Khai of Khem Read online

  “And so you’re up on your feet and out and about at last,” the elder Sommers continued. “And how do you feel?”

  “I’ll feel a lot better,” Arnott grimaced ruefully, “when they take this damned straight-jacket off my neck! Wilfred has told me about your peculiar visitor, but he says there’s more still to be told. Perhaps you’d like to enlighten me?”

  “Ah!” the professor smiled again. “But I had hoped you might enlighten us!”

  “I don’t follow you.”

  “Sit down, Paul, sit down. Wilfred, get him a drink, will you? Paul, about this Egyptian, Omar Dassam. Does the name mean anything to you?”

  “No, I never heard of him before. Why do you ask?”

  “Well, I’ve spoken to him at some length, and to tell the truth—and quite apart from his accent and the obvious difference of character and background—it was much the same as talking to you!”

  “How on earth do you mean?” Arnott frowned.

  “When he talks about Egypt,” the professor explained, “—about the prehistoric Egypt which predated the ancient land we study and try to understand—then he sounds just like you. It’s almost as if you shared a common source of knowledge. . . . But listen, you don’t have to take my word for it, you’ll be able to talk to him yourself in a few minutes. He’s on his way over here now. Meanwhile, what do you think of the mask?”

  “The photograph? I’d much rather see the real thing.”

  The professor nodded and sat down in his chair. He opened a cupboard behind his desk, took out the large, heavy mask and placed it on the desktop where Arnott could see it. Arnott stood up immediately, took up the golden mask and held it up to the light from the window. He stared at it wide-eyed.

  At that very moment, there came the sound of footsteps from the office beyond the closed door, followed by a knock and a guttural, muffled inquiry: “Sir George, are you in?”

  “You see?” said the professor. “He’s already here.” In a louder voice he called out, “Come in, Omar, come in.”

  Arnott heard Sir George’s words, heard the study door open and close behind his back, but he made no move. He remained as he was, as if frozen in that position, with the mask held up to the light. His eyes burned in its reflected glow.

  “Ahem!” the professor coughed. “Wilfred, perhaps you’d do the honors?”

  “Paul,” came the younger Sommers’s voice as if from a million miles away, breaking in on Arnott’s rapt contemplation of the funerary mask, “this is Omar Dassam. Omar, Paul Arnott.”

  Now Arnott turned to gaze at the newcomer. Dark eyes stared into his own, a strong hand reached for his. The man was obviously Egyptian, sharing with Arnott a slim-hipped, broad-shouldered build. “How do you do?” he inquired, sensuous lips forming a curiously cautious smile.

  Their hands met.

  Dassam glanced down at the hand he held—and immediately snatched his own hand back.

  “Wha—? What the devil—!” Arnott exclaimed, startled and angry.

  The other carefully took hold of his hand again, pointed at the white groove that ran in a band round the middle finger. “That mark,” he rasped. “Do you wear a ring?”

  “No,” Arnott answered. “The mark is a scar—I think. It’s been there as long as I can remember.”

  Dassam released his hand, groped in a pocket, brought out two rings. One was silver and he placed it on a finger of his own hand. The other—large, golden, with an ankh relief—he gave to Arnott. “Try it on,” he nodded eagerly, licking his lips, visibly held in the grip of unknown emotions.

  Arnott stared at him a moment longer, then pushed the ring onto his finger. It sat in the groove of flesh as if grown there. Then—

  The room seemed to reel!

  To the two men freshly introduced, it was as if an earthquake had struck suddenly, silently in the heart of London, one whose shock they alone could feel. While the professor and his son looked on in amazement, Dassam and Arnott staggered and fell one against the other, held on for support, then straightened and gazed once more into each other’s eyes. All was as it had been, except that now there was something new written on their faces.

  Recognition. . . .

  “Khai!” Dassam gasped, his voice choked, breaking as it gabbled something in a harsh, unknown tongue.

  “Manek!” Arnott answered in that same tongue. “You, Manek Thotak!”

  And in that long moment as the two stared, they seemed to look through their present forms to a time beyond—and they remembered . . . they remembered.

  part

  THREE

  I

  KHAI’S WORLD

  The center of Khai’s world was Asorbes, the Pharaoh Khasathut’s fortress city. Asorbes stood a mile and a half square, built mainly of limestone, a little less than two miles from the west bank of the Nile. Indeed, the river was clearly visible from the top of the East Wall. Khai had been out of the city as a small child, down the river with his father almost as far as the Great Sea itself, but that journey was only a dim memory now. He did remember, however, that it had been a great adventure; how he had hunted imaginary beasts in the hills and quarries while his father prospected for the fine limestones of his craft.

  Of Asorbes itself: Khai had long since explored most of the city at one time or another. He had been atop the massive walls, walking right round the city and back to his starting point all in a single morning. That, too, had been with his father, and Khai remembered how much it had tired the old man. And indeed, Harsin Ben Ibizin was old now. Khai was a child of his old age, conceived of an old man’s seed in the womb of a younger wife.

  Harsin Ben, because of his age, was lucky that no younger man had taken his place. He had his rivals, true, but it was also true that no other man in Asorbes or all of Khem had his skills as an architect. His greatest achievement—which stood him high in the favor of the Pharaoh and his councilors and guaranteed his continued employment well into the foreseeable future—was the great pyramid itself, Khasathut’s massive monument, as yet unfinished but slowly nearing completion with each passing season.

  Of necessity, Harsin Ben had to be at the pyramid’s site almost every day, but that was the one aspect of his work which displeased him: the sight of those polyglot slaves whose life’s blood stained (and not only figuratively) each single huge block of stone from which the pyramid was constructed. Khai, too, had found the sight of the myriad half-naked brown and verminous bodies that struggled, sweated, bled and died under the lash of Khasathut’s overseers painful and offensive. Often, during his lone wanderings about the city, whenever he found the vast pyramid looming before him, he had paused to wonder why these people were forced to remain here in Asorbes when their homelands lay beyond Khem’s farthest corners.

  “Son,” his father had once explained, “the Pharaoh has decreed that his pyramid will be built in his lifetime. He will be buried within the completed structure to await the second coming of his own kind, Gods from the stars who brought Khasathut’s forebears here when the land was chaos. Because he knows that his time among mortal men is running out, he is in a hurry to see the work done. And so he takes slaves. Using Arabban slavers, he takes them from Therae, Nubia, Daraaf, Siwad and Syra—even from the hills of Kush, when he can get them. Aye, and the criminals of Khem, too—they also serve their sentences in the quarries and on the walls of the pyramid.” And Khai’s father had looked at him with wise eyes.

  “I know what you are thinking, Khai, and even though your thoughts are deep and strange for a small boy, still I agree with them. You would not be my son if your thoughts were other than they are, for you are a kind boy, even as I am kind. But they are dangerous thoughts, my son, and must never be given voice, not in Khem. Console yourself as I do with this thought: your father only designs great monuments. He is not responsible for the way in which his masters choose to build them, or for the work-force they employ. . . .”

  So it was that in all Khai’s world, as in his father’s, the one
black spot was the great pyramid. The pyramid . . . and perhaps the ghetto, that sprawling huddle of low, crumbling piles and crooked, smelly streets where the slaves were quartered, where they lived out their lives and reared the next generation which, upon reaching the age of eight or nine years, would commence working on the pyramid in its turn. As for the rest of Asorbes—indeed throughout the entire lands of Khem, from the Mediterranean to the Nubian border and from Kush and Daraaf to the Red Sea—Khai’s world was green and wonderful and teemed with life.

  The river for most of its length harbored countless hippopotamuses and crocodiles, and in the forests the elephants and buffaloes were everywhere. Fishes proliferated in the Nile’s waters and mollusks grew large and fat in the warm mud of its banks and in the lakes and marshes. Cattle not too far removed from ancestral Bos primigenius were herded in their thousands along with sheep and goats, and the savannahs were alive with antelopes, gazelles and wild pigs.

  It was a land of plenty, where a whole range of wild asses, ostriches, giraffes, aardvarks and lions wandered the forests and plains at will, and countless myriads of other animals sported around the water holes and in the long grasses of the savannahs. Though the horse was almost unknown in Khem, Khai had seen a small number of those graceful creatures imported from Arabba and lands east; and he knew that in the mountains of Kush, fierce tribesmen tamed wild ponies, riding upon their naked backs and using them for haulage and other domestic tasks. He had often wondered what it must be like to ride upon the back of a fleet-footed horse. Why, a simple horse would be able to run rings about one of Khasathut’s jewel-bedecked, lumbering ceremonial elephants!

  Because of the number and variety of beasts and birds, Khem was a hunter’s paradise. Khai’s father had given him his first bow and quiver of arrows when he was not yet nine years old, and less than two years later, he had brought home a brace of fine geese shot in flight over the papyrus reeds on the banks of the Nile. On that occasion Khai had been in trouble, for he was only a small boy and he had returned home late, bedraggled and weary—and it was an exceptionally bad year for crocodiles. Several children and a number of adults too had been taken by the ugly reptiles, so that the city’s councilors had offered a goldpiece for every Nile crocodile killed.

  It was curious to think that in at least one province downriver the crocodile was deified in certain seasons and its hunting utterly forbidden, when that same year in Asorbes the tanners had amassed such a heap of hides that there would be no shortage for several years and sandals, belts and other leather and hide goods were at their very cheapest.

  “If it were not for the fact that your own hide is so soft and white,” Harsin Ben Ibizin had told his son, “and that you are the light of your mother’s life, then I would flay you alive for being so late home! Here I and your poor mother have sat and waited, not knowing if you lived or lay dead in the belly of some great croc, and you straggle home covered in Nile mud, and only a pair of scrawny geese with which to redeem yourself! Are these supposed to be worth a day’s waiting and worrying? You’ll not do it again, Khai Ibizin, d’you hear?”

  And Khai had gone to bed without his supper; but later his mother, Merayet, had sneaked in to him with bread and meat and a cup of sweet wine. “My fine hunter,” she had called him, and had gone on to tell him that indeed his geese were excellent birds, glossy and fat. “We shall eat them tomorrow,” she said, “roasted on spits in the garden, when we all come home from the Pharaoh’s Procession.”

  The Royal Procession, yes! And this would be the first time that Khai had ever seen it. The splendid pomp and ceremony of Khasathut’s quarterly parade, when the Pharaoh himself would appear to the people, to be praised and worshipped by them; when he would choose three more brides, as he did four times a year, to enter with him into the pyramid and the glory of matrimony with the great and omnipotent man-God. . . .

  II

  THE GOD-KING’S PARADE

  With the first rays of the morning sun—whose golden disk had been a god long before Khasathut’s many-times great-grandfather had become the first Pharaoh—the peoples of Khem were out in all their finery, thronging through the streets, squares and thoroughfares of Asorbes to gather at the base of the pyramid.

  Arriving mid-morning with his parents, his older brother Adhan and his sister Namisha, Khai was astonished at the masses of color, the fantastic arrangements of flowers which adorned the sides of the great ramp, the thousands of pennants emblazoned with Khasathut’s double-looped ankh, and the gold and ivory gleam of the Pharaoh’s Black Guard where they stood single-ranked along the three edges of the pyramid’s plateau-like eastern summit.

  Wide ramps of packed earth had once wound in a rising square whorl about a towering central pillar which had formed the core of the pyramid. Preshaped blocks of stone had been pushed, dragged and hoisted up these ramps to be positioned on the inside, thus forming the inner mazes, chambers and outer walls of that mighty monument. The north, south and west faces were now almost complete; they lacked only their facing of fine white limestone and the layer of beaten gold with which Khasathut intended eventually to cover them.

  The eastern face, however, with its great ramp that ran up to it for almost half a mile from the distantly looming East Wall, was still incomplete. At its top it formed a man-made plateau. There the ranks of the Black Guard stood at ease, as they had stood since early morning, their spears leaning outward over the city; behind them a great pinnacle of carved stone in the shape of a vast arrowhead towered almost half as high as the plateau again.

  As noon approached and the sun drew near the zenith, the merchants collapsed their many stalls and bundled up their wares, the crowds drew back from the paved road that reached around the pyramid’s base and along both sides of the great ramp, and there was sudden movement atop the high plateau of the east face. There, where the ramp merged with the lip of the plateau, the Black Guard had drawn aside; and now, with a blare of brazen trumpets, the rest of the guardsmen snapped to attention and lifted their spears in the royal salute. This was the moment for which Khai had been waiting, when Pharaoh would show himself to his people.

  Khasathut—a man, and yet a god—descendant of those Great Gods from the sky who came in their golden pyramid when the tribes of Khem were mere savages and left their seed to take root in the fertile valley of the Nile. Legend had it that the first gods who grew from that seed were weak and died young, and that many generations passed before there grew to old age a Pharaoh of that alien stock. This was because the gods had mated with the daughters of mere men, which had severely weakened their blood. By the time the strain was strong again, most of the wisdom of the sky-gods had been lost forever, for none had lived long enough to learn it and pass it on. Thus, only the legends now remained. And now, with his own eyes, Khai was about to see one of those legends—or the sole surviving descendant of them—for himself.

  The Ibizins had an excellent view of the entire affair. They were seated along with many other high-ranking personages and their families on cushioned chairs placed about marble tables on a dais high over the heads of Asorbes’ less prominent citizens. Even so, they had to crane their necks to look up at the plateau’s rim where the Pharaoh now appeared.

  Khai, because he had been distracted by a distant trumpeting of elephants from somewhere to the rear of the pyramid, did not actually see the figure of the Pharaoh come into view—but he heard the sudden cessation of all mundane sounds, and then the concerted sigh that went up from many thousands of throats. Only then did Khai turn his widening eyes up to the incredible golden figure on the plateau high above.

  Towering head and shoulders over the huge black guardsmen flanking him, Khasathut was massive! In a flowing robe of royal golden-yellow, the God-king stood at the head of the great ramp and looked out over Asorbes, over all Khem. He slowly turned his huge head to the south, as if looking far beyond the borders of Khem to the unseen sources of the Nile, then to the north, toward the Great Sea and beyond, and finally
he faced east and inclined his head downward to gaze upon his people. So huge was Pharaoh that Khai fancied he could make out his features: radiant, benign and beautiful.

  Then the awesome figure slowly held up its arms and its robe fell from incredibly broad shoulders; and again that mighty sigh, that gasp of wonder, went up from Khasathut’s subjects. The sun was reflected dazzlingly from golden armor that covered his body and limbs, from a golden crown that sat upon his head, and thousands of eyes watered as they stared at a skirt embroidered with hundreds of glittering jewels.

  “Why!” Khai thought out loud, his voice the merest whisper, “his arms and his thighs, they must be like trees!” He had seen huge Nubian wrestlers fighting bouts for their Khemite masters in the market squares, but even they would be dwarfed by the massive figure atop the ramp who now drew the crowd’s amazed and adoring attention. And why shouldn’t they adore him? His prosperity was Khem’s prosperity, wasn’t it? And if ever a man looked like a king, surely the Pharaoh was that man. And if a king could be a god, then most certainly was Khasathut the God-king himself!

  And now the members of the Black Guard were replaced on the high plateau by the royal trumpeters, whose molten instruments blared out in unison once more to herald the commencement of Pharaoh’s parade. As a bellowing of elephants answered the call of the trumpeters, so a huge throne was pushed forward from behind the great golden God-figure and Khasathut seated himself (rather stiffly, Khai thought). Then, with a vast swaying of trunks and a pounding of great gray limbs, the Pharaoh’s two hundred elephants appeared from behind the pyramid, maneuvering along the base of the north face and down the paved road toward the foot of the ramp. Wearing horned helmets of bronze and armored about their great knees—driven by tiny, big-bellied pigmy riders who sat the mighty beasts bareback—the huge pachyderms were the most fearsome creatures that Khai had ever seen.