Scroll of Saqqara

by Pauline Gedge

  “What?” Khaemwaset croaked. He was looking about desperately, his eyes lighting on first one thing and then another, but he could not escape his own feeling of mounting betrayal and rage. Tbubui collapsed onto the floor, pulling her hair to hide her face, then her hands scooped up imaginary earth and placed it on her head in the traditional gesture of mourning.

  “I do not even know if my baby is yours or his!” she blurted. “I pray that it is yours, Khaemwaset! I pray! I pray!”

  Khaemwaset came slowly to his feet. “You need not fear, Tbubui,” he said thickly. “Sleep in peace, you and our unborn child. Hori has betrayed every decency, every claim he might have had on my affections or my paternal duty. He will be punished.”

  She looked up, her face disfigured and tear-stained. “You must kill him, Khaemwaset,” she choked. “He will not rest until he has exacted what he sees as a just vengeance on me, and I am so afraid! Kill him!”

  Some part of Khaemwaset, a tiny core of sanity, began to shout no! No! This is an illusion! Remember his sense of humour, his smile, his readiness to be your partner. The work you have done together, the discussions, the nights of drinking and closeness, the love and pride in his eyes … But the overwhelming part of him that was Tbubui swept over him.

  Walking to her he squatted and drew her hot, damp head down onto his chest. “I am sorry that you have suffered so much at the hands of my family,” he said into her hair, eyes closed. “Hori does not deserve to live. I will see to it.”

  “I am desperately sorry, Khaemwaset,” she said, her voice muffled against his skin, and he felt her hand insinuate itself between his thighs.

  SHERITRA WAS DREAMING. Harmin was bending over her, a scarlet ribbon tied into his hair, the smell of his skin a musky, warm perfume that invaded her nostrils and rendered her weak with longing. “Pull back your sheets and let me come in,” he was whispering. “It is I, Sheritra. I am here. I am here.” She looked up at him, lit dimly by the night lamp, her gaze languorous and slow with desire, but there was something wrong. His smile was changing, becoming feral. His teeth were lengthening, sharpening, his face greying, and she realized with a shock of pure horror that a jackal was bending over her. Starting up with a shriek she realized first that it was still night and the peace and silence of the numbing hours before dawn had a hold on the house, and second that Bakmut was shaking her gently.

  “Highness, your brother is here. He is here,” the girl was saying, and Sheritra passed a shaking hand over her face.

  “Hori?” she asked, aware that she was drenched in sweat. “He has returned? Bring him in, Bakmut, and find some food and something to drink at once.” The girl nodded and melted into the shadows.

  Sheritra looked at the night lamp. Bakmut had obviously just trimmed it and it send a tiny, reassuring column of yellow sanity into the darkness pressing about the couch. Sheritra sat higher, now wide awake, and as she did so there was movement beyond the lamp’s reach. Hori materialized and sat heavily beside her knees. Sheritra stifled a scream. He was so gaunt that she could see his ribs, and his head was trembling The hair that had once been so thick and gleaming with health lay lank against his neck, and his eyes, as he turned to survey her, were as filmed and sunken as an old man’s.

  “Gods, Hori,” she exhaled. “What has happened to you?”

  “I never thought I would see you again,” he rasped, and she could see tears of fatigue gathering. “I am dying of a curse, Sheritra, Tbubui’s curse, like the bite she put on poor Penbuy. Do you remember?”

  For a confused moment she could not comprehend what he was saying. He sounded delirious. But then in a flash of enlightenment she saw again the pile of refuse, the glint of something, the broken pen case in her puzzled hands and the wax doll.

  “Penbuy!” she cried out “Of course! How could I have been so blind! It was his pen case. He had several, and I suppose I must have seen them all at one time or another but not directly, just out of the corner of my eye, unremarked. Penbuy …”

  “She put a death curse on him so that he would not bring back bad news from Koptos,” Hori whispered. “Sheritra, read these. Read them now.” Several scrolls appeared and he passed them to her. The shaking in his hands was so pronounced that it was communicated to her as she took the papyrus. His skin, as she brushed his fingers, was hot and dry. She wanted to throw the scrolls aside, to call for her father in his capacity as physician, to rouse the servants and have him put to bed, but she sensed the desperation behind his request and honoured it, giving all her attention to the scrolls.

  She had just begun to read when Bakmut returned with wine and slices of cold roast goose and melon. “Bring more light,” she ordered absently, but by the time the girl was placing larger lamps on the holders about the room she was oblivious, all her attention fixed on what she was reading. Hori sat quietly, swaying sometimes, occasionally lifting a flask to his mouth. What is that?” she asked once, her eyes still on the scroll under her hands, and he answered, “Poppy, Little Sun.” She had nodded and gone back to her reading.

  At last she allowed the final scroll to roll up with a polite rustle. Hori turned to her and they regarded one another in silence.

  “Impossible,” she hissed. “Never.” There was a cold anger in her.

  “No,” he insisted. “Think, Sheritra. Let us examine the evidence rationally.”

  “What you are suggesting is not rational, Hori,” she said, and he jerked away, his whole body quivering uncontrollably with the gesture.

  “I know,” he said. “But I was in that tomb, Sheritra. The body had gone. The librarian was horrified and mystified. The water depicted on the walls …” He stopped himself with an obvious effort. “May I try and convince you?”

  Sheritra’s dream came back to her, alien and frightening. “Very well. But you should not be trying to talk. You are very sick. I think she has poisoned you, and if so you need Father and an antidote.”

  He laughed breathlessly, painfully. “He can’t help me. She murdered Penbuy by a death curse and she is doing the same to me. Is that too difficult to understand?”

  “I am sorry, Hori. Continue.” Privately she sent a quick glance into the room for Bakmut. If she could send the girl for her father Hori might be saved, but she did not want to drain her brother’s strength with argument. “At least eat something first,” she suggested, and at that Hori turned on her, his lips drawn back in a fevered snarl.

  “Antef fed me soup until I could no longer keep it down,” he said, and with a chill of real fear Sheritra heard the terror in his voice. “I have no time to eat, you little fool. Wake up! I am dying! Let me try to convince you!” She recoiled, then took his hand.

  “Yes,” she quavered.

  “Will you first try to believe that Father has done this? That he unleashed something perverse when he spoke the words on the scroll without knowing what he said?”

  “I will try.”

  “Good. Let me lie down, Sheritra. Give me that pillow. Thank you. First accept that Tbubui killed Penbuy by magic and she is killing me. Penbuy she murdered because Father would have listened to any evidence he brought back from Koptos. He was respected, and Father knew his intelligence. Even if Penbuy’s story had sounded insane it would have planted a seed of doubt in Father’s mind. As for me …” He lifted one shoulder in a frail shrug. “I am already thoroughly discredited in Father’s eyes. I think she is simply tasting power and finding it sweet. She knows I would never harm her. She does not need to get rid of me, she merely wants to. If there is another motive I cannot find it.”

  He fell silent. Sheritra saw sweat break out on his forehead and knew that he had stopped talking in order to marshal his strength. She waited while he wiped his face on her bunched sheets. His next words took her by surprise.

  “Sheritra,” he began, “what do Tbubui’s servants remind you of? Think carefully.”

  Dark, totally silent, immediately obedient—she shook her head, puzzled. “They are strange,” she replied, �
�but they don’t remind me of anything.”

  “Well perhaps you have not been in as many tombs as I have with Father,” Hori said grimly. “Aren’t they like shawabtis, Sheritra?”

  Shawabtis, she thought. The wooden slaves buried with the nobility to be brought to life at the magic word of their owner. Dumb bearers of wine and food, obedient weavers of linen and makers of bread, dark, unerring hands to fasten a necklace, smooth kohl around tired eyes, dip the fine henna brush into the pot so delicately, so exactly, and always with the blank, expressionless faces of the wood from which they were carved. Sheritra’s scalp prickled. “Shawabtis?” she said. “Ridiculous, Hori!”

  “Is it? Well never mind. Consider this.” He pulled a small pouch from his belt and with trembling fingers forced it open. The earring lay on his sticky palm, glowing faintly in the dim light. “Take it. Weigh it in your hand. Feel it. Imagine the one you lifted out of Tbubui’s jewel chest. You had your doubts, didn’t you, Sheritra? A copy of something so ancient can be a clever approximation if it is made by a master craftsman, but there will be tiny clues to its true age. The gold perhaps not so clearly striated in purple or so mellow with use, the stone with that freshly set look to it, the rear stopper unsullied by years of being pressed against human skin. Your first reaction to it was the fear that it was the original. Well you were right. Tbubui had one. She lost the other crawling out of the tunnel.”

  Sheritra had been turning the earring over in her fingers. Now she pushed it back at him. “Stop it, Hori,” she cried out. “You are frightening me!”

  “Good!” he said briskly. “Now I will frighten you some more. I will try to be coherent, to put all this in its proper order. Have you water here?”

  Without comment she leaned over and poured some for him. He drank rapidly, then fumbled the poppy flask to his lips and took a long swallow.

  “You will kill yourself with that,” she remonstrated, then realized what she had said. He wiped his mouth with the back of one hand and gave her a glance.

  “Already my body is becoming inured to it,” he said. “I need more and more to keep the pain under control, but I do not think I will need it much longer.” She opened her mouth to protest but he forestalled her. “No lies, Little Sun. Let me proceed. I have much to say and little strength with which to say it.”

  She subsided and watched him, her heart aching. Shadows lay sombrely over half his face and tinged the rest with melancholy. He is right, she thought suddenly. He is going to die. Panic shot through her, but her voice was quiet. “Go on, dearest.”

  “Father woke them by stealing the Scroll, theirs by right, and babbling the spell in ignorant foolishness,” he began. “The lids of the coffins were missing in the inner chamber, remember? I would wager that they ordered open coffins in the hope that at some time someone would break into the tomb, find the Scroll sewn to the hand of a servant, and be intrigued enough to read it aloud, without knowing, of course, that Nenefer-ka-Ptah and the Princess Ahura, their real names, were lying behind a false wall in the same burial place. They struggle into Memphis and look for somewhere to hide, perhaps to recover. Sheritra?”

  She answered his concern with a forced smile. Something in her was answering his arguments with a terrified but sure affirmative, yet there was Harmin, her own, her love, and she dared not believe for fear her life should tumble into ruin. It seemed to her that the room was becoming colder and she shrugged the sheet higher on her shoulders, trying to hear Hori’s words without engaging her imagination. She did not want to see in her mind those ancient, desiccated bodies tottering about the inner chamber in the Stygian blackness, gaining suppleness and strength, pushing their stiff limbs along the tunnel.

  “It is a delicious ghost story,” she said firmly, “and nothing more. You say they struggle into Memphis, leaving the tomb by way of the tunnel, I presume. But the tunnel was blocked by a rock, and surely sand would have sifted over it as the hentis went by. How did they free themselves? By magic?”

  “Perhaps. Or by some evil power. They had the tunnel dug in the first place, I am sure, so that they could escape in the event of the Scroll being read. They might even have left tools in it, close to the entrance. How do I know?” He moved pettishly against the pillow. “In any case, they find a vacant estate that closely resembles the home they once occupied hundreds of years ago in Koptos. Isolated, quiet, simple, perhaps it soothes their bewilderment and homesickness. Think of that house, Sheritra, the peculiar silence, the echoes in the palm grove, the feeling that you are leaving the world behind as you walk that soft, winding path. And inside, pure history. Furniture that is sparse and stark, something out of an age long gone …” His voice cracked to a whisper and he paused, waiting, recovering. Then he continued. “They speak the words and animate the shawabtis, who must have stood with them in the inner chamber, and they begin to repair the house. Then they seek the man who has stolen their scroll. The tomb is open. Workmen swarm over it. A few judicious inquiries bring them the information they want and they begin to plot a revenge.”

  “But why revenge?” Sheritra interrupted, caught up in his tale and forgetting that he was speaking of Sisenet and Tbubui. “All they had to do was contrive to steal it back and then go on living unobtrusively where they were. Why become deliberately involved with …” She faltered.

  “With our family?” Hori finished for her. “I don’t know. But I feel there is a reason and it cannot be a pleasant one. I do not have the ability to discuss that, Sheritra. This damnable pain.” His voice had risen. Sheritra heard the hysteria he was struggling to hide and stroked his arm. He was burning hot. “I learned that the Prince and his wife, and a few days later their son, had died by drowning,” he went on. “Remember Tbubui’s exaggerated horror when she believed she was going to fall from the ramp that day? Has Harmin ever been swimming with you, even in the hottest afternoons?”

  “No, she whispered, her voice no more than a sibilant rush of air. “But why do you bring Harmin into this, Hori? There were only two coffins in that tomb. You cannot be speaking of the same family.”

  “You are not hearing me!” Hori pressed desperately. “You read the scrolls. We are dealing with the darkest magic, Sheritra. We are not in the world of the decent, the rational, anymore. Let reason go! Merhu, your Harmin, drowned in Koptos and was buried there. I was in his tomb. Again there was no coffin lid, and something had dug its way out, breaking the seal. Father woke him also, and he made his way back to his parents in Memphis.”

  “No, no,” she interrupted, shaking her head vigorously. “Sisenet is Harmin’s uncle. Tbubui said so.”

  Hori stared at her helplessly. The corners of his mouth were black from the poppy and his pupils were so dilated that no irises remained. “Tbubui and Sisenet are husband and wife,” he said slowly, emphasizing each word as though he were addressing a child. “Harmin is their son. Their son, Sheritra. I know how terrifying this is, but please try to face it.”

  Sheritra jerked away. “Don’t do this to me, Hori!” she begged. “Harmin is innocent, I know he is! He was so wounded and angry when I tried to talk to him about his mother. He …”

  “He is a brilliant, unscrupulous actor, like the ghoulish thing who calls herself his mother,” Hori tried to shout, but the words came out a broken whistle. “Their flesh is mummified, cold. How many times have you touched Harmin and been puzzled at how cold he felt? Not lately, perhaps, for I believe that they are adjusting more each day to their second life. Tbubui loves the heat, remember? But the tomb, Little Sun … the Scroll was devised by Thoth in the beginning, and the family’s devotion to that god is evident everywhere, The baboons, animals of Thoth. The moons, his symbol.”

  “Hori,” Sheritra cut in determinedly. “I believe none of this. It has just occurred to me that Tbubui has cursed you for the same reason she persuaded Father to remove us from the will. She is convinced that the life of her unborn child is in danger from you if you go on living. Once it is born, all you need to do is
kill it to be once again Father’s heir.”

  He began to laugh, then bent suddenly over his abdomen. “There is no child in her womb,” he choked. “She is dead, remember? The dead cannot give life, but they can take it. Perhaps she fabricated a child to force some kind of a decision on Father. It seems to me that he has been backing slowly but surely into a corner from which there is no escape, that she has been pushing him with lies, with seduction, breaking him up inside, Sheritra, weakening his soul, sullying his honour until there is no integrity left. Her aim seems to be to destroy him spiritually. But why? A punishment for stealing the Scroll is not reason enough.”

  Sheritra pushed herself from the couch, and dipping a square of linen in the water jug she drew it carefully over her brother’s face, his hands, his neck. The actions brought her relief. She did not have to think while her fingers busied themselves. “We must find the wax doll Tbubui used to cause this suffering,” she said determinedly, “and pull out the pins. We must also break into Father’s chest and find an incantation that will undo the damage to you. Removing the pins will allow you to live but your health must be restored.” He sat submissively while she worked. She could tell that he would not be able to do anything for himself, that searching Tbubui’s quarters would be up to her. Quickly flinging cushions onto the couch she gently forced him to lie down. “Sleep,” she said. “I will see what I can do. Will you be all right here by yourself?”

  He had already closed his eyes. “Antef is outside,” he murmured. “Send him in. Thank you, Little Sun.” She kissed him on his damp forehead. His breath smelled of poppy and something else, a sweetish sourness that made her bite her lip in anxiety. He had already fallen into a restless doze when she stole out the door.