Paul Doherty - An Evil Spirit Out of the West

My aunt seemed impervious to the hideous death agonies and the dreadful scenes. Beating the air with her fly whisk she approached an officer, a standard-bearer of the Chariot Squadron. In a hoarse voice she explained who we were. Immediately we were surrounded by soldiers and priests — a strange contrast of soft skin and sloe eyes with the tough and grimy war veterans, eyes red-rimmed from tiredness and desert dust. I recall a mixture of sweat, exotic perfume, hardened leather and perfumed linen robes. My aunt was treated as an object of veneration whilst I was caressed as the Son of the Hero. A priest gabbled his apologies, how we were not supposed to wait but I knew Aunt, she always liked to make a grand entrance. We were ceremoniously ushered across the second court which boasted a giant statue of a jackal-headed Anubis. A priest explained that it had a movable jaw so it could speak to devotees and utter an oracle. Around the courtyard were fountains, each with a sacred stela, a statue over which the water could flow and so become holy, a sure remedy against poison. I, remembering the Saluki hound, didn’t think there were such remedies and stopped to examine one. My aunt pulled me away. I could tell by the curl of her lips that she was not impressed.

I wondered why my aunt was so apprehensive about approaching the temple until I entered it and realised that this was my first time in a true House of Worship: Aunt Isithia’s house had few statues or tokens of the Divine Ones. Isn’t life strange? I have never thought much of the gods but the Houses of Eternity in which they are supposed to live always impressed me. The hypostyle or hall of columns: rows of papyriform pillars with their bell-shaped bases and bud-forming capitals painted in glorious red, blue and green and decorated with triangular patterns. Bronze-plated doors, emblazoned with inscriptions, opened smoothly and silently on hinges set into the wall. I truly felt we were entering a place of magic.

Every so often we were sprinkled by a priest with drops of holy water from a stoup and cleansed by brushing the images of Pharaoh inscribed on the wall. Paintings and decorations were everywhere. The air was thick with incense and pierced by a low chanting which echoed eerily through the columned passageway. We passed Chapels of the Ear where pilgrims presented their petitions and eventually reached the Wabet , the Place of Purification. At the express order of the Magnificent One my father would begin his journey from here to the eternally fresh fields of the Green-skinned Osiris. A great honour! Even the most expensive embalming houses in the Necropolis could not be trusted with the corpses of the great ones. A priest once confided to me in a scandalised whisper how even the bodies of beautiful women were kept for a few days to allow decomposition to begin so they would not be violated.

The steps we went down seemed to stretch for ever. The cavern below glowed with light. Priests, some with shoulders draped with jaguar skins, others with their faces hidden behind jackal masks, moved through the billowing smoke. The air was rich with spices. The object of their veneration was the body of my father, stretched naked in the centre of the chamber on a sloping wooden slab. He looked fast asleep except for his grey skin and the dark wound in his neck. His corpse had already been drenched in natron. Surrounded by incense-burners, a lector priest, eyes half-closed, swayed backwards and forwards as he chanted the death prayers. I had to stand and watch my father’s body be embalmed. The ethnoid bone in his nose was broken, the brains pulled out, the eyes pushed back and the cavities filled with resin-soaked bandages. Armed with an Ethiopian obsidian knife a priest made the cut in my father’s left side and drew out the liver, lungs and intestines. The inside was washed with natron and stuffed with perfumes. All the time the prayers were chanted and the incense billowed. I was not frightened, whatever my aunt intended. I was fascinated by the priests in their white kilts and robes, shaven of all hair, even their eyebrows, their soft skins glinting with oil. Afterwards, when we left, I did not feel sad. My father was gone and these secretive priests in that sinister chamber with the brooding statues of Anubis meant nothing to me.

We honoured the seventy-day mourning period whilst the preparations were brought to an end. Father’s corpse was pickled in perfume, his heart covered with a sacred scarab, tongue lined with gold and two precious stones placed in his eye-sockets. He was then bound in bandages. On the day of his burial I joined my aunt and a legion of mourners and singers to accompany Father across the Nile to the House of Eternity. He was placed in his sarcophagus. We had the funeral feast and afterwards on our journey back across the Nile my aunt leaned over. I had studied her well and so had remained totally impassive throughout the entire ceremony. At the end she asked if I was upset.

‘Madam,’ I replied, ‘I am not sad.’

‘Because your father has gone,’ she gabbled, ‘to the Field of the Blessed?’

‘No, dearest Aunt, I am happy because my father’s ghost will now join my mother’s beneath the willow tree in your garden.’

Isithia’s face went slack. I savoured for the first time how revenge, well prepared and served cold, was sweeter than the richest honeycomb.

‘You have seen her there?’ my aunt breathed.

‘Often,’ I replied, round-eyed in innocence.

She moved away. I glanced at the swirling water of the Nile.

‘Oh swampland,’ I whispered, reciting a famous curse, ‘I now come to you.’ I glanced quickly at Isithia. ‘I have brought the grey-haired one down to the dust. I have swallowed up her darkness.’ I realised, even then, that my days in Aunt Isithia’s house were closely numbered.

Despite my tender years, these were the verses I sang under the willow tree. I even managed to find gifts to place there: small coffers made out of papyrus, miniature wooden statues which would act as shabtis , servants to help my parents in the Fields of the Blessed. I turned the area around the willow tree into a small shrine. To be perfectly honest, it was not so much out of filial affection, more to taunt Aunt Isithia. Oh yes, I knew I would be going but I just wanted to help her make that decision. I spent more time under that willow tree than anywhere else. Accordingly, I was not surprised when, within a month of my father’s burial, I had joined the Kap, the Royal House of Instruction at the place known as the Nose of the Gazelle in the sprawling, unfinished Palace of the Malkata. The Malkata was a jewel, the House of Rejoicing, the Palace of the dazzling Aten built by the Magnificent One, Amenhotep III, for his own pleasure. It lay just beneath the western hills, so at evening the palace was suffused with the dying rays of the sun. It was an impressive imperial residence, but as a boy of no more than nine summers, I didn’t care about its splendour. Children are strange! I was not aware of the coloured pillars, the flower-filled courtyards or the ornamental lakes. All I cared about was the fact that I was leaving Aunt Isithia! I was to be in a new place, the school attended by Pharaoh’s son, the Crown Prince Tuthmosis, and the chosen offspring of certain highranking officials. My place there was the Magnificent One’s final tribute to my father. Only later did I learn that Aunt Isithia wielded considerable influence, not to mention her rod, over certain of Pharaoh’s ministers.

The House of Instruction stood at the far side of the palace and, looking back, I smile wryly. I was in the most splendid palace under the sun, being given a foretaste of life in Osiris’s Great House and Territory. However, I was more concerned with my new surroundings and new companions. The House was a one-storey building built four square round a large courtyard which boasted a splendidly built fountain, a small herb garden and a multi-coloured pavilion. The building was mud-bricked, stamped with the name of the Crown Prince; plastered within, whitewashed without, its flat roof was served by outside stairs, its doors and lintels made of wood and limestone. One part served as a dormitory: its beds were crude cots, wooden frames with stretched leather thongs to support a straw-filled mattress. Each bed was protected by a canopy of coarse linen veils against the flies, with sheets of the same texture and a rug for when the nights turned cold. The floor was of polished acacia wood so bright you could see your face in it. Beside each bed was a simple fold-up camp chair and a plain stool fashioned out of sycamore. A chest of terebrinth wood stood at the end of each bed to contain clothing and other personal belongings. Down the centre of the room ranged small dining tables bearing oil lamps. The windows were mere wooden-edged squares in the wall, boarded up with shutters in the winter or latticed screens in the summer. One part of the building was a schoolroom during inclement weather. In the spring and summer, unless it grew too hot, we were taught outside. The rest of the building served as offices, kitchens, wash places and schoolrooms.