Hot Times in Magma City, 1990-95

  THREE

  Senmut-Ptah was waiting for her outside, by the great sphinx that bore the inscription of Tuthmosis III. He was wearing a kilt of scarlet cloth into which golden ibises had been woven, and a tall priestly crown with three long feathers set in it. His shoulders and chest were bare. He was a long-limbed, bony man, very broad through the shoulders, and his features were sharp and powerful, giving him a falcon-face, a Horus-hawk face. Just now he looked angry and impatient.

  “You know you’ve made me miss the rising of the Bull’s Thigh,” he said at once, when she appeared. “The North Star will be past the meridian by the time I—”

  “Shh,” she said. “The North Star won’t go anywhere unusual tonight, and the Bull’s Thigh will look just the same tomorrow. Walk with me. We have to talk.”

  “What about?”

  “Walk,” she said. “We can’t talk here. Let’s go down toward the Sacred Lake.”

  “I don’t understand why we can’t—”

  “Because we can’t,” she said in a fierce whisper. “Come on. Walk with me. The astronomer and the priestess of Isis, out for a little stroll by starlight.”

  “I have important observations that absolutely have to be made this evening, and—”

  “Yes, I know,” she said.

  She loathed the all-enveloping obsessive concern with his astronomical duties that had taken possession of him in recent years. He was like a machine, now. Or like an insect of some sort, clicking along busily in his preprogrammed routines. Day and night preoccupied with his viewing apertures and his transits, his reflecting bowls, his azimuths and meridians and ascensions, his sundials and his water-clocks. Once, when the two of them were new here and first struggling with the terrible challenge of building lives for themselves in Egypt, he had been aflame with wonder and eager curiosity and a kind of burning dauntlessness, but that was all gone now. Nothing seemed to matter to him any longer except his observations of the stars. Somewhere along the way a vast leaden indifference had come to engulf all the rest of him. Why was it so important to him, that absurd compilation of astronomical data, probably inaccurate and in any case useless? And where had he misplaced the warmth and passion that had carried the two of them through all the difficulties they had had to face in this strange land in earlier days?

  He glared at her now as though he would send her to the Lake of Fire with a single flash of his eyes, if he could. By the chilly light of the stars his eyes seemed cruel and cold to her, and his face, sculpted to harshness by the years, had some of the nightmare look of the gods whose images were engraved on every wall of every temple. She had once thought he was handsome, even romantic, but time had made his face and body gaunt just as it had turned his soul to stone. He was as ugly as Thoth now, she thought. And as horrid as Set.

  But he was the closest thing to an ally that she had in this eternally strange land, unless she counted the prince; and the prince was dangerously unstable, and an Egyptian besides. However much the man who stood before her had changed since he and she had first come to Thebes, he was nevertheless someone of her own kind. She needed him. She couldn’t let herself ever forget that.

  She slipped her arm into his and tugged him along, through the colonnade that surrounded the Precinct of Mut, down the new avenue that Pharaoh had built, lined by a double row of cobras, and across the field toward the Sacred Lake. When they had gone far enough from the House of Life so that there was no chance the breeze might carry her voice upward to the sick man in the pavilion she said, speaking suddenly in English, “Someone from downtime showed up in Thebes today, Roger. From Home Era.”

  The shift to English was like the throwing of a switch. It was years since she had spoken it, and the effect was immediate and emphatic for her. She felt her former identity, so long suppressed, come leaping forth now from its entombment. Her heart pounded; her breasts rose and fell quickly.

  The man who called himself Senmut-Ptah seemed shaken as though by an earthquake. He made a choking sound and pulled himself free of her. Then his icy self-control reasserted itself.

  “You can’t be serious. And why are you speaking English?”

  “Because Egyptian doesn’t have the words I need in order to tell you what I have to tell you. And because I wouldn’t want anyone who might overhear us to understand.”

  “I hate speaking it.”

  “I know you do. Speak it anyway.”

  “All right. English, then.”

  “And I am serious.”

  “Someone else from downtime is here? Really?”

  “Yes. Really.”

  The corner of his mouth made a little quirking motion. He was trying to comprehend her news and obviously having a difficult time of it. She had finally broken through that indifference of his. But it had taken something like this to do it.

  “His name’s Edward Davis. He’s very young, very innocent in a charming way. He was staggering around outside Luxor Temple this afternoon right about the time the king was leaving, and he passed out with heatstroke and a bad case of temporal shock practically at Hapu-seneb’s feet. Hapu-seneb brought him to me. I’ve got him in the House of Life this very minute. Eyaseyab’s trying to get a little food into him.”

  The astronomer stared. His nostrils flickered tensely. She could see him fighting to maintain his poise.

  Sullenly he said, “This is all a fantasy. You’re making it up.”

  “I wish. He’s real.”

  “Is he? Is he?”

  “I could take you to him right now. You can say hello to him in English and hear what he says.”

  “No. No, I don’t want to do that.”

  “What are you afraid of?”

  “I’m not afraid of anything. But if you’ve got someone from Home Era up there in your temple, the last thing I would want to do is go to him and give him a big happy handshake. The absolutely last thing.”

  “Will you believe me without seeing him, then?”

  “If I have to.”

  “You have to, yes. Why would I want to invent something like this?”

  His lips worked, but for a moment no sound came out.

  “Yes, why would you?” he said, finally. And then, after another pause: “When is he from?”

  “I don’t know, but it’s got to be a year pretty close to ours. He told me right flat out that he’s from America—what should he care, he must figure the word’s just a meaningless noise to me?—and that he came in today or yesterday on a ship from Canada. He started to say he sailed in from Crete, but maybe it occurred to him that I could check up on that. Or maybe he just enjoys telling whoppers. Did you know an Edward Davis when you were in the Service?”

  “I don’t remember any.”

  “Neither do I.”

  “He must be later than we are.”

  “I suppose. But not much. I’m sure of that.”

  The astronomer shrugged. “He could come from five hundred years after our time, for all we can tell. Isn’t that so?”

  “He could. But I don’t think he does.”

  “Intuition?”

  “He just doesn’t seem to. Edward Davis. Is that your idea of a Twenty-Seventh Century name?”

  “How would I know what a Twenty-Seventh Century name would sound like?” he asked, his voice rising angrily. By the glimmering light of the torches set in the sconces ringing the Sacred Lake she saw agitation returning to his face. Ordinarily he was as expressionless as a granite statue. She had broken through, all right.

  He began to pace rapidly along the perimeter of the lake. She was hard pressed to keep up with him.

  Then he turned and looked back at her.

  Hoarsely he said, “What do you think he wants here, Elaine?”

  “What do you think he wants? What else would he be doing here but to study Eighteenth Dynasty Egypt? He speaks the language so well that he must be trained in Egyptology. So he’s come on the usual kind of preliminary exploration mission, the sort of thing we were going to do in Rome.
Did you really believe that nobody was ever going to come here? Did you, Roger?”

  “I wanted to believe that.”

  She laughed. “It had to happen sooner or later.”

  “They’ve got five thousand years of Egyptian history to play with. They could have gone to Memphis to watch the pyramids being built. Or to Alexandria to see Antony screwing Cleopatra. Or to the court of Rameses II.”

  “They’ve probably been to all those places,” the priestess said. “But they’d want to come here too. Thebes is a fabulous city. And it’s absolutely at its peak right now. It’s an obvious destination.”

  The man who called himself Senmut-Ptah nodded glumly. He was silent for a time. He walked even faster. He held his shoulders hunched in an odd way and now and then one of them rose abruptly as though he was being swept by a tic.

  At length he said, in a new and oddly flat, unresonant tone, a dead man’s voice, “Well, so someone came at long last. And fell right into your lap on his very first day.”

  “Was dumped.”

  “Whatever. There he is, up there in your temple, not more than five hundred feet away from us. He could have landed anywhere in Thebes and used up his whole time here without ever laying eyes on either of us or having the slightest notion that we’re here, and instead somehow he finds his way to you in a single day. How neat that is.”

  “He doesn’t know anything about me, Roger.”

  “Are you sure of that?”

  “Positive.”

  “You didn’t tell him you aren’t Egyptian, did you?”

  “I didn’t tell him anything.”

  “Do you think he could have guessed?”

  “He doesn’t have a clue. He’s still groggy from the jump and he thinks I’m a priestess of Isis.”

  “You are a priestess of Isis,” the astronomer said.

  “Of course I am. But that’s all he knows about me.”

  “Right. You didn’t say a thing. You wouldn’t have.” He came to a halt and stood rigidly with his back toward her, staring off toward the Precinct of Amon. There was another long silence. Then he said, his voice still flat and dead, “Okay. So we’ve got a young man from Home Era on our hands, and you know what he is, but he doesn’t know what you are. Well. Well, well, well. All right: what are we going to do about him, Elaine?”

  “Is there any question about that? I have to get rid of him.”

  “Get rid? How? What do you mean?”

  “Get him out of the temple, is what I mean. Move him along, send him on his way. See to it that he uses up his time in Thebes without finding out anything about us.”

  He gave her a long peculiar look. She had no idea what was going on in his mind. He seemed to be cracking apart. He frightened her, reacting to the coming of the visitor as he was, in all these different contradictory ways.

  He moistened his lips and said, “So you don’t want to speak to him at all?”

  “Speak to him about what?”

  The look on his face grew even more strange. She couldn’t remember a time when he had ever seemed so disturbed, not even in the first chaotic days after their arrival. “Anything. The news from Home Era. What’s going on in the world. The Service, our friends. He may know some of them. We haven’t heard a thing in fifteen years. Aren’t you even curious?”

  “Of course I am. But the risks—”

  “Yes,” he said.

  “We’ve talked about this so many times. What we would do if somebody from down there showed up.”

  “Yes.”

  “And now that someone actually has—”

  “That changes everything, having someone from down there actually arrive here.”

  “It doesn’t change a thing,” she said coolly. “You only think it does. I’m amazed, Roger. You said only a couple of minutes ago that revealing yourself to him was the last thing you’d want to do. You aren’t seriously suggesting now that we do it, are you?”

  He contemplated that.

  “Are you?” she asked.

  “No,” he said. “Not seriously. And you don’t want to either.”

  “Of course I don’t. I just want to be left alone to live my life.”

  “Well, so do I.”

  “Then we can’t let him know anything, can we?”

  “No.”

  “But you’re tempted, all of a sudden. I can see that you are. I didn’t expect this of you, Roger.”

  He looked past her, into the night, as though she were not there at all. He seemed once again to be rebuilding some of his old glacial indifference. But she knew now that it was only a pose. He was more confused than she had ever imagined.

  “Maybe I am tempted, just a little,” he said grudgingly. “Is that so surprising, that the idea should cross my mind? But of course I don’t mean it.”

  “Of course not.”

  “Of course.”

  “Good. I’ll take care of this, then. I just wanted you to know what was happening. You can go back to your observatory, now. Maybe there’s still time to find the North Star tonight. Or whatever it is that you do.”

  She realized that somewhere during the conversation she had gone back to speaking Egyptian, and so had he. She wasn’t sure when that had been.

  FOUR

  In the morning the slave-girl Eyaseyab came into the pavilion where he was lying on the sloping bed and said, “You are awake? You are better? You are strong today?”

  He blinked at her. It must be well along in the morning. The sky was like a blue shield above him and the air was already warming toward the midday scorch. He realized that he was awake and that he felt reasonably strong. During the night the worst effects of the shock of his arrival in Eighteenth Dynasty Egypt seemed to have left him. His throat was dry and his stomach felt hollow, but he was probably strong enough to stand.

  He swung his legs over the side of the bed and cautiously got up. The flimsy cloth that was covering him fell away, leaving him naked. That was a little strange; but Eyaseyab was just about naked too, as naked as any of the girls in the tomb paintings in the Valley of the Kings, just a little beaded belt around her hips and a tiny loincloth covering the pubic area. Little anklets of blue beads jingled as she moved. She was sixteen or seventeen, he supposed, though it was hard to tell, and she seemed cheerful and healthy and reasonably clean. Her eyes were dark and glossy and so was her hair, and her skin was a pleasing olive color with a hint of red in it and a golden underhue.

  She had brought a basin of water and a flask of perfumed oil. Carefully she washed him, in a way that was the nearest thing to being intimate, but wasn’t. He suspected that it could be, if he asked. He had never been washed by a woman like this, at least not since he was a child, and it was enticing and unnerving both at once. When she was done washing him she anointed him with the warm, fragrant oil, rubbing it into his chest and back and thighs. That too was new to him, and very strange. She is a slave, he told himself. She’s accustomed to doing this. Now and again she giggled. Once her eyes came up to meet his, and he saw provocation in them; but it seemed unthinkable for him to reach for her now, in this open place, in this temple. To draw her to him, to use her. She is a slave, he told himself. She expects to be used. Which makes it all the more impossible.

  She handed him his white kilt and watched without embarrassment as he clambered into it.

  “I have brought food,” she said. “You will eat and then we will go.”

  “Go where?”

  “To the place where you will live.”

  “On the temple grounds?”

  “In town,” she said. “You will not stay here. The priestess Nefret has said I am to take you to a lodging in the town.”

  That was upsetting. He had been hoping to stay here, to be taken into the service of the temple in some fashion. He wanted to speak with that serene, mysterious, aloof priestess again; in this profoundly unfamiliar place she had already begun to seem like an island of security and succor. He had felt a strange kind of rapport with her,
some curious sort of kinship, and he would gladly have remained in her domain a little longer. But finding some safe nest to hide in, he knew, would not be a useful way of achieving the goals of his mission here.

  Eyaseyab went out and returned shortly with a tray of food for him: a bowl of broth, a piece of grilled fish, some flat bread and a few sweet cakes and a little stone pot of dates. It seemed much too much food. Last night he had only been able to nibble at the meat and beer the girl had brought him. But to his surprise his appetite was enormous today; he emptied the broth bowl in gulps, gobbled the dates, went on to the fish and bread and cakes without hesitating. Vaguely he wondered what sort of microbes he might be ingesting. But of course he had been loaded to the brim with antigens before leaving downtime: one whole division of the Service did nothing but immunological research, and travelers setting out for the past went forth well protected, not just against the great obsolete plagues of yesteryear but against the subtlest of intestinal bugs. He probably had been at greater medical risk during his orientation visit to modern Cairo and Luxor than he was here.

  “You want more to eat?” she asked him.

  “I don’t think I should.”

  “You should eat, if you’re hungry. Here at the temple there’s plenty of food.”

  He understood what she was telling him. All well and good; but he couldn’t pack away a month’s worth of eating at a single sitting.

  “Come, then,” she said. “I will take you to your lodging-place.”

  They left the temple precinct by a side gate. A dusty unpaved path took them quickly to the river promenade, just a short walk away. The temples were much closer to the Nile than they would be thirty-five centuries later. Millennia of sedimentation had changed the river’s course to a startling extent. In this era the Nile flowed where, in modern-day Luxor, there was a broad stretch of land covering several blocks, running from the riverfront promenade to the taxi plaza that served the Karnak ruins, the ticket-booth area, the approach to the avenue of sphinxes at the temple’s first pylon.

  She walked swiftly, keeping half a dozen paces in front of him, never looking back. He watched with amusement the rhythmic movements of her buttocks. She was heading south into the bewildering maze that was the city proper.