“Sir Neville,” she said, “take us to the riverbank. We may be able to recruit another crew to row us.”
“Lady Cheshire,” Neville replied stiffly, “we have seen no sign of human life. Indeed, we have seen little other than reptiles.”
“I don’t think,” Stephen said, “that hippopotami are reptiles.”
“Blast your hippopotamus, Stephen Holmboe!” Neville exploded. “Blast your taxonomy, too. The only use I’d have for that water horse is if we could convince it to pull us upstream.”
Lady Cheshire persisted. “I don’t fancy hippopotami for motive power, Sir Neville, but the ancient Egyptians did provide for laborers.”
Jenny saw her own realization touching her uncle’s face.
“You mean those shabti things?” he said. “The figurines that were supposed to do the work in the afterlife?”
“Precisely,” Lady Cheshire said. “We might be able to create some. Stephen and I have managed a few things so far—we may be granted one more miracle.”
“Eddie?” Neville said.
“I’ll steer for the riverbank,” Eddie replied, “on your command.”
“Do it then,” Neville said.
Even with all of them pulling on the oars, they more drove the Boat of Millions of Years into the nearest riverbank than landed it. The hippopotamus-mutilated prow cracked a little more as it thumped against the land.
“I hope the sail soaked up most of the venom,” Jenny said, “or we’re going to need more than rowers.”
“I’ll take a look for leaks,” Neville said, rising. “Eddie, lend me a hand.”
“I only have one to lend,” Eddie said, “but you’re welcome to it.”
Rashid motioned that he could help, too, and Neville accepted gladly.
“We may need someone who can climb down the side,” he said, “and neither Eddie nor I could handle that.”
Jenny was about to offer her assistance when Lady Cheshire touched her arm.
“Please, Jenny,” she said, her green eyes intense. “We’ll need extra hands to model the figures. I’m sure I can get Sarah to help, but…”
“Sure,” Jenny said.
Ra had returned to his seat at the center of the vessel, and took Mozelle back into his lap. There was a silent consensus among the humans that they could not ask him to assist in this next step. He’d aided in the defense against Apophis, pulled an oar, managed the sail, and warded off the crocodiles. Jenny had the impression that the god—if god Ra was—was as distressed in his own fashion by all this strangeness as his human crew were.
“I’m better at drawing than modeling,” Jenny apologized as she joined Stephen, Lady Cheshire, and Mrs. Syms. “What do we do?”
She stopped and took another look at the two women. “First thing I’m going to do is rebandage your arm, then take a look at the dressing on Sarah’s collarbone.”
“Thank you,” Lady Cheshire said simply. “Stephen, the book you loaned me contained some sections from the Book of the Dead. I thought I saw one for enchanting shabti figures. Can you find that passage and adapt it to our needs?”
“Gladly,” Stephen said.
“What are we going to do, Audrey?” Mrs. Syms asked.
“After Miss Benet finishes checking our bandages, we are going on the shore to make mud figures,” Lady Cheshire told her. “We can’t be too fancy about this,” she said when they had all stepped ashore, and a convenient deposit of sticky mud had been located. “How many oarsmen do we need?”
Jenny had counted when they were rowing, wishing then that some of Ra’s usual companions would show up and fill the empty benches.
“Six to a side,” Jenny said, “if none of us take seats.”
“I think we should remain free to do other things, if needed,” Lady Cheshire said. “Very well, first we need twelve human figures. They needn’t be large.”
“They’ll be awfully soft,” Jenny said, digging out a wet lump with her fingernails.
“I thought,” Lady Cheshire said, almost shyly, “that we would ask Ra to bake them for us. If he cannot, we will need to settle for air-drying, but that will take more time.”
Sarah Syms was already making a nice little mud doll about six inches tall.
“Good thing they don’t need to be life-sized,” Jenny asked.
“Indeed.” Lady Cheshire glanced at her once well-tended hands with a slight sigh, then dug into the mud with a will, if not with enthusiasm. “The ones in the tombs were not—not usually, at least.”
Stephen looked up from his reading and started taking notes. He glanced over at them, and said, “Incise each figure with the ankh for life, the Eye of Horus for protection, and then number each one in order. Lady Cheshire, do you recall Egyptian numbers?”
“The lower ones, yes,” she responded, “and the determinative for hundreds and thousands and such.”
“Then label each with a hieroglyph between one and twelve,” Stephen said. “Might as well be purists. Finish them off with something green—sticking a bit of leaf into the mud should do it. Green’s the color of life and strength, as I recall.” He briefly flashed an enthusiastic grin, then returned to his scribbling.
The dozen mud figures were soon completed, inscribed, and equipped with oars—more like broad-bladed paddles to Jenny’s way of thinking. They wore tidy little loincloths cut from a flexible leaf. Mrs. Syms had insisted in adding hair and facial features, using a stick as a stylus. A couple of broad, thick leaves served as trays to move the completed figures without offering too much damage to the soft clay.
“Ra?” Lady Cheshire said with more hesitation than Jenny had ever heard from her. “Could you… uh… bake these?”
Ra blinked, then looked at the shabti figures. For a moment, Jenny thought he might refuse. Then he raised his hands and held one over each of the leaf trays. There was a wash of heat, so intense that Jenny’s hands rose to cover her eyes of their own volition. When she lowered them, the leaves had been burnt to ash, though the deck beneath them was untouched. The twelve clay figures remained as well, but they hadn’t merely been baked; they had been transformed.
Each little man was now shiny reddish-brown, polished and glazed. The leaf ornamentation shown like opaque glass or even emerald. The hieroglyphs were incised into the figures with a fine tracery of gold. The figures’ features were more human now—no longer the pinching of a nose, or a mere line to suggest eye or hair, but tidy, realistic sculptures. The paddles they carried, which before had been rough approximations, whittled out by Jenny with her Bowie knife from a portion of splintered planking, were now elegantly curved, with a smoothed haft where the paddler’s hand would rest, and a sturdy, leaf-shaped blade.
When Stephen saw the completed shabti figures, his mouth dropped open in surprise.
“My spell isn’t going to match your modeling,” he said with sincerity. “I’ve adapted the verse from the Book of the Dead, removing references to service in the afterlife. Hopefully, it will do.”
Lady Cheshire looked at the figures, then over at Ra, who sat, eyes closed, hand gently stroking Mozelle.
“I think it had better. Ra doesn’t look at all well. I think he needs to reach the east.”
Stephen cleared his throat. “You may be right. Gather round, all, and take a look at this.”
The three women did so, Mrs. Syms with the air of one being invited to take part in a particularly amusing party game.
Jenny read silently the words on the page,
Oh Shabti, created by me, joyful in service,
arise at my call, heed my commands,
know full well the task given to you,
even as does the seasoned laborer.
When I call upon you, rise up, take your place.
Say when I call, “Here I am.”
Lady Cheshire nodded, finished her own reading, and said, “Shall we recite it together, each of us holding three of the shabti figures?”
“Holding hands over them, rather,” Stephe
n suggested. “Better not to be touching them, just in case.”
Crowding together to use Stephen’s crib, they recited the words. Jenny had to fight the urge to look over at Ra—and the increasingly unfathomable Mozelle. If either looked in the least mocking, she knew she’d falter, and a cat could look mocking without even trying.
Then Jenny felt the deck tremble, felt something brush against her fingertips, and forgot about feeling foolish. She moved the hand she held over her three shabti figures, then she jerked it aside as she might have from a burning stove.
The shabti were growing, shifting muscles under reddish-brown skin, moving heads slowly side to side, rolling neck muscles, testing the curl of arms and fingers. Jenny thought she should be growing accustomed to wonders, but from the way her heart was beating against her ribs, she knew she had not.
She quickly stepped back a pace. She knew that when she said the final lines— “When I call upon you, rise up, take your place. Say when I call, ‘Here I am.’ ” —the shabti figures would indeed rise.
The dozen figures stood as one, not mere clay figures any longer, but neither breathing nor truly alive. Their eyes were liquid and moving, but they did not blink. Their hair fell silken to their shoulders, but did not shift in the breeze. When the recitation was concluded, their lips moved and a dozen voices said as one: “Here I am.”
Stephen mastered himself first. He’d clearly been thinking about what would be needed if the spell actually worked.
“Take your paddles, men. You know your names, for they are graven into your hearts. Go to the seats in the order of those names: front to back in ascending order, divided with odd number to the port, even to starboard.”
And as if these directions were another form of spell, the shabti figures moved to the places indicated. Number One sat in the foremost bench on the left, Number Two on the foremost bench to the right. Their fellows ranked themselves in order behind them.
Uncle Neville spoke, his voice filled with wonder.
“You’ve found us a crew. I can hardly believe it. Jenny, can you take the late Captain Brentworth’s post at the stern? I’ll watch from what’s left of the bow, and Rashid can take my place here.”
Jenny nodded, walking carefully so as not to tread in the still drying marks left by the captain’s blood. She grasped the poles that controlled the rudders.
“Ready, Uncle Neville.”
“Rowers, forward,” came Sir Neville’s voice, not quite certain, but willing to try accepting this latest impossibility. “We’re going to this river’s end. We’re taking Ra to where he can ascend again into the sky.”
“And the rest of us?” Lady Cheshire said, speaking very carefully, as if she suspected she would not like the answer. “Will the rest of us ascend to the sky?”
Ra answered, “You did not come here seeking the sky, Audrey. You came here seeking the good king, Neferankhotep. It is before him you shall go. I believe he has some questions for you all.”
23
Negative Confessions
Ra’s words rung like a pronouncement of doom. Neville had no doubt that even Jenny—the least schooled in Egyptology of them all, unless one counted Rashid, and Neville had no idea what the Arab youth knew or did not know—understood perfectly what the hawk-headed figure had meant. One could not travel up the Nile, touring temple and tomb alike, and not grasp some basic tenets of Egyptian belief.
In the afterlife, if one passed trial before Maat—and Neville had no doubt that Neferankhotep had passed such judgment with ease—the pharaoh became as one with Osiris. Osiris was judge of the dead, though not the only judge, and Neville realized his hand was shaking as he recalled depictions of some of those other judges.
This can’t be real! he thought with desperation, but he knew it was. Robert Brentworth was dead, impaled on the fang of a serpent who might otherwise have swallowed the sun. The kitten Jenny had rescued had grown larger than the serpent, and Neville’s own boots were stained with the blood of impossible snakes and of crocodiles who had attacked with the determination of men.
If this isn’t reality, Neville thought, determinedly silencing the nagging inner voice, it’s a forgery of which God Almighty could be proud. My only other choice is joining Mrs. Syms, and making pretend that we’re punting along the Thames or the Severn, doubtless stopping for lunch along the way. I’ll settle for unreality, if my only other choice is insanity.
Stephen seemed to have arrived at some similar conclusion, for he addressed Ra almost conversationally as they followed the hawk-headed man onto the shore.
“I say, Mr. Ra, I don’t expect that you’d be able to put in a good word for us, would you? We’ve done our best by you at least.”
“Certainly, the deeds of the end of a life weigh against the crimes done earlier,” Ra agreed, “but the final judge is Maat. Is your soul as light as the feather of truth and justice? If so, then you should have no concern about what comes after.”
Stephen looked troubled.
“I always thought of truth as a heavy thing indeed,” he replied slowly, “since people have so much trouble continuing to carry it. And justice is a slippery concept. I’m not sure that what Eddie’s religion considers justice is the same as what mine does. Are such differences in interpretation taken into account, Ra?”
“Ask Osiris,” Ra said, “when you reach the halls of judgment.”
Ra’s next words were spoken in a language Neville did not understand, but in response the shabti figures shipped their oars and the Boat of Millions of Years glided up to the river bank.
“Here is where I change boats,” Ra said, almost conversationally, “and we part company. You may stay on this riverbank, but I should warn you—it remains Apophis’s country, and he will not think kindly of you after what you have done. Through those doors is the Hall of Judgment. I suggest you pass through them. Even Ammit’s jaws would be kinder than what Apophis and his children will do if they catch you.”
Neville looked. Two enormous double doors stood where Ra had indicated—and where Neville was absolutely certain nothing had been before. They stood twice as high as a grown man and were intricately inscribed with hieroglyphs. Both the doors and the building into which they led were oddly shaped, the doors having a peculiar curve to their top and the building being quite narrow in comparison to its length.
Didn’t I read somewhere that the Hall of Judgment was supposed to be shaped like a gigantic sarcophagus? Neville thought. That would account for the oddities of that structure—the doors are where the feet would be.
He tore his gaze from the doors, and offered Ra his best court bow.
“Thank you for permitting us to take passage on your boat, Ra,” he said. “It was an interesting trip.”
“A bit too interesting,” Ra said. “I shall certainly make some stern inquiries after my usual companions.”
He bent to pat Mozelle.
“I would ask you to come with me, little one,” he said, “but I know you will not leave your friends.”
Granting them a regal yet friendly inclination of his head, Ra walked a few steps upstream, then boarded a boat covered stem to stern with delicate gold leaf that glowed like the first pale rays of the rising sun.
As they watched, Ra’s hawk head began to transform, growing more compact and ovoid, but the light was very bright now, too bright for Neville to see clearly. In Neville’s last glimpse of Ra, the hawk-headed man had become a scarab beetle, and the beetle somehow was both passenger upon the boat, and walking behind it, pushing the vessel’s glowing roundness up through the darkness and into the sky.
Neville shook his head, drawing himself back from that vision, for he thought he might stare after the boat of the sun forever, longing besieging his heart as he imagined its celestial voyage. When he looked around, all of his companions except for Mrs. Syms were coming to themselves, longing and wonder naked on their faces. Mrs. Syms merely looked a trace impatient.
“Well,” she said, “the temple
is here. Are we going to tour it, or not?”
“By all means, Mrs. Syms,” Neville said, squaring his shoulders, and stepping forward to open the door. “Let me and Stephen go first. Who knows what might be inside?”
Jenny half expected the door to open before Uncle Neville touched it, creaking open like the portal to a crypt in one of the stories in Stephen’s Poe collection, but the door did no such thing. Indeed, it took both of the men working together to shove it ajar, yet once it was set in motion, the door moved smoothly and soundlessly, like any ordinary portal into any fine house.
But this isn’t any ordinary portal, nor this any ordinary house, Jenny thought, fighting the impulse to draw one of her revolvers. The weight of the gun might be comforting, but she expected that bullets would prove as useless here as they had against Apophis.
Mozelle rubbed against her ankles, twining around them so that Jenny had to scoop her up or stumble. Once lifted, Mozelle settled herself quite contentedly onto the level platform of Jenny’s forearm, sitting upright, like a statue of Bastet.
And what are you, kitten? Jenny thought, glancing down at the fragile ball of tawny fur. You’re so tiny your eyes are still blue and your tail’s just a little stick covered with fur, but I saw you when you attacked Apophis, and then you were grander than the grandest lion.
Mozelle did not answer, even here in this place where words from a cat might have seemed perfectly normal. She only buzzed a warm, vibrating purr that seemed as innocent as Mrs. Syms’s pleasure in this newest “tour.”
“Uncle Neville, should we get our gear off the boat?” Jenny asked, when her uncle would have stepped into the temple.
Neville Hawthorne quirked half a smile. “I think we may be beyond anything that gear can do for us, but it does seem imprudent to leave it…”
Eddie was starting back to board the vessel when a deep voice spoke from beyond the open door.
“Come. There is no need for such here. If you are vindicated, then your soul bird will fly free to where offerings from the upper world await. Come hither without delay.”
Jenny opened her mouth, but no words came forth, only a quiet moan.
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