The Pyramid

XV. Skullstacks

LIKE A reflected image, the first avatar of the pyramid’s afterlife occurred at a different time, in a place many thousands of miles away. In deepest Asia, in the steppe of Isfahan, a potentate called Timur the Lame raised a pyramid just as Cheops had done before him. Though Timur’s was made of severed heads instead of stone, the two pyramids were as like as two peas in a pod.

Like its Egyptian predecessor, Timur’s stack had been built according to a plan, with the same number of faces, and just as the stones for the first pyramid had had to be quarried in several different places, so Timur’s seventy thousand heads, since they could not have been taken from a single war or just one qatl i amm (general massacre), had had to be gathered from the battlefields of Tous and Kara Tourgaj as well as from the slaughters of Aksaraj, Tabriz, and Tatch Kurgan. As in the old days, inspectors examined the heads one by one, since the skullstack was supposed to be made exclusively of the heads of men, though it is probably true that the greedy rummagers who delivered the skulls to the site sometimes tried to cheat by shaving the hair and muddying the faces of murdered women, so as to make them unrecognizable. The builders used mortar, but the architect, Kara Houleg, was not confident that it would suffice to protect the monument from the effects of winter weather and wild animals, so he had the skulls pierced and each row strung together, to prevent them being pulled apart by the wind or by wolves. That was how the first twelve rows were put together one by one, followed by a further twenty-two, and then another score, topped by the seven final rows. But they ran out of heads for constructing the vertex of the pyramid: since the surrounding area was now entirely uninhabited, the organizers were obliged to press for the rapid discovery of a group, even if its activities did not yet quite merit the name of conspiracy. Without waiting for suspicions to be confirmed, they had the alleged conspirators cut down like unripe fruit, and so were able to complete their edifice. It became clear that the architect Kara Houleg was rather better informed about his predecessor Imhotep than might have been supposed, since he undertook to explain to his sovereign that it would be proper, in the light of tradition, to place a pyramidion on the summit. So they set off with great guffaws to find a skull of unusual shape. As they found none, they suddenly thought of one of the camp-followers called Mongka, an idiot with an oversize head. The defective was summoned and told: “We’re going to make you into a prince!” After cutting off his head, they poured molten lead over it to general amusement before sticking it right on top of the stack.

When Timur’s army had moved away from Isfahan, leaving its frightful monument in the midst of the steppe, the whole area seemed even more deserted. Crows and jackdaws wheeled over the skullstack, then swooped down to pick at the eyes of the heads that the builders had taken care to place face outward, as Kara Houleg had instructed.

Freezing temperatures came earlier than expected that year. Rain had long since washed away all trace of blood, and quite soon powdery frost covered the slopes of the stack, especially the northern slope. No damage was done to it by winter storms, except for the lightning that was apparently attracted by the leaded head of the idiot Mongka. To everyone’s amazement it made not the slightest scratch to the head itself but remelted the lead, which spread down to form spikes on each side of the forehead and also trickled into the eye-sockets, giving them that look of cloudy vacuousness characteristic of the faces of the gods.

Snow twice covered the pyramid that winter. Toward the spring, when the March winds restored the stack’s dark hue, head and face hair could be seen once again. Pilgrims trekking across Asia were mostly horrified at the sight, but those who knew the history of the world stated that the hair had not appeared by chance: four thousand years earlier, they said, a prophet and martyr had foretold that the pyramid would one day grow a beard. At least, that was the kind of story that you could hear being put about. There were even songs about it; but no one suspected that the legend originated in the chance discovery of a papyrus used to copy down the inquisitor’s interrogation of Setka the Idiot.

Meanwhile, the wild beasts of the steppes prowled about at night, and by day, their snouts stuffed with clumps of hair snatched from Timur’s pyramid, they raced with the howling wind across the plateau of Turkmenistan through the sands of Kandahar, and even farther afield, into the vast Mongolian plain.

He got used to the sight, and on every plain where he set up camp a pile of heads was hastily made. Then, like a Pharaoh, he empowered his sons and grandsons to have their own pyramids, and eventually gave this right to all the generals of his army. As a result many hundreds were made, and they spread such terror as to become an indispensable feature of every campaign that was launched. When each new heap was made — as they were still endowed with eyes, they were called head piles—-the older ones, made two or three years before, had already been transformed into skullstacks. However, though the skulls had only sockets for eyes, they kept their teeth, just as the prophecy had foretold.

In the myriad tents of the army, and even more in the cities and states that it threatened, people spoke of the Isfahan pyramid with such fear and loathing that many reckoned that, even if it was hardly up to the stonestack of Cheops in terms of its size, the time it had taken to build, and its lack of antiquity, it was nonetheless the real thing, the Egyptians’ old heap being nothing but a paltry, overblown imitation.

The Isfahan pyramid was the one that possessed a straight, firm, and living character. Timur’s stack spread instant panic like a thunderclap. It was unaffected by rumors or by flattery, it consumed men’s heads in a few hours, in the time it took for a qatl i amm, instead of dragging things out over years or decades and making people wade through files and investigations beyond countings not to mention cuts in the bread ration, anguish, and despair. Its diaman-tine density gave it its sparkle, its brilliance was in the idea that had governed its construction: and the upshot of all this was that the rhapsodists and subsequently the scholars of Samarkand eventually proclaimed that the first authentic pyramid had arisen in the Isfahan steppe, and that its Egyptian rival was a crude replica of later date. Although this claim may at first have sounded somewhat bizarre, close attention to the ballads of the shamans would have informed you that, since no one could say whether time flowed forward or backward, no one could be sure of the ages of people and things, and thus their order of appearance was even less fixed. In other words, who can tell who is the father and who the son? And so on.

During one of his long marches Timur remembered that Isfahan was not far away from one of-his army’s flanks, and a sense of foreboding made him want to set eyes upon his pyramid one more time. It now looked a little shriveled. Part of the leaden head of the mental defective had split, and all the tufts of hair on the lower rows had been torn out by wild beasts. But the jawbones were clamped together more tightly than ever. As if the pyramid was threatening, or alternatively provoking, the whole world. He cast a melancholy gaze at the first signs of its decline, and when he was told that it might stay up for another four or maybe five years, but not longer, he sighed. An empty shell far away, somewhere in Egypt, could keep on going after four millennia, and was going to last another forty, whereas this treasure would have a life as short that of as his son Djahangjir, and had but four more years to go.

He turned his head toward where Egypt was supposed to be, and nodded slowly. Patience, he thought. One day he would set out to sweep that state off the face of the earth, together with all its stonestacks. He would dismantle them, especially the tallest, Cheops’s stack, and he would replace that grotesque edifice with a skullstack of equal volume, to show everyone which pile was the true pyramid, and which one just a piece of scenery on the world’s stage.

But he could not set off just yet. He was intent on his Chinese campaign, and the winter had set in early that year. It was the Year of the Dog, a year he had never liked very much. The Sir Daria was already half frozen over, and he was not feeling at his best. His mind wandered toward impossible projects — for instance, to the time when, a few years earlier, during the Siberian campaign, despite the magicians’ terrified prayers, night would not fall, because of what people called the northern lights. That was during a Year of the Rat, and he racked his brains trying to work out the complexities of the calendar; yet his own days and nights had become as misshapen as embryos from incestuous couplings.

He felt feverish, as he had done during the northern lights. He would have liked to concentrate his mind on simpler things, such as remembering to avoid having the first skirmish during a rainstorm, so as not to suffer the consequences that arose at the battle of Sijabkir, when his archers could not target correctly with sodden bows. His mind was drawn to dozens of other concrete and visible topics, but the skull-stack interfered with his thinking. He was less obsessed with the dense glint of lead on the idiot’s head than with the wire thread that ran through all the skulls, and especially with the lightning that, according to the reports he had received, had darted all the way through, faster than a snake…

A thought that connected the wire that linked the heads to lightning and to his own orders was struggling to take shape in his brain, but, as during the Siberian campaign, it never quite managed to come together.

No doubt about it, he had a fever. He expected that death would await him at Otrar, but it could be no more than the mask of death. The death he feared above all others was the one that habitually pursued him on the far edges of his empire, in the untilled lands, the great swampy deserts where reeds were as thinly spread as Mongolian monks.