How she loved him!
“I begged Time to let me see you again, Annie,” he said, feasting his eyes on her. The torch, still lying on the edge of the hole in the upper room, gave a faint shadowy glow to the room. “I climbed to the top of Khufu’s Pyramid to ask it, because the natives say that the ghosts of Time are present in the night.” He tightened his embrace.
In his time, a lady was not merely covered with undergarments of lace, silk and satin, but also strapped into corsets, so that the actual form and feel of the lady was unavailable to anybody, including the lady. Surely what his hands told him now of Annie Lockwood was beyond the bounds of propriety. He comforted himself that this was ancient Egypt, however, and for that, she was properly dressed.
“Not only did Time bring us together,” said Strat, “but amid such excitement.”
“If you call being buried alive excitement,” said Annie. “The two of us are supposed to suffocate to death down here. I think there’s a famous opera where that actually happens.”
“Aida,” said Strat. “In days gone by I often attended such musical torture.”
They held each other, their tears dampening their close cheeks.
“How did you know how to get down to us?” asked Annie. “I can’t stand feeling so confused.”
“I found a second shaft in real life,” he told her. “Well, 1899 life. Just this morning. Except forty-five hundred years from now, if I remember Khufu’s dates correctly. I paced it off exactly, and of course the same markers are here, because this came first. So Time flung me down on the sand, and I regained consciousness, and had the astounding privilege of seeing Pharaoh in a royal procession, and the shocking reality of seeing two human sacrifices, and just as the second sacrifice was lowered in her basket, I recognized her.”
Annie buried her face in his throat.
He said, “I’m not sure if you were sent to save me or if I was sent to save you. Had I stayed in my time, I would have been in terrible difficulties.”
“Had you stayed in your time,” said Annie, “I would have been dead. Was it you the other day in the museum? Did you buy me lunch?”
He was puzzled. “Lunch?” he said confusedly. “What museum?”
“I forgot. It hasn’t happened yet. But I’m sure it’s you.”
She had the oddest sense of wanting to get back and check on him in the museum. First, we’d better get out of our tomb, she thought, sitting up abruptly.
“Tell me how it worked for you,” he said, sitting up with her. He slid his hand under the mass of her silky hair and rubbed her spine.
“Your photographs,” said Annie. “You had told me you were going to Egypt to be an archaeologist, do you remember? I never found out a single thing about what happened to you. You vanished. But I happened to pick up the Sunday New York Times, which my parents don’t often buy and I almost never touch. And I felt you through the print. You were in a museum article. So I went to the museum to find you. I have only four days, which is the first problem. You see, my parents just got married, Strat. It was a lovely ceremony, and they’re having a very short honeymoon so I thought we could have a very short reunion or ask Time to stretch it or bring you back with me or stay here with you.”
Strat decided not to ask why her parents had just gotten married. It seemed late, what with their daughter in her teens. But who was he, whose father was on wife number four, to quibble about the marriages of parents? “The ceremony I just watched was also lovely,” he teased. “You made a beautiful sacrifice.”
“Thank you,” said Annie. “I threw Pharaoh’s gold on the floor over there. I think, but I’m not sure, that Renifer’s actual father and her actual boyfriend handed her over to Pharaoh to be sacrificed. Those two men enjoyed every minute of shoving Renifer underground.”
“I cannot accept such a statement,” said Strat. “Her own father? Her own beloved? I expect they were so fearful of Pharaoh that they could not move to save their darling girl.”
“Since when have you thought highly of fathers?” Annie demanded. “Your own father did the same thing to you. Or have you already forgotten being thrown down the shaft, so to speak, into the asylum?”
Strat did not like to think that the world—now, then or ever—had fathers who behaved that way. He liked to think of his own father as an unpleasant exception. He liked to think that when he became a father, he would be an excellent one. Under the circumstances, both 1899 and now, however, he did not actually expect to reach adulthood and have the privilege of being a father.
“Tell me everything,” said Annie. “Tell me about your life, and Devonny, and Harriett and Katie and what happened and where everybody is and all that.”
“First let’s get out of here,” said Strat. He got up off Queen Hetepheres’ bed and paced the tiny room. He smiled at Renifer, who was backed against the wall, holding her hand up to keep him away. “Don’t be afraid,” he said to her. “I came to save you both.”
Renifer just held both hands up like traffic signals.
“I don’t know how much time we have, Annie,” said Strat, suddenly worried. “Dawn will come soon. We have to get up out of here, but once we are out on the sand, we’ll be very visible. The soldiers won’t take kindly to finding Pharaoh’s sacrifices running around laughing.”
“How hard will it be to get out?” asked Annie, staring up at the hole.
“Easy. I had to remove some stones, which took me a while, but once the shaft was revealed, there’s a ladder. We just go up and we’re fifty feet or so from Hetepheres’ chapel. I’ll go first, and then reach down and help each of you up.”
Standing tiptoe on the bed frame, Strat was able to get his fingers around the stone rim of the ceiling hole. With the wonderful upper arm strength of boys, he hauled himself upward.
“I couldn’t do that in a thousand years,” said Annie.
“You don’t need to,” said Strat. “Hand Renifer up first.”
But Renifer would not go.
RENIFER
Renifer’s heart was still beating, which she thought amazing, considering what she had been through.
The thing was male, she could tell from the voice and shape of it.
It was foreign, she could tell from the smell and clothing of it.
It was not a ka, because a ghost could pass through stone but this creature had needed an opening, as humans did.
Renifer had pretended that it would be Pankh, coming to prove his love. For a space of time so brief the words had hardly formed in her mind, she even asked Sekhmet to dismiss her prayer for revenge. But she had been right the first time. Pankh’s love was gold, and he would come for that.
The rescuer, on the other hand, had not glanced at the treasure on the floor. It meant nothing to him. He cared about the girl. And the girl, whom Renifer had thought chained by the gold, had forgotten it also, swept away by the presence of the boy. Even now, begging, they were not thinking of gold, but of her.
They wanted to save her.
I cannot go, she said, without words, because neither of them could understand Egyptian, and because she did not think they could understand in any language. The Living God had decreed that she stay here and die. Yes, this was terror. She had felt great terror when she had stood above, and grasped what Pharaoh wanted of her. She felt greater terror in the hours of knowledge below the earth.
But now, Renifer could make the choice herself. Live or die?
Her family had betrayed Pharaoh in all ways. She, Renifer, could atone. She could die for Hetepheres.
She climbed on top of the sarcophagus, and lay down on her back, carefully adjusting her gown and folding her arms over her chest as neatly as if she had been laid out by the priests. She stared silently upward at the un-painted ceiling.
The girl of ivory begged and plucked at her and the boy called from his hole in the ceiling. Arguments in a foreign language were presented. Tears were shed. For a while, it even seemed that the boy might come back down and they would tr
y to force Renifer into the fresh air.
How many human sacrifices had to fight for the privilege of staying dead?
“Go,” said Renifer irritably. “Go!” She flicked her fingers at the girl as one might snap at a bug and hoped the girl would understand. Of course she did not, being a foreigner, and instead stamped her foot like Renifer’s little sister having a tantrum.
Renifer returned her gaze to the ceiling. She was faintly amused by what was happening. Hetepheres’ reburial had been arranged so speedily that none of the priests and courtiers on the barge and none of the soldiers at the shaft had paused to remember that an unused tomb probably had more than one open shaft. In a week or a year, some dedicated priest of Pharaoh would remember.
But would he do anything?
Renifer doubted it. Innocent men had already died because of Hetepheres’ tomb. Why be numbered among them?
A dedicated priest might even decide to check that second shaft and fill it in himself, to be sure the queen’s tomb could not be robbed yet again. But Renifer had recognized Pharaoh’s priest last night. It was the man who had held his ostrich fan in front of his face, fleeing the unfortunate event of Pen-Meru caught in the act of robbing Hetepheres’ tomb. No doubt that priest was very dedicated. To gold.
Which meant there had been at least three tomb robbers present at the reburial of Hetepheres: the priest, her father, her beloved. Poor Pharaoh, she thought. You do not know with whom You consort.
“Renifer!” said the girl of ivory fiercely, trying to drag her right off the sarcophagus.
Renifer made a universal sign: finger slicing her throat. Quit!
Muttering, the girl expended considerable effort replacing the queen’s sedan chair on top of the mattress. At first Renifer thought the girl was going to do a little tomb robbing after all, but then she understood the girl wanted to be sure that Renifer could change her mind. If Renifer stood on top of that sedan chair, she might be close enough to the ceiling to pull herself through.
Coming back to the sarcophagus, the girl kissed her own fingertips and placed those fingertips on Renifer’s forehead, drawing on her skin a sign Renifer did not recognize. A blessing, perhaps, or a salute. Renifer would never know. She did not let herself meet the girl’s eyes. In a moment of weakness, she might surrender, cry out and go with them.
Pankh was weak. She, Renifer, would be strong.
She held her breath and all her muscle and bone against weakness and while she lay rigid and unyielding, the boy lifted his girl into the upper chamber. A treasure room empty, Renifer supposed, of anything except air.
Although, in its way, air was a treasure.
The boy did not slide the stone over the ceiling opening. She would lie here knowing she could leave, and that was difficult knowledge to possess. The flow of fresh air meant that she could not die easily in gathering sleep, and would die in the dreadful pain of thirst. But they were foreigners, and did not understand these things, and she had no means to explain.
She could tell by the sounds of their feet that a ladder remained in place inside the shaft; that he went first and she second up the shaft and from thence to freedom and life.
And then they were gone.
Renifer’s tears puddled on the cold stone at her back. Then she prayed, composing a song for her own soul. How glorious and magnified was her voice in the stone chamber. She imagined her soprano rising like smoke, ascending to heaven, and knew that Pharaoh would be pleased.
She decided to die wearing Pharaoh’s gold, so that when she passed into the next world, she could present that gold to Hetepheres and be acquitted of the evil deeds of her family.
She dressed slowly, finishing just as the torch the boy had left by the ceiling hole went out.
The weight of the gold was great. She feared falling over, getting disoriented in the dark or hurting herself. She wanted to die in dignity. So, keeping a grip on the edge of the sarcophagus to steady herself, Renifer knelt to pray once more.
She asked for one thing only.
That Hetepheres’ tomb should not be robbed twice.
PANKH
Pankh pressed his back against a small obelisk, faced directly west and counted paces. He need only kick aside a few rocks, breaking the plaster that held them together, and shift a few large flat stones. According to the plans, these were not slabs requiring a team of men or ropes.
The torches on the causeway had been doused by the priests themselves to provide secrecy for the reburial of Hetepheres. Pankh felt his way through the gloom and shadows toward the entrance to the second shaft. He had almost finished the pace count when he saw on the ground a darker dark. A hole.
Somebody else had gotten to the second shaft before him. His hand flew to the hilt of his dagger. That gold is mine, he thought. I will kill them!
He was already making plans: better, perhaps, to shove the stones back over the hole, entrapping the robbers, and wait a few weeks, when both tomb robbers and girls would have died! Or perhaps he should just join the ongoing robbery. At least he would get some of the gold.
Although Pankh did not share well, and still meant to have it all.
But a hand stopped him.
Pankh whirled, ready to slash, and found himself facing two puzzled tomb police. If they were part of the robbery, they would have knifed him from behind. So they were simply doing their jobs, wondering who was wandering around in the dark, and why.
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 su
rprisingly 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.