Pyramids

‘Well, they’re here, sir! That’s not right, is it? I mean, not to be really here. And they’re just striding around and fighting amongst themselves and shouting at people.’ He looked both ways before continuing. ‘Between you and me, sir,’ he said, ‘they don’t seem too bright.’

The king nodded. ‘What are the priests doing about this?’ he said.

‘I saw them throwing one another in the river, sir.’

The king nodded again. ‘That sounds about right,’ he said. ‘They’ve come to their senses at last.’

‘You know what I think, sir?’ said Dil earnestly. ‘Everything we believe is coming true. And I heard something else, sir. This morning, if it was this morning, you understand, because the sun’s all over the place, sir, and it’s not the right sort of sun, but this morning some of the soldiers tried to get out along the Ephebe road, sir, and do you know what they found?’

‘What did they find?’

‘The road out, sir, leads in!’ Dil took a step backwards the better to illustrate the seriousness of the revelations. ‘They got up into the rocks and then suddenly they were walking down the Tsort road. It all sort of curves back on itself. We’re shut in, sir. Shut in with our gods.’

And I’m shut in my body, thought the king. Everything we believe is true? And what we believe isn’t what we think we believe.

I mean, we think we believe that the gods are wise and just and powerful, but what we really believe is that they are like our father after a long day. And we think we believe the Netherworld is a sort of paradise, but we really believe it’s right here and you go to it in your body and I’m in it and I’m never going to get away. Never, ever.

‘What’s my son got to say about all this?’ he said.

Dil coughed. It was the ominous cough. The Spanish use an upside-down question mark to tell you what you’re about to hear is a question; this was the kind of cough that tells you what you’re about to hear is a dirge.

‘Don’t know how to tell you this, sir,’ he said.

‘Out with it, man.’

‘Sir, they say he’s dead, sir. They say he killed himself and ran away.’

‘Killed himself?’

‘Sorry, sir.’

‘And ran away afterwards?’

‘On a camel, they say.’

‘We lead an active afterlife in our family, don’t we?’ observed the king drily.

‘Beg pardon, sir?’

‘I mean, the two statements could be held to be mutually exclusive.’

Dil’s face became a well-meaning blank.

‘That is to say, they can’t both be true,’ supplied the king, helpfully.

‘Ahem,’ said Dil.

‘Yes, but I’m a special case,’ said the king testily. ‘In this kingdom we believe you live after death only if you’ve been mumm—’

He stopped.

It was too horrible to think about. He thought about it, nevertheless, for some time.

Then he said, ‘We must do something about it.’

Dil said, ‘Your son, sir?’

‘Never mind about my son, he’s not dead, I’d know about it,’ snapped the king. ‘He can look after himself, he’s my son. It’s my ancestors I’m worried about.’

‘But they’re dead—’ Dil began.

It has already been remarked that Dil had a very poor imagination. In a job like his a poor imagination was essential. But his mind’s eye opened on a panorama of pyramids, stretching along the river, and his mind’s ear swooped and curved through solid doors that no thief could penetrate.

And it heard the scrabbling.

And it heard the hammering.

And it heard the muffled shouting.

The king put a bandaged arm over his trembling shoulders.

‘I know you’re a good man with a needle, Dil,’ he said. ‘Tell me — how are you with a sledgehammer?’

Copolymer, the greatest storyteller in the history of the world, sat back and beamed at the greatest minds in the world, assembled at the dining table.

Teppic had added another iota to his store of new knowledge. ‘Symposium’ meant a knife-and-fork tea.^{40}

‘Well,’ said Copolymer, and launched into the story of the Tsortean Wars.^{41}