In the Valley of the Kings: Stories

by Terrence Holt

  Only then did the enormity of the thing bear in on me at last. It was a trap. As though laid down long ago for me and me alone, through five millennia it had led me, across the continents and decades of my own life, to this empty ending. And I, driven by a need I had not stopped to question, a credulity that even now makes me grimace in the darkness with embarrassment, though there is no one here to see—freighted with all this burden of desire and dread, I had come. I had answered the call. I am here.

  Unconsciously, I had started to back away from the blank cartouche, as though I suspected in it some power to ensnare me still, to wind me deeper in extremities of self-love and self-deceit. I backed away. My feet scraped sound from the floor, cutting through the silence that had swathed my thoughts numb, letting in flashes of fact: the certainty that the door behind me had locked; the conviction that I would find in it no mechanism of release; the faint but definite indications that my flashlight was failing; all the long distance at my back, of corridor and chamber, unscalable wall and empty sky; and beyond that sky, over the ocean my life in ruins behind me; and before me a darkness pulsing, deeper, blacker, until the real darkness closing in seemed only the ashen shadow of despair. My heart stood on my shoulder, shouting. Against the darkness I saw, repeated in flashes that came to me with the vivid immediacy of lightning, the leathery stare of horror in the face of Nur-Mar’s Answerer; I remembered how we had found him crouched, head furled close to his drawn-up knees: I felt the same urge tightening in my chest, struggling to curl itself around the void left by my soul.

  I do not know—and even now some fugitive spirit of curiosity will not let the question alone—just what it was that made me stop. Perhaps it was the panic seizing me at last. Perhaps it was despair. But I suspect, rather, it was the perverse spirit that has led me so infallibly to this place. It had not finished with me yet. I was to be its toy some hours more. Whatever it was, it prevented me from taking the final step backward, which would (I think of it now with regret) have been my last. It would have been much easier to tumble in blindly backward, not knowing until too late just what my feet had done.

  Air breathed up the back of my neck. The hairs there stirred. A smell—not damp, not dry but infinitely corrupt—penetrated finally through my terror. Some sense for which I have no name registered emptiness behind me. As if in a dream, or acting out in waking life a dream I had long ago forgotten, I turned, knowing already just what I would find: a pit some ten feet across and immeasurably deep occupied the center of the room. In the same uncanny doubleness I teetered, caught in the centripetal pull of the pit but unable, finally, to allow myself to fall.

  I fell back instead to lie in darkness. Ghostly chuckling echoed upward from the mortar my foot had dislodged, loosening more echoes from the depths of the well. I heard no impact.

  I lay for a long time before lighting the torch again. The ceiling was low, and marked, above the center of the well, with a small gathering of glyphs: Akha, it read: enter, go. But when I looked more closely, I saw that the word was incomplete: the last sign of the glyph was broken. Either the engraving was shaved plane, or the stone had fallen into the well, but I knew, as plainly as if it had been spoken aloud, as if I had always expected to find it here, what the entire glyph would be. Akha-t, the glyph had said, still echoing over the empty centuries the pride and despair of a King, and a cynicism deeper still. The glyph gestured to the well at my feet, embracing as well the immense edifice around me, the King’s death, my own life, and all the world of light that I had lost long, long ago: Akha-t: a disease of the womb.

  I had found what Khafre’s Sphinx was still seeking in the sky over Giza: the answer opened at my feet.

  There was little else to do. I knew better than to try the door, although I did. I knew better than to search the walls and ceiling, to pry at the joints between the stones, but I did. I did these things, and several others, until my own bloody fingerprints marked the room. Time passed. The air in the room grew foul, and not all of the foulness came from the well. The flashlight, no matter now I saved it, grew dim. I was hungry light-headed, and the voice in my ears was loud.

  Only one discovery did I make in these hours in my tomb, one last contribution I have to make to human knowledge. Forgive me: the dreadful cynicism of the King’s last gesture is infecting me at last—or my own despair has finally unleashed itself, now that there is no shred of human society left to hold it back. But if I am bitter, it is not without reason. He did not leave me even so much of my pride as this: even this, my last discovery, was determined long ago, this neat stack of papyrus placed here at the margins of the floor where, sooner or later, I must stumble over it.

  And obey.

  As though they held some potent spell, once I found the sheets of paper I had no choice: Ser, Serr, Ser metut: arrange words in order, compose a work: write. Of course the papyrus crumbled through my fingers: dust, swirling in the last rays of my flashlight. I thought at first that this too was another piece in the puzzle, another refinement of a torture I could hardly understand: to be commanded to write, and given only dust. Almost I rebelled again: I shoveled the ashes down the chute. But when I found the pens, purest ivory, still supple and sharp, bound with a linen cord beside their alabaster ink-pot, the powdered ink waiting in its stoppered flask, I gave myself up at last to the command. I sat, I crossed my legs in the old, familiar posture of the scribe, and ari metchut: I made a book.

  The fluid for the ink I supplied in the only way I could. My pockets I emptied for what small evidences of my past they could provide: my journal notebook, scraps of letters, old index cards. Words came to me out of the darkness. And although I cannot see what I write, these words will suffice. They will survive me, I know, just as the King’s monument survived him: as long as time requires, and the darkness in the pit endures.

  Out of that darkness, reader, I reach my hand to you.

  SCYLLA

  —ODYSSEY XII: 58

  It was a fair cruise, the seas calm, the winds and currents favoring, the skies so clear the evening star was visible by day. Mornings and evenings low clouds rolled, pink in the sunrise, orange in the west; always they vanished before us. The crew, off watch, hung in the shrouds, where they swung with the long surge of the sea; high in the foretop, Teofilo, the Portygee, sang in his languid tongue. This was in the days before the Law.

  On the fortieth day we spoke a ship, heavy-laden out of the east. Its captain told us that the Law had come.

  “What is the Law?” I called back, but the ship had drifted out of hailing. It settled over the horizon, and we never saw it again. On the sixtieth day, we spoke a black, lean ship, an eye painted on its prow. Its captain howled at us like a madman, and evidently he was mad, for his crew had tied him to the mast, and rowed as though the devil was after them. We pulled away on a freshening wind.

  On the ninetieth day, in calm seas we spoke a monstrous vessel, all iron and smoke among the ice. It told us, too, the Law had come, but when we asked what this Law might be it only forged ahead, full speed into the night. And on the last day of our voyage, as the lighthouse top rose out of the west, and then the steeple on the hill, and we made our way into the harbor, clear and smooth as glass, the shadow of the moon ghosted across our wake, a shudder shook our canvas as if the wind had died, and a hollow voice from astern told us that the Law had come.

  We stepped ashore, all uncertain of what this Law might be, and what it might mean to us, men returned from a long voyage on the sea.

  At first, it seemed nothing had changed. The inn at the wharf was lighted as ever, the fire still burned on its hearth, the smoke still smudged against the low roll of cloud as it always had, and the landlord welcomed us as he always had. Our gear piled in the corner smelled strongly of the sea, and that, too, was as it always had been, the salt smell suddenly strange among the smells of earth.

  And on the next morning, as we rose from the arms of our sweethearts and wives, this, too, was as it had always been. And we aske
d them, I asked my wife, what this was about the Law. And then there was a change. Her eyes clouded, as though struggling to remember. Her hands smoothed absently a corner of the counterpane, as though in it she sought to read this Law.

  “Is it nothing then?” I prompted her. “Is it only a yarn?”

  “No,” she said, slow and uncertain, bewildered at her inability to remember. “No, it is not that.” But what the Law might be she could not recall, and I could not guess.

  My crew had all dispersed. I caught the last of them, the bosun, as he waited by the depot, shortly after noon. When I questioned him, he told me that the crew had all gone home.

  “Gone home?” I said to him. “Their homes are here—what homes they have. And what business have sailors to talk of home ashore? At sea, we talk of home. But ashore, we talk of the sea. That is how it has always been.”

  “I know,” said the bosun, fingering a lanyard woven ’round his neck. “But that was before the Law.” His fingers traced the length of the lanyard as if it irritated the skin beneath his chin. I noticed suddenly his beard was gone. His fingers reached the lanyard’s end, and missed the whistle that had hung there.

  I collared him. “Back to the ship, me hearty,” I cried, but even I could tell my heart was no longer in it: the boisterous tones fell flat in the dusty street.

  “Please, Captain.” The bosun’s eyes were pleading, more for me than for himself. In the street around us, people were staring. In the sunstruck street my sou’wester shone a ridiculous yellow.

  In the harbor I found the ship had gone.

  AND SO THIS was what the Law must be, I told myself, and felt already the strength of its claim on me. I felt it in the easy acquiescence to the loss of my ship, a ship I had not even had the chance to go down with. At low tide, I prowled the breakwater, but not a mast stuck out above the glassy harbor. A flock of pigeons broke from the steeple, wheeled once above the seaward channel, and I knew then that my ship had gone that way, and I remembered suddenly that none of us, in our eagerness for shore, had bothered to secure her. She had simply drifted out to sea. And this, I knew, must be the Law as well—not the tide, but our forgetting of our duty.

  Our old duty, I should say. Keeping watch. Standing to the wheel. Going aloft in all weathers, even when the ice stood so sharp upon the shrouds that our hands bled. I speak, of course, for the crew. And the lookout who had never failed us, never failed in the sight of land, the sight of other shipping, of curiosities—whales, uncharted islands—of the sea: how had he failed to warn us of the Law? How had I failed to steer us clear?

  And now I find new duties, here upon the land. I am not captain, of course. I work now among other men, my sou’wester on the shelf of the hall closet in our home. It is a snug home. My wife has tried to keep it as much as possible like a ship, and for this I am grateful, but I find, as the weeks go on, the neighbors’ curiosity makes me self-conscious. I may replace the portholes with proper windows soon, before the winter comes. It will be better to have the light.

  And I correspond, of course, with my old crew. This, too, I think, is something of the Law: they wrote, sending in their new addresses. Teofilo, the Portygee, writes from Providence, where he works in dry goods; Sundays he still sings, in a choir. My first mate, in Hartford, has taken up the insurance trade. The cook, of course, is unemployed, but hopeful.

  And so they all wrote in. Some sent snapshots of their children, grown astonishingly over the course of our last voyage. Already there are college plans, small triumphs of the rising generation, and already there are sorrows. A collection for Anderson, whose youngest died of fever, makes the rounds. This too, I know, is of the Law.

  But what this Law is, and who decreed it, still I do not know. I work all day in city hall, a petty functionary recording deeds, and you would think that here, surrounded by machineries of regulation, recording, order, here the agencies of Law would show themselves. But it is not so simple, and I think this complexity as well, it too is of the Law.

  I have made my own investigations. I have collared them in the marmoreal halls of the county courthouse, back there across the parking lot, beside the jail, from which occasionally angry voices rise, occasionally a tattooed hand reaches forth, and once already I have known the tattoo, remembered it when it had pulled upon an oar, and felt the profoundest pity seeing it now, livid on an arm grown pale in confinement, the hand that once pulled yare now a helpless fluttering upon a windowpane. I have buttonholed them, I say, between meetings, trying to ascertain who might be the Law, who might know what clause in it decreed the drifting of my ship.

  Here, too, the Law intercedes. I feel it dividing me, cluttering my speech with doubts, with qualifications. Where once I might have roared, “Avast! I’ll split ye, ye beggars,” and all manner of stout nonsense, now I find myself not wanting to press too urgently, not wanting to reveal my ignorance of the Law, but wondering as well, as this city councilman I grip seeks this way and that around me, his eyes rolling like a whale in its flurry as he looks for someone to rescue him: I have wondered if he knows, it anyone knows, just what is going on. I wonder if these lubbers, who were once so content to feed us, drunk us, bed us down and ship us out, to take our cargo, our fish, our rendered blubber and our ambergris, I wonder if they are so content now as they seem, under their Law.

  For I cannot but feel it is their Law. I tell myself, angry even as I worry if I go too far with this collared councilman, that this was none of my doing, and then I feel the doubt, I wonder if this Law were not some stowaway on my own ship, a rat that slunk down the first hawser carrying the Law within its fur, but then I tell myself that doubts such as these are just the workings of the Law, a teredo worm upon the stout oak of my heart, but it is too late, the councilman has escaped, in tow with two county attorneys. They depart, promising to meet over lunch next week when I have written up a brief, and I am left holding a starched paper collar in my hands, and no closer to knowing how I might regain my ship.

  And this, I know, is not the Law: I want my ship again. I dream of it in the night, dream that I have awakened, thrown back the curtains in the moonlight, flung up the sash, and there, from the second storey of my snug home, which still looks down upon the harbor, the harbor still smooth as glass, there in the moonlight my ship glides in past the breakwater, there on the wharf my crew are all assembled, the townspeople as of old, wives and sweethearts, innkeepers and merchants all waving, all sobbing, all joyous to see us off, and we are joyous, stout, absorbed in our work, running up and down the ratlines, departing on the tide. And there at the channel’s end, as a favoring wind freshens at our stern, our wake begins to boil, the harbormaster’s boat frets against the side, and the pilot, climbing overboard, reaches up to shake my hand. His grip is strong, it pulls me after, and together we fall into no harbormaster’s boat, only into water deep, and cold, and I awake, I have thrown the counterpane aside and lie shivering in a sweat that has cooled upon my skin, chill now in the breeze from the open window, the window which, as I rise to close it, I see looks down on no harbor, but only into my neighbor’s yard. On his roof a windvane in the shape of a whale swings, moodily complaining to the moon. This too I recognize as the workings of the Law.

  I have learned to recognize it. It is clearest in the shape of the hills off to the west, the notch in them where the sun, on these December evenings, sets. They were not there, those hills, when we left on our last voyage. But it is not in their existence that I trace the Law in its clearest function—not in the fact of them so much as in their action. The way they catch at the eye, the way they block the horizon that once lay so vividly flat there was no mistaking that the world was round, the sun a mighty vessel gone hull-down on the horizon, and the whole globe an ocean. Now, these hills, they give a weight, an unfair advantage, to the land, and even the sun seems to sink beneath it. In this I see most clearly the workings of the Law: in this, and in the way I have taken to staring westward, the sea at my back almost always now, almost as i
f I have forgotten it is there, I look away from it, I look landward, where my crew has gone, and wonder when I will follow them.

  I know the stories. Certainly I know the traditions, the gear I should carry, the questions I should wait for. When I should plant the oar. If I am lucky, if the land be fertile, perhaps the oar will sprout. God knows, any oar I find in this town will be green enough.

  But I resist, divided in myself, and feeling in that division the workings of the Law. The fluorescent lights in my office, the soft muttering of the television set at home, the children who each day astonish me as they grow strange and stranger, their voices roughen, their faces lengthen, until I seem to have come home to the wrong house by mistake, and somewhere down this line of cottages my life is waiting, my wife wondering what can be keeping me: all of this, I know, is the Law.

  Only, I tell myself, only this questioning, only my doubt that these changeling children can be my own, only my conviction that my life lies elsewhere, in the dream of my ship’s return: only here, I tell myself, and in this story I tell you, hoping you will understand—only here I hold the Law at bay.

  But it is hard. I feel the weakening of my resolve, the strength of my limbs draining away under the Law. I have, in fact, grown old here on the land. Each year at Christmastide, the cards are fewer. Anderson died last year, succumbing to the curse that seems to have dogged his family, a curse we all know to be the workings of the Law, but why it should have worked more strongly in him than in the others, I do not know. The years have passed as quickly as any dream, the children are truly strangers, voices on the telephone. There are resentments between us now, old grudges I cannot remember, and these, too, are the workings of the Law.