The edge of satisfaction in her voice made it clear that it was a one-way trip.
Koomi shivered with delight and horror. Oh, yes. Those were the days. Some countries had experimented with the idea of the sacrificial king, long ago. A few years of feasting and ruling, then chop—and make way for a new administration.
“In a time of crisis, possibly any high-born minister of state would suffice,” she went on.
Dios looked up, his face mirroring the agony of his tendons.
“I
see
” he said. “And who would be high priest then?”
“The gods would choose,” said Koomi.
“I daresay they would,” said Dios sourly. “I am in some doubt as to the wisdom of their choice.”
“The dead can speak to the gods in the Netherworld,” said the priestess.
“But the gods are all
here
,” said Dios, fighting against the throbbing in his legs, which were insisting that, at this time, they should be walking along the central corridor en route to supervise the Rite of the Under Sky. His body cried out for the solace over the river. And once over the river, never to return…but he’d always said that.
“In the absence of the king the high priest performs his duties. Isn’t that right, Dios?” said Koomi.
It was. It was written. You couldn’t rewrite it, once it was written. He’d written it. Long ago.
Dios hung his head. This was worse than plumbing, this was worse than anything. And yet, and yet…to go across the river…
“Very well, then,” he said. “I have one final request.”
“Yes?” Koomi’s voice had timber now, it was already a high priest’s voice.
“I wish to be interred in the—” Dios began, and was cut off by a murmur from those priests who could look out across the river. All eyes turned to the distant, inky shore.
The legions of the kings of Djelibeybi were on the march.
They lurched, but they covered the ground quickly. There were platoons, battalions of them. They didn’t need Gern’s hammer anymore.
“It’s the pickle,” said the king, as they watched half-a-dozen ancestors mummyhandle a seal out of its socket. “It toughens you up.”
Some of the more ancient were getting over-enthusiastic and attacking the pyramids themselves, actually managing to shift blocks higher than they were. The king didn’t blame them. How terrible to be dead, and know you were dead, and locked away in the darkness.
They’re never going to get me in one of those things, he vowed.
At last they came, like a tide, to yet another pyramid. It was small, low, dark, half-concealed in drifted sands, and the blocks were hardly even masonry; they were no more than roughly squared boulders. It had clearly been built long before the Kingdom got the hang of pyramids. It was barely more than a pile.
Hacked into the doorseal, angular and deep, were the hieroglyphs of the Ur Kingdom: K
HUFT HAD ME
M
ADE
. T
HE
F
IRST
.
Several ancestors clustered around it.
“Oh, dear,” said the king. “This might be going too far.”
“The First,” whispered Dil. “The First into the Kingdom. No one here before but hippos and crocodiles. From inside that pyramids seventy centuries look out at us. Older than anything—”
“Yes, yes, all right,” said Teppicymon. “No need to get carried away. He was a man, just like all of us.”
“‘And Khuft the camel herder looked upon the valley…’” Dil began.
“After seven thousand yeares, he wyll be wantyng to look upon yt again,” said Ashk-ur-men-tep bluntly.
“Even so,” said the king. “It
does
seem a bit…”
“The dead are equal,” said Ashk-ur-men-tep. “You, younge manne. Calle hym forth.”
“Who, me?” said Gern. “But he was the Fir—”
“Yes, we’ve been through all that,” said Teppicymon. “Do it. Everyone’s getting impatient. So is he, I expect.”
Gern rolled his eyes, and hefted the hammer. Just as it was about to hiss down on the seal Dil darted forward, causing Gern to dance wildly across the ground in a groin-straining effort to avoid interring the hammer in his master’s head.
“It’s open!” said Dil. “Look! The seal just swings aside!”
“Youe meane he iss
oute
?”
Teppicymon tottered forward and grabbed the door of the pyramid. It moved quite easily. Then he examined the stone beneath it. Derelict and half-covered though it was, someone had taken care to keep a pathway clear to the pyramid. And the stone was quite worn away, as by the passage of many feet.
This was not, by the nature of things, the normal state of affairs for a pyramid. The whole point was that once you were in, you were in.
The mummies examined the worn entrance and creaked at one another in surprise. One of the very ancient ones, who was barely holding himself together, made a noise like deathwatch beetle finally conquering a rotten tree.
“What’d he say?” said Teppicymon.
The mummy of Ashk-ur-men-tep translated. “He saide yt ys Spooky,” he croaked.
The late king nodded. “I’m going in to have a look. You two live ones, you come with me.”
Dil’s face fell.
“Oh, come on, man,” snapped Teppicymon, forcing the door back. “Look,
I’m
not frightened. Show a bit of backbone. Everyone else is.”
“But we’ll need some light,” protested Dil.
The nearest mummies lurched back sharply as Gern timidly took a tinderbox out of his pocket.
“We’ll need something to burn,” said Dil. The mummies shuffled further back, muttering.
“There’s torches in here,” said Teppicymon, his voice slightly muffled. “And you can keep them away from me, lad.”
It was a small pyramid, mazeless, without traps, just a stone passage leading upward. Tremulously, expecting at any moment to see unnamed terrors leap out at them, the embalmers followed the king into a small, square chamber that smelled of sand. The roof was black with soot.
There was no sarcophagus within, no mummy case, no terror named or nameless. The center of the floor was occupied by a raised block, with a blanket and a pillow on it.
Neither of them looked particularly old. It was almost disappointing.
Gern craned to look around.
“Quite nice, really,” he said. “Comfy.”
“No,” said Dil.
“Hey, master king, look here,” said Gern, trotting over to one of the walls. “Look. Someone’s been scratching things. Look, all little lines all over the wall.”
“And this wall,” said the king, “and the floor. Someone’s been counting. Every ten have been crossed through, you see. Someone’s been counting things. Lots of things.” He stood back.
“What things?” said Dil, looking behind him.
“Very strange,” said the king. He leaned forward. “You can barely make out the inscriptions underneath.”
“Can you read it, king?” said Gern, showing what Dil considered to be unnecessary enthusiasm.
“No. It’s one of the really ancient dialects. Can’t make out a blessed hieroglyph,” said Teppicymon. “I shouldn’t think there’s a single person alive today who can read it.”
“That’s a shame,” said Gern.
“True enough,” said the king, and sighed. They stood in gloomy silence.
“So perhaps we could ask one of the dead ones?” said Gern.
“Er. Gern,” said Dil, backing away.
The king slapped the apprentice on the back, pitching him forward.
“Damn clever idea!” he said. “We’ll just go and get one of the real early ancestors. Oh.” He sagged. “That’s no good. No one will be able to understand them—”
“Gern!” said Dil, his eyes growing wider.
“No, it’s all right, king,” said Gern, enjoying the newfound freedom of thought, “because, the reason being, everyone understands
someone
, all we have to do is sort them out.”
“Bright lad. Bright lad,” said the king.
“
Gern
!”
They both looked at him in astonishment.
“You all right, master?” said Gern. “You’ve gone all white.”
“The t—” stuttered Dil, rigid with terror.
“The what, master?”
“The t—look at the t—”
“He ought to have a lie down,” said the king. “I know his sort. The artistic type. Highly strung.”
Dil took a deep breath.
“
Look at the sodding torch, Gern
!” he shouted.
They looked.
Without any fuss, turning its black ashes into dry straw, the torch was burning backward.
The Old Kingdom lay stretched out before Teppic, and it was unreal.
He looked at You Bastard, who had stuck his muzzle in a wayside spring and was making a noise like the last drop in the milkshake glass.
*
You Bastard looked real enough. There’s nothing like a camel for looking really solid. But the landscape had an uncertain quality, as if it hadn’t quite made up its mind to be there or not.
Except for the Great Pyramid. It squatted in the middle distance as real as the pin that nails a butterfly to a board. It was contriving to look extremely solid, as though it was sucking all the solidity out of the landscape into itself.
Well, he was here. Wherever here was.
How did you kill a pyramid?
And what would happen if you did?
He was working on the hypothesis that everything would snap back into place. Into the Old Kingdom’s pool of recirculated time.
He watched the gods for a while, wondering what the hell they were, and how it didn’t seem to matter. They looked no more real than the land over which they strode, about incomprehensible errands of their own. The world was no more than a dream. Teppic felt incapable of surprise. If seven fat cows had wandered by, he wouldn’t have given them a second glance.
He remounted You Bastard and rode him, sloshing gently, down the road. The fields on either side had a devastated look.
The sun was finally sinking; the gods of night and evening were prevailing over the daylight gods, but it had been a long struggle and, when you thought about all the things that would happen to it now—eaten by goddesses, carried on boats under the world, and so on—it was an odds-on chance that it wouldn’t be seen again.
No one was visible as he rode into the stable yard. You Bastard padded sedately to his stall and pulled delicately at a wisp of hay. He’d thought of something interesting about bivariant distributions.
Teppic patted him on the flank, raising another cloud, and walked up the wide steps that led to the palace proper. Still there were no guards, no servants. No living soul.
He slipped into his own palace like a thief in the day, and found his way to Dil’s workshop. It was empty, and looked as though a robber with very peculiar tastes had recently been at work in there. The throne room smelled like a kitchen, and by the looks of it the cooks had fled in a hurry.
The gold mask of the kings of Djelibeybi, slightly buckled out of shape, had rolled into a corner. He picked it up and, on a suspicion, scratched it with one of his knives. The gold peeled away, exposing a sliver-gray gleam.
He’d suspected that. There simply wasn’t that much gold around. The mask felt as heavy as lead because, well, it
was
lead. He wondered if it had ever been all gold, and which ancestor had done it, and how many pyramids it had paid for. It was probably very symbolic of something or other. Perhaps not even symbolic
of
anything. Just symbolic, all by itself.
One of the sacred cats was hiding under the throne. It flattened its ears and spat at Teppic as he reached down to pat it. That much hadn’t changed, at least.
Still no people. He padded across to the balcony.
And there the people were, a great silent mass, staring across the river in the fading, leaden light. As Teppic watched a flotilla of boats and ferries set out from the near bank.
We ought to have been building bridges, he thought. But we said that would be shackling the river.
He dropped lightly over the balustrade onto the packed earth and walked down to the crowd.
And the full force of its belief scythed into him.
The people of Djelibeybi might have had conflicting ideas about their gods, but their belief in their kings had been unswerving for thousands of years. To Teppic it was like walking into a vat of alcohol. He felt it pouring into him until his fingertips crackled, rising up through his body until it gushed into his brain, bringing not omnipotence but the
feeling
of omnipotence, the very strong sensation that while he didn’t actually know everything, he would do soon and had done once.
It had been like this back in Ankh, when the divinity had hooked him. But that had been just a flicker. Now it had the solid power of real belief behind it.
He looked down at a rustling below him, and saw green shoots springing out of the dry sand around his feet.
Bloody hell, he thought. I really
am
a god.
This could be very embarrassing.
He shouldered his way through the press of people until he reached the riverbank and stood there in a thickening clump of corn. As the crowd caught on, those nearest fell to their knees, and a circle of reverentially collapsing people spread out from Teppic like ripples.
But I never wanted this! I just wanted to help people live more happily, with plumbing. I wanted something done about rundown inner-city areas. I just wanted to put them at their ease, and ask them how they enjoyed their lives. I thought schools might be a good idea, so they wouldn’t fall down and worship someone just because he’s got green feet.
And I wanted to do something about the architecture…
As the light drained from the sky like steel going cold the pyramid was somehow even bigger than before. If you had to design something to give the very distinct impression of mass, the pyramid was It. There was a crowd of figures around it, unidentifiable in the gray light.
Teppic looked around the prostrate crowd until he saw someone in the uniform of the palace guard.
“You, man, on your feet,” he commanded.
The man gave him a look of dread, but did stagger sheepishly upright.
“What’s going on here?”
“O king, who is the lord of—”