The Assassins of Isis by P. C. Doherty Page B

mother transform me!
    Do not rise and testify against me
    Do not stand against me at the Great Tribunal
    Do not be my enemy in the presence of the Guardian of the Scales.

    Amerotke stopped to admire the exquisite paintings of the goddess Ma’at. In one she had a golden skin, in another the royal blue of the gods. She stood holding her scales next to Osiris, the green-skinned falcon-headed god who decided the eternal fate of souls.

    The acolyte led Amerotke across the cavern. They had to pick their way carefully, as each corpse was surrounded by a range of caskets, coffers, pots and the tall canopic jars which would receive the sloppy entrails of the dead. The smell was rank and cloying, mixing with the salty odour of the natron in which the corpses would be bathed and dried out once the intestines had been removed. Trails of perfume, cassia, frankincense and myrrh teased Amerotke’s nostrils as the priests, still chanting their prayers, wound the corpses in thick linen bandages. Shufoy picked up a heart scarab from the floor and paused to watch an acolyte priest push a wire up the nose of a corpse to break the bone and draw out the brain. Amerotke turned and grasped the little man by the shoulder.
    â€˜Shufoy,’ he leaned down, ‘this is not a place for the curious.’
    They crossed the cavern, the priests around them oblivious to their presence. Their guide escorted them into an adjoining chamber, where other corpses, yet untreated, lay beneath white shrouds covered with the Words of the Gods, the sacred hieroglyphs from the Book of Thoth; these would protect the dead until they received the ministrations of the priests. It was a stark chamber where the Scribe of the Dead, sitting on his low stool, carefully described each corpse as it arrived. Amerotke noticed with some amusement that above the stool a scribe had painted a quotation on the wall extolling his profession. He nudged Shufoy. ‘You should take careful note of that!’
    Shufoy, peering through the ill-lit room, spelt out the words. ‘Be a friend of the scroll and the pen, this is more pleasing than wine. Writing is better than all professions, it pleases more than bread and beer, it satisfies more than clothing and ointment , it is even richer than a tomb in the West. I don’t know,’ he whispered back. ‘I still believe a shrewd merchant can make a fortune.’
    â€˜My lord judge.’ The acolyte paused at one table and
pulled back the linen cloth. The corpse underneath looked frightful, the face still contorted in the final convulsions of death, with popping eyes and snarling mouth. It was the corpse of a soldier, muscular and scarred. The acolyte moved the blood-stained linen poultice which covered the groin. Shufoy gagged and looked away; Amerotke stared in horror: the man’s genitals had been removed, both penis and scrotum.
    â€˜May the gods of Egypt guide him,’ Amerotke prayed. ‘By all the terrors of the night, who did this?’
    Shufoy turned back, hand over his mouth. The priest too had difficulty controlling his stomach. Amerotke pinched his nostrils. It was a truly horrid death. The removal of a man’s genitals was the final indignity; it would hamper his journey to the Eternal West, for if his body was incomplete, so was his soul.
    The priest removed the second poultice, on the left side of the chest. Amerotke already knew to expect the great gaping hole where the heart had once been. This dead soldier’s fate was sealed. According to the Rites of Osiris, when the body was embalmed, the heart was always protected by a sacred scarab. If the dead person had no heart, what could be weighed in the Scales of Truth? Murdered in life, Mafdet had also been murdered in death, and unless the compassion of the gods intervened, his soul would be doomed to wander the gloomy caverns of Am-Duat, the Underworld, for all eternity.
    â€˜What happened?’ Amerotke asked.
    â€˜Lord Impuki