Enough, enough. How the wind howls and shrieks here at night! I must raise myself now and make my final inspections of the counting houses before the guards change. And hope for better dreams.
To the palace of Kaliphus this day, to return the favor of his visit to Cul Holman.
A longer journey than I imagined, but at least it took me out of these hills. Closer to the true waters of the Nile, there is at least some vegetation. Indeed, here are grown many of the crops that keep us. Once, the ditches and canals must have been filled with each spring inundation. But most now are dry or impossibly silted, and the villages are poor, stinking places.
Kaliphus’s palace lies at the center of what I suppose must once have been called a town. I was reminded of my wanderings in Alexandria as my entourage was forced to dismount to make our way through the narrow, disordered streets. Here, it almost seemed, were the same ill-made faces, the same filthy textures of shadow, the same darkly draped and shifting figures. The same fishy stink.
Rising out of these hovels, Kaliphus’s palace was larger than I’d imagined, and constructed in the main of stone. When I inspected the halls and columned entrances, I realized that most of it had been pillaged from ancient sites. The slabs were broken, lopsided, worked into different colors and ages, with all the usual hieroglyphs, the scarabs and the birds. Within the palace, beneath the bright but crudely dyed tapestries and rugs, I even glimpsed walls made of fine and more clearly blocklike sections, with markings that reminded me of the soapstone in my villa’s wooden alter.
Most of my conversation with Kaliphus was devoted to the tribute the boatmen of Rasind are demanding, or was too trivial to record. The food was poorer than that which I had given him, and ill-flavored with alien spices, but I finally thanked him over ale for the gift of the slaves.
Kaliphus explained that Alya and Dahib were members of a desert tribe who had been captured in some minor war, and thus brought to the markets at Pathgris. The remainder of her family still served in his palace.
“But there is some sport, is there not, in breaking a new horse?” he said when I mentioned Konchab’s doubts about such slaves. “And anyway, you have nothing to fear as long as I keep the rest of the family here. You need do no more than tell me of any, ah, refusal..
Sick at heart, I nodded.
“Their kind make interesting slaves,” he added. “Simply because they do not believe they are slaves. It is like keeping a wild bird, touching the fluttering brightness of its feathers, teaching it not to damage itself. Watching it sing…”
The chief scribe Alathn was waiting for me beside the counting houses when I finally got back this evening to Cul Holman. He was more than usually agitated, concerned about some tedious discrepancy in the accounts. Once again, it was the records of the sweepings of the counting house floors. Unlike most such things here, these are not kept in duplicate, and can only be checked approximately against the amounts that are inevitably lost as the refined dust is ladled in and out of the great scales.
Watching the weighing process as I often do, or visiting the counting houses in my nightly wanderings, I am reminded of the tale of the dogheaded Egyptian god Anubis, who once enjoyed a minor cult in Rome. He was often portrayed weighing the souls of the dead on similar scales. About Alathn, of course, there is no such poetry. He argues that, whilst the recorded weight of the sweepings of the floors has actually increased in the time since I have arrived here, the amount of gold that is eventually extracted from this mixture of desert dust, hair, foot-scrapings and an occasional fallen grain has dropped noticeably. I did my best to dismiss him with promises that I would take command of the matter myself. He refused, though, my direct request that he hand over the relevant scrolls on the excuse that they were not fully completed.
The man is odious. I know I cannot trust him.
Today, and the days before that, I have devoted myself to the pursuit of the relics that, since my visit to the palace of Kaliphus, I am once again certain must reside somewhere in these hills. Konchab has grudgingly released four of his better and younger slaves on the pretext of looking for new gold seams—but of course, if any such were found, they would belong not to me, but to the Empire.
It is dark, troublesome work. I do not fully trust the slaves to explore the many pits and caves as fully as they might, and I have sometimes had to delve beneath the ground myself. Inside the few sealed caves I have been able to find, the air still has the odd, faintly sweet smell of antiquity. Undisturbed for untold centuries, there comes a whispering, a faint muttering and crackling of echoing movement as the entombed bodies crumble to dust in the new air. Pushing on, coughing through this ancient decay, I am often forced to use the smaller of the tar-wrapped bodies as brands to light my way. Yet it is all to no avail. The only relics I have been able to find are a few more of the greenish star-shaped soapstones. I have now, in total, twenty-three of the things, which I keep in a pile beside my trunk in this room.
Once in my explorations, moving forward too hastily toward the back of a cave, the ground began to give beneath me, and my makeshift brand was extinguished. In a darkness of dust and bones, my mouth begin to fill. Luckily, I was soon dragged out and carried coughing into the harsh light outside the cave.
I cannot imagine a worse way to die.
Last night, I dreamed once again that my grandmother was sitting beside me. Each time, the tales she speaks of change and unfold. I am no longer sure whether I am witnessing a memory, a portent, or merely fantasy.
When I look straight at her, she appears black, wizened as an old date; even her eyes are a blood-threaded brown, giving way to the darkness of immense pupils. Her words are often hard to follow, they seem to fade in and out of my hearing and buzz like the rattle of a loose shutter or the droning of a trapped insect. The meaning also ebbs and flows. Sometimes it could be the Roman tongue, at others the mutterings of some crude local dialect, then again it becomes something else stranger and darker that sounds more in my head than in the hissing air.
When I look away at the hangings on the walls, I see stars and dots and cuneiform signs that may be decoration or some kind of lettering. And my grandmother seems to shift and change at the edges of my sight. It is almost as if she is folding in upon herself. Her limbs slide together like a bird preening its feathers, then her whole body diminishes and yet regrows within strange angles. It is, as her voice rises and falls and slips in and out of my comprehension, as if I am looking at her from some other place entirely.
Now, she speaks to me of the old Greek gods, and I witness their sport in ancient Thessaly where there was once a blue lake surrounded by mountains as high as the sky. In this luxuriant country of the dead, over which dark Pheraia reigned and the dead rose from cracks in the ground to flood the plains, Apollo himself was forced to slave for a Great Year, which is the time it takes for all the stars in the heavens to return to their original positions.
But here, my grandmother begins to tell of things of which my waking mind knows she had no knowledge. A Great Year, she tells me, lasts for twenty-six thousand of our earth years. And she speaks of how, before the Greeks, the Pharaohs also studied the stars. They, too, marked the slow progress of the Great Year, and little doubted that their dynasties would live through it. Indeed, such was the certainty of the Pharaohs that when their astronomers discovered a small miscalculation in the earth’s own short year, it was decreed that they wait some fifteen hundred years to make their amendment until the seasons had returned to their rightful place.