction which he believed to be down toward the pyramid in the valley.
That pyramid, in itself was eerie, being six-sided.
The branch fell another interminable distance and he paused at the threshold of the entranceway, recalling the fact that the tomb began an appreciable way up the hill, perhaps sixty feet or more. He guessed that the builders of this crypt had dug far underground, burying the pharaoh’s remains in the dark with her treasures— possibly far beneath the valley’s floor.
This must be the secret of Koruka’s tomb!
He remembered the solemn procession that began early that morning—how the fifty men and women clad in white-linen robes, woven-wigs, fine leather sandals and shawls had trudged up the baking slope, gained the foot of the hill, and proceeded to climb the valley to enter the hidden valley. The men had conveyed a sacred litter on stout poles atop their shoulders. It bore Koruka’s embalmed mummy, four moons dead—amongst many glinting treasures borne in carved ebony cases: polished figurines, rams, serpents, great golden cartouches, amethysts, emeralds, dazzling instruments of wood, bronze emblems, priceless plumes and filigrees of ebony feathered with silver dust. So much treasure for so few gods. It awed his young imagination. How the mouths of his four comrades would water when they saw what he would fetch!
Qapseth navigated the dark depths with ease and his mind shifted back in time. Five days before, while sleeping in a rock cave in the hills overlooking the floodplain of the Nile, he had chanced to hear the muted tread of brute beasts plodding at night. Snatching himself awake from his animal-skin pallet, he looked out from his eyrie to behold the dim outline of stealthy shapes skulking in the night: a troupe of dromedaries led by silent, mysterious men clad in white. He had counted no less than nineteen sacred camels laden with supplies, sporting bulky chests of tools and riches—and what he believed, long tapered sacks that exhibited a delicate, life-like swaying and rolling motion of their own—like humans.
Thrilled, he had roused the others. After spying the plump caravan plodding under the lofty rim of their lookout, the thieves rounded up the supplies, packed two dromedaries hidden in the nearby recesses, and descended in pursuit.
The robbers had pursued the mysterious caravan for hours—following ancient trails, through dry ravines, parched gullies hemmed in by rugged hills, always keeping at a safe distance in the hope that at an appropriate time they would be able to loot their host.
Daybreak pai
nted the desert red, leaving it scorching. The toothless rogue Othosthes had recognized the lead camel rider as a certain priest of the Pharaoh Koruka—Senestes. Oddly, the bandits noticed that only three other holy men led the caravan. Dour, hunched men. The company of forty seemed peculiarly drugged. The ‘tapered sacks’ were actually men strapped to the backs of camels, doped to prevent them from learning the location of the tomb. A single water buffalo drew a carriage where the few women of the fellowship reposed, similarly drugged.
The plunderers’ suspicions were kindled, their ambitions fuelled to diabolic heights. Instead of looting the host, the pilferers followed the unsuspecting priests to the fabulous tomb. The thieves thrust aside their plans for immediate pillaging.
On the second dawn, the apparently dosed men and women roused themselves, and by sheer willpower, they proceeded to organize themselves for the procession.
* * *
Qapseth’s reverie was impinged by a sudden misplaced step. He almost tripped, dousing his feeble flame. He cringed at the thought of being trapped down here in the pitch blackness with no assistance. The ominous possibilities catapulted him into terror. He shook the fever out of his skull, promised himself to remain alert. His nerves were panicked; his muscles knotted as he realized the stakes he was up against. Every bit of stamina would be necessary to see this through.
Many yards below the entrance, his feet touched smooth pavestones. He found himself in a long, high passageway wrought with smooth, bare walls. Corridors branched left and right. A small presence of light glowed from the rightmost branch, along with the faint redolence of bittersweet incense. The presence was unnerving.
Qapseth entered a vast domed hall. The lofty ceiling rose to four times his height. The young thief was transfixed with awe as he moved past fans of lotus-topped pillars inlaid with gilded bronze. Many sinister side passageways peeked from left and right. The feeble light did no justice to the magnificent paintings, the awesome friezes, the entablatures mounted on the bone-smooth walls from where pictographs and glyphs flew like countless birds. They detailed spells, charms, prayers, hundreds of more anecdotes of his country’s heritage.
Qapseth marvelled at length over the labours of the talented artists who had painstakingly devoted their energy to craft the underground splendour—all for the sake of a pharaoh! He felt the spooky grandeur accompanying such craftsmanship. The pharaoh was over a hundred suns dead and the mortuary procession was but a half day old. He could feel the walls resonating with the dirge-like thrum of tabors and drums, gongs and cymbals, the chanting of solemn priests, the swaying of beautiful women to the stark, melancholic rhythms of afterlife-prayer, the air thick with adulation and the sacred mourning of a queen…
The glow grew brighter. With brave conviction, Qapseth approached the chamber’s end where he stood before a wide doorway whose post and lintel were embossed with stone-carved serpents’ and rams’ heads held in high relief. A few strides had him in an adjoining chamber, much smaller than the last. There, he could smell the fumes of the procession, more pungent than ever. A forbidding diorite statue lurked beyond, several heads taller than himself. Its sinewy back was turned. A torch burned in a stone vessel. Here was the source of the marvellous light! The light was almost spent, for only a finger width of its shaft remained.
Qapseth loped around to face the great statue. Instantly he became leery of the savage aspect of the face and the monumental proportion of the sleek torso, having the slim waist, sinuous hips, shapely breasts, and elegant contours of a woman, but affixed with the great, grisly head of a ram with a lion’s mane that sprouted wolfish snout. Horns were up-curled, twisted in many swirls like an endless seashell. Pointed teeth were bared in fanged menace, almost as an omen of force to daring men like himself who would probe the forbidden chambers and strive to outwit pharaohs’ traps.
Qapseth’s breath quickened. He could feel the thieving blood pulse in his veins—a strange quickening gripped his imagination. Here in this very chamber existed the source of a pharaoh’s ransom! A plunderer’s dream!
He sidestepped the effigy, doing his best to ignore the hideous face and its promise of wrath. He moved like a ghost past a row of serpent-twined pillars lined against the far wall. Amazed, he saw that his hand trembled, that the walls contained bestial images.
Carved murals magnificently wrought depicted endless menageries of animals—rams and serpents mostly. But there were also ibises and jackals, leopards, crocodiles, giraffes, falcons, baboons—a primitive mishmash of horn-headed gods, quasi-human figures, portrayed in bold strokes with rich red, umber, violet, green pigments. Was this a traditional pharaoh’s tomb? To Qapseth, who was not a man of art, the prolific panoply presented an incongruous contradiction. Shapes, forms, lines and squiggles, arcane glyphs and cunning zigzags seemed to have no sequence. He was so overwhelmed that his head swam. He wrenched his gaze up to the ceiling, noted that it also was domed and arched, though painted yellow and gold and with silver stars on a sky-blue background.
The guttering torchlight faltered behind him. Bloody fingers of light licked the statue’s contours, pitched bestial, erotic shadows along the walls, burning a dusky glow. A sudden glance over his shoulder had him glimpsing the sinister ram-woman glaring at him with an almost malignant intelligence. Despite the presence of light, he shivered anew, and was fearful that the tense silence and the absence of living things down here was of some unnatural order.
Qapseth forced the unsettling awareness from his mind. Working his way along the far wall, he explored the chamber’s three adjoining side chapels. These he found empty. To his utter disappointment, he was almost at the end of the chambers and he had discovered no ebony chests of jewels, no golden figurines, no sarcophagus! His heart beat with a sick displeasure. Where could the pharaoh’s riches be hidden?
He sighted a block of jarred stones—set loosely along the base of the wall.
Qapseth stooped to run his feverish hand along the cracks of its outline. Only hastily had a stone been put back in its place, as if an oversight on the part of the retreating priests. With a leer, he used all his might to pry the wedge completely out from the wall, and when he did, he stood back, eyes lit.
In the light of his lamp, he craned his neck, curious at what might lie beyond this peculiar stone. He saw a low, squat tunnel racing into the inky gloom. The catacomb was barely wide enough for him to crawl through. At its end, lay a hollow disc of watchful darkness. Its too-smoothly polished walls guarded what seemed the strange quality of death. At the outset, the suspicion seemed purely coincidental, but yet, a sentiment of intuition called out to him: “Cover up the hole. Get out of here. Never look back!”
Qapseth rebuked himself for such a qualm. Was he to return empty-handed to his jeering peers? His initiation was at stake; he would get no further chance to prove himself. It was not for this that he and his comrades had lain in silence and privation, risking the desert’s heat and danger. This was only a darkened tunnel…what possible menace could it have?
And so, lips curled, Qapseth puzzled over the conflicting emotions that brewed in his brain. The smell of incense wafted from deeper within the tunnel. He could retrace his steps, explore the leftmost passage where branched the initial T junction, but some vague intuition told him to abandon the enterprise. Why did he not just continue ahead?
The youthful boldness in him experienced a sudden unnerving jolt: cold unforgiving eyes bored in his back. He ducked out of the tunnel, turning on his haunches. He glared at the statue with a nervous apprehension.
What was this? A flicker of movement? The sudden glinting of eyes in the ram’s head?
The hairs on the back of Qapseth’s neck pricked. The statue seemed to have moved closer.
Qapseth chided himself, dismissing the sight as a trick of the eye. It was the product of nervous tension, an imagination running wild.
Despite his flippant assurance, Qapseth felt chilled, and he hunted for the source of this probing scrutiny. The presence
watched him from beyond the elegantly crafted walls—intelligent awareness needing not a living body to perceive the invasion of an unwanted guest.
Qapseth’s unspeakable fear was something more primordial still and it took every ounce of power to fight it. But eventually the fright was matched by the shame of defeat reflected in his comrades’ eyes.
The thief fell on his belly and wormed his way into the narrow tunnel. With elbows and knees thrust forward, he burrowed his way through, lamp splayed in front. Ahead, the passage seemed to jog sharply to the left, but he could detect only an acrid scent of incense stronger than without.
The whiff emboldened his ambition: perhaps the prospect of treasure was near?
He was perhaps three yards farther along when almost from beyond the rock wall, he heard the scrape of a cog, a spinning wheel and violin-twine of copper wire snapped taut.
Qapseth recoiled with terror. Things of monumental weight shifted above him. A loud snapping greeted his ears. A terrible scuttling arose as a chute unfurled and a ponderous weight came crashing down. As time in a nightmare slows, Qapseth felt the cold brush of death. It sprang upon his back.
For an unbearable instant, he broke out of his frozen horror. Desperately he tried to worm his way back out of the tunnel.
Too late.
Everything went dizzily slack. He felt the madness of a doomful curse smiting him; bats and ghouls of horror-drenched nightmare crowded his horizon. His life passed before him in a fleeting gasp, occluding all sense of reality. Only a lingering, funereal silence remained, along with a ram-woman’s bestial, triumphant stare, which was largely unseen as the last dying torchlit rays flickered and faded into hissing smoke.
* * *
An hour passed. The four rogues waited in the darkness without, dancing with impatience. Each wondered what had become of their young scout. Another few hours and dawn would curtail any further plans of plundering the tomb before the wretched priests arrived and sealed it. If these pacing men could have guessed the nature of Qapseth’s fate, they would have fled instantly—but not yet: one of them spat a gob of phlegm, cursing Qapseth’s name; another peered down into the gloom, past the rounded wheel, and tossed a pebble. Another suggested that they look for him. The remaining rogues shuddered at the thought, and muttered at it as rogues would, for in light of Qapseth’s inexplicable and prolonged absence, they argued that even if they were small enough to slip beyond the narrow portal, it would be a suicide mission to attempt entry without a light, with their only lamp being entrusted to the youth. Not only this, it would take a man braver than any of them to plunge into that dark hole after him.