An Evil Spirit Out of the West Read online

  My father was a Medjay from the moment he left the egg. A born soldier, he did not bother with me. My memories of him are vague: a stout man with a shaven head, dressed in a leather kilt and jerkin, marching boots on his feet, a war-belt fastened about his waist, a quiver of arrows slung across his back. A man proud of serving Pharaoh, he had received the Golden Collar of Honour together with the Silver Bees of Courage for slaying enemies in hand-to-hand combat in battle. (I still own these medals of bravery; the heavy gold necklace and the small silver bees carved in a cluster from a lump of pure silver with a jewelled hook to fasten on your tunic.) I remember him showing me the khopesh, the curved sword which he used against the People of the Nine Bows, those myriad enemies of Pharaoh who envied Egypt’s riches and lusted after her rich soil and fair cities.

  Father visited me occasionally, sometimes accompanied by an aide who carried his ceremonial shield. He would crouch down and stare coldly at me, eyes wrinkled up after years of peering through the heat and dust of the Red Lands. From the beginning I was lonely. I lived with my father’s sister, Isithia, a hard-faced, sinewy woman, sharp-eyed and bitter-tongued. A childless woman whose husband had gone North on business and never returned. I could understand why! He certainly left Isithia wealthy enough, the owner of a country mansion surrounded by lofty thick walls. One of my constant memories is playing on the steps leading up to its porticoed entrance with its palmetta decoration in blue, green and ochre-red. Around the house were slender columns carved to represent green papyrus with red roots and golden capitals, a shadow-filled peristyle which provided welcome shade against the heat. The rooms inside had polished beam ceilings and tiled floors: a vestibule, an audience chamber, other rooms and polished wooden stairs leading to upper chambers. Isithia and I would sit on the broad roof, away from the heat, to catch the cooling breath of Amun. All around the house stretched verdant gardens, fed by a canal from the Nile, shaded by climbing vines and edged with flowers. A beautiful place, its paths were lined with trees of every variety: kaku palms, sycamore, persea, pomegranate, acacia, yew, tamarisk and terebrinth. Elegant coloured pavilions stood around the garden where you could sit to enjoy the different flowers and scents. In the centre gleamed a square pool of pure water with blooms of white water lilies floating on the top. Even as a boy I could sit for hours and observe them, how the blue lotus would flower at dawn, curl at midday and sink beneath the water whilst the white lotus only flowered after darkness fell.

  I very rarely left that house and garden. I used to stand on the roof next to the corn bins, resting against the latticework built around the parapet to keep me from falling off. Not that Isithia cared all that much for me. She was a cold woman. The only creature she ever showed affection for was Seth, the ugly Saluki hound – a fierce war-dog from less gentle days, and in my youth a rare breed. Where Isithia went, Seth always followed, and where Isithia went, so did her fly whisk. She hated flies and mice. Every hole, every crack through which vermin could creep, were liberally coated in cat fat.

  I recall her sitting, fly whisk in hand, in her high-backed armchair, its legs ending in four panther paws. The chair suited her. Isithia was a panther with narrow eyes and receding chin. A tall woman, she dressed in flowing gowns and embroidered sashes. She very rarely wore a wig or, indeed, her silver-edged sandals which a servant always carried behind her. If the nights turned chilly, she’d drape a fringed shawl about her shoulders. She distilled perfumes and medicine and sold them to select customers, often making trips out to the Valley of the Pines to collect those herbs and concoctions she could not grow in her own gardens. In the main these produced enough fruit and vegetables to make us self-sufficient, with crops of onions, leeks, lettuces and water melons. Isithia rarely went to the market but hired the best cooks to buy and serve fattened duck and geese. I always drank the freshest milk, sweetened with honey from the hives of pottery jars kept at the end of the garden and, when the bees were found wanting, the milk was sweetened with carob seeds. If I was naughty I’d be given nothing except the pith of a papyrus stalk to suck. Isithia never hit me though sometimes she’d seize me by the shoulders and shake me. She led her own private life: her customers came at night – women for potions and sometimes men. I used to hear the sound of beating and cries but whether they were of pleasure or pain I could not tell.

  Isithia’s servants were shemsous, or personal slaves, who wore a collar with a hieroglyph denoting their status – rolled-up matting on a stick. They were as terrified of her as I was – wary of her tongue and fly whisk. There were also a few slaves or bekous, men and women captured in war who were made to work in the gardens and live in sheds not fit for cattle. On one occasion two of them escaped. My father pursued them, caught them but never brought them back. Wielding authority over these was Api, Isithia’s wedpou or steward, dumb as an ox but just as faithful.

  Isithia was undoubtedly rich. Her strongrooms held vases of oils and unguents: henna, iris, fir, mandrake and lotus, all kept in sealable chests with ebony and gold veneer in silver mountings. I don’t know whether Father even recognised the truth about his sister, or the silent terror she instilled in me. Sometimes at night, on the eve of an inauspicious day, Isithia would stand on the portico quoting blood-curdling verses from The Book of the Dead. Flanked by fire cauldrons she would sprinkle the darkness with oils and herbs, Api standing in the shadows behind her. Isithia’s voice would carry low and terrible through the night.

  ‘Go back! Retreat!

  Get back, you dangerous one.

  Do not come against us.

  Do not thrive on my magic.

  Go back, you crocodiles of the South.

  Go back, you who feed on faeces, smoke and want!

  Detestation of you gnaws at my belly!’

  One night I even glimpsed her in the garden squatting over a dish of glowing charcoal strewn with herbs. Her kilt pulled up, she crouched like a woman would over a latrine, mouthing curses into the night. Isithia practised hek, the magic of the dark. She was always terrified of the aataruu, those evil spirits out of the West. Only the gods know what her past contained; her soul must have been heavy with the nastiness. She hardly spoke to me except to quote proverbs about the need for peace and security. I remember one of the verses well. She made me learn it by rote.

  It is so good when beds are smoothed

  And the pillows well laid out for the officers,

  When the need of every man is filled

  with a sheet and a shade

  And a securely closed door for someone who slept in

  a bush.

  In my later years, going through the records, I discovered that Isithia’s former husband had been an army officer. Perhaps she was terrified of the chaos war might bring. Occasionally I tried to ask her about Mother but she forced a quick smile and told me to keep quiet. I asked about my birth and she pounced like a cat would on a mouse.

  ‘You were born between the twenty-third and twenty-seventh day,’ she waved her fly whisk at me, ‘so you must always be wary of snakes and crocodiles.’

  On reflection, oh how right she was! I asked what god should be my patron? What divine being protected my birth? She pushed her face close to mine in mock sadness. ‘Strange you ask that, Mahu. Strange to answer. No god.’ Again, how right she was!

  My memories should be sweet: a clean house with its bathrooms, hard-tiled stoolroom and well-decorated chambers. The air was sweet with the fragrance of kiphye, juniper, cassia and frankincense, and plentiful incense, the divine perfume of the gods, burned in spoons, their handles carved in the form of human forearms. Food was plentiful, delicious meals piled high on reed dishes. Yet I cannot recall anything sweet. No children ever visited us. I was given an education of sorts. The first hieroglyph I drew was the sebkhet, an enclosure with battlements that represented my life as a boy, locked in an enclosure. On rare occasions Father arrived and took both my aunt and me across the Nile to the Todjeser – the Necropolis. I loved such occasions: the fast-flowing Nile, the cooling breezes, the pungent smell from the thick papyrus groves, the flashes of colour as ducks and wild birds rose up and wheeled against the blue sky. Sometimes the roar of the hippopotami would echo along the banks. I’d feel a shiver of fear as my father pointed out the crocodile pools. Occasionally, I’d glimpse the gold-topped obelisks and carved mountings of the temples of Thebes.

  ‘That is Waset,’ Father would whisper in my ear. ‘Pharaoh’s city. And from here you can see . . .’ And he’d list the temples but I couldn’t really care. I was just so pleased he was close to me. Eventually the crew would make ready to land at the Great Mooring Place. Above us soared the peak of Meretseger, the brooding goddess, and those craggy cliffs which could change colour so dramatically. These loomed over the City of the Dead and its warren of tombs, the Valley of the Nobles, the Valley of the Kings, the places where the dead came. We’d disembark on the quayside, pass the huge statue of the green-skinned god Osiris and go up through the winding streets of the City of the Dead, a place of horror and delight where the stench of natron, the heavy salt from the embalmers’ shops, mingled with the more pervasive stink of corruption. Yet we’d turn a corner and glimpse beautifully carved caskets and coffins or elegantly sculptured canopic jars. The embalming shops, cabinet-makers and coffin suppliers did a roaring trade. As in life so in death. The rich could buy the best but the corpses of the poor were everywhere, nothing more than dried-out skeletons, draped in skins lying on floors or ledges. Not for them the Osirian rites of the embalmer but the cheap juice of the juniper pumped up through the rectum, the entire corpse pickled in natron. The very poor were given some cheaper, even more corrosive, substance, before being dried out in a natron bath wrapped in a dirty sheet and housed with scores of others in some coffin room. I noti
ced my aunt’s whisk was even more vigorously at work as the flies buzzed everywhere. Great black clouds of them seemed to haunt her.

  At last we were free of the city and going along the rocky, crumbling path to the Valley of the Nobles. At its entrance we were greeted by the Master of the Necropolis carrying his staff, its top carved in the shape of an ankh, the symbol of life. He was flanked by two priests wearing Anubis masks, which the Master introduced as Wabs or ‘Pure Ones’. They took us along to my father’s tomb, the House of Eternity which sheltered his wife’s corpse and would, in time, shelter his, Isithia’s and mine. Even then I uttered a silent prayer that, in death, I would be free, as far away from her as possible. We entered a courtyard. Inside, a small stela proclaimed the message:

  The Great Enchantress has purged and purified her.

  She has confessed her sins which shall be destroyed.

  Homage to thee, oh Osiris.

  He who hears all our words,

  who washed away our sins,

  has justified her voice.

  This was the first clear reference I had ever seen to my mother. My father squatted down and pointed out the words Ma a Kherou. ‘Do you know what that means, Mahu?’

  ‘No, sir,’ I replied. My father smiled slightly, a rare occurrence. ‘It means “Be true of voice”. Will you be true of voice, Mahu?’

  ‘Why, yes, sir.’

  That was the first promise I ever really made and the first one I never really kept. ‘Was Mother . . . ?’

  ‘Your mother was a good woman,’ Father replied.

  He took my hand, another rare occurrence, and led me round to the other side of the squat stela to read out the confession from The Book of the Dead.

  ‘“I have not ill-treated people. I have not taken milk from the mouths of little children”.’ (I glanced sharply at my aunt.)

  Under this there was a picture of my mother’s soul being weighed on the Scales of Truth. My aunt took great delight in naming the demons, also carved there, ready to seize my mother’s soul if the Scales went against her: Great Strider, Swallower of Shades, the Breaker of Bones, the Eater of Blood, the Shatterer of Shades. I tried to grasp my father’s hand but he gently pushed me away. Standing up he ruffled my black hair.

  ‘Don’t worry, Mahu. Your mother is in Yalou, the Fields of the Blessed, under the protection of the great Osiris.’

  He led me across the courtyard to the small temple faced with columns. The Master of the Necropolis unsealed the door. For a while we waited for the torches to be lit and my father led me proudly into the vestibule.

  ‘This, Mahu, is our House of Eternity! We have prepared it well.’

  The walls of the entrance chamber were decorated with scenes from Father’s life: being received in audience by Pharaoh to be presented with the Silver Bees. Father hunting out in the desert, driving his chariot towards a herd of antelope. Father in a papyrus thicket, boomerang at the ready, waiting to bring down the gloriously painted water birds which burst out at his approach. Other more touching scenes were recorded: my mother, lithe and graceful, anointing him with perfume or pouring water into his hands.

  We left the vestibule and went down a narrow passageway; its walls on either side were decorated with scenes of souls being taken to Abydos, of worshipping the gods, of offering them dishes of fruit above lighted braziers. At the entrance to the burial chamber Father paused to talk to the priests, making sure that the Ka priest, the Priest of the Double, offered prayers and libations to the gods on the anniversary of my mother’s death. At last we entered the burial chamber containing four sarcophagi. To the left stood my mother’s, dark-red and covered with quotations from The Book of the Dead. I was fascinated by the wadjet eyes painted just under the sarcophagus lid. I ignored everything else and went across and pressed my cheek against the cold stone. When I looked up, my father was staring down at me, tears in his eyes. My aunt, however, still stood in the doorway, the only time I had ever glimpsed her really fearful. I wished to crouch down. Burial chamber or not, I could have slept by that tomb. However, my father picked me gently up and led me out.

  On our way back across the Nile, Father asked me to speak with true voice. Was I well? Was I happy?

  ‘I am, sir,’ I replied.

  ‘And are you not happy to live in the Land of Tomery?’ He used the old term for the Kingdom of the Two Lands, the realm of Egypt.

  ‘Of course, Father.’

  ‘Then what is wrong, son?’

  My aunt’s obsidian-like eyes caught my gaze, but sheltering by my mother’s tomb had strengthened me.

  ‘I am lonely, sir.’

  My father laughed and ruffled my hair. I thought he’d ignore me but, in the riverside marketplace, he stopped and bought me a pet monkey, an agile little creature with bright mischievous eyes who clung to me and screeched noisily. My aunt whispered a joke, how it would be difficult to tell us apart. I was delighted. I called my pet Bes after the ugly household god, and when my father left I hardly noticed. I loved little Bes. He truly was a brother. Indeed, I took pride in the jokes, made by my aunt and taken up by the servants, about the resemblance between us. I bought Bes a little shawl and a silver medallion with the debens of copper I had saved. I didn’t actually do this in person. An old servant called Dedi went to the marketplace for me. She was a bekou, a slave who did the laundry and who somehow knew a great deal about monkeys. Bes was the delight of my life. A greedy creature, the very aroma of duck or meat cooked in onion and garlic would send him chattering wildly whilst a piece of sliced melon made him dance with joy. Where I went, Bes followed.

  My aunt came to hate him.

  ‘He attracts the flies,’ she snapped.

  Bes grew very wary of her copper-tipped whisk.

  Isn’t it strange where dreams come from? Memories drift in and out of our hearts like incense across a sanctuary. Our memories are traces of ghosts, things that were, or even might have been. My aunt’s house was always dark yet tinted with yellow as if one of those great sandstorms had blown in from the Red Lands. My childhood was like a wall frieze with a yellow background against which all those around me, including Bes, acted out their roles. I can still recall that little monkey, his jerky movements, the silver chain glittering around his neck, the naughty face and darting eyes. I also remember that fateful day so well. Dedi was filling the vase of the water clock: it was decorated with carvings of the baboons of Thoth, ringed with twelve lines to signify the hours of the day. I was explaining all this to Bes, chattering like a monkey to a monkey, one of the few occasions I ever did so in my aunt’s house.

  ‘You see,’ I pointed with my finger, ‘it takes one hour for the water to sink from one line to the next as it trickles out of that small hole at the bottom.’ Bes jumped up and down on my lap. Dedi started laughing at me, not in a mocking way; her fat face crinkled up, her eyes, like two slivers of black glass, bright with merriment. I rose and embraced her; she was one of the few people I touched. She smelt of dust and soap. Dedi stopped what she was doing, put the jug down and gave me her endearing gumless smile. I heard a patter behind me and looked round. Bes was streaking like a pellet from a sling through the doorway towards a piece of juicy melon lying there. That monkey could never resist melon. I shouted and ran after him, but Bes grabbed the melon and scampered across the courtyard.

  I had almost reached the doorway when an agonising scream, followed by a low growl, made my stomach lurch. I could hardly step through that doorway. Even then I knew what had happened. Someone had let Seth the great Saluki hound out. Bes was already dangling between his jaws. The cur was shaking him as a cat would a mouse; blood spattered the pavements. Bes’s arms hung limp, his head strangely sideways, the small medallion glinting in an ever-widening pool of blood. A nightmare image as that hellhound shook the little corpse like some bloodsoaked rag.