49
I released Thoth’s muzzle, and he bounded into the darkness. Red light flared from the burning oil that had splashed from Sobek’s lamp, and spread across the wall behind me. I heard barking, and then, gratifyingly, screaming. But I needed Sobek alive, to give evidence, and above all to return my son to me. I shouted an urgent order to the baboon as I ran along the dark gallery towards the figure huddled on the ground. I held my lamp up. Thoth had bitten deeply into Sobek’s throat; there was a great gash down one side of his mauled face, tearing his eye from the socket, and the ragged flesh of his cheek hung loosely from the face, exposing bone and vessels. Black blood was pulsing from the neck wound. I knelt down and dragged his ruined face close to mine.
‘Where is my son?’
Blood gurgled in his mouth as he tried to laugh.
I pressed my thumbs down on his eyes.
‘What do you see now?’ I whispered into his ear. ‘Nothing. There is nothing. You are nothing. There is no Otherworld. This darkness you see is your eternity.’
I pressed harder and harder, forcing his eyes back into their sockets, and his legs kicked in the dust like a swimmer drowning on dry land, and he squealed like a rodent, and I felt blood under my fingers, I kept pushing until his vicious heart pumped the last of his black blood from his body, and he was dead.
I kicked his useless corpse, over and over, stamping on the remains of his face until I lost all strength. Then I collapsed on the ground, sobbing in defeat. For his death had achieved nothing. I had done wrong. The oil lamp was dimming fast. I no longer cared.
And then-I heard something. Far, far off: the sound of a child, waking from a nightmare to find himself alone in the darkness, weeping and screaming…
‘I’m coming!’
Amenmose’s screams came back louder.
Thoth bounded ahead of me, into the greater depths of the darkness, but sure of himself as he moved left and right, making the choices for me. And all the time we cried out to each other, father and son, screaming for life.
Thoth found him at the end of one of the deepest galleries. His small head stood out above the rim of a pot large enough for a fully grown baboon. His face was sticky with tears and dirt, and his cries were inconsolable. I scrabbled around for a stone with which to smash open the pot without hurting him. And I kissed the howling boy, and tried to calm him a little, calling ‘
The lamp was guttering now. We had to try to find our way out before we lost the light. I shouted a command to Thoth. He barked as if he understood me, and bounded ahead. I held the boy under my arm, and ran after him, unable to protect the flame at the same time.
But too soon, it flickered and died.
Utter darkness. The boy whimpered, and began to cry again. I shushed him, tried to comfort him.
‘Thoth!’
The baboon bounded to my side, and by feel and habit I fastened the leash on to his collar. He moved on into the blackness, and all I could do was follow, trying to protect the boy from harm as we bumped into walls, and tripped on the uneven floor. Hope, that most delicate of emotions, flickered in me as weak as the lamplight had been. I kissed my son’s eyes in despair. He was quiet now, as if my presence in the dark comforted him, and any fate would now be acceptable.
And then, I saw a brief flash in the obscurity. Perhaps I had imagined it, a figment of my desperate brain. But Thoth barked again, and then the light duplicated itself, and I heard calls coming to me, as if from the lost world of life and sunlight. I shouted back. The lights turned and gathered, coming towards me, like sacred deliverance from the shadows. As they approached I looked down at my son’s little face. His eyes opened wide as he watched the lights in the darkness, like something from a fable bringing him to the happy ending of a scary story.
In the shaking light of the first lamp I recognized a familiar face, at once fearful and relieved. Khety.
50
When I had carried Amenmose up the lane and into the house, Tanefert had fallen to her knees, her mouth open in a silent howl of agony and relief. She held him in the vigil of her arms, and would not let go. When eventually, speaking to her gently, I had been able to prise him from her and lay him on his couch, she then turned to me and beat me with her fists, slapping my face with her hands as if she would tear me apart; and in truth I was glad to let her.
Then she washed the boy in cool water, with a cloth, with infinite tenderness, talking to him quietly. He was tired and fractious. Then she watched over him sleeping, as if she would never leave him again. Her own face was still wet with her tears. She avoided my gaze. I could not speak. I tried brushing my hand gently against her cheek, and she ignored it. I was about to withdraw it, but suddenly she grasped it, kissed it, and held on to it. I encircled her with my arms, and held her as tightly as she had held our son.
‘Never forgive me, as I will never forgive myself,’ I said, eventually.
She looked at me with her now-calm, dark eyes.
‘You promised me you would never allow your work to hurt our family,’ she said simply.
She was right. I put my head in my hands. She stroked my head, as if I were a child.
‘How did he take him?’
‘I had to find food for us all to eat. The children were sick of the same old dinners. They were bored, and frustrated. And I couldn’t stay inside the house all the time. It wasn’t possible. So I decided to go out to the market. I left the servant girl in charge of them. The guard was on the door. She says they were all playing in the yard, and she was doing the washing. And suddenly all she could hear was screaming. She ran out-and Amenmose had disappeared. The gate was open. The guard was lying on the ground, blood pouring from his head. Sekhmet had tried to stop him taking Amenmose. He punched her. That monster punched my daughter. It was my fault.’
She curled into herself, sobbing. Futile tears startled my eyes. Now it was my turn to comfort her in my arms.
‘That monster is dead. I killed him.’
Tanefert raised her tearful face, taken aback, and she saw it was the truth.
‘Please don’t ask me any more today. I will talk about it when I can. But he is dead. He cannot harm us any more,’ I promised.
‘He has harmed us too much already,’ she replied, with an honesty that broke my heart.
The girls’ heads appeared around the curtain. Tanefert looked up, and tried to smile.
‘Is he all right?’ said Thuyu, chewing her side-lock.
‘He’s asleep, so be quiet,’ I said.
Nedjmet stared at him.
But Sekhmet, when she saw him, broke down. I saw the black bruising around her eye, and the scratch marks on her arms, and the long grazes on her legs. She gulped and swallowed, and the plump tears came extravagantly.
‘How could you let that happen to him?’ she cried in her broken voice, hardly able to breathe.
I felt shame come upon me, like a mantle of mud. I kissed her gently on the forehead, wiped her tears, said to all of them, ‘I am so sorry,’ and then I walked away.
I sat on the low bench in the courtyard. From outside the walls of the house the sounds of the street came to me distantly, from another world. I thought about everything that had happened since the night Khety knocked upon the wall by the window. My own heart was knocking now, in my ribs. I had done my family a terrible wrong by leaving. It had not seemed so at the time. And perhaps I had had no choice. But Tanefert is right: there is always a choice. I had chosen the mystery, and I had paid the price. And I did not know how I could heal this.
