The Crocodile Tomb

by Michelle Paver

  ‘Then why not tell her the dagger’s in the tomb?’ said Hylas. ‘She can send in her men and they can get it –’

  ‘Never!’ gasped Nebetku. ‘My ancestors have kept our tomb secret for generations – and so it must remain! I will not be the one to endanger their eternal rest!’

  ‘Then what can we do?’ cried Pirra.

  Clumsily, Nebetku wiped his lips with the bloody rag. ‘There is a way for someone to get inside without the guards knowing.’

  ‘Why do you want us to do it?’ said Hylas. ‘Why not Herihor or Rensi?’

  ‘They have duties at the heb, their absence would be noted. Besides …’ The emaciated features hardened. ‘To disturb the peace of the ancestors – why should my friends risk their souls when it was you who killed him? Let you put it right!’

  ‘What do we get out of it?’ retorted Hylas.

  ‘If you replace the Spells and save my brother’s spirit, you can take your filthy dagger from his coffin.’

  Pirra felt sick. Meritamen had been clever. But then, she was desperate. She would stop at nothing to protect her family from the wrath of the Perao, even it meant dooming Userref’s spirit for eternity.

  Hylas was running his thumb along his lower lip. ‘What about Meritamen? She needs the dagger. If she doesn’t get it, she’ll come after you.’

  The dying man snorted. ‘Let her! Once I know Userref’s ba is safe, I’ll have nothing to fear. Soon I will be dead. I will become a sah, a Wrapped One. I will join my brother in our tomb, and when I too have journeyed through the Duat, we will be together in the Place of Reeds for eternity.’

  Rensi gulped and pinched the bridge of his nose. Herihor shifted unhappily from foot to foot.

  Hylas made to speak, but Pirra got in first. ‘I’ll do it. I’ll go into the tomb.’

  ‘We’ll go together,’ said Hylas.

  ‘No,’ said Nebetku. ‘There is space only for one.’

  ‘Then it has to be me,’ said Pirra. ‘Yes it does, Hylas. It’s my fault he died, it’s up to me to save his spirit.’

  He looked at her. ‘Pirra. You get panicky in a cave. You couldn’t stand being shut up in a tomb, you’d go mad! I could handle it; when I was a slave, I spent ages down the mines.’

  ‘But there might be ghosts,’ protested Pirra.

  ‘I haven’t seen a single ghost since I’ve been in Egypt,’ he said.

  ‘They are all at peace,’ put in Nebetku, ‘for in Egypt we know the proper rites. All except my poor brother.’ He glanced at Pirra. ‘The boy will go in the tomb. I have a role for you, too.’

  ‘Well, then,’ said Hylas. ‘Tell us what to do.’

  ‘Two moons ago,’ said Nebetku, ‘one of the sacred crocodiles died.’

  ‘A good omen for the Flood,’ Herihor said in Egyptian. ‘I have embalmed it, so it can take its place in the heb.’

  ‘Tomorrow is the Eve of the First Drop,’ Nebetku went on in Akean. ‘The heb will come to the West Bank, and the sacred crocodile will be buried in the tomb of the animals – you do not need to know where this is, let us call it simply the Crocodile Tomb.’ He struggled for breath.

  ‘Long ago, my ancestors were embalmers of animals. They knew the Crocodile Tomb well, all its twisting tunnels. When they fell out of favour with the great ones, they sought a secret place to conceal their dead. So from a passage in the Crocodile Tomb, they dug a secret tunnel. This is the only way to reach the place where Userref is buried: by the hidden tunnel that leads from the Crocodile Tomb to that of my ancestors.’

  Even thinking about it made Pirra want to throw up, but Hylas seemed alarmingly untroubled.

  ‘Rensi and Herihor,’ said the sick man, ‘are making space for you to lie inside the coffin of the sacred crocodile.’

  ‘What?’ cried Pirra. ‘You want to put him in a coffin?’

  ‘Pirra it’s all right,’ said Hylas.

  ‘This is very dangerous for the crocodile,’ said Herihor in Egyptian, ‘that barbarian is unclean!’

  Luckily, Hylas didn’t understand.

  ‘Inside the coffin,’ Nebetku went on, ‘you will be part of the procession, but no one will know you are there. You will be carried into the Crocodile Tomb and sealed inside –’

  ‘No!’ said Pirra.

  ‘– at night when the heb is gone, you will crawl through the tunnel to our tomb; that is, to Userref’s tomb. You will replace the Spells in his coffin and remove the cursed dagger for which he died. You will then crawl back through the tunnel, into the Crocodile Tomb, where you will be let out.’

  ‘How?’ said Pirra. ‘You said the Crocodile Tomb will be sealed.’

  Nebetku met her eyes. ‘The Lady Meritamen often visits the West Bank to pray for the health of the Hati-aa. Where she prays, at the tomb of his ancestors, is not far from the entrance to the Crocodile Tomb. In the dark, if you dressed like her, the guards would believe you were her … They would let you through. Then you could let the barbarian out.’

  ‘Oh, no,’ said Hylas, ‘that’s far too dangerous –’

  ‘It could work,’ said Pirra.

  ‘It must work,’ said Nebetku.

  ‘Come,’ Rensi said briskly in Egyptian. ‘We need to measure the barbarian for the coffin.’

  The smell in Herihor’s embalming workshops was a nauseating mix of boiled oxhide, resin and decay, but Herihor took a deep sniff and smiled. ‘Behold my House of Rebirth. Don’t touch anything.’

  His workshops were set apart from the others and hidden behind high walls. They were the cleanest rooms Pirra had ever seen. Everything gleamed: copper sieves, hooks, tongs, tweezers, knives of flint and obsidian, and everything was precisely aligned: baskets of chopped straw, vats of sacred salt, jars of gums and spices, rolls of bandages …

  Pirra stared at a spotless limestone slab on a trestle. It was slightly tilted, with drainage grooves and a jar underneath, to catch drips.

  ‘I like things clean,’ said Herihor, rubbing his bony hands. He glanced at Pirra in distaste. ‘The living are so dirty.’

  Hylas was gazing around him. ‘These are animals.’

  ‘Don’t touch!’ cried Herihor.

  Dangling from the roofbeams – presumably to protect them from mice – were creatures so deftly bandaged that Pirra could tell at once what they were: baboons, cats, fish, even something that looked worryingly like a falcon. The only thing she didn’t recognize was a row of tiny neat balls, the size of plums.

  Rensi chuckled. ‘Bees. Not many embalmers can do those.’

  Herihor led them into a smaller workshop occupied by two trestles. On one lay the unmistakable form of a large bandaged crocodile with a greenstone scarab between its eye-bumps. On the other, a long tapered coffin.

  ‘Hylas cannot go in that,’ Pirra said flatly.

  ‘I’ll manage,’ he said. But he’d gone pale.

  The coffin was wooden, painted inside and out with stripes to look like bandages, the stripes filled in with brightly coloured writing. Beside it lay a large half-painted wooden lid. Pirra saw two spreading wings – but no air-holes. ‘How will he breathe?’ she demanded.

  Herihor blinked, as if that hadn’t occurred to him.

  ‘We’ll bore holes,’ Rensi said hastily. ‘We haven’t finished it yet, we’re still making it. See how it’s higher? That’s to leave room for the barbarian.’

  ‘The main thing,’ said Herihor, ‘is to keep him separate from the Wrapped One. He must be washed, purged and fumigated, and I’ll put a mat underneath with purifying herbs, to keep his unclean flesh from sullying the Wrapped One.’

  All this was spoken in Egyptian. When Pirra translated for Hylas, he was too startled to be offended. ‘Isn’t it the dead crocodile who’ll be sullying me?’

  Herihor guessed his meaning. ‘It’s the living who are unclean!’ Lovingly, he passed his bony fingers over the crocodile, taking care not to touch it. ‘I remove all imperfections,’ he said fervently. ‘The guts, the worthless brain … I cleanse the flesh in
wine and spices till it’s light and pure as the sands of the deshret – I leave nothing inside but the hard dry heart. I rescue the dead, I make them perfect!’

  Rensi cast his friend an affectionate glance. ‘Herihor is the master. There is no better embalmer in all Pa-Sobek.’

  Pirra was staring at the coffin, picturing Hylas inside.

  He touched her arm. ‘I’ll be all right.’

  She shook her head. ‘You don’t understand how dangerous this is. You see all this writing? The little painted signs? The whole point of them is to create what they describe. Hylas, they’re going to come alive in the tomb!’

  He swallowed.

  ‘That’s why the dangerous ones are missing bits,’ she said. ‘You see how they’ve left the claws off the vultures and the sting off the scorpions? Cut off the snakes’ tails, put little red spears through the crocodile signs? That’s to stop them doing harm!’

  ‘Well then, there’s no problem,’ he said defensively.

  ‘But you don’t know if it’ll work!’ she burst out. ‘No one knows!’

  ‘I’ll be all right,’ he repeated, as if to convince himself. He forced a laugh. ‘I mean, Pirra: an Egyptian tomb with an Outsider in it? Their gods won’t let me stay in there for long, they’ll spit me out!’

  ‘That,’ she said, ‘is what I’m afraid of.’

  The heb had lasted most of the night, and the Hati-aa’s residence was still slumbering when Telamon was woken by the braying of a donkey. Too much wine had given him a pounding head, and he was furious with himself for losing Meritamen in the crowd. That was a mistake a boy would make, not a man.

  Stumbling out of his quarters, he staggered outside to get some air.

  Mist hazed the River, and over on the West Bank, the cliffs were flushed dark pink in the rising Sun. Around him, the outdoor slaves were preparing for the second day of the heb. Brewers stirred beer-vats, washerwomen pounded wet linen. A sleepy maidservant sprinkled water to settle the dust, and another yawned as she scattered grain in the duck-pen. The smell of baking bread made Telamon queasy.

  How am I ever going to find the dagger? he wondered. What would Pharax do? Or Koronos?

  It struck him that he hadn’t asked himself what his father would do. But compared to his kinsmen, Thestor was weak. He was kind, too, and at Mycenae, Telamon had learnt that kindness didn’t work. Men like Pharax and Koronos got respect because they were feared.

  Children were playing near the fig orchards: boys stick-fighting, girls hunched over a game of knuckle-bones. Telamon spotted Meritamen’s little sister, squatting near some beehives with her cat sprawled beside her. He was pleased to see that Kerasher had set one of his slaves to watch the child; but it irked him to remember that it was Alekto who had asked Kerasher to arrange this. Alekto takes too much upon herself, thought Telamon. She needs to understand that I am the leader.

  The little girl was busy scolding a wooden doll with straggly date-fibre hair. Something about the child’s scowl reminded Telamon sharply of Issi, Hylas’ sister. Telamon had liked Issi, and she’d worshipped him – before everything had gone wrong.

  The beekeeper was wafting a pot of burning cattle dung around the hives, to calm them. They were big clay cylinders stacked on top of each other in the shade of a fig tree, and around them, bees came and went with their usual mysterious certainty.

  Suddenly, Telamon was back home on Mount Lykas, on that summer’s day when he and Hylas and Issi had tracked the wild bees. It had been Hylas’ idea. He’d found a pool where bees came to drink, and the three of them had darted about, flicking powdered red ochre on as many bees as they could, then following the marked ones back to their nest. Well, that was the idea. It had turned into an uproarious race through the forest: ‘This way!’ ‘No don’t be an idiot, it’s over here!’

  Eventually, Telamon had spotted the bees’ nest halfway up the trunk of an old pine. They’d woken a smoky fire beneath it to calm the bees: Hylas teasing Issi about being scared, she hotly denying it, Telamon secretly anxious and trying not to show it. He and Hylas had taken turns to stand on each other’s shoulders and try to reach the nest with a knife tied to a stick. Hylas had managed to sever a honeycomb. He’d yelled at Issi to catch it and she’d missed, and blamed him for bad throwing. Then the three of them had huddled together, counting their bee-stings and cramming honeycomb in their mouths. The taste of it: that astonishing sweetness. Like eating sunshine.

  The little girl’s voice wrenched Telamon back to the present. He was angry with himself. You’re a man now, all that’s in the past. Burn it. Scorch it from your mind for ever. Be more like Koronos.

  The child had stopped scolding her doll, and was making a small clay snake slither menacingly towards it.

  Some impulse or maybe some god made Telamon summon Kerasher’s slave and have him translate what the child was saying.

  ‘If you wish, my lord,’ said the startled slave. ‘She says: “And then the cobra slithered towards the little girl … but suddenly – wsh! – the yellow-haired stranger threw his knife, and –’

  ‘She said what?’ snapped Telamon.

  Nervously, the slave repeated it.

  A cold wave washed over Telamon. ‘The yellow-haired stranger. You’re sure she said that.’

  The slave nodded. ‘She keeps saying it.’ He smiled. ‘Children are like that –’

  ‘The yellow-haired stranger,’ said a woman’s voice behind Telamon. His skin prickled with loathing.

  Alekto looked very fresh and cool in her long sleeveless dress of green and black silk, with gilded sandals on her hennaed feet. ‘Well done, nephew,’ she said with her mocking smile. ‘This almost makes up for losing sight of the girl at the heb.’

  Telamon’s cheeks flamed. ‘I hear you killed another peasant yesterday.’

  She laughed. ‘I can’t help it if they’re weak.’

  ‘Alekto,’ Telamon said sharply. ‘Go back inside. I’ll question the child alone.’

  She tilted her lovely head. ‘Oh, nephew, that’s not –’

  ‘My name is Telamon,’ he said in a tone that made her blink. ‘Go back inside.’

  Her dark eyes flashed, but she turned, and went back inside.

  It worked, thought Telamon. It actually worked.

  Meritamen’s little sister had stopped playing and was staring up at him. Telamon strode towards her. She scrambled to her feet and placed herself protectively between him and her cat. Behind her, the boys stopped stick-fighting and ran away. The girls gathered up their knuckle-bones and followed.

  With a new sense of confidence, Telamon made Kerasher’s slave ask the child in Egyptian where she’d seen the stranger with the yellow hair.

  The little girl went on staring at him with round dark eyes.

  Telamon had the slave repeat the question.

  Still nothing.

  Meritamen emerged from the house and came hurrying over.

  Telamon knew then that the gods were indeed on his side. They had ensured that he learnt what the child had seen, and now they’d sent him her sister.

  Dismissing the slave, he smiled down at Meritamen. ‘You’ve been lying to me,’ he said pleasantly.

  She flinched. ‘No.’ But he could see the blood beating in her throat.

  ‘Oh, yes,’ he replied. ‘Hylas the Outsider is here in Pa-Sobek. Don’t deny it, your sister saw him. I take it the Keftian girl with the scar is here too.’ He read the answer in her face. ‘Where are they?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘I don’t believe you.’

  She lifted her chin defiantly. ‘It is not for you to speak in such a way to the wife of the Hati-aa. Soon I will have your dagger for you. Then you can go back to your own land.’

  Again Telamon smiled. ‘But I want the Outsider too. You have spies. You must know where they are.’

  ‘I did, but someone helped them get away.’

  ‘Indeed.’ Telamon placed his hand on the little sister’s shaven head. He felt the soft
downy fuzz, and beneath it, the fragile skull.

  Meritamen’s eyes widened as he squeezed the child’s temples: gently, just making a point. ‘Pretty child,’ he murmured. ‘The Lady Alekto likes her very much.’

  The blood drained from Meritamen’s lips.

  ‘I wouldn’t want anything to happen to her,’ Telamon went on. ‘But you know how at times the Lady Alekto goes too far.’

  ‘You wouldn’t dare touch her,’ said Meritamen.

  ‘I have the favour of the Perao,’ replied Telamon. ‘You don’t know what I would dare to do.’

  Her throat worked, as if she was trying to swallow. ‘They’re on the West Bank. That’s all I know, I swear!’

  Telamon gazed across the River at the tall cliffs, tawny now that the Sun had risen, and pocked with man-made caves.

  And suddenly, he knew. ‘The dagger,’ he said. ‘It’s in a tomb.’

  They slept on rush mats in Rensi’s shabti workshop. Pirra dreamt Hylas was trapped in a tomb, screaming to be let out, while she tried frantically to find him.

  She woke around midnight to see him sitting up in the dark. ‘I’ll be back soon,’ he whispered. ‘I need to make sure Havoc’s all right.’

  When she woke again he’d returned, smelling of lions and the desert. It was nearly dawn. Today, the heb would reach the West Bank, and the crocodile coffin – with him inside – would be carried to its tomb. Pirra asked when it would start, and he said not till afternoon, but Herihor needed him before then, to be purified. He made a face. She gave him a strained smile.

  Rensi came in with his wife Berenib, a plump motherly woman, who towered over her husband. She’d brought fried bean cakes and oniony beer: Hylas wolfed his, but Pirra had to force hers down. Dread lay on her stomach like a stone.

  Rensi took Hylas away, and Berenib hustled Pirra off to make a start on her disguise. Noticing Pirra’s stricken face, she gave her a little pat. ‘Don’t worry, you’ll see your lion-haired barbarian before the heb.’

  Until now, Pirra had only seen the West Bank by night. This morning it was heaving, everyone preparing for the procession. Berenib said there were in fact two villages: Tjebu, where ‘the lower workers’ lived – tomb-diggers, reed-cutters, water-carriers, peasants, fishermen – and Gesa, for craftsmen such as her husband. She was clearly proud of the difference.