Pyramids

to his feet almost without any effort. He looked down to see what had caused it.
    “Oh dear,” he said.
    The culture of the river kingdom had a lot to say about death and what happened afterward. In fact it had very little to say about life, regarding it as a sort of inconvenient prelude to the main event and something to be hurried through as politely as possible, and therefore the pharaoh reached the conclusion that he was dead very quickly. The sight of his mangled body on the sand below him played a major part in this.
    There was a grayness about everything. The landscape had a ghostly look, as though he could walk straight through it. Of course, he thought, I probably can.
    He rubbed the analog of his hands. Well, this is it. This is where it gets interesting; this is where I start to really live .
    Behind him a voice said, G OOD MORNING .
    The king turned.
    “Hallo,” he said. “You’d be—”
    D EATH , said Death.
    The king looked surprised.
    “I understood that Death came as a three-headed giant scarab beetle,” he said.
    Death shrugged. W ELL . N OW YOU KNOW .
    “What’s that thing in your hand?”
    T HIS? I T’S A SCYTHE .
    “Strange-looking object, isn’t it?” said the pharaoh. “I thought Death carried the Flail of Mercy and the Reaping Hook of Justice.”
    Death appeared to think about this.
    W HAT IN? he said.
    “Pardon?”
    A RE WE STILL TALKING ABOUT A GIANT BEETLE ?
    “Ah. In his mandibles, I suppose. But I think he’s got arms in one of the frescoes in the palace.” The king hesitated. “Seems a bit silly, really, now I come to tell someone. I mean, a giant beetle with arms. And the head of an ibis, I seem to recall.”
    Death sighed. He was not a creature of Time, and therefore past and future were all one to him, but there had been a period when he’d made an effort to appear in whatever form the client expected. This foundered because it was usually impossible to know what the client was expecting until after they were dead. And then he’d decided that, since no one ever really expected to die anyway, he might as well please himself and he’d henceforth stuck to the familiar black-cowled robe, which was neat and very familiar and acceptable everywhere, like the best credit cards.
    “Anyway,” said the pharaoh, “I expect we’d better be going.”
    W HERE TO?
    “Don’t you know?”
    I AM HERE ONLY TO SEE THAT YOU DIE AT THE APPOINTED TIME . W HAT HAPPENS NEXT IS UP TO YOU .
    “Well…” The king automatically scratched his chin. “I suppose I have to wait until they’ve done all the preparations and so forth. Mummified me. And built a bloody pyramid. Um. Do I have to hang around here to wait for all that?”
    I ASSUME SO . Death clicked his fingers and a magnificent white horse ceased its grazing on some of the garden greenery and trotted toward him.
    “Oh. Well, I think I shall look away. They take all the squishy inside bits out first, you know.” A look of faint worry crossed his face. Things that had seemed perfectly sensible when he was alive seemed a little suspect now that he was dead.
    “It’s to preserve the body so that it may begin life anew in the Netherworld,” he added, in a slightly perplexed voice. “And then they wrap you in bandages. At least that seems logical.”
    He rubbed his nose. “But then they put all this food and drink in the pyramid with you. Bit weird, really.”
    W HERE ARE ONE’S INTERNAL ORGANS AT THIS POINT ?
    “That’s the funny thing, isn’t it? They’re in a jar in the next room,” said the king, his voice edged with doubt. “We even put a damn great model cart in dad’s pyramid.”
    His frown deepened. “Solid wood, it was,” he said, half to himself, “with gold leaf all over it. And four wooden bullocks to pull it. Then we whacked a damn great stone over the door…”
    He tried to think, and found that it was surprisingly easy. New ideas were pouring into his mind in a cold, clear stream. They had to do with the play of light on the rocks, the deep blue of the sky, the manifold possibilities of the world that stretched away on every side of him. Now that he didn’t have a body to importune him with its insistent demands the world seemed full of astonishments, but unfortunately among the first of them was the fact that much of what you thought was true now seemed as solid and reliable as marsh gas. And also that, just as he was fully equipped to enjoy the world, he was going to be buried inside a