The Buried Pyramid

by Jane Lindskold

  He glanced over at Ra.

  “What’s the lighting situation?”

  “Lighting?” Ra looked amused. “The thieves may have paid off the guards, but there is still reason for them to take care. The only lights are for those working in the tomb itself. These are small lamps burning fat. They give some light, but the robbers work more by touch.”

  “I expect so,” Neville agreed. “Time enough to inspect their loot when they’re safely away. What is the phase of the moon?”

  “Khons is a waning crescent,” Ra answered, “but the night is clear and at the time you will arrive he will give some light.”

  “Enough to let them get a good look at us,” Neville said. “That’s just fine. You told Jenny we can’t bring firearms, but can we bring anything else?”

  “What you are wearing,” Ra said, “and perhaps a few other small things, within reason.”

  “You already said we could have our knives,” Neville said, “but we’re hoping not to kill anyone. How about a stout short club for each of us, some lengths of rope, writing paper, ink, and pens?”

  Ra looked amused again.

  “These are not unreasonable.”

  Jenny admired how her uncle was acting, treating the matter as if it was part of his normal day’s work to plan operations into the past—or was it future?—at the behest of a variety of theriomorphic creatures who just might possibly be gods. She decided to imitate him.

  “I’d also like my doctor’s bag,” she said. “We’re going to do our best not to harm anyone, but that doesn’t mean the robbers will feel the same way—or we might hurt one of them. Is that reasonable?”

  Ra inclined his hawk head, gestured, and Jenny’s familiar bag appeared on the sand next to the map. He made a second gesture, producing this time the rope and the clubs. Wordlessly, Eddie handed these out.

  Jenny noted that her supply of rope had already been cut into lengths just about perfect to use to tie someone up. The clubs were about the size of a policeman’s billy—to which they bore more than a passing resemblance. She wondered if Ra had somehow drawn an image out of Uncle Neville’s mind and reproduced it.

  She tucked the lengths of rope into her bag, then slid the bag’s straps over her shoulders so that her hands would be free—a neat adaptation designed by a mountain man who had stayed with her family while his broken ankle was mending. Swinging the club to accustom herself to its weight and heft, she tried to look as if she coshed people on a regular basis.

  Neville glanced around the circle.

  “Everyone comfortable with their part in this?”

  Stephen cleared his throat.

  “We haven’t asked just how many men we’ll be dealing with.”

  “Ten or so,” Ra replied, cooperative as ever. “Several will be within the tomb, several positioned along the tunnel to hand out items as they are secured, and the rest are above ground, packing away those things that have been stolen, and watching just in case their bribes were not enough to keep away guards who might find a profit in turning them in—after taking a bribe in advance.”

  “We’ll worry about the ones in the tunnel later,” Neville decided. “Above and below first.”

  He turned and looked squarely at Jenny.

  “Are you sure you’re up to this, Jenny? We might be better off keeping you and your medical kit above—in fact, the more I think about it, the better I like that idea.”

  Jenny shook her head.

  “I’m going down. I have a feeling any of the rest of you would be crowded.”

  Rashid laid his hand lightly on her arm.

  “Except for Rashid, of course,” she said.

  The Egyptian youth beamed, then handed Mischief to Ra. Club in hand, he stood ready for whatever was to come.

  Jenny attempted to mirror Rashid’s attitude, but she knew she didn’t seem nearly so confident.

  Neville tried hard not to think about the task he was about to undertake. It was so much easier to plan if he thought of this as just another military action, leaving out where, when, and against whom this action was going to occur.

  To his surprise, he found this selective amnesia worked. After his attempt to convince Jenny to take a different post had failed—an effort he had suspected was futile, but one he had to make—he looked around his group.

  “All right, you two who are staying with me, pick your positions.”

  Predictably, Eddie chose the post closest to the opening of the tomb, Stephen the one farthest back. Neville thought it showed wisdom on both of their parts. Whatever Neferankhotep’s physician had done for him had mended Neville’s newer injuries, but the ones he had sustained all those years before remained, limiting his mobility.

  Eddie’s post placed him behind one of the rubble heaps, and he looked over at Ra.

  “Will we be visible from the moment we appear?”

  “That is so,” Ra said.

  Eddie hunkered down in a crouch.

  “You said the rubble heaps were about waist high, so this should give me a moment to reconnoiter.”

  Stephen licked his lips, obviously nervous, but still game.

  “The rock I’ve chosen,” he asked, “how high is it?”

  Ra made a gesture about four feet off the ground.

  “This is where they have picketed their donkeys,” he said. “Does that change your mind?”

  “Not as long as I don’t land right on a donkey,” Stephen said. “I might be useful there.”

  Neville mentally kicked himself for not asking such an obvious question. The tomb robbers would not have gone to such trouble only to settle for what they could carry off in their pockets.

  “Can you tell us where the robbers themselves will be?”

  Ra considered, “I think that would be too much. Even though they desecrate this tomb, they are, after their own fashion, my worshippers as well—many of them more so than the king whose tomb we move to defend.”

  With this cryptic comment, Ra turned to Jenny and Rashid.

  “Into which room do you wish to be placed?”

  Jenny glanced at Rashid, then indicated the larger, central room.

  “This one okay? I figure everyone has to go through there. If we go further back, they may just wall us up.”

  The Egyptian youth nodded.

  “They may try that anyhow,” Eddie said. “You’re going to be on the wrong side of that tunnel.”

  Jenny gave him a grin.

  “We’re counting on you to make sure that tunnel stays open.”

  “Are you prepared?” Ra asked.

  Neville watched as four heads nodded, then he turned to Ra.

  “We’re ready.”

  Ra nodded stiffly, and raised his hands as in benediction. A glow of golden light as of the rising sun wrapped them each around, then almost instantly began to fade. Neville felt the surface under his boot soles change from smooth sand to sand interspersed with broken chunks of rock.

  Better watch my footing, he thought. Then the time for thought had ended.

  Despite the brilliance of Ra’s translation, Neville found he could see perfectly—or at least as well as the natural light permitted. Within a moment he had located four men.

  One was standing at the entrance to the tomb, accepting an irregularly shaped bundle a second man was handing out to him. A third man was crossing the open area between the entrance to the tomb and the slightly higher ground where the donkeys were tied. As he passed Neville’s hiding place, Neville caught the odor of a strong, musky perfume from the objects he carried slung back to front over his broad shoulders. A fourth man, only partially visible, was busy packing bundles onto the mules. All four men were stripped to the waist, though the night was not oppressively hot. Indeed, Neville guessed the season to be sometime in the winter.

  There was a rhythm to their labors, to the way the man in the entrance to the tomb handed out his bundles, to the way the second man secured them about his person, to the steady tread of the man crossing to
the donkeys, that suggested they had been about their labors for some time now, and expected to continue working a good deal longer.

  There was no excitement, no eagerness, though they must be handling fortunes in every load—especially when compared to their daily earnings. Nor was there any fear, neither of gods or of men. The tomb robbers were doing a job, a job at which they were very good, and that was all.

  Then the man nearest to the donkeys let out a scream of raw wordless terror. Its high shrill notes falling to guttural moans cut through the nighttime silence like lightning through a storm-darkened sky.

  Neville had been worried that sound might bring attentive guards, but no one would come into a graveyard after hearing that horror-stricken cry. Even the most devout would believe that the gods were taking a hand in daily affairs.

  The man crossing toward the donkeys froze, uncertain what to do. Neville didn’t give him a chance to decide. Moving as stealthily as possible, he swung his club, catching the man hard behind the knees and dropping him onto his loincloth-covered backside. The thief fell with a thud, releasing so strong an odor of flowers and exotic spices that Neville nearly stepped back in revulsion.

  Instead he stepped forward, letting the man see his pale features, his un-Egyptian beard and slightly curling hair. The man’s eyes widened in terror. He tried to surge to his feet, though whether to run or to fight, Neville would never know, for his feet slipped in the costly oils spilled on the ground around him. He fell onto his knees, and remained there, trembling.

  Eddie was not having as easy a time of it. He had gone for the men in the doorway of the tomb. Perhaps there was courage in numbers, perhaps the surrounding stone had deadened the sound of their fellow’s cry, perhaps these two were made of stronger stuff, but the man on the outside wheeled, dodging Eddie’s cudgel with lithe, muscular grace. He swung at Eddie, a bare-fisted punch that argued he was a brawler. Eddie dodged, but now the other man was crawling out of the tomb entrance, eager to join the fray.

  Neville looked down at his oil-soaked and trembling victim, and made a quick decision. He could hear Stephen saying something back among the donkeys. If Neville waited to tie up his man, Eddie might be badly hurt. Who knew how many others would emerge from below? For a fleeting moment, Neville wished desperately to know how things were going for Jenny, then he knew he could not spare the concentration.

  “Stephen! I’ve one here, hurry!”

  Stephen’s glad-sounding response came instantly, and Neville limped as fast as he could to where Eddie had backed up against a rubble mound and was whaling away with his cudgel. One of his opponents had a mace-like weapon and was swinging at Eddie with this. The other had a simpler club. Neither appeared to have knives or swords.

  But then worked metal would be expensive, Neville thought, and I doubt their authorities like armed peasantry any more than ours do.

  “I’m coming, Eddie!” he called, hoping that the sound of his voice would prove a distraction.

  The man with the mace checked his blow, turning to face this new intruder. Although he handled his weapon with confidence, his eyes were wild. He might not have broken at the sound of his fellow’s scream, but clearly he was shaken by the appearance of these peculiar guardians.

  “Who paid you, barbarian? Who paid you? Was it Pawara? I knew he’d cross us!”

  All of this was gasped out between ferocious swings of his mace.

  “Pawara didn’t send us,” Neville replied, blocking some blows with his mace, dodging others. “Ra did. We have ridden the Boat of Millions of Years with Ra, and have looked on the face of Anubis, protector of the dead.”

  The mace wielder looked properly terrified, but he didn’t stop fighting.

  No wonder, Neville thought. He knows he’s damned if he dies now and goes to Osiris with this on his soul. Tomb robbing violates the Negative Confessions—and I bet he’s violated a few others, too. Better, as he sees it, to fight and hope to escape, and make amends later.

  Eddie’s opponent had been disheartened by his fellow’s shift in focus, but he continued working at Eddie, taking full advantage of the uneven footing nearer to the rubble heap. But Eddie was not only a soldier trained in the rough service of Her Majesty’s Army. He had spent the last ten years living between the worlds in an Egypt that didn’t know what to make of him—and that tested that uncertainty with violence.

  Eddie countered his man’s blows with evident ease, then after the first panicked frenzy had let up, began beating him back. His attitude was so matter-of-fact and methodical that it, rather than any single swing, broke his opponent’s morale.

  The tomb robber savagely blocked one of Eddie’s blows, almost knocking Eddie’s club from his hand. Taking advantage of the momentary interruption, he turned to flee, his own club extended half behind him as he ran. Eddie reached out and caught hold of it, jerking hard. The man lost his balance and reeled a few steps before Eddie hit him and he went down.

  Neville had caught glimpses of this while blocking his own opponent’s increasingly erratic attacks. The man’s intensifying fear didn’t make Neville’s fight any easier. The blows might have less concentrated force behind them, but Neville began to feel that they might land anywhere. One wild swing did graze Neville across the back of his left hand, the sharpened edge of the bit of stone or metal set in the heavy wood slicing the skin open as neatly as a razor.

  It was a messy cut, but when Neville flexed his fingers they moved unhindered. He swore, and the man actually cringed back a step—apparently more afraid than triumphant at wounding this self-proclaimed champion of the gods.

  Momentarily spurred to anger by the surge of pain, Neville swung down hard. He heard the thief’s collarbone crack beneath the impact and instantly regretted his own violence. The man went down on his knees, dropped the mace and cowered. Neville closed on him, kicking the mace out of the way, and resisting a rather absurd impulse to apologize. He knew perfectly well that the man wouldn’t have felt the least regret if he’d gotten the upper hand.

  Panting slightly, Stephen came trotting over, two lengths of rope dangling from his hand.

  “You’d better wrap that hand, Neville,” he said. “I’ll tie this one up.”

  The thief, looking up in sudden hope when Neville didn’t kill him, cringed in horror at his first sight of Stephen’s pale blonde hair and sunburned face.

  “I keep having this effect on people,” Stephen said cheerfully. “Well, I’m blond and determined to be fair.”

  Neville grinned.

  “Your man under control, Eddie?”

  “Yes,” Eddie replied, but his voice sounded distracted.

  “Did he hurt you?”

  “No,” Eddie paused long enough to jerk his man over to one side, clear of the entrance to the tunnel. “But I don’t like the sound of what’s coming out of the tunnel.”

  He had hardly finished speaking when one thief, followed closely by another, burst onto the surface. Eddie readied his club and closed the first. Neville headed for the second, yelling to Stephen to secure the prisoners and keep a close eye for anyone attracted by the noise.

  The emerging men seemed infuriated, terrified, or both, but there was no time to determine whether their discovery of what had happened to their above ground colleagues or something else had triggered the mood.

  Jenny, what’s going on down there? Neville thought desperately. Then his man was swinging at him and another man was emerging from the tunnel, and once again, he had no time to spare for the luxury of thought.

  26

  Sweet Balm

  Jenny emerged from the glow of Ra’s brilliance into a flickering flame-lit dimness that reflected from the warm hue of pure gold. The sources of the light were three or four clay lamps perched on various pieces of furnishing so elaborately carved and painted, she grasped only details, not items as a whole.

  There was the head of a hippopotamus, strangely elongated. Another of a lion. There was a statue of man, his skin as black as ebony,
but with Egyptian, rather than Nubian, features. There was a hand with gently curved fingers, part of a larger painting, hidden by odds and ends heaped in front of it. The corner of a painted box showed a man in a chariot. A heap of wickerwork lay tumbled on the floor.

  As soon as her mind had registered this, Jenny was aware that not all the chaos in these initial impressions was due to the flickering light. The room in which she stood had been well and thoroughly ransacked. Incredibly embroidered garments were spilled out on the floor, the boxes that had held them turned on their sides. A beaded sandal lay on its edge, looking oddly pathetic. A small jar had spilled some dark powder onto the stone floor. Its mate stood upright, but with its lid poorly set, as if it had been opened, the contents inspected, and dismissed as being without value.

  Jenny was aware of Rashid’s warmth where he stood at her shoulder, of the closeness of air little circulated for long years, and then, so overwhelmingly that it was hard to separate from its surroundings, the odor of perfume, the essence of flowers, musk, and rare spices, so concentrated that she wondered if her lungs could find air to breathe.

  She took a few panting breaths, just to assure herself that she could indeed breathe, then Rashid had touched her lightly on the arm and pointed down.

  A man—or rather the backside of a man—protruded into the room from beneath what Jenny now realized was one of the long couches so prevalent in depictions of Egyptian domesticity. The couch was shaped like an animal of some sort, a cross between a hippo and a crocodile. Reminded of Ammit, Jenny wondered that the man had the courage to crawl beneath it.

  But then he hasn’t met Ammit. He doesn’t know that she is real.

  The top of the couch was loaded down with treasures, but apparently these were nothing compared to whatever was in the room beyond, for the thief’s attention was concentrated on what was below. They could hear his voice, muffled by the thickness of the walls.