Wicked Women Read online

  ‘What has happened?’ She glanced at Inubet, who might have looked peaceful now if not for the bruised welt circling her throat.

  ‘The queen.’ Hamun-Ra sighed. His lips drew together in a tight line, as if pulled by one of his own corpse-stitches. ‘She commands we bury the dead at once.’

  ‘Today?’

  ‘Before the feast.’

  ‘Are their bodies prepared?’

  He sighed again, pained. ‘As well as we could, but…’ A hopeless wave of his hand said the rest.

  She thought of the ba-spirits, how they crawled and squirmed. She thought of the ka-spirits, flown ahead to the next world, and the souls in the dark river-caverns of the Hours of the Night.

  ‘It will have to do, then,’ Sakhmet said.

  ‘You brought the shabti?’

  ‘I did.’ She touched the strap of the basket. ‘Something told me I needed to hurry.’

  The priest nodded. ‘Good. At least there is that. See to them.’

  ‘These are for Inubet.’ She handed him the packet containing the four figurines she’d chosen: the shabti woman drawing water, Taweret and Bes, the date-palm. Then she left Hamun-Ra to his own task and went out from the Beautiful House by way of a tent-flap on the other side.

  The stink of spoilage, rank and meaty, wafted up from a long shallow trench that had been dug in the sand. The dead were laid out there in rows, workers shoulder-to-shoulder with slaves. Though an outcrop of the cliffside shaded the trench from much of the sun, the inescapable heat of the day took its toll.

  Their bodies had been washed of the worst of the bloodstains and filth. They still wore the simple garments in which they had died. The sudden violence of their endings showed in bones jutting from mangled limbs, misshapen ribcages, caved-in skulls, features battered almost beyond recognition.

  Their legs were bound at the ankles and their arms folded over their chests. A gum made from sap sealed their eyelids. A stitch of coarse thread held shut their lips. Around each man’s neck, on a loop of cord, hung a wooden, clay, or papyrus cartouche inscribed with that man’s name.

  Little else had been done. Little else could be, for so many, in so short a time.

  Sun-darkened brown skin had gone the greyish hue of old liver. Untreated flesh had begun to swell and bloat with soft putrefaction. Seeping fluids had dried, caked and crusted.

  No incisions marked their abdomens. Their intestines had not been removed, or even flushed with water, let alone filled with cedar oil to cleanse out the dissolved viscera. There would be, for these unfortunates, no preserved organs. Their corpses would not spend the requisite seventy days soaked with natron. They would not be wrapped in strips of linen treated with aromatic spices, or have amulets and protective spells and scarabs tucked into the winding-cloths at crucial points.

  They would simply have their faces draped, their bodies sprinkled with salts, and then the sand would be shovelled over them, burying them together in this single mass-grave. Thirty-one workers, a dozen slaves, and Inubet.

  The two donkeys had been another matter. A pharaoh might be buried with mummified horses, a sacrificial ox, his best hunting-hounds and his favourites of the palace cats. Theirs was a poor village, these had been merely donkeys, and meat and hides were hard enough to come by.

  Hamun-Ra’s youngest son moved along the rows of the dead, ceaselessly waving at the buzzing flies with a palm-frond. One of his brothers set clay dishes of grain, bread, and beer by the head of each corpse; another placed tools or other items at their feet for use in the next world. A few of the dead had small bundles of personal effects brought by their families.

  It was not much. Hardly luxurious. Hardly vessels of wine, barges and chariots, or golden death-masks banded with precious gems.

  Sakhmet frowned, troubled by the bitter flavour of her own thoughts. Never before had she pondered the differences so much, never before had she felt such a sense of dissatisfaction. This was the way of the world, of life and death, the will of the gods. It simply was, and was to be accepted.

  She set down her basket, knelt, opened it, and began sorting through the leaf-wrapped packets of shabti and figurines.

  This earthly life was often wretched and short, filled with struggle and suffering and hardship. In the next world, in Tuat, the souls of the dead could rest at their ease –

  ‘What are you doing?’

  The youthful voice startled her so that she dropped the shabti she held. It landed unharmed in the loose dirt. A small, soft-fingered hand picked it up.

  Prince Utsef examined the shabti as Sakhmet blinked at him in surprise. He stood unconcerned, fearless, his dimpled legs bowed, his plump belly rounding forward. The light sparkled from his golden ornaments and gleamed on the waxed black ringlets of his hair.

  ‘My Prince,’ she said, bending her head.

  ‘I asked what you were doing.’

  Her glance darted past him and found the nurse some distance off, sharing a goatskin of wine with the handsome guard as they kept watch over the pharaoh’s son. Why they were with him here, of all places …

  ‘I am Sakhmet, the village shabti-maker,’ she said. ‘I brought the shabti to be placed with the dead.’

  ‘They smell,’ he announced. ‘Nurse said they would, but I wanted to see for myself.’

  In his other hand, he clutched a cloth daubed with sweet-scented oil, no doubt to press to his royal nose if the stink became too unpleasant, but at the moment he did not seem bothered.

  ‘I was bored with all the scribe-talk and priest-talk,’ Prince Utsef went on. ‘But I was bored in the village, too. There are no nice gardens, or bath-pools, or anything.’

  ‘Well, we are poor, humble people, my Prince.’

  ‘Do you have dancers? Tumblers and acrobats? Music? Games?’

  ‘I’m sure there will be music and dancing tonight at the feast.’

  He made a face, and turned the shabti around to inspect it from all sides. ‘It looks like a little farmer,’ he said. ‘Harvesting grain.’

  ‘Yes, my Prince.’

  ‘Do you have others?’

  She unwrapped more and showed him. ‘This one carries wood, and this one here is a stone-cutter, and a brick-maker, and a painter. I will put with each man a shabti to match his trade and profession.’

  ‘Even the mud-people?’

  ‘Mud-people?’

  ‘The mud-people, the slaves.’

  ‘Oh,’ Sakhmet said. ‘Yes, my Prince. Even the slaves.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘The shabti will follow the souls of the dead into the next world. When they are needed to do work, they may send the shabti instead. That is what it means, shabti, one who answers when called upon. The shabti will do the work for them, while their souls rest at their ease in the kingdom of Osiris.’

  He considered that, smooth brow furrowing, full lower lip poking out. He looked at the little farmer again.

  ‘No,’ he said.

  ‘No, my prince?’ echoed Sakhmet, perplexed.

  ‘I said, no!’ He hurled the shabti to the ground. Again, it landed unharmed in the loose dirt, but then Prince Utsef stomped on it and it crunched under the leather sole of his sandal.

  Sakhmet stifled a cry, as if it had been her brittle body under his foot and not one sculpted of clay.

  ‘They should not be allowed to do no work!’ the prince said. Another stomp cracked the shabti into several chunks.

  ‘But … it is for the afterlife’...’

  ‘They did not do their work in this life!’

  ‘They died...’

  ‘They died without finishing my father’s tomb. For that, they should be rewarded? They should be lazy?’ His kohl-outlined eyes narrowed. ‘I say, no! I will be Pharaoh, and I say, no!’

  He rushed at Sakhmet and shoved her with all his strength. Which might not have been much when he was just a child, but she was caught off-guard and kneeling, and her frail old frame went over like a bundle of twigs. Pain flared in her hip and
shoulder. Her breath escaped in a grunt; her next gasp drew dust into her lungs and she started to cough.

  Through a watering veil of tears, she saw the young prince turn his anger on her carrying-basket. He dumped it over, scattering its contents.

  ‘Are these for them, too?’ he shouted, kicking at the figurines. ‘Fruit trees and fish? Songbirds to sing for them? Animals to hunt?’

  Still coughing, choking on dust, Sakhmet reached for the shabti. Prince Utsef brought his heel down on the back of her hand. Bones snapped. She tried to scream but could not. At his next kick, she felt ribs give with a dry and weary kind of creak.

  Voices and commotion surrounded them. Hamun-Ra’s sons scrambling up from the trench of the dead, the nurse and guard running over with their wine-skin forgotten. Hamun-Ra himself emerging from the Beautiful House.

  Prince Utsef jumped up and down, breaking shabti into pieces. It must have hurt, like jumping on rocks would have, and some of the clay shards gouged his feet so they bled, but he did not stop.

  ‘I say they work forever!’

  Had she thought him splendid, beautiful and perfect?

  He was hideous now, his chubby face monstrous in its twisted, hateful sneer.

  Sakhmet forced herself to her knees again, cradling her broken hand to her chest. ‘Leave them alone!’

  The little prince stuck out his tongue and made a rude noise. He raised his sandal over another shabti.

  Her withered palm struck his fat cheek with a loud, stinging slap.

  It was, in that moment, hard to say who among them was the most shocked, the onlookers, Prince Utsef or Sakhmet herself.

  His mouth dropped open. The side of his face bloomed red. His kohl-outlined eyes brimmed with tears.

  ‘Sefi!’ squealed the nurse.

  A white flash of pain burst in her head, the guard’s spear-butt hitting her a fierce blow just above the ear. Sakhmet fell sprawling again. Hip, ribs, shoulder, all her old bones and joints screamed. The horizon tilted, the world spun, as if Nut and Geb rolled, sky and earth changing places. Dizziness whirled a dust storm in her mind. She was aware of everyone speaking, yelling at once, but only one word and one voice were of distinct utterance.

  ‘Death!’ the young prince commanded. Just as his mother had done.

  Hamun-Ra’s protests went ignored.

  The guard reversed his spear and plunged the sharp copper point into Sakhmet’s back. She both heard and felt the metal grate against her spine.

  Then she felt nothing, though she saw her own hands continuing to scrabble in the dirt, the broken one like a crippled beetle, groping for the clay and wood fragments of the shabti. She pawed at them, gathering them to her. Many were sprinkled with grains of sand stuck in Prince Utsef’s blood, which the shards of clay had cut from his feet.

  She lifted her gaze to the boy. She managed a smile.

  Her wizened fingers pressed the pieces together.

  ‘When you call upon them,’ she said, in a thin whisper, ‘the shabti will not answer. And when the dead call upon these which you have ruined, the one who will answer, my little Prince, is you.’

  With that, she let her ka-spirit fly, swift on its wings. Its talons snatched at Utsef like a falcon hooking a fish from a stream.

  He collapsed as if boneless. His wide eyes stared, emptily, into hers. Something stirred in the hollowness behind his red-tinted full lips.

  Sakhmet’s last breath rose dark in her throat, issuing forth with a cold, oily hiss.

  Her ba-spirit swarmed over his, engulfing it as they both died: and she carried his soul, screeching, into the Hours of the Night.

  KRAVOLITZ

  Tom Johnstone

  ‘When shall we three meet again?’ we used to say.

  Then it was a joke. Now it seems a little macabre.

  I

  They used to call us Charlie’s Angels, which still used to crop up on television quite a bit back then. The few that liked us did anyway. The rest called us the Three Witches. Still, we didn’t care what the bouffant-haired princesses thought, with their pearls glimmering under their turned up shirt collars and turned up noses.

  The saying, ‘two’s company, three’s a crowd’, didn’t really apply to us, though sometimes our friendship could be a little stormy. Now there are just two of us left, and I don’t see that much of Phina. I try and visit her as much as I can, but I am very busy, I keep telling myself.

  I know what you’re thinking: perhaps I make myself busy to avoid doing so, to avoid thinking about why she’s in there. It’s a place of white-washed walls and ordered calm, where quietly brutal guards escort patients and their visitors from room to room, and regular medication controls levels of Dopamine and Serotonin with benign strictness. The nurses are quite friendly, in a guarded sort of way, but the guards are more like prison officers and refuse to return eye-contact or smiles. Perhaps they believe that to do so would show weakness in front of the patients. Perhaps they nurse a grudge against visitors for naively offering kindness to these dangerous beasts.

  Phina hardly seems a danger now, except perhaps to herself. For the most part, she just seems lost, confused, a little puzzled.

  Funny that, because it was a puzzle that started it all.

  II

  Rubik’s Cubes were all the rage that year at our school.

  Just like Phina to go one better, of course. But then Seraphina Ilyana Belosselskya-Belozerskya was never one to follow the well-trodden path. She was the only one out of our little trio that boarded. Emily Blunkett and I were both middle class local girls who attended the school by day on its assisted places scheme, so I suppose that made her the odd one out. We all had to put up with that in some way at one time or another. For example, I was the only one of the three that preferred the Arts to Mathematics and Science. Also, I never got to play Seraphina’s strange game, unlike Emily. At the time I was thoroughly peeved at this, at being excluded as I saw it. I’ve since thought I may have been the lucky one. Emily, on the other hand…

  Ah, yes, Emily, poor Emily. She has the dubious distinction of being the only one of the three of us who’s no longer alive.

  We were all odd though in our way, or at least, Emily and I liked to think so. But neither of us were as odd as Seraphina. The whispers around school were that she was some sort of Russian aristocrat, whose family had fled the October Revolution in 1917. She certainly had enough airs and graces to feed the rumours. We never saw her parents, weren’t even sure if she had any. When school broke up, she would leave for London in a black Daimler with tinted windows. There, she informed us, a firm of solicitors administered the various engagements and functions she attended. We never saw her during the school holidays, and whenever the two of us met up in those times, it was all rather awkward, as if the shadow of her absence cursed our interaction. Our parents would orchestrate meetings that were, I remember, horribly stilted.

  I suppose they couldn’t be any more uncomfortable than these infrequent visits to Phina. If only I could make eye contact. That was impossible behind the dark glasses she always wears now. Where is the tall, elegant girl I once knew, with blue eyes as pale as her porcelain skin beneath that severe coal-black fringe? Her hair is dry and papery now: cobweb-grey threads that twist with crazed electricity around her head. Her skin’s still pale, almost white enough to match the walls of this place, yet blotchy and pouchy. And as for her eyes, perhaps it’s for the best that I can’t see them after all.

  How could someone change so much?

  The doctors say the dramatic weight-gain is a side effect of the medication: Clotramiazole, Haliperidole, Methyldopa, I’m not sure which; one of the anti-psychotics. It’s difficult to keep track when they change them so often. She used to be so preoccupied with her weight at school, as girls of that age often are. Now she doesn’t seem to care. Perhaps that’s a side effect of the drugs too. If she could just see herself…

  I’m sitting opposite her at a table in the visitors’ room, thinking about those thi
ngs, about the game I never played, when suddenly she says:

  ‘I’ve still got it you know. The game. The puzzle. The Kravolitz.’

  She says it with a startling clarity. These flashes of insight amid the blind fog she inhabits give the impression that she’s got some kind of clairvoyant ability. I remember the time she said something that seemed to indicate that she knew details about how my divorce was playing out that only I could know. Maybe it was a lucky guess. Maybe this was one too, like a stage psychic’s hunch. I wonder if she’s playing me. Shakespeare taught me that madness can be a kind of performance. Maybe it’s just that most of the time she seems so vague and unfocussed, that when she says something that makes any sense it seems more significant than it is. After all, the game was probably on her mind as much as it was on mine. It’s been her obsession since we left school.

  ‘It’s in a drawer by my bed,’ she continues in low, conspiratorial tones. And she checks over her shoulder to see if the guard outside the door is listening before going on: ‘They don’t let me have any glass, knives, even spoons in my room. But that they’ve let me keep, all these years. The most dangerous thing of all. Still, it’s reset itself, like it always does when it’s claimed another soul. But if someone else were to find it, and were able to play it…’

  She’s just rambling again now, about the delusion she’s held onto all these years, the one that’s gradually become more real to her than anyone else: that the Kravolitz can steal your soul. Of course, she used to say this at school, and we kind of believed her in a way, despite the scepticism adolescents tend to affect, trying to appear ‘cool’. It was a game we played together. Or maybe she played us. It was a ghost story she told us around the campfire, metaphorically speaking. About how a man with two extra fingers on each hand designed and built the first one, the seventh son of a seventh son. That’s why it was divided into twenty eight segments.

  She kept on about it for years before we actually saw the thing.

  The way I remember it, on the first day of the autumn term in the sixth form, she came back from London with a little book bound in worn, black leather. I wondered if it was a jotter to write down lists of those that had slighted her. But she said it was an instruction manual, handed down ‘through generations of my family’, for a game ‘like no other’. So she said in that rather portentous way of hers. She spent a lot of her time poring over it that day, and whenever I tried to peek over her shoulder she would slam it shut and fix her pale blue stare on me, allowing me only a brief glance that was unsettling and fascinating in equal measure.