Darkness, I

by Lee, Tanith

  She pushed a glass towards Johanon, and filled it, and filled her own. She lifted the red glass and sipped. She said, ‘Rather bitter. But then, that’s appropriate.’

  He drew his own glass near but did not drink.

  He waited.

  ‘Do you remember him?’ she said. ‘Cajanus?’

  ‘Yes. It was a memorable day.’

  She lowered her eyes again. ‘Don’t blame me.’

  ‘No. Go on.’

  ‘He had come to me, those years before, out of darkness.

  I was alone. And in the night, a man rode to the door. He had obtained their authority—Scarabae. Or he’d gained it.’

  ‘I understand.’

  ‘He dined with me. Oh, not like this. Do you recall... of course you do. The old table made from an oak tree—and he ate rabbits. But I ate them too. We drank Rhenish wine. He was—’ She looked about as if, now, only her vision tried to abscond and failed. She said, ‘He was handsome.’

  Sofie did not drink. She laid her hands on the table, loose, and empty.

  ‘He wooed me. He said he was married to a woman who couldn’t bear him sons. He said he would divorce her. He was so gentle. His voice. There was—a kind of hesitation in it, so musical, as if he made the words into velvet before he let them fall.’

  ‘He had black hair,’ said Johanon, ‘and blue eyes.’

  ‘Yes. He seemed tall. But now—Bus would be taller. You also.’

  ‘Perhaps he’s grown. We do grow.’

  She shook her head. She said, ‘Let me turn away from you. I can’t say this to your face.’

  Then she turned. She turned her head.

  She said, ‘He seduced me. With words and poetry, and by caressive touches. I longed for him. And one night he came to my chamber.’

  Johanon waited.

  Sofie said, ‘He told me he was old. One of the oldest of us. He said I mustn’t call him Cajanus, but Cain. I laughed. Was his name like the name in the Bible. He laughed then. He didn’t answer me. Then he made love to me.’

  Sofie rose. She walked across to the magenta wall and stood facing it.

  ‘He was loving, until the candle burned down. And then in the dark, in the dark, the dark—’

  Johanon waited.

  Sofie his mother said, ‘He tossed me on my face and lay on me. I couldn’t move. He took me like a tiger. A manic love. He rent me, bruised me—inside—my back—scored down to the bone. I screamed and he tore out my hair and stuffed my mouth with it. He drank my blood. He was like the Devil, icy cold. Or scalding hot.

  I don’t know when he went away. I thought I had died of it. They found me. The Scarabae took care of me. Yes, Scarabae. I’m strong, as they are. I lived. I had the scars on my back for one hundred and thirty-three years. All gone now. But they’re there. On my spirit. That is what he did. Cajanus. Cain.’

  Johanon waited. He said, ‘Where did he go to?’

  ‘I don’t know. I know nothing.’

  ‘Didn’t he speak to you of any place?’

  Sofie bellowed at the wall, ‘Don’t you care what he did to me?’

  ‘Yes. I care. Let me find him.’

  ‘He told me nothing,’ she said. ‘Only of his wife, that he would leave for me. He went away. Drink,’ she said, ‘drink to my destruction. Drink.’

  Johanon took up the goblet of Armagnac and swallowed it. It was bitter, as she had said.

  ‘And then,’ she said, ‘I was with child. I brought you out. Four days I was at the work. Four days, four nights.’

  ‘I know, Sofie, I know.’

  ‘You man. You ape a woman. What do you know of women? You man.’

  ‘Sofie, I didn’t mean to distress you.’

  ‘No, nor when you split my womb. His bastard. Blood and muck from his rotted, scalding seed.’

  She whirled back. Her face was mad again. Now she did not shout: she said, ‘Go to bed. Grete’s prepared the room. Take the Armagnac.’

  ‘No, thank you.’

  And then she picked up the red crystal flask and flung it at the wall.

  Like blood on black, it did not mark, it was only wet, like tears.

  When he reached the attic, it seemed to him he must speak to her again, and she would be calmer, and maybe recollect—but no, she would not. All she had she gave him.

  How she must have longed to thrust this bouquet of thorns into his hands. (Why hold back?)

  Johanon felt exhausted, ears whining, nauseous, deathly. The white attic that had no true light or heat wheeled slowly, and he half fell down on the sparse, now-sheeted bed.

  The ceiling pulsed with the lights below, and now they were like blood. A white bloodied wheel...

  Yes, he thought. His mother, of course, had put something in his glass. Had successfully murdered him at last.

  And from the pit of his heart it came, a shameful sinking ease, that he could do no more.

  Chapter Nineteen

  Set’s breath died in the night.

  So much for the fifty day wind.

  The water was quite low, and as they pushed upstream, the suburbs of the city, under a briary of TV aerials, hid the great tombs that lay along the desert of the east bank.

  Red brickyards followed, with sandal boats at their quays, palms like green tarantulas, acacias. Sometimes women had come to the water in the cool morning. They filled aluminium pots and plastic buckets from the grey-brown fluid of the Nile.

  It was easy to believe this sluggish stained tinfoil water had once been turned to blood.

  But an eruption had done that, not the fury of God.

  Lebas, an atheist, stood complacently on the afternoon deck. He watched the silt-built banks drift by, the acacias, the women. Once a noisy motorbike outpaced them. They were going slowly. The Arabs who manned the boat were of course lazy scoundrels, dirty, shiftless, villainous. And their normal ill-feeling towards a Westerner had been augmented by the war. The city had been notable for a dearth of tourists. But that was a blessing. Paul-Luc loathed also the Americans—uncouth, the English—constipated and soul-less, the Germans—beasts.

  Berenice he had put in the cabin and instructed to remain there. Arabs were not to be trusted around a child, and besides she tended to infernal sore throats, and the day was cold. She had her English and literature lessons to do and, slower even than the boat, that would occupy her until dinner time.

  Lunch had been execrable. Rice and some slop. At least the boat kept going. They were refusing to travel by night, but he would insist. They said it was illegal.

  He thought about the map. He knew now exactly where they must dock, and where he must ride out across the desert. His agent had promised the donkeys would be waiting at the village, but you could not be sure, sure of nothing in this country.

  He glanced at the captain in the wheel-house.

  This benighted race the descendants of Ancient Egypt.

  Then, for a second, he recalled the blonde woman in the hotel restaurant. She had left before he did. Her legs were as alluring as he had predicted, in sleek blonde stockings and high-heeled sandals.

  Then he forgot her, thinking of the map again. Of what the map showed.

  There had been a slight earth tremor. Finding some fault, it had dislodged hill rock and quantities of sand. This had happened before, apparently, at the turn of the century, but then the natives, the very peasants, had gone out, it seemed, and covered up the spot. This time, no one had, as yet, done so. Modern life overwhelmed honour, or fear. For, as with all these graves of the old world, an air of the superstitious and the uncanny hung about the burial place.

  It was a rock tomb, out in the low hills, beyond the village with the name that meant Dove. Unusual, in any case, to find this type of tomb in just this area.

  It could be a hoax. Paul-Luc Lebas had enemies...

  But he could not risk losing such a chance, if it were genuine. If it were—it would make his name. Not since that gaudy, over-publicized tomb of the boy-king, Tutankhamun—oh, he coul
d remember the exhibition in Paris in the ‘60s. He had eschewed it.

  No. Here was something wholly original. Unique. Mysterious.

  He turned, and saw Berenice had come up on deck.

  ‘Go back,’ he shouted. ‘There’s nothing to see, the water’s too low.’

  She whined, ‘Papa, the cabin’s stuffy.’

  ‘Never mind. Go in.’

  The sunset was like fire and the Nile changed to blood. The winter-parched flower they called the Nile Rose turned purple, black.

  More slop for dinner. Paul-Luc swallowed a couple of penicillin tablets.

  The stars came through like daggers, so bright. These stars, if not quite the same, had blazed above the land of Lower Egypt. And now the god journeyed through the hell beneath the earth in his boat, the night-Nile of death, from which Khepri would raise him with the dawn—

  Moved, Paul-Luc wrote two or three lines of poetry in his notebook.

  The boat had been persuaded to go on, illegally or not.

  It sailed past villages like dreams of the ancient time, russet window cracks and smoke lifting, but then another village would appear, neon lit, with a water tower and the TV aerials bristling. Pedlars from night markets ran to the bank, offering the boat unripe bananas, tiny oranges. A single woman rose like a ghost, an antique jar upon her head. The lights of the boat picked out her inky garment, then she vanished among the palms.

  If he went to sleep probably the boat would moor. But he was tired now, and tomorrow was another early start.

  Berenice was sleeping on her bunk, rolled into four blankets like a worm. She snored a little, congested. He hoped this would not disturb him.

  Muezzins woke him, singing from their sky-scanning towers, at the town where the boat had tied up.

  Lebas cursed them.

  The dark was barely opening.

  But day came in a wash, and Khepri lifted the sun disc into the air.

  Berenice murmured in her sleep.

  ‘What? What are you saying?’

  She whispered, in French, ‘Out of dark he arises, conqueror of the night.’

  But still he did not catch the phrase.

  He said, ‘Clear your throat and speak properly.’

  She said, ‘I don’t know, Papa. I—forget.’

  Outside, on the morning river, a great two-masted sandal passed, laid with white limestone blocks from the quarries farther south.

  Paul-Luc argued with his captain. He did not want to spend time at the town where, any way, they should not have tied up. The river police, the captain explained, had told them that they must, or be fined.

  Paul-Luc swore.

  They went on, up-river.

  He had once visited the vast pyramid above the city, but not gone very close. He had taken the child. As night came, there, the neoned metropolis glared emerald green, yellow and white, creating a surreal sky, and the floodlit mound inflated to a giant triangle of broken biscuit.

  Paul-Luc had experienced contempt. He would not enter such a spectacle. His times of doing that were done.

  When they reached the village named Dove, the day was going. Not red that night, but fulvous. Wild duck flew across the vast orb of the sun. There were ten-feet-tall reeds around a stubborn little island in the channel. Not papyrus, some other more common thing.

  The village itself was a dustbin of mud-brick hovels, with patches of fields, sugar cane, maize, beans, and clover. Tortured-looking fig trees huddled together. There was no water tower. And yet street lighting had come here, up on wires, and from some of the desperate roofs the plague of aerials poked forth.

  They slept on the boat, woken now and then by the laughter of their sailors playing cards and smoking hookahs with the villagers.

  When the sun came, he told Berenice she must stay below.

  ‘But, Papa, you said—’

  ‘I know what I said. We’re late. It will be a nasty ride. If I find this place, once we begin, I’ll come back for you.’

  ‘Will you?’

  He glanced at her. The horrible food, this morning a sort of porridge affair, seemed to suit her. Her face was pale but fresh, and her gaze had widened. So he glimpsed, unknowing, how her odd eyes would be effective in adult life, bright grey and starred with golden freckles, alluring eyes of differing shape, that each held separate thoughts.

  Did she doubt him? If he said he would do something, it should be done.

  ‘Berenice, don’t be stupid. Attend to your lessons. Stay in the cabin. I’ll be back before sunset.’

  Berenice wilted. ‘Yes, Papa.’

  He got off the boat and walked along a street. Women emerged from hovels with their tin jars. They came out like rats.

  Near the street’s end an Arab stood in white galabia and turban.

  ‘Monsieur Lebas? I hope you have had a good journey.’ The man spoke in excellent French.

  ‘Foul. What a trial. Are the donkeys ready, and the men?’

  ‘The men will meet us at the site. And the donkeys are ready.’

  As he uttered, as if conjured, a donkey moved across the end of the street between two leaning ochre houses. On its back was tied a large colour television weighted by a piece of pumice.

  Lebas stared.

  And then, as if to try him further, a woman in blue veils followed the donkey, on her head what seemed to be a Swedish microwave oven.

  ‘What—?’

  ‘It’s of no importance, monsieur. Wealth comes and goes in these places.’

  Their two animals were under a palm, held ready by a small, mostly naked boy.

  Paul-Luc stared out across the clutter of hovels, the dismal fields with their shallow irrigation ditches, to the powder brown stretch of the desert. The hills rose on its flank, looking too near, lions’ backs, under the warmthless blue sky.

  As they rode, they did not speak. The Arab had attempted a little polite conversation, but desisted. Lebas was the master, and the pay-master.

  The donkey, evidently, had fleas.

  They kept the rounded hills over to their left, and the pointed hill to their right.

  The sun was hard, like glass.

  Lebas drank from his Evian bottle.

  It took two hours (sweat, contrary dryness, dry winds), and then they were there.

  A solitary palm stood like a burnt column fringed with fronds, and beside it the four men he had hired sat smoking and drinking coffee, under an awning.

  They got up as he approached, and salaamed. At least, then, they knew their place, or made believe to. A small heap of tools lay on plastic sacks.

  ‘Ask them if they were questioned.’

  ‘They all speak French, monsieur.’

  One of the four, a man with three very white front teeth, spoke up. ‘No one noticed us, monsieur. We’ve been coming out for a week or so. They think,’ he grinned more widely, ‘we know a place with boys, and pretend to go into the desert.’

  The other men laughed.

  Paul-Luc, disgusted, made no comment.

  ‘Well then,’ he said.

  ‘I will show monsieur,’ said the three-toothed man. ‘We have cleared a little sand.’

  Feeling oddly reluctant, Paul-Luc swung off the donkey; he was stiff and at pains not to display it.

  Three-teeth oozed over the ground towards the slope of the nearest hill, now only about twenty-five feet away.

  Lebas went after.

  The man slipped round the mass of rock, which had in it veins of white and pink, ambled up almost on all fours, disappeared around the face, and called, winningly, ‘Here, monsieur.’

  Lebas touched the pistol in his jacket.

  But that was nonsense. The money could only come to them from the city at his order.

  He climbed, unwieldy, round the rock.

  Ah God—that nonexistent God—it was there.

  The sand mounted the hill like a sheath—foolishly he was reminded of his daughter in her furl of blankets—but there, above, the cut oblong of red door stood from t
he hill.

  It was a ruddy granite, smooth as a pearl—

  Here and there, small vortices, some damage from the quakes, the last or the most recent—very little.

  Above the sand, on the door, the incised shoulders of a man, who had the head of a scarab beetle—Khepri. Just as the map had told him.

  ‘You! Go back and fetch the men. They must brush off all this sand.’

  Three-teeth slid down the hill as if he had skates on his backside, and was gone.

  Deftly, softly, unwisely, Paul-Luc reached up and fanned at the powders of the desert.

  The flat carven breast of an Egyptian man-god appeared.

  Then, Lebas looked up.

  There were scarabs, the sign of resurrection, around the top of the door. They were bizarre. Beetles with wings and also with human legs and arms. He studied the hieroglyphs. Twenty-first Dynasty, probably, they were the usual ones. None must enter here. Beware. Let the vile Arabs beware. The warning might mean that poison had been incorporated in the mortar at the joins of the door. As the door was forced, bane showered out. He had told his workers, via the agent, they must acquire surgical masks and gloves, which might protect them.

  He lost interest in that. For this—what was this? The picture writing ran clear—

  A papyrus leaf, a kite, the cord-measure for one hundred, a symbol that had to do with the Underworld...

  He put it together, his lips working.

  The phonetic sound Khau. The sound that could mean shame, or a vessel from the altar, or the crown of a king—but this... was Darkness.

  Khau-Khepra.

  The darkness, then, of the scarab god. He that raised the sun. (And, punned from other words, something that must be filled.)

  From the upright lintel of the door, the writing proceeded. Lebas took time over it. He took care.

  It read: I am the one that came out of the desert. I am the blue-eyed—

  The writing stopped, in a masonry graze that had erased it.

  Blue-eyed? No. There were barbarians, of course, but the Egyptians did not generate blue eyes. Not until Alexander’s Greeks had come among them. Some earlier infiltrator then. Risen high enough to gain this tomb.