“The burnt creature was near to collapse. He had gone down on his knees, and he didn’t have to explain to me why. He had found them many a time in different positions, but he had never witnessed their movement. And he had never seen her as she had been before.
“I was bursting with the knowledge of why she had been as she was before. She had come to me. But there was a point at which my pride and exhilaration gave way to what it should have been: overwhelming awe, and finally grief.
“I started to cry. I started to cry uncontrollably as I had not cried since I had been with the old god in the grove and my death had occurred, and this curse, this great luminous and powerful curse, had descended on me. I cried as you cried when you first saw them. I cried for their stillness and their isolation, and this horrible little place in which they stared forward at nothing or sat in darkness while Egypt died above.
“The goddess, the mother, the thing, whatever she was, the mindless and silent or helpless progenitor was looking at me. Surely it wasn’t an illusion. Her great glossy eyes, with their black fringe of lashes, were fixed upon me. And there came her voice again, but it had nothing of its old power, it was merely the thought, quite beyond language, inside my head.
“Take us out of Egypt, Marius. The Elder means to destroy us. Guard us, Marius. Or we perish here.
“ ‘Do they want blood?’ the burnt one cried. ‘Did they move because they would have sacrifice?’ the dried one begged.
“ ‘Go get them a sacrifice,’ I said.
“ ‘I cannot now. I haven’t the strength. And they won’t give their healing blood to me. Would they but allow me a few drops, my burnt flesh might restore itself, the blood in me would be replenished, and I should bring them glorious sacrifices . . . ’
“But there was an element of dishonesty in this little speech, because they didn’t desire glorious sacrifices anymore.
“ ‘Try again to drink their blood,’ I said and this was horribly selfish of me. I just wanted to see what would happen.
“Yet to my humiliation, he did approach them, bent over and weeping, begging them to give their powerful blood, their old blood, so that his burns might heal faster, saying that he was innocent, he had not put them in the sand—it had been the Elder—please, please, would they let him drink from the original fount.
“And then ravenous hunger consumed him. And, convulsing, he distended his fangs as a cobra might and he shot forward, his black claws out, to the neck of Enkil.
“Enkil’s arm rose as the Elder said it would, and it flung the burnt one across the chamber on his back before it returned to its proper place.
“The burnt one was sobbing and I was even more ashamed. The burnt one was too weak to hunt for victims or bring victims. I had urged him on to this to see it. And the gloom of this place, the gritty sand on the floor, the barrenness, the stink of the torch, and the ugly sight of the burnt one writhing and crying, all this was dispiriting beyond words.
“ ‘Then drink from me,’ I said, shuddering at the sight of him, the fangs distended again, the hands out to grasp me. But it was the least I could do.”
12
“AS SOON as I was done with that creature, I ordered him to let no one enter the crypt. How the hell he was supposed to keep anyone out I couldn’t imagine, but I told him this with tremendous authority and I hurried away.
“I went back into Alexandria, and I broke into a shop that sold antique things and I stole two fine painted and gold-plated mummy cases, and I took a great deal of linen for wrapping, and I went back to the desert crypt.
“My courage and my fear were at their peak.
“As often happens when we give the blood or take it from another of our kind, I had seen things, dreamed things as it were, when the burnt one had his teeth in my throat. And what I had seen and dreamed had to do with Egypt, the age of Egypt, the fact that for four thousand years this land had known little change in language, religion, or art. And for the first time