From the same great portal where the Falcon-god had stood, a goddess entered. Her cow's head held tall horns that curved around a ball of orange light. A melody of utes followed her where she walked, and a familiar gure attended her carrying a golden stool. Rekemheb * 229 *

maintained the formal bearing of a priest in service, but he glanced to the side conspiratorially. A hint of smile played over his face, as if to say, "See? We are here together at the Balance, after all."

The goddess glanced contemptuously at Seth. "I have seen her taking refuge in a village mosque while she rescued my priest. I speak for her." The light between her horns seemed to increase in brightness.

The judges said together, "We hear the words of the Great Mother Hathor."

The sound of metal scraping on metal drew all eyes back to the Great Balance. The heart dish had risen slightly from the oor, but it still trembled below the other dish where the Ma'at feather once again lay.

Seth leaned toward the accused, his snout glistening. "These testimonies carry no weight, for she offends my father the Aton, in whom all things live. As His light shineth, so am I the thunder in the sky." He extended his whole arm toward the new Ka, nearly touching her. "I am His voice and His right hand, and I condemn her."

The heart dish dropped a millimeter and the Hall fell silent with uncertainty, rendering audible the tap of the goddess's golden stool as Rekemheb set it down. Valerie looked over toward the two, waiting for rescue, but neither had more to say.

Then Rekemheb's face brightened, and he inclined his head in deference as another gure appeared suddenly beside him.

The new god wore a simple snow-white kilt that hung to his knees and a wide collar of turquoise beads across his chest. At the top of the collar, a slender neck ended in the small white head and long curved beak of an ibis. Peering through round bird's eyes, the Scribe-god looked myopic and professorial. He held his stylus over what looked for all the world like a clipboard. In three small steps, the god walked toward the Balance and turned around.

At that moment the long beak evaporated upward, and the bird face metamorphosed into the face of a white-haired man. A man who had served her tea.

"Jehut!" Valerie exclaimed.

"I am called Jehuti here," he said, with the same John Gielgud voice he had used in the necropolis. He glanced at Seth, who stood wide-legged and hostile before the center of the Balance. "You overstate your complaint, Son of Aton." He looked up at the judges on the left and on the right. "The Son of Aton, who loves not his brother, nor any of us in * 230 *

this place, shall not accuse her. Do you not recognize this mortal? She is one of the chosen, and my palette and reed have been given to her."

The God of the Dead nodded stif y in agreement, his greenish hand lifting his crook and bringing it down again on his knee.

The Scribe wrote on his tablet. "She is justi ed," he declared, and held the tablet up to display the all-important hieroglyphs: the platform and the oar.

The judges did not speak, but forty-two staffs began to tap, each one a heartbeat after the other, circling the Hall like distant thunder. At the nal tap, the heart dish slowly rose, the feather dish sank, and the forty-two judges said in unison, "Ma' heru! "

"True of voice," Osiris repeated, before his eyes glazed over. At the same instant, the divine witnesses faded from sight, and the ring of judges froze to form a frieze of stone around the empty Hall.

"That's it?"

Fear had ebbed to annoyance, and the newly acquitted Valerie-Ka turned to her rescuer. The Scribe-god was already halfway through the portal. She hurried after him.

Outside the Hall it was twilight, though whether it was dawn or dusk she could not tell. Against a faintly orange sky the objects on the landscape were still black. A path descended to a eld of reeds, and as she scurried along behind the god, she sensed herself as well among the Ba-birds gliding overhead. Yes, here I am, the two parts of her thought, surveying the green landscape from above and from below.

She searched in her mind for a sensation of her shadow, which had not followed from the Hall. She detected it nally, somnambulant among others of its sort, soundless anchors among the dead.

The god had stopped before a river, not the dismal water that the ferry had crossed, she noted, but a stream so wide she could not see the other bank.

"That's all there is?" she repeated. "You've judged my immortal soul and that's the end of the story?"

"Ah, no. It is rather the beginning. Listen well, Valerie Foret. You are newborn to the afterlife and know as little as you did when you were newborn into the world." He swept his hand downward the length of her in the air. "Behold. Bereft of your earthly ties, this is the essence of yourself."

Her initial fears dispelled, she realized she had paid little attention to her new self. She looked down at her chest, examined her arms. In the * 231 *

twilight, she saw she was translucent as Rekemheb had been, though of a slightly bluer cast. She held her hand up to her face and found she could render it invisible. Like exing a muscle, she willed her arms to fade but, horri ed at the sight of her armless self, she brought them back again. She wondered whether the laws of physics were suspended in the afterlife, or if laws existed that science had simply overlooked.

"And my Ba?" she felt her bird-soul think.

"Your Ba has the same ability, if less need to conceal herself from the living. But you should stop playing now and set yourself to the task the gods have given you." A low table, such as a scribe would use, appeared before them on the ground, and he motioned her toward it.

"Sit down."

She hesitated for a second and then lowered herself to the sand.

The god sat down across from her, as he had done under the calligraphed arcade of the Emir Sharif al Kitab. His face was still kind, avuncular, but it confused her to see the soft-spoken Arab she had met in rags now bare-chested and in the ornaments of a god.

"This is it, then? This is where all the world's souls come?" She looked around, making no effort to conceal her disappointment. "What happens to the billions of nonbelievers?"

Jehuti took his palette and scroll case from her shoulder and laid them across his lap, then leaned his elbows on his knees. "Every creature has its story, and at death, each one goes to its own hereafter."

She frowned. "Rekemheb told us that in the desert, but I never quite believed him. I still can't get my mind around it."

"No? Yet your Christian Book of the Dead proclaims, 'In the Beginning was the Word, and the Word was God.' You are surely familiar with that truth."

"You mean the Bible? Yes, I suppose so, but I always assumed those words were just mumbo jumbo. What have words got to do with life after death?"

"Do not doubt the spirit, which is everlasting, for it lives in you as understanding. Even the scientist must agree to that."

She nodded cautiously.

"And what else is understanding but words, the words you use to interpret the experience of life and to tell yourself all things. It is through words that you comprehend death as well as life."

She nodded again, frowning as she struggled to grasp what he said. He added, "It is in these selfsame words and images that the spirit * 232 *

lives on."

"The spirit lives in its own story, you mean. So that the hereafter we 'understand' is the one that we experience?"

"Yes. The story that you tell is the story that tells you."

The sky overhead seemed to lighten imperceptibly while they spoke, revealing that the half-light they sat in was in fact dawn.

"That is your creation story, then?"

"Before the Scribe there was no story, only the Light and the Darkness. But then the Light gave rise to me, and I spoke forth the rest." He laid a bony hand on his upper chest.

"You are the Creator, then?" Valerie asked, awestruck.

He shook his head. "I am the Words of Ra. I am that which spoke 'water' and it came to be. I told the names of things: 'papyrus,' 'lotus,'

'sparrow,' and they took form."

In the increasing light Valerie looked at the objects he pointed toward, and as he named them they seemed to take on sharper outline. It was as if he had spread form over some other formless thing, something vibrant and vast and yet that needed him.

"Then Ra is the Creator."

"As water is the creator of the wave. Ra is the force that enlivens the lion and the jackal, the river and the wind, and we are the forms of his divinity. This was understood by men until the Aton appeared."

"The Sun Disk? But how is the Aton different from the Sun God Ra?"

"He is an aberration of Ra, a demented form of him which claims all power."

"Then why is the Sun Disk guarded by Seth?"

"Seth does not guard the Aton so much as represent it and in his story is its herald. But he has his place in our story as well. The strength of Seth holds back Apophis, which is the enemy of all. Apophis is the emptiness which swallows up my words and so undoes them."

"Then Seth serves a good purpose. Chaos must not reign."

"Neither must the single will. For the light of the world is not one but many, and some of the light is darkness."

"Interesting way of putting it. But what has all that got to do with me?"

"It is you who must tell the world of the rst crime, when the Aton silenced the gods and declared omnipotence."

"With Pharaoh Akhnaton, you mean?"

* 233 *

"Clever girl, to have puzzled that out. It was but the usurper's rst appearance, and soon he came with other names, offering men an irresistible inducement. In exchange for obedience to his single voice, he freed men from service to nature and gave them dominion over it."

"What was he called?"

"In each nation he came forth with a different name but always with the same blandishment, that god's image mirrored that of men.

Oh, excellent of atteries. 'Inasmuch as you abjure nature and worship me, your God, so you shall be like me.' But the One-god has not done well by His believers. He has failed to keep them from each other's throats or from the despoilment of the earth." The god reached over and with a slender nger touched the small fresh scar between ear and cheekbone. "See how he chides the disobedient?"

Valerie listened, her lips pressed against her knuckles. He spoke of nature's silence and yet, as the light neared, she could sense nothing but its vitality. The wide river had begun to glisten, wrinkling under the morning breeze. Birds and insects crisscrossed in the air. Seed and blossom, worm and burrowing animal began to stir, and she felt their every wakening.

The god continued. "Ra reigns with the other gods here in the Duat, but the Aton reigns in the land of the living. Foreseeing this, I gave to Pharaoh Meremptah a dream of the crime and of the man whose lineage could one day undo it. I gave the dream to you as well."

"The dream of ying came from you? Then maybe you can explain it. It ended with sparks springing from my mouth and turning into words. Words that even as I said them I couldn't understand."

Jehuti chuckled softly. "They are older than the languages you know. For you, unfathomably old."

"The rst word, ' Khetet'? What is that?" At the moment that she asked, she sensed a vast benevolence approaching from the east, and her mind yearned toward it.

"The opposite of that which stirs in you now."

"What do you me-" Then all around her palm and lotus, bird and beetle began to give off melodies, and every object shimmered with color and perfume. Creatures under the water and in the ground, desert creatures in the vast distance called out to her in every hue and timbre, and each new voice seemed to increase her.

In the onrush of sensation, she could scarcely see or hear the god as he handed back the scroll case. "Tell our story, child of Rekemheb, * 234 *

as you see it with your heart. Write it with my reeds and ink which were given you. Do it quickly, for disaster hastens, and every word that oweth forth herefrom will live forever."

"Child of Rekemheb?" she murmured. She felt her own light increase as she joined the crescendo of greeting for the majestic light that neared. She beheld it through closed lids, euphoric, as if she stood within a vast chorus of rejoicing. Then the Barque of Ra was upon her, and she gave herself over to the rapture of its passage. Horus suffused her rst in his taut virility, and she felt him in every ber of herself.

In a moment his aggressive maleness gave way to the voluptuous femaleness of Hathor and Isis. Then Ra itself ignited in her, in a single outburst. She soared on the hissing winds of Shu, rippling desert sand, and was cooled by the moisture of Tefnut. Ma'at enveloped her then with harmony for a moment before the sharp wit of Jehuti focused her inner vision. Finally she felt the ancient ladies course through her, the savage protection of Nekhbet and Wadjet.

The passing sun barque warmed her face, and she held her eyes shut, prolonging the joy and peace. Then, through closed lids, she sensed a shadow come across her face, and she heard the soft crunch of sandals stepping on sand.

* 235 *

* 236 *

CHAPTER XXXIII:.

CHE FAR SENZA EURIDICE.

So, you have fallen for their little spectacle, then," she heard him snort. "You will tire of it soon enough."

Valerie opened her eyes to the gure that stood before her with the sun at his back. He remained motionless, except for his long upright ears, which twitched slightly. "You do not belong in this place," the gure added.

She tilted her head back. "Seth. Haven't you heard? I am justi ed.

There is nothing you can do now." She shifted out of his shade and then, blinded by the light that radiated behind him, she shifted back. "If you were trying to keep me out of the Duat, then you have lost."

"If I have lost, then you might consider what you have won." He looked around, drawing her glance to the empty landscape. "It's quiet, isn't it? You haven't asked yet where the other Kas are."

She followed his glance, dread beginning to increase again.

The camel mouth widened in the hint of a smile. "They're all gone, all but a few tenacious ones, and they will pass soon enough. The mummies are all found, you see, or disintegrated." He looked around again. "As hereafters go, this one is a wasteland. Even the gods are barely hanging on."

"I don't believe you. The gods were in the Hall of Judgment, and I felt them passing in the sun barque. And you yourself are here."

"Oh, but I've gotten out. I serve the One God and live as He does, in your world. I've been through most of your history. It's a much better story than this one."

"I don't know what you are talking about." Hating to be on the ground looking up at him, she struggled to her feet and stood as if bracing for a physical attack.

* 237 *

He went on, lightly. "Oh yes. I've been all over your world. I've been looking out for you too. But you would have your way, wouldn't you, and it got you shot."

"What? That was you, who made Vanderschmitt pull the trigger?"

Unconsciously she touched the spot just under her heart where her life's blood had poured out.

"No, it was you who made him shoot. What possessed you to pursue him when you knew he was desperate-and had a weapon?"