Domino City Museum's special exhibition, The Nameless Pharaoh, tells a clean story: a young king offered up his name and his soul, and the world was saved. Seto reads the panel twice — once as prose, once as a financial statement — and finds a boy missing from the books.
Atem, back among the living with a forged family register and a birthday chosen for the sake of cake, walks through the exhibit as an ordinary visitor and listens to strangers call his death noble.
That night, Seto refuses to grant the word. What Atem says in reply is something he has not told anyone in three thousand years.
This is a translation of an original work.
Original Title: 等身
Original Author: 葉人(@Hathor_yuki)
Personal site: https://prideshipping.sakura.ne.jp
Grave goods were laid out inside the glass cases. A golden armlet, a stone tablet with its cartouche chiselled away, a restored crown. The explanatory panel read: "The young Pharaoh offered up his own name and soul to the vessel of the seal, and drove back the darkness that sought to engulf the world. Through his noble sacrifice, three thousand years of peace——"
Seto read the text as though glaring at it. First as prose. Then as a financial statement.
It was, unmistakably, a set of falsified accounts. In the expenses column, an entire boy had gone unbooked.
Seto had never thought of Atem as a king. Still less as a god. The memories from three thousand years ago, the talk of souls, whatever lay on the far side of dimensions — by now he had processed all of it as fact.
But acknowledging a fact and bending the knee were not the same thing. What Seto refused to acknowledge was not the fact. It was the price tag stuck on it.
A king, as Seto understood it, was not even an occupation.
It was the name on a debt assigned to a child at the time. Not a title he had earned, but something he had been billed for. And the people who sang its praises never spoke of the interest on the bill.
For Atem's return, Seto had paid to have a full set of papers made. A family register, a personal history, residency records. On paper, Atem was an eighteen-year-old civilian.
Mokuba had chosen the date of birth. The birthday Atem himself remembered took the form of the nineteenth day of the third month of the harvest season — a date in a calendar that had died three thousand years ago. Converting it to the current calendar would be a job for an astronomer, and even then the answer could only be narrowed to a rough window. Making the two match was impossible.
But Mokuba solved it. "Let's make it the day after my birthday. It's easy to remember, and we get cake two days in a row." Neither Atem nor Seto had any objection. For the first time in three thousand years, a birthday had been renewed — and the deciding factor was cake.
Seto thought it was not a bad way to decide. At the very least, its grounds were clearer than any oracle's.
And speaking of grounds: of every document ever written about Atem, the most accurate was this forged paperwork.
Because it said he was alive.
Stone inscriptions lie. The residence certificate, on this one point at least, is correct.
The man himself was standing in front of the glass.
No one noticed. Naturally. According to the inscriptions, the tomb's occupant was dead, and a dead man would hardly be coming in as a visitor.
Atem looked at his own armlet as one visitor among the rest.
A curator's guided tour caught up behind him.
"The Pharaoh's death is estimated to have come in his mid-teens. It was by no means a long reign, but…"
Atem heard his own age at death in someone else's voice. The woman leading the tour was courteous, and there was no shadow of malice in her voice. And yet, for some reason, his death felt like something that had happened to someone else.
A boy of about primary-school age came to stand beside him, read the panel aloud haltingly, and said, cool. His mother answered, a noble sacrifice.
Atem found himself smiling. It was the smile he used to wear three thousand years ago.
Noble. Atem had been leaning on that word.
Meaning is a pillar. It had held up that long, dark stretch of time.
He had been King. He had protected his people. He had saved the world. So it had been a sacrifice, not merely a death. A sealing, not merely a confinement.
He knew what would be left if the pillar were pulled out. So he did not pull it out, and he chose to leave it unknown.
Just before the exit, a visitors' book had been set out. On the open page was a child's handwriting.
"thank you nameless pharaoh for protecting the world"
Atem looked at the writing for a while. He was being thanked for having died three thousand years ago.
The recipient was not inside an inscription, but standing in front of the book on his own two feet. The child's thanks were warm.
But something in them resembled a eulogy.
Thanks and mourning share the same addressee. Both are written to someone for whom something is over.
In the museum shop, replicas of the armlet were lined up. Zinc alloy, 2,800 yen. Atem picked one up, looked at it for a while, and put it back on the shelf.
"You want it?"
It was Seto who asked; at some point he had come to stand beside him.
"No. …It's shoddy work. The weight's completely wrong, too."
That was the verdict of the man who had once worn the real thing on his arm. Seto gave a short laugh.
A little way off, Seto stood at the desk for comment forms. He glanced at the pencil provided, then drew a fountain pen from his breast pocket. It took him several minutes to finish writing. Longer than he had stopped in front of any exhibit.
"What did you write?"
"A demand for a correction of fact."
He said nothing more. Atem didn't ask, either. The form was folded with precision and dropped into the comment box.
In that man's gaze alone, there was no altar. It had always been so. When the gods took physical form in the Duel arena, that man had summoned a god with his own hand — and then had not worshipped it. Had not prayed, either.
In that man's deck, a god was a trump card, and nothing more. He dismissed past lives and destiny as drivel and collided head-on only with the phenomenon in front of him.
Once, that would have been called irreverence, and arrogance. But Atem alone had called it by another name.
Room to breathe.
While you are being worshipped, your breathing is being watched. Reverence resembles surveillance. Only in front of Seto was Atem actual size.
At the exit, Seto said just one thing.
"We're leaving. It's not worth staying for."
The exhibit, or the wording of the inscriptions? Atem didn't ask.
That night, at the manor, it was Seto who spoke first.
"That panel falsifies the accounts."
"It's the truth, isn't it? The world was saved."
Atem set down his cup.
"The world being saved and you being used up are entirely compatible."
Seto's voice was flat. It was not the shouting rage of the old days. It was, somehow, a cool anger — the anger of a man auditing the facts.
"Salvation is an outcome. It does not justify the procedure. And the procedure was to use a sixteen-year-old child's soul as a component in a sealing device."
"There was no other way."
"I suppose there wasn't."
Seto conceded it easily. Then he went on.
"Having no other way and being right are not the same thing. I'll grant unavoidable. I will not grant noble. The moment you rephrase it as noble, every adult around you is exempted from any reckoning. Hmph. And the next era gets to use the same trick."
"I was King. Protecting my people was my role, and…"
Atem's voice hardened slightly.
"Role, is it."
Seto cut him off.
"I know that vocabulary. Role. Duty. The heir's responsibility. Fine words. Hand them to a child, and the child will seal off his own escape routes. Saves the people doing the educating a good deal of trouble."
Atem looked at Seto. Seto did not go on. So that was his source, Atem thought.
Seto did not seem to have noticed, but his fingers around the cup had gone white.
"…Are you pitying me?"
"If it were pity, I'd have chosen a gentler way of putting it."
"I suppose you'd hardly be one for pity."
Seto snorted a laugh, then let it vanish.
"I ran. By beating that man. For you, an escape route was never designed in the first place. That's the only difference. Not the difference between a king and a human. The difference between having an exit and not."
Atem stood and walked to the window. Domino City was burning with a brightness that had never known torches. A city that did not sleep.
Atem was remembering the night he had not been able to sleep.
A place he had not looked at in three thousand years had just been inspected, without anyone so much as taking off his shoes. He had every right to be angry, but he wasn't. Instead, a strangely old feeling rose from the bottom of his chest.
It was the feeling that he might be allowed to set something down.
Still looking out the window, Atem opened his mouth.
He had not opened it having decided what to say. The moment he thought he might set it down, the words began to spill out on their own.
"The last night, I couldn't sleep, so I pretended to. The attendants would have cried otherwise. With my eyes closed, I listened to the sounds of daybreak. When I tired of that, I looked at the ceiling. There were stars painted on it. I'd been counting them since I was a child, so I knew how many there were. That night, I counted them again. The count came out right. …I thought, so even on a night when the world might end, the count of the stars still comes out right."
Seto said nothing. Not interrupting was this man's way of listening.
"At dawn, before I set out, an attendant put my armlet on me. Same as any other morning, but his hands were shaking. Not me, the one having it put on — he shook first. Someone had already taken the part of the one who trembles."
The words broke off there. The next one carried three thousand years of weight.
"…I was scared."
Having said it, Atem was startled by his own voice.
He had never told anyone. There had been no moment, anywhere, when he could have.
Kings do not fear. Gods do not regret. Speak of fear before those who grieve, and you deepen their wound; speak of it before those who praise you, and it is blasphemy. Only before this man were those things simply a report.
"My regrets aren't anything big. I entrusted the country's future to others. My people were protected. All that's left are the trivial things."
Atem smiled a little. The smile did not take shape.
"How tall I'd grow. I died without ever finding out. My father was tall. The priests were tall, too. Me — I stayed at the height I stopped at, at sixteen, and went on to play King again in the afterlife. …That's the regret of the noble King everyone talks about. You can't carve it on a tomb, and you can't throw it out, either. Awkward, isn't it?"
There was a silence.
"No one has ever been angry on my behalf. Only those who grieved, and those who praised. For three thousand years. The whole time."
Atem said.
"I see. Then that's my department."
Seto's reply was brief.
As expected, there were no words of comfort. Atem had no need of them, either. Only, in the air of the room, something shifted position. An anger that for three thousand years had appeared on no financial statement had just now been booked as one man's debt. Taken on, with interest.
"And what will your anger change?"
"Nothing. But that is not the same thing as no one needing to do it."
Seto said.
That night, Atem slept well.
Three weeks later, an envelope arrived from the museum.
It was addressed to Seto.
"Thank you for your valuable feedback. The content you have shared will be used as a reference in our future exhibition activities."
It was a form letter. Not a single line touched on any plan to correct anything. Seto read it once, clicked his tongue, and then filed it away.
"Told you. Nothing changes."
Atem laughed.
"Changing nothing is not the same thing as not needing to keep a record."
Even the reply ran exactly to form.
The exhibition closed, and the grave goods went back to Egypt. On the day they were shipped out, Atem did not go to see them off.
He had a routine dental check-up. Between three-thousand-year-old gold and a check-up every six months, he would take the check-up. Maintaining a living body takes more work than any grave good. That was not bad.
That evening, Seto called Atem to the doorway of his study. He was holding a pencil and a ruler.
"Stand. Put your back against that pillar. Your heels, too."
"…What?"
"Straighten up. There's no point measuring a slouch."
Atem did as he was told and stood with his back to the pillar. The ruler touched the top of his head, and the pencil drew a short line. Beside it, Seto wrote the date in small figures.
"What's this?"
"A growth record. I'll measure again next year."
Seto said.
"There's no telling whether this body will grow. It's a body that came back."
"In that case, next year there'll simply be another line at the same height. The value of the record doesn't change. Data only means something when it's continuous."
Atem stepped away from the pillar, turned, and looked at the line.
It was a pencil line, gone the moment anyone chose to erase it. Friction would fade it, and it would not last a hundred years.
Letters carved in stone do not wear away in three thousand years. They are the records of the dead, fixing for eternity a height that has finished growing. A pencil line is drawn on the premise that it will be passed next year.
The records of the living are premised on being erased, and on being proved wrong.
"Kaiba."
"What."
"Next year too?"
"And the year after. Every year. The date can be your birthday. The one on paper."
"Cake day."
"Exactly. Impossible to forget."
Atem laughed. This time, it took shape. The line on the pillar sat a little above eye level, and it was more accurate than any inscription in any temple. All it bore was a line and a date; not a single great deed was written there.
That was as it should be. Only to an addressee with no column for great deeds is a person life-size.
"Yeah. Next year."
The future tense was the grammar of the living.
