Thebes of the Hundred Gates

Six

Four days went by very much like the first one, in a dreamlike haze of hard work and overmastering strangeness.

He knew he needed to get out of this place, that he had to go back across the river and set about the search for the two missing members of the Service whose trajectories had gone astray and who—so the calculations indicated—were somewhere hereabouts. And, while he was at it, take in as much as he could of mighty Thebes. He had no business settling down like this in the necropolis. He had been sent here in part to rescue the vanished Roger Lehman and Elaine Sandburg, and in part as a scholar of sorts who had been trained to observe and report on one of the most glorious of all ancient cities; and although it might be useful for him to be learning the things that he was concerning the village of the embalmers, it was definitely time to move along. He owed that much to Sandburg, to Lehman, to the Service. Yet a curious trance-like lassitude held him. He sensed that the exhaustion of the day of his arrival had never really lifted from him. He had seemed to recover, he had gone past that frightening stage of dizziness and fainting, he could even cope with the hellish heat, he was able to put in a full working day at manual labor, some of it quite nasty; but in truth he realized that he had drawn back into this awful place as a kind of refuge and he was unable to muster the energy to get out and get on with his real work.

On the fourth night Eyaseyab unexpectedly returned. He had given up all hope of her.

When she appeared, trudging into the compound wearing little more than a shawl over her shoulders, the other men looked enviously at him, with a certain puzzlement and awe in their expressions. A slave-girl of the temple, a young and pretty one at that, coming to see him! Why, the stranger must not be as stupid as he seems. Or else he has some other merit that must not be readily apparent.

He wondered about it himself. And decided that he must seem elegant and exotic to her, courtly, even, a man with manners far beyond those of the class to which he obviously belonged. He was a luxury for her.

As she lay beside him that night she said, “You like it here? You are doing well?”

“Very well.”

“You work hard, you will rise in the House. Perhaps your children will be embalmers, even.”

He brought his hand up her side and cupped her breast.

“Children? What children?”

“Of course you will have children.”

What was she talking about? The children that she would bear for him?

“Even if I did,” he said, “how could they become embalmers? Isn’t the guild hereditary?”

“You could marry an embalmer’s daughter,” she told him. “They would have you. You are very handsome. You are very intelligent. An embalmer’s daughter would do well to be married to a man like you. You could choose the best of the daughters of the House of Purification. And then your wife’s father would bring your children into the guild. How fine that would be for you and all your descendants!”

“Yes,” he said dispiritedly.

The conversation was drifting into strange places. He imagined himself sitting at his dining-room table at the head of his clan, with his sons around him, each one wearing his little Anubis mask, gravely discussing the fine points of embalming with his father-in-law. How fine that would be, yes.

He was struck by the realization that Eyaseyab seemed to expect him to remain in the House of Purification for the rest of his life. A wonderful career opportunity, evidently. And of course she had automatically ruled herself out as a potential mate for him. She was a slave; he was a free man, and handsome and intelligent besides. Not for the likes of her. Perhaps slaves weren’t allowed to marry. He was a divertissement for her, a novelty item who would pass swiftly through her life—like a comet, yes, the image was a good one—and disappear.

To distract himself he stroked the plump pleasant spheroid of her breast. But it had lost all erotic charge for him. It was flesh, only flesh. He had a sudden horrifying vision of good-hearted Eyaseyab lying face-up on a wooden table in one of the booths of the House of Purification. But no, no, they wouldn’t send a slave’s body there. What did they do with them, throw them into the Nile?

Abruptly he said, “In the morning I want to go across the river. I have to see the priestess Nefret again.”

“Oh, no. That would be impossible.”

“You can get me into the temple.”

“The priestess sees no one from the outside.”

“Nevertheless,” he said. “Do it for me. Tell her it’s urgent, tell her that Edward-Davis has important business with her.” He hovered over her in the darkness. His thumb lightly caressed her nipple, which began to grow rigid again. In a low voice he said, “Tell her that Edward-Davis is in truth an ambassador from a foreign land, and needs to speak with her about highly significant matters.”

She began to laugh. She wriggled and slipped her knee between his thighs and began to slide it back and forth.

“I’m serious,” he said.

“Yes. Of course you are. Now stop talking and put it in me the way you do so well.”

“Eyaseyab—”

“Like this.”

“I want you—to talk—to the priestess—”

“Shh.”

“Eyaseyab.”

“Yes. Yes. Good. Oh, you are Amon! You are Min! Oh, yes! Yes, Edward-Davis! Oh—don’t stop—”

Was he supposed to include this in his report? he wondered.

The Service had no vow of chastity. But some things were none of their business.

“You are Amon! You are Min!”

She was slippery with sweat in the heat of the night. He said no more to her about going across the river to see the priestess, and eventually they slept.

But when he heard her up and moving about the room a few hours later, getting her things together, he reached out, hooked his finger into her anklet in the darkness, and whispered, “Wait for me. I’m coming with you.”

“You mustn’t!” She sounded frightened.

“I need to see the priestess.”

She seemed baffled by his insistent need to do what could not be done. But in the end she yielded: she was a slave, after all, accustomed to obeying. As they crossed the Nile on the early-morning ferry she still appeared tense and apprehensive, but he stroked her soft shoulders and she grew calm. The river at sunrise was glorious, a streak of polished turquoise running between the two lion-colored strips of land. Two little elongated puffs of cloud were drifting above the western hills and the early light turned them to pennants of flame. He saw white ibises clustering in the sycamore trees along the shore.

They entered the temple grounds through the side gate by which they had left, nearly a week before. A burly pockmarked guard scowled at him as he passed through, but he kept his head up and moved as though he belonged there. On the steps of the House of Life Eyaseyab paused and said, “You wait here. I will see what can be managed.”

“No, don’t leave me here. Take me inside with—”

Too late. She was gone. He prowled outside the building, uneasily looking around. But no one seemed to care that he was there. He studied a pair of elegant stone cobras, one wearing the red crown of Lower Egypt, the other wearing the white crown of the southern kingdom. He dug about in the sandy soil with the tip of his big toe and unearthed a superb scarab of blue faience that any museum would have been proud to own. He touched his hand wonderingly to the flawlessly executed and brightly painted bas-relief that was carved along the wall: Pharaoh before the gods, Isis to his left, Osiris to the right, Thoth and Horus in the background, the ibis-head and the hawk.

Egypt. Egypt. Egypt.

He had dreamed all his life of coming here. And here he was. Well ahead of normal Service schedule for such a major mission, and all because of Elaine Sandburg and Roger Lehman.

“I’m not so sure I want to find out what they’ve turned into,” Charlie Farhad had told him, explaining why he had refused to take on the assignment. “The past’s a weird place. It can make you pretty weird yourself, if you stay in it long enough.”

“They’ve only been there a year and a half.”

“Not necessarily,” Farhad had said. “Think about it.”

Sandburg and Lehman had been heading for the Rome of Tiberius, a ninety-day reconnaissance. But they had missed their return rendezvous and an analysis of the field spectrum indicated some serious anomalies—i.e., an overshoot. How much of an overshoot had taken almost a year to calculate. A lot of algorithmic massage produced the conclusion that instead of landing in 32 A.D. they had plopped down at least thirteen centuries earlier and a goodly distance to the east: Eighteenth Dynasty Egypt, the calculations indicated. “Poor Roger,” Charlie Farhad said. “He was so damned proud of his Latin, too. Won’t do him a fucking bit of good now, will it?” The algorithm was a murky one; the calculation was only probabilistic. Sandburg and Lehman might have landed right on top of the Nile or they could have turned up in some merciless corner of the Arabian desert. The high-probability line said Thebes. The most likely year was 1390 B.C., but the time range was plus or minus ten years. Not a hope in hell of finding them again, right? Nevertheless an attempt to rescue them had to be made, but none of the veteran time-jockeys wanted to touch it. That was their privilege. They hinted darkly about serious risk and the considerable unlikelihood of success. And in any case they had their own projects to worry about.

Davis heard what they had to say, but in the end he had volunteered anyway. Fools rush in, et cetera. He hadn’t known Sandburg and Lehman at all: the Service was a big operation, and he was pretty far down in junior staff. So he wasn’t doing it out of friendship. He took the job on partly because he was in love with the idea of experiencing Egypt in the prime of its greatness, partly because he was young enough still to see something romantic as well as useful to his career about being a hero, and partly because his own real-time life had taken some nasty turns lately—a collapsed romance, a bitter unexpected parting—and he was willing enough to go ricocheting off thirty-five centuries regardless of the risks. And so he had. And here he was.

Eyaseyab appeared at the head of the stairs and beckoned to him.

“The prince is with her. But he will be leaving soon.”

“The prince?”

“Pharaoh’s son, yes. The young Amenhotep.” A mischievous look came into the slave-girl’s eyes. “He is Nefret’s brother.”

Davis was bewildered by that for a moment. Then he recognized the idiom. This was an incestuous land: Eyaseyab meant that the priestess and the prince were lovers. A tingle of awe traveled quickly along his spine. She was talking about the fourth Amenhotep, the future Pharaoh Akhnaten, he who would in another few years attempt to overthrow the old gods of Egypt and install a new cult of solar worship that had only a single deity. Akhnaten? Could it be? Up there now, just a hundred feet away, at this moment caressing the priestess Nefret? Davis shook his head in wonder. This was like standing in the plaza and watching Pharaoh himself come out of the temple. He had expected to lurk around the periphery of history here, not to be thrust right into the heart of it. That he was seeing these people in the flesh was remarkable, but not entirely pleasing. It cheapened things, in a way, to be running into actual major historical figures; it made it all seem too much like a movie. But at least it was a well-done movie. The producers hadn’t spared any expense.

“Is that him?” Davis asked.

Of course it was. The tingle returned, redoubled. A figure had appeared on the portico of the House of Life. He gaped at it: a very peculiar figure indeed, a slender young man in a loose pleated linen robe with wide sleeves trimmed with blue bows. The upper half of his body seemed frail, but from the waist down he was fleshy, thick-thighed, soft-bellied. A long jutting jaw, a narrow head, full lips: an odd-looking mysterious face. He was instantly recognizable. Only a few weeks before Davis had peered wonderstruck at the four giant statues of him in the Amarna gallery at the far end of the ground floor at the Cairo Museum. Now here was the man himself.

Here and gone. He smiled at Davis in an eerie otherworldly way as if to say, Yes, you know who I am and I know who you are, and went quickly down the back steps of the temple’s podium. A litter must have been waiting for him there. Davis watched as he was borne away.

“Now,” he said to Eyaseyab, forcing himself to snap from his trance. “Did you tell the priestess I’m here?”

“Yes. She says no. She says she will not see you.”

“Go back inside. Ask her again.”

“She seemed angry that you are here. She seemed very annoyed. Very annoyed.”

“Tell her that it’s a matter of life and death.”

“It will do no good.”

“Tell her. Tell her that I’m here and it’s extremely important that I get to see her. Lives are at stake, the lives of good, innocent people. Remind her who I am.”

“She knows who you are.”

“Remind her. Edward-Davis, the man from America.”

“A-meri-ca.”

“America, yes.”

She trotted up the stairs again. Some moments passed, and then a few more. And then Eyaseyab returned, eyes wide with amazement, face ruddy and bright with surprise and chagrin.

“Nefret will see you!”

“I knew she would.”

“You must be very important!”

“Yes,” he said. “I am.”

The priestess was waiting for him in an antechamber. As before, she was wearing a filmy gown, casually revealing in what he was coming to regard as the usual Egyptian way; but she was more splendidly bedecked this time, lips painted a glowing yellow-red, cheeks touched with the same color, the rims of her eyes dark with kohl, the eyelids deep green. A muskiness of perfume clung to her. An intricate golden chain lay on her breast; pendant beads of carnelian and amethyst and lapis-lazuli dangled from it. The presence of her royal lover seemed still to be about her, like an aura. She seemed imperious, magnificent, splendid. For someone her age—she had to be past forty—she was remarkably beautiful, in a chilly, regal way.

And unusual-looking. There was something exotic about her that he hadn’t noticed the other time, when he was too too dazzled by the whole sweep of Egypt and in any event too sick to focus closely on anything. He realized now that she probably was not an Egyptian. Her skin was much too white, her eyes had an un-Egyptian touch of violet in them. Perhaps she was Hittite, or Syrian, or a native of one of the mysterious lands beyond the Mediterranean. Or Helen of Troy’s great-great-grandmother.

She seemed strangely tense: a coiled spring. Her eyes gleamed with expressions of—what? Uneasiness? Uncertainty? Powerful curiosity? Even a tinge of sexual attraction, maybe. But she appeared to be holding herself under tight control.

She said, “The stranger returns, the man from America. You look healthier now. Hard work must agree with you.”

“Yes,” he said. “I suppose it does.”

“Eyaseyab says you are an ambassador.”

“In a manner of speaking.”

“Ambassadors should present themselves at court, not at the temple of the goddess.”

“I suppose so. But I can’t do that.” His eyes met hers. “I don’t have any credentials that would get me access to the court. In all of Thebes you’re the only person of any importance that I have access to. I’ve come to you today to ask for your help. To beg you for it.”

“Help? What kind of help?”

He moistened his lips.

“Two people from my country are living somewhere in Thebes. I’ve come to Egypt to find them.”

“Two people from America, you say.”

“Yes.”

“Living in Thebes.”

“Yes.”

“Friends of yours?”

“Not exactly. But I need to find them.”

“You need to.”

“Yes.”

She nodded. Her eyes drifted away from his. She seemed to be staring past his left cheekbone.

“Who are these people? Why are they here?”

“Well—”

“And why is finding them so important to you?” she asked.

“It’s—a long story.”

“Tell me. I want to know everything.”

He had nothing to lose. But where to begin? He hesitated a moment. Then the words began to flow freely. He poured it all out. My country, he told her, is so far away that you could never comprehend it. There is a Service—a kind of priesthood, think of it as a priesthood—that sends emissaries to distant lands. A little while ago they sent two to a place called Rome, a man and a woman—Rome is very distant, almost as far as my own country—but they went astray in their journey, they traveled much too far, they wandered even as far as the land of the Nile and have not been heard from since—

He listened to himself speaking for what seemed to be an hour. It must all have been the wildest nonsense to her. He watched her watching him with what might have been irritation or incredulity or even shock on her face, but which was probably just bewilderment. At last he ran down and fell silent. Her face had tightened: it was like a mask now.

But to his amazement the mask suddenly cracked. He saw unexpected tears welling in her eyes, flowing, darkening her cheeks with tracks of liquefied kohl.

She was trembling. Holding her arms crossed over her breasts, pacing the stone floor in agitation.

What had he said, what had he done?

She turned and stared straight at him from the far side of the room. Even at that distance he could see restless movements in her cheeks, her lips, her throat. She was trying to say something but would not allow it to emerge.

At last she got it out: “What are the names of the two people you’re looking for.”

“They won’t mean anything to you.”

“Tell me.”

“They’re American names. They wouldn’t be using them here, if they were here.”

“Tell me their names,” she said.

He shrugged. “One is called Elaine Sandburg. The other is Roger Lehman.”

There was a long moment of silence. She moistened her lips, a quick tense serpent-flicker of her tongue. Her throat moved wordlessly once again. She paced furiously. Some powerful emotion seemed to be racking her: but what? What? Why would a couple of strange names have such an effect on her? He waited, wondering what was going on.

“I have to be crazy for telling you this,” she said finally, in a low, husky voice he could scarcely identify as hers. He was stunned to realize that she was speaking in English. “But I can’t go on lying to you any longer. You’ve already found one of the people you’re looking for. I’m Elaine Sandburg.”

“You?”

“Yes. Yes.”

It was the last thing he had expected to hear. Vortices whirled about him. He felt numb with shock, almost dazed.

“But that isn’t possible,” he said inanely. “She’s only thirty-two.” His face flamed. “And you’re at least—”

His voice trailed off in embarrassment.

She said, “I’ve been here almost fifteen years.”

She had to be telling the truth. There was no other possibility. She spoke English; she knew Elaine Sandburg’s name. Who else could she be if not the woman he had come here to find? But it was a struggle for him to believe it. She had had him completely fooled; she seemed completely a woman of her time. He had memorized photos of Elaine Sandburg from every angle; but he would never have recognized this woman as Sandburg, not in a thousand years, not in a million. Her face had changed: considerably sharpened by time, lengthened by her journey into middle age. The tight brown curls of the photographs must have been shaved off long ago, replaced by the traditional black Egyptian wig of an upper-class woman. Her eyebrows had been plucked. And then there was the strange jewelry, the transparent robes. Her lips and cheeks painted in this alien way. Everything about her masked her identity: she had transformed herself fully into an Egyptian. But she was the one. No doubt of it, no doubt at all. This priestess, this devotee of Isis, was Elaine Sandburg. Who had given him cuddly Eyaseyab to play with. And had told Eyaseyab to take him across the river to the City of the Dead and lose him over there.

Sudden searing anger went roaring through him.

“You were simply playing with me, that other time. Pretending you had no idea where I was from. Asking me where America was, whether it was farther from here than Syria.”

“Yes. I was playing with you, I suppose. Do you blame me?”

“You knew I was from Home Era. You could have told me who you were.”

“If I had wanted to, yes.”

He was mystified by that. “Why hide it? You saw right away that I was Service. Why’d you hold back from identifying yourself? And why ship me over to the other side of the river and stash me among the embalmers, for God’s sake?”

“I had my reasons.”

“But I came here to help you!”

“Did you?” she asked.