IIb doodled fitfully with his stylus. IIa strummed his abacus.
'We're going to do it,' said Ptaclusp, and strode out of the room. 'And any son who doesn't like it will be cast into the outer darkness where there is a wailing and a crashing of teeth,' he called over his shoulder.
The two brothers, left to themselves, glowered at each other.
At last IIa said, 'What does “quantum” mean, anyway?'
IIb shrugged. 'It means add another nought,' he said.
'Oh,' said IIa, 'is that all?'
All along the river valley of the Djel the pyramids were flaring silently into the night, discharging the accumulated power of the day.
Great soundless flames erupted from their capstones and danced upwards, jagged as lightning, cold as ice.
For hundreds of miles the desert glittered with the constellations of the dead, the aurora of antiquity. But along the valley of the Djel the lights ran together in one solid ribbon of fire.
It was on the floor and it had a pillow at one end. It had to be a bed.
Teppic found he was doubting it as he tossed and turned, trying to find some part of the mattress that was prepared to meet him halfway. This is stupid, he thought, I grew up on beds like this. And pillows carved out of rock. I was born in this palace, this is my heritage, I must be prepared to accept it . . .
I must order a proper bed and a feather pillow from Ankh, first thing in the morning. I, the king, have said this shall be done.
He turned over, his head hitting the pillow with a thud.
And plumbing. What a great idea that was. It was amazing what you could do with a hole in the ground.
Yes, plumbing. And bloody doors. Teppic definitely wasn't used to having several attendants waiting on his will all the time, so performing his ablutions before bed had been extremely embarrassing. And the people, too. He was definitely going to get to know the people. It was wrong, all this skulking in palaces.
And how was a fellow supposed to sleep with the sky over the river glowing like a firework?
Eventually sheer exhaustion wrestled his body into some zone between sleeping and waking, and mad images stalked across his eyeballs.
There was the shame of his ancestors when future archaeologists translated the as-yet unpainted frescoes of his reign: '“Squiggle, constipated eagle, wiggly line, hippo's bottom, squiggle”: And in the year of the Cycle of Cephnet the Sun God Teppic had Plumbing Installed and Scorned the Pillows of his Forebears.'
He dreamed of Khuft - huge, bearded, speaking in thunder and lightning, calling down the wrath of the heavens on this descendant who was betraying the noble past.
Dios floated past his vision, explaining that as a result of an edict passed several thousand years ago it was essential that he marry a cat.
Various-headed gods vied for his attention, explaining details of godhood, while in the background a distant voice tried to attract his attention and screamed something about not wanting to be buried under a load of stone. But he had no time to concentrate on this, because he saw seven fat cows and seven thin cows, one of them playing a trombone.
But that was an old dream, he dreamt that one nearly every night.
And then there was a man firing arrows at a tortoise . . .
And then he was walking over the desert and found a tiny pyramid, only a few inches high. A wind sprang up and blew away the sand, only now it wasn't a wind, it was the pyramid rising, sand tumbling down its gleaming sides .
And it grew bigger and bigger, bigger than the world, so that at last the pyramid was so big that the whole world was a speck in the centre.
And in the centre of the pyramid, something very strange happened.
And the pyramid grew smaller, taking the world with it. and vanished . . .
Of course, when you're a pharaoh, you get a very high class of obscure dream.
Another day dawned, courtesy of the king, who was curled up on the bed and using his rolled-up clothes as a pillow. Around the stone maze of the palace the servants of the kingdom began to wake up.
Dios's boat slid gently through the water and bumped into the jetty. Dios climbed out and hurried into the palace, bounding up the steps three at a time and rubbing his hands together at the thought of a fresh day laid out before him, every hour and ritual ticking neatly into place. So much to organise, so much to be needed for . . .