The Posids are coming, they who live beyond the sea. They have destroyed the foundation of their homeland, and now they are coming here, to Alexandria. We stand on the steps of the Library and face the sea, watching their water crafts bob toward us on distant waves, hundreds of crafts carrying thousands of people. From far off they seemed vulnerable, peaceful, but now we can hear the drums.
I want to ask the priests why they are beating the war drums but the priests are running now, their robes trailing behind their flight. Even the old ones, those whose heads no longer require shearing, are running as fast as their old bones will go. I feel I must run too, but I do not know where to go or whom to follow.
My home is the Library. I have no family. I was given to the Temple gods as a young child and I do not remember my parents, except my mother’s green eyes. I can still see her eyes, but not her face. I think of them, those disembodied eyes, and sometimes I search for them in the market, but I never find them there.
It is an honorable life, to be an aid to a priest of the Library of Alexandria. We are told, every morning, that our sacrifice appeases the gods of knowledge, who are too innumerable to name. The dedicated lives of priests and temple aids are what make Alexandria the most knowledgable and honored city in the world. Only Pharaoh knows more than the Library and its priests.
Ashra, the Priest of Records, grabs my arm and pulls me with him, yelling, “Come, come!”
I’m surprised, not that I’ve been grabbed amidst the clamor, but that I’ve been grabbed by Ashra, the highest-ranking priest in the Library. I have never served as aid to him because his aids are other priests. The Hall of Records is off limits to all aids, and most priests.
Pharaoh visited it three years ago, in the spring, during the famine that drove us to eat the crocodiles in the river, and when he emerged he was sweating and tearful. He fled, crying like a child, to the farthest corner of the Hall of Study. We averted our eyes as quickly as we could, but still, one of his guards killed my friend, Eshya, for observing Pharaoh’s weakness. Ever since, I have wondered what it was Pharaoh saw in the Hall of Records, though I am terrified to discover what horror could make a god weep.
After Pharaoh left, and after Eshya was buried, the rains returned, and we ate bread again.
I follow Ashra into the Library, past the grand statues of the death gods with their stony jackal snouts, past the ancient script carved into the Library’s walls, past the inner gardens, rife with flowering plants that appease the gods of the air, through the Hall of Reading, where we aids transcribe papyrus records to stone with the heavy chisels that cause my hands to ache until numb.
We slip over the stony grit of the morning’s chiselings and Ashra grabs my arm to maintain his balance. I notice his age. Skin sags under his once-indomitable jaw, clenched with urgency. He rights himself and we continue past the stacks of virgin stone slates, through a broad doorway into a snaking hallway, and through another set of doors that house the great bindings of papyrus that catalog the history of our civilization and the records of wars.
We aids are expected to learn all of the wars, their names, with whom we warred, the cause of the wars, their durations, and how many brethren were sent to the afterlife. If we cannot recite these details by the time we come of age, we are dismissed from our positions at the Library and forced to live as merchants or beggars. I learned the wars.
Ashra halts, and I skid to a stop beside him. He stands in front of a small door beyond the Hall of Records, a door I’ve never noticed. It is wooden and diminutive, unnoticeable among the grandeur of the rest of the Library. He extends a quivering hand and I wait silently. He raises the heavy latch until it clicks and the door eases open. He pokes his head into the doorway, and for a long moment, he is very still.
His stillness amplifies the chaos beyond the hall. Priests bark orders and aids scurry, panic in their eyes. Women wail in fear. Some of the priests try to corral them into the kitchens, even the sacred women who serve the gods and have never entered the kitchens beneath the Library’s main floor.
I lock eyes with a woman who serves the god, Osiris. I have seen her many times. She is quiet and demure. Her chocolate skin shimmers in both the daylight of the Library and the darkness of Osiris’s Temple. Her eyes are pools of black, the color of night, flecked with tiny, golden stars. Rich sarongs cling to her hips in such a way that compels one to stare. Her necklaces lay between small breasts and bracelets of copper twine up her arms to where her shoulders emerge, naked, from the metal coils. Only now, as I gaze helplessly, her eyes are the unfathomable black of bottomless pits. I cannot hear her cries over the tumult. I only know that she calls to me, and that I do not go to her.
Ashra jerks my arm and I hurtle back to reality.
“This is the day,” he says. He looks into my eyes as though examining the thoughts behind them. “The Records must be moved.”
Before I can say “Yes, honored one,” he says, “This is not the time for civilities, boy. Ask what you must ask, and take orders when they are given. We are to move the sacred Records to Giza before the Posids can take them. Under no circumstance are you to touch them. Look at me, boy!” He grabs hold of my jaw and wrenches it painfully so that I am staring into his eyes. “Under no circumstance are you to touch them. They will kill you as surely as those who beat those drums on the water. Come!”
I follow him through the modest doorway into a dark chamber whose cramped size I feel rather than see. Ashra speeds through it to a gloomy hallway, as though he’s passed this way a hundred times. I am not so sure-footed, and stumble, especially when his figure darts into the darkness and I am led only by the padding of his feet upon the ground.
His footsteps slow, and, finally, he stops. I can sense his figure in the haze. He is signaling me to silence, though he need not bother. He shuffles toward a heavily locked, tiny door in the wall, a door as high as my waist, as though a very small person, like those from overseas who perform during the Feast of Anuket, lives here in the darkness. Satisfied with the silence that greets us, Ashra unlocks a series of bolts and pushes the door open with caution, as though he expects that very small person to attack us.
Instead, a blue light, unlike anything I have seen, pours through the opening. It grows brighter as the door fully opens, until it illuminates the entire hallway. The light encompasses Ashra, and I am forced to squint and shield my eyes.
“What is this?” I ask before I can help it.
“These are the Records,” he says.
“Honored one—“
“No time for civilities!” he hisses. “Spit it out!”
I nod, though I’m uncomfortable addressing him at all, much less casually. “What about the papyrus records in the Hall of Records? Is that not what should be saved?”
He shakes his head. “I am the Priest of Records. Only one Priest of Records lives at a time. Once he dies, the next one takes over, and is tasked not with the Hall of Records, but these, the Akashic Records.”
As he speaks, I step around his small frame, and the source of the light comes fully into view. It is a glowing, cylindrical mass that reaches from the floor to ceiling of an enormous square room. The cylinder seems to move, to undulate, as though made of water, but it is light. It moves like the fog that rolls up from the sea and plunges the entire city into shadow. But unlike fog, it’s translucent, like the humors of the body, the mucus that drains from the nose and throat during illness, and it vibrates, pulses, with light, like it is alive.
I am transfixed. “This is witchcraft,” I whisper. “Surely it will kill us.”
“Surely it will,” he assures me. “Do not touch it.”
“But,” I stammer, “I don’t understand it. This — these are records?”
“Yes, boy,” Ashra says, his voice suddenly kind. “This is the record of every moment on Earth. Every day, every night, every person, every animal and plant is recorded here. Everything that has ever happened, and everything that will happen, is recorded in the Akashic Records.”
I nod again, though I do not understand. Ashra seems to know this, because he smiles at me and his voice softens further. “Come, I have chosen you to help me, and so you are capable of that help, whether you feel it or not.”
He skirts around the glowing mass to the far wall of the chamber. Seven miniature pyramids, reaching no higher than Ashra’s knees, are stacked there. As I follow, I pass shallow squares carved into the solid rock of the ground, encircling the Records.
“These pyramids must be installed, in order, into their places surrounding the Records,” Ashra says, thrusting the first pyramid into my arms.
I almost tumble backward with its immense heft. That an aged man could lift such a weight is beyond my expectation, but I dismiss my surprise and concentrate on his precise instructions.
“That is the first pyramid, take it to the square marked one, on the other side,” he says, his hand waving me toward the far end of the room. “The white side of the pyramid must face the Records, the red sides must face each other, and black side must face away from the Records.”
I heave the pyramid into place, and then hurry back for the second, then the third, fourth, fifth, sixth, and seventh pyramids, which I carefully install around the Records in the same formation.
“Very good,” Ashra says. I stand wearily after placing the seventh. “Now we will move the Records from this room. Stand back.” He steps forward and begins to chant.
I am accustomed to chanting. It is something we do every morning upon rising, at special festivals and sacrificial rites, and before sleeping. But this chant is unlike anything I have heard. Ashra chants in a voice that is not his own, in a language that I have never heard. His voice rises to a shriek and his eyes roll back into his head, the whites glowing blue in their sockets. The hair rises along my arms and up my neck. My spine tingles with fear. He raises his hands above his head, and because I am staring at him, I do not, at first, notice that the small pyramids are rising off the ground, and with them, the Akashic Records.
When I realize what is happening, I throw myself against the wall behind me, trembling from head to foot and biting my tongue against the childish whimpering that threatens to escape my undisciplined mouth. I wish, for one clear moment, that I was facing the brutes on the sea instead of helping this most revered of priests.
The ceiling has gone now, vanished into thin air as the Records rise to meet it. The pyramids rise far above our heads and the Records are rising into the light of day. Ashra stops chanting and beckons me to follow him up a ladder carved into the far wall. We ascend into daylight, and as I step onto the Library’s roof, I’m beset by the sounds of war.
The Posids are landing, and it seems their main tactic is to set fire to everything they pass. Along the coast, the city is aflame, and acrid smoke fills my nostrils and mouth. I cough and cover my nose with the long sleeves of my robe. People scream and run, and it’s difficult to decipher who is who. The Posids are known to have fairer skin than we Egyptians, but the contrast is so minor that differentiation is impossible without time to study individuals. Our army is scrambling. They must have been surprised. Word of the sinking of the Posids’s homeland reached us almost two moon cycles ago, and so our city relaxed its guard. We assumed the threat of invasion had sunk with it. That was a mistake.
Ashra begins chanting again. His arms tremble above his head, and as he shrieks, the Records glow brighter. On the ground, far below us, war cries change to exclamations of surprise. I gaze upon the ground, and people, Posids and Egyptians alike, are pointing at us and wailing. Assaults and defenses have halted as the battle’s participants unify in a newfound fear.
I whirl around to Ashra and am momentarily blinded by the Records. It radiates a powerful glow, an evil, unnatural glow, and from it, I feel heat and cold and vibration and stillness wash over me. I am too close to them. I begin to move away, past Ashra, but he catches me and holds me tight.
The ground begins to tremble as though the gods have stepped into our world. Below, the wails grow until I press my hands over my ears, willing my courage to overcome my fear. It does not. Blinding light is now beaming from the Records and is blocking out even Ra’s noontime rays. I feel the roof begin to crumble under our feet and I shake Ashra’s arm, afraid that he is unaware of the danger in his altered state. A crack forms between my feet and the ancient dust of the Library’s walls rise in clouds to my nose. I can smell it, the sweet, earthy must of the ancients, over the raging smoke. This dust, I realize with odd clarity, has not been breathed since the founding of this city.
Ashra’s grip tightens on my arm, and with a flash that surely obliterates every structure and human being within our sights, we are flying, hurtling over the city walls, along the edge of the Nile Delta, where, miles from the city, fishermen in boats are netting fish and women are gathering reeds; they have not yet realized that this is the final day of their lives. We leave the lush green of the water and pass over the Desert Road, upon which merchants travel in caravans between Alexandria and Cairo, leading asses, camels, and slaves for auction. We fly over the mud huts of local tribes, and then we dip into Giza, where the proud pyramids illuminate the barren desert under the Eye of Ra, their white, red, and black sides shimmering, just like their miniature versions accompanying us now. We slow to a halt in midair, hovering over the great pyramids and the majestic tombs that fan out toward the distant river.
Below, a group of priests stand outside a strange, long temple, which, after noting the paws, I realize is the Sphinx. Before I can study them, we are on the earth once again. I feel nauseous. Ashra releases me, and the priests rush to his aid. He collapses in their arms, panting. I step forward, wanting to help, but they ignore me.
“They are here,” Ashra says. His eyes are closed. “It must be done, now. They will take our knowledge, they will burn the Library, but they must not take the Records. The gods have punished them. They must not have the Records.” His voice is weak but insistent. He takes a rattling breath and dies in the arms of the priests. They lay him tenderly on the ground, and a young priest steps forward, one whom I recognize from the Library.
“We will secure the Records, as Ashra requested,” he says, “and then we will tend to his burial rites. Come.”
I don’t need to be told that this younger man is now the Priest of Records.
“Aid,” he says, beckoning me. “You have done well.” I incline my head. “You will assist the moving of the Records to their new home, and then you will stay and work here, with me.”
“Yes, honored one,” I say. I realize the gravity of his words: In working with the Priest of Records, I will no longer be an aid, but will become a priest.
The young priest barks orders at the four priests surrounding the Records, which are now gently pulsing with soft blue light. I turn to see where we are going, and nearly fall over as I look up into the eyes of the Sphinx. Fear floods me yet again, and I can’t help but feel that the beast will bend down and swallow me whole. In the sleeping quarters at the Library, the aids whisper about the nightly wanderings of the Sphinx. She is said to rove the country, consuming those unworthiest of citizens, those who drink and whore, those whose hearts contain bitter impurities. Staring now into her terrible eyes, I no longer doubt the tales.
“Aid!” the young priest calls, snapping his fingers. I rush to his side. “Come.”
He assigns our places around the Records, one man to each of the pyramids, though one is left unattended, the one that had been intended for Ashra. The young priest begins his own chant, which sounds similar to Ashra’s, back in Alexandria, but less frantic. His eyes do not roll back in his head, and his arms are free from trembling. He marches forward, toward the heart of the Sphinx, and we follow, the Records keeping pace with our bodies.
Between the Sphinx’s forelegs, below her breast, a secret stairway has been revealed for our purpose. The smooth stone that normally conceals it has been pulled aside, and we skirt it as we march to, and then down, the stairs. Pocket doors of thickest stone have been heaved aside, allowing an entrance exactly the breadth of our party. We descend to darkness, but the steady glow of the Records drives away the gloom until the entire chamber is filled with blue light.
The chamber is small, like the one in the Library, but its rich decor surprises me. The floor is tiled with vibrant scenes of Egyptian life. The walls are carved with writings of the ancients, just like the walls of the Library. Statues of sky gods and Pharaoh gods punctuate the writings, and the ceiling shimmers with the same iridescent white stone that lines the exterior north-facing walls of the great pyramids outside.
The young priest halts just beyond the middle of the room, and the Records settle to the ground as though recognizing their new home. We are instructed to move the small pyramids to the far wall, freeing the records to swirl and undulate quietly in their mysterious column between the ceiling and the floor, and then the priest gathers us into a group beside the records and instructs us to sit.
“These are the Akashic Records,” he says. He gazes at them, a look of awe upon his face. We are all for a moment dazzled by their impossibility.
“We are its Keepers, now that Ashra is dead,” the young priest continues. “He was my mentor and teacher, and passed to me all that he learned from his mentors and their mentors, from time immemorial. As Keepers, we will die before relinquishing the secret of the Records to any person, friend or foe. Do you agree?”
We agree, “Yes, honored one.”
“Timman,” he says, holding his hand to me, “Come here.”
I stand, though my knees are shaking, and I hurry to his side. “Timman will be my successor upon my death. We will wait for the outcome of the invasion before deciding whether to move on to the Valley of the Kings, where there awaits another chamber.”
The priests nod, though I see, in a few faces, resentment.
“You may sit,” the young priest tells me. I walk back to my place, but as I begin to kneel, I feel a rush of warmth. A wave, or a hand of sorts, reaches out from the Records, grasps me, and pulls me into its depths. I plunge, and am dragged, into its amorphous depths.
I’m simultaneously suspended in air and water, in a thick, viscous liquid. I feel no need to breathe. My entire body is assaulted with sensation, pain and pleasure, fear and calm, pinching, caressing, stabbing, bliss. My mind struggles to process the dichotomies, and I writhe, trying to free myself from this oddest of prisons.
The young priest is screaming orders at the others, but I know there is nothing they can do until the Records release me. I am presented with hundreds, no, thousands of scenes of people, of Alexandria, of Cairo and Egypt, of the whole Earth. I see that we exist on a round stone, floating among the stars. I see that we are a star, and that Ra is a larger star. I understand that the round stone is called a planet, and that all of humankind exist on this planet, together, in the sky, which is filled with other planets and stars beyond counting.
I see our entire planet in flames. Rocks the size of Cairo are tossed by the sky gods into the inferno. Flames explode again and again. Finally, the gods are sated; they fling no more rocks. The fires burn to embers, the embers cool to smoke, and for a long time, the scorched Earth is still, black, the picture of grief.
Then I blink and it is green and blue, colors that exist in Egypt only where there is water. Mountains heave forth and oceans roil. I feel I can touch the colors, but when I reach out, they are as far from me as Ra is from the desert. Under the surface of the sea are small movements, pinpoints of life. I squint at the land and see small movements upon it as well. Animals, birds, and then people in small towns, large cities, in boats on the sea, and then in crafts gliding through the air.
Dwellings become larger than even Giza’s proud pyramids. Towers of shining metals reach toward the sky, and inside them, I know, are people, living and working at impossible heights, higher than birds fly. The stone of their cities blots out the land. Green turns to brown, brown turns to grey. At night, so many fires burn, it is like day. Their tools move on their own, their crafts move on their own, taking them wherever they want to go, even into the depths of the sea. Now the crafts are traveling to Ra, to the moon, to the Dog Star and beyond. They have killed the gods of the temples and now all people live under one leader. There are no more wars, no more slaves, but they wage war in space, against the beings of other planets. But then they come, the sky gods that were forgotten. They rain fire down from the heavens, and again, the world is engulfed in flames.
In one eye, it seems, I watch the birth and destruction of the Earth happen again and again, and I know that it will happen infinitely until the Earth herself is immolated, vanishing as dust into the sky. In the other eye, I see every moment of every being upon the planet, man or beast. Births, deaths, hunger, love, hatred, kisses, killings. I see war and my body is wracked with the pain and fear of every person that has and will ever experience the horror of war.
I see the outcome of the Posids’s invasion, and the outcome of every war that follows. I see love and experience the immense joy of every lover, every mother, father, every animal capable of affection. I see abandonment and loss through the eyes of children. I see disease through the eyes of healers. I see discovery through the eyes of scientists and scholars. I see the pain of hunger through the eyes of the hunter and the pain of fear through the eyes of the hunted.
I see the greed of the governors and the revenge of the governed. I feel the injuries of the builders, and the exhilaration of those for whom they are building. I feel the warming and cooling of the seas upon the slick bodies of the sea dwellers. I feel the parched heat of those who have died beneath the gaze of Ra, and the chill of those who died in ice, in snow, on mountain tops, or in winter deserts. I see every leaf bud and fall, every flower blossom and crumple. I count the spines upon cacti and the berries upon bushes. I am overwhelmed by the sheer impossibility of life, and I also feel it is not enough, that it must never end.
The humor in which I float is clear, and yet I experience this knowledge as though viewing it upon a dense surface, like the curtains that hang in the sleeping rooms. I can see the priests running, trying to rescue me from the Records before I am incinerated within them, for the records are charged with the energy of every being upon the Earth, and every destiny of every being.
I know that I will live, and I know that I will die. I hold that knowledge in my hand and spin it around, like the spinning top I played with as a child upon my green-eyed mother’s kitchen floor. I look around without moving, and see it all, and know that the Records are complete. I hope the Records keep the Earth from her cycle of death, but I know they will not. And then I step out, onto the solid ground of the temple beneath the mighty Sphinx.
The priests stare. I’m aware that I am glowing, for my movement casts blue light upon a dim corner of the chamber.
“It is all there,” I tell the young priest. He kneels at my feet in supplication, and I’m surprised.
“No,” I say, “I am not the Priest of Records. You are. I am the Auditor of Records, and I have seen that they are complete.”
The young priest looks up at me, and I see fear in his eyes, but it does not worry me. I turn and look back upon my Earthly body, that inhibiting sack of liquid and minerals now floating lifeless within the Records in perpetuity, just like the discarded bodies of all the Auditors who have come before me. I have fulfilled my duty and require it no longer.
I move past the priest, up the narrow stairs, into dusk. In the distance, fires rage in Alexandria, but I know that the Posids have not succeeded. Those who are peaceful will become knitted into the fabric of Egypt, tucked safely into neighborhoods and towns. Their mythologies will marry ours, and new gods will be born. Someday, proof of their sunken homeland will be lost to history, and they will fade, like the Pharaohs of Egypt, into obscurity.
I pass under the gaze of the Sphinx, though she is now the one filled with fear. Between her paws stands Ashra. He is waiting for me, as I expected. He holds out his hand and smiles at me, and I know he is proud. He chose the right aid.
I grasp his hand, and we fly, once again, above Giza and Cairo, above Alexandria, above continents and islands, seas and oceans, planets and stars, up into the boundless shimmer of life.