—Psalms 18:7
“Mother’s Love, it’s murderously hot today,” the Captain breathed as he wiped his forehead with a handkerchief.
He sat on a litter, which swayed rhythmically as the litter bearers beneath it jogged across the low, rolling hills of sand and dirt that separated the survey team camp from the cities along the great Nile River. There was a canopy stretched over the litter, so he was sitting in shade, but the heat of the air itself was stifling.
The litter bearers were all lean young men, their bodies perfectly muscled. They wore only a small strip of material around their waists, which was tied in front. The two ends of the material hung down over their genitals, providing only the slightest amount of covering. They did not mind. Nudity was not something the natives here found embarrassing. In such a warm climate, clothes were often a hindrance to work, and many in the worker class did without them entirely.
The litter bearers were sweating profusely, but they were used to their task and kept up their steady pace.
The Captain’s wife, the Archaeologist, sat in a litter to his left. She too was mopping her brow. He glanced at her profile—fine features with long blond hair tied up behind her head. He had always thought she was beautiful, but now, as he looked at her, he thought, perhaps, stately was a better word.
On the other side of the Captain, the Mechanic sat in his own litter. The Captain could tell that the man secretly reveled in being carried by others. He was fanning himself with a palm leaf.
Behind the litters ran ten workers, each carrying a small sack full of the medicinals they would be using to tend to the citizens of Memphis. Behind them were three water bearers who periodically brought ladles of water to the others.
The Archaeologist had many qualifications for being on this mission, aside from being the Captain’s wife. She had spent her professional career in digs all over Herrod, where she had studied dozens of ancient cultures. Her specialty was the evolution of government in society and its relationship to religion.
The Captain had always been proud of finding a wife so comparable to himself. They had been together for over twenty years. Their one child, a son, was with them on this mission.
This was to be their first visit to Memphis, capital city of the Egyptian empire. The Archaeologist had been studying the culture from afar to prepare them for this day. They had many local workers at their camp, which sat in the desert between the Nile and the Red Sea. By carefully questioning these workers over the past three months, she had developed a very good idea about how Egypt was organized. She was briefing her traveling companions a final time as they approached the city.
“Egypt is an interesting place,” she said. “The kingdom stretches over hundreds of miles along the banks of the river. Because of the great distances between the cities, there is a tight-knit bureaucracy in place to ensure things are run properly.
“The king is the intermediary between his people and their many gods. And there are many gods. Every town or village has its own, and these are lorded over by the higher, more powerful deities. It’s pretty typical, as societies progress, for the local gods to be subsumed within the personalities of the larger gods, until, ultimately, there are only a few left, each with dozens of aspects. Egypt is in the early stages of this.
“The people are quite superstitious, which is normal for this stage of development. Their science is rather crude. They still have not figured out the wheel, for example. Nature is unexplainable in many ways, so they create gods to explain it.
“Because the kingdom is so large, it will be important for the king to categorize us. We must strike just the right tone. We want to show that we are powerful so he does not threaten us, but we don’t want to appear too powerful, or we might soon be deified, and then we will have entirely disrupted their religion.”
The litter bearers slowed now. They had come up over a rise and were passing through the villages that lay outside the walls of Memphis. These villages were groupings of small houses, lined along the sides of the canals that ran out from the river. The houses were all of mud bricks, made from a mixture of riverbank mud and straw that was left to bake in the sun. The mortar to hold the bricks together was a combination of mud, straw, and sand, which was usually smeared over the entire surface of the walls to make them smooth and weather-resistant.
There were windows facing north, to let in the cool breezes that came from that direction. There were gardens behind walls, where the tops of trees were visible. Trees were considered highly valuable in this desert land.
Men, women, and children walked along the dirt streets, which were packed as hard as rock on the main throughways. The Captain could see women and men washing clothes and gathering water in the canals. They were a dark-skinned people, with dark hair, most naked from the waist up.
Children stopped and pointed as the three litters passed through. They chattered wildly to each other as they watched the fair-complexioned people being borne past. News of their ship’s arrival in Egypt had spread quickly through these villages and through the cities, and it was known, or at least rumored, that these golden-haired people were the ones who had come from the sky. This was impressive, but within the context of the Egyptian worldview, not outrageous or unbelievable.
Upon the survey team’s arrival in the desert, King Snefru, ruler of all Egypt, had sent an emissary with armed escort to their camp. The Captain had explained to the emissary that their mission was entirely peaceful and they wished only to observe local culture. In exchange, he had offered to share his team’s medical knowledge with the king and his people. As a token of friendship, the Captain had asked the Doctor to prepare a small medicinal kit for use by the king’s own physicians, and he had invited the physicians to come to camp and be trained in the use of the kit.
The king had sent back a reply indicating that the visitors were welcome to stay in his kingdom as long as their intentions remained peaceful and as long as they attempted no influence of a political nature. He thanked the Captain for his gift, but did not send his physicians for the training.
He’s waiting to be convinced of our competence, the Captain mused. And, like my wife says, he wants to categorize us. Are we a threat?
With the king’s approval, they had begun to treat the locals in a minor way, first gaining the trust of those who made the twenty-mile trek to the camp in hope of being healed. Many of those had stayed to work in the camp, finding the survey team both friendly and generous.
Today would be their first foray into the city to treat the population there. The Captain had now fully realized the value of their medical knowledge. Every human had ailments. By curing them the survey team immediately became treasured friends. The king, by messenger, had given his permission for this day’s outing, and the Captain was determined to make the best of it. It was his hope to be granted free access to all Egyptian cities for his entire team. This would allow them to quickly catalog Egyptian society, and then they would be free to move on to one of the other Earth cultures.
The Doctor herself should have been on this expedition, but two of the local women working at camp had gone into labor that morning, and with the high infant mortality rate in this land, she had preferred to stay and deliver the babies. The Captain and the Archaeologist had sufficient medical training to address the local ills, and the Captain had brought along the Mechanic as a helper.
“How do we strike the right tone?” he asked his wife.
“We do a good job, we cure people, and we show deference toward the king and his family. To other high officials, we adopt an attitude of friend. Thus, we make the king feel important, but establish ourselves a senior to any of his underlings.”
“Very good. Look there.”
The three of them looked up and saw the encircling wall of Memphis coming into view. It was a tall mud-brick structure, and even from this distance, they could see the great open doors leading into the city.
They were now joining other traffic heading for Me
mphis. There were men driving donkeys laden with produce, teams of oxen pulling sledges loaded with bags of seed or flax, or small cages full of geese. A few young men with military bearing, dressed in the short linen skirts of the upper classes, walked briskly toward Memphis, perhaps heading back to their army battalion at the end of a furlough.
The Captain found his eyes wandering to the shapes of the young women. Most wore thin, snug dresses that left their breasts bare. With their hardworking lives, they stayed trim and healthy, and the Captain found them beautiful.
Within half an hour, they had reached the city. The gates, which were twenty feet high and thirty feet wide, were flung open for the day, but would be closed at sunset. Ten guards were posted at the sides of the gateway. They were tall young men, with short linen skirts bordered in green, the color of their army division. They carried long spears and small oblong shields made of tough leather. Their dark hair was shoulder length and combed back from the forehead.
They saluted by bringing their fists to their chests as the Captain’s entourage passed through the gates. It was a sign that the king welcomed them.
They passed into the city, and the change in atmosphere was immediate. Here was a cultural center. There were buildings and private houses lining the street, many in tight rows of abutting structures. Wood was in use as well as mud-brick. In the more well-to-do houses, there was a wide gap between the roof and the top of the walls. Through this gap came breezes to keep the interior cool.
There was a smell of human waste, for there was no sewage system in Egypt. Instead, families were forced to collect their waste and carry it outside the city walls where it was dumped into an ever-increasing pile. Much waste was dumped into the river as well. Thus infection was rampant among the lower classes, for though the Egyptians were a clean people and fond of bathing, their water supply was polluted.
As they made their way down wide streets, the Captain caught a glimpse of the king’s palace atop a hill at the very center of the city. It too was mud-brick and wood, for the Egyptians only used stone for temples or tombs. The palace was an impressive complex of structures nonetheless. From the Captain’s vantage, he could see several graceful buildings of three stories set in an enormous garden of flowering trees.
“Look there, darling,” he said to his wife, and she followed his gaze.
“It’s beautiful.”
There were crowds forming around them, people pointing and gossiping. It was clear their reputation had preceded them. The people here were more sophisticated. Most wore wigs of false hair, elaborately coifed into tiny curls or long, straight tresses with decorative hair pins. The children wore their hair in a sidelock, a single long lock on the right side of their heads, with the rest of the head shaved. Many of the women had fine linen dresses, some with rich, dyed colors. There was jewelry on almost everyone who could afford it, much of it featuring designs in colored stone.
As the Captain’s entourage made its way to the market square, it pulled a crowd of city folk with it. They would have an enormous audience today.
At last, they reached the square, and their litter bearers deposited them on a stone dais in the corner. Here the workers who had followed the litters from camp carefully unloaded their burdens. The Captain instructed his three water-bearers to ladle out generous portions to the men.
The Archaeologist busied herself setting up the jars of medicinals on wooden crates along the front end of the dais, and she began instructing the Mechanic in how to prepare some of the more common poultices they would use. Inside the city walls, the heat was even more oppressive, and the Captain took a long drink of water as he surveyed the market square.
Mud-brick market stalls covered an area of over two acres, the proprietors within selling everything from produce to wool to cosmetics to livestock. The square had four ornate wooden gates leading into it. On all sides, large, well-kept houses bordered the square. This was a desirable neighborhood.
The morning market rush was over, but there were still a few hundred customers browsing the stalls and haggling over goods. These customers were now being overwhelmed by the hundreds of people who had followed the Captain through the streets. A long line of prospective patients was already forming in the midst of the crowd.
“Are you ready, dear?” he asked his wife as she set up the last of the medicinal pots.
“Yes, we’re set.”
The Captain turned and spoke to his workers, addressing them through a translator that enabled him to carry on natural conversations in the local tongue. The translator was a small, flat strip that wrapped around the user’s ear and down along the jawline to his chin. Inside was a computer with advanced language programming. If the translator was exposed to a language for a sufficient amount of time, it would begin to translate into Haight, the language he and the rest of the survey team spoke. It drew power from the kinetic energy of its user. “Organize the line, and show people up to us one at a time.”
The chief worker nodded, not in the least bit fazed by the fact that the Captain’s voice and mouth motions were out of synch. After all, he had been working at the camp of the sky visitors for over a month. Miracles were commonplace.
Under the direction of the Captain’s men, the crowds stood back, and the line of patients was left with a clear path to the dais. The first patient was ushered up the three stone steps to the top of the platform. It was a middle-aged man, his natural gray hair sticking out beneath his dark-black wig of tight curls. His face was lined, and he had lost several teeth. He gestured to his shoulder. On inspection, the Archaeologist found that there was a sharp splinter of wood lodged deep under the skin. There was an angry wound around the splinter. The Archaeologist tended to him herself, numbing the area with a poultice that combined some of the medical supplies from their ship with local herbs, then carefully cutting in and removing the splinter.
The Captain moved onto the next patient. This was a grandmother, and her complaint was indigestion. The Captain asked her to catalog her symptoms very carefully; then he looked through a set of medical crystals laid out on a table behind them. He slipped one into a crystal reader and scanned through the data bands. Using the search index on the crystal, he made a diagnosis and concocted the woman a small vial of medicine to be taken over the next week. She took it from him and bowed gratefully.
It continued this way for some hours. The Mechanic helped them with the mixtures and occasionally supplemented the Captain’s strength when they had to set bones. Many of the complaints were dental. The Doctor had explained to them that tooth decay was one of the banes of this society. The stones they used in their mills left hard particles in the flour, which eventually wore down the teeth of even the most healthy citizens.
They had no resources to replace teeth, so they had to settle for removing infected ones and giving their patients hard balls of painkiller and disinfectant that they could chew to ease the ache and promote healing.
It was tending to one of these toothache cases that the Captain found himself pressed up against a young woman with bare breasts as he peered into her jaw. Despite her troublesome tooth, her breath was sweet, as though she’d been chewing mint leaves, and her body was pleasantly curved. He was forced to stand close to her to reach the infected tooth, and one of her breasts was pressed up against his chest. He felt his body’s response to this touch, and he looked up for a moment, to find the Mechanic looking at him.
When, at last, they had removed the tooth and sent the girl on her way, sucking on her painkiller, the Mechanic whispered, “You’re such a loyal, old dog. I bet you didn’t even remember what a young breast felt like.” The Captain smiled without commenting.
Some time later, when the sun had already begun to go down in the west, there was a commotion near one gate of the square. Looking up from the tasks at hand, the Captain, Archaeologist, and Mechanic saw a large procession entering the marketplace. A way was being cleared through the onlookers near the north gate. A murmur was running through t
he crowds. The Captain caught some of it: “It is He? Truly?” “The Blessed One comes…” “…the king himself is here…”
The Captain covered his translator so he could speak in privacy and said to his wife, “The king. That’s what they’re saying. He’s coming.”
“Remember what I said. We’ll show him deference, but make it clear that we are powerful and unafraid.”
The Captain nodded and glanced around. He had a gun at his waist and so did his two companions. There were additional sidearms in one of the crates they had brought from camp. Against spears and arrows they would have a distinct advantage. But the important thing was not to need weapons. Surely the king was only coming to observe the miracles of healing.
They quickly finished the patients they were tending to, then watched as the royal procession made its way through the crowds. At the front were twenty soldiers, whose kilts were trimmed in gold and who wore matching gold necklaces. These wielded long switches, which they used to force people out of the way.
Behind them came three dignitaries of the court, men who wore short linen skirts, over which their burgeoning paunches hung slightly, and heavily jeweled necklaces. Each wore a light cloak over his upper body, into which were stitched designs indicating his rank. They were bracketed by servants who held up parasols and fanned them.
Behind these figures were the litter bearers. There were two litters, both of finely carved, heavy wood, painted in blues and greens. Linen hung down on all sides, and servants ran along beside them, carrying parasols and fans in case they were needed.
Each litter was carried by eight men, and these chanted as they walked to keep the time. The words were translated for the Captain as, “Joyous is our work; joyous is our service to the king.”
Between the litters was a man with two dogs and a tame monkey on leashes, apparently the pets of the king.
Behind the litters were twenty more soldiers, an honor guard. They wore skirts of brown linen, and no jewelry, save for a single bracelet on either arm, which was set with jade beads. The leader of this group wore a cheetah pelt like a cape over his back. The tail hung down between his legs, and the head was perched on his left shoulder. The front claws hung down his chest.