Reflections in the Nile (38 page)

When she sat up and stretched at dawn, Cheftu had still not returned. Where the hell was he? She refilled her jug of water, locust free thanks to the expedient of covering it, and munched on the stale bread. Peeking outside, she saw the sun had risen and was already burning high and bright. She withdrew at the light and at the sight of the many locusts still gnawing away at what was left of the vegetation. She plugged her ears again. Exhausted, she stumbled over locusts to the couch, fanning the sheets to make sure they were clean, or at least locust free, and lay down, falling into a deep and dreamless sleep.

She jumped when she felt the touch on her elbow and turned over to see Cheftu's servant, Ehuru. “By the gods! What happened to you?” He was blackened with smoke, his eyes red and bleary, and he had vicious-looking burns on his hands and arms. His eyebrows had singed off, and Chloe saw for the first time that he was shaven headed, having lost his wig at some point.

He gave a sketchy reduction of his usual bow and said in a rasping voice, “We have been seeing to the Apiru all night, my lady. My Lord Cheftu was concerned you would worry and sent me to check on you.”

Chloe got up and forced him to lie down. “Rest just for a moment,” she said, overriding his protests.

“On my master's couch? It is unthinkable, my lady!”

“Ehuru, do it. It is my order.”

“My lady, I—”

“Ehuru!”

“This is for you, my lady,” he finally said, handing her a papyrus scroll before his eyes closed and his low snoring filled the room.

Stepping into the main room, she broke the Oryx nome seal and read the hieratic scrawl. “Beloved—there has been a fire, many are wounded. I am sorry to leave you but must assist all I can. I shall return to you, keep faith this will not last long.” Then, instead of his name, he had signed in fluid, flowing script, “Francois.” Chloe smiled as she traced the letters with her fingertip, the locusts forgotten momentarily as she remembered his lovemaking.

However, if her nineteenth-century-ancient Egyptian composite husband expected her to just keep the home fires burning until the men returned home, he was in for a shock. Fires were disasters. Misplaced and hungry people, disorganization, and chaos were her specialty. Cheftu would be dealing with the victims, but who would help the confused survivors?

Chloe smiled to herself. I'm the up-and-coming Red Cross—no, make that Red
Ankh
—brigade. Would Cheftu like this? No. Would Ehuru let her come back? No. Would that matter? Chloe twisted her—RaEm's—ankh necklace. No.

Actually, Ehuru wasn't nearly as difficult to badger as Chloe had expected. He didn't think the burned village was a place for “my lady,” but his eyes filled with tears when he admitted that aye, the Apiru did need help.

They left in the afternoon, a horrifying, post-Apocalyptic walk. No greenery remained anywhere. Stubs that were once trees bristled obscenely from nude, dusty soil. Locusts covered the sides of buildings, eating vines and flowers, staining everything tobacco brown. The beautiful whitewashed buildings, clean and neat even among the
rekkit,
were discolored hovels.

The sky, a brassy, alien blue, seemed harsh above the moving, living black-and-yellow earth. Chloe wept, her lips compressed to avoid the odd, flying locust.

Doggedly they kept walking, stomping and crushing the bugs, staining their feet and ankles with locust innards, like a macabre vintners’ dance. She was certain her legs were numb, for even those bugs that crawled up her dress she blithely brushed aside. Praise HatHor she had fashioned a tight, impenetrable diaper.

They arrived after
atmu,
and Chloe gasped when she saw the village. It was like an El Greco: eerie gray smoke against the night, tortured figures, and unholy, glowing flames in the distance.

Cheftu and Meneptah had set up a makeshift surgery in a tent to the side of the remaining house. Light glowed behind the smoke-stained flax curtain, and locusts moved on the outside, weighing down the fabric.

Lying on the locust-covered ground were bodies. “They are laid out in family groups,” Ehuru said, his voice flat.

Chloe was grateful for the darkness, though the white glow of bare bone and the horrifying stillness were graphic enough testimony to the deaths. The stink of burned flesh hung like a mournful cloud over the smoldering remains, and Chloe's stomach was empty before they stepped into the square.

The survivors clustered here. Those too weak to live had been given painkillers and waited to die, to meet their jealous God. Those who were relatively unscathed sat in shock, staring. The slaves had no organization: water sat in jugs a hand's reach from those dying of thirst.

Everywhere, covering everything, were locusts. They buried the dead, they poisoned the wounded, and they crawled on the living.

It was the closest thing to hell that Chloe could imagine. She felt scared and sick and wished violently that she'd never come. “The well is filled with locusts,” Ehuru said. “We cannot get to the water.”

“My lady?” The harsh voice, tear filled and vaguely feminine, halted Chloe. She scanned through the darkness, the lumps of flesh moving and still.

“D'vorah?”

The Israelite girl stepped forward, and Chloe stifled a shriek. She had been badly burned; her hair, eyebrows, and eyelashes were gone, leaving crusted dark wounds, a gruesome relief on the girl's sooty face. Her hands were bandaged, yet she smiled, her lips cracked and bleeding. “Why have you come, my lady? This is no place for you!”

Chloe bit her lip to hide her revulsion. Medicine had never been appealing—she hadn't even been able to carve open her frog in junior high biology. Even cuts and bruises on her own body seemed foreign and horrible. It had taken three tries before she'd completed her first-aid training, and even then she'd been sick afterward. However, this was D'vorah, the young woman who had been with her through the miscarriage. The one who had held her hand when Chloe had spontaneously burst into tears. It wasn't just a sick, scabbed, wounded person. It was a friend.

Tears streaming down her cheeks, Chloe hugged her gingerly, feeling D'vorah's delicate bones beneath parchment-dry skin. The girl sobbed, racking sounds that led to globs of black phlegm bubbling through her lips. Chloe was pinned between pity and horror. “How is your family?”

“Gone, my lady. All gone.”

They sank onto the locust-covered ground, the wails of mourning blending with the low drone of destruction. Chloe held the girl, listening. To save their master's fields from the locusts, for he was a good man, the Apiru had started fires, using smoke as a deterrent. The foreman was gone, but it was a typical choice to make in a locust storm.

It had worked well until the wind had suddenly shifted. Within moments the mud-brick village with its dried reed roofs had burst into flame.

“I was sleeping downstairs,” D'vorah said. “With the children—Ari, who is five, and Lina, who is eight.” She put a blistered hand to her mouth. “They never even awoke!” She coughed again, and Chloe winced at the dark blood mixed in with the black mucus.

“A popping sound woke me.” She crossed her arms on her knees, watching the locusts climb up her burned hands. “I carried the children to the window, but I could not put them through! It was too high, and I was too weak.”

D'vorah said that while she had stood there, trying to fit her smoke-dead siblings through the clerestory window, the roof had crashed in, raining molten brick and the scorched bodies of her parents and older siblings.

Meneptah had been outside and had battered the windowsill and dragged D'vorah through, but not before a jar had exploded, inflaming her hair and scorching her face.

Chloe rocked the burned girl in her arms, caressing her shoulders, picking the locusts off her burns.

“Lady RaEm?”

Chloe opened her eyes to see a black figure bent over her in the dawn. She and D'vorah were lying together, arms around each other. Chloe twisted her body, protecting the girl. “What do you want?” she snapped, half-asleep and scared.

The man stepped back hastily, crossing his chest. “It is Meneptah, my la—”

“Meneptah! I am so sorry! Please, I was asleep. Come, see D'vorah.”

The Israelite bent over the sleeping girl. His hands were clean, the only part of him not black with soot. His touch was painstakingly gentle, reverent, and when Chloe looked at his face, the expression in his eyes, she doubted D'vorah would be without a family for long. She slipped away, seeing the destruction for the first time.

It had been a much larger village than the one in which they were married. Forty, maybe fifty two-story homes had clustered around dirt tracks all leading to the center well and the square.

Nothing but the shack at the end, where Cheftu's surgery was, still stood. Charred squares and rectangles were all that remained of street after street of homes. How many people had there been? How many had survived?

The sun was already hot on Chloe's neck, and she couldn't fathom the agony for those who were burned. Shelter, water, and food were what these people needed.

She needed Ehuru. She needed some slaves. Chloe bit her lip, wanting to see Cheftu but afraid to disturb him. His work was saving lives; she could wait.

Chloe recruited five Apiru women, grieving and in need of a task, and sent them to the palace in the care of Ehuru.

While they were gone, she and three teenage boys who were hurt, but not badly, proceeded to clean out the well, taking turns going inside to sift out buckets of locusts. Chloe was convinced that at least forty thousand locusts had fallen in the well. It was horrible, the dank, clammy darkness, the crawling bugs, grabbing handfuls of piled and drowned locust bodies, and throwing them in the buckets to be hauled up.

When the well was clean enough—in other words, only thirty percent locusts—Chloe instructed the returned women to weave a linen well covering from the palace sheets.

She and her three boys left, returning with stripped tree trunks. With mud, niter, and crushed locusts they mixed a cement to fix the trees in the ground solidly. Then they stretched layer after layer of linen sheeting across the four trunks. Carefully, on linen and branch stretchers, they moved the survivors into the shade.

When one of the women fainted from hunger, Chloe knew they had to eat. Ehuru had raided the palace kitchens, returning with fat, lazy fowl, honey, and flour. Though she didn't speak the language of the women, they communicated in the international and eternal way of all culinary mavericks. The flour and eggs became soup, a kind of cross between chicken dumpling and egg drop, Chloe thought, and finally they fried locusts and served them with honey, a bittersweet treat for the Apiru.

Chloe thought the locusts’ taste was better disguised under chocolate, but there was a certain mean satisfaction in crunching the little monsters who had terrorized her for days, awake and asleep; a distinct vengeance to rip off their legs and wings before cooking them.

When the people came in from the fires in the fields, Egyptian and Apiru working side by side, Chloe saw that they had water to rinse with and drink, then soup and locusts. For three days she worked, never seeing Cheftu but instructing Ehuru to see that he took some soup. Another village on the edge of the estate had caught fire, and Cheftu was dealing with their casualties while Chloe organized their survivors. The locusts were soon the sole foodstuff, but the well was once again sweet.

They no longer fell from the sky, but they were still piled about three deep everywhere there had been grass. She crunched through them without thinking, her face set in a permanent expression of revulsion. The noise of their hammering jaws had become an audient wallpaper; she didn't hear it but knew it was there at all times.

She didn't know she'd collapsed until she woke up to face a black-stained, furious, proud
hemu neter
spouse. They had done all they could do; it was time to go home.

Thutmosis’ palace was still deserted, except for the slaves and the ever-present locusts. Chloe and Cheftu absently trod them into the floor on the way to their apartments and inside. Cheftu was gray beneath the soot but refused to sleep until he was cleaned. Chloe thought he would probably drown if he tried alone, so she led him toward the bath chamber and helped him unfasten his kilt and sandals as she sat him on the stool and skimmed the water for locusts.

“It is not fresh or warm,” she warned, and Cheftu croaked in a facsimile of laughter.

“Anything is cleaner than I am, and I have felt enough heat to last a lifetime.” He sank into the water, not caring, and Chloe began washing off the soot and grime. He was crisscrossed with scratches, and the black hair on his arms had been singed, the roots standing up like bristles. His hair was oddly burned, patches here and there, leaving small areas of his scalp pink and peeling. Chloe washed his face, noting the beard growth and trying not to irritate the angry red marks that looked like claws or fingernails. His hands were blistered from the heat; Chloe wondered how he had taken care of others when his hands were so wounded. The fingernails were cracked and torn, the small black hairs that graced his fingers torched. His eyebrows were singed, but he suffered no major damage.

Then she saw his back. He must have stood with it directly to the fire, she thought. The blisters were raised and filling with fluid, and it looked as though a branch had fallen across his shoulder, touching his upper back and part of his upper buttocks. He had fallen asleep in the cool water but jerked awake when Chloe touched him.

“What happened, Cheftu? What was it like? Talk to me,” she asked softly.

He groaned and whispered, his lungs also damaged. “People were screaming, running with their bodies on fire, seeking some relief. The houses went up in moments, the smoke killing those still asleep.” He sighed heavily. “I arrived too late to do anything. Meneptah and his mother had been staying with family. It is a boon of the god that they were awake and in the square when they saw the wind change and the sparks fly.” He ran a hand over his face. “As you saw, most of the people who survived have lost their hah, or eyebrows, and have blistering burns. Those who were badly burned have died, which is merciful. We could do nothing for them.”