People today think ancient Egypt was ineffably cool. I blame this misconception on hieroglyphics and (to a lesser extent) on the Bangles.
The truth is that the ancient Egyptians regarded most people as chattel for the ruling class and practiced some of the blackest magic history has ever seen—or, rather,
hasn’t
seen, because they were deadly serious about keeping their secrets. But they wrote such happy tomes as
The Book of the Dead
and illustrated joyful kids’ books like
Little Scarab Shat Blood
and
Anubis Eats the Hearts of the Disobedient
. I’m not kidding; I saw them before the Library of Alexandria was ruined by Emperor Aurelian.
I saw plenty at Alexandria in its heyday. In fact, I saw quite a few things I never should have seen, which is why I now avoid the country when I can. My logic, if it could be called that, suggests that if I never think about the country again, the old deities of Egypt will forget that I once snaffled their sex rituals and necromantic tomes. Calls from Cairo, therefore, automatically excite more than their fair share of suspicion. When I picked up the phone in my shop and the voice in my ear identified himself as “Nkosi Elkhashab from Egypt,” I toyed briefly with the idea of hanging up before he could even state his business.
The problem was this: Long ago—in what I suppose I must now call my “youth,” even though I was already a couple of hundred years old at the time—I raided an extremely restricted section at Alexandria. It was at the behest of Ogma, one of the Tuatha Dé Danann, so to please that particular god I wound up vexing several others in the Egyptian pantheon. Not so much that they would take the trouble to hunt me down, but neither am I precisely welcome in their territory anymore. Bast, in particular, has several bones to pick with me, aside from the fact that I’m not a cat person. I have a book of hers—or, rather, a book that belonged to her cult—that contains some fairly lurid descriptions of her “mysteries.” It is physical evidence of the old saying that there is more than one way to skin a cat: The parchment itself is made of catskin—a fine quality bordering on vellum—and the cover is a thicker, tanned catskin leather to protect the contents from minor water damage. I’d thwarted a couple of attempts by her agents to steal it back or assassinate me, but I could also say the same for most of my Egyptian collection. Almost all of it had been cursed or enchanted in some fashion and had given me more trouble than it was worth. I held on to it now just to be stubborn, to say “Neener neener!” to all those ancient mages and gods who thought they could scare a Druid into giving away his hard-earned (if ill-gotten)library. I tended to hoard magical tomes the way dragons hoarded treasure—and protected them with the same ferocity.
Mr. Elkhashab, however, wanted what amounted to a cookbook. “If you are the rare-book dealer Atticus O’Sullivan …?”
“I am.”
“Then I am told you have a collection of extremely rare works from Egypt,” he said, his voice rich with the lilt of an Arabic accent. I could easily speak Arabic with him, but it was better for now to let him assume I was an American and, therefore, statistically speaking, limited to English and two years of another language in high school.
“Are you from the Ministry of Antiquities?” I asked. These days, admitting you had old stuff from Egypt would earn you a visit from men with mirrored sunglasses.
“No, Mr. O’Sullivan,” he chuckled in surprise. “My relationship with them is rather strained. In any case, I doubt they even know of the existence of the particular work I’m looking for. Nor are they likely to care, since it has nothing to do with the pharaohs. It’s simply a book written in Coptic, either first or perhaps second century, and it contains a collection of recipes for cooking lamb. Might you have anything remotely resembling such a book?”
I did
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