Ancient Evenings (110 page)

Of course, it was never wise to attempt to comprehend my Mother. She was faithful at maintaining the chapel, even to keeping Ptah-nem-hotep amused about it and thereby tolerant—She would make dreadful jokes to the effect that She could feel well protected by Her four Canopic jars!—and while She certainly kept up the care of it after His death, She decided, so soon as I died, even, indeed, while I lay in my bath of natron, that Menenhetet-of-the-fourth-life, which is to say, his mummy, sarcophagus and jars, was to be moved by some peculiar logic of Her heart to the same mean tomb to which I would be sent. But, then, much had changed in Her life after Ptah-nem-hotep’s death.

Toward the end, He aged grievously. As my royal Father grew older, so did He lose that handsomeness of feature which had set Him apart from other men, and His cheeks grew heavy and His neck thickened. He was forever dejected. In the Sixteenth (and next to last) year of His Reign, it was discovered that several tombs of old Pharaohs in Western Thebes had been despoiled. The boldness of the brigands was demeaning to Him. The thieves seemed all too ready for the wrath of any Pharaoh, living or dead. The mummy of Sebekemsef, hundreds of years old, had been stripped of its gems and His Queen violated as well. When the culprits were captured (and proved to be workmen in the Necropolis) Ptah-nem-hotep discovered that many of His officials were implicated as well. The mayors of West Thebes and East Thebes accused each other. There was no end to the inquiries. Nes-Amon (who survived as Chief Scribe after his dreams of higher office were ended by Khem-Usha) was even sent to Thebes to keep a record of the commission.

That was the year Ptah-nem-hotep began to age so noticeably. And I began to feel a desire for my Mother which proved so difficult to restrain I know it could only have risen from the Ka of Menenhetet’s unborn child. When my Mother also proved affected by these passions, we began to feel as blessed by the Gods—or, was it despised?—as Nefertiri and Amen-khep-shu-ef.

It was then, in the six months before His death, that my Father raised Amen-Ka to be a co-regent with Himself. He even gave my brother the title of Ramses the Tenth, Kheper-Maat-Ra, Setpenere Amen-khep-shu-ef Meri-Amon. Thus was I deprived of my birthright, if my weak claim can so be called, considering how I was conceived. Yet even in that year, so soon as Ptah-nem-hotep died (and how my Mother wept at His funeral) so did my brother, not ten years old, have to contend with a greater scandal than the plundered vault of the Pharaoh Sebekemsef.

It was discovered that the long-hidden tomb of Ramses the Second high in the hills (that place most difficult of access to which Usermare had once led His First Charioteer) had been violated. The tomb of the Father, Seti the First, was also pillaged. Was there a Pharaoh left Whose tomb had not been entered? My poor brother! In the midst of great public bewilderment, with unrest everywhere, He celebrated His tenth birthday in Memphi even as word came from Thebes that barbarians out of the Western Desert had captured the city. Khem-Usha (whom I could not think of in any way as Amenhotep) was held captive for six months and tortured. When released at last, he was no better than a frail old man. Amen-Ka had two more years on the throne and died. When He was gone, so, too, ended all royal prerogatives for Hathfertiti and me. A great-nephew of Ramses the Third became Ramses the Eleventh, and shortly thereafter, I was dead. How, I do not know. No picture chose to form in my mind. I could not even rely on the treacherous memory of Menenhetet. Other images, however, appeared on the wall. Now I could witness a most peculiar phenomenon. I began to watch the reign of those who came after me. That passed before us. The first of these strange rulers was a new High Priest named Hrihor. He ruled in Thebes, and the Two-Lands were more divided. Then came a Syrian, or some such fellow, named Nesubenedded, and he ruled Lower Egypt from Memphi to Tanis on the Very Green.

During these years, violent entries into Pharaohs’ tombs were as common as a plague, and officials came to feel so helpless that in much desperation, they shifted the royal bodies until Usermare was even placed in the tomb of Seti the First. But when Their outer rooms were again broken into, both Pharaohs, with Their wives, were now transferred to the tomb of Amenhotep the First and before long, the priests had to hide a good many of these royal bodies in an unmarked grave west of Thebes. In such a dark pit, among the cliffs, rested Ahmose, and Amenhotep the First, and Thutmose the Second, and Thutmose the Great, Who was the Third, and Seti the First and Ramses the Second and many others, packed side by side like a litter of stillborn beasts. I could not believe what I saw. The wall spoke of sights not even my great-grandfather could dare to conceive. Indeed, my Ka felt like a bottomless pit before the weight of these Pharaohs disrupted from Their tombs, and I had to wonder if the Two-Lands were now lost and without a foundation.

All this while, the Ka of Menenhetet had not said another word to me. Yet I saw him smile at all that was before us, and wondered how many of these pictures might have come from his mind. Then, I remembered my own mummy badly wrapped, the cloth at my feet open to maggots, and gloom came to me. I still could not remember how I died. The more I pondered, the less I saw on the wall, and wondered why I seemed to be so certain that I was killed one night in a drunken brawl.

As I brooded on this, I saw the same beer-house I had glimpsed in the hour I lay in the wondrous room where the fish were painted on the floor, and I had a glimpse of Bone-Smasher again as he came close to his own drunken fight. Much as I wished to learn about my own dying, I was obliged instead to follow my own fortunes no more, but had to witness many changes in the lives of Bone-Smasher and Eyaseyab. While I thought I would not care to watch, I soon became curious. For much passed before me rapidly. Their faces began to age soon after Bone-Smasher was made Captain of the Royal Barge as a reward for having protected me through the morning when Khem-Usha’s troops occupied the Palace.

The helm of the Royal Barge was not, however, an office to which he was suited. Bone-Smasher was uncouth to work for a King. So he was soon moved to other tasks. Before long, he slipped further, and ended at last as he had begun—a man who drank too much and turned violent when sodden, even to Eyaseyab who had become his wife.

Eyaseyab loved him, however; so well, and so much for every day of their life together, that she may even have been rewarded by Maat. A second prosperity began for Bone-Smasher. He went to visit Menenhetet in order to seek work, and found it. My great-grandfather had been looking for a man savage enough to serve as runner between the thieves of Kurna and himself.

Bone-Smasher became so useful at this task that Eyaseyab was soon able to leave my mother’s service and bought a home on the Western Bank of Thebes with the good riches his labors provided. They had children, and my former nurse might have become a respectable matron with her own family tomb in the City of the Dead, but Bone-Smasher grew careless after Menenhetet’s death, and was one of the brigands arrested for plundering the tomb of Usermare. Soon executed, he was thrown away in an unmarked grave.

Eyaseyab never found his body. She came back to Memphi and worked once more for my mother as Mistress of All Maids. One night, however, in order to fulfill a vow to her husband, she slipped out to the Necropolis. By the illumination of the pictures on the wall, I saw her dare the ghost, that same fellow with the unbelievably evil breath I had encountered on the walk back to my tomb. It proved a fearful meeting for Eyaseyab, but she did not flee, and waited until the ghost, with all his imprecations, moved farther down the alley on his nightly watch. Then she buried a little statue which she had had made of Bone-Smasher, there, right in front of the door to my tomb. For the vow to Bone-Smasher, whispered into his ear, had promised that if he were thrown into an unmarked grave, she would have a likeness made of him, and find the tomb of Menenhetet, and bury it near. I came near to weeping as I thought of the loyalty of my old nurse, and thereby discovered that my Ka had kept Sweet Finger, for he, too, remembered her.

Why I saw the story, I do not know, but I can say that after these tears, my sorrow began to move from concern for Eyaseyab to the misery of contemplating my own death. Now I could see my old nurse working for my mother on the last day I could remember, there, dressed in the clothes of a widow and still mourning Bone-Smasher. Yet the sight of Eyaseyab was now equal to a sight of myself in my mother’s bed. I was no longer a child, but a man, and my mother and I were lovers.

What passed between us, I could not bring myself to recollect—except I knew there was no other woman I desired more. Yet, in that bed, even as we held each other, was the weight of our shame. For if love between brother and sister was commonplace to all our lives, the same could not be said of a passion for one’s mother. Now I remembered Hathfertiti’s fear before the gossip of Memphi, indeed it had been so great, and whispered so about us, that she had joined with Nef-khep-aukhem once more, and for a second time, became his wife.

There, sitting beside my great-grandfather, my poor Ka bewildered once more by these poor fragments of recollection, I found the place, at last, where two shards joined. For now I remembered how I used to make love to the priest and his sister, that one who had buttocks like a plump panther. Her brother had been no priest, not a priest at all, but Nef-khep-aukhem—who, for sanitary reasons had shaved off all hair—and his sister was my mother.

In misery, in this tomb of Khufu, I was obliged to contemplate the perfumed squalor and prodigious animosity of the most fearful jealousy, the most dreadful quarrels between Nef-khep-aukhem, Hathfertiti and myself. The outcome—did I now remember it, or merely think I did?—was that three brutes were hired by my uncle (who once supposed he was my father, and was now certainly my rival) yes, were chosen by him to waylay me in a bar. Before it was done—what a damnable waste, what a shattering of expectations—I was dead. All that had lived in the little boy who was six, all of his tenderness, his wisdom, his pleasure, all that spoke of his days to come, and the promise of it, was gone. There had been no more purpose than in the squashing of a beetle. I could have wept for myself as if lamenting another. In all the debauchery of these last few years, I had never thought that I would not emerge with some—at least—of the expectations of my earliest years redeemed. Now I would not. He was gone. Menenhetet the Second was dead—a young life and a wasted one! Yes, tears came to my eyes, as powerful as the purity of mourning for a stranger, and I shook within. And as I trembled in this anguish, the walls began to stir, and in our darkness, before I could even feel a great fear, the presence of the Duad was on the wall. We were in the Duad.

SEVEN

I had always supposed that the Land of the Dead could not be reached without a journey of great difficulty. One would march for days under a sun as hot as the desert of Eshuranib, and then be faced with a descent down a precipitous drop into caverns where you could not see. The mist from the hot baths would render every handhold treacherous. Yet, now, sitting beside the Ka of my great-grandfather, his hip touching mine, these visions moved about in so natural a manner that I no longer knew if what I witnessed was in my mind, in my great-grandfather’s, or would prove to be a property of the wall. Some creatures I saw drew near and gave every threat of swarming over me, yet, always, before I could feel too much oppressed, they went away, as if at my command. So it was. So be it. I was in the Duad. Although I had never entered a jungle but had only heard about such places from Nubian eunuchs who served in the Palace, there was now much rustle in my ear and many honking sounds and all the din and turmoil one might expect from a great thicket of a forest. Everywhere I could hear gates fly open, and sounds of weeping from the distraught as well as the cries of Gods Who spoke like animals. The shriek of a hawk came to me and the cries of waterfowl in their nest, the whirring of bees and terrible great groans of the bull-Gods, even male cats in heat. I saw the Ka of all who were so unfortunate as to be the enemies of Ra, and witnessed the destruction of their bodies at the First Gate, and the loss of their shadows as they fell into pits of fire. Flames flowed forth from the mouths of Goddesses. And all these wonders were without fear for me. Soon, I could separate the keepers of the gate from the wretches waiting to be judged, inasmuch as the Gods had the bodies of men or women, but walked about with the heads of hawks and herons and jackals and rams upon Their necks, and one great fellow of a God had the head of a beetle. While I did not speak to the Ka of my great-grandfather, I was tempted to remark that many of these Gods looked the same as the drawings of Them on the temple walls.

Then, with the safety of the blessed—yet how could I be blessed when my tomb was spoiled?—we saw the First Gate pass before us, no, we did not walk through it, but upon the wall it drifted by, and I wondered if we were in the sacred Boat of Ra and so could pass and feel no fire. I do not know how I knew (for I saw no other passengers but my great-grandfather and myself) yet I can say that now we were in the Second Bend of the Duad, and here we watched a few wretches stoop to drink cold water from the springs, and we saw how all who told too many lies in their life began to scream. For the water boiled so soon as it touched their tongue. I saw the rich man, Fekh-futi, and he was now in garments soiled with the mud of the riverbank. He had carried the toe of Honey-Ball through many a gate, but was still here at the beginning because his misdeeds had proved more numerous than his virtues. Now he lay upon his back while the Third Gate showed the pivot of its hinge implanted in his eye, and each time the great door opened or closed, he uttered the piteous cry of a man who has spent his life seeking his advantage too directly. Beside him, writhed others in their bonds.