“How about once?” he said.
Koomi chewed his fingernails distractedly.
“Fire,” he said. “That’d stop them. They’re very inflammable. Or water. They’d probably dissolve.”
“Some of them were destroying
pyramids
,” said the high priest of Juf, the Cobra-Headed God of Papyrus.
“People always come back from the dead in such a bad temper,” said another priest.
Koomi watched the approaching army in mounting bewilderment.
“Where’s Dios?” he said.
The old high priest was pushed to the front of the crowd.
“What shall I say to them?” Koomi demanded.
It would be wrong to say that Dios smiled. It wasn’t an action he often felt called upon to perform. But his mouth creased at the edges and his eyes went half-hooded.
“You could tell them,” he said, “that new times demand new men. You could tell them that it is time to make way for younger people with fresh ideas. You could tell them that they are outmoded. You could tell them all that.”
“They’ll kill me!”
“Would they be that anxious for your eternal company, I wonder?”
“You’re still high priest!”
“Why don’t you talk to them?” said Dios. “Don’t forget to tell them that they are to be dragged kicking and screaming into the Century of the Cobra.” He handed Koomi the staff. “Or whatever this century is called,” he added.
Koomi felt the eyes of the assembled brethren and sistren upon him. He cleared his throat, adjusted his robe, and turned to face the mummies.
They were chanting something, one word, over and over again. He couldn’t quite make it out, but it seemed to have worked them up into a rage.
He raised the staff, and the carved wooden snakes looked unusually alive in the flat light.
The gods of the Disc—and here is meant the great consensus gods, who really do exist in Dunmanifestin, their semi-detached Valhalla on the world’s impossibly high central mountain, where they pass the time observing the petty antics of mortal men and organizing petitions about how the influx of the Ice Giants has lowered property values in the celestial regions—the gods of Disc have always been fascinated by humanity’s incredible ability to say exactly the wrong thing at the wrong time.
They’re not talking here of such easy errors as “It’s perfectly safe,” or “The ones that growl a lot don’t bite,” but of simple little sentences which are injected into difficult situations with the same general effect as a steel bar dropped into the bearings of a 3,000 rpm, 660 megawatt steam turbine.
And connoisseurs of mankind’s tendency to put his pedal extremity where his tongue should be are agreed that when the judges’ envelopes are opened then Hoot Koomi’s fine performance in “Begone from this place, foul shades” will be a contender for all-time bloody stupid greeting.
The front row of ancestors halted, and were pushed forward a little by the press of those behind.
King Teppicymon XXVII, who by common consent among the other twenty-six Teppicymons was spokesman, lurched on alone and picked up the trembling Koomi by his arms.
“What did you say?” he said.
Koomi’s eyes rolled. His mouth opened and shut, but his voice wisely decided not to come out.
Teppicymon pushed his bandaged face close to the priest’s pointed nose.
“I remember you,” he growled. “I’ve seen you oiling around the place. A bad hat, if ever I saw one. I remember thinking that.”
He glared around at the others.
“You’re all priests, aren’t you? Come to say sorry, have you?
Where’s Dios
?”
The ancestors pressed forward, muttering. When you’ve been dead for hundreds of years, you’re not inclined to feel generous to those people who assured you that you were going to have a lovely time. There was a scuffle in the middle of the crowd as King Psam-nut-kha, who had spent five thousand years with nothing to look at but the inside of a lid, was restrained by younger colleagues.
Teppicymon switched his attention back to Koomi, who hadn’t gone anywhere.
“Foul shades, was it?” he said.
“Er,” said Koomi.
“Put him down.” Dios gently took the staff from Koomi’s unresisting fingers and said, “I am Dios, the high priest. Why are you here?”
It was a perfectly calm and reasonable voice, with overtones of concerned but indubitable authority. It was a tone of voice the pharaohs of Djelibeybi had heard for thousands of years, a voice which had regulated the days, prescribed the rituals, cut the time into carefully-turned segments, interpreted the ways of gods to men. It was the sound of authority, which stirred antique memories among the ancestors and caused them to look embarrassed and shuffle their feet.
One of the younger pharaohs lurched forward.
“You bastard,” he croaked. “You laid us out and shut us away, one by one, and you went on. People thought the name was passed on but it was always
you
. How
old
are you, Dios?”
There was no sound. No one moved. A breeze stirred the dust a little.
Dios sighed.
“I did not mean to,” he said. “There was so much to do. There were never enough hours in the day. Truly, I did not realize what was happening. I thought it was refreshing, nothing more, I suspected nothing. I noted the passing of the rituals, not the years.”
“Come from a long-lived family, do you?” said Teppicymon sarcastically.
Dios stared at him, his lips moving. “Family,” he said at last, his voice softened from its normal bark. “Family. Yes. I must have had a family, mustn’t I. But, you know, I can’t remember. Memory is the first thing that goes. The pyramids don’t seem to preserve it, strangely.”
“This is Dios, the footnote-keeper of history?” said Teppicymon.
“Ah.” The high priest smiled. “Memory goes from the head. But it is all around me. Every scroll and book.”
“That’s the history of the kingdom, man!”
“Yes. My memory.”
The king relaxed a little. Sheer horrified fascination was unravelling the knot of fury.
“How old are you?” he said.
“I think…seven thousand years. But sometimes it seems much longer.”
“
Really
seven thousand years?”
“Yes,” said Dios.
“How could any man stand it?” said the king.
Dios shrugged.
“Seven thousand years is just one day at a time,” he said.
Slowly, with the occasional wince, he got down on one knee and held up his staff in shaking hands.
“O kings,” he said, “I have always existed only to serve.”
There was a long, extremely embarrassed pause.
“We will destroy the pyramids,” said Far-re-ptah, pushing forward.
“You will destroy the kingdom,” said Dios. “I cannot allow it.”
“
You cannot allow it
?”
“Yes. What will we be without the pyramids?” said Dios.
“Speaking for the dead,” said Far-re-ptah, “we will be free.”
“But the kingdom will be just another small country,” said Dios, and to their horror the ancestors saw tears in his eyes. “All that we hold dear, you will cast adrift in time. Uncertain. Without guidance.
Changeable
.”
“Then it can take its chances,” said Teppicymon. “Stand aside, Dios.”
Dios held up his staff. The snake around it uncoiled and hissed at the king.
“Be still,” said Dios.
Dark lightning crackled between the ancestors. Dios stared at the staff in astonishment; it had never done this before. But seven thousand years of his priests had believed, in their hearts, that the staff of Dios could rule this world and the next.
In the sudden silence there was the faint chink, high up, of a knife being wedged between two black marble slabs.
The pyramid pulsed under Teppic, and the marble was as slippery as ice. The inward slope wasn’t the help he had expected.
The thing, he told himself, is not to look up or down, but straight ahead, into the marble, parcelling the impossible height into manageable sections. Just like time. That’s how we survive infinity—we kill it by breaking it up into small bits.
He was aware of shouts below him, and glanced briefly over his shoulder. He was barely a third of the way up, but he could see the crowds across the river, a gray mass speckled with the pale blobs of upturned faces. Closer to, the pale army of the dead, facing the small gray group of priests, with Dios in front of them. There was some sort of argument going on.
The sun was on the horizon.
He reached up, located the next crack, found a handhold…
Dios spotted Ptaclusp’s head peering over the debris, and sent a couple of priests to bring him back. IIb followed, his carefully folded brother under his arm.
“What is the boy doing?” Dios demanded.
“O Dios, he said he was going to flare off the pyramid,” said Ptaclusp.
“How can he do that?”
“O lord, he says he is going to cap it off before the sun sets.”
“Is it possible?” Dios demanded, turning to the architect, IIb hesitated.
“It may be,” he said.
“And what will happen? Will we return to the world outside?”
“Well, it depends on whether the dimensional effect ratchets, as it were, and is stable in each state, or if, on the contrary, the pyramid is acting as a piece of rubber under tension—”
His voice stuttered to a halt under the intensity of Dios’s stare.
“I don’t know,” he admitted.
“Back to the world outside,” said Dios. “Not our world. Our world is the Valley. Ours is a world of order. Men need order.”
He raised his staff.
“That’s my son!” shouted Teppicymon. “Don’t you dare try anything! That’s the king!”
The ranks of ancestors swayed, but couldn’t break the spell.
“Er, Dios,” said Koomi.
Dios turned, his eyebrows raised.
“You spoke?” he said.
“Er, if it
is
the king, er I—that is, we—think perhaps you should let him get on with it. Er, don’t you think that would be a really good idea?”
Dios’s staff kicked, and the priests felt the cold bands of restraint freeze their limbs.
“I gave my life for the kingdom,” said the high priest. “I gave it over and over again. Everything it is, I created. I cannot fail it now.”
And then he saw the gods.
Teppic eased himself up another couple of feet and then gently reached down to pull a knife out of the marble. It wasn’t going to work, though. Knife climbing was for those short and awkward passages, and frowned on anyway because it suggested you’d chosen a wrong route. It wasn’t for this sort of thing, unless you had unlimited knives.
He glanced over his shoulder again as strange barred shadows flickered across the face of the pyramid.
From out of the sunset, where they had been engaged in their eternal squabbling, the gods were returning.
They staggered and lurched across the fields and reed beds, heading for the pyramid. Near-brainless though they were, they understood what it was. Perhaps they even understood what Teppic was trying to do. Their assorted animal faces made it hard to be certain, but it looked as though they were very angry.
“Are you going to control them, Dios?” said the king. “Are you going to tell them that the world should be changeless?”
Dios stared up at the creatures jostling one another as they waded the river. There were too many teeth, too many lolling tongues. The bits of them that were human were sloughing away. A lion headed god of justice—Put, Dios recalled the name—was using its scales as a flail to beat one of the river gods. Chefet, the Dog-Headed God of metalwork, was growling and attacking his fellows at random with his hammer; this was Chefet, Dios thought, the god that he had created to be an example to men in the art of wire and filigree and small beauty.
Yet it had worked. He’d taken a desert rabble and shown them all he could remember of the arts of civilization and the secrets of the pyramids. He’d needed gods then.
The trouble with gods is that after enough people start believing in them, they begin to exist. And what begins to exist isn’t what was originally intended.
Chefet, Chefet, thought Dios. Maker of rings, weaver of metal. Now he’s out of our heads, and see how his nails grow into claws…
This is
not
how I imagined him.
“Stop,” he instructed. “I order you to stop! You will obey me. I made you!”
They also lack gratitude.
King Teppicymon felt the power around him weaken as Dios turned all his attention to ecclesiastical matters. He saw the tiny shape halfway up the wall of the pyramid, saw it falter.
The rest of the ancestors saw it, too, and as one corpse they knew what to do. Dios could wait.
This was family.
Teppic heard the snap of the handle under his foot, slid a little, and hung by one hand. He’d got another knife in above him but…no, no good. He hadn’t got the reach. For practical purposes his arms felt like short lengths of wet rope. Now, if he spread-eagled himself as he slid, he might be able to slow enough…
He looked down and saw the climbers coming toward him, in a tide that was tumbling
upward
.
The ancestors rose up the face of the pyramid silently, like creepers, each new row settling into position on the shoulders of the generation beneath, while the younger ones climbed on over them. Bony hands grabbed Teppic as the wave of edificeers broke around him, and he was half-pushed, half-pulled up the sloping wall. Voices like the creak of sarcophagi filled his ears, moaning encouragement.
“Well done, boy,” groaned a crumbling mummy, hauling him bodily onto its shoulder. “You remind me of me when I was alive. To you, son.”
“Got him,” said the corpse above, lifting Teppic easily on one outstretched arm. “That’s a fine family spirit, lad. Best wishes from your great-great-great-great uncle, although I don’t suppose you remember me. Coming
up
.”
Other ancestors were climbing on past Teppic as he rose from hand to hand. Ancient fingers with a grip like steel clutched at him, hoisting him onward.
The pyramid grew narrower.
Down below, Ptaclusp watched thoughtfully.
“What a workforce,” he said. “I mean, the ones at the bottom are supporting the whole weight!”