The Egyptologist - Arthur Phillips [201]
And then, with whatever strength remained to him, he turned to face the flickering torchlight, walked one last time the rooms in which he would await his admission to immortality.
What will the final moments feel like, wonders the last king of Egypt as he sets to his one remaining task. What will his last breath taste of, and the first one after it?
His hands shake with foolish fear and hunger. Some of his fingers are smashed, swollen, broken in battle or from his work on the Master. His fingers are stained with paint, and they stink still of preservatives and his father-in-law’s guts.
The chemical treatment of his feet and legs will be excruciating, but with the numbing effect of the slow-acting poisons he will have already consumed, and with the further comforting knowledge that immortality is approaching and he has thwarted his enemies for all time, he will be able to wrap his feet and legs tightly. He will remark how far he has come in this life, from how low to how high, and how high he will soar in the next, where his name will ring out forever. The preservative treatment of his groin and trunk will be almost unbearably painful. But he will bear it, and wrap himself to his waist. The embalming fluids across his cheeks feel like ice fire, and the fumes in his nose scorch his brain. The drops that fall over his parched lips and tongue gag him. His eyes cloud and burn, but he does not stop. There is no time to stop, for soon the poisons will complete their work, and he must complete his own before his departure. He tightly wraps his face and head.
He has rehearsed the solution to his final, intractable problem, practised it over and over in his solitude, and while no solution is flawless, this is the best that Fate has allowed him: the long, measured strips of linen laid out across the floor. Even as the preservative’s sting grows crueller, he clutches the linen in his fist. Lying on the tomb floor, he rolls, gathering the wrapping as best he can around his arms and trunk as he goes, finishing the task, he hopes, at the chamber’s exact centre, precisely at the moment of his departure.
Darkness. The king’s final pains recede. His breathing stops for a spell, the length of time no longer measurable. He drifts in silence. And then he awakens to music. The first face he sees is his father’s, already risen and now standing over him, repentant, servile, restrained, loving. So lovingly he has with his own gentle fingers opened his son’s eyes from sleep. And now the women enter the room, their almond eyes striped with malachite kohl, their copper bodies under sheer and clinging shirts. They approach and caress him sweetly. They love him so. They unwrap him and anoint him with oil. And when they have prepared him, they lead her in, at last: in floats his queen, her long-fingered hands reaching for him. She is healthy and fresh and only for him. The food descends from the walls and fills long tables. The new, unimaginable music grows louder, and his wife leads him away from life’s pain and loneliness. Far beneath him, mere men will daily speak of him with awe, their honeyed exhalations of his name forming clouds that will waft him high above the masses of rivals and pedants, above poverty and mockery, above snobs and villains, secure from enemies and doubt and betrayal. His mysteries and riddles remain unsolved for millennia stacked upon millennia until another should find him, embrace him, twist and fuse with him, vanish into him, and win, for discoverer and king alike, the eternal love due an immortal name, Atum-hadu and Trilipush, Trilipush and Atum-hadu, Trilipush, Trilipush, Trilipush.
ARTHUR PHILLIPS GRATEFULLY ACKNOWLEDGES THE KIND ASSISTANCE OF:
the British Museum’s Department of Ancient Egypt and Sudan (particularly Marcel Marée), Jim