These bas-reliefs immediately caught and held Khai’s attention, for they were especially erotic in nature and showed coition between naked men and women and all manner of birds and beasts. Moving with the action of the lamp-cast shadows, the figures seemed so full of lustful life that Khai soon became aroused by the sight. Finally, fighting his excitement, he forced himself to look away.
His eyes found the dark mouths of twin passages where they entered like huge nostrils into the bridal chamber through the wall directly opposite his vantage point. Between these tunnels, the buttress of the inner wall supported a bracketed, unlighted torch. Peering round the room, Khai noted that similar flambeaux were set in the other walls, including, it seemed likely, the wall through which he even now gazed. If these torches were to be lighted, Khai would have to be careful that his eyes were not seen shining through the peephole.
For the time being, however, he might as well make himself comfortable. Wedging himself into position, Khai waited in darkness until he heard sounds echoing through the thin limestone wall from the chamber beyond. Then, gazing once again through his peephole, he was at last rewarded by the sight of Anulep leading three girls into the chamber from one of the passageways. The Pharaoh’s high priest looked once, pointedly and with narrowed eyes, directly at the spot where Khai’s own eyes stared back at him, and then he turned to the girls.
To each of the three Anulep gave a taper which they lighted from the lamp atop its pedestal. Then, as they went about the hexagonal room lighting the flambeaux, the Vizier bade them wait and strode from the room into the second passageway. He returned a few moments later with six members of the pyramid’s Black Guard. The latter were dressed in leather sandals, red kilts and tall bronze helmets. On their wrists they wore wide golden bracelets, and they carried long, curving and wickedly sharp daggers in their black leather belts.
As for the girls: they were dressed in flowing, virgin-white robes, their features almost completely hidden behind gauzy veils. It was an odd sight, Khai thought: these small, slender female figures, two Khemish girls and one Nubian—a girl of high birth, Anulep had told him, stolen from her homeland by Arabban slavers in a secret raid—surrounded by vast and nightmarish walls of massively lewd limestone; and the Pharaoh’s men: tall, black and powerfully muscled, their sharply filed teeth showing white behind thick, grinning lips. Frowning in the darkness of his hideaway, the boy felt the short hairs at the back of his neck rising in a sudden and nameless fear.
II
Enter the Pharaoh
Now the girls were led to one of the walls, a guardsman at each shoulder, and there their arms were lifted up and their wrists locked in manacles above their heads. As this happened, Anulep, in a voice soft and oily, explained to the girls that they now symbolized total subjugation, offering themselves in abject bondage to Pharaoh, their Lord, Master, God, and Husband-Extraordinary. None of them seemed in the least concerned about being manacled in this fashion, and as Khai peered at their veiled faces he wondered what was going on in their minds.
Were they terrified, he wondered, at this ceremony, where soon they would become the brides of Khasathut and enter into his harem? If so, they did not show it. Perhaps they had been made to inhale the hen’ay fumes, of which Khem’s high elite were currently enamored and which it was rumored the Pharaoh himself had introduced from lands beyond the islands of the Sea-Peoples. The hen’ay was a resin which when burned made sweet waking dreams for all who inhaled its heady smoke. The magicians of Khem had used opiates for as long as Khem had existed, but recently Pharaoh had added several refinements of his own.
Of one thing Khai was certain: the maidens would all be beautiful. Pharaoh’s brides were always beautiful, his entire harem, which by now must be vast. Indeed, the pyramid must be a veritable beehive of queens. Khasathut had taken his first trio of wives seven years previously, at the onset of his reign, and thereafter at regular quarterly intervals. Employing his considerable knowledge of mathematics while he waited for the midnight hour (at which time, according to Anulep, the Pharaoh would make his appearance), Khai determined the current strength of the harem. He calculated that since this was the third quarter of the seventh year, Khasathut now had a total of eighty-one wives!
Eighty-one wives? As far as Khai knew, no one had ever seen them and he wondered where they could all be. There were many rooms in the heart of the pyramid, no one knew better than he, but sufficient to house eighty-one wives? And who did their cooking? And where did they eat? For that matter, where did they bathe? The pyramid simply wasn’t equipped for it. And wouldn’t they expect a degree of privacy, as befitted the wives of a great ruler? Of course they would; but they would surely never find it in the pyramid. For all its size, the open spaces inside the vast monument were not unlimited. …
As he was puzzling over the problem, Khai heard the bronze gong sounding from deep within the pyramid. It was a sepulchral sound in these stony confines, whose echoes seemed to linger ominously; but its effect upon Khasathut’s huge Nubian guardsmen was immediate. Before the echoes of that single note had died away, the great blacks had backed off from the manacled girls until they flanked the jeweled throne three to each side. There they stood rigidly to attention, filed teeth hidden now behind tight lips, while Anulep took up a position directly behind the throne. Tall man that he was, the high priest dwarfed the throne; but he, too, stood to attention while he waited for Pharaoh to enter.
Now Khai was more puzzled than ever, for it would seem that this tiny bejeweled chair was fully intended to represent Khasathut’s royal seat. Why not a real, man-sized throne? Surely Pharaoh could never cram his massive frame into—
But there Khai’s thoughts came to an abrupt, astonished end, for suddenly he saw something which could not possibly be. A figure had emerged from one of the passageways. A figure wearing Khasathut’s long-headed crown and clad in his royal, golden-yellow robes, which in turn were embroidered with his double-looped cross, the tai-ankh. To all intents and purposes, this then must be the Pharaoh himself... but how could it be? The man (was it truly a man? Khai wondered) was barely five feet tall, grotesque and limping, quite alien in its lop-sided, crippled-insect movements.
The Pharaoh—or Pharaoh’s exotic pet? An ape, perhaps? But no, it was no ape. It was indeed ... Khasathut!
Khai knew it as soon as the creature spoke, recognizing the voice of this travesty immediately. Though less powerful than the magnified whoosh and gasping roar which Pharaoh’s subjects were used to, the voice was nevertheless his. Quickly recovering from his shock, without giving himself time to ponder the meaning of what he was seeing, Khai looked closer. He now desired to see—to know—everything.
The features beneath the long crown were much the same as had been the old Pharaoh’s. Khai had been only seven years old when Thanop’et died, but he remembered the previous ruler’s face: the long jaw; small, round, piercing eyes—slit down the middle like a cat’s—with their thin, straight eyebrows; the sharply sloping forehead whose line was carried on by the long, backward sloping crown. All of these features were visible in Thanop’et’s son, Khasathut. There was something of his mother in him, too: her smallness, for one thing, and the paleness of her skin….