We’ll get to that in proper time. Let me show you something first.
Mael lead him through the Egyptian wing of the Met. The mummies had taken it over and Gary saw for the first time how morbid the place was. An inside-out graveyard where the dead were put on display for schoolchildren. Gary saw a mummy trying on jewelry in one room, the turquoise and gold necklaces glinting against the stained linen at her throat. In another room a truly ancient mummy who was little more than rags and bones was trying to pry open a massive sarcophagus with his splayed fingers. It looked like he was trying to return to the tomb.
Mael stopped at a room partitioned off by a folding screen. The exhibit beyond was only half finished: clearly the curators had been working on it when they abandoned the museum during the Epidemic. The walls had been painted a sky blue and in white italic script above a row of empty display cases was written MUMMIES AROUND THE WORLD. The bodies in this room were truly dead. SIBERIAN ICE MUMMIES were little more than incomplete skeletons with clumps of hair attached to their broken skulls; MOUNTAIN MUMMIES OF PERU showed hollow darkness through their sunken orbits, their brains having long since rotted away. At the back of the room sat a long low case that had been shattered from the inside. Gary crunched glass underfoot as he approached it. A CELTIC BOG MUMMY FROM SCOTLAND, he read. This must have been Mael’s sepulcher.
THE MUMMY IN THIS CASE LIVED IN THE TIME OF THE ROMANS. HE WAS MOST LIKELY A PRIEST OR A KING, Gary read.
A little of both, actually. Also a musician and an astronomer and a healer, when the need arose. Yes, Gary, I too was a physician in my day. You would probably consider my methods crude but I did more good than ill on the whole.
Gary squatted down to study the display. There was a recreation of how Mael would have looked in life-pretty much exactly like the apparitions that had appeared to him downtown. Next to this was a picture of Stonehenge, which the museum assured Gary was not built by the Celts but which they had used to predict solar eclipses. “How did you die?” he asked.
Now there’s a tale to tell.Mael sat down on a display case full of partially preserved skulls and ruminated for a while before continuing.We took turns, is how. The burnt bannock cake came to me in my twenty-third year. That’s how we chose the anointed ones, drawing bits of cake out of a bag. The summer had been too cool for the corn and my people were in danger of starvation. So they took me to the oaks above Mтin Boglach and hanged me until I gurgled for breath. When they cut me down and I plunged into the black water below the peat I had a prayer to Teutates on my lips. Oh, lord, please make the grains to grow. Something of the sort.
Gary noticed for the first time that the rope around Mael’s neck wasn’t for decoration. It was a noose. “Jesus,” Gary breathed. “That’s horrible.”
Mael came alive with anger as he responded, his head shaking so violently Gary worried it might fall off.It was glorious! I was the soul of my island in that moment, Gary, I was the hopes of my tribe made agonized flesh. I was born for that dying. It wasmagical.
Gary reached out and put a hand on Mael’s arm. “I’m truly sorry-but you wasted your death. Teutates, whoever that was. He couldn’t make the crops grow.”
Mael stood up hurriedly and hobbled out of the room.Maybe so, maybe so. Luckily for me then that’s not how the tale ended.