The Mummy (2 page)

And now, appearing as if frightful mirages, the pharaoh’s elite palace guards popped up, to watch from the dunes. The Med-jai (as these ominous spectators were known) had skin interrupted occasionally by a puzzlelike patchwork of tattoos whose meaning was known only to the secret cult into which they had been born. The fervently faithful “guards” were here, Imhotep supposed, to honor their dead master by witnessing the curse that would be dispensed upon the treacherous paramour who had slain their liege.

The only other possibility, the high priest knew, was that the Med-jai harbored certain dangerous suspicions—suspicions that would be allayed only by Imhotep’s reading of the sacred incantations from the golden pages of
The Book of Amun Ra,
condemning Anck-su-namun as evil, and sending her on a journey to the underworld where her soul would be eaten by Ammit, monster of the dead.

He would sooner send himself there.

Imhotep—like the late pharaoh—was a man of flesh and blood under his priestly vestments; and—like the late pharaoh—he had dearly loved this woman, loved the spirit of her, the nimble mind of her, and most certainly the pliant flesh of her. The high priest, who had seemed to those around him as much a man of stone as any statue in any temple, had some forty nights ago—the mummification process was a slow one—stood on the balcony of the house of the pharaoh’s mistress, feeling the gentle fingers of the desert breeze wafting across the slumbering river to caress him, to kiss his bare chest, in gentle foreshadowing of delights to come.

Delights she would bestow upon him.

On that night, Imhotep’s contingent of priestly guards had positioned themselves in and around Anck-su-namun’s palacelike residence, keeping watch. Their heads shaved, their bodies tattooed with their own cult’s secret markings, their skin withered from desert ritual, their strength rivaling their master’s, the priests of Osiris were devoted to Imhotep, whom they considered a god walking among them. Of course, the pharaoh, too, was said to be a god; but these priests served Osiris, and as Imhotep was his high priest, he commanded their loyalty.

The pharaoh was not expected—he was said to be attending a dinner of state—but precautions, in so dangerous a liaison, were always necessary, and never to be taken for granted.

In the many-pillared, high-ceiling anteroom, barely distinguishable from the ornate statuary, the priests of Imhotep followed with their eyes the mistress of the house as she entered through the tall golden doors and passed among them wordlessly, gliding over the marble floor with a dancer’s lithe grace, crossing to part the sheer curtains of her bedchamber. No sign that the olive-skinned goddess affected them as men could be detected; nor was any anxiety apparent in their cracked-stonelike faces.

But they were not stone, these men who were priests, and they had just witnessed the sight of the most beautiful woman in Thebes, regal in the elaborate, bluntly cut human-hair headdress.

Anck-su-namun’s lovely catlike face twitched a smile as she gestured to her painted skin.

“This is the final indignity, my love,” she said, in a voice nearly as low as his. “Now I am truly Pharaoh’s possession—with fresh coats of paint applied each day.”

The lovers stood facing each other near the silk-draped slanting bed of the gilded bedchamber.

“But when Seti dies,” Imhotep said, cupping her face in his hands, avoiding her painted skin where the design climbed her throat, “his son takes the throne, and you are set free . . .”

He kissed her, greedily, and she returned the kiss, with equal passion. They both knew that upon the pharaoh’s death, his mistress would receive this house, a considerable annual stipend, and the full rights of a citizen. And while they could never marry, a high priest could keep his own mistress; a high priest in Thebes could do almost anything.

“He’s an old man,” she said, reaching a painted hand out and stopping just short of caressing his cheek, “but healthy. He has many years left.”

“Does he?”

Her eyes narrowed, dark jewels in the oval mask of her face. “Are you willing to take the necessary steps?”

His answer was a smile, and he kissed her again.

“For the love of you,” he said, nuzzling her throat, “I am willing to risk death itself.”

“Death itself,” she echoed, and her lips found his.

They had no way to know that even as they began hatching a plot to take his life, the pharaoh was barreling through a nearby plaza, driving his chariot so hard that the phalanx of royal guards could barely keep pace with him.

They would do it—the murder—here in this chamber, tomorrow night; Imhotep would himself do the deed, with a Hittite dagger, which would remain in the pharaoh’s breast, placing blame on a known enemy.

But the plan for the terrible act they contemplated was not complete when the heavy gilt doors Imhotep’s priests guarded burst open with the force of an explosion.

Unaccompanied by his usual contingent of royal guards, the Med-jai, whom he had outrun in his zeal to discover the identity of his lover’s lover, Seti charged into the anteroom, as Imhotep’s priests—startled and dismayed by the pharaoh’s presence—backed away.

Face made longer by his high, caplike serpent-embossed gold crown, Seti—his square goatee like a black stain on his chin—scowled at the cowering priests, growling, “Why are you here?” Then without waiting for a response, he strode past them, sandaled feet sending echoes off the marble floor like deep drumbeats.

And the priests watched in helpless horror as the formidable figure in leather-and-gold breastplate, muscular arms and legs bare, jewels glittering at his wrists and at the hilt of his sword, went swiftly to the curtain that separated anteroom from bedchamber, his sheer cloak trailing after him like a ghost.

Anck-su-namun, apparently alone in the chamber, stood at the foot of her bed, arms behind her, head lowered submissively, but gazing up at her longtime lover with the sensuous smile that had won her this house and so many riches.

“What a wonderful surprise, my lord, my love,” she purred.

Seti sneered. “So the rumors were true.”

“My lord?”

“Who has touched you?” he asked. Then he demanded:
“What man has dared touch you?”

Stepping from the shadows of the balcony behind the pharaoh, Imhotep answered Seti’s question by reaching around and withdrawing the pharaoh’s heavy sword from its scabbard.

Spinning, sheer cloak trying to catch up with him, Seti faced his own raised weapon in unexpected hands; the ruler’s dark eyes widened in shock. “Imhotep? My priest . . .” And then the eyes narrowed in contempt. “My friend . . .”

Those words froze Imhotep, momentarily, and he did not bring down the blade.

But in back of the pharaoh, her eyes and nostrils flaring like those of rearing horse, Anck-su-namun raised a gleaming dagger, and her small hand with the big knife came swiftly down.

And again the pharaoh’s eyes widened in shock, and in pain, and a scream of agony escaped the god who was a man, a scream articulate in the many layers of anguish it conveyed.

The pharaoh fell to his knees, as if in supplication to his priest, who stood over Seti with the man’s own sword raised high. Momentarily the dying ruler’s expression asked for mercy, but the coldness of Imhotep’s gaze matched that of the blade hovering over Seti, whose expression turned blank, even accepting, of the blessing Imhotep was about to bestow.

In the foyer, Imhotep’s bald, tattooed priests saw the shadows of their leader and his lover undulating upon the sheer curtain as sword and dagger hacked and stabbed the fallen pharaoh. As if to seal off this terrible sight from the world, the priests instinctively slammed shut the golden doors, barring and bolting them tight. Behind the curtain the shadows slashed and cleaved, and the blood of a victim long since dead spattered the fabric like mud droplets thrown by a chariot’s churning wheels. The priests watched in stunned silence, as if observing some bizarre religious rite, a sacrifice of particular savagery, and had no forewarning when the loudest knock ever heard in the kingdom came at the barred double doors.

Startled, the priests turned toward the sound, as did Imhotep and Anck-su-namun, their bloody blades poised in midair, dripping red.

“They’ve come,” Imhotep whispered.

“The Med-jai,” Anck-su-namun breathed, terror in her face.

The bare feet of Seti’s bodyguards, as they’d finally caught up with their king, had kept their approach secret, behind those massive locked doors; but now—responding to their master’s screams—they were ramming the doors with their shoulders.

“Pharaoh’s guards!” a priest cried to Imhotep, and the doors again shuddered under the relentless onslaught of human battering rams.

The eyes of the lovers—Imhotep, the high priest, and Anck-su-namun, the royal mistress—locked in sudden desperation, as if the realization of what they had done had finally dawned upon them. They looked down, as if seeing for the first time the crowned corpse in the pooled blood at their feet.

Then a priest of Osiris was at Imhotep’s side, respectfully but urgently saying, “My lord, they will be upon us. Come!”

“No . . .”

But then two more of his priests were upon him, and the three of them seized their master, pulling him toward the balcony, where a one-story drop led the way to escape. Imhotep, teeth bared, howling his displeasure, did his best to extract himself from their well-meaning but infuriating grasp, straining at their combined strength, and as he struggled, someone reached out and plucked the blood-streaked sword from his hand.

Anck-su-namun.

Tall and slender though she was, she seemed small, delicate, with the massive sword in one hand; but she had surprising strength when she used her other hand to shove the momentarily slack Imhotep, taking with him the trio of priests he’d been struggling with, onto the balcony.

Again shoulders slammed into the double doors, the thunder of an approaching storm.

“You must go, my love,” she said, quietly but firmly. “You must save yourself.”

Again Imhotep’s eyes locked with those of his beloved, and in a terrible fraction of an instant, he knew what she intended. His mouth was forming the word
No!,
even as she spoke.

“Only you can resurrect me,” she said, and the doors splintered open and the Med-jai, swords and spears raised high, poured in, eyes and teeth white in their faces, rushing toward them.

But Imhotep’s priests were dragging him onto the dark balcony when the Med-jai yanked at, and ripped aside, the curtains; one of the high priest’s would-be saviors clamped a hand over his lord’s mouth as the shadows concealed them. The pharaoh’s royal guards had their attention fixed upon their fallen leader and the beautiful, sword-wielding woman who stood over the bloody slashed remains.

“My body is no longer his temple!” she snarled at them.

And as Imhotep screamed silently into the palm of his protector, Anck-su-namun turned the sword on herself, both hands on its hilt, and plunged the blade into her heart.

Now—forty days and nights later, the mummification process of Anck-su-namun’s remains complete—Imhotep stood under the starry sky in the flickering orange light of torches, in the company of Nubian slaves and Pharaoh’s soldiers and his own priests of Osiris, under the wary gaze of the Med-jai high on surrounding dunes, and read from
The Book of Amun Ra,
intoning the sacred incantation of damnation over the linen-wrapped body of his beloved . . .

And the massive metal book held open in Imhotep’s hands began to emanate a golden glow, as if the sun were rising from its pages; like golden lightning it flashed, sending the muscular black slaves to their knees like whimpering children.

Washed in the golden glow, as if the book in his hands were aflame, Imhotep, his voice a rumbling emotionless baritone, continued the fearsome incantation.

And now the golden lightning was accompanied by an impossible wind which whipped at the clothing of those gathered around the mummified mistress, and soldiers who had fought in ferocious battles now cringed like frightened children, hiding behind their shields as their skirts fluttered in a wind that caused not a grain of sand to shift.

Imhotep, unaffected by the lightning and the wind, read on, uttering the ghastly malediction as his faithful priests—holding their white cats in front of them ceremonially—remained as calm and unaffected by the lightning flashes of gold and the lashing wind as their high priest himself seemingly was.

As Imhotep neared the final words of the incantation, the linen-wrapped mummy began to tremble, as if coming back to life. As gold lightning intermittently flashed, a whirlpool of wind seemed to find the woman’s body and, at first slowly, then with dramatic quickness, raised her into the air. The eyes of the terrified slaves, the frightened soldiers, the calm priests, followed her ascent, watching mesmerized as the mummified woman floated there, eerily, Imhotep’s deep voice rumbling through the concluding passage.

Then, in one last all-pervasive golden flash, and a blast of wind that should have (but did not) created a sandstorm, the mummy fell back to earth, where Anck-su-namun’s remains suddenly revealed themselves as no longer shapely, but shriveled, twisted, and grotesque, as if even the final few vestiges of beauty had been siphoned from her.

Silence draped the desert like a suffocating cloak. No wind. No one spoke as the priests of Osiris gathered up the gnarled mummy and deposited it in the wooden coffin; the canopic jars were placed within the box as well before the lid was shut. The Nubians carted the coffin to the grave and dropped it in, then began shoveling sand in on top of it with their hands. On the surrounding dunes, many of the Med-jai turned and drifted away into the night, satisfied, apparently, that their late master had been avenged. Anck-su-namun would soon be in the underworld, her soul devoured.

When the sand had been smoothed over, the grave disappearing into the desert floor, the Nubian slaves looked toward Imhotep for their next order. But the next order Imhotep issued was not for the slaves . . .

The high priest nodded to the soldiers, who raised their spears and hurled them at the Nubians, whose cries of pain and surprise broke the unearthly silence. Within seconds the area was littered with the dead, sand stained dark with blood.