Darkness, I

by Lee, Tanith

  Lebas thought of Joseph, the Hebrew who had brought his people into Egypt, a time of prosperity and then despair, enslaved, until the ten plagues freed them (wealth comes and goes)—

  But Joseph would not be here, would not be termed Darkness.

  Paul-Luc looked up over the actual door, and in the scored rock above, he saw, faintly, the hieroglyphs that spelled Ukha na. There was a gap between them.

  Yet, something made him step away.

  He turned, and the Arab workers had grouped obediently down the slope.

  ‘Clear the sand.’

  ‘Monsieur,’ said the one who had met him in the street of Dove, ‘may we first finish with our coffee?’

  ‘No you may not. Come up now, and brush away the sand.’

  Three-teeth said, ‘It’s the time for prayer. We may not labour yet.’

  Lebas felt a gouging of rage. He cursed them in their own language, terrible curses that he saw offended. He finished, ‘Do as I say.’

  For this tomb was a find indeed. He would not be cheated.

  And then, the camel glided around the rock, like a honey-coloured prehistoric sheep, and poised itself below, dripping tassels. On its back sat a beautiful woman with blonde hair. She wore white trousers and shirt, and a straw hat with a long, floating white-green scarf.

  She called to Paul-Luc.

  ‘Monsieur Lebas. Forgive this intrusion.’

  She spoke the French of France.

  He gaped at her.

  She said, ‘Or, dear monsieur, simply graciously forgive me.’

  Chapter Twenty

  How had she come here? The train from the city, to some town up ahead, then riding back? Or all the way, somehow so fleet, on the camel? For whom was she working? With whom was she in league? His foes? Some museum?

  Fifty-seven years old, he felt childish.

  He did not like it.

  He said, coldly, ‘Explain yourself.’

  ‘I will, Monsieur Lebas. A moment.’

  She spoke to the camel in Arabic and it kneeled, its proud sheep-rabbit’s face a study in enviable distance. The woman came gracefully off its back.

  The Arabs clustered round and she smiled, and put some money into the hands of the man in the white galabia. In their own tongue, again, she requested that they lift the hamper off the animal. They did so. Then, they melted away, and beyond the rock, as they went, he heard their male laughter.

  ‘I insist—’ he said.

  ‘Oh,’ she said, ‘I’m very embarrassed.’ She lowered her large fine eyes. ‘But I must confess.’

  ‘Confess what? How did you know of this place?’

  ‘I didn’t, monsieur. I had—someone discover where you were going. A little bribery. I followed you. You know, in this land, they can learn anything, and will sell—anything.’

  ‘Are you French?’ he rapped.

  ‘I wouldn’t presume to claim so much.’ (His shoulders went back. He accepted the accolade, despite himself.) ‘Perhaps a little.’

  ‘Then why this interest in me, and in my whereabouts?’

  She looked at him. And then, prettily, she blushed. Or seemed to. She said, ‘You make me very shy, monsieur. But I must be truthful. You see through me. You give no quarter.’

  ‘Well?’

  ‘I saw you at the hotel. And then—you were gone. I set myself to discover you. Have I been very terrible?’

  ‘You’ve been bloodily impertinent. Do you know what this is?’ He waved his arm at the door behind him.

  She looked, considered, and said quietly, ‘I believe so.’

  ‘Then you understand a need for secrecy.’

  She said, softly, but he heard her, ‘Well, you must silence me. The best way to stop a mouth... a kiss.’

  Paul-Luc glared at her, and yet, he was aroused. She had used an ambiguous phrase. The kiss might mean more... than a kiss.

  ‘This is absurd,’ he said.

  ‘Then let me placate you. I promise, I won’t betray this place. You alone found it. I’m an admirer of yours, Monsieur Lebas. I always read your columns, on Antigone, on Electra, The Bacchae, Petronius. Long before I saw you, I knew about you. And then—’ She smiled again. ‘And then, dare I say? The lightning struck.’

  He was lost for words. But no longer childish.

  She was quite, quite spectacular. About thirty-five. Slim, nearly boyish. Exactly of a type he liked—Marthe had been of this sort. But Marthe had never read his writings. The sun lit this one’s hair to angelic floss.

  ‘I shall call you Medee,’ he said, ‘a cunning witch.’

  She laughed. She indicated the hamper.

  ‘I’ve brought you a feast. If you’ll be my Jason.’

  ‘I’m far too old for that.’

  ‘You?’ Her eyes were like warm dark flowers. ‘Ah, monsieur.’

  Then she opened the lid of the hamper, and he saw the golden unleavened bread, one of the few foods of Egypt he cared for, and Russian caviare on ice, and coppery duck breasts wrapped about mahogany dates. Two bottles of light red claret rested in coolers. She said, ‘You don’t believe in the snobbery of wine, I know. You’ll find these tastes complementary.’

  ‘I hate the stupidity of wine drinkers,’ he said. ‘I seldom drink.’

  ‘But now, with me?’

  He laughed. ‘Who can resist Medee? But what’s your name?’

  ‘Call me Medee,’ she said. ‘Until you know me. Names are magic.’

  ‘But you know mine.’

  ‘You’re special to me.’

  He said, ‘You expend too much flattery upon me, madame.’

  ‘So. I’ll say no more. All that’s needful is said.’

  She sat down, careless, on the sand, and even through the white trousers he saw the lines of her slim, firm thighs and calves. Her hands were small, narrow, lightly tanned. The hands of a French woman of the south. She had very white teeth, and today no liptstick, so the tawny plum of her mouth was revealed. A kiss.

  He sat beside her, and she deferred at once to him, spreading a white napkin, offering him the wine to open, as she polished, with another white cloth, his glass.

  The ice was intriguing. Where had she got it? From Dove...? Well, if TV had come there, why not refrigeration? Why not caviare and claret.

  Women had sometimes pursued him in the past. Never so boldly or with such finesse. He had to admit he enjoyed it. And, it had been almost a year, cumbered with Berenice, since he had allowed himself a dalliance. This woman was in love with him. He could secure her, his Medee. (And why not Medee? The ancient Greeks had been a golden race, unlike the oily black-haired wretches who had kidnapped their islands.) She would be loyal. She could help him. Perhaps that impossible rarity, like a unicorn, an intelligent woman.

  They ate. He was hungry, but she was spare with her meal, fastidiously toying with her fork amid the food, assuming little bites, liking them, not captivated. More enamoured of him. Perhaps, despite her sophistication, in awe of him, and a touch nervous.

  He did not mind this. Nor did she.

  He imagined her, sitting at his feet, in some cool room, her small ringless hand upon his shoe.

  He tried the wine. It was excellent. Light yet mature, an exact accessory to the fish-eggs, and the richness of the duck.

  He said, ‘I’ve waited some months to be sure of this tomb.’

  ‘I know,’ she murmured. ‘I’ve found out.’

  ‘Inquisitive little creature. But what do you know of it?’

  ‘I have heard of this burial place. It’s rumoured.’

  ‘Perhaps you know more than I do.’

  She laughed at the idea. She refilled his glass but not her own. He was pleased to note she drank, too, abstemiously. Not like Marthe with her passion for Cognac in chambers cloudy with cigarette smoke—

  ‘I know a little. Who they say it is. The body in the tomb.’

  Down the slope, the camel stood peaceably, as if sleeping.

  Paul-Luc, expanded by wine, relaxed, quic
kened a fraction. It was true, she might, with her woman’s curiosity, have stumbled across facts, or symbols of facts, he had been denied.

  ‘Well, tell me, blonde Medee.’

  ‘A sorcerer perhaps. Named Khau. Darkness. A man with blue eyes, feared greatly, his corpse brought away from Men-Nefer, the White City, and buried here. Maybe a second burial. Prestigious, performed from terror.’

  ‘And this is a novel by that charlatan Rider Haggard. That’s what it sounds like now.’

  ‘Oh, do you consider Monsieur Haggard a charlatan?’

  He said dismissively, ‘If you had studied where I have, so would you.’

  And she, charmingly, ‘Ah, but for a woman, monsieur, a writer of great allure.’

  The wine had gone to his head. Lebas did not wonder if a hint of irony had crept into her tone. He was fascinated by her mouth, more than what it said.

  Beyond the rock, silence. The bloody debased Arabs had slunk far away. Would it be conceivable he might even, in a little while, possess her here?

  His own readiness startled him, but he did not mind it.

  He said, ‘And this Khau, this sorcerer, what do you know about him?’

  ‘Something,’ she said.

  ‘Then tell me.’

  ‘He was a king, but they expunged all trace of him from the temples and the walls of Memphis. In revulsion his body was flung first into a pit for crocodiles to devour. But later the bones were brought here. Even dead, he held them, even nameless, with no chance of immortality. Neshenti—Fury of Set. That’s written too, on the door of his tomb. Or so they say.’

  ‘The great mysterious They,’ said Lebas. Mellow, he leaned on the slope, where the sand packed against the foot of the grave of Khau-Khepra, the blue-eyed. Something stuck into his back, he did not care.

  ‘Oh, it’s imbecilic, of course,’ she said. She filled his glass. ‘Shall I tell you the rest?’

  He said, smiling, ‘My Scheherazade, not my Medee.’

  ‘He, the Lord Khau, was the instrument of God. As were his people. The Tale of the Lost Tribe of Israel... In the story they are lost before the Exodus. Lost, and called back, to assist the prince-prophet Moses, the boy left in the reeds for the priests of the sun.’

  Paul-Luc corrected her, ‘Pharoah’s daughter.’

  ‘No, there the story is mislaid. It was a custom at Memphis—Men-Nefer—to put out the unwanted children of the peasants in baskets of mud, among the papyrus, for the priests to choose from. Some children were taken into the temples. Some left in the river. The mud cradles melted away and the Nile sucked them down. But Moses was chosen. Have you never heard, monsieur, how some of the old texts call certain of the temples “Son of Pharaoh” and “Pharoah’s Daughter”?’

  He nodded. Perhaps he had. He was sleepy yet sweet with desire. The hard knob of rock was nearly comfortable in his back. In a while he would draw her close. But let her go on with her game. Her voice was musical. The sun felt warm now, and old, like the ancient disc, the Aten, giver of health and joy.

  ‘Pharaoh resisted the plea of Moses, as you know, to let go his slaves, the Hebrews. And so ten plagues descended on the city.’

  ‘The Nile to blood,’ he said. ‘It’s all explainable—’

  ‘Oh, yes. Everything is, monsieur. But the story, monsieur, the story has it that when the first three plagues had been unsuccessful—the plague of water changed to blood, of frogs falling on the land, the plague of lice—a fourth plague was summoned.’

  Paul-Luc Lebas closed his eyes. He felt elated, pure, as if some religious ecstasy had captured him. The wine. Well, why not. He saw against the lids of his eyes, red from the old gold beaten bowl of sun, her pictures.

  ‘A wind came, the hot scorpion wind of the desert.’ She said: ‘The dust thrashed against the city. The sun was dull.’

  And from the dust, the wind out of the desert waste, they came. There was no true name for them.

  ‘The Torah,’ she said, ‘instructs that they were Arov—this term is disputed by scholars. Wild beasts, say some. Others tell us that flies came upon the city of Pharaoh. Or snakes. And others say that they were, the Arov, blood-suckers. Scarabs.’

  From the desert, haloed by dust, the plague walked on bare narrow feet that did not feel the furnace heat of the sand. Their robes were black. Their hair was black, blowing about their faces. Their eyes were like the drawings on the walls of tombs, almonds painted in by a black rim, the iris black as an orb of night.

  Scarabs. The Arov.

  ‘They entered the streets, and the wind covered them over like a cloak. The sun-bird was snared in a net of shadow. For they did not like the sun.’

  They crept into the palaces and the hovels of the city. They were—she told him—too marvellous to resist.

  And there they sucked human blood.

  They tore out throats, they fastened their teeth into necks, they drained dry Men-Nefer, whose white walls, deadened with shade, were then splashed by red.

  And the river ran scarlet, as before, from the dead thrown into it.

  ‘Vampires?’ he queried. Amused. But his voice, slurred, annoyed him.

  ‘Yes, monsieur. Delicious vampires. Lovely until the moment of attack. In Men-Nefer some of the citizens died of shock, and some of the blood that was lost. Some of not giving in, killed. And the streets were dyed with red, and the river was red, and the sun was red too, in the black day sky.’

  He saw it. It was horrible, and fair.

  He meant to say, ‘And then what?’

  ‘It wasn’t enough. The king, the Pharaoh, was obdurate. And so other plagues fell upon Men-Nefer. The diseases that the vampire Arov had brought with their bites. Hail that flamed. Locusts that ate the crops. And then—Darkness came. Darkness which could be touched.’

  Paul-Luc felt the hardness under the sand, as if it had grown into him. Some arcane buggery. It came to him that a ledge of the tomb itself was pressing into his flesh. He should move away. Uncover it carefully.

  He could say: Now you’ll tell me that the—what would it be—ninth plague, this Darkness, was Khau-Khepra. Your sorcerer king.

  As if he had, she said, ‘He came among them, like his people, from the desert. The Egyptians thought he was Set himself, riding on an ass, with black hair. His eyes were like lapis-lazuli, the sky at dusk, kindled with the dawn star.’

  Paul-Luc did not reply or move.

  She said, ‘You’ll say, but what of the tenth plague. I’ll answer you. Khau took away their first born. He robbed them of their children.’

  Paul-Luc did not move. He thought, This thing. Under my back.

  He realized she had stood up. She was like, now, a white shadow, rimmed by the ancient sun. So bright. Yet—dark.

  ‘He took away their children and left the city bereft.’

  Paul-Luc did not move.

  She said, ‘And then he returned into the desert, with his tribe, his Scarab people, and the children of Men-Nefer. And only the Hebrew race were safe, for they had marked the lintels of their doors—with blood.’

  Paul-Luc did not move.

  She said, ‘The Angel of Death is another, an apt, name for him. Monsieur.’

  She waited then, and looked at Paul-Luc Lebas, who sat with his back against the sand of the hill. His glass rested in his fingers, on his knee. His eyes looked out, as if fixed on her pictures still.

  But by now the thing, with which she had wiped his glass, had killed him.

  She kicked him at last in the side, and he went over and rolled down the slope, right down, into the sand below.

  (The camel snorted, a farting, scoffing noise.)

  On the skin of the man’s back, under his jacket, was an impression of the hieroglyphs cut out on the door, mirror-wise: Neshenti.

  The woman turned and called, in Arabic.

  The men were waiting. Now they would cover up the tomb and seal it close. And in the village of Dove their reward was already in position, the satellite TV dishes, placed high on the mud w
alls of their huts.

  Berenice had been afraid.

  Not at first, while she had heard the crew of her father’s boat playing music, shouting to each other, and other noises from the village, goats and typewriters.

  But now silence had come, and when, finally, she disobeyed, and went up on to the deck, no one was there. The men had left the boat. The wheel-house was empty. And on the streets of the village, nothing moved.

  The sky was overcast too, thick with something like a smoked lens.

  It was, as it had been in the city, chilly but close.

  She went to the side and looked down into the water. It was not as she recalled—but what did she mean?

  She had some memory, from a film or book no doubt, of a beer-clear Nile, massed only with hippopotami. But this was muddy, sickly, destitute. She mourned for it.

  And then she looked up, at the high bank with its figs and muddled houses, and beyond, the vague ghost of brownness that must be desert.

  He did not like her, she knew, her father. He had only kept her because her mother was insane and a slut. Perhaps he had grown tired of Berenice now. Her stupidity, which irritated him so. Her appearance.

  She started to cry.

  And strangely, as she wept, it seemed to her that others wept with her, demons of the land and water. Women had wept here for so many centuries. Their tears had filled the Nile.

  She was curled on her bunk in her blankets, half asleep, half unconscious, in the shadow of nightfall, when the lady came in.

  The lady wore white and had wonderful golden hair. Berenice had seen her in the hotel.

  ‘Don’t be frightened, little one. It’s all right. Poor little girl. There.’

  Berenice sat up.

  ‘Where’s Papa?’

  ‘He’s had to go on to another village. So I’ve come to look after you for a while. You won’t mind, will you?’

  Berenice only stared.

  The lady was beautiful. Beautiful like someone else, long ago. And she smiled at Berenice, a true smile, which there is, never, ever any mistaking. The smile of possessive desire.

  Chapter Twenty-One

  They had gone back to living in the trees.

  To living in what had been recycled from trees: cardboard boxes.