Preternatural

They gawk at her from the same alternate universe as her fifth-grade classmates. She will never be popular among her peers. When will she learn?

Alone in a white room, Karen writes of white rooms...

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The chamber smelled of herbs, strong acid, death and drying plaster. In this driest of dry climates, where even the finest Pharaoh's Bread contained so much sand intermixed inadvertently with the grain that it wore the teeth down to bare nerve, this room was forever damp. No guardian god looked down hawk-eyed from the bare white walls, protecting; the walls themselves grew unheard of mold in corners, requiring frequent whitewash. No matter for, in this brightest of bright lands, where the eye of Amun-Re struck stark shadows even as he struck men blind who dared contemplate his visage, this room (womb/tomb), lit only by a single lamp, was uncommonly dark.

The high priest Herihor went about his task furtively. Never before had a pharaoh been prepared for death with such unseemly haste. Then again, never before had there been a pharaoh like this one. Even the blasphemies of Hatshepsut, who had dared to rule despite that she was female, had not been equal to the sins of this one, who had tried to destroy the world.

What he had earned by this most egregious transgression was that none of the five names bestowed upon him at his coronation would ever be spoken or inscribed again in the land of the Two Niles. More to the point, the inscriptions already extant in the temples and tombs would be chiseled away or inscribed over with the name of another. Some had suggested that of his eldest daughter Meritaten - a particular insult in that it ascribed his many deeds both praiseworthy and execrable to a female offspring. Others had suggested that even this were not sufficient; he must be expunged entirely from the scroll of history, a blank space on the walls of public edifices built within his reign, a hiatus in the long unbroken progression of the Eighteenth Dynasty which future historians would perhaps attribute to a scribe's error and elide over completely, dividing his years between the father who had sired him on a slave woman and the nephew-son who succeeded him.

Thus this body, royally prepared but destined for a pauper's grave. The high priest Herihor, who had been among this prince's most loyal retainers until the Great Aberration, had returned to claim him afterward, for reasons he himself did not entirely understand. Bad enough that this prince had tried to destroy the world, and in so doing had very likely sacrificed his own soul. How many other souls, including that of Herihor, had he endangered in the process?

That it was Herihor who had the great gaunt misshapen body brought to this womb-like room by tongueless slaves who could not report it after was among the finest of ironies. For despite his concern for the disposition of his own soul, Herihor had taken it upon himself to perform his last duty toward this fallen king, to see that his body was preserved so that his royal soul, even in its pauper's guise, could perhaps sneak through a side door into heaven. Surely there he would be recognized for what he was, thought Herihor, and numbered among the very gods he had disavowed? If I were a god, wondered Herihor, what would I do?

His answer lay in the tasks his hands performed - the loving washing of the long, edemic limbs, the careful removal of the viscera to be sealed in the canopic jars. If I were a god, thought Herihor, I would forgive him. Not for what he did, but for what he meant to do.

What prompted this thought? Herihor wondered as expertly he severed the slippery intestines from the contiguous organs, placing them in the jar which bore the head of Qebekh-sennuef the Falcon -

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Wrong! Amber's resonance clamors down the Common Mind. Wrong, wrong, wrong! Canopic jars did not bear the heads of the Sons of Horus until Ramesses' time! These would have borne human heads, if in fact four separate jars were even used this early. As I recall, they were still using a common chest for all the guts.