Thebes of the Hundred Gates

Ten

At least this time they had given him a room that was above ground-level, instead of returning him to the cheerless subterranean hole they had stashed him in before. He actually had a window of sorts—a rectangular slot, about fifteen feet high up in the wall, which admitted a long shaft of dusty light for five or six hours every day. He could hear the occasional twitterings of birds outside and now and then the distant chanting of priests. And, since the Egyptians evidently hated to leave so much as a square inch of any stone surface uncovered by incredible artistic masterpieces, there were superbly done bas-reliefs of gods on the walls of his cell to give him something to look at: good old ibis-headed Thoth aloofly accepting an offering of fruit and loaves of bread from some worshipful king, and the crocodile-faced god Sobek on the opposite wall holding a pleasant conversation with winged Isis while Osiris in his mummy-wrappings looked on benignly. Three times a day someone opened a little window in the door and passed a tray of food through for him. It wasn’t bad food. They gave him a mug of beer or wine at least once every day. There could be worse places to be imprisoned.

This was the fourteenth day of the thirty. He was still keeping meticulous count.

Through the niche in the wall came the sound of singing voices, high-pitched, eerily meeting in harmonies that made his ears ache:

He had no idea where he was, because they had brought him here in the middle of the night, but he assumed that he must be in one of the innumerable outbuildings of the Karnak Temple complex. What Sandburg and Lehman intended, he assumed, was to keep him bottled up in here until the thirtieth day had passed and the jump field had come and gone in the alleyway near Luxor Temple. After that they would be safe, since he’d have no way of getting back to Home Era and letting the authorities know where and in what year the two missing renegades were hiding out. So they could afford to let him go free, then: stranded in time just like them, forever cut off from any chance of making his return journey, one more unsolved and probably unsolvable mystery of the Time Service.

Thinking about that made his temples pound and his chest ache. Trapped? Stranded here forever?

Over and over again he tried to understand where he had made his critical mistake. Maybe it had been to reveal the nature of his mission to the supposed priestess Nefret before he knew that she was Sandburg and Sandburg was dangerous. But she had already known the nature of his mission, because he evidently had been muttering in English during that time of delirium. So she was always a step ahead of him, or maybe two or three.

If he had been able to recognize Nefret as being Elaine Sandburg, either the first time when she was taking care of him, or a week later when he had walked back into her grasp, so that he could have been on his guard against—

No, that wouldn’t have made any difference either. He hadn’t had any reason to expect treachery from her. He had come here to rescue her, after all; why would she greet him with anything other than gratitude?

That was his mistake, he saw. Failing to anticipate that Sandburg and Lehman were deserters who didn’t want to be rescued. Why hadn’t anyone warned him of that? They had simply sent him off to Thebes and let him blithely walk right into the clutches of two people who had every reason to prevent him from returning to Home Era with news of their whereabouts and their whenabouts.

He heard a sound outside the door. Someone scrabbling around out there, fooling with the bolt.

He felt a foolish surge of hope.

“Eyaseyab? Is that you?”

Yesterday, when his evening food-tray had arrived, he had been waiting by the window in the door. “Tell the slave-girl Eyaseyab I’m here,” he had said through the tiny opening. “Tell her her friend Edward-Davis needs help.” A desperate grasping at straws, sure. But what else was there? He had to escape from this room. He didn’t want to spend the rest of his life in ancient Egypt. Egypt was remarkable, yes, Egypt was astounding, he’d never deny that; but as a member of the Service he had the whole range of human history open to him, and prehistory too, for that matter, and to have that snatched away from him by these two, to be sentenced to a lifetime in the land of the Pharaohs—

The bolt slid back.

“Eyaseyab?”

He imagined her bribing his guards with jewels stolen from Nefret’s bedchamber, with amphoras of royal wine, promises of wild nights of love, anything—anything, so long as she was able to let him out of here. And then she and that one-eyed brother of hers, maybe, would help him make his way across the river to the City of the Dead, where he could probably hide out safely in that maze of tiny streets until the thirtieth day. Then he could slip aboard the ferry again, entering Thebes proper, finding his alleyway with the graffito and the palm tree, waiting for the shimmering rainbow of the jump field to appear. And he’d get himself clear of this place. To hell with Sandburg and Lehman: let them stay if that was what they wanted to do. He’d report what had happened—he was under no obligation to cover for them; if anything quite the contrary—and then it was up to the Service. They could send someone else to bring them back. The defection would be expunged; the unauthorized intrusion into the domain of the past would be undone.

If only. If.

Now the door was opening. The dim smoky light of a little oil lamp came sputtering through from the hallway, just enough illumination to allow him to see that the veiled figure of a woman was entering his room.

Not Eyaseyab, no. Too tall, too slender.

It was Sandburg. “You?” he said, astonished. “What the hell are you doing—”

“Shh. And don’t get any funny ideas. The guards are right outside and they’ll be in here in two seconds if they hear anything they don’t like.”

She set her lamp down on the floor and came toward him. Close enough to grab, he thought. She didn’t seem to be carrying a weapon. He could twist one of her arms up behind her back and put his hand on her throat and tell her that unless she issued an order to have him released and gave him a safe-conduct out of this building he would strangle her.

“Don’t,” she said. “Whatever you’re thinking, don’t even toy with the idea. You wouldn’t stand a chance of finding your way out of here no matter what you did. And you’d be throwing away the only chance you have to salvage things for yourself.”

“Where do I have any chance of salvaging anything?”

“It’s all up to you,” she said. “I’ve come here to try to help you work things out.”

She came closer to him and pulled aside her veil. In the flickering glow of the lamplight her violet-flecked eyes had an amethyst sheen. Her face looked younger than it did by day. She seemed unexpectedly beautiful. That sudden revelation of beauty jarred him, and he was startled by his own reaction.

He said, “There’s only one way you could help me. I want you to let me out of here.”

“I know you do. I can’t do that.”

“Why not?”

“Don’t try to sound naive. If we release you, you’ll go back to Home Era and tell them exactly where and when we are. And the next time they’ll send out a whole crew to get us and bring us back.”

He thought for a moment.

“I could tell them I never located any trace of you,” he said.

“You would do that?”

“If that was the price of my being allowed to go home, yes. Why not? You think I want to be stuck here forever?”

“How could we trust you?” she asked. “I know: you’d give us your word of honor, right? You’ll swear a solemn oath at the high altar of Amon, maybe? Oh, Davis, Davis, how silly do you think we are? You’ll simply go back where you came from and let us live out our lives in peace? Sure you will. Five minutes after you’re back there you’ll be spilling the whole thing out to them.”

“No.”

“You will. Or they’ll pry it out of you. Come on, boy: don’t try to weasel around like this. You aren’t fooling me for a second and you’re simply making yourself look sneaky. Listen, Davis, there’s no sense either of us pretending anything. You’re screwed and that’s all there is to it. There’s no way we’re going to let you go home, regardless of anything you might promise us.”

Her voice was low, steady, unyielding. He felt her words sinking in. He could hear the hundred gates of Thebes closing on him with a great metallic clangor.

“Then why have you come here?” he asked, staring into those troublesome amethyst eyes.

She waited a beat or two.

“I had to. To let you know how much I hate having to do this to you. How sorry I am that it’s necessary.”

“I bet you are.”

“No. I want you to believe me. You’re a completely innocent victim, and what we’re doing is incredibly shitty. I want to make it clear to you that that’s how I feel. Roger feels that way too, for that matter.”

“Well,” he said. “I’m really tremendously sorry that you’re forced to suffer such terrible pangs of guilt on my behalf.”

“You don’t understand a thing, do you?”

“Probably not.”

“Do you have family back there down the line?”

“A mother. In Indiana.”

“No wife? Children?”

“No. I was engaged, but it fell apart. You feel any better now?”

“And how old are you?”

“27.”

“I figured you to be a little younger than that.”

“I’m very tricky that way,” Davis said.

“So you joined the Service to see the marvels of the past. This your first mission?”

“Yes. And apparently my last, right?”

“It looks that way, doesn’t it?”

“It doesn’t have to be,” he said. “You still could let me go and take your chances that I’ll cover up for you, or that the Service will have lost interest in you. Or you could opt to go back with me. Why the hell do you want to stay in Egypt so much, anyway?”

“We want to, that’s all. We’re accustomed to it. We’ve been here fifteen years. This is our life now.”

“The hell it is.”

“No. You’re wrong. We’ve come up from nowhere and we’re part of the inside establishment now. Roger’s considered practically a miracle man, the way he’s revolutionized Egyptian astronomy. And I’ve got my temple responsibilities, which I take a lot more seriously than you could ever imagine. It’s a fantastically compelling religion.” Her voice changed, taking on an odd quavering intensity. “I have to tell you—there are moments when I can feel the wings of Isis beating—when I’m the Goddess—the Bride, the Mother, the Healer.” She hesitated a moment, as though she was taken aback by her own sudden rhapsodic tone. When she spoke again it was in a more normal voice. “Also I have high connections at the court, very powerful friends who make my life extremely rewarding in various material ways.”

“I know about those connections. I saw one of your very powerful friends leaving your temple just as I was arriving. He’s crazy, isn’t he, your prince? And you sound pretty crazy too, I have to tell you. Jesus! Two lunatics take me prisoner and I have to spend the rest of my life marooned in Eighteenth Dynasty Egypt for their convenience. A hell of a thing. Don’t you see what you’re doing to me? Don’t you see?”

“Of course we do,” she said. “I’ve already told you so.”

Tears were glistening on her cheeks, suddenly. Making deep tracks in the elaborate makeup. He had seen her weep like that once before.

“You’re a good actress, too.”

“No. No.”

She reached for him. He jerked his hand away angrily; but she held him tight, and then she was up against him, and, to his amazement, her lips were seeking his. His whole body stiffened. The alien perfume of her filled his nostrils, overwhelming him with mysterious scents. And then, as her fingertips drew a light trail down the skin of his back, he shivered and trembled, and all resistance went from him. They tumbled down together onto the pile of furs that served him as a bed.

“Osiris—” she crooned. “You are Osiris—”

She was muttering deep in her throat, Egyptian words, words he hadn’t been taught at Service headquarters but whose meaning he could guess. There was something frightening about her intensity, something so grotesque about this stream of erotic babble that he couldn’t bear to listen to it, and to shut it off he pressed his mouth over hers. Her tongue came at him like a spear. Her pelvis arched; her legs wrapped themselves around him. He closed his eyes and lost himself in her.

Afterward he sat with his back against the wall, looking at her, stunned.

She grinned at him.

“I’ve wanted to do that since the day you came here, do you know that? Ever since I first saw you stretched out on that bed in the House of Life.”

His heart was still thundering. He could scarcely breathe. The air in the room, hot and close and dense, sizzled with her strange aromas.

“And now you have,” he said, when he could speak again. “All right. Now you have.” A new idea was blossoming in his mind. “We were pretty good together, weren’t we?”

“Yes. I’ll say we were.”

“Well, it doesn’t have to stop there. We can go back together, you and I. Lehman can do whatever he damned pleases. But we could become a team. The Service would send us anywhere, and—”

“Stop it. Don’t talk nonsense.”

“We could. We could.”

“I’m almost old enough to be your mother.”

“It didn’t seem that way just now.”

“It would in broad daylight. But regardless. I choose to stay in Egypt. And therefore you have to stay too.”

Her words came at him like a volley of punches.

He had almost hoped, for a moment, that he had won her over. But what folly that was! Change her mind with a single roll in the furs? Expect her to walk away from her plush life at Pharaoh’s court for the sake of a little heavy breathing? What a child you are, he told himself.

He heard the hundred gates clanging shut again.

“Now you listen to me,” she said. She crouched opposite him, on the far side of the little lamp, under the bas-relief of Sobek and Isis. She was still naked and her body had an oiled gleam in the near darkness. She still looked beautiful to him, too. Although now, in the aftermath of passion, he was able to see more clearly the signs of aging on her. “You said a little while ago that you think Roger and I are crazy for wanting to stay here. You want to save us from ourselves. Well, you’re wrong about that. We’re staying here because it’s where we want to be. And you’ll feel the same way yourself, after you’ve been here for a little while longer.”

“I don’t—”

“Listen to me,” she said. “Here are your options. There’s an embassy leaving next month for Assyria. It’s an ugly crossing, passing through a pretty desolate stretch of wasteland that someday will be called the Sinai Peninsula. We can arrange to have you become a slave attached to the ambassador’s party, with the understanding that at some disagreeable place in the middle of the Sinai you’ll be left behind to fend for yourself. That’s your first choice. If you opt for it, it’s extremely unlikely that you’ll ever find your way back to Thebes. In which case you’re not going to be here to greet any possible rescuers that the Service may decide to send out to find you.”

“Let me hear some other options.”

“Option Two. You stay in Thebes. I use my influence to have you appointed a captain in the army—it’s safe, there’s no significant military activity going on these days—or a priest of Amon or anything else that might strike your fancy. We get you a nice villa in a good part of town. You can have Eyaseyab as your personal slave, if you like, and a dozen more pretty much like her. A certain priestess of Isis might pay visits to your villa also, possibly. That would be up to you. You’ll have a very pleasant and comfortable existence, with every luxury you can imagine. And when the Service sends a mission out to rescue you—and they will, I’m sure they will—we’ll help you deal with the problem of staying out of their clutches. You’ll want to stay out of their clutches, believe me, because by the time they come for you you’ll be an Egyptian just like us. And once you’ve had a chance to discover what life is like as a member of the privileged classes in the capital city of Eighteenth Dynasty Egypt, you won’t want to go back to Home Era any more than we do. Believe me.”

“Are there any further choices?”

“That’s it. Go with the ambassador’s party to Assyria and end up chewing sand, or stay here and live like a prince. Either way, of course, we keep you secluded in this room for another couple of weeks, until the time of the jump field’s return is safely past.” She stood up and began to don her filmy robe. Smiling, she said, “You don’t have to tell me which one you choose right now. Think it over. I wouldn’t want you to be too hasty about your decision. You can let me know when we come to let you out.”

She kissed him lightly on the lips and went quickly out of the room.

“No—wait—come back!”

He heard the bolt slamming home.