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(Excerpt)
No sooner had she uttered the prayer than the painted surfaces of hieroglyphs on the tomb walls began to writhe as if in the heat of a nightmare. A pin-tailed duck exploded out of a piece of wall text and flapped past her head. She jumped out of the way.
No sooner had she uttered the prayer than the painted surfaces of hieroglyphs on the tomb walls began to writhe as if in the heat of a nightmare. A pin-tailed duck exploded out of a piece of wall text and flapped past her head. She jumped out of the way.
An
ape shrieked and chattered and sprang onto a golden chair and fixed her with a
narrow, close-set gaze. She shrank away.
A
snake slithered out of the text of an ornamental casket and dropped. It hissed
and wriggled to form a jagged black line like an earthquake that split the
floor.
Nefera gave a scream. She leapt up onto her golden lion couch to escape
it, drawing up her legs. Now two hieroglyphs of lions sprang from the wall and
leapt in unison at the couch as if to attack, but instead they passed into the
golden lions of the frame.
The
couch suddenly rippled underneath her like muscles drawing taut. Then it reared
like a creature.
Nefera rolled to the back and would have flown off had it not been for
the footboard that stopped her. As it was, her head banged the edge of the
frame, which set her ears ringing.
The
twin lions of her couch landed and broke into a charge. She lifted her head,
dizzied by the acceleration and struggled against the force of gravity. They
were charging through a storm of living glyphs, eyes, feathers, a hare, reeds,
ploughs, panicking birds, bees and suns and she was riding on the lions’ backs
– carried along on a hurtling couch.
They
sped across a plain, sandy waste, lit by a dim light like that from the moon
and stars, except there was no moon and no stars up above, just glowing
hieroglyphs in the sky as if it were a painted ceiling.
Nefera crawled to the front of the surging couch so that she could see
where they were going.
“What is
happening? Where am I going?”
“I am the Lion of Yesterday,” the one
lion spoke in a rumble like far off thunder
“I am the Lion of Tomorrow,” the other
coughed as he ran.
‘Hieroglyphs
that spring off walls. A lion couch that comes to life and now speaks. What
have I done?’ Nefera thought, her mind in wild disarray.
It
was like one of the scary bedtime stories her nurse used to tell her, except
this one was a nightmare – and she was riding on a nightmare couch.
Was
she being carried to the judgment Hall of Osiris? If so, then they must be taking her by a different route. She
could see no sign of the series of passages, gates and guardians that were said
to line the route to the Hall of Judgment.
Only
desert.
She
looked over the edge of the couch at the ground flying beneath and now she saw
that it was not in fact desert, but instead a grainy, yellow-brown surface
– papyrus!
They
were racing across a vast, unrolled scroll. Was this her missing Book of the
Dead and was she being carried along by living words.
Nefera felt a surge of hope. ‘Perhaps my words are not lost and can save
me after all.’
