Imhotep (9 page)

“W
hat should we do, father?” Ahmes said.

From
the wadi they could hear the god screaming over and over again, the sounds
filled with pain and rage.

Paneb
was almost thirty years old.  He had stood close enough to touch King
Djoser.  He had seen the beautiful priestess Hetephernebti.  He had
watched the river flood and wash into the streets of Ineb-Hedj. 

He had
seen the priestess of Isis re-enact the goddess’ grief and tears when her
husband Osiris was torn apart by the evil god Set.  He had heard songs
about her great lamentations when she found that her child, the great god
Horus, had been poisoned by his evil uncle.

Her
grief must have sounded like the cries that came now from the plateau above
them.

He
stood with Ahmes and rested his hand on his son’s shoulder, feeling the small
muscles and bones and fragile life beneath his hand.

“The
netjrew have greater lives, Ahmes.  They see the dawning of a thousand
years, they know joys we cannot imagine.  When you rise so high above,
then, Ahmes, when you fall your pain must be so much greater.

“I
don’t know why this netjer is in such pain.  I don’t know how we can help
him.  But if he asks us, we must do whatever we can.”

“Do
you think someone has died?”

“We
all enter Khert-Neter, Ahmes.  It is passing to a better world.  No,
I think this netjer has lost something that is now beyond his reach.”

“Isn’t
there anything we can do?”

Paneb
nodded.  “Yes, Ahmes.  I have an idea.”

F
eeling a presence, he turned to see Paneb
standing by the path that led from the wadi to the edge of the plateau.

His
pain remained a sore knot in his heart, but his anger was exhausted, emptied
into desert sky.  He felt immensely lost and isolated but at the same time
immensely free and unburdened. Addy was gone, but she was gone from the other
time.  As long as he was here he could think of Addy as a dream that was
yet to happen.

Tim
got to his feet.  He knew his face was streaked with tears, but he didn’t
want to run his sand-covered hands against his skin.  He walked to Paneb,
who watched him with undisguised friendliness and compassion.

Tim
wanted to try to smile, but knew it would seem false. 

He
sighed deeply, collecting himself.

Brian
and Diane.  They were the reason he had come here, wherever and whenever
‘here’ was.  He would find them and help them return to their world. 
Their world.  Part of his mind wondered if he even wanted it to be his
world anymore.

“Paneb,”
he said, his voice hoarse.  “Brian and Diane?”

 Paneb
pointed away from the river, off to the southwest and said “Brian, Diane,
To-She.”

They
returned to the wadi.  His backpack was where he had left it, the map on
the ground beside it, four small piles of sand holding down its corners.

If he
was in ancient Egypt, Tim realized, then there would be no interpreters for his
English, his smatterings of Arabic would not be understood.  He knew some
of the ancient names of people and places, but nothing of the everyday words.

He
crossed his arms, studied the map for a minute and then looked off into the
distance. 

He had
no idea if this was a hostile place, who he could go to for help, how he would
travel.  Were Brian and Diane in danger?  Did they even understand
where they were?

He saw
that Paneb and Ahmes were waiting for his attention.  Ahmes was standing
near the shelter, almost bouncing from one foot to the other, a hopeful smile
on his face.  Tim saw that the sand by the boy was filled with drawings.

The
hair on Tim’s arms stood up as he looked at the drawings.  They were drawn
exactly in the style of the tomb murals.  Using symbols, they told a
story.

T
he sand drawings reminded Tim of the
symbols engraved on the Pioneer 10 probe launched into space in the 1970s.

The
spacecraft passed by Mars, swung beyond it to Jupiter and then slipped past the
giant planet into the dark void.  It was the first man-made object to
leave the solar system, so scientists mounted a plaque on the craft in case
aliens corralled the tiny ship as it hurtled past them.

The
plaque showed a line etching of a naked man and woman standing in front of a
silhouette of the spacecraft.  The man’s right hand was raised in
greeting.  A diagram of a hydrogen atom, its wavelength meant to establish
scale, and a series of converging lines were designed to help the aliens figure
out where our sun is located.  A schematic drawing of the solar system’s
planets, with a binary code showing their relative distances, pinpointed the
origin of the space probe.

The
idea had been to find a way to communicate basic information to an alien life
form.

Paneb
had taken the same approach.

Brian
and Diane, drawn in profile, were holding hands.  He had a baseball cap on
his head and a short spear in his free hand.  A small cat was at her
feet.  Tim puzzled over that for a minute until he remembered the
Sylvester the Cat shirt she had been wearing.

They
were facing a fat man who welcomed them with two hands turned palm up and
extended.  A crocodile-headed man stood behind the fat man.  At his
feet stood two small men, each armed with a short spear.  Beside them was
a long, thin four-legged animal with a curved snout like an aardvark.

A
vertical line separated the first group from the next drawings.

In the
next series of drawings, the baseball cap, the cat and a spear were drawn above
a camel standing in profile.  A boat with a curved prow and stern held a
crocodile and spear.  Three circles followed and then the baseball cap,
spear and cat were drawn beside a palm tree.  Two more circles separated
them from the boat at a palm tree.

A lake
was drawn beside the palm tree.  A man with a crocodile head stood beside
the tree.

As Tim
looked at the last drawing, the feeling of sandy grittiness on his hands and
face grew too annoying.  He turned and walked to his backpack where he dug
around until he found a pack of wet wipes.  He pulled one out and
carefully cleaned around his eyes and then his mouth.  Conserving the
small wipe, he folded it carefully and then cleaned between his fingers and in
small crevices of skin under the joints of his fingers.

Finished,
he looked at the neatly folded square, incrusted with sand, and wondered if he
could somehow clean it and remoisten it.  If he was interpreting the
drawing correctly, then Brian and Diane were three days away by camel. 
That put a lot of sand between them and him.

He
shook the tissue and tucked it in a corner pocket of the backpack.

When
he returned to the drawings, Ahmes and Paneb were standing in different spots.

“OK,”
Tim said.  “Let’s give those nouns a workout.” He smiled at Ahmes, who
smiled shyly and then looked away.

Returning
to the first drawings, Tim pointed at Brian and Diane and said their
names. 

Paneb
nodded. 

Pointing
at the fat man, Tim said “To-She.”

Paneb
shook his head and ran lightly to the last set of drawings.  He motioned
in a circle that included the lake, palm tree and the god Sobek. 
“To-She,” he said.  Then he returned to the fat man and said, “Djefi.”

“Got
it,” Tim said.  “To-She is the place, Djefi is the fat man.  Djefi
greets Brian and Diane and then they go off on a camel.  The little guys
must be soldiers.” Tim remembered that in tomb paintings, secondary characters,
no matter how large in life, were drawn at a smaller scale to signify their
relative insignificance.

“Wait
a minute, the dog thing is gone.  Where’s the dog thing?” he asked,
pointing at a smooth spot by Djefi where the strange creature with the curved
snout had been sketched in the sand.

Paneb
ignored his question.  Instead he walked over to the first set of drawings
and began to explain in Egyptian.  “The two netjrew were greeted by Djefi,
First Prophet of Sobek, and his bodyguards.  A guard took Brian and Diane
by camel.  Djefi left by boat.  It will take Brian and Diane three
days to travel by camel to To-She.  Djefi will get there two days later on
his boat.”

Picking
out the names in Paneb’s speech, Tim found that the sound of the language was
becoming less grating.  Although it was tempting to try to teach Ahmes and
Paneb English, he realized that unless one of them was with him constantly to
serve as an interpreter, he would need to learn ancient Egyptian.

He
wasn’t sure what had happened with the dog figure, perhaps it had been a
mistake they had corrected, but Ahmes had seemed embarrassed about
something.  Either they had decided not to tell him something or else they
were trying to hint at something.

He was
in a foreign land and a foreign time.  He needed friends.

Tim
clapped his hands softly and looked at Paneb with a smile.

“Thank
you, Paneb,” he said, giving a slight bow.

Turning
to his backpack, Tim pulled out a bag with a large sweet cinnamon roll he had
taken from the restaurant after breakfast.  He carried it to Paneb and
Ahmes.  He tore off part of it and offered it to Ahmes, who started to
reach for it and then stopped himself, looking to Paneb to get his father’s
permission.

Paneb
nodded and Ahmes took the piece of roll.  Tim tore away another piece and
offered it to Paneb, who took it gravely as if receiving a communion
wafer.  Tim said, “To friends,” and bit into the sweet pastry.

W
hen Addy’s friends were setting Tim up on
the blind date where he met her, they had described her as intelligent, driven,
analytical and organized.  They had meant it as a compliment.  Her
personality was so forceful that they had forgotten to mention how beautiful
she was.  Tim had assumed that she would fall into the “nice personality”
category of the other blind dates his friends had arranged.

They
had met for an afternoon walk in a park, a cup of coffee afterward.  Her
blond hair was pulled back in a ponytail.  A few delicate wisps of hair
had escaped and floated at the nape of her neck.  When Tim first saw her,
the sun was behind her and she seemed to glow with its energy and light.

They
said hello and his eyes kept drifting to her neck where those wisps of hair and
the smooth curve of her neck looked so exposed and innocent.  He had to
consciously keep himself from reaching out and touching her.

Later
over coffee, as he looked at her green eyes, so alive and full of interest, he
blurted out that he thought she was beautiful.

“I
know,” she answered, smiling into her coffee cup.

He was
taken aback by her confidence and smugness.

His
face showed it and she laughed, a series of light musical notes that he wanted
to hear over and over again.

“No,
no, I don’t know that I’m beautiful.  Well, maybe,” she grinned at
him.  “But I know you think so.”

She
sipped her coffee, her eyes on him, deciding how open she should be.

“Tim,”
she said, setting down her cup and reaching over to place her hand over
his.  Her touch thrilled him and he wanted to turn over her hand and trace
its contours with his fingertips.

“Tim,
you should never, ever play poker.  Your face doesn’t hide anything. 
When we were in the park, I would have run away from you if my friends hadn’t
told me, over and over, that you’re not really a pervert.”

She
laughed again at his confused expression.

“Oh my
god.  You are going to be so much fun.”

He
knew he was blushing now.  Her words suggested that they would see each
other again.

“Here,”
she tugged at his hand and placed it on her neck; at the very spot he had
stared at earlier.

He
felt the tender thickness of the hair as it emerged from her skin and then how
it grew softer and willowy until it seemed to merge with the air.  He
brushed her skin gently, realizing how thin the boundary was between her body
and his, how the surfaces of their skins, sliding softly along each other, were
really no boundary at all.

“My
god, that’s electric,” she said turning her neck into his hand.

Reluctantly
he slid his hand away. “They told you I’m not a pervert?” he asked.  “How
did that come up?”

She laughed
again.  “They were telling me that you’re an artist and then, Jeanne, I
think it was, said, ‘Oh yeah, don’t worry if he really, really looks at
you.  He’s not a pervert.’ ”

“Thanks,
Jeanne,” Tim said.

“They
all really like you, Tim.  And they were right.”

“I’m
not a pervert?”

“I
don’t know, yet,” she said, grinning.  “I mean you do really study
things.  You know you felt the texture of the napkin when we sat down,
don’t you?  And when we got our coffee, you held the cup up to your face,
closed your eyes and took a long, slow breath of its aroma.  When people
come in, you don’t just glance at them, you really look at them as if you're
trying to memorize them.

“And,
to be honest, I kind of like the way you look at me.  It’s not exactly
naked hunger, but it’s certainly intense.  You seem able to control
yourself in public, although I’m not sure I will be able to the way you just
touched me.”

“Will
be able?”

“Yes,”
she said.  “I think you’re about to ask me out on a real date.”

T
im realized as he chewed the cinnamon roll
that it was a little easier to think of her now.  The love he would always
feel for her seemed to be pushing at the pain that had overwhelmed him earlier
up on the plateau.  For the first time, he thought it might be possible
one day to remember her without pain.

T
he sweet taste of the roll was something
Ahmes had never imagined.  What other things did the gods have that he had
never imagined?

This
god seemed very different from the two who had arrived earlier.  But then
people were different, he thought, the gods would be different, too.  He
had always pictured them in a vague way as strong, powerful, fearless; as hard
as the stone in the tombs.

But
this god looked and felt like any other person.  He did seem different
when he looked at things because he seemed to drink them in and to see past
them.  And at other times, like now, he seemed to have left his
body.  Perhaps his body was here in Kemet and at the same time his ka was
in Khert-Neter.

It
must be very strange to be a god, Ahmes thought.  He took the last bite of
the sweet roll.  Strange and very nice.

P
aneb kept stealing glances at Tim.

He had
seen Hetephernebti, priestess of Re, several times.  She was happy and
smiling, often stopping to talk with people as she walked through the streets
of Iunu where the great temple of Re stood.  He had seen the stern-looking
Waja-Hur, priest of Thoth several times here at the tomb when he came to draw
hieroglyphics from the Book of the Dead.  He was ancient, and although
unbent by the years he carried, he had seemed weary and almost angry.

This
god was as different from Brian and Diane as Hetephernebti was from Waja-Hur,
or from Djefi.

The
male gods surprised Paneb with their energy.  But then gods must be so
full of life, it would be hard to contain it in a body, he thought. 
Although Brian had been larger and stronger, this god, with his intensity and
quietness seemed more powerful.  There was something about his face, an
openness and honesty, that made Paneb want to help and protect him.

As if
he could help and protect a god.

Ahh,
what would Taki think?

She
was so attentive to the things that their family needed to survive from day to
day - cooking, fetching water, making linen to barter at the market for
food, shaving their heads, caring for them every day.

She
had little time for the gods, except, of course for Ptah and Bes.  But all
the women wore amulets of Bes to help with childbirth and to keep snakes out of
the home.

He
felt sad some times, worried that Taki was so involved in living this life,
that she never got a glimpse of what their eternal life would be like.

When
he took priests to see his tomb paintings of the gods, Paneb would watch their
reactions.  Sometimes as they studied the drawings, Paneb would see their
eyes focus beyond the tomb walls, and he knew that his art had opened a window
for the priests to see into Khert-Neter.  They would stand a little
straighter, their voices would grow softer, even their movements would become
more graceful.