Pyramids

‘Can you read it, king?’ said Gern, showing what Dil considered to be unnecessary enthusiasm.

‘No. It’s one of the really ancient dialects. Can’t make out a blessed hieroglyph,’ said Teppicymon. ‘I shouldn’t think there’s a single person alive today who can read it.’

‘That’s a shame,’ said Gern.

‘True enough,’ said the king, and sighed. They stood in gloomy silence.

‘So perhaps we could ask one of the dead ones?’ said Gern.

‘Er. Gern,’ said Dil, backing away.

The king slapped the apprentice on the back, pitching him forward.

‘Damn clever idea!’ he said. ‘We’ll just go and get one of the real early ancestors. Oh.’ He sagged. ‘That’s no good. No one will be able to understand them—’

‘Gern!’ said Dil, his eyes growing wider.

‘No, it’s all right, king,’ said Gern, enjoying the new-found freedom of thought, ‘because, the reason being, everyone understands someone, all we have to do is sort them out.’

‘Bright lad. Bright lad,’ said the king.

‘Gern!’

They both looked at him in astonishment.

‘You all right, master?’ said Gern. ‘You’ve gone all white.’

‘The t—’ stuttered Dil, rigid with terror.

‘The what, master?’

‘The t— look at the t—’

‘He ought to have a lie down,’ said the king. ‘I know his sort. The artistic type. Highly strung.’

Dil took a deep breath.

‘Look at the sodding torch, Gern!’ he shouted.

They looked.

Without any fuss, turning its black ashes into dry straw, the torch was burning backwards.

The Old Kingdom lay stretched out before Teppic, and it was unreal.

He looked at You Bastard, who had stuck his muzzle in a wayside spring and was making a noise like the last drop in the milkshake glass[27]. You Bastard looked real enough. There’s nothing like a camel for looking really solid. But the landscape had an uncertain quality, as if it hadn’t quite made up its mind to be there or not.

Except for the Great Pyramid. It squatted in the middle distance as real as the pin that nails a butterfly to a board. It was contriving to look extremely solid, as though it was sucking all the solidity out of the landscape into itself.

Well, he was here. Wherever here was.

How did you kill a pyramid?

And what would happen if you did?

He was working on the hypothesis that everything would snap back into place. Into the Old Kingdom’s pool of recirculated time.

He watched the gods for a while, wondering what the hell they were, and how it didn’t seem to matter. They looked no more real than the land over which they strode, about incomprehensible errands of their own. The world was no more than a dream. Teppic felt incapable of surprise. If seven fat cows had wandered by, he wouldn’t have given them a second glance.

He remounted You Bastard and rode him, sloshing gently, down the road. The fields on either side had a devastated look.

The sun was finally sinking; the gods of night and evening were prevailing over the daylight gods, but it had been a long struggle and, when you thought about all the things that would happen to it now — eaten by goddesses, carried on boats under the world, and so on — it was an odds-on chance that it wouldn’t be seen again.

No one was visible as he rode into the stable yard. You Bastard padded sedately to his stall and pulled delicately at a wisp of hay. He’d thought of something interesting about bivariant distributions.

Teppic patted him on the flank, raising another cloud, and walked up the wide steps that led to the palace proper. Still there were no guards, no servants. No living soul.

He slipped into his own palace like a thief in the day, and found his way to Dil’s workshop. It was empty, and looked as though a robber with very peculiar tastes had recently been at work in there. The throne room smelled like a kitchen, and by the looks of it the cooks had fled in a hurry.

The gold mask of the kings of Djelibeybi, slightly buckled out of shape, had rolled into a corner. He picked it up and, on a suspicion, scratched it with one of his knives. The gold peeled away, exposing a silver-grey gleam.

He’d suspected that. There simply wasn’t that much gold around. The mask felt as heavy as lead because, well, it was lead. He wondered if it had ever been all gold, and which ancestor had done it, and how many pyramids it had paid for. It was probably very symbolic of something or other. Perhaps not even symbolic of anything. Just symbolic, all by itself.

One of the sacred cats was hiding under the throne. It flattened its ears and spat at Teppic as he reached down to pat it. That much hadn’t changed, at least.

Still no people. He padded across to the balcony.

And there the people were, a great silent mass, staring across the river in the fading, leaden light. As Teppic watched a flotilla of boats and ferries set out from the near bank.

We ought to have been building bridges, he thought. But we said that would be shackling the river.

He dropped lightly over the balustrade on to the packed earth and walked down to the crowd.

And the full force of its belief scythed into him.