Tutankhamun: The Book of Shadows

47

I ran through the shadows of the night. Thoth kept pace with me. Perhaps Khety was following behind. I did not look back. As if from far away I could hear the distant pounding of my sandals upon the dusty ground, and the low hum of the blood in my skull, and the thumping of my heart in the cage of my chest.

A guard had been in place. Khety had ordered Tanefert not to let the children out, under any circumstances, nor to open the door to anyone. The house was to look as if it were closed up. So how had Sobek managed to take him? I imagined Tanefert’s grief and the children’s terror. And I was not there to save them. What if it was a bluff? What if it was not? I ran faster.

He would meet me at the catacombs. I must come alone. If I came with anyone, the boy would die. I was to bring the hallucinogen. If I failed, the boy would die. If I spoke to anyone of this, the boy would die. I was to come alone.

I came to the harbour, tore a reed skiff from its moorings, and began to paddle, demented, across the Great River. I thought nothing this time of crocodiles. The moon was a white stone. The water was black marble. I sailed upon the surface of shadows like a tiny statue of myself on a model boat, accompanied by Thoth, passing over the waters of death to meet Osiris, God of Shadows.

From the western shore I ran on, and the air cooled as I passed the border of the western edge of the cultivation. I was an animal now, all senses alert, and all vengeance. I had a new skin, the colour of rage. My teeth felt sharp as jewels in my jaws. But time was passing too fast, and the distances were too great, and I feared I would be too late.

I only stopped running at the low entrance to the catacombs. I looked down at Thoth, who had kept pace with me. He gazed up, panting hard. His eyes were clear and bright. I slipped the bridle on his muzzle to stop him from barking. He understood. I had not come alone, but he would be silent. Then I took my last breath of open night air, and we passed under the ancient carved lintel, and descended the steps into the darkness beyond darkness.

We came out into a long low-raftered hall. I listened to the monumental silence. It seemed possible in such a holy hush to hear the dead gasping as they crumbled to dust, or sighing to persuade us to join them in the delights of the Otherworld. Someone had left a lamp lit in a wall sconce for me. It burned without movement or sound, undisturbed by currents of air or time. I picked it up and walked forward; tunnels disappeared unfathomably in every direction, and off each one of them deep, low-ceilinged chambers were stacked high with clay pots of all shapes and sizes. There must have been millions and millions of them, containing the embalmed remains of ibises, falcons and baboons…Thoth, surrounded by the remains of his own kind, scented the cemetery air, his ears alert, to catch the smallest revealing sounds-a sandal treading on dust, the whisper of linen across living skin-such things as would be inaudible to me but might betray the presence of Sobek and my son to his acute attention.

Then we both heard it: a child’s cry, lost and stricken, calling pitifully from deep within the catacombs. My son’s voice…but where was it coming from? Thoth tugged suddenly on his leash, and we scrambled along the passage to our left, our shadows tracing us along the walls in the sphere of light cast by the lamp. The passage sloped downwards. More passageways led off in different directions into branching infinities of darkness. Where was he? How would I save him?

Then we heard another high, echoing cry, this time from another direction. Thoth turned and tugged on the leash, urging me to follow. I let him lead me down a side passage. At the end, it divided into two. We listened, vigilant, every nerve sharpened, every muscle tense. Another cry came, this time to the right. We hastened along the passage, past still more low chambers crammed with pots, most of them smashed now, with small bones and bits of skull sticking out at odd angles, as if they had been here for a very long time.

Every time the cry came echoing up to us, it led us deeper and deeper into the catacombs. It occurred to me then how impossible it would be, even if I could save my son, to find our way out again. And the thought followed: this was a game. He was trapping me. I stopped. When the next cry came I shouted out: ‘I will go no further. Come to me. Show yourself.’

My voice echoed down the passages, resounding and repeating throughout the labyrinth, before fading to nothing. Thoth and I waited in the vast obscurity, in our small circle of weak, propitiatory light. At first, there was nothing. But then the faintest glow glimmered in the darkness. Impossible to gauge how close or how far away it was, this tiny point of light. But we watched it bud and flower, as it lit up the sides of the passageway, I saw within it: a shadow, walking.