Immortal (23 page)

“Nope.”

“Hey, maybe I can loan you out to other cult members.”

“The female ones? I’m game.”

She punched me lightly on the shoulder. “Hey! I’m keeping you to myself, buddy.”

“Your customs are so strange to me,” I joked.

“Cut it out.” She rolled out of bed and walked to the kitchen, returning with two bottles of water. She tossed me one of them, and I drank eagerly while she polished off the other bottle. “God,” she said. “I’m wiped.”

Curling up beside me, she nuzzled her head under my arm and dozed off with a pretty little contented smile on her face. I watched her.

I tried to imagine what might be going on inside that lovely head of hers. Like how much she really knew about me and where that information had come from. I wondered how much of what she’d told me about the MUD was even true. Because a great body and an afternoon of marathon sex might drive me to distraction, but not enough to recall that I’d never told her I was sterile.

I wish I could say I’m naturally more trusting of women with whom I happen to be sleeping, but invariably I find just the opposite to be the case. It’s not that I think anyone who would willingly engage in intercourse with me is therefore untrustworthy—although the idea has merit—it’s just that I’ve been burned before. And betrayal at the hands of someone I’m intimate with ends up being more memorable for some reason. One might even call it “intimacy issues,” if one were so inclined.

   
I think I developed this problem after I was forced to leave ancient Egypt. This was around the time of what’s now called the fourth dynasty, under the rule of King Khufu. (We didn’t call them Pharaohs back then. Nor did we call it Egypt. It was Kemet.) I had been living in and around the Nile Delta for quite a long time by then, because for many centuries there was simply no better place to be.

I started out there on the losing side of a local conflict during the first expansion of the Kemet Empire and ended up introduced to the Nile region as a slave, the property of a landowner named Hefuz. Hefuz was a brutal, unpleasant man who treated women and slaves more or less the same and who sired more than two dozen legitimate and illegitimate children in his time on Earth before passing things on to his eldest son, Hefiz.

The son was only slightly less brutal toward women and considerably nicer to the help—especially the male ones—as Hefiz clearly swung in that direction. In the latter years of his life, Hefiz was kind enough to grant me a small plot of land and my freedom, Kemet being one of the few places where a slave could work his way out of bondage given time and a kind owner. Patience, decent farming, irrigation skills and a little crafty maneuvering, and a century later I owned most of the land old Hefuz once did. It’s one of those small ironies I get to appreciate from time to time.

Living a public life as a landowner in Kemet, as an immortal, was slightly trickier than it would be later in Carthage, and for a couple of reasons. First, Kemet had the most advanced culture I had ever seen up to that point in time, and I had to learn how to master it. One might think more culture means more people and more people means more ways to disguise oneself, and to an extent that is true. But it also meant more laws, more outside concerns over one’s identity and place in the world, more politics, more people in places of power to view you as a threat, or worse. Look at what I have to do today to avoid official notice and you’ll understand that increased population size doesn’t necessarily translate into decreased danger.

Second, Kemet’s system of government was much more religiously oriented than Carthage would ever be. The more religious the population, the more dangerous a high-profile life is for someone like me.

After living for three generations on Hefuz’s land, I started over again from scratch. I handed my slaves their own parcels of land and took off with the modern equivalent of a handful of cash: two ducks, an ox, and two bushels of barley. I soon found work as an apprentice to a pottery maker, and when that grew tiresome, I moved on to jewelry, then textiles, then basket-weaving, and so on. Over the subsequent three centuries, I learned how to do every handcraft you can name, and I also discovered how good beer can be when it’s made properly.

I eventually tried my hand in politics. Through a series of maneuvers that would be incredibly boring to list, I worked my way into the court of King Khufu, initially as an astronomer, later as vizier. In that position I had less trouble with the whole immortality thing. Surrounded by people who already believed the king was a living god, it wasn’t difficult to convince them I’d simply managed, through wisdom and a superior knowledge of the ways of the world, to figure out how to cheat aging and death. I even had fun with it, telling those who asked that one of the secrets was swallowing a live scarab each evening before I went to bed. I think a few might have actually tried this.

If you go by Hollywood, the position of vizier translates into “grand wizard” of some kind, but this is pretty much a load of crap. (I watched
The Mummy
in a movie theater and laughed out loud for the entire film. This did not endear me to anybody else in attendance.) I was a political figure, less there to administer advice, than to run things while Khufu was busy with his various wives. The modern analogue would be prime minister.

And I had a lot to do, because Khufu was always busy. Being raised with the understanding that one is a god can do wonders for one’s perspective of oneself, especially
vis-à-vis
all matters sexual. He—and all kings before and after him—was permitted as many wives as he wanted provided he had a Wife Number One to bear him a formal offspring, said offspring being the official heir to the throne. Wife Number One was, per requisite, a blood member of the royal family. In Khufu’s case she was his half-sister. This is not quite as icky as it sounds, given the number of wives and attendant offspring each of the kings had.

I got quite a bit of tail myself, if you don’t mind my being slightly crude about it. As vizier, I was at the top of the, well, the top of the pyramid, second only to those with royal blood. That kind of power is one heck of an aphrodisiac.

There was one woman in particular I was very fond of. Her name was Nampheta, a fifteen-year-old wonder of a girl. (Do not, please, get hung up on her age. Judging the past by the present understanding of sexual adulthood is unfair and it doesn’t take into account the fact that people didn’t always live as long then as they do now. For contrast, consider Khufu took his first wife when he was eleven. Even were I not immortal, my grand old age of thirty-something would have identified me as an elder.) Nampheta had dark eyes, straight black hair down to her navel, skin the color of coffee, and a manner that mimicked the royal upbringing she had never had.

She was a slave. Her position was that of attendant to Khufu’s third wife, Heptamre. Consequently, few paid her much heed, as one learns to ignore slaves. My personal downfall came in assuming that because of her status, she was without power.

For at least a little while, I was in love with Nampheta. She would come to my chambers as often as was possible, stealing away two and three times a week, or as often as Heptamre’s schedule—Heptamre was a harpy, by the way—would permit. And I had a private room that ensured us complete privacy for all manner of intimacies, sexual and otherwise.

I do believe Nampheta was the most creative lover I ever had. She was like a walking Kama Sutra, but without the annoying religious undertones. And more flexible than you could imagine. We spent many an evening developing exotic new uses for whatever prop might be on hand, such that I could never look at a spear, a clay urn, or a cat quite the same way again. And when we were too exhausted to move, we talked. It was a decent little arrangement.

Until one evening, when everything went awry. It was after a particularly exhausting effort, which included what may have been the first historical example of a trapeze, that Nampheta asked the question.

“Lord Vizier, will you soon take a wife?”

My bachelorhood had approached something legendary within the palace of Khufu. As most of the residents knew, I was far older than any man they’d ever met, rumors combining the two facts freely circulated. My favorite, and the one most commonly repeated, had me being castrated by the god Re himself in exchange for eternal life. Nampheta—and maybe four or five other women in the palace—knew from personal experience that this was untrue, but I didn’t go through much trouble debunking it.

Anyway, I had no intention of taking a wife and starting a family. The family part was entirely out of the question, not to mention physically impossible. Emotionally, I wasn’t up for it either. Okay, so maybe my intimacy issues predated Nampheta.

“I had no plans to,” I admitted to her.

Nampheta sat up on the stone floor, still quite naked, her sweaty body half-visible and glistening in the shafts of moonlight from the window. I couldn’t see her face, as I’d lit no brazier for our evening’s calisthenics. Maybe if I had, I’d have been able to glean from her expression how much more serious this conversation was to her than it was to me.

“Never?” she asked quietly.

“What would I do with a wife?” I was busy trying to fill a basin with water. Other than jumping in the river, linen cloths and fresh water was the closest thing to a bath one got in Kemet. Just one step up from licking oneself clean.

“I see,” she said quietly. She rose and began assembling her clothing without another word.

Sensing that something was amiss—and yes, you did have to hit me over the head with it in those days—I stopped what I was doing and went to her. “You wish for something more?” I asked her, trying to reach for her elbow and getting shoved off.

“Of course I do,” she said. “Would you not, were our roles reversed? I am a slave.”

And I was one also once, I wanted to say. But that didn’t go well with the all-wise vizier-guy role, so I kept it to myself. “Perhaps I could help you in some other way,” I offered. “I could buy . . .”

“I don’t want you to buy me,” she snapped. “I want you to marry me!”

“Nampheta . . . I do love you, you know that.”

“Do you? Then make me your wife.”

“I can’t,” I said. “It’s not that simple. You’re a . . . a common slave.”

“Common, am I?” she snapped icily.

“A bad choice of words,” I said defensively. I was never great at talking to women, by the way. “What I mean is, politically, it would be a sign of weakness. It would . . .”

“You are the grand vizier, second only to the king, looked on by most as a god. None would dare question you.”

And what happens when you get old and I don’t?
I didn’t say. What I did say was, “It’s far more complicated than that.”

She fastened the belt around the waist of her linen dress, and then dried her eyes with a swipe. “Well then,” she said, “this common slave must go now to see to her queen. I would not want to become a complication.”

And without another word she marched out through the unguarded servant’s exit, never to return to my bedchamber.

It was weeks before I discovered how badly I’d screwed up.

*
 
*
 
*

I was collecting taxes when I received word that King Khufu wished to speak to me.

Tax collecting did not involve my going out and knocking on doors or any such thing. I mainly stood at the steps of the temple and counted duties from various parts of Kemet as they were brought in. We did not employ a true currency system of any sort, so this mainly entailed the receipt of various goods. Foods, mostly, but also finished crafts and precious metals. One of my responsibilities was value assessment—whether, say, two geese equaled a bushel of wheat—and this was a real strength for a man who was familiar with nearly every manual skill known at that time.

Taxes were high that year and food was much more precious than other goods because we were building up a supply. The plan was to use the stored food to feed the farm laborers who were soon to be idle thanks to the floodwaters of the Nile. This was no welfare plan, because then the farmers would be put to a different sort of work altogether—building Khufu’s pyramid. (It was the world’s first public works program, after a fashion.) A lot of labor was needed because Khufu’s pyramid was designed—by him and his priest—to be the biggest thing anybody had ever seen. It had to be to fit that ego of his.

Knowing full well how unusual it was to get called back to the palace—and the message was delivered by two of his guards rather than a runner, which didn’t make me feel much better—I left the temple immediately. (And with no assistants to fall back on, a lot of people were going to be waiting an awfully long time for me to return. This had happened before on occasion, and I never heard one complaint about it. People didn’t mind lines all that much back then. Bet the motor vehicles registry would appreciate that kind of respect.)

I went on foot, which didn’t take long as the temple was right next to the palace, but which invariably got the royals all chatty about the impropriety of it all. Nobody, and I mean nobody, went around on foot if they could afford not to. We all had these chairs to get carried around in. I hated them. I was always expecting somebody in front to trip and send me flying into an ox or something.