Pyramids

‘If we could just begin again, sire? This is the Cabbage of Vegetative Increase—’

‘Sorry,’ said Teppic, ‘I didn’t hear you say I should marry my aunt, did I?’

‘You did, sire. Interfamilial marriage is a proud tradition of our lineage,’ said Dios.^{23}

‘But my aunt is my aunt!’

Dios rolled his eyes. He’d advised the late king repeatedly about the education of his son, but the man was stubborn, stubborn. Now he’d have to do it on the fly. The gods were testing him, he decided. It took decades to make a monarch, and he had weeks to do it in.

‘Yes, sire,’ he said patiently. ‘Of course. And she is also your uncle, your cousin and your father.’

‘Hold on. My father—’

The priest raised his hand soothingly. ‘A technicality,’ he said. ‘Your great-great-grandmother once declared she is king as a matter of political expediency and I don’t believe the edict is ever rescinded.’

‘But she was a woman, though?’

Dios looked shocked. ‘Oh no, sire. She is a man. She herself declared this.’

‘But look, a chap’s aunt—’

‘Quite so, sire. I quite understand.’

‘Well, thank you,’ said Teppic.

‘It is a great shame that we have no sisters.’

‘Sisters!’

‘It does not do to water the divine blood, sire. The sun might not like it. Now this, sire, is the Scapula of Hygiene. Where would you like it put?’

King Teppicymon XXVII was watching himself being stuffed. It was just as well he didn’t feel hunger these days. Certainly he would never want to eat chicken again.

‘Very nice stitching there, master.’

‘Just keep your finger still, Gern.’

‘My mother does stitching like that. She’s got a pinny with stitching like that, has our mum,’ said Gern conversationally.

‘Keep it still, I said.’

‘It’s got all ducks and hens on it,’ Gern supplied helpfully.

Dil concentrated on the job in hand. It was good workmanship, he was prepared to admit. The Guild of Embalmers and Allied Trades had awarded him medals for it.

‘It must make you feel really proud,’ said Gern.

‘What?’

‘Well, our mam says the king goes on living, sort of thing, after all this stuffing and stitching. Sort of in the Netherworld. With your stitching in him.’

And several sacks of straw and a couple of buckets of pitch, thought the shade of the king sadly. And the wrapping off Gern’s lunch, although he didn’t blame the lad, who’d just forgotten where he’d put it. All eternity with someone’s lunch wrapping as part of your vital organs. There had been half a sausage left, too.

He’d become quite attached to Dil, and even to Gern. He seemed still to be attached to his body, too — at least, he felt uncomfortable if he wandered more than a few hundred yards away from it — and so in the course of the last couple of days he’d learned quite a lot about them.

Funny, really. He’d spent the whole of his life in the kingdom talking to a few priests and so forth. He knew objectively there had been other people around — servants and gardeners and so forth — but they figured in his life as blobs. He was at the top, and then his family, and then the priests and the nobles of course, and then there were the blobs. Damn fine blobs, of course, some of the finest blobs in the world, as loyal a collection of blobs as a king might hope to rule. But blobs, none the less.

But now he was absolutely engrossed in the daily details of Dil’s shy hopes for advancement within the Guild, and the unfolding story of Gern’s clumsy overtures to Glwenda, the garlic farmer’s daughter who lived nearby. He listened in fascinated astonishment to the elaboration of a world as full of subtle distinctions of grade and station as the one he had so recently left; it was terrible to think that he might never know if Gern overcame her father’s objections and won his intended, or if Dil’s work on this job — on him — would allow him to aspire to the rank of Exalted Grand Ninety-Degree Variance of the Natron Lodge of the Guild of Embalmers and Allied Trades.

It was as if death was some astonishing optical device which turned even a drop of water into a complex hive of life.

He found an overpowering urge to counsel Dil on elementary politics, or apprise Gern of the benefits of washing and looking respectable. He tried it several times. They could sense him, there was no doubt about that. But they just put it down to draughts.

Now he watched Dil pad over to the big table of bandages, and come back with a thick swatch which he held reflectively against what even the king was now prepared to think of as his corpse.

‘I think the linen,’ he said at last. ‘It’s definitely his colour.’

Gern put his head on one side.

‘He’d look good in the hessian,’ he said. ‘Or maybe the calico.’

‘Not the calico. Definitely not the calico. On him it’s too big.’

‘He could moulder into it. With wear, you know.’