The Book of the Dead Read online

  Her first instinct was to run for it, but like earlier in the night, when she was atop the pyramid, Marjorie found herself rooted to the earth. Helpless, she watched as Zupan took the cat from its pedestal. She observed him in abject horror, as he used the blade of his knife to cut through the elaborate wrappings around its body, turning them to scraps and dust, revealing the desiccated corpse inside. She wished she could look away; watching a valuable piece of material history destroyed so wantonly was fundamentally repulsive to her.

  Yet more repulsive was when, just as suddenly as the knife had appeared, the four canopic jars from the earlier illusion were with them in the room. One by one, the kneeling Zupan decanted them into the open mouth of the cat’s corpse. As he did so, the cat – somehow – grew more and more alive before Marjorie’s eyes. The creature’s skin softened, its patchy fur hair turned softer, thicker, and in some places grew back entirely, and its limbs began to loosen. After all four ghost-organs had been funneled into the animal, he applied his mouth to the cat’s snaggle-toothed rictus and breathed into it.

  The long-legged, fat-tailed, slender, fox-eyed and – now – whole and live tabby-cat got unsteadily to its feet. After washing its left paw with its pink tongue, it meowed once before jumping into Zupan’s arms and nuzzling his chin with a bone-to-bone thonk. Zupan scratched it behind its ears, whispered something, and got to his feet.

  “Thank you, Marjorie,” he said kindly. “Your assistance for my final trick tonight has been invaluable. But now, my show is at an end… as is yours.” Zupan shook his head. “I’m sure the police will be able to concoct some theory around why such a promising young acquisitions librarian would sneak into a home and destroy a priceless Egyptian artifact. Possibly they will blame your coming to my show. That’s a popular one these days. More likely they’ll see you as a jilted young woman out for revenge on a man who treated you shabbily.” He manipulated her still-motionless body onto the carpet, beside the ruined bindings and ancient dust of the formerly-mummified cat, and placed the hilt of his knife in her hand, where it lengthened into a common ball-peen hammer.

  “Here they come,” he said, winking at her – and disappeared.

  Only when Mrs. Quildring, in a flowery night-dress, and Edgar, looking like he’d been hitting the “apple juice” all night, rushed into the room, could Marjorie move again. She sat up, hammer in hand, mouth open to explain… but no words came to her.

  “Marjorie?” Mrs. Quildring looked appalled. “After all I did for you, how could you?”

  Tollund

  Adam Roberts

  -1-

  1333 AH

  As he stepped from the boat, Gamal el-Kafir el-Sheikh’s impressions were of warm air and a bright sky. That vivid, alien green so characteristic of the northlands. It was, altogether, a pleasant surprise. There weren’t many passengers; for few people had any reason to come to this far-flung land, and el-Kafir el-Sheikh’s servant – assigned him for the duration of the excavation – found him easily enough. “I am Bille, minherr,” he said in passable Masri. “I may take you the hotel?” He was a tall man, but he stared at his own shoes as he spoke, which in turn prompted el-Kafir el-Sheikh to look down. The fellow had huge feet, big as boats, wrapped in two ill-cobbled shoes of scuffed leather. “Bille what?” el-Kafir el-Sheikh asked him. “Or is it, what-Bille?

  This seemed to confuse the big Jutlander. “I’m sorry minherr?”

  “I’m asking your full name.”

  “Bille Jensen, minherr.”

  “Come along, man, don’t quail! I’m an historian, an archaeologist, not a Grendl! I won’t eat you”. The fellow didn’t respond to this, but el-Kafir el-Sheikh clapped him on the back. “My first time here, you know. Though I’ve spent years in libraries learning about it. What a charming looking country!”

  “Yes, minherr.”

  They rode a horse and cart, the nag a proper north-Europe beast, rust-coloured, barrel-flanked, its legs tasselled with dirty trailing strands of hair. The road was rutted and progress was slow. El-Kafir el-Sheikh didn’t care. The air was full of xylophonic birdsong and the breeze had the authentic tang of occidental exoticism. It was all so green! The trees positively foamed with leaves. “Are my colleagues all at the hotel?”

  “Minherr?”

  “Professor Suyuti? Professor el-Akkad? Or are they at the dig?”

  “At the hotel, minherr.”

  “You have seen the dig?”

  The fellow angled his long-boned face in his master’s direction. Was that fear in the old man’s eyes? “Yes, minherr.”

  “Oh it’s a marvellous thing. You know, I have nothing but respect for your people and your culture,” el-Kafir el-Sheikh told him, a touch over-earnestly (but he was prone to over-earnestness). “You should know that these archaeological digs are a way of uncovering the rich history of your folk.”

  “Yes, minherr,” the fellow said, sulkily, turning his big head back in the direction of travel.

  “I sense your disaffection. You don’t like us rootling around amongst your old kings and dukes.” When this failed to produce a reply, el-Kafir el-Sheikh added: “are you a superstitious fellow, Bille? Is it the business with the mummies?”

  The servant put a brief sine wave into the reins he was holding and barked a barbaric Jutlandese command at the horse. But he did not answer el-Kafir el-Sheikh question.

  “It’s all nonsense, you know, my dear fellow,” el-Kafir el-Sheikh told him, pulling out his pipe and lighting it. “We are men of science. Of course I heard those stories about murders and strange deaths. Which is to say, I read about them in the papers. Back in Cairo there’s a deal of excitement about your mummies, you know. Oh we have mummies back home, you know, but they’re clean. The fact is, there’s a certain type of Egyptian who likes nothing better than grisly stories of the bog-mummies, coming alive and turning human victims to sludge. But that it’s a good story doesn’t mean it’s true, now does it!”

  The cart trundled round the corner, under an archway formed by two lusciously foliaged trees, and the hotel appeared before them. And sauntering out through the main entrance was Professor Tawfiq el-Akkad. “Gamal, you old rogue!” he cried. “Finally you have come!”

  -2-

  The whole team took tea in the conservatory: el-Kafir el-Sheikh, Suyuti, el-Akkad and Hussein. Everyone called Hussein Gurbati because he was Dom rather than misriyūn; but he didn’t seem to mind. “It’s too late to go out to the site today,” el-Akkad announced. “And tomorrow is Sabbath. But first thing al-Ahad we’ll go straight there. We have a car, you know. I do believe it is the only internal combustion engine in the whole of Jutland!”

  “I really can’t wait,” el-Kafir el-Sheikh gushed. “I brought all my books.”

  “Oh, it’s your noggin we really need,” said Suyuti.

  “Don’t tell me there aren’t any runes,” said el-Kafir el-Sheikh. “I was promised runes.”

  “Runes,” said Gurbarti, in a bored-sounding voice. “We’ve dozens of tablets, linden-wood mostly, absolutely covered in runes. But it’s not that.”

  “People are chatting,” Suyuti said. “In Danish.”

  “You mean – Old Danish?”

  “I certainly don’t mean new Danish!”

  “Which people?”

  “Natives; whitters. People who cannot read or write. As to how they could acquire the complex grammar and vocabulary of a dead language… well, some say their god of language, Jut, has put a spell upon them. Cast a spell across time, from a thousand years ago.”

  “Good gracious!” El-Kafir el-Sheikh sucked lustily on his pipe stem. “It took me seven years careful study to acquire it. Are you sure they’re speaking Old Danish?”

  Suyuti’s laugh was like a thunderclap. “That’s what you’re here to determine, my old friend!” he boomed. He took a drink, and when he lowered the cup the hairs of his moustache were dewed with droplets of tea. “That – and the runes.”

  “Of course you’ve heard the stor
ies of strange goings on,” Gurbati observed, gloomily.

  “Well,” el-Kafir el-Sheikh laughed. “I’ve read some silly stories. People exploding and so on. People turning to… well, manure. I can’t say I believed it.”

  “He believes it,” Suyuti chortled, clapping Gurbati on the shoulder.

  “Really? I didn’t realise you were a superstitious type, Gurbati! And you think it’s connected to your digging up these old mummies? It hardly seems credible.”

  “It looks unlikely in the sunlight, I grant you,” said Gurbati. “But you wait. The weather will revert to type tomorrow, and everything will look different. As to the mummies; well, I don’t know. But I do know that there have been strange deaths. The police have opened official investigations on three of them. Talk to Bille. He saw one of the victims die. Actually watched the woman… deliquesce!”

  But nothing could dampen el-Kafir el-Sheikh’s spirits. He was actually here, in Jutland, with his university friends, about to take part in the most exciting discovery in the history of archaeology! “Come come,” he said. “It’s 1333! It’s not the dark ages. We are men of science. I’ll keep an open mind,” he added, “of course. But I’m itching to see these mummies, and I don’t believe they’re cursed.”

  Later that evening, after a splendid supper, they all sat in the conservatory of the hotel. The weather had changed, and el-Kafir el-Sheikh, listened to the rain percussing the roof with a continual, rather soothing rush of noise over their heads. They all smoked. Mohammed Suyuti gave them the benefit of his theory as to why the northerners had failed to rise to the level of the Ummah. “It’s not racial, whatever some people say. I do not hold with those despicable racist views. There’s nothing intrinsically inferior about the northerners. It’s an accident of geography.”

  “You mean,” said el-Akkad. “The climate.”

  “The climate dulls their spirits, it is true,” said Suyuti. “In Africa it is so hot that a man must either wilt or rouse himself to great things. There’s nothing like that here; they all stumble about in a daze. It’s too cold to sleep properly, and also so cold that they can’t properly wake up. But, no, I meant something else. Here.” He pulled a notebook from his pocket, opened it and began to read:

  Egypt is not just a piece of land. Egypt is the inventor of civilisation... The strange thing is that this country of great history and unsurpassed civilisation is nothing but a thin strip along the banks of the Nile... This thin strip of land created moral values, launched the concept of monotheism, developed arts, invented science and gave the world a stunning administration. These factors enabled the Egyptians to survive while other cultures and nations withered and died.

  “I copied that from a book I was reading. Doesn’t it strike you as true? In Egypt civilisation was focussed about the Nile, and that focus, the pressure that applied to human culture, generated civilisation – as carbon is compressed into diamond! But throughout northern Europe there’s no such focus. Population spreads itself more or less equally about the inlands, more or less diffuse, and no great civilisation can coalesce.”

  “It’s an interesting theory,” said el-Kafir el-Sheikh, gesturing towards Suyuti with the stem of his pipe. “But I would need to see hard evidence. Science! That’s the key, gentlemen!”

  “My father used to tell me,” Gurbati said, in a gloomy voice, “men contend with the living, not with the dead. It was his way of telling me to get on with life, and not waste my energies worrying about the past. But here – in Jutland – well, I tell you, the opposite is true. The opposite is literally true.”

  “Nonsense,” el-Kafir el-Sheikh retorted. “Don’t tell me you’ve become a slave to superstition?”

  “Back home the past is cleaned and tidied away. Here it’s simply left to rot where it falls. It mulches down. These bogs all around us—compacted layers of decaying generations.” He shuddered, visibly. “Magic may not be so difficult to believe as all that, you know. Not here. Not in this land.”

  - 3 -

  First sun, then rain, and finally mist. The following morning el-Kafir el-Sheikh pulled the curtains back to be faced with an honest-to-goodness Jutland fog. The homely sun and blue sky had been completely erased, as if dissolved in white solution. Boughs from a couple of the nearer trees loomed blackly towards him, looking disconnected from the world as if levitating in mid-air. Everything else was albumen and opacity. He opened his window. The smell of clouds, wet and faintly vegetative; and a weird muffled silence.

  Breakfast was a muted affair, as if the fog had gotten into everyone’s spirits. Suyuti spoke at an ordinary volume, which for him was akin to whispering. “You’ll need gloves, and a scarf,” he advised el-Kafir el-Sheikh. “And I recommend a hat. It’s a long drive to the dig, and we’ll have to take it slowly in this weather. Visibility, you know.”

  “Chilly, chilly,” el-Akkad confirmed.

  The drive was a surreal experience. The road was unsmooth, and the four of them (plus Bille, who was driving) were bounced around, continuously jiggled and agitated; but otherwise el-Kafir el-Sheikh had almost no sensation of motion. Objects might suddenly appear, as if magically transported from nothing into being – the end of a hedgerow, a cow – and lurch towards them, and then vanish into nothingness behind them. And it was cold. Worse, el-Kafir el-Sheikh found that his clothes soaked up moisture and quickly became sopping. The sun was a vagueness of light, high up and to the south. Nothing cast a shadow. “I pride myself on my scientific rationalism,” el-Kafir el-Sheikh confided to Gurbati; “but even I can see that – this is a spooky sort of place.”

  “It’s so ancient,” Gurbati replied, raising his voice over the rattle and hum of the car’s passage. “I mean: Egypt is ancient, obviously. But Egypt has moved on. This land is trapped by the past – as if the past is throttling it, preventing the whole country from going forward.” He shuddered. With the cold, perhaps.

  “It’s like some vast entity has breathed onto the mirror of the sky, and clouded it over,” el-Kafir el-Sheikh said.

  Finally they arrived: two lights like pearl-coloured eyes bright in the fog revealed themselves to be oil-lamps, struggling to light either side of gateway in a fence of knitted wire. A Jutlander boy, presumably alerted by the sound of the approaching vehicle, was standing guard. Bille drove past him, and turned the car to a halt, tossing up a little surf of mud. They had parked in front of a long wooden shed, lit from within. El-Kafir el-Sheikh was not sorry to get inside, for there was a stove in the middle around which they all huddled. “So cold!” el-Kafir el-Sheikh gasped. “And yesterday was sunny and warm!”

  “We’re on higher ground,” Gurbati said. “That, and the mist, cools it. That, and that fact that this land is always cold – cold as death! Come! Do you want to see this mummy, or not?”

  The four of them went out of the back of the building, leaving Bille scowling by the stove. The trench was two dozen yards away, roofed with canvas; they went down the turf-cut steps one after the other into the dark. It took Suyuti an unconscionably long time to light the lamp, and el-Kafir el-Sheikh stood in the grey mirk trying to see where the mud at his feet ended and the ancient bodies began. But even when light filled the space it was hard to see. “They’re the same colour as the soil,” Gurbati explained, pointing to the first of them. Dark brown bumps and ridges, inset in the ground. Suyuti lit a second lamp and handed it to el-Kafir el-Sheikh; and by squatting down he made out the contours of the body. “The face is,” Suyuti prompted, pointing, “particularly well preserved.”

  “Remarkable!” el-Kafir el-Sheikh agreed, holding the lamp closer. And so it was: two thousand years old, yet every detail perfectly preserved – the grain of his chin stubble; the left-curling line of his nose (broken in life, perhaps; or distorted by the pressures of the bog); the creases under his closed eyes; the vertical worry-ridges running up his forehead. As if he were asleep and having a bad dream. The fellow was wearing a thin leather cap, tied under his chin. Moving the lamp, el-Kafir el-Sheikh
could see the cord – he’d read about it, of course – tight around the corpse’s neck and trailing down his back like a tentacle; the leather rope that had killed him. “Why the hood?” he wondered aloud. “From Strabo and Tacitus we discover that the northerners stripped their victims naked before sacrificing them to the goddess. And,” he moved the lamp to shine more clearly on the corpse’s emaciated body, a man-shaped, teak-brown leather sack pulled tight around its skeleton. “He is naked. But his head is covered!”

  “The other bodies we’ve found have been bare-headed, as you probably know,” said Suyuti, in a condescending voice. “This chap must have been special.”

  “Fascinating,” said el-Kafir el-Sheikh, poking gently at the face with the stem of his pipe. He stood up. “Are we moving him today?”

  “I was thinking we would,” Suyuti replied. “Get him back to the hotel. It’s the peat that has preserved him, and now he’s exposed to the air he’s going to start decaying. He needs to go into the chemical bath back at the hotel. You see,” Suyuti said, as they started climbing, single file, out of the tent, el-Kafir el-Sheikh carrying one torch and Suyuti the other, “he’s not a true mummy. When our ancestors mummified a man they did it properly: took out the viscera and brains, all the matter that would putrefy quickly. They cleaned everything up. But this dirty fellow has all his guts and brains intact – they just strangled him and shoved in the bog!”

  “Clean,” Gurbati observed gloomily, “is an alien concept to these people.”

  Back inside the hut they found Bille and the boy huddled about the stove. It was, el-Kafir el-Sheikh thought with an inward sigh, hard to dispute Gurbati’s prejudice when faced with the two of them: grimy faces, unwashed clothes. A tight, sweaty stink seemed permanently attached to them, as if they never bathed. Suyuti shooed them away and the four archeologists pulled up chairs and smoked their pipes. El-Akkad fetched some a folding table, and the wooden paddles from a crate in the corner of the hut, and el-Kafir el-Sheikh diverted them for half an hour by reading the runes aloud, translating as he went. “There’s not much here,” he said. “Itineraries, heads of cattle – this one is a royal proclamation, declaring that King Rudolphus claims all the land from the north sea to the southern mountains.”