Sunrise on the Mediterranean (10 page)

When Cheftu awoke the next day, he saw the sails were swollen with wind, the sailors sleeping, playing dice with each other,
or attending to the busywork of being shipboard. Inside the covered cabin, Cheftu saw the shadow of Wenaten bent over a desk.
Was he preparing the papyri documents that would grant them entrance to sail up the Nile to Akhetaten? RaEm had left their
couch already; he saw her sitting by the prow, the wind blowing her burned hair. She made quite a picture for the sailors.

Akhenaten. The name meant nothing to Cheftu. Did Wenaten know of Pharaoh Hatshepsut, the wise leader under whom Cheftu had
been a courtier? Or had her successor Thutmosis kept his vow and stricken her from all records? What of the-Most-Splendid,
her mortuary temple on the west bank of the Nile? It had survived until Chloe’s time; was it just ignored now? The sun began
to rise, and Cheftu’s mind raced faster. Pharaoh sounded quite mad. Was Chloe in that court?

“Dreaming of your lover again?” RaEm asked. She’d crept up on him; he must still be exhausted not to have heard her.

He ignored her query. “What will you do when we arrive?” he asked, noting that most of the damage sustained in the eruption
to the black-haired, copper-skinned body she wore was healing. At least nothing had happened to the face she was wearing.

“A pharaoh currently without wife, and you ask that?” RaEm laughed, and Cheftu noticed the sailors glance her way. Though
they were beneath her notice, she was not beneath theirs. However, the lashing she had given their senior tinted those gazes
with fear and respect, in addition to lust. They followed her with their eyes as she slinked along the deck, her shoulders
brazenly displayed even in the winter weather. It was acceptable dress and behavior in Egypt; alas, the oarsmen were Tsori.
To them she was less clothed than their whores. Cheftu had suggested a cloak, but RaEm had laughed at him, grateful to be
out of Levi’s and Vic’s Secret contraptions, she said.

“What will you do?” she asked. “ ‘Adviser to royalty’? When did you learn to speak the tongue of these people? How can you
take these things so calmly?” Though her tone was teasing, Cheftu felt wary. RaEm was self-centered to a fault; she was also
vain. But he must never forget that she was clever, wickedly so.

“Offer my services to Pharaoh, of course.” Perhaps he could win a position high enough that he could find Chloe?

Or she could find him? That assumed she had left her twentieth-century world again. Could she do that? Had she?

He must ask the stones at the earliest possible moment.

“Aye, I forget you are the nobleman who is so noble, he cannot bear to spend time with anyone other than the rich and titled,”
RaEm said to his silence.

He opened his mouth to protest, then shut it. What value to argue with RaEm? Maybe if he said nothing, he would be allowed
to enjoy the sunrise in peace. Would he see Chloe in days? Was she in this Akhetaten?

Wenaten bustled through to them.
“Aii
, greetings of the morning goddess to you.” He slapped a hand over his mouth. “May Aten forgive me! Greetings of the one god
Aten to you,” he said. “I really must recall the proper way to greet people! Isis—umm, Aten help me!” He walked over to the
timekeeper.

“What do you make of this worshiping this Aten?” RaEm asked in a whisper.

“Given our host’s nervousness, I am uncertain,” Cheftu said. “Is he exaggerating the situation? I cannot imagine Egypt without
the gods and goddesses. Just one god seems so little for such a rich land.”

“Modern Egypt has only one god. A harsh, bloodthirsty god,” RaEm said. “He has little sense of beauty or grandeur; he cares
only to rule as many as possible.”

“Allah?” Cheftu asked.

“Aye. Mohammed—”

“Is his prophet.” Cheftu looked out across the water. Egypt was Mohammedan in his time also.

“How did you know that?” RaEm asked, an edge of suspicion in her voice. “How did you know it was me in this body? How did
you know Chloe’s language?” She laid a hand on his arm. “You travel through the portals also? You are of the twenty-third
power?”

Wenaten’s approach saved Cheftu from having to answer. “We will be in the blessed two lands by Ra—Aten’s zenith,” he said.
“I have called for baths, razors, so we should be ready to present ourselves to the guard as Egyptians. Home again!” he sang,
walking past them.

“This man, he makes me dizzy,” RaEm said. The phrase sounded so much like Chloe that Cheftu almost laughed. He ran a hand
over his bearded chin, noted that his hair still flowed down his back in the style of Aztlan. It was no wonder that Wenaten
had dismissed him initially.
I look about as Egyptian as a Philistine.

“I will go first,” he said. “If that is well with you.” He didn’t know how to answer her questions. Information was a dangerous
thing for this woman to have, for she had no limits. She wanted everything for herself. That, Cheftu thought, might be the
deadliest ambition of any soul.

RaEm looked him up and down. “Please do. I tire of looking at you that way. Also shave and perfume yourself. First impressions,
you know.”

He frowned and walked into the shaded area. A bath would be good, as would a shave. As would being back in Egypt. As would
being back in Chloe.
Aii!
gods! However, he had another purpose in bathing.

Once inside the tub, the cold water rinsing away the salt, he slipped the oracular stones into his palms. Each was an oblong,
one black and one white, inscribed on both sides with letters. The carved scratches were painted in gold and silver, forming
letters that would someday be recognized as most ancient Hebrew. The Urim and Thummim. The convoluted path that had followed
to end in his ownership astounded Cheftu, but he knew their value.

Even as he held them, one in each hand, he felt their life.

Glancing over his shoulder nervously, he phrased his question. “Where am I?”

He tossed the stones and they danced in the air, each spin illuminating a different character etched in their sides. “I-n
w-a-t-e-r.”

Cheftu snatched them apart. Of course—how could he have forgotten how very literal these stones were?

“Are you finished yet?” RaEm asked, not too far behind him.

“Cannot a man have some privacy to bathe!” he bellowed, hiding the stones in his palms.

Swearing at him, she stomped away. Cheftu waited until all was quiet again, then whispered the question of his heart to the
stones. “How do I find Chloe?”

“F-o-l-l-o-w.”

Follow what? Follow where? Follow whom? Maybe he should start at the beginning. “Is Chloe here?”

They were silent, an indication that the question wasn’t phrased properly. Cheftu had forgotten how irritating it was to deal
with their oracular powers. “Is Chloe here, in this time period?”

“A-y-e.”

Joy surged through Cheftu. She was here! She was here! All he had to do was—

“Don’t dirty the bath,” RaEm called.

Cursing her, Cheftu bundled the stones away, tempted to urinate childishly in the water just because RaEm was such an annoyance.
Instead he rose, dried himself, dressed, and strode off to meet with the barber. The stones were tucked safely in his waist
sash once more: one on his left side, the other on his right.

Chloe was here, somewhere in this time period. To get to her he needed only to figure out the first message. If he followed,
he would find Chloe. Gratefully he submitted to the hot, steamy face cloths as he pondered the answer to his question. The
stones were never wrong, but also they were rarely clear. He needed more direction in that response.

However, she was here. The world wasn’t so big that he couldn’t find her. Remember your vow, he thought. I remember mine.

Egypt. She stretched before them like a multifaceted jewel. The fields were green with growing grain, and the waters of the
Nile reflected the blue sky. Cheftu touched his newly shaven chin, felt the winter wind whip at his legs, shielded by a long,
heavily woven kilt. The tight dryness of kohl surrounded his eyes, and his neck was once more naked to the sun.

The Tsori ship, with its wary sailors, had been traded for a Nile vessel. Shallow bottomed, with no keel, it was easier to
move over rocks and through the sometimes dangerous twists in the river. Wenaten and his staff had easily passed inspection
by the lazy officials on the Delta; now they moved toward Akhetaten.

Temples that once stood proud and regal along the river were now swamped with weeds, serving as homes for rodents. Many of
the statues to other gods and goddesses had been defaced, leaving only the orb with its extended hands, the Aten, where an
animal’s visage once was. Cat-headed Bastet, ibis-headed Thoth, falcon-headed Horus, all were defaced in favor of the handed
disk.

Obelisks had been knocked over, and fields lay fallow with no priests to work them. What other industry had absorbed the discharge
of tens of thousands of priests?

“What has he done to Egypt?” RaEm said beside him. “It is … an embarrassment!”

Cheftu watched the waters slide by, felt the timelessness of the Nile, the sadness of the decay around them. “He seems a destroyer,
not a creator,” he said. Though these temples were dilapidated, there didn’t appear to be new ones to take their places. “What
are the people doing?” he wondered aloud.

RaEm watched for a few more moments, then announced it was making her unwell and she was returning to her couch. Wenaten’s
couch, Cheftu thought, which she had commandeered, casting Wenaten from it.

A few minutes later the ambassador joined Cheftu by the railing, drumming his fingers on the wood.

“What bothers you, my lord?” Cheftu asked lazily. Where was Chloe? Was she in Egypt? Follow what, follow whom, follow how
… The words chased each other in his head like a dog with its tail.

“I spoke briefly to an acquaintance of mine at the border. Pharaoh, umm, living forever! has allowed three uprisings in Kush
to go unchecked.” Wenaten had donned a new wig, short and curled. “Even though Canaan boils with trouble, the entire eastern
outpost has been dissolved, save one old diplomat.”

“Egypt is the most powerful entity in the world,” Cheftu said, wondering if those words were still true. “Surely we have nothing
to fear from Canaan?”

“All the land that Thutmosis the Great One gathered for us is gone.”

Which means I am now after the time of Thut, Cheftu thought, and before the time of Rameses. I know nothing of this history.
Merde!

“One by one we have lost our vassals.” Wenaten slapped his wig straight, irritated. “This time we stand to lose the King’s
Highway.”

“That is where?” Cheftu asked. This was not a phrase or term he recalled.

“Runs from the Salt Sea up to Mitanni and Assyria. Straight across the plateau in the center of Canani land, so we don’t have
to worry about those conniving Tsidoni thieves on the seaboard. They have no respect for Egypt,” he muttered. “Uncircumcised
sons of jackals!”

“How can we lose the King’s Highway?” How could Egypt lose anything? Cheftu stared at the abandoned villages, haunted roadways;
he would not have believed this had he not seen it. How the people must be suffering.

Wenaten began picking at a loose thread in his sash, his short, skinny fingers working at its edge, tugging it free. “The
fool lost it through passivity. The same way he lost us the Sea Road that runs from Sais to Gaza.” The thread broke off in
his hand, so with a shake of his head, he started picking around for another one to pull. “Already they are calling it the
Way of the Pelesti. Passivity,” he muttered. “Now the Pelesti have renamed it, as though it didn’t belong to Egypt for generations
and generations.” The second thread broke. “It was the Way of the Sea, named by the Egyptians, before those sea raiders cursed
our land with their invasions.”

Cheftu nodded, as though this were common knowledge to him. Pelesti; who were these people? Were they sea raiders, or were
the Tsidoni the sea raiders? Had everyone taken to stealing rights-of-way from Egypt? “One of the petty mountain lords in
central Canaan has overtaken the others’ lands,” Wenaten said. “The
seren
, how the Pelesti call their king, plead with Egypt to intervene.”