Noreen
Doyle
Egyptology
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Noreen
Doyle
Egyptology
Nautical Archaeology
Fiction
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The wake of the sun's golden barge washed over the limestone cliffs, flooding the desolate landscape with the lurid hues of the dying day. For a brief moment the fading brilliance illuminated a narrow fissure among the rocks, until it was lost in the shadows climbing up from the valley floor. The cooling desert exhaled; the lizards and scorpions crept from the crevasses and shallow dens where they had taken refuge from the searing heat of the day. Sand slid away, widening the fissure, from which stepped into the newborn night a figure draped in a hooded black cloak, as if shadows had wrapped themselves around her. The Oppressor had departed the sky and she was free, until his return. Raising her arms, she faced the west and her voice filled the evening silence: A hymn of damnation to thee at eventide, When thou shalt set as the living set, Forever and forever in the west, Never to traverse thy nightly passage, For the Fiend shall swallow thy prow, For the Fiend shall swallow thy midships, For the Fiend shall swallow thy stern, And the Fiend shall swallow thee and thy every crew. Here of all places on earth was the oppressive power of the sun most manifest, this barren land burned lifeless, a place where only the dead dwelled, they and their forgotten gods. She knew them all, the ancient dead: from the gnawed and scattered bones of beggars to the flesh of kings preserved in aromatic resins and cased in solid gold. Yet it was life she needed now, so she descended with a smooth gliding stride across the crumbling rocks and sand, toward those places where water flowed. Approaching was the familiar scent of goats and donkeys -- a well, and men drawn to it with their livestock to spend the night. One of them slept a bit apart from the fire where the rest were gathered, wrapped in his ragged blanket against the evils of darkness. She beckoned him in dreams. He opened his eyes, he beheld her: the black cloak thrown back from her shoulders uncovered the alabaster smoothness of her form, glowing like the moon against the cloak that hid only her face from his sight. Like a serpent his staff of life rose, though he never willed it, for he knew what she was, and his fear would have made him flee if he only could have moved. But he was entirely powerless to resist her, and soon his drained and lifeless form lay empty on the ground. Five thousand years ago the people of this region had found the remains of such men, her victims, preserved undecayed in the sun-baked sand. So they in error came to believe in the power of the Oppressor to grant eternal life, and they began to prepare the bodies of their dead to keep them from corruption in their tombs. But those times had long since passed and the monuments they had once raised were ruins now, their treasures plundered and despoiled by grave-robbers. This man too had been a grave-robber, drawn to this barren land by greed, which overruled his fear of the specters that were whispered to haunt the buried necropolis. Now his own grave would be a shallow pit in the desert. But all mortals must die; only the gods were doomed to live forever. She drew a leather sack out from his tattered garments, spilled out the familiar contents onto the ground. Once these had lain in the tomb of Nakht, her faithful worshiper: scarabs and other amulets of fine faience; a gold ring; a tiny glass bottle; the stopper of a canopic jar with the head of a baboon carved of alabaster from Hatnub. She reflected that once her own image had watched over the preserved remains of her mortal worshipers. How long it had been since anyone had called upon her power or sung her praises! Now she too was reduced to a thief, little more than a grave-robber herself, she who had once been invoked as a protectress of the dead. In ancient days, she had commanded men to steal for her, to bring her riches from the graves at Thebes and Memphis, and with these lures of gold and alabaster and real lapis lazuli she tempted others into these hills. Sometimes she had caught her own. "Forgive me, Nakht," she whispered. She poured the objects back into the sack and drew the strings tight. On her return, she would replace them among the rocks. More men would come to seek such things, as they had for ages. And they would find them. And her. Sunrise came too soon. Fearful of the Oppressor's harsh touch, that which would shrivel her as surely as it had the desert, as surely as she had shriveled this man at her feet, she returned to her Lord's house of eternity. Within the heart of the hills was the tomb where her Lord was imprisoned. He lay at the very back of it, fastened to the rock floor by adamantine chains forged by the Creator from the substance of Creation. But more hateful yet was the immense Serpent coiled next to his body, formed from the living stone. "Brother, I return." He turned a face that pain could never make less beautiful to her. "You were not gone so long tonight." Millennia had passed while he lay bound here, great empires rose and fell, and the gods themselves had passed away, fading even from the memory of the people who now lived in this most ancient of lands. But there was yet a sharp pang to see the plunder of the temples and shrines which men so long ago had built for the worship of her Lord and their brothers and sisters. She hated the thieves but she needed them, for without their lives she could not spare her Lord the most painful of his torments. "More rich foreign merchants come into the land. The grave-robbers are all dreaming of becoming wealthy men." So she had heard their thoughts as she slid unseen past their sleeping forms. He sighed, nostrils flaring. "It seems strange to think of the world become such poor place that so many men still travel here from afar to hunt for gold. Has the breed of man become too lazy to dig their own mines? Or do they build their cities of gold and, having run dry the veins within the earth, seek the gold of ancients?" "Not just for gold, beloved brother, do they come. It might be common stone shaped by human hand, so long as it is five thousand yeas old they covet it. It is antiquity they seek." Five thousand years. Near two million sunrises had passed since her Lord was first chained here. How could so much be endured? They spoke of tomb-robbers, of such matters of little significance, to keep their minds from the dreadful hour that approached, when the burning golden barge would break through the barriers of night ferrying the Oppressor onto the throne of his realm -- the Usurper who had chained his bother, the rightful Lord of the land, and condemned him to this eternal suffering. Nothing could hold back the hours, not even a god, and the moment came at last when the darkness lifted at the back of the cave, and the stone Serpent moved. First its eyes shifted, then its head rose, and its tongue flicked the air, searching for the scent of its appointed prey. She watched her Lord, unable to avert her eyes as the vast head turned toward him, as the fanged jaws slowly opened. So she had watched for century after century, helpless to stop it, powerless to help him while the cruel jaws bit and severed his limbs, one by one, devouring them as the Usurper's curse had decreed: Like the Serpent thou shalt be limbless, by the Serpent thou shalt be dismembered. As it had been spoken, thus it was done. And for all those centuries she had searched through the most secret archives of the temples, the hidden tombs of priests and magicians, through the scrolls and inscriptions, searching for the spell to save him. And found it at last, though the cost was high -- the cost was a life, for every sunrise. Yet why were mortals born, except to die? And to serve their gods? So this night as on so many others she had gone forth to take life, and now she gave it up, straining to give birth, uttering the words of the spell as it had been written: O thou shabti! As my lord is called, as my lord is adjudged, behold! Let the judgment fall not upon him, but upon thee! And into her hands it came, wet from the birth-passage between her legs, the homunculus, a perfect copy of her Lord, who as god of the barren desert could never himself father a child. The Serpent's cruel jaws gaped wide, about to strike, and she forestalled it, offering this small piece of flesh as a sacrifice in the place of her Lord. So it was done, the sacrifice taken, and her Lord spared his suffering until another sunrise came. #
Dr. Archibald E. Wordsley turned up the flame of his lamp and drew it closer to the fragment of papyrus that lay on an Arab table he had appropriated as a desk. Why did the beggars always have to come here by night, like thieves? Of course, thieves they certainly were, and the meanest sort -- grave-robbers. The fellah named Ali leaned closer, exhaling foul breath from a mouth full of blackened teeth that he framed by a grin. Wordsley wished there were a little more space in this rented room; it was a potter's store-room where he and his makeshift desk and cot and boxes competed with bowls and jugs and heaps of little cups -- and now an Arab -- for the floor. "You see, effendi? Is it not what I promised?" In reply, Wordsley pulled out a magnifying glass from his desk drawer to better examine the text. These hieroglyphs were time-worn, difficult to read, but this spoke in favor of the papyrus's authenticity. Forgery was an industry with these beggars; you could never quite trust them, but papyri were beyond their clever skill. The industry had been lost, the script forgotten. Out of habit, he picked up a pen and began to draw a facsimile of the papyrus. There was nothing here of any great interest, just another chapter from the the Book of the Dead looted from the grave of some artisan or minor bureaucrat, a man of no known importance but wealthy enough at least to afford a proper burial and a scroll containing the spells necessary to ensure him prosperity in the afterlife to come. "Where did you get it? The little pyramid that the American tore down and shipped down river -- from there, eh?" "No, no, effendi. By decree of the pasha, what the American digs up belongs to the American. And he pays besides. This is from -- it is from elsewhere." Wordsley looked up sharply at the thief. "Was there anything else with this? Pottery, for example? Even ostraca, broken pottery? With writing or pictures upon it?" He had found interesting things written on potsherds, names, faces of kings. These might just date the papyrus. The Arab grinned in false apology. "No, effendi, pardon me, but there was nothing else at all, just this piece of writing. Very old, very genuine anteekah. Very valuable." Wordsley snorted. "I'll give you a shilling." Payment enough for this beggar, and all Wordsley could afford, given the present state of his finances. The would-be seller howled in offended outrage. Only a shilling for such a valuable antiquity? A genuine manuscript from the tomb of the kings? The Englishman insulted him with such an offer. He would take his find instead to the American, who would be sure to pay what it was truly worth. But Wordsley was unmoved. A shilling was two piasters, enough to feed the thief and his family for a day. And he was sure that if the beggar was offering the papyrus to him now, doubtless the American had turned it down already. Phineas Bigham had no interest in common funeral texts, not the man who bought the head of the Sphinx itself and shipped it back to America as a museum exhibit. In the end Ali accepted the shilling and left, assuring Wordsley that the starvation of his children was imminent. Wordsley poured himself a glass of claret to wash the taste of the transaction out of his mouth, as well as the dust. Every corner of the room not taken up by the potter's stores held boxes of ostraca, potsherds and scrolls, most untranscribed and untranslated, most likely as worthless as this one, but he did not dare risk the loss of any manuscript of potential significance. Too much had been lost already, too much was being lost even yet, thanks to the activities of tomb-robbers and plunderers and in particular the greatest plunderer of them all, this American mountebank Bigham. "Bigham!" The name was a curse on Wordsley's lips. Destroying everything in his quest for antiquities, forever obliterating the historical record of millennia, Phineas Bigham was hardly the first of the tomb robbers, but his dollars had inflicted more damage on the remains of ancient Egypt than centuries of conquering armies. His lavish bribery had purchased the pasha's license to carry off whatever he pleased, and his devastating methods of excavation left irreplaceable papyri torn and rotting amid the ruins he left in the wake of his search for the monumental statues and gold coffins of ancient pharaohs. Wordsley had had hopes when he set out for Tukh, devoid of the great temples such as those at Luxor or Philae or Abu Simbel. Nothing, he thought, would attract the American here. But something had, nevertheless. The tumbledown pyramid was gone when he arrived two days ago, removed stone by stone; in fact, he had seen but not recognized it sitting on a wharf in Cairo, awaiting steamers to take it seaward as ballast to America, where it would be resurrected again. The graves, most ancient graves, that edged the farmers' fields had been stripped of their occupants and the gold and stone and ivory that had accompanied them in death. More than two thousand looted in a fortnight. Whatever else had stood in the vicinity of Tukh was gone too. What could he do but salvage here? He felt like a gleaner following an army through fields of devastation. And there was something to glean, for the American had his own desires to satisfy. Only the finest manuscripts, with crisply-drawn vignettes painted in delicate green, red, white and gold, merited Bigham's interest. Wordsley had let it be known that he would pay for whatever the American had thrown aside, at least for as long as his funds held out. Lighting a second lamp, he applied his attention now to the papyrus fragment on his desk. He copied it out, sign for sign, word for word, column for column, translating in his head. He knew the words before he even saw them: ordinary, ordinary, ordinary! Yet he did not consider his shilling entirely wasted, for perhaps the next manuscript Ali brought in would contain the name of some previously unknown king or god or spell. There was the piece on which he had been working before the thief's arrival, for example: a new hymn to the sun-god Ra-Horakhety triumphant over his enemies at dawn. So much remained unknown and unexplained about the ancient Egyptian gods, so much they might never know, despite all that was left behind. It was now smashed by the chisel for the heads of pretty goddesses, torn up for amulets of gold and lapis lazuli. Wordsley poured another glass of claret and dipped his pen again into the ink. So much to do. In the next few days his labors were interrupted so often, by so many natives bearing artifacts for sale -- papyri, scarabs, shabtis, pottery jars, bits of mummified animals and birds -- that he soon realized something was amiss. The vendors were sly; they said nothing, but it was not only in their silent smiles that Wordsley knew something out of the ordinary was happening. The two thousand and more graves and tombs near Tukh had been of utmost antiquity: Wordsley had ascertained from interviews of the workmen that there were no scrolls among them, but rather ivory combs, fine stone vases, gold jewelry and other things for which the American had paid handsomely. Although the fellahin were reluctant to admit it, the scrolls and ostraca he had been purchasing from them came from less ancient ruins south of the stolen pyramid. What they brought him now, however, came in such quantity and diversity that he knew they had discovered a new source. So, having paid six piasters for an ostraca with the cartouche of a king he did not know -- Neb-Khepru-Ra Tut-Ankh-Amun -- Wordsley pushed himself away from his desk, called his servant Ahmed to bring his hat, and ventured out into the marketplace to investigate the situation. Heat and sun-glare and dust, with the overpowering scents of dung from camels, asses and the native Arabs met him. The skirling whine of flies was his greeting. Few people were abroad today, and all of those were women and girls and very small children. Virtually every man and every boy older than eight or ten seemed absent. "Where is everyone?" he asked of the potter from whom he had rented the room. He wondered how many of his own pots the man had thrown to the ground, buried in dirt, and dug up again for some wide-eyed tourist sailing by in his dahabeeyah. "With the American," was the reply. "With the American? I thought Bigham had gone." "He is gone, gone into the desert. He has hired most any man with a pair of legs, see?" The man displayed his crippled feet. "From here, from el-Ballas, from Naqada. They're all in the desert now, far up the wadi. Another Biban el-Molouk they have there, yes, it is said. Another Valley of the Kings. Oh, but your face, effendi, it is flushed. Come inside, come inside. It is too hot here. Beer, yes? Come inside. The sun has made you ill." Wordsley brushed away the old man's offer. What had Phineas Bigham found? The objects the Arabs were bringing to Wordsley lately were undoubtedly more typical of Thebes than of this region. No one had ever reported such tombs or temples here before. Terra incognita! Overlooked by Napolean's savants, missed by that Italian king of grave robbers Belzoni, could it be? The place would be destroyed, utterly and totally, and carted off to America before it was ever known in Egypt. "He must be stopped --" Wordsley choked the words back as the potter regarded him coldly. The villagers would not treat kindly anyone apt to thwart their benefactor. Regardless, Phineas Bigham had to be stopped before he raped another tomb, plundered another temple. Wordsley strode rapidly back to his rented store-room and shouted for Ahmed, who dutifully appeared and listened to instructions. He must prepare, at once, for an expedition into the hills. Donkeys, flour, water, whatever would be needed. There was no other way. Appeals to the local authorities would be futile. Bribes had placed the pasha squarely in the American's pocket. The British counsel, to whom Wordsley would naturally appeal, was interested only in the matter as far as it came to getting a share of the loot; the British Museum was Bigham's greatest rival in the antiquities trade. So with great difficulty and expense a tent and supplies were obtained, and donkeys to carry them, and an animal for Wordsley to ride. He was, alas, no great explorer, no doughty digger-of-tombs. He was ordinarily content to let others bring their manuscripts and scarabs and ostraca to him for deciphering. But he now had to press beyond that. His mission, if ever he had one, was clear and neither discomfort not inconvenience would deter him. Bigham had gone into the desert and so Wordsley must follow. The gleaner would glean no longer: time had come for the harvest to end. read the rest of the story in the February 2000 issue of Realms of Fantasy
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 Historical fantasy novelette Realms of Fantasy February 2000 illustrated by John Berkey Realms of Fantasy Honorable mention
--Gardner
Dozois,
The Year's Best Science Fiction: Eighteenth Annual Collection "my favorite story this issue. . . . [The] clash between these three forces makes for a story that's good in so many ways." --
Michael H. Payne,
Tangent Online
"What else should be in a book like this? . . . There are
even
more recent stories -- "The Chapter of Coming Forth by Night' by Lois
Tilton and Noreen Doyle. . . -- that might make the grade."
other excerpts: Ankhtifi the Brave is dying. Callum's Feast The Chapter of Bringing a Boat into Heaven The Chapter of the Hawk of Gold The Dovecote The Execration Horizon The Rope Shadow of the Pyramid Trading Places |
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