Khaemwaset surrendered for once to the pressure of his son’s comforting grip and allowed himself to be led outside. Sisenet’s litter was just vanishing into the northern edge of the city. “Yes, home,” Khaemwaset muttered, “but I cannot rest until I have done what must be done. Let us hurry, Hori. I do not want to be here when the shadows begin to lengthen.”
They returned to the house, and while Hori waited, Khaemwaset went to his office and grabbed up the scroll, deliberately not reacting to the feel of it or allowing his mind to become entangled in the past. From Kasa he obtained a copper needle and some thread, and clutching these objects he went back to where Hori stood anxiously. “Come with me,” he begged, and Hori nodded. Together they rode the swaying litters back the way they had come, Khaemwaset’s impatience now a desperate, helpless thing.
At the tomb entrance Khaemwaset staggered from the litter and, with a shout for Hori, ran down the stairs and inside. The body he had mutilated lay at he had left it, its chest now gaping drily open. “Hold up the hand,” Khaemwaset snapped. The young man obeyed, lifting the light, stiff arm and turning it so that Khaemwaset could work.
With needle threaded and the scroll roughly bunched against the linen bandages, Khaemwaset began to sew. The papyrus was resistant, the hand so rigid that it seemed both scroll and lifeless limb were conspiring to prevent him from accomplishing the distasteful task. It is too late, the chamber whispered with cruel satisfaction. You have sinned and you are cursed, cursed, cursed … The needle slipped and Khaemwaset swore. Two large drops of his blood fell onto the dead finger he held crushed in his grasp, and spreading, sank into the greedy linen. One smeared against the scroll. Terror stalked him and this time he could not fight it. Panting he made the last stitch, jerked out the needle, and nodded at Hori, who pushed the arm back down into the musty-smelling coffin. “The lid,” Khaemwaset said hoarsely. “Call the guards and the litter-bearers to help.”
Hori seemed to have caught his father’s urgency. He dashed outside and returned shortly with ten wary men. Khaemwaset pointed to the lid still leaning against the wall, and though he did not want to touch it he took his place with his servants and his son as they dragged and heaved the solid slab of granite across the floor, up onto the pedestal, and, with a final groan, onto the coffin itself. It settled with a thud and a grind.
Thoughtfully, Khaemwaset looked at the second coffin, then nodded curtly. “That one too,” he said. This time he stood back and watched until the lid smashed down. A tiny piece of stone pulled free and clattered towards him to come to rest by his left sandal. He kicked it away. “Hori, have this accursed place closed immediately,” he said. “I don’t care if the artists have finished or not. Fill the stairway with rocks and rubble and have the largest stone you can find rolled over it. Have it done now, before night, before night, do you hear?” He was aware that his voice was rising to an uncontrollable shriek, and his servants were staring at him. He closed his mouth and, turning his back on the mystery that had terrified and enthralled him for so many months, he forced himself to go slowly outside. Hori came after him. “I will send to the Master Mason at once, Father,” he said, “but I beg you to consider Sisenet’s sensible words. He is right. Go home, sleep, and ponder them.”
Khaemwaset looked into the unhappy, drawn face of his son, then suddenly they were embracing, arms about each other, and Hori’s face was buried in Khaemwaset’s neck. “I love you,” Khaemwaset choked, near to tears, almost at the end of his control, and Hori’s muffled voice replied, “I love you also, O my father.”
The litter-bearers were sorting themselves out and bending to their loads. Khaemwaset sank with exhaustion into the haven of privacy and lay back with a sigh. He felt as though a great burden had been lifted from his heart, his body. After all, he thought, nothing has happened in all the weeks since I said the so-called spell. No one has died or been stricken with some foul disease No sudden misfortune has befallen the family. I reacted like a stupid, ignorant peasant. Sisenet was right. The thought made him smile, and before he was set down gently outside his door he had fallen into a relieved doze.
IN THE DAYS that followed, Khaemwaset became increasingly ashamed of his outburst before Sisenet and Hori. The man’s arguments against the scroll being anything other than a poor fabrication had been quietly reasonable, and Khaemwaset, going over every word and unspoken nuance of that unsettling afternoon, was forced to agree with him.
All his life he had carried the dream of one day finding the Scroll of Thoth whose two spells would give him the total knowledge of all living things through the understanding of their language, and more, the secret, ultimate power over death he had craved. He would become a god. But now he began to recognize the fantasy for what it was. Childhood had spawned it, and his own greed and ambition had fed it. It was true that the Scroll’s existence was believed by every magician who had lived in Egypt, but wherever it lay, if in fact it lay anywhere, it would be in some deep, exotic place where time and eternity met, surrounded by potent spells, watched over by Thoth himself. And if a human being had ever owned it, that person would have been a creature of more than human powers himself. Certainly it would never have been buried in a simple, shallow tomb at Saqqara.