Testament, p.38
Testament, page 38
‘We can’t afford to wait, you know that,’ Piay said. ‘Now that the Eye of Horus and Disc of Ra are back in our possession, the Sons of Apis will once again see us as enemies.’
‘Don’t forget the Cobra,’ Hannu muttered. ‘He won’t hold back, not now that he’s so close to his prize.’
Ankhu stepped out of the shadows of the Valley Temple, which would once have greeted Khufu’s priests as they made preparations to receive the royal body. Piay had heard the scribe’s rhythmic chanting roll out from the open courtyard in the centre of the temple. Spells of protection, Piay hoped.
‘Everything is ready,’ the scribe said, his voice heavy with foreboding. ‘I have told you all that you need to know of the tunnels and chambers within the tomb. Are you prepared for what lies ahead?’
‘Yes,’ Piay replied.
‘No,’ Hannu said.
‘Heed my warning,’ Ankhu said. ‘Do not venture into the lowest region of the pyramid. Go up.’
Piay eyed Hannu, still wondering if he could trust Ankhu’s intentions.
Ankhu muttered another prayer and then he stepped aside and swept out one arm, ushering them on a journey to the threshold of the afterlife.
For a while Piay and Hannu walked in silence, with only the sizzle of their torches to accompany them.
‘Myssa will not thank you for making her a captive,’ Hannu said, speaking as a means of distracting his mind and keeping the fears that lurked there at bay.
‘The Blue Crocodile Guards will treat her like a queen, at least,’ Piay said. ‘Left unguarded, she would be away like an ibis on the wing.’
And I would never see her again, he thought.
Was he wrong to deny Myssa her freedom? It was certainly going to make it harder to win back her affections.
‘You’re still planning to give her the blue lotus pellets your father gave you?’
‘When we return to Memphis and it’s easier to watch over her.’
Piay dreamed of holding Myssa in his arms again, of everything being as it once was. He would never take her for granted again.
An angry shout rang out from the labourers’ camp. Another voice roared in opposition. A fight was brewing.
Hannu looked towards the jumble of shelters.
‘Things haven’t gone well while you’ve been away.’
‘The men were bound to lose their discipline without Adon to crack his whip.’
‘It is more than that. The caravan bringing supplies from Memphis has not arrived for two days now. There are empty bellies, and a hungry man is an angry man.’
Piay sighed. ‘I can’t say I am surprised. Feeding mouths is not a priority for Zahur or Harrar. I can just imagine them deciding to stop the caravans.’
‘Or it could be corrupt merchants and officials, taking the money that was meant to be spent on supplies and keeping it for themselves instead.’
‘Maybe the mule-drivers had heard about the Hyksos’ attack, and refused to come out here,’ Piay said. ‘No point worrying about that now. Just concentrate on the task in hand.’
To their left, the ghostly outlines of the mastabas appeared out of the dark, the mud-brick buildings that would have been the final resting place of dignitaries during Khufu’s time. Beyond them, a line of three smaller pyramids crouched like children in the shadow of a stern father.
By one of the mastabas, Bast was waiting for them. Piay shook his head.
‘That cat!’
‘Leave it be. Cats come and go.’
‘Not like this one,’ Piay muttered.
He eyed Bast as he passed, but she only licked her paw and began grooming herself. He hoped it was an omen of a successful night to come. The lioness goddess watched over her own.
They passed through the Mortuary Temple, where Khufu’s cult would have drained the blood of beasts in his name. The black basalt flooring under their feet seemed as if the night sky had been brought down to earth.
And then they were standing at the foot of that towering wall of stone.
‘One thing you should remember – Myssa returned to the land of the living . . . and we are following in her footsteps.’
They clambered up the crumbling rows of blocks until they reached the entrance Ankhu had shown them. Piay dragged back the covering stone. He looked up at the stars, searching for the Four Sons of Horus, and then he stepped over the threshold into the unknown.
H
annu glanced over his shoulder time and again as they edged along the passage. The strange echoes of that narrow space made it seem as if another set of footsteps was following them into the heart of the tomb.
Never had Piay been in such a disorientating place. His own whispers floated back to him from the dark ahead, as if he was standing there, waiting for himself to arrive. The stone pressed in hard on either side, choking the spirit so that Piay felt as if he were in his own grave. He breathed in air so dry it burned his throat. All he could smell was the dusty odour of stone.
Ankhu had warned them that the place was a labyrinth. But it was the other warning that still troubled him: the scribe’s insistence that Piay should not descend deep into the bedrock beneath the pyramid where, by all accounts, an unfinished chamber waited. It was a trap, Ankhu had said, and Piay would never return if he visited that place. The only way was up. But that advice seemed to be the opposite of what Imhotep intended. Piay wondered once again if Ankhu was trying to deflect them from where the next sign lay or, worse, send them to their doom so that he could claim the reward.
‘Myssa’s footprints,’ Hannu said.
He lowered the torch so Piay could see the tracks in the dust.
‘Then we follow them,’ Piay replied.
As they pushed on in the wavering pale gold light of the torches, Piay took whatever small comforts he could. Everywhere he looked there were signs of the robbers who had broken into the tomb in times long gone – tunnels carved through the vast blocks of stone of the original construction, side passages to avoid the many obstructions the original builders had put in place to keep the king’s riches safe.
No old bones littered that place. No blood had seeped into the stone. Those robbers had, like Myssa, escaped with their lives. That, at least, was some small comfort.
‘Hold it,’ Hannu raised a hand to bring Piay to a halt.
When he waved his torch, the dark flew away from the sputtering flames to reveal a junction with a passage descending into the gloom and another ascending.
‘That way to the trap that Ankhu warned us about,’ Piay said, pointing down.
‘Or the way to the truth,’ Hannu said.
‘Which way do Myssa’s footprints go?’
‘They’ve vanished. The dust is thinner here. Hang on . . .’
Hannu took a few more paces forward and got down on his haunches to look at the passage floor. He turned his head back to look up at Piay.
‘More prints, and they’re heading up,’ he said. ‘But these aren’t Myssa’s. They’re larger . . . a man.’
‘Then someone else was in here.’
‘Or still is.’
Piay’s eyes darted back and forth from the footprints in the rising passage to the tunnel leading down into the dark. Should he trust Ankhu or not, knowing full well this could be a matter of life and death?
He turned the decision over in his head, then told himself to rely on his instinct.
‘We go up.’
As they moved upwards, Piay took one last glance back down the tunnel into the depths, and wished he hadn’t. Something appeared to be waiting there, just beyond the edge of the torchlight – a dark bulk, hunched in readiness.
Just your imagination, he told himself.
But he could not forget what the texts said waited in the next stage of the journey through the underworld: a monstrous serpent that threatened to dismember whoever dared venture there.
‘Pick up your step,’ he said to Hannu, trying to keep his voice steady and bright. ‘No point wasting time. The sooner we’re done, the sooner we can return to the land of the living.’
Piay’s lips puckered in that arid air and the dust tasted bitter on his tongue. When he breathed in, he felt that dryness seep deep into his lungs. The light did not seem bright enough to keep the dark at bay.
His heart thumped faster as he thought of the mountain of stone above his head, pressing down upon him. And there he was, crushed in such a narrow passage that his shoulders almost brushed both walls and he had to stoop to avoid bumping his head on the low ceiling.
Was this how it would feel in his own tomb at the end of his days? Would he finally meet the gods themselves when they guided his soul through the afterlife?
His skin tingled and he ground to a halt. In the bubble of light from his torch, he half-turned, his shoulders dragging across the bare stone. He could not tell if it was his imagination, but he felt convinced he had heard something – something that sounded like nails being dragged along the wall.
A chill settled deep inside him. Piay cocked his head, straining to listen, though a part of him did not want to know if anyone was there. He could not throw off the vision of that thing swathed by the gloom in the descending passage.
The silence swallowed him, so intense he felt like he was drowning in it. The more he forced himself to listen, the more the blood pounded in his head, making it impossible for him to hear anything.
Finally, Piay could not bear to wait there any longer. He turned back, and only then did he realise he was alone.
Lost to his own thoughts, Hannu must have pushed on ahead.
Cursing his friend for moving so fast, Piay clawed his way up the slope into the gloom. His knuckles ached from gripping the torch so hard; he was afraid that if he dropped it the light would vanish and the dark would rush in to claim him.
His ragged breathing echoed in that suffocating space.
Piay began to wonder if Ankhu’s information had been wrong – after all, the scribe had not been within the great monument himself, and was only passing on stories that had been handed down through the generations.
What if these passages were designed to confuse the unwary, like the ones that existed beneath Djoser’s pyramid? He could be trapped there until he drew his last breath.
The torchlight flickered past the constricting space to reveal the vast, steeply ascending passageway that Ankhu said led to the tomb where Khufu’s mummy would have been laid to rest. But in front of him was a much narrower horizontal passage to a smaller chamber. That was where he would need to explore first.
And still no sign of Hannu, not even the scrape of a leather sole upon stone.
Crouching down, Piay pushed himself into the small passage. His mouth was numb now from the bitter dust, and he felt as if his throat had constricted so that it was no wider than his little finger. He could not seem to draw in enough air to fill his lungs.
Piay scrambled on into the gloom. The light barely reached an arm’s length ahead of him.
Finally, he crawled out into the small chamber. The golden glow rushed up the walls to the ceiling, and for the first time in what seemed like an age he could stand upright.
The room was bare. Perhaps once it would have been filled to the brim with everything the king needed to sustain him in the afterlife, but the space did not seem large enough to contain such sumptuous riches.
Creeping into the centre of the chamber, Piay looked around.
Where should I begin?
Once again he thought of Imhotep, and Taita, and he tried to imagine what his master would have done if he was preparing a ritual path to test the wisdom of those who came after him.
The more Piay thought, the more his head ached. He wished Myssa was there – even Ankhu. And then he remembered what the scribe had said about Imhotep drawing the connection between the heavens and the earth. Was that why the scribe had urged him to take the upper path, that pointed towards the sky and the home of the gods, rather than the path that led away from it?
Swinging up the torch, he swept the light across the low ceiling. Pulling the Eye of Horus from the pouch, Piay steadied it in front of the brand until the pure white light blasted out.
Fiery tracings blazed across the stone and his heart leaped. His reasoning had been correct once again. Perhaps he was not as dull-witted as he thought.
The etching revealed the bed-shaped symbol pt – sky or heaven. Piay frowned. What could this mean? The sky, as everyone knew, was an ocean across which the dead sailed to the afterlife.
Piay searched on, and the shifting glow revealed another symbol beneath that one. It was a single stroke – I. One.
One step had been taken along Imhotep’s path into the eternal dark. Piay sucked in a wheezing gulp of that tainted air, trying to stay calm.
‘Turn you not around.’
Piay’s heart hammered. The voice had been barely more than a whisper just behind his left shoulder. His hand crept to the knife hidden in his kilt.
‘Turn you not around. You must not look upon my visage.’
The voice was like the desert breeze stirring the sand on a moonlit night. The tone was not unkind or threatening, Piay thought.
‘Khonsu?’ he murmured.
‘There is great danger for you here. You must not tarry any longer than you need to, for if you do, you will be lost forever.’
Piay felt his thoughts shift in an odd way, as they did when he had swilled too much wine.
Then he heard the god whisper, ‘What part you play in these unfolding events will decide the way of all things. You must not fail.’
Once again, Piay thought of a great struggle taking place among the gods, acted out upon the earth with agents of the deities’ choosing. He had accepted his role as Khonsu’s emissary in these matters. He had thought Seth had chosen Akkan, but now it seemed the Cobra was the one to whom he should really have been paying attention.
Yet there was something in those hoarse words that troubled him. The outcome of this war seemed to be hanging in the balance. Could it really be that his own actions would echo forever?
Piay felt a breath on the back of his neck.
‘When the time comes, only water will keep the fire at bay.’
‘What does that mean?’ Piay breathed.
He waited for what seemed an age, but no reply came. Steeling himself, he glanced back into the darkness. The presence that had been there had departed.
There was no time to waste. Piay scrambled back into the cramped passage and hauled his way along until he reached the junction.
The torch crackled lower. It was slowly burning itself out. Yet there was still enough light to see by. The ascending passageway from this point was grander than any other he had seen, the magnificence no doubt designed to catch the breath on the approach to the king’s tomb. Piay raised the brand higher and marvelled at a vaulted roof of such fine workmanship that it reminded him of the temple in Thebes. Yet this one had been constructed a thousand years ago.
A cough bubbled up, and then another. Piay tried to stifle them, in case he alerted some other denizen of the dark, but the dust had reached deep into his chest.
As the echoes died away, he felt sure he heard the sound of footsteps behind him.
Piay hurled himself up the passageway, his free hand clutching at the wall to pull himself on.
At the summit of the passage, he stared down a short corridor. A few steps further on, he slipped into the chamber that had been set aside for the king’s mummy. Like the smaller chamber, it was bare except for a large stone sarcophagus with the lid cracked and half slid off.
Piay breathed in to steady himself, and then leaned over the gap. To his relief, the brand’s dancing light showed that the sarcophagus was empty. Those grave robbers must have even stolen Khufu’s mummy, though what good that would do them, he had no idea. Were they not afraid of being cursed? Or was it, as Ankhu had suggested, that no remains had ever been interred? Could this entire edifice have just been part of Imhotep’s plan to reach across the ages?
Piay turned in an arc, letting the glow kiss the walls. Blocks of granite lined the chamber, which was coldly austere in its design. Fine particles of dust floated in the shimmering light. But the torch was dimming rapidly.
He cocked his head to listen, and once he was satisfied that the footsteps had not followed him, he lowered the torch to illuminate the flagstones.
Fresh footprints ended just inside the entrance, next to his own trail. Hannu had been in there, by the looks of it.
Once again, Piay brought the Eye of Horus and the brand close to the stone over his head. This time he found the mark II first – the second of Imhotep’s signs. Above it, the brilliant light revealed two engraved stars and above them the ankh, the key of life.
There was no time to muse on the meaning – that would come later, when they had found safety.
The glow of the torch had shrunk down to a small globe of light, gradually turning ruddy.
The dark started to close in.
Piay’s heart beat faster still and his thoughts slid back and forth. In that delirium, he felt sure he could hear the footsteps approaching again, heavy and methodical, this time accompanied by the sound of a body dragging itself along the wall and the rasping of breath, like a bull preparing to attack.
Piay felt the first sparks of panic lick into a flame inside him. But he knew what he had to do.
He crushed the torch against the wall, extinguishing it in a shower of sparks. The all-consuming dark engulfed him.
Feeling around, Piay’s fingers caught on the edge of the sarcophagus. His legs trembled in a blaze of dread.
Heaving himself up, he slid under the half-removed lid and into the sarcophagus.
In that confined space, Piay thought he might go mad. He was lying in a grave, half-expecting Khufu to descend on him in fury. At the very least, he would be cursed.
Whatever was in the dark stepped into the chamber.
Piay heard footsteps thump upon the flagstones and he felt sure the very sarcophagus shook. He clamped a hand over his mouth to stifle any sound of his breath.
