Living in Threes (15 page)

The king bent over her daughter. The child still breathed, but the rattle was louder. Her face was grey and sunken, as if death had already taken her.

There were no hymns left to sing that would not seem to mock the king’s grief. It hardly mattered. If the gods were listening, none was inclined to answer.

The sun hung just above the wall. A breath of wind played through the garden, ruffling the fronds of the palms and making the flowers sway. Meritre breathed in their sweetness.

She braced for another vision, but nothing came to her except fragments that made no sense: a white animal like a huge dog or an impossibly strange and gigantic gazelle; a broken wall beneath a sky full of stars; a shadow with wings.

The king’s sorcerers raised their smokes and stinks and chanted their spells. With a small but potent shock, Meritre recognized the one she had been going to try with Djehuti.

It was not nearly as impressive as she had hoped. Her hand rose to the amulet that hung around her neck. For an instant it felt strange, as if it had come alive. But when she touched it, it was the same as always.

The princess’ breathing stopped. So, for a long count of heartbeats, did the wind.

One of the maids began to wail. The others took up the chorus, with the priests and sorcerers, and even a handful of the temple singers.

Meritre had no voice left. Nor, it seemed, did Aweret, or the king.

Aweret’s knees gave way. Meritre went down with her to the smooth warmth of the paving. Aweret’s eyes were open; she was conscious, but the strength had run out of her.

No one cared for one commoner among the silenced chorus. There was water in a jar near enough for Meritre to reach, with a dipper beside it. Probably she should beg someone’s leave, but who would listen?

She dipped a ladleful and coaxed it into Aweret. It seemed to help a little. Aweret sighed and leaned her head against Meritre’s shoulder.

Everyone else was lost to reason. People ran without sense or direction, shrilling and keening.

The king did nothing to stop or direct them. She sat on her stool with the princess’ hand still in hers. For her, the world had stopped.

The king was a god and Meritre most surely was not, but that deep and terrible stillness she did understand. That was death, which was stronger than gods.

The sun set on them all, leaving them in twilight rent with weeping, as word of the plague’s last victim spread through the city. The singers of Amon stayed in the garden, hungry and thirsty, until a servant who was both wise and kind brought them bread and beer and a basket of dates.

Meritre made sure that her mother had a fair share. Aweret ate slowly and without appetite, but she was wise enough to know that she had to keep herself and the baby fed.

At last one of the priests found the presence of mind to dismiss the singers. They left gratefully, making their way through a palace in uproar and a city that seemed unlikely to sleep tonight.

When hundreds of common people and even nobles died, there had been mourning enough. Now that the king’s heir was dead, the world’s foundations were shaken. The best Meritre could think of to do was get her mother home, hope Father and the boys had managed to feed themselves, and then hope any of them could manage to rest.

It was slow going. Torches blazed on roofs and in doorways. The streets were full of people who had let go all restraint. All the grief, all the anger and sorrow that the plague had brought, burst out on this terrible night.

Meritre clung to the edges as much as she could, shielded Aweret with her body and held firm against jostling and outright blows. Someone’s elbow caught her lip and split it; before she was halfway home, she was covered in lesser bruises. But Aweret was safe, and that was all that mattered.

The market near their house had closed before sunset, but it was full of people. The air reeked of beer. Meritre set her teeth, held tight to Aweret, and dived into the crowd.

She rocked like a boat in a flood. Her mother’s arms were firm around her, as if somehow she had found new strength. It would not last, but it might get them through this last and worst ordeal before they were safe inside their own walls.

A mob of men lurched past in a haze of beer. They knocked Meritre half off her feet and sent her staggering against a shuttered booth. Someone else was there already; he grunted as Meritre collided with him, and staggered back but did not fall.

She looked up startled in the fitful torchlight, into Djehuti’s face. He looked less surprised than she: he must have seen her coming. “You waited all this time?” she said, forgetting for an instant that her mother was between them.

“It seemed safer than trying to leave,” he said. He sounded the same as always, calm and unruffled, though his cheek was dark with bruising and his kilt was torn.

“Come home with us,” Aweret said, too tired or too wise to ask questions. “The sooner we’re all in the house, the better we’ll be.”

Meritre agreed with that wholeheartedly. So did Djehuti. With Aweret between them, doubly safe now, they braved the torrent of people for one last time.

Chapter 15

Dad stayed longer than I thought he would. A week after he showed up at Luxor House, he was still in town. He and Kelly were doing tours of all the greatest hits. On Friday, which is the Muslim Sunday so everyone has the day off, Aunt Jessie got us into King Tut’s tomb and we got to stay for as long as the heat would let us.

It wasn’t till after that that he and Kelly made it to Aunt Jessie’s dig. I was still on shard-and-scarab duty. I was getting good at it, maybe too good: nobody would want me down in the trenches, where things were getting frustrating and Aunt Jessie was about to give up on the latest tunnel and try somewhere else.

I kept trying to find ways to get through to Meru or Meritre when I wanted to, and not just at random. Nothing worked. I wasn’t dreaming about them, either, but small things kept me from thinking I’d imagined the whole thing. I’d smell beer or feel the starwing close by, or look up and for a split second the daylight sky would be full of stars.

They were still there, just not on top. When I did dream, I’d be riding Bonnie through the palmettos to the river, or counting turtle eggs while the moon shone on the ocean. Sometimes I was alone. More often, especially if I’d been Skyping or texting before I went to sleep, the usuals were with me.

Those were peaceful dreams, full of ordinary and comfortable and quietly wonderful things; I’d wake happy. Then during the days I was so busy just being in Egypt that I hardly had time to think about anything else.

That was deliberate. I’d been hearing from everybody as often as I could get a phone signal, and everybody told me everything, especially about Bonnie. But there was never much from Mom. A one-liner once or twice a day, saying thanks for the ten-screen epic I’d sent her, and a couple of texts, that was it. No Skype.

She must be busy. Summer in Florida is crazy season; the heat drives people nuts, then they start shooting at each other. Her court docket would be running over.

Then there was the time difference. She probably meant to call, but kept forgetting how late or how early it would be here.

One of these days she’d get around to sending me her own epic. In the meantime I wasn’t going to panic. If anything awful happened, Aunt Jessie would tell me. Wouldn’t she?

The day Dad came to the site, I finished labeling my box of shards before the heat got too ridiculous. Gwyn saw me twitching; she smiled and said, “Go on. I’m almost done, too.”

I didn’t wait for her to change her mind. I grabbed my water bottle and sunglasses and dived out of the tent.

After the first shock, the heat really wasn’t bad. It helped to slow down, chart a path from shade to shade, and keep sipping from the bottle.

The crew was working in the tunnel that slanted down off the side of the temple. Aunt Jessie had been playing a hunch, and arguing with her students over it. They said there couldn’t be a tomb that close or that obvious. Aunt Jessie kept saying, “Have you ever heard of hiding in plain sight?”

The digging had gone down a good hundred yards, and so far all they were finding was sand, rubble, and a lot of nothing. The first twenty yards or so were painted from floor to ceiling with hieroglyphs, but then those stopped and there was just bare brick, not even covered with plaster.

If they didn’t find something today that would encourage them to keep on, they were going to give up and go back to one of the other tunnels. They might even try somewhere new—Hamid had a theory about a cave he’d found up under the ridge.

Things were tense on the site this morning. Dad and Kelly showing up didn’t help much. Aunt Jessie left the tunnel to show them around the parts of the temple that were already excavated.

I wasn’t supposed to go in the tunnel without someone to babysit, but everybody was either down there, in one of the tents doing the same sorts of things Gwyn and I did, or playing tour guide. I sneaked down a little ways, not so far I needed the lights that were strung up along the ceiling, but far enough that the light outside barely made it. I could hear voices farther down, and scraping and pounding. They must have hit another wall of rubble.

I stopped because I felt weird all of a sudden: not sick exactly, or scared, but not normal, either. It felt like something soft and cold walking down my spine.

The wall paintings stopped just past where I was standing. This was where they’d found the scarab, more or less.

I still had it, wrapped in its napkin; I kept it in my pocket every day and slept with it under my pillow at night. It didn’t do anything magical. When I rubbed it or concentrated on it till I gave myself a headache, nothing ever happened.

I couldn’t bring myself to sneak it back where it belonged, though guilt dug like a splinter under my skin. My hand was in my pocket now, curled around it, the way it kept doing if I didn’t pay attention.

I knelt down and touched the floor with my other hand, and saw the scarab lying there, where it must have rolled down the slight but obvious slope.

The eyes that saw it weren’t mine, and neither was the time they lived in. I knew that because when I looked up, the paintings on the walls were bright and new.

They told a story of a king who loved her daughter as much as any mother had ever loved a child. Then the gods demanded a sacrifice, and the king had this temple built, raising it in seventy days while the princess’ body lay in its vat, being preserved for eternity.

It wasn’t an enormous feat like building Pyramids, but for people without wheels or machines to shape those columns and carve those stones and paint those walls in just over two months, I thought it was impressive. The paint was still damp in the corners when Meritre was there, and in one place it had dripped a little, so the bird with the human head looked as if it was winking at her.

I bent toward that part of the wall. It was worn and faded, but not so much that I couldn’t see where the line of black paint had gone a bit crooked.

My skin was all goose-bumpy. Somehow, more than anything else, this made it real. Meritre had been here, in this exact place.

Four thousand years. For most people I know, four years is forever. Before you were born? It might as well be the beginning of the universe.

It was too much. I had to get out of there. I scrambled up and out, toward the line of canvas roofs where all the modern people were.

I heard Aunt Jessie’s voice around the corner, inside the main part of the temple. She must be showing Dad the statue they’d dug up, that had them all excited: it showed the king dressed like a woman but wearing the crown and the beard like every other pharaoh.

Then I heard Dad say, “We have to tell her.”

“Janet doesn’t want that,” Aunt Jessie said. She sounded flat, the way I did to myself when I was trying not to scream at somebody. “She wants Meredith to enjoy her time here, and not have to worry.”

“She already is worried,” Dad said. “She’s bottling it up, but it’s obvious to me. Don’t you think she’d rather know what’s going on than get slammed with it as soon as she gets off the plane?”