The Time Travelers, Volume 2 (37 page)

Luckily, he was wearing his best clothing and his finest jewelry. His uniform would give him some control. “Good evening,” he said, smiling, and guiding them away from the half-visible hole. “What good luck that you have appeared,” he told them. “Perhaps you would spend a moment or two to help me.”

He managed to draw them around the corner of an old mastaba, with flat roof and sloping sides. To face him, the police would have their backs to the shaft opening. “I dropped an amulet of Sekhmet during Pharaoh’s night ceremony, the one finished only an hour or two ago, in which I was honored to participate. I hoped to see my amulet still lying here.”

Pankh sneered at amulets and religious symbols. When men or women hung such things about their necks, or built little shrines in their gardens, or more comical still, erected temples, Pankh laughed. Tomb robbers were atheists and knew what the common run of people did not. Nothing mattered except possessions.

“Why don’t we wait for the sun to rise,” said one policeman, “so we can see better?”

In the east, the sand had brightened. In a moment,
dawn would explode over the desert. Surely Pankh was not too late to get the gold! “Let’s go over to the causeway,” he suggested, herding them. “I’m sure my precious amulet is lying on the stones.”

“Then why were you coming from the desert?” asked one policeman pleasantly.

“The Lord of the Two Lands required a sacrifice to the jackals and to Anubis, jackal god of the dead, because of the urgency of Pharaoh’s prayers and the need for celestial guidance.”

The guards were unconvinced. He did manage to jostle them onto the causeway, however.

“Here it is!” exclaimed the other policeman, astonished. “Such a tiny ornament on such a vast surface! You are very lucky, sir.” He stooped to retrieve an amulet which he first drew over his lips to obtain its blessing and then handed to Pankh.

It was a miniature Sekhmet, so perfectly carved it seemed the handwork of a god, not of man. Pankh had never owned such a thing, much less dropped it. Its slender chain was woven of tiny gold plackets, but the Sekhmet herself was made of a material he did not at first recognize.

He rubbed the tiny goddess between his thumb and forefinger. It was ivory.

From his palm, the little Sekhmet snarled at him. Under his heavy wig, Pankh’s shaved scalp quivered.

Then he remembered he had no patience with religious superstition, and he put the necklace on. “I owe
you,” he said to the policeman. “I will see that you are well paid for your prompt assistance.”

The necklace was surprisingly chilly against his skin. Nor did the heat of his body warm the slender chain. Although the chain was long and did not press up against his throat, he felt strangled by it, and he rubbed his windpipe, straining for air.

“Look there,” said the first guard softly. “What are those two doing?”

In the growing light, Pankh made out two people a hundred yards away, admiring the Pyramid. The man, dressed in the ludicrous trousers of northerners, vaulted onto the stone wall that enclosed the Pyramid, built to keep just such people from touching its sacred sides. Little boys had proved particularly annoying in this regard, scrambling over the wall and then with their bare toes trying to find cracks between the Pyramid slabs, so they could crawl upward. They fell and broke bones and their mothers sobbed.

“Tourists even at this hour,” said the second guard, shaking his head. “Amazing. And behaving badly, of course, since they’re foreigners.”

The foreigner stretched out his hand, that he might help his woman up onto the wall with him, and as she was drawing onto her toes, Pankh saw her white gown and long black hair, and recognized the girl of ivory.

Impossible
.

But true. This foreigner had opened the second shaft. How could a foreigner have known the location? Who
could the man be? Some crafty slave, perhaps, or escaped criminal. And what of Renifer? Where was she?

And who had the gold?

For had the girl of ivory still been clothed in gold, he would easily see it from here.

Giving their names to Pankh, so they could be rewarded, the policemen ambled off to deal with the tourists. Pankh had no more time to waste. Slipping around the mastaba, he strode up to the hole. Even in the few minutes that had gone by, there was enough light to see quite well. He descended the long ladder in two steps, crossed the empty treasure room and knelt beside the open trapdoor.

“I will have my gold!” he whispered. “I care for nothing but the gold!”

Pankh stroked the little Sekhmet as if beseeching her.

He forgot that there was one other thing he cared about.

Life.

T
he first rays of dawn glinted off Annie’s dark hair. Her long white pleated gown lifted gently in the breeze. She seemed ancient and silvery. She could have been a goddess.

“I am starving to death,” said Annie dramatically.

He looked at her with great affection. He had saved her from starving to death. Whatever else he had done wrong in his life—and Strat felt assaulted by all he had done wrong in his life—at least he had rescued Annie.

He said, “No one will ever excavate it, because archaeologists care only for kings, but I know where the workmen’s village is from here. It takes hundreds of men to do all the stonework, the painting, the road building, the engineering, the cooking. Would a gold sandal be a fair exchange for a jug of water, a loaf of bread and a seat in the shade?”

Annie giggled. “Let’s hold out for two jugs of water. Although I would really like an ice cream sundae with chocolate sauce.”

He loved her instant recovery. She was not having the vapors, or in need of a rest cure, or weeping on his
shoulder, the way girls would in his day. She was bouncing and eager for whatever came next.

He felt a ripping in his soul, as of tendons wrenched from bones because of a fall in a ball game.

What
would
come next?

He sat above her on the wall, Annie standing between his knees staring up at him, thinking his the most beautiful face she had ever seen. Of my precious four days, she thought, more than two are gone. Time is so stingy. “How I missed you,” she said, “all these months. But you did the right thing when you saved Katie, Strat, and I have held your noble act in my heart as an example of how to live.”

Annie imagined saying those words in 1999 to a boy in her high school. The situation would not come up, though, because boys in her class liked to be examples of how
not
to live. Noble conduct was not a goal in her century.

“Here comes trouble,” said Strat softly.

Guards were walking toward them, motioning at Strat to get down. But there was nothing scary about them. They were not armed and dangerous like her tomb escorts. They were just nice guys keeping people off tourist attractions. Annie smiled and waved.

Strat hopped down onto the pavement. “I don’t think they know you,” he murmured. “They probably weren’t part of the sacrifice ritual. They’ve lost interest now that I’m off their wall. Let’s find the workmen’s village and buy some food.”

Already the cool breezes were gone and the air parched. Huge numbers of people had arrived to take advantage of the short time before the blistering heat began.

Crews were getting to work on funerary chapels and memorial temples. Teams were erecting statues and walling in family cemeteries. Flowers were being delivered, and fine spices and incense being burned. Daughters were visiting their dead mothers and sons paying respect to their ancestors.

Where they had been alone only minutes ago, Annie and Strat were among hundreds now.

“I can hear a choir rehearsing somewhere,” she said. “This is so much more fun with you here. I really feel part of ancient Egypt. Of course, I almost
was
part of ancient Egypt. The dead part.”

“We are in the center of the City of the Dead,” he agreed.

“Thank you,” she said, “for keeping me in the city of the living instead,” and she began to cry. “Oh, Strat,” she whispered, “what should we do about Renifer? She didn’t choose the city of the living. Should Renifer have to obey our choice, and not be allowed her choice? Is she still a sacrifice or has she become a suicide?”

Strat looked around him. In the west, where the sands deepened into hills, just before the hills soared into cliffs hundreds of feet high, somewhere tucked among those hills was the workers’ village.

“I know,” said Annie. “At some point in the day when
nobody’s around, we’ll go back down and offer her a second chance. I know I’d take it. I’d be sick of dying by then.”

Strat took a deep breath. “I think it would be better if we went right now and closed the shaft.”

“Strat! You can’t mean it!” How had she ever thought that Strat was noble of heart and generous in deed? “That’s horrible. Absolutely not! Leaving her there was bad enough. We’re not going to be the ones who seal her in!”

“People are going to walk by and find that open hole. They’ll explore. They’ll find Renifer. She won’t be dead because it takes days to starve. Then what? They drag her out? They hand her back to Pharaoh? Will she suffer an even more terrible fate because she circumvented Pharaoh’s plan?”

“What could be more terrible than being buried alive?” Annie demanded.

Strat pointed toward the edge of the desert. A hundred yards away, the mutilated corpses of dead men stuck up into the air on tall sharp spikes. Annie had seen that happen; she just hadn’t been willing to remember. There was, after all, something worse than running out of air.

“If we close up the shaft, we’ll actually be keeping Renifer safe,” said Strat. “When it’s dark tonight, and everyone else is gone, we pull away the stone and offer her a second chance.”

Annie’s heartbeat returned to normal. He was a gentleman
after all; he had saved Katie; he would save Renifer. It was good.

“Too late,” said Strat sadly. “Look. The shaft is already surrounded.”

“I can’t see,” whispered Annie, starting to cry. “What’s happening?”

“I don’t dare get closer,” said Strat. “Quick, up that hill. We can see from there.”

They staggered across the sand, which was first hard and flat and then sinking and ankle-breaking, scrabbled up a ragged hillside of sand and climbed rocks that collapsed under their weight. Some places were so steep they were forced to crawl.

“Be careful at the edges,” said Strat. “The wind chews on the undersides of these hills, leaving crags supported by nothing.”

The crest of the hill was wild and wonderful. Fingers of rock poked out into thin air. The peak of the Pyramid was half a mile away, but eye level. The necropolis stretched on and on. Thousands of distant tomb structures glittered like sugar cubes in the sun.

And where Renifer’s open shaft might be, Annie had no idea.

“Let your eye travel down the causeway,” said Strat, “and look for a dozen workers with baskets.”

“Baskets?” said Annie blankly.

“Rock and sand,” said Strat quietly. “That’s how they filled in your shaft. Basket after basket. Rock after rock.”

And there it was, a team lifting one basket after another from a series of donkey-drawn carts. Somebody somewhere had known about the second shaft.

Strat and Annie clung to each other. They could not, mercifully, hear the sound of the rocks as they dropped down.

But Renifer would.

Annie prayed to her own God that Renifer would not be scared. That she remained proud of her choice. That the end would come quickly for her.

Strat held her until she had stopped weeping.

The sun scorched the desert floor on four sides. He knew that the workmen’s village was not far below, but the twists and turns of the jagged hill hid it entirely. Alone, they perched on a rock ledge.

“You’re wearing only one sandal,” said Strat.

“The other one fell off in the tomb,” said Annie. “It’s there with Renifer, I guess. I don’t know how I managed to keep this one.”

Strat took it in his hand. I also held this sandal in another life. Or stole it, depending on who tells the story. He remembered what he had to go back to.

When he set the sandal down, Annie’s white dress blew over it, hiding it.

Beyond them, spread out like a painting in five stripes, lay Egypt. Two outside stripes of yellow desert. Narrow green stripes of farmland inside those. The placid brown ribbon of the Nile in the middle. “The river is a sort of vertical oasis, isn’t it?” said Annie.

“You are my oasis,” said Strat.

He was not sure just how much time he spent telling her that and showing her that. Long enough to know he wanted it to last forever, but long enough to know that time was passing. The heat of noon would be too much on this exposed spot. They must get out of the sun or die under it.

He pulled her even closer, to tell her what he thought they should do next, and Annie screamed.

P
ankh was amused.

The foreigners were in each other’s arms, oblivious to the world, cooing. He had completely surprised them.

He knew how impressive he looked. Of course, foreigners were always deeply impressed by Egyptians. His white kilt was starched and finely pleated, unlike their sweat-stained garb. His wig was heavy and flawlessly braided, unlike the messy sandy locks of the foreigners. But most important, his dagger was heavy and strong in his hand.

The girl, pleasingly, had screamed.

She would scream more before he was done.

Hetepheres’ tomb had been empty. He had spat down the trapdoor, trying to spit on the queen’s sarcophagus, but missed.

These were the possibilities: The foreign male had carried the gold in some basket or bundle that Pankh had not seen; or the man had buried it to retrieve later; or somebody else had the gold.

Pen-Meru? Could he have moved so swiftly?

But it was unlikely that Pen-Meru would trust a foreign male. And although Pankh could possibly imagine Pen-Meru saving Renifer, why would anybody save the girl of ivory?

Pankh had climbed out of the tomb, retreated behind the mastaba, dusted himself off and straightened his wig. He was preparing a lie should he encounter the same tomb police when Pharaoh’s crew arrived to fill in the shaft.