Ouhish had stopped to let them catch up: he put his whiskers forward at Rhiow. “Interesting,” he said, “but Hwallis says something very like that. Come on: I want you to meet.”
He hurried down the hallway nearly to its end: then turned left suddenly and showed them a wood-panelled side door, which was open a crack. Ouhish put his paw into it and pulled it open. “In here,” he said.
He led them into what turned out to be a warren of little offices and storage spaces behind the exhibition halls. It was a strangely homely place after the grandeur and silence of the outer halls. Other statues were here, pushed carefully up against the walls, some being repaired for cracks or broken noses: near one doorway a bucket and some mops and brooms stood handy: another small room had a sink and some cleaning rags and solvents, and buckets of different kinds of grout for polishing stone. Other rooms were stacked and piled high with books: one was filled with crates that held piles of papyrus rolls and books.
And in one room which they came to, there was an ehhif bent over a long table. The table was covered with something that might have been dust, and he was working, slowly and carefully, to unwrap something that lay in the midst of the dust. As they came in behind him, he sneezed.
“Hwallis,” said Ouhish in Ailurin, very loudly so that the ehhif would be able to hear him, “there are guests here.”
The ehhif turned. He was young: maybe no more than eighteen, Rhiow thought—a tall, dark-haired, long-faced young man, dressed in a shirt with its sleeves rolled up, and long dark pants with suspenders. He looked at the doorway, and at Ouhish: and he said, in Ailurin, “Where?”
The People glanced at each other, surprised. “It’s all right,” Ouhish said, “you can unsidle.”
They did. The young ehhif looked at them with some surprise, and said to Ouhish, with very passable intonation, “Are these the People you asked to come?”
Rhiow was very impressed. She said, in the Speech rather than in Ailurin, “Young sir, since you plainly know that our kind exists, then I tell you that we’re wizards on errantry, and we greet you. I’m Rhiow: here are my colleagues Urruah, Auhlae, Arhu, and Siffha’h. Ouhish says he sent for us, and though we came on other business originally, he thinks you have need of our services. So tell us what your problem is, and we’ll help if we can. But speak your own language, if you like: we’ll understand you well enough, and we can help Ouhish to do so too if there’s need. We have complicated matters to discuss, I think, and there’s no need for any of us to guess at what we mean. Even if you do have a good accent.”
The young ehhif opened and closed his mouth, and then said, “Good heavens. Well, allow me to introduce myself. I’m Edward Wallis Budge.”
The others waved their tails at him in greeting. Urruah sat down, looking around him. “What exactly do you do here?” he said.
Wallis smiled slightly. “I have the honor to hold the position of Honorary Assistant to the Keeper of the Mummied Cats.”
Urruah put his whiskers forward. “Boy,” he said, “they don’t make job titles like that any more.” He peered up at the table. “I suppose that if the museum needs a keeper for mummied cats, there must be a lot of them.”
“Hundreds of thousands,” Wallis said.
“Sweet Iau in a basket,” Auhlae murmured, “what would anyone want hundreds of thousands of mummied cats for?”
“Please make yourself comfortable, and I’ll explain,” said Wallis, and he pulled out a creaky-looking ladderback chair and sat down in it. The People sat or sprawled as they pleased, and Wallis indicated the shelves and racks all around the room, all full of boxes with numbers and letters scrawled on the ends of them. “I expect you know something about the civilization of ancient Egypt,” he said.
Rhiow put her whiskers forward. “They knew something about our civilization,” she said, “which is why so many of their carvings feature our ‘gods’.”
“The neter-teh,” Wallis said, and nodded, “the Powers that Be. Yes. Well, you’ll understand that the Egyptians were very partial to cats, considering them at least partially divine, since they looked like the gods which the cats had described to my people, the ehhif.”
And suddenly he burst out laughing.
“I’m sorry,” Rhiow said, “have we missed a joke?”
“No, no …” The young ehhif wiped his eyes, still trying to get control of his laughter. “It’s just this situation. You here, and me explaining this, and … oh my.” He wiped his eyes again. “I’m sorry. Anyway, the Egyptian ehhif back then loved their cats very much, even before someone got the idea that the cats’ semi-divine status might mean they would make good intercessors for humans. To the gods, the Great Gods, I mean: to the One, and the Powers. So when their cats would die, the Egyptians would have their bodies mummified, with amulets and words of power wrapped in among the bandages, the intention being to give the cats power in the Next World.” He turned to the table, and lifted from it one of the strips of bandage that he had been removing from the cat-mummy he had been working on. Faintly, on the linen, in a brownish ink, were written the pictogram-letters of the “hieratic” writing of old Egypt. “Then they would send the mummies to the great cat-burial ground at the city of the Queen-Cat, Bubastis.”
“Some of this we knew,” Auhlae said, “though I was always a little vague about the whys and wherefores.”
“The idea was that the cats would tell the Gods how well their ehhif had treated them,” Wallis said, leaning back and folding his arms, “and the Gods would be nice to the ehhif in return. Well, this went nicely for some centuries. The mummies got more elaborate—see, this is a fairly late one: the mummy cases had become quite ornate.” He turned to the table again and lifted down the case which had enclosed the mummy on which he had been working. It was in the small shape of a Person, but with its forefeet crossed together over its chest, the way a human mummy would have had its arms crossed: its hind legs were stretched out straight, and the whole business stood upright on a little pedestal, which was gilded, so that the Person’s image stood upright as well, the way an ehhif would have. The image of the cat’s face was inlaid with lapis lazuli whiskers, and around the cat’s neck was a tracery of gold, a collar, jeweled with shining bits of colored glass.
“It’s beautiful workmanship, isn’t it?” Wallis said. “They took a lot of trouble over some of these. Equally, the spells and amulets buried with the People became very involved indeed: and the cemeteries at Bubastis got fuller and fuller. There were at least three hundred thousand cat-mummies at the cemetery at Beni-Hassan alone: probably there were many more … But then the Egyptian ehhif’s religion changed, or was supplanted by others, and the cat-mummies and the cemeteries were forgotten.”
Wallis leaned back further in the chair, uncrossed his legs, crossed them again. “Well. Their language became lost over time, and it has taken us a long time to start getting it back again. My old teacher was one of those who became involved with trying to recover it, and I went with him to Egypt, a couple of years ago, to start trying to translate some of the texts in the Pyramids. Some of those texts were very peculiar, and my teacher could make very little of them: but I came at the translation from a slightly different angle … and realized what some of those wall carvings meant.”