understand them, but to sense them, to tiptoe, as it were, on the edge of understanding them. He did know that the most profound truths are sometimes those most seldom spoken, and indeed often those whose utterance was, as though by some secret compact, forbidden, even denied with vehemence. Indeed, those who knew them might be the first to claim ignorance, or to deny them. This undoubtedly gave them power, great power, to know these truths, and act in terms of them, and yet to pretend they did not exist, or must not be believed. But sometimes truths are embodied in traditions, in customs, in ways of life. They are silent, so to speak, but real in the lives of a people. Traditions carry them on, invisibly. Perhaps it was so with the brethren. Perhaps, like unseen companions, with them truths walked on soft feet. These could be like shadows always behind them, never seen, or like furies, come from some remote hell, or angels with swords, guarding gateways through which they could never return. Or they might be memories too deep for recollection, of deeds antedating by eons not only the most ancient of annals, and not only the most ancient fragments of the histories drawn on rocks, and not only the most ancient fragments of the winter songs, taught at hearths since the capture of fire, but speech itself. Yet these memories too deep for recollection, these thoughts too deep for thinking, in any normal sense, which may have antedated the invention of the meaningful sound, might remain active in the people, forming them, giving them shape. Horemheb considered how such a memory, or traces indicative of such a memory, recreating its surrogate and image, its fidelity, or indeed its recurrent actuality, through genetic selections, through innatenesses, might be transmitted from generation to generation. Such a thing would be possible Horemheb knew, but, if it were actual, surely profound and subtle. Let us suppose that a natural memory consists of, or is caused by, or is invariably correlated with, a certain alignment of fibers, or certain patterns of electrochemical activity, or interactions, or certain states of the brain, or with some such complex and mysterious thing, or arrangements, or patterns. If these same alignments, so to speak, can occur in more than one way then it seems one might speak of a memory, or of something perhaps even deeper, which lay beneath both memory and invention. In this sense one might, in a sense, without recourse to a putative preexistence of individuals, or the transmigrations of souls, or such, be said, even in a frail, doomed, mortal frame, to remember events, and deeds, and thoughts which antedated one’s birth, deeds which, so to speak, might have occurred thousands of years before the birth of one’s oldest known ancestors. To be sure, if one wishes to restrict discourse narrowly, one might say that such is impossible, because of the meanings assigned words, to remember what one has never personally experienced, but that is, in a sense, to beg a question. For example, it would be easy enough to use words differently, so that one might, in a new sense, be said to remember what one has never personally experienced except, of course, in its memory. But more importantly, if the alignments, so to speak, however produced, whether by some genetic transmission, perhaps eccentric to a species, perhaps favored by selection, or by the subtle, unspoken transmissions within generations, through simple but subtle enculturations, by those ways in which we learn, and are unaware that we have learned, what most deeply shapes us and moves us, are indistinguishable from those of the natural memory, it seems one might speak of “memory.” But these thoughts, Horemheb told himself, are absurd, and what have they to do with the journey, and the string, and the platform? But then who knows what are the deepest and most secret motivations of the heart? It is known they cannot be what they are commonly claimed to be, and are frenziedly and hysterically insisted upon, but what are they?
Who, Horemheb wondered, are the brethren? And, too, Horemheb wondered upon himself, for he did not know who he was, but only that he, too, was of the brethren. He had never denied that, and never would. He was of the brethren. Without the brethren, outside of the brethren, he was nothing. But, too, he was different. He wanted to know who they were, and who he was,