The Book of the Dead (29 page)

In Rome, the mummy looks up at the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. In Venice, they ride in a gondola. In Paris, they see the Eiffel tower and at a small café in the dark, Shira Klein drinks a glass of sparkling wine and the mummy sits across the table, gazing.

In London, at the factory, Shira Klein settles the bag on the desk of the managing director. He looks apologetic.

“We might have a few limbs lying around, a finger, a hand,” he says. “But it’s been at least twenty years since we’ve been able to get an entire mummy. It’s frowned upon now. That ink’s discontinued. It’s in paintings and old correspondence all over London, though, if you’d like to see it. Edward Burne-Jones buried a tube in his garden when he realized he’d been painting with the dead.”

He laughs.

Miss Klein opens the bag, and there it is, the scent of honey, white flowers, forgetfulness, heaven.

The mummy looks up at him.

“I want to be of use,” says the mummy. “I want to be painted onto canvas. I want to be written into books.”

The managing director looks flummoxed into the eyes of the mummy.

“I want to be a portrait,” says the mummy. “A portrait of my wife.”

Miss Klein looks at the director. The director smiles uncertainly. Miss Klein shakes out her long silver, black and gold hair. She smiles back at him. There are tears running down her cheeks. Her traveling suit unbuttons itself, and stretches its arms on the chair she’s sitting in.

“This is what we want,” says Shira Klein.

The mummy whispers. “Oh, I’ve loved the light.”

“We can make a batch of ink for you,” says the managing director, uncertain, bewildered, why is he doing what he’s doing? He can’t say. “The last batch of Mummy Brown.”

Now, the portrait of Shira Klein hangs in a museum in New York City. It has a creamy background, and the portrait itself is done in a chocolate-colored ink. It’s skillful, in a style unusually abstract for the time in which it was painted, crosshatched precisely, but the woman’s hair is done in messy pools of spilt ink. There are several sticky prints along the border of the paper. The ink is sweet-smelling and from across a room it can bring to mind things no one has ever seen.

Shira Klein’s mouth, the only part of the portrait that is painted in a different color, a dark red, is quirked at one corner. Around her neck, there is a strand of scarab beetles which look intriguingly alive.

Miss Klein lives in an apartment near the museum, and walks a circuit of the city every day, her hair straight and white and falling to her ankles now, a pair of red Lucite glasses balancing on her face like some kind of butterfly. She does not look her age. Her spine is straight, and her waist is encircled with her scarabs, and when she hails a taxi, she whistles in such a piercing tone that every driver in the city finds himself halted against his will.

In the room next to her gallery, the funeral portraits taken without permission from Egypt are in glass cases, these papyrus faces painted to show souls, all in a row of the dry dead, but in the room where Shira Klein’s portrait is displayed, the light bounces off the mysterious object painted into her left hand, a large carved insect, which, if looked at from a slightly sideways angle, is revealed to be a heart, the ink still wet with something sweeter and more complicated than blood.

“I am here and will come wherever you bid me.”

He sits by the door, barely noticed, barely moving, almost like one of the exhibits. But he sees them, he notices them: the French language students; the Japanese tourists; the Americans holidaymakers. The museum is thick with them. These galleries in particular heave with visitors; the living marvelling at the dead.

He sits on his chair by the door in his uniform and he watches them all flow in and out, not one of them realising the privilege they enjoy in even being allowed within her presence. They stare at the coffins and the funerary artefacts, their faces agog, but not one of them appreciates the honour they have been afforded, in being permitted to stand mere inches from an Egyptian goddess. They only see the mummy. They do not see what he sees. They do not see the woman within.

Not one of them sees him. He is old, his skin parchment thin; the colour of cedar wood. He is unimportant, his emaciated body swamped by the uniform he wears.

The tide of people ebbs and flows throughout the day, as the shadows shift and change with the passage of the sun god’s chariot across the firmament. Ra’s radiant beams penetrate the magnificent glass and steel roof of the Great Court, bars of light and shade falling across the gleaming white stone of the Reading Room rotunda. But it is not as bright, nor as clean, as the pyramids of Giza had once appeared, their gold-cased summits blazing as if on fire with the sun god’s fury, the shining white structures almost impossible to gaze upon as they reflected the splendour of the ancient kings buried within.

Never was there a sight like it, not even here, in this new Egypt, in this city of wonders; this new Heliopolis.

And then the last of the visitors are gone. A few of the other gallery attendants are the last people he sees as they pass through Room 63 on their way home. The glow beyond the roof of the Great Court fades until the stars of Nut’s body can just be seen twinkling above this unsleeping city of kings.

He is alone again. Except for her.

He rises stiffly from his seat beside the door – the entrance to the gallery so like the entrance to a tomb – his old bones aching. Just as Anubis watches over the desert cemeteries of the West Bank, so he is cast in the role of guardian of this place that is now her tomb.

With slow steps he follows his familiar route between the glass cases, reading the text printed on the display cards again (even though he has read it all a thousand times before) barely taking in what he reads, knowing every last detail by heart anyway.

His eyes linger on the ancient papyri, preserved behind layers of glass and plastic; the so-called
Book of the Dead
. In the modern world it might be considered a cartoon or even a road map to the afterlife rather than a book, as the term is understood now, although even that is changing.

Everything changes, except for her, and him.

He takes in the stylised image of a dead man as he embarks upon his journey to the Fields of Yalu, as related in the picture script of the hieroglyphs painted on the beaten papyrus with practised care. He considers how the Lady Henutmehyt began her contrasting journey into the afterlife.

And he remembers…

He had met Howard Carter once, amidst the hustle and bustle of a ferry wharf on the west bank of the Nile, the air thick with noise and flies and the stink of cow dung. He had been younger then, carrying the tomb hunter’s bags off the boat for a shilling. That had been before the discovery of the boy king’s tomb as well.

He had been younger but he had been wise as well. He had seen what was coming –Egyptology’s own gold rush was an inevitability by then. There had been only one way to ensure the Lady’s safety, to ensure that they remained protected.

And so the deal was done and the two of them had left the black land together, passing into the protective custody of the British Museum. They had never been apart in all the years since, not even when war had come to this new Egypt.

The card in the bottom of the case describes the objects within as “Four magic bricks”. But those simple words belittle the divine power that is manifested within the blue-glazed faience Djed pillar, the cooked clay figure of Anubis, the mummiform figure carved from wood and the reed lamp.

All four, acting together, keep evil influences from invading the resting place of the Lady Henutmehyt and causing the priestess’ body harm, while she sleeps the sleep of ages. These amuletic “bricks”, inscribed with the enchantments that described their function, had been placed with all due care and ceremony, at the cardinal points of Lady Henutmehyt’s tomb, in niches cut into the walls of her burial chamber, to keep the servants of Seth at bay.

He moves on, his every footfall ringing from the marble tiled floor of the chamber – the Lady Henutmehyt’s new sepulchre. He passes preserved coffin fragments, thick with funerary prayers. He passes pieces of plaster, still bearing the gesso-painted image of Osiris, king of the underworld, the first mummy, a benevolent smile on his lips, his natron-impregnated flesh as green as the papyrus fronds swaying in the breeze in the shallows of the Nile delta.

And he remembers…

The funerary temple, where the Lady’s mortal remains had been preserved for eternity, ready for her journey into the afterlife – consumed by the hungry desert. The temples where Lady Henutmehyt had given adoration to the Theban triad – Amun-Re, celestial sun-father, Mut, divine mother, and Montu, war-god and son – lost to the encroaching sands. The arid wind coming in off the desert smelled of dust and the distant campfires of the Mamluk tribesmen.

The soldiers had come through the valley, past the sleeping colossi, the white and blue of their uniforms stained a uniform ochre by the dust those rose with every regimented step they took. They had come with their guns, fighting for their own king, their pharaoh – Emperor, they called him – but
he
had seen kings come and go; entire dynasties rise and fall. They had marvelled at the sand-blown stones that rose from the desert even after all these years – so many, many years.

And then they had come with shovels and pickaxes, their new orders to save the lost kingdom of the pharaohs from the predations of the waterless wilderness. And he had joined them in reclaiming the ruins from the Seth’s desert domain.

Certain recollections shine from the fog of memory like the star-jewels that adorn Nut’s belly, or like the glitter of gold under the torches of the tomb breakers. Others are long forgotten, lost to the profligate centuries.

He moves on. Other objects resurrect other memories.

He continues his circuit of the gallery, passing skulls showing evidence of perforation of the ethmoid bone, where embalmers removed the brain of the deceased through the nose before mummification of the body began. He passes cases filled with figures of the gods carved from wood, intended to protect the mummies as they slept; another level of defence against any evil power that might seek to penetrate the tomb.

Egypt is sand and it is sacrifice, it is blood and it is honour. It is life and it is death.

And he remembers…

Aegyptus, the upper and lower kingdoms were called then. The name would remain long after the Romans left, even after the fall of Rome itself, once a city as mighty as the city that is yet to be – a new Rome, capital of a new Aegyptus.

A time of strife and division, with battle after battle, as the occupying Romans sought to cede control of the Nile nation from the Ptolemaic line, control of the country passing from one side to the other and back again. A time when Sekhmet remained well fed.

Trying times. Times when to protect the sleeping priestess he had to take another’s life, and more than once, whilst avoiding being maimed himself. Carrying out his duty for all time was a blessing the Lady Henutmehyt herself had bestowed upon him long before, but to continue down through the years in a body made useless by injury would have been an intolerable curse.

His eyes linger on the cracked, lacquered storage box. Beside it stand the four canopic jars, which in turn have been the resting place for the priestess’s lungs, liver, stomach and intestines for more than three thousand years.

On one of the boards is a photograph of a plaster painting credited as:

He remembers Thebes. It was in Thebes, in the triple-temple complex of Karnak, that he had laid eyes upon the goddess – his Lady Henutmehyt – for the first time. And the last.

How could he ever forget…?

It had been dark inside the temple, and despite the heat he had felt cold with dread. Cold with fear. His world was ending. The Lady Henutmehyt was dying.

She was no longer the beautiful young woman he had first fallen in love with, but that mattered not. What he felt for her now was beyond love. It was duty and devotion. Adoration. Adulation.

She was his sun, his sky, his world. She was his universe, his beginning and his end. Without her he was nothing, as formless as the chaos that came before creation. Nothing could exist within his world without her.

He stops and looks up into the face of the Lady Henutmehyt, preserved forever in the golden death mask that adorns her coffin still. That is how he remembers her, although she was in life more beautiful than all the gold in Nubia.

This was the face he saw when he made his promise to her. Having been her servant in life – worshipping her from afar, having her within his reach and yet forever out of reach, having loved her for so many years, watching as the sickness took hold, unable to do anything to help her – what she asked of him then was a little thing compared to what he would have done to save her, if only he had been able.

He would have given his life for her a thousand times over, so to give his death was nothing.

For one day she will complete her journey to the Fields of Yalu, when the gods see fit, and he will be waiting for her there, just as he waits with her now, ready to heed her call and do her bidding when she speaks his name again.

He puts a trembling hand to the glass as he gazes into the sightless alabaster eyes of the coffin. There are tears in his eyes, distorting his vision so that he could almost believe she is smiling at him again, the way she smiled when he pledged to serve her in death as he had done down through the long years of her life.

“I am here,” he says, his voice barely a whisper as he kisses the glass, “and will come wherever you bid me.”

The words spoken, his vow renewed, the silence of the tomb returns to the gallery. The only sound that disturbs the sombre silence is that of his footsteps as he crosses the marble floor of the Lady Henutmehyt’s sepulchre.

He takes his seat by the door once more, ready to keep watch over her tomb, as he has kept watch down through the decades, the centuries and the long millennia. As he will continue to do until Apophis swallows the sun and the world returns to a state of primordial chaos or until they are reunited once again – slave and mistress, the Lady Henutmehyt and her most devoted servant – in the kingdom of Osiris, in the city of the dead.