Scroll of Saqqara

by Pauline Gedge

  He who is at rest cannot hear thy complaint,

  and he who is in the tomb cannot understand

  thy weeping.

  THE GUARDS HAD LAID HORI on his couch and withdrawn, and he had fallen into a sodden, drugged dream in which Tbubui, clad in pure white linen, sat in the garden under the dappling shade of a sycamore tree with one round breast exposed. A tiny wax doll, with copper pins driven into its head and abdomen, was sucking from her puckered nipple, its malformed, lipless mouth working in a grotesque rhythm. “It will not be long now, dear Hori,” Tbubui was saying sweetly. “He is almost full.” Hori woke with a soundless scream in his throat, the now familiar throbbing in his head and gut giving him a moment of panic. He scrabbled against the sheets until his control reasserted itself. Then he lay still trying to accept the pain, to absorb it.

  Around him the house followed its appointed routine. He could hear people passing and repassing, his guard shuffling and sighing beyond the door to the antechamber, snatches of music from somewhere in the garden, and he smelled a strong aroma of wheaten gruel. Turning his head with difficulty, he saw that while he slept someone had been admitted with food for him. A bowl of now cold soup and a plate of melon slices smothered in honey sat on his bedside table. Beside the fruit lay a paring knife, winking in the sunlight angling from the clerestory windows high in the walls.

  Hori stared at it stupidly. The events of the night reeled slowly through his mind in an aura of dream-like unreality, yet he knew they had occurred. Father rejected everything I tried to show him, he thought weakly. Sheritra stands loyally by my side but she refuses to consider the truth.. She is too besotted with Harmin to allow the possibility that he is … that Tbubui is … What is left to do? No spell will save me and we cannot find the doll. I think Sheritra is right. It is in the house on the east bank. If I could only go there. The paring knife lay innocently, its tip buried in oozing honey, its blade shimmering.

  While contemplating it Hori fell into another doze, not knowing if his eyes had closed on not, for he woke still gazing at the innocent little fruit knife. The pain had intensified, like a feral animal gnawing and worrying at his vitals, yet no one had come. There is no one to tend me, he thought with a gush of self-pity. No servant to bathe and soothe me, no physician to administer the blessed herbs of oblivion. I have been deliberately forgotten.

  Tears of weakness and loneliness ran down his face, and for a while he succumbed to them, drawing his knees up to his chin while that cursed beast chewed delightedly at his vitals and pawed at his brain. But then he struggled up and reached for the flask of poppy he himself had dropped to the table before plummeting like a stone down the well of forgetting. He shook it before taking a mouthful. There was not much left. Curiously, he felt a little stronger and more clear-headed, a sign that sent a stab of panic through him. His father was a physician, and he knew that often a terminally ill patient would exhibit a burst of well-being, lucidity and energy just before the end, like the flaring of a candle about to gutter into nothingness. I must make use of this, he thought. It will not last long.

  His agony had receded to a dull ache and his eyes returned to the small, clean knife waiting beside the melon. The house on the east bank, he thought lazily. I refuse to die without a fight. How many guards stand at my door? Surely no more than one at a time. I am dying, remember? And that one will not be alert, thinking that he watches over a very sick man. Hori’s hand reached out and closed over the hilt of the knife. Tonight, he told himself. He fell asleep again, still clutching it.

  He woke, and it was dark. Some noiseless, faceless servant had set a night lamp on his table but had not bothered to remove the tray from the morning. If I were Father, Hori thought with hysterical humour, I would reprimand that person. His fingers had frozen around the hilt of the knife, which had become entangled in the sheets. He extricated it, flexed his hand and examined himself. He felt better. He knew very well that it was the calm before the final, incendiary storm, but put that thought away.

  With infinite care he sat up, felt for the floor with his feet and cautiously stood. The room whirled and then steadied. He realized that he was naked, but the filthy kilt the guards must have stripped from him lay in a heap on a chair. Slowly, still bent double against the pain that lay in wait for him if he straightened, he tottered to it and wrapped it on. No sound came to him from the passage beyond the door. He crept across the room, the knife held loosely on his palm, and put his ear to the warm cedar wood. He could hear his guard shuffle, but little more. Slowly he inched the door open.

  The man was standing to his right, leaning with a negligent boredom against the wall, most of him in deep shadow. The nearest torch burned some way along the passage. Hori took a deep breath. He knew what a frighteningly small amount of his strength was left. If he missed the first time he would not get a second chance. Easing himself beyond the door he tightened his grip on the knife, then, lurching forward and sideways, he grasped the guard’s arm and drove the blade up under the man’s chin and into his throat. The soldier coughed once, grabbed at his chest, then slid to the floor. His eyes were wide and shocked under the intermittent flare of the torch’s flame. Hori did not have the strength to drag the body inside the room but it did not matter. Within a very few minutes he would have left the house. The amount of energy needed to kill the guard who lay, still bleeding, at his feet, had been enormous. He put out a hand to the wall to steady himself while the deserted passage revolved slowly around him. Renewed pain seemed to bulge in his abdomen and send jolts of fire down his legs. Struggling to breathe more evenly he bent, set his foot on the soldier’s shoulder and wrenched out the paring knife, wiping it as best as he could on the man’s kilt. Then he set off towards the garden.

  All the entrances were guarded, he knew that, and sure enough another tall figure bulked where the large near passage gave out into the night. Hori did not want to kill again. These men were innocents doing their duty and nothing more. But he realized, on a rising tide of cold desperation, that he would somehow have to shamble up to the soldier and at least disable him. That was the answer.

  Creeping forward, he hefted the blade. The man stirred, shifting his stance, and his sword clinked softly against the studding on his belt. Hori struck, aiming for the tendons behind the knee. He felt them give as he slashed, and with a howl the guard went down and lay writhing and shrieking. There was a tall jar just inside the passage kept full of drinking water to be cooled by the breezes that funelled through the open doors at either end. With a grunt Hori tipped it over. Water gushed across his feet, swirled about the guard and cascaded, mingled with blood, onto the grass. Hefting the jar, Hori brought it crashing down on the soldier’s head. The shrieking stopped abruptly. Shaking and sweating, Hori stepped past him and out into the garden.

  The night was still and fine with a full moon and a black sky resplendent with stars, but Hori had no inclination to admire it. He set off for the watersteps, weaving and stumbling but covering the ground steadily, all his attention grimly fixed on putting one foot after the other. Nevertheless, his nose told him that the river was rising. Its smell—rich, dank and slightly humid—underlay the more fragile aromas of flowering shrubs and watered grass. He stayed off the path, trudging silently along, his ears and eyes alert for any sign of more guards. But tonight he was lucky. He presumed that they were posted around the perimeter of the estate.

  The torch illuminating the watersteps flared and danced in the moving air by the river. He passed under it, too tired to make a detour so that he would not be seen. He did not know how he would deal with the man always guarding the boats. He negotiated the steps carefully, his balance teetering because of the constant throbbing in his head, and there was the guard, sitting at the bottom, his back against the stone and fast asleep. There is another servant who needs a severe reprimand, Hori thought, repressing a desire to giggle aloud. Now where is the skiff? He spotted it to the right, rising and falling gently on the swell, its tether loope
d to a pole.

  Trying not to put any vibrations through the step that might wake the soldier, he went lightly, lifting a steering pole from its site in the mud and approaching the skiff. There were no oars resting in the bottom but it did not matter. He knew he had no strength to row in any case. He must trust to the now purposeful running of the current, growing each day as the Nile filled, to take him the short distance north he needed to go. He slipped the skiff’s tether and half scrambled, half fell into it.

  Grasping the pole he pushed off, and the little craft bucked and began to swing towards midstream. Once there, Hori knew he need do nothing but sit and let the flow take him away. His head was spinning and he was suddenly terrified that he might lose consciousness. The knife was still in his hand. He had no belt to take it, only the kilt wrapped loosely about his waist, so he laid it in the bottom of the skiff and set one foot over it. With both hands he sank the pole once more, and the skiff protested, but after a moment Hori felt the current tug at it and he relaxed with a quivering sigh.

  When next he came to himself he was floating in a broken shaft of moonlight with the dark city on his left and the shadows of spindly acacia bushes clinging to the bank on his right. He had fallen unconscious after all. Whimpering, he slapped his face twice but his fingers merely brushed his skin. The burst of strength that had brought him this far was failing rapidly and he was all at once frightened that he would die here, hunched over in the skiff, and he would bob and rock all the way to the Delta before his body was found. It would be too late then to beautify me, he thought in a panic. My body would have rotted too far. O Amun, King of gods, have mercy on me and bring me safely to the watersteps!

  The skiff glided on, and slowly but surely Hori saw the darkly familiar shrubbery that thickened, deepened, and became the palm plantation in which Tbubui’s old house was nestled. He began to ply the pole, clumsily jerking the craft towards the bank. For a moment it did not respond, and he was afraid that the current would prove stronger than his own miserable efforts, but then it turned reluctantly and soon was grinding against the dilapidated stair. Hori fumbled about for the knife, found it, and fell out of the boat onto the steps. The skiff immediately began to angle and drift away, but he did not care.

  It all seemed to take a very long time. On hands and knees he crawled up onto the path, and once there he lay for a while with his cheek against the hard sand. I want to sleep, he thought. I want to sink into the ground forever. And indeed his thoughts did run away so that the next time he opened his eyes he sensed that the moon was waning.

  With a groan he came to his feet and lurched along the path. It was very dark under the palms. Like black pillars they clustered stiffly around him, marching away to right and left, shrouded in their own mystery. Hori tried not to let them cut him off from reality, but as he manoeuvred the final corner and saw the house crouched to one end of its clearing, he had to contend with a rushing sense of confusion. It seemed to him that he was back in Koptos, hovering on the edge of the ruins whose silence and desolation had been so familiar. With a tightening of his will he forced his imagination away from that place and into the present, but the silence and desolation remained. Its quality here was an evil, brooding thing, and as Hori staggered across the sparse, dry grass he was sure that invisible eyes were closely observing his progress. I have nothing left to lose, he told himself. No pain, no evil, can be greater than that which I am suffering now. I will walk straight through the main entrance into that cold hall. I will ignore any servant standing in the shadows, for I am positive they will ignore me. The shawabtis, retreating into their twilight world of not-being during the dark hours when their services are not required, blind, deaf, woodenly unmoving … He shuddered, an involuntary action that poured agony into his wasting muscles, and stepped from the airy darkness of night into the close, Stygian blackness of the house.

  There was a servant standing in a far corner, feet together, dusky arms rigidly at its sides, eyes closed. Hori drew near and passed it with one timid glance, but it did not stir. The rear passage yawned, a hole into nothing. Pausing to temporarily put down the knife and wipe his slippery palm on his kilt, he stole into it.

  The darkness was total. Hori knew that Tbubui’s old room lay to the right near the exit to the garden, and he inched towards it, shoulder against the wall. At the other end of the house Sisenet and Harmin would be sleeping, or whatever it is that the dead do at night, he thought with another burst of amusement that he recognized as hysteria. I must not disturb them. His shoulder bumped against a ridge and he felt about. The door was there. It gave at the pressure of his hand, swinging open soundlessly but with the slightest movement of air, and Hori walked in.

  The same complete blackness reigned here, and in despair Hori realized that he would have to search by touch alone. He had not brought a lamp; indeed, he would have been unable to carry one. His symptoms had intensified the moment he had placed his fingers on the door, and now the sharp horns of pain gored and twisted his vitals, his brain. He tried to rise above it, to set it apart somehow from the place where reason and decision took precedence in his mind, but it was hard.

  Slowly and awkwardly he began to search, his fingers probing the corners, the floor, the knife held temporarily in his teeth. Shuffling across the floor he encountered the couch, now stripped of its bedding. He felt the mattress, the gritty space under the couch, and then left it to continue on the other side of the room, but he soon realized it was bare. Her tiring boxes had all gone. The night table was missing as was the shrine to Thoth. She had taken it all to his father’s home.

  Sobbing with fatigue and frustration, Hori fumbled his way back to the door. You are going to die, the pain mocked him. You will never find the doll. She is far too clever for you. Who would have thought six months ago when you sat with your father on the plain of Saqqara and watched the ancient air stream from the tomb in a thin grey cloud that you would end up crouched in this stuffy, empty room with your life draining away? Be quiet, he told himself sternly, though he felt his own tears hot on his neck. Accept and go on as long as you can. His knee struck the edge of the door and he eased himself back into the passage.

  A thin stream of dull yellow light was illuminating the other end of the corridor. Hori paused, thunderstruck. He was absolutely positive that the narrow space had been completely dark before, but now someone had lit a lamp and its sullen glow was showing under a door. Whose door? Hori thought, gripping the knife and shambling towards it. He re-passed the entrance to the hall on his left and caught one glimpse of the motionless servant propped against the wall before he moved on. Whose door? It was Sisenet’s, and it was suddenly ajar. A strange calmness fell upon Hori. He pushed it all the way open and walked in.

  The first thing that struck him was the smell. He had been in enough places of burial to recognize it at once—a musty, earthy odour of sun-starved rock and undisturbed soil with a hint of human decay—but here the stink of corruption was dominant. He felt it immediately in his throat and swallowed, his nostrils constricting. He had not been in this room before. It was small and unadorned, the walls grey mud, the floor untiled. A couch stood against the far wall, holding nothing but a stone headrest, and in the middle of the floor there was a table supporting a plain lamp and a box. Whatever else the table held was obscured by the man rising and turning with a cold smile. This place reminds me of something, Hori thought, standing in the doorway and looking about. It reminds me of … of a tomb.

  But he had no time to become afraid, not then, for Sisenet was bowing coolly. He was clad in a short linen kilt. The rest of his spare, whipcord body was naked and as dusty as the earthen floor, the simple table. Dusty.

  “So it is young Hori,” Sisenet said, still grinning. “I heard someone fumbling along the passage. I thought it might be you. You do not look so well, young Prince. One might even say you have the stamp of death on you. Now why is that?”

  Hori stepped further into the room, all at once very aware of t
he paring knife held loosely in his fingers. Sisenet moved slightly, his dry fingers trailing along the table, leaving marks on its surface. The husk of a dead scorpion appeared, its brown carapace gleaming in the lamplight. Hori did not answer. He waited. He had never given much thought to Tbubui’s so-called brother. Sisenet had been nothing more than a quiet, self-contained man who came and went occasionally on the periphery of Hori’s vision, on the outskirts of his life, seemingly content with his scholarly pursuits and the privacy of his little room. But now Hori, watching him carefully, wondered just what those scholarly pursuits had been. Sisenet’s smile was broadening. It was not a pleasant sight, and Hori all at once recognized the self-possession as supreme arrogance, the self-effacement as the kind of amused confidence that observed and coldly dissected everyone. Sisenet was power. Hori’s whole spine contracted.

  “It was you!” he cried out. “All the time. You conjured against Penbuy. You conspired with Tbubui to seduce my father. You are killing me!”

  For answer the man stepped right away from the table and there, sitting like some fat, malevolent, primitive god, was the wax doll Hori sought. The flickering light danced along the wicked copper pins, one driven through the scarcely formed head from temple to temple and one canting down through the squat abdomen. Beside it Hori recognized his gold-and-jasper earrings. Earrings, he thought. How apt. How accursedly right.

  “Is this what you are looking for, Highness?” Sisenet asked politely. “Yes? I rather thought so. But it is too late. You will be dead in two days.”

  Faintness swirled around Hori and he planted his feet apart and fought it off. “But why?” he croaked, that dreadful stench intensifying so that he felt as though it was seeping into all his pores and his flesh itself recoiled. “Why? It is true that you are her husband, isn’t it. You are the wizard-prince Nenefer-ka-Ptah and she the princess Ahura. Father resurrected you all, you are the walking dead, but why us?”