The Time Travelers, Volume 2 (38 page)

So Pharaoh had known of the second shaft; known its precise location and that it was empty. But his men had certainly not known that the stone would be moved away and the shaft gaping open, down to where the living sacrifice probably still lived. Pankh laughed grimly to himself as they swore oaths not to tell Pharaoh. His retreat was covered by the racket of rocks they threw down as quickly as they could, to keep the spirit of the sacrifice from reaching out toward their bare feet and cursing their lives.

And there, beyond, were the two foreigners, on the edge of the desert, climbing the cliff. Nobody went toward the desert, where there was no water, no shelter and no hope. People went toward the Nile. Had there been time already to bury the gold up on that cliff? Were they carrying it with them? Or did they expect to meet others with the gold at that spot?

Pankh would get the gold before he threw them off the cliff. No need to worry about bodies. Tomb police didn’t bother with this piece of sand. Jackals did.

But now, standing before them, Pankh felt the rage of
frustration working through his chest. They had no gold with them. But they certainly knew where it was; the girl had removed it and placed it somewhere. “Gold,” said Pankh clearly. He drew bracelets around his arms and a necklace around his throat and raised his eyebrows.

The foreign boy and girl were puzzled.

“Gold!” he shouted, hating them for not understanding a civilized language. “Where is the gold?”

Their eyes flew open and their jaws dropped. They stared as if seeing somebody rise from the dead.

“The gold,” he spat. “Where is the gold?”

“I have the gold,” said Renifer, behind him.

Pankh whirled.

Renifer stood on the very edge of the cliff. She was so weighted down with that beautiful gold he did not know how she could possibly have scrambled up here. Behind her was nothing but air.

Pankh recovered quickly. “How beautiful you are, my beloved,” he whispered. “How wonderful that you survived Pharaoh’s evil trick. How glad I am to see you in the land of the living.”

Renifer said nothing. He could not see her breathe or blink. She did not look as if she belonged to the land of the living. Her face was as expressionless as if she had died.

Pankh had his back to the foreign man. He was vulnerable. And yet, he felt in some way that the danger came from Renifer herself. “Come, my beloved. You will hide in my house, lest Pharaoh learn that you survived.
But what pleasure we will have in being together, you and I.”

Renifer said nothing.

Pankh took a few steps away, hoping Renifer would step toward him. The rims of this kind of cliff frequently caved in, and her weight was putting her in danger. Although of course he could simply retrieve the gold from her corpse. “Renifer, it wasn’t my fault. I didn’t intend for Pharaoh to sacrifice you. Who could have dreamed that such an idea would enter the mind of a civilized Egyptian? Come to me, my beloved.”

Renifer said nothing.

She had not an inch between herself and falling. He extended his hand. But she seemed not to see it. “Your father and I were forced to agree with Pharaoh. My beloved, let us leave these strangers to their own devices. Let us go home and rejoice that you live.”

She was still and unearthly in her gold. How
had
she gotten up the steep and difficult slope? Had she been lifted? By what power?

The thin chain of the amulet of Sekhmet seemed to cut his neck.

By now some laborer or priest or guard would have noticed this strange scene playing out on the distant hill. Somebody would investigate. Pankh could not permit Renifer to delay any longer. They would be out of time. “Renifer, come let your beloved Pankh embrace you.”

Renifer removed one arm piece. Its gold was over an inch thick. He could not take his eyes off it. Underhanded, she threw the bracelet. The heavy circle sailed
in a great arc out beyond the cliff and then vanished in a long curving silent fall.

The sand below was soft. The heavy gold would dig its own hole, the sand would close over it and Pankh would never find it. “No, no, my beloved!” protested Pankh. “You and I will need that gold in our marriage. Think what it will cost to protect you for all time from the wrath of Pharaoh.”

Renifer threw a second bracelet into the air.

“Beloved,” he said coaxingly, inching toward her.

She almost smiled. She almost softened. She was almost his. When she held out her arms, Pankh acted swiftly, grabbing for those gold-laden wrists, but Renifer leaned back over the cliff edge, planning to fall, still willing to die for Pharaoh.

Pankh’s velocity was great. He could not stop himself. Together they would hurtle over the cliff and hundreds of feet down to their deaths. He tried to brace himself against her; let her fall while he saved himself.

But the arm of the foreign male, in its loathsome jacket of heavy cloth, pulled Renifer to safety while Pankh spun out into the air and was lost.

The amulet flew up in Pankh’s face, and the last thing he saw before death was the image of Sekhmet, goddess of revenge.

R
enifer stood within the embrace of the foreign male.

She did not need to follow their language to know what they were asking. Fascinated, amazed, they were crying—how did you get here? how did you know? are you all right? we’re so glad to see you!

Had the gods sent these strangers to save Renifer—or had she been sent to save them? “I was kneeling beside the sarcophagus while I prayed,” she explained, as if they had been given Egyptian along with life. “Pankh looked into the tomb. He did not see me. He had eyes only for gold and thought the tomb empty. He swore, yet again defiling Hetepheres. He damned her for not making her gold available to him. He spat, promising to kill you, O girl of ivory.”

The girl had been entrusted to Renifer’s care. Handed to Renifer, as it were, in the midst of Pharaoh’s papyrus swamp. Renifer could not let Pankh kill the girl of ivory. She had almost literally been on Pankh’s heels as he ascended the ladder out of Hetepheres’ tomb, too busy muttering to himself and uttering threats to look
back. When Pankh hid behind a mastaba, she walked behind a chapel, and then Pharaoh’s crew arrived.

For a few moments, she stared at them, as they filled in forever the shaft out of which she had just escaped. She heard their oaths to say nothing to Pharaoh and understood their terror.

Heavy lay the gold on her body. She followed Pankh as he chased the girl of ivory and the foreign male. There was a perfectly fine path up the cliff, but the foreigners and Pankh hadn’t seen it, so they struggled up the worst and most crumbling side. Renifer walked slowly along the path. The workers in the village saw her—a goddess, as it were, clothed in gold, going back to her home in the cliffs, and they fell on their faces in the sand and let her pass.

Beyond the Pyramids, the Nile sparkled under the sun. Renifer could see the city of Memphis, her beloved and beautiful home. She could see, from here, the entire world.

And many of its inhabitants, running in her direction.

Pankh had not cried out, but witnesses had. Tourists and guides, vendors of carved wooden hippos or hot spicy sausages—all had shouted to the tomb police that somebody had fallen. A crowd was gathering at the foot of the cliff, exclaiming over Pankh’s body. He was an officer of Pharaoh, wearing his uniform. There was no hope of explaining these extraordinary events.

Foreigners would be held responsible.

Nobody would believe any version of Pankh’s death except the worst: that he had been pushed to his death
by the foreign male. Renifer could see all too clearly what was going to happen now. The boy, who had come to save the girl of ivory and who had just now saved Renifer herself, would be accused of murder, and pay the ultimate price.

The crowd began pointing and shouting, and Renifer knew what they were shouting for. The foreign male.

The girl of ivory turned even more pale, if that were possible, and she and the boy exchanged frightened looks. They had reason to be frightened.

“Go into the desert,” said Renifer, pointing at the massive hills in the west. The Nile was truly cupped in a valley, and the sides of the cup were high and brutal. No civilized person went west of the Nile.

“Sekhmet saved me,” she said quietly, “and you who protected me will be given protection. Be not afraid. I will prevent the mob from reaching you.”

Even now, the boy worried more about Renifer than himself. He wanted her to come too.

She shook her head. “Go, and go swiftly,” she said, giving him a gentle push in the right direction.

Coming out of the west, borne on a high wind, was a cloud of sand. It stood up vertically, like an approaching god. The boy and girl walked toward it, while the girl of ivory called farewell, waving, and repeating her accented version of Renifer’s name.

How powerful were the gods. Sekhmet had answered every one of Renifer’s prayers: Hetepheres’ tomb would not be robbed twice, the queen was avenged and Pankh had suffered.

The terror and joy of dying for Pharaoh disappeared. Renifer was astonished and glad to be alive.

She followed the path back down, arriving at the bottom exactly when the soldiers did. They froze at the sight of her.

Renifer extended her long slender arms and stood under the blazing sun, all gold and white, all shimmer and ghost. She sang the chants of the dead, her soprano rising and shivering, curling around the tops of temples as she walked. She flung her head back and addressed the sky and the hidden stars. She called upon Hetepheres to be with her, and Sekhmet to avenge her. She called upon jackals and queens, upon crocodiles and princesses.

Long before she finished her song, the tourists had scurried back to the temples and the guards had fled to the safety of their headquarters. Tomb robbers they would fight. Ghosts and
ka
s would be left to their own devices.

Renifer lowered her arms. They trembled from the weight of the gold.

The tall thin windstorm spread and deepened, until it sailed like a ship over the desert. It flung sand over the half-carved Sphinx, hiding an entire paw. It flung sand over tourists too foolish to shelter in a mausoleum. It smothered the pots of flowers and put out the fires of incense.

Renifer ignored the sand. It would wrap her forever or let her go. She walked on, accepting the will of her gods.

S
trat had known they would not die in the tomb of Hetepheres, because when it was uncovered in 1899, it contained no bones. But out here, in the vicious true desert, the one that reached all the way to the Atlantic Ocean, here they could die. No one would know, either. Not in Khufu’s time, not in Strat’s and not in Annie’s.

The footing was terrible.

From a great distance, he had been able to make out tiny paths twisting up those towering cliffs, probably followed by wild goats and greedy robbers. Up close, there were a hundred possible ledges or routes, and no way to tell which actually went somewhere. But in his heart, Strat knew that nothing out here went somewhere. They were headed toward nothing. No town, no oasis, no road, no water.

The sandstorm was no longer a single column. It now covered an entire width of desert. Like a blustery sheet of sand or a hurricane all in a row, its hope was to fill lungs, blind eyes, deafen ears, bury bones.

They came to a bluff, and had to scramble up it, but
their feet sank. They circled it, tripping and stumbling on rocks and rubble. They plunged once more into sand; sand; sand. The wind hurled sand into Annie’s eyes, and she cried out, and clung to Strat, wiping at her eyes with her free hand. “It will kill us,” she shouted. “We have to go back!”

But they had nothing to go back to. When Strat turned, even the Pyramid of Pharaoh had been obliterated. “Tuck your face beneath my shirt, Annie,” he ordered her, “and we will grip each other tightly and hope not to be torn apart by the strength of the wind.”

They would be buried where they stood. For a moment he bowed his head over Annie’s grit-filled black hair and accepted his defeat. But only for a moment. “No!” he shouted. “I will not be beaten again!”

Strat recognized this shred of his father in him: the refusal to admit defeat. Well, then he had one good thing from Hiram Stratton, Sr., and he would take it.

“Annie,” he commanded, “step through Time.”

The pain in his heart was so fierce he could not tell whether it was dying of sorrow or of sand. “You go first, Annie. I cannot live a second time in fear that I abandoned you or that you suffered without me. Go. Quickly.”

But just as Renifer had refused to leave her tomb, so Annie refused to leave hers. “No, Strat. I love you. Now when Time has finally brought us together, you think I’m leaving? Forget it! Whatever happens, it will happen to both of us.”

“Annie, all that can happen to us is death. We have no water, we have no transportation, you don’t even have shoes. We cannot live here, only die here. We must cross through Time again.”

“But Time won’t let us go together and I want to be together. When this storm ends, we’ll steal a camel,” said Annie. “We’ll be our own little wagon train to Morocco. Then we’ll build a boat and row across the Atlantic to New York. Although there won’t be much around in Manhattan, forty-five hundred years ago.” She giggled.

“Stop playing games,” said Strat, although this was why he adored her. She could always laugh. Perhaps it was her century; a time when girls seemed to have so much more than the girls in his time. “Anyway, there are no camels in ancient Egypt. If you want to steal a camel, you have to come to 1899 with me.”

He expected to hear one of her peculiar words, from the vocabulary of her amazing decade: Okay or Deal.

But Annie’s hair swirled across his face in a black cloud, her eyes opened wide, and screaming, she filtered away from him. It was as quick as the death of Pankh. She was in his arms and then his arms were empty.

Strat tried to follow her, stumbling through the sand, falling over rocks, tumbling off the cliff they had so desperately climbed. He felt himself surrounded by all the troops of Pharaoh, reaching and grasping, and then in the sand, he was alone again, retching and gasping. He eluded them, neither dying nor living, just staggering on, calling her name.