Scroll of Saqqara(191)
But he had no time to become afraid, not then, for Sisenet was bowing coolly. He was clad in a short linen kilt. The rest of his spare, whipcord body was naked and as dusty as the earthen floor, the simple table. Dusty.
“So it is young Hori,” Sisenet said, still grinning. “I heard someone fumbling along the passage. I thought it might be you. You do not look so well, young Prince. One might even say you have the stamp of death on you. Now why is that?”
Hori stepped further into the room, all at once very aware of the paring knife held loosely in his fingers. Sisenet moved slightly, his dry fingers trailing along the table, leaving marks on its surface. The husk of a dead scorpion appeared, its brown carapace gleaming in the lamplight. Hori did not answer. He waited. He had never given much thought to Tbubui’s so-called brother. Sisenet had been nothing more than a quiet, self-contained man who came and went occasionally on the periphery of Hori’s vision, on the outskirts of his life, seemingly content with his scholarly pursuits and the privacy of his little room. But now Hori, watching him carefully, wondered just what those scholarly pursuits had been. Sisenet’s smile was broadening. It was not a pleasant sight, and Hori all at once recognized the self-possession as supreme arrogance, the self-effacement as the kind of amused confidence that observed and coldly dissected everyone. Sisenet was power. Hori’s whole spine contracted.
“It was you!” he cried out. “All the time. You conjured against Penbuy. You conspired with Tbubui to seduce my father. You are killing me!”
For answer the man stepped right away from the table and there, sitting like some fat, malevolent, primitive god, was the wax doll Hori sought. The flickering light danced along the wicked copper pins, one driven through the scarcely formed head from temple to temple and one canting down through the squat abdomen. Beside it Hori recognized his gold-and-jasper earrings. Earrings, he thought. How apt. How accursedly right.
“Is this what you are looking for, Highness?” Sisenet asked politely. “Yes? I rather thought so. But it is too late. You will be dead in two days.”
Faintness swirled around Hori and he planted his feet apart and fought it off. “But why?” he croaked, that dreadful stench intensifying so that he felt as though it was seeping into all his pores and his flesh itself recoiled. “Why? It is true that you are her husband, isn’t it. You are the wizard-prince Nenefer-ka-Ptah and she the princess Ahura. Father resurrected you all, you are the walking dead, but why us?”
“Poor Hori,” Nenefer-ka-Ptah said with mock concern. “Perhaps you should sit. Here. Take my chair. Shall I call a servant and order wine for you?” His black eyes twinkled with ghoulish humour. He knows what I am thinking, Hori told himself, the terror beginning. I am in the presence of something hundreds of years old, something that has no right to be walking and talking, smiling and gesturing, something that should by rights be wound in linen and lying in darkness, rotting. “I can wake them with a word,” Nenefer-ka-Ptah went on “They do not mind They are perfectly obedient, my servants.”
“No wine,” Hori whispered, though he longed for something to wash away the taste of coffins in his mouth. His earrings winked jauntily up at him and the grotesque doll grinned its knowing smile.
“She was the talk of the south, my wife,” Nenefer-ka-Ptah said conversationally. He had begun to pace in a leisurely fashion, his feet making no sound. “High-born, beautiful, with that seductive magnetism men cannot resist. Her sexual prowess was legendary. She clung to me when we were drowning, clung like a lover, her legs wrapped around mine, her body convulsing against me in fear. She has wrapped her legs around you, hasn’t she, Highness?” Hori nodded, spellbound and repulsed. “I was not afraid. I thought of the Scroll, my Scroll, the thing I had laboured long and hard to acquire, and I was comforted. The sem-priests had their orders. We were to be buried in coffins without lids and immured behind a false wall. The Scroll itself was to be sewn to the corpse of one of my servants. I actually commanded two of them to be killed in the event of my death so that they could be buried in my tomb. But Merhu …” He came to a halt, passing a hand over his shaven skull. “Merhu. My son. The flower of Egyptian youth in those days. Handsome, in demand, accomplished, spoiled, and wilful. He knew about the Scroll. Both of them did. He agreed to my preparations for his burial also, and it was just as well, for he himself drowned not long after Ahura and I were beautified and laid in the tomb your father so cheerfully desecrated. All of us dead by water,” he said. “That surely was a cosmic joke, for we loved the Nile inordinately. We swam in it and fished from it, glided on it in long red evenings, often made love on its verge with our feet kissed by its waves, held parties on its mysterious bosom and ached for it as we watched it falter and recede every year. We decorated our tomb at Saqqara with it, Merhu’s also at Koptos, the city he loved, and all the while the god was waiting to end our lives with the thing that had given us the highest pleasure. Of such interesting ironies is life composed.” He came to Hori. “I knew that possessing the Scroll brought its own dangers,” he said, “but I was a great magician, the greatest in Egypt, and I chose to take the risk. It was mine. I earned it. The price I and my family paid was an early death after five years of power and prosperity.”