Thebes of the Hundred Gates

One

The sensory impact pressed in on him from all sides at once in the first dazzling moment of his arrival: a fierce bombardment of smells, sights, sounds, everything alien, everything much too intense, animated by a strange inner life. Luminous visions assailed him. He wandered for some indeterminate span of astounded time in shimmering dream-forests. Even the air had texture, contradictory and confusing, a softness and a roughness, a heaviness and a giddy lightness. Egypt coursed through him like an uncheckable river, sparking and fizzing, stunning him with its immensity, with its stupefying aliveness.

He was inhaling magic, and he was choking on it. Breathing was a struggle—he was so stunned that he had to remind himself how it was done—but the real problem was the disorientation. There was too much information and he was having trouble processing it. It was like sticking not just your fingertip but your whole head into the light-socket. He was a dozen different sizes and he was experiencing every moment of his life, including moments he hadn’t yet lived, in a single simultaneous flash.

He had prepared for this moment for months—for nearly all his life, you might almost say—and yet nothing could really prepare anyone for this, not really. He had made three training jumps, two hundred years, then four hundred, then six hundred, and he thought he knew what to expect, that sickening sense of breathlessness, of dizziness, of having crashed into the side of a mountain at full tilt; but everyone had warned him that even the impact of a six-C jump was nothing at all compared with the zap of a really big one, and everyone had been right. This one was thirty-five C’s, and it was a killer. Just hold on and try to catch your breath, that’s what the old hands had told him, Charlie Farhad who had made the Babylon jump and Nick Efthimiou who had seen the dancers leaping over bulls at the court of King Minos and Amiel Gordon who had attended a royal bar mitzvah at the temple of Solomon when the paint was still fresh. It’s a parachute jump without the parachute, Efthimiou had said. The trick is to roll with the punch and not try to offer any resistance. If you live through the first five minutes you’ll be okay. You built up a charge of temporal potential as you went, and the farther back in time you went, the stiffer the charge, in more ways than one.

Gradually the world stopped spinning wildly around him. Gradually the dizziness ebbed.

The actual extent of what he could see was quite limited. They did their best to drop you off someplace where your arrival wouldn’t be noticed. He was in an unpaved alleyway maybe six feet wide, flanked by high walls of dirty whitewashed mud-brick that blocked his view to either side. The last bright traces of the golden aura of the jump field were still visible as a series of concentric rings with him at its center, a glittering spiderweb of light, but they were dwindling fast. Two donkeys stood just in front of him, chewing on straw, studying him with no great curiosity. A dozen yards or so behind him was some sort of rubble-heap, filling the alley almost completely. His sandal-clad left foot was inches from a row of warm green turds that one of the donkeys must have laid down not very long before. To his right flowed a thin runnel of brownish water so foul that it seemed to him he could make out the movements of giant microorganisms in it, huge amoebas and paramecia, grim predatory rotifers swimming angrily against the tide. Of the city that lay beyond the nasty, scruffy little slot where he had materialized, nothing was visible except a single tall, skinny palm tree, rising like an arrow against the blank blue sky above the alley wall. He could have been anywhere in any of a hundred Asian or African or Latin American countries. But when he glanced a second time at the wall to his left he caught sight of a scrawled graffito, a scribbled line of faded words hastily applied; and the script was the vaguely Arabic-looking squiggles and dots and boxes of Eighteenth Dynasty hieratic and his well-trained mind instantly provided a translation: May the serpent Amakhu devourer of spirits swallow the soul of Ipuky the wine-merchant, may he fall into the Lake of Fire, may he be trapped in the Room of Monsters, may he die for a million years, may his ka perish eternally, may his tomb be full of scorpions, for he is a cheat and a teller of falsehoods. In that moment the totality of the world which he had just entered, the inescapable bizarre reality of it, came sweeping in on him in tidal surges of sensation, Thoth and Amon, Isis and Osiris, temples and tombs, obelisks and pyramids, hawkfaced gods, black earth, beetles that talked, snakes with legs, baboon-gods, vulture-gods, winking sphinxes, incense fumes drifting upward, the smell of sweet beer, sacks of barley and beans, half-mummified bodies lying in tubs of natron, birds with the heads of women, women with the heads of birds, processions of masked priests moving through forests of fat-bellied stone columns, water-wheels turning slowly at the river’s edge, oxen and jackals, cattle and dogs, alabaster vessels and breastplates of gold, plump Pharaoh on his throne sweating beneath the weight of his two-toned crown, and above all else the sun, the sun, the sun, the inescapable implacable sun, reaching down with insinuating fingers to caress everything that lived or did not live in this land of the living and the dead. The whole of it was coming through to him in one great shot. His head was expanding like a balloon. He was drowning in data.

He wanted to cry. He was so dazed, so weakened by the impact of his leap through time, so overwhelmed. There was so much he needed to defend himself against, and he had so few resources with which to do it. He was frightened. He was eight years old again, suddenly promoted to a higher grade in school because of his quick mind and his restless spirit, and abruptly confronted with the mysteries of subjects that for once were too difficult for him instead of too easy—long division, geography—and a classroom full of unfamiliar new classmates, older than he was, dumber, bigger, hostile.

His cheeks blazed with the shame of it. Failure wasn’t a permissible mode.

Maybe it was time to start moving out of this alleyway, he decided. The worst of the somatics seemed to be past, now, pulse more or less normal, vision unblurred—if you live through the first five minutes you’ll be okay—and he felt steady enough on his feet. Warily he made his way around the two donkeys. There was barely enough clearance between the beasts and the wall. One of the donkeys rubbed his shoulder with its bristly nose. He was bare to the waist, wearing a white linen kilt, sandals of red leather, a woven skullcap to protect his head. He didn’t for a moment think he looked convincingly Egyptian, but he didn’t have to; here in the great age of the New Empire the place was full of foreigners—Hittites, Cretans, Assyrians, Babylonians, maybe even a Chinaman or two or some sleek little Dravidian voyager from far-off India—tell them you’re a Hebrew, Amiel had advised, tell them you’re Moses’ great-grandfather and they’d better not fuck around with you or you’ll hit them with the twelve plagues a hundred years ahead of schedule. All he had to do was find some short-term way of fitting in, keep himself fed somehow until he had completed his mission, sign on for work of any sort where he could simulate a skill—a scribe, a butler, a maker of pots, a fashioner of bricks. Anything. He only had to cope for thirty days.

The alley took a sharp bend twenty feet beyond the donkeys. He paused there for a long careful look, fixing the details in his mind: the graffito, the rubble-heap, a bare place where the whitewash had worn through, the angle of the bend, the height and declination of the palm tree. He was going to have to find his way back here, of course, on the thirtieth day. They would be trawling through time for him, and that was like fishing with a bent pin: he had to give them all the help he could. For a moment his heart sank. Probably there were fifty thousand alleys just like this one in Thebes. But he was supposed to be an intelligent life-form, he reminded himself. He’d make note of the landmarks; he’d file away all the specifics. His life depended on it.

Now at last he was at the end of the alley.

He peered out into the street and had his first glimpse of Thebes of the Hundred Gates.

The city hit him in the face with a blast of sensation so heavy that he felt almost as shaken as he had in the first instant of the time-jump. Everything was noise, bustle, heat, dust. The smell of dung and rotting fruit was so ripe he had to fight to keep from gagging. There were people everywhere, huge throngs of them, moving with startling purposefulness, jostling past him, bumping him, pushing him aside as though he were invisible to them as he stood slackjawed in the midst of all this frenzy; this could be New York’s Fifth Avenue on a spring afternoon, except that many of them were naked or nearly so in the astonishing furnace-like heat, and huge herds of goats and sheep and oxen and asses and weird longhorned hump-backed cattle were moving serenely among them. Pigs snorted and snuffled at his feet. He had emerged into a sort of plaza, with tangled clusters of little mud-walled shops and taverns and, very likely, brothels, all around him. The river was on his right just a few dozen steps away, very low but flowing fast, a swift green monster cluttered with hundreds of ships with curving prows and towering masts, and right in front of him, no more than a hundred yards distant, was a vast walled structure which, from the double row of giant papyrus-bud stone columns and the hint of intricate antechambers beyond, he supposed was the building that in modern times was known as Luxor Temple. At least it was in the proper north-south alignment along the Nile. But what he saw now was very different from the temple he had explored just two weeks ago—Two weeks? Thirty-five hundred years!—on his orientation trip to contemporary Egypt. The Avenue of the Sphinxes was missing, and so were the obelisks and the colossi that stood before the great flaring wings of the north pylon. The pylon didn’t seem to be there either. Of course. The Luxor Temple sphinxes were Thirtieth Dynasty work, still a dozen centuries in the future. The obelisks and the colossi were the doing of Rameses II, whose reign lay five or six kingships from now, and so too was the north pylon itself. In their place was an unfamiliar covered colonnade that looked almost dainty by Egyptian architectural standards, and two small square shrines of pink granite, with a low, slender pylon of a clearly archaic style behind them, bedecked with bright fluttering pennants. He felt a small scholarly thrill at the sight of them: these were Twelfth Dynasty structures, perhaps, ancient even in this era, which Rameses’ inexorable builders would eventually sweep away to make room for their own more grandiose contributions. But what was more bewildering than the differences in floor plan was the contrast between this temple and the bare, brown, skeletal ruin that he had seen in latter-day Luxor. The white limestone blocks of the facades and columns were almost unbearably brilliant under the sun’s unblinking gaze. And they were covered everywhere by gaudy reliefs painted in mercilessly bright colors, red, yellow, blue, green. From every cornice and joist glittered inlays of precious metal: silver, gold, rare alloys. The temple pulsed with reflected sunlight. It was like a second sun itself, radiating shattering jolts of energy into the frantic plaza.

Too much, he thought, beginning to sway. Too much. He was overloading. His head throbbed. His stomach lurched. He was having trouble focusing his eyes. He felt chills even in the midst of all this heat. Because of it, most likely. He imagined that he was turning green with nausea.

“You are ill? Yes, I can see that you are ill, very ill.” A sudden deep voice, virile and harsh. A hand closing tight around his wrist. A man’s face thrust practically up against his, thin lips, hawk nose, shaven scalp. Dark brooding eyes bright with concern. “You look very bad. You will be an Osiris soon, I think.”

“I—I—”

“To die like a pig in the street—that is not good, not good at all, my friend.”

It was astonishing that anyone had spoken to him and even more astonishing—despite all his training—that he could understand. Of course they had filled his brain with Egypt, pumped him to the brim, language, art, history, customs, everything. And he had learned a good deal on his own before that. But still he was surprised to find that he had comprehended the other man’s words so easily. His tutors hadn’t guessed quite right on the pronunciation, but they had been close enough. The vowels were wrong, everything shifted into the back of the throat, “e” turning into “i,” “o” turning into “u,” but he was able quickly enough to adjust for that. His benefactor was holding him upright with that vise-like grip; otherwise he would fall. He tried to think of something to say, but no words would come. His fluency failed him when it was his moment to speak. He couldn’t frame a single sentence. You will be an Osiris soon. Was he dying, then? How strange, putting it that way. He must be starting to look like Osiris already, the dead god, green-faced, mummified.

The stranger was drawing him out of the sun, into the sparse shade of a five-branched palm at the edge of the plaza.

“I am very ill, yes—” he managed finally. “The heat—my head—”

“Yes. Yes. It is so sad. But look, my friend, the god is coming now.”

He thought at first that some apparition was descending, that Horus or Thoth had come to carry him off to the Land of the Dead. But no, no, that wasn’t what the stranger meant at all. A stupefying roar had gone up from the crowd, a bursting swell of incredible noise. The man pointed. He managed to follow the outstretched arm. His vision was blurring again, but he could make out a commotion near the front of the temple, brawny men wearing nothing but strips of blue and gold cloth advancing, wielding whips, people falling back, and then a chariot appearing from somewhere, everything gilded, blindingly bright, falcons on the yoke-pole, a great solar disk above them, winged goddesses on the sides, horned creatures behind; and out of the temple and into the chariot, then, there came a slow portly figure, ornately robed in the stifling heat—the blue crown on his head, the khepresh, and the two scepters in his hands, the crook and the flail, and the stiff little false beard strapped to his chin—

The king, it was—it must be—the Pharaoh, getting into the chariot—he has been at some ceremony in the temple, and now he will return to his palace across the river—

Drums and trumpets, and the sound of high-pitched things something like oboes. An immense roar. “Horus!” the crowd was crying now. Ten thousand voices at once, a single throat. “Horus! Neb-Maat-Re! Life! Health! Strength!”

Neb-Maat-Re. The Pharaoh Amenhotep III, that was what that meant. His coronation name. It was the king himself, yes. Standing there, smiling, acknowledging the crowd, before his very eyes.

“Lord of the Two Lands!” they were shouting. “Son of Re! Living image of Amon! Mighty one! Benefactor of Egypt! Life! Health! Strength!”

Too much, too much, too much. He was totally overwhelmed by it all. He was thirty-five centuries out of his proper time, a displacement that he had been confident he would be able to comprehend until the moment he found himself actually experiencing it. Now his entire body convulsed in a tremor born of fatigue and confusion and panic. He tottered and desperately grasped the palm tree’s rough scaly trunk. The last of his little strength was fleeing under the impact of all this staggering unthinkable reality. Thebes as a living city—Amenhotep III himself, wearing the blue crown—the masked priests, hawk-faced, ibis-faced, dog-faced—the dark mysterious figure of a woman coming out now, surely the queen, taking her place beside the Pharaoh—the chariot beginning to move—

“Life! Health! Strength!”

For the king, maybe. Not for him. How had he ever managed to pass the psychological tests for this mission? He was flunking now. He had been able to fake his way successfully among tougher people all his life, but the truth was coming out at last. His legs were turning to water. His eyes were rolling in his head. They had sent the wrong man for the job: he saw that clearly now. Indeed it was the only thing he could see clearly. He was too complicated, too—delicate. They should have sent some stolid unimaginative jock, some prosaic astronaut type, invulnerable to emotion, to the hot dark unreasoning side of life, poetry-free, magic-free, someone who would not become overwhelmed like this by the sight of a fat middle-aged man in a silly costume getting into a Hollywood chariot.

Was it that? Or simply the heat, and the lingering shock of the thirty-five-C jump itself?

“Ah, my friend, my friend,” the dark-eyed stranger was saying. “I fear you are becoming an Osiris this very minute. It is so sad for you. I will do what I can to help you. I will use my skills. But you must pray, my dear friend. Ask the king to spare your life. Ask the Lady Isis. Ask the mercy of Thoth the Healer, my friend, or you will die as surely as—”

It was the last thing he heard as he pitched forward and crumpled to the ground at the palm tree’s base.