The Book of the Dead Read online

  He keeps wondering if something went wrong with his funeral rites. He’s sure his ka, which left his body at the moment of death, has been provided with excellent refreshment. And many spells had been written and placed to allow him to deal with the problems of the afterlife. He examined the lists himself, just days before he went to bed for what turned out to be his final sleep. There had been a great rush to get it all done. He’d only been Pharaoh for a few months before his illness, and they’d only made a small tomb as a result, but he’d been told that everything was ready. His son Seti had repeatedly assured him. But here he is, feeling like he’s still in his body, but with his body being a... well, Ramesses isn’t really comfortable thinking about that.

  His ka certainly left, because he remembers the moment of his death, him looking up at his beautiful son, and darkness moving swiftly in from the world all around his eyes. His ba, the record of his ethical efforts, is supposed to have stayed attached to his body until the correct ceremonies were performed, but there’s no way to tell if they were, because he’s as unaware of his ba now as he was in life.

  If that new High Priest got that bit wrong, then perhaps that’s why he’s more like a corpse than an akh. This is definitely not what he was expecting.

  He’s sure that whatever’s going on here, he won’t be here forever. But time does seem to be stretching on, and nothing much seems to be happening. When he was High Priest, he put the correct religion back in its rightful place. The gods owe him. So what’s the hold up?

  It’s not just himself he’s worried for. It’s his people. The nation of the river, the mirror of heaven, depends upon him completing this journey in order for others to follow. He is their ambassador. He changes the way as he passes through it. He makes it easier, like someone who stamps down reeds as they walk through a marsh. The rest of his folk who’ve died will be backed up by now for... well, who knows how long he’s been here? The halls have certainly changed during that time, but they might change continually. He walks at night, but he doesn’t know if that’s every night. He only feels it is night because the mysterious lighting is kept so low, and he has a vague awareness of there being times when it’s been brighter.

  So that’s his situation. He’s awake again tonight. He’s stuck. And he can’t find a god to complain to.

  As usual, he cautiously pulls back the lid of the casket, waits for a moment to check that there is only what passes here for silence, and climbs out. His feels the ache in his back. He sighs. He wonders if there is ever, actually, an end to pain. He sometimes thinks that’s his punishment, but it’s really not much of one, is it? And one should be aware of justice having been done to one, not just wake up in jail none the wiser. When he sent those sun worshippers running, he made damn sure they knew what was being done to them. Don’t be such cowards, he bellowed at them, Ra will be back tomorrow, and it’s the other gods you should worry about. The people applauded him and threw things at the sun worshippers as they ran from his soldiers. A great day.

  Ramesses realises he’s allowed himself to become lost in reverie. Again. This is no good. His mind is a little foggy. But maybe that’s only to be expected, considering how far he is from his organs.

  He goes for a wander.

  He walks through the vast, quiet halls, looking up once more in undiminished awe at the crystal ceiling, the flowing images that are somehow pinned to the walls, put inside frames like important declarations. This building, so reminiscent of a tomb, must be the Duat, the underground world where spirits and gods come and go, which leads to final judgment. The images on the walls are one piece of evidence that points to this theory being correct. What he’s seeing there are perhaps those caught on the way, because of his own predicament. He sees the same faces many times. They are mostly faces that are rather like those of Syrians, but paler, which is a bit weird. Perhaps that’s just who was coming across when he got here, when the system seized up. It is a little surprising that these unknown races should be involved. That they should be depending on him. But pleasing, in a way. The true religion must be true wherever you go. His river people are ahead in that regard. At least, they are now he’s gotten them back on track.

  The pale people’s clothes are bizarre. Ramesses assumes that their dream selves are being examined alongside their lives. There is no other explanation for the impossible wonders. Whoever these foreigners are, he’s pretty sure that if they could, for instance, fly by the use of machines, they would have jealously come and taken the land of the river. He shivers at the thought of how many of them there are, and how strong. He’s glad they’re dead now, and not about to invade his beloved land. But still, he’ll put in a good word for them. They seem fun.

  Ramesses moves on.

  At the end of the central chamber, there are a series of paintings, rendered to a high degree of detail, most of them oddly not in the colours of life but in blacks and silvers. Perhaps the artist only had those available. They show the great river that must be nearby, the sound of which Ramesses can sometimes hear when the halls are relatively quiet. In the pictures, souls are either in the river, or in containers placed in the river. These are very like the vases that, back in his grave, contain his own internal organs, assuming that new High Priest got that bit right. The pictures show people getting into these containers and being taken out of them. There are a few on display – just the remains of them, with no sign of the soul inside. All of them are pictured in the vicinity of a thing Ramesses has only heard of, but never previously seen: a great downward plunge of water, foam and rising mist.

  He stands there staring up at the perplexing images. What is he supposed to do? What is he missing?

  There are doors that obviously lead outside, but he has put his ear to them, and heard strange blarings and screamings every time he has done so, surely the wailings of those who haven’t been allowed into the Duat. One is not supposed to arrive in the Duat and then simply leave. If he could find just one minor god, he could indicate to them that the Pharaoh is here, and they would surely realise that something has gone wrong and remember their obligations. He would be gracious. He would say hey, mistakes happen. They’d be tripping over themselves with an urgent need to put right this terrible faux pas.

  He stops beside one of the upright walls of crystal and considers himself. He is not what he was. He looks as hollow as he feels, well, as hollow as actually, he is. His arms are used to resting across his chest now, so accustomed to the position that, whenever he gets up, he fears he will break one of them. His eyes have narrowed to slits, so he looks permanently like he’s holding in a laugh, which isn’t how he feels at all. His nose, which used to be so fine, looks like it’s been broken in a fight. His neck is thin, like that of a strangled goose. At least his temples still remind him of himself. He still has wisps of hair, pushed back from his bald patch. He touches them sometimes. They remind him of touching the head of Seti, of smelling that scalp when the kid was newborn. His own head is that soft now. All that’s left of his wrappings, so carefully prepared, are a few rags. They do not preserve his modesty. Not that he’s got much to hide. His legs are so thin it’s like walking on stilts. His hands are all knuckle. He holds one up and looks at his palm. It resembles papyrus. He is a scroll that has been filled with writing, and is now crisp out of its jar, and yet still he knows too little. No scroll knows the information it contains, he thinks. And all he wants is to be read.

  No. He wants to see Seti again. He wants to touch his hair instead of his own.

  There is a noise from behind him. He realises he has been so lost in his thoughts that he hasn’t considered the possibility of him not being alone in the halls tonight. This has happened on a couple of previous occasions. The first time he saw the lamps he wanted to stop their owners and question them about where he was and what he could do to continue, but then he saw that those carrying the lamps were of the same people he’d seen on the walls, and realised that they must share his predicament, rather than be responsible
for it, and not wishing to be weighed down by questions he could not answer, he’d avoided them. He’s done so ever since.

  But now the sound is so close that he’s not sure he can avoid it. The light from the lamp is all around him.

  He summons his regal bearing, highly aware that he is naked, and turns to see the newcomer.

  Ramesses is relieved to see that this is not someone of an unknown race who is staring at him, but a Nubian woman. Finally! Here is someone who might understand how he came to be here. Perhaps they can share information, see if any new conclusions can be drawn. Ramesses raises his hands to call for silence, but then remembers, ridiculously, that he can’t speak, that his tongue is still with his organs in their jar.

  He attempts to speak anyway. He manages to summon a sound that vibrates like breath in his chest.

  “Arrooooogghhhhhh!” he says.

  The Nubian stares at him. She’s playing that lamp in her hand up and down Ramesses’ body as if what she’s seeing might change any moment. He should tell her that in his condition that’s pretty damn unlikely.

  She finally says words that Ramesses doesn’t understand. “You better come talk to my supervisor.”

  And then, bewilderingly, she turns around and starts to walk away. To turn her back on the Pharaoh! Ramesses can’t quite take it in. In his working life he has seen comparatively few backs. He keeps his arms in the air, and repeats his opening statement, that takes such an effort of will to generate. “Arrooooogghhhhhh?!”

  The Nubian looks back over her shoulder and gestures to Ramesses with a crooked finger. He is, it seems, to follow.

  Ramesses bridles for a moment, but then decides. He won’t let pride get in the way of the first sign of progress since he got here. Putting stilt leg after stilt leg, trying to keep up with the Nubian, he follows.

  They reach a small lighted enclosure, in an area that Ramesses has never explored, because it has always been full of foreigners. “Seth?” calls the Nubian, opening the door.

  Inside the enclosure sits a Nubian man looking at unbound sheets of papyrus with the black and silver drawings on them. A greyhound sits at his feet. The dog is attached to his chair by a leather rein. It’s looking imperiously at Ramesses, and now so does Seth. “Ah,” says Seth, looking up and seeing Ramesses, “there you are. Finally.”

  Ramesses still doesn’t understand a word of what’s being said to him.

  Seth reaches beside him, picks up a walking stick, and uses it to slowly get to his feet. Ramesses recognises the walking stick. It has a slim handle and a forked base. Ramesses smiles, opens his arms. Here he is! Finally! Seth goes to a cabinet, opens it and finds something. He hands it to Ramesses. The Pharaoh peers at it. It’s a small, hard cake, with the image of a dog imprinted on it.

  Apt. Ramesses wants to indicate that he has no tongue, but he assumes that the god Seth, bearer of a Was Staff, knows that. He puts the cake in his mouth and does his best, with so little water in him, to give it a good hard suck. As he does so, Seth starts talking, with little hand gestures that seem to say that it doesn’t matter much what he’s saying...

  “... the god of foreigners, and so it’s only apt that I’m in charge of - ah, okay, now you can understand me. Great.”

  Ramesses suddenly finds that, though he still has no tongue, he can talk properly too. “Have you been here all this time, Seth?” he says. “I consecrated my son to you, and still you didn’t come to find me?”

  “It was you who didn’t come to find me.”

  Ramesses holds himself back. He’s speaking, unlike at any other time in his life or afterlife, to an equal. So he must be diplomatic. And he knows Seth can be tricky, can be about storms and the chaos of the world, about what’s over the border. That’s why, while he was in the land of the living, he put in a word with him by naming his son that way. “Okay,” he says, “well, putting that aside, maybe you could answer my questions now. How long have I been here?”

  Seth looks at his watch. “Three thousand, three hundred years, give or take.”

  Ramesses frowns. It makes his brow hurt. “But... it doesn’t feel like –“

  “You’ve only been in this building for the last one hundred and thirty nine years. You were taken from your tomb by thieves. All part of the great design, but of course they can’t know that, so the usual curses have been bestowed upon their families.”

  Ramesses wants to say that he’s very much in favour of that, but he’s been struck by what Seth said a moment earlier. “This... building?”

  Seth sighs. He goes to another cabinet, and pulls out a rolled up piece of papyrus of a sort which is familiar to Ramesses. It’s stored a bit offhandedly, but the Pharaoh stops himself from saying anything; the gods can keep things any way they like. Seth unrolls it onto the table.

  The Nubian woman who led Ramesses here joins them to look down on it also. “I’m Mattie,” she says. “If you’re a good boy, you might be seeing me later.”

  Ramesses gets what she means. He nods his understanding.

  The scroll turns out to be a map. Ramesses’ gaze immediately seeks the river of his country and the green around it, but although he finds many rivers, none are the right shape. In fact, he doesn’t recognise a single geographical feature. He can’t even find the great waterfall that he’s heard outside.

  He looks up and sees that Seth is smiling at him. “You got separated from your coffin book,” he says. “So I thought I’d show you our own Book of the Dead: a map of the United States, circa 1999.” He puts a cook’s relish into the pronunciation of each meaningless digit. “That’s what the locals call the Duat and that’s the year by their calendar. The Duat, you see, extends far beyond the walls of this building. In fact it only properly begins just south of here. We’re in its hinterland, another country.” His finger stabs down and down and down, faster than Ramesses can follow. “Over here’s the White House, here’s Disneyland, here’s Canaveral, here’s Graceland, here’s Nashville.” The finger spins. “In the air above it all, fear of the future, which is starting to crystallise as...” He spreads his palms wide to create a shadow with wiggling fingers on the map. “The Millennium Bug!” He laughs. It’s not a nice laugh. “What the future actually holds for them... well, that’s in the next drawer!”

  Ramesses tries not to frown again. “You speak as though this is a real nation, with real subjects.”

  “They do think of it in that way, yes,” he chuckles.

  “So... if all this is the Duat...”

  Seth nods. “You haven’t started your journey yet.”

  “Why?”

  “Because the Duat is the land of opportunity, a mirror of the mirror of heaven, and you’ve done nothing to take advantage of the opportunity you’ve been given. You were separated from your grave goods, which is where your ka goes back to during the day. And I’ve come back here night after night waiting for you to make your first move. In that time I’ve seen so many other guys get to where they’re going –”

  “My people –”

  “The ones who died after you did are in a holding pattern. They’re fine. The ones born after you died went on along after the next Pharaoh, your son.”

  “Seti has already –”

  “He has indeed. And many others after him.”

  “What must I do?”

  Seth gestures at the map. “I’ve let your ba go on ahead, as far as it can. Catch up to it, where it’s waiting for you, at the Weighing of your Heart.”

  Ramesses leans closer, to where his thin eyes can see the words beside the geographical features, and he finally sees something he recognises. He finds he knows many of the inscriptions. They are familiar from the Books of the Dead he has seen prepared for others. So here are destinations. But they don’t suggest a path. He is aware now of the shadow of the rest of his people, falling on him from behind. He is not even on this map yet. He doesn’t know where he’ll enter or how. He looks up at Seth again. “If I open the doors and go out there...?”
r />   “You’ll find your way. During your lifetime, you always had a map that led you along. But here, you’ll be lucky if you can get a few pointers. It’s all up to you. That’s the way we made it. Go out into the world of the day. Go to America.” And before Ramesses can take another look, he rolls up the map again, and puts it back in its cabinet. Then he looks back to the pharaoh. “You move on now.”

  And the dog even barks in warning.

  It’s winter here, he’s told, so the day of these people’s calendars will begin while it’s still dark. Ramesses will be able to leave when the doors are opened, when he would normally be driven back to his bed by the noise.

  So Ramesses waits, standing around the halls a little awkwardly. Then, when the big doors are opened, and these pale people, who live, unknowingly, right next to the Duat, and are coloured fittingly for a life in shadow, start to flood in, he boldly marches towards them. Some of them scream and point, but some of them laugh, or even, more suitably, applaud. The eyes of children are shielded from him, but he suspects that’s not because of his magnificence, or his fearsomeness, but because of his tiny genitals.

  He steps bravely out into this new world and winces. Oh, it’s a bit cold out here. He sees that the screams he heard are mostly the sounds of unusual vehicles. But under that is a bigger sound.

  He goes to see the waterfall. He stands there for quite a while, letting the spray moisten his face. He finds a smile cracking his lips. This is great. And he’s full of hope, because he finally has a way.