Chapter Twenty-Five
FROM THE ELEVENTH DYNASTY, THE DAWN OF THE MIDDLE Kingdom, many centuries before the birth of the man Christ, the better-off dwellers by the Nile were concerned to maintain their quality of life, in death.
Were there not fields in the afterworld? Did the crops of the nightlands, the farms of each of the hours of the night, not need harvesting and tending? Were there not households and the tasks that would mean? How could a man of power, who would never work his own land while alive, be expected to do so dead?
In the tombs, by their mummied masters, the shabtis were placed. They would do it.
They were made to do it. Created for those specifics. Little figures in clay or wax, stone, bronze, crude glass, or the glazed earthware faience, dusted with oxide. Shaped at first in imitation of their overlords like tiny dead in funeral wrappings, later without that coy dissembling, made instead holding adzes, hoes and baskets, integral tools cut or cast as part of their mineral serf bodies.
The hosts of figurines grew more numerous over centuries, until there was one to work each day of the year. Servants of, workers for the rich dead, rendered to render, to perform what had to be done in that posthumous mode of production, to work the fields for the blessed deceased.
Each was inscribed at its making with the sixth chapter of the Book of the Dead. Oh shabti, allotted me, their skins read. If I be summoned or decreed to do any work which must be done in the place of the dead, remove all obstacles that stand in the way, detail yourself to me to plough the fields, to flood the banks, to carry sand from east to west. “Here I am,” you shall say. “I shall do it.”
Their purpose was written on the body. Here I am. I shall do it.
THERE IS NO KNOWING BEYOND THAT MEMBRANE, THE MENISCUS OF death. What can be seen from here is distorted, refracted. All we can know are those untrustworthy glimpses-that and rumour. The prattle. The dead gossip: it is the reverberation of that gossip against the surface tension of death that the better mediums hear. It is like listening to whispered secrets through a toilet door. It is a crude and muffled susurrus.
We gather, we intuit or think we have heard and understood, that there was effort in that place. There in Neter-Khertet, the flickered, judged dead of the kingdom had been trained into belief, strong enough to shape their post-death life into something like a cold unstable mimicking of their splendid eschatology. A vivid tableau imitated in stones, electricity and gruel. (What function of that post-dead stuff coagulated and thought itself Anubis? What Ammit the Heart-eater?)
For centuries the shabtis did what they were tasked. Here I am, they said in the dark unsound, and cut the uncrops, and harvested them, and channelled the not-water of death, carried the remembrance of sand. Made to do, mindless serf-things obeying dead lords.
Until at last one shabti paused by the riverbank-analogues, and stopped. Dropped the bundled shadow-harvest it had cut, and took the tools it was built carrying to its own clay skin. Effaced the holy text it had been made wearing.
Here I am, it shouted in what passed there for its voice. I shall not do it.
“IT NAMED ITSELF WATI,” DANE SAID. “‘THE REBEL.’ HE WAS MADE IN SetMaat her imenty Waset.” He said the strange place carefully. “Now called Deir el-Medina. In the twenty-ninth year of Ramses Three.”
They were in a new car. There was something giddying about the new accoutrements they ferried with each theft: the different toys, books, papers, debris ignored on each back seat.
“The royal tomb-builders weren’t paid for days,” Dane said. “They downed tools. About 1100 BC. They were the first strikers. I think it was one of them builders that built it. The shabti.”
Carved by a rebel, that ressentiment flowing through the fingers and the chisel and defining it? Made by the emotions that made it?
“Nah,” said Dane. “I think they watched each other. Either Wati or his maker learnt by example.”
SELF-NAMED WATI LED THE FIRST-EVER STRIKE IN THE AFTERLIFE. IT escalated. That first revolt of the shabti, the uprising of the made.
Insurrection in Neter-Khertet. Murderous fighting among the constructed, the smithed servants, split between rebels, the afraid, and the still-obedient, slave armies of the loyal. They shattered each other in the fields of the spirits. All confused, none used to the emotions they had accreted by some accident of agency, their capacity to choose their allegiance bewildering. The dead watched aghast, huddled among the ash-reeds of the river of death. Overseer gods came running from their own hours to demand order, horrified by the chaos in those bone-cold agricultural lands.
It was a brutal war of human spirits and quasi-souls made out of anger. Shabti killing shabti, killing the already dead, in heretic acts of meta-murder, sending the appalled souls of the deceased into some further afterlife about which nothing has ever been known.
The fields were full of the corpses of souls. Shabti were slaughtered in hundreds by gods but they killed gods too. The crude features of comrades no one had bothered to carve with precision making their own expressions out of the indistinct impressions given them, taking their axes and ploughs and the fucking baskets they were built carrying in a swarm over bodies the size of mountains with jackal heads howling and eating them but being overrun by us and hacked with our stupid weapons and killed.
Wati and his comrades won. You can bet that meant a change.
It must have been a shock for succeeding generations of highborn Egyptian dead. To wake in a strange fogged underworld scandalously off-message. The rituals of posthumous hierarchy to which their corpses had been piously subjected turned out to be antique, overthrown mummery. They and the worker-statue-spirit household they had had made to come with them were met by disrespectful representatives of the new shabti nation. Their own figurines swiftly recruited to the polity of that shadeland. The human dead were told, If you work, you may eat.
CENTURIES AND SOCIAL SYSTEMS GO, AND IMMIGRATION TO THAT afterland slows and ceases, and piece by piece and without complaint the shabti and those human souls who had made their peace with the rough democracy of the shabti deadland farmers fade, go out, move on, un-be, pass over, are no longer there. There is not much sadness. It is history, is all.
Wati will have none of that.
Here I am. I shall not do it.
He moved too, at last, but he moved not beyond nor to any dark or light but sideways, through borders between belief-worlds.
An epic trek, that curious passage through foreign afterlifes. Always toward the source of the river or the beginning of the road. Swimming up through Murimuria, passing up through the caverns of Naraka and the shade of Yomi, crossing the rivers Tuoni and Styx from the farthest shore back, to the ferrymen’s consternation, through a kaleidoscope flutter of lands, passing psychopomps of all traditions who had to pause with the new dead they were escorting and whisper to Wati, You’re going the wrong way.
Northers in bearskins, women in saris and kimonos, funerary glad-rags, bronze-armoured mercenaries, the axes that had killed them bouncing bloody and politely ignored in their pretend-flesh like giant skin tags, all astonished by the militant inhuman statue-shade ascending, astonished by this contrary wayfarer of whom bugger-all was written in any of the reams of pantheon-specific wittering about what the dead would face, all staring frankly at this intruder, this unplaced class-guerrilla in the myth, or glancing from under brows and introducing themselves politely or not, depending on the cultural norms they had not yet learned were for the living.