Hot Times in Magma City, 1990-95 Read online

  Now he was plainly wavering again, back the other way.

  “Well—”

  “I know it’s a temptation, wanting to see your own time again. Don’t you think I’ve felt it too, now and then? But it’s not worth it. Giving up all this.”

  “Well—”

  “Think about it.”

  He looked into the distance. The faint warm breeze brought the sound of a harp, some temple slave playing to amuse the elder priests in the Amon temple.

  “Think.”

  “Yes.”

  She watched him. She saw the knots come and go in his craggy face. He was adding up the columns in that precise mathematical way of his, tallying the profits and the losses.

  “Well?” she said.

  “All right,” he told her. He sounded almost relieved. “Forget what I’ve been saying. We stay in Egypt. Both of us.”

  “You’re sure of that?”

  “Yes. Yes.”

  “Good,” she said. She grinned at him and winked. “And now we ought to go back in there and finish talking to him.”

  He nodded. “Yes. We do.”

  “Do we understand each other completely now, Roger?”

  “Yes. Yes.”

  She gave him a long cool look. “Let’s go back inside, then, and get it over with.”

  “Not there,” Lehman said. “Not in that miserable musty storeroom. It’s too depressing down in a hole like that. Let’s take him over to my chambers in the observatory, at least. It’ll be a little more civilized, talking to him over there.”

  “If you want to.”

  “I think we should,” Lehman said.

  NINE

  This part of the Karnak complex that they had brought him to was new to him, a round two-story domed building behind the main temple. Since Roger Lehman’s priestly specialty was supposed to be astronomy, the building was surely his observatory, Davis thought. So far as he could recall there had been no trace of any such structure in the modern-day Karnak ruins that he had visited on the orientation trip. Perhaps it had been demolished during the tremendous religious upheavals that were due to hit Egypt after Amenhotep III died.

  “How about a little wine?” Lehman asked, with unconvincing geniality. “This is good stuff, from the royal vineyards in the Delta. The very best.”

  “You must have good connections at the court,” Davis said.

  “The very best,” said Lehman.

  From a cupboard in the wall he drew forth three alabaster drinking-cups embellished elaborately with hieroglyphics and a tall graceful terra-cotta amphora with two small handles and a pointed base. A clay stopper plugged its narrow mouth. As he broke it he said, “Elaine? Wine?”

  “Please.”

  Davis took a sip, and then a deeper draught. The wine was sweet and thick, with a raisiny underflavor. Not bad, really. And the cup he was drinking out of was a little masterpiece, museum quality. The room itself, Lehman’s private priestly chamber, was splendidly furnished, the walls magnificently covered with dark, vividly realistic murals of gods and demons and stars. It had a look of quiet luxury. Sandburg and Lehman had done all right for themselves in Egypt, especially considering that they had started with absolutely nothing only fifteen years ago, worse off than slaves, having no identities, not even knowing how to speak the language. Lehman seemed to have made himself into an important figure in the scientific establishment, such as it was. And she a high priestess and the mistress of the heir to the throne, no less. Both of them obviously wealthy, powerful, well connected. He had felt sorry for them a year ago when he first had heard the story of their being lost in time, far from the Imperial Rome that had been their intended destination, marooned in some alien hostile place where they were doubtlessly eking out miserable, difficult lives. He couldn’t have been more wrong about that. They had proved to be paragons of adaptability. But of course they were Service personnel, trained to handle themselves satisfactorily under all sorts of unfamiliar and bewildering conditions.

  Lehman turned to the cupboard again. This time he took from it a lovely little game-board, ebony inlaid with golden hieroglyphic inscriptions. Thirty gleaming squares of ivory veneer were set into it, arranged in three rows of ten, each square separated from its neighbors by ebony strips. From a box at its base he withdrew a pair of odd curving dice and a handful of pawn-shaped gaming-pieces made of some polished blue stone.

  “You know what this is?” he asked.

  “A senet-board?” Davis said at once.

  “They really gave you a good briefing.”

  “The works. But I’ve always been interested in Egypt. I made special studies on my own.”

  “You don’t know how to play, though, do you?”

  “Senet? No. The rules are lost.”

  “Not here they aren’t. Everyone plays it. Soldiers, slaves, construction workers, whores. The king plays it very well. So does the royal astronomer.”

  From a corner of the room Sandburg said, “Roger, why don’t you get down to business?”

  “Please, Elaine,” Lehman said.

  Calmly he arranged the pieces on the game-board.

  “It even figures in the Book of the Dead, you know. Spell 17: the dead man plays senet with an invisible adversary, and has to win the game in order to continue his passage safely through the Netherworld.”

  “I know,” said Davis. “But I’m not dead, and this isn’t the Netherworld. Ms. Sandburg is right. If there’s business for us to get down to, let’s get down to it.”

  “Let me show you the rules of the game first, at least. We arrange the pieces like this. And then—a roll of the dice to determine who the challenger is and who’s the defender—”

  “Roger,” Sandburg said.

  “There. You challenge. I defend. Now, we start at this end of the board—”

  “Roger.”

  Lehman smiled. “Well then. Senet afterward, perhaps.”

  He poured more wine into Davis’ cup and his own and leaned forward across the table, bringing his face uncomfortably close. Davis saw what fifteen years of the Egyptian sun had done to Lehman’s skin: he was as dry as a mummy, his skin drumhead-tight over his bones.

  He said, “About this rescue proposal of yours, Davis. It was very kind of you to take the leap all the way back here for the sake of locating us. And marvelous luck that you found us at all. But I have to tell you: it’s no go.”

  “What?”

  “We’re staying here, Elaine and I.”

  Staying?

  Davis stared. Yes, yes, of course. It all fit together now, their odd fidgety elusiveness; her failure to disclose herself to him the first day, when she had heard him babbling deliriously in English; her side-tracking of him to the City of the Dead; her clapping him in that dungeon-like storeroom once she finally had blurted out the truth about herself. They were renegades. They were deserters. So dumb of him to have failed to see it.

  He could hear Charlie Farhad’s words echoing in his mind.

  The past’s a weird place. It can make you pretty weird yourself if you stay in it long enough.

  Farhad hadn’t been willing to go looking for them.

  I’m not so sure I want to find out what they’ve turned into, Farhad had said.

  Yes.

  “You like it here that much?” Davis asked, after a bit.

  “We’ve settled in,” Elaine Sandburg said from across the room. “We have our niches here.”

  “We’re Egyptians now,” said Lehman. “Very highly placed court figures leading very pleasant lives.”

  “So I see. But still, to turn your back forever on your own era, your own world—”

  “We’ve been here a long time,” Lehman said. “To you we’ve only been missing a year or so. But we’ve lived a third of our lives here. Egypt’s a real place to us. It’s fantastic, it’s bizarre, it’s full of magic and mumbo-jumbo that doesn’t make the slightest bit of sense to modern-day people. But it’s beginning to make sense to us.”

&nb
sp; “Osiris? Thoth? Gods with the heads of birds and beetles and goats? They make sense to you?”

  “In a larger sense. A metaphorical sense. You want more wine, Davis?”

  “Yes. I think I do.”

  He drank more deeply this time.

  “So this place is real to you and Home Era isn’t?” he asked.

  Lehman smiled. “I won’t deny that Elaine and I feel a certain pull toward Home Era. Certainly I do. I suppose I still have family there, friends, people who remember me, who would be happy to see me again. I have to admit that when you first showed up I felt a powerful temptation to go back there with you when the jump field comes to get you. What is it, a thirty-day mission, you said?”

  “Thirty, yes.”

  “But the moment of temptation passed. I worked my way through it. We’re not going to go. The decision is final.”

  “That’s a hell of a thing. Desertion, in fact. Completely against all the rules.”

  “It is, isn’t it? But it’s what we want. We’re sorry about the rules. We didn’t ask to come here, or expect it or want it. But somehow we did, and we made our own way upward. Clawed our way. You think working in the mummy factory is bad? You ought to know some of the things Elaine and I had to do. But we put new lives together for ourselves, against all the odds. Damned fine new lives, as a matter of fact. And now we want to keep them.”

  “The Time Service is a damned fine life too.”

  “Screw the Time Service,” Lehman said. He wasn’t smiling now. “What did the Service ever do for us except dump us fifteen hundred years from where we were hoping to go?” His long skeletal fingers toyed with the pieces on the senet-board. He fondled them a moment; then, in a single swift motion, he swept them brusquely off the board and into their box. “That’s it,” he said. “That’s what we had to tell you. Your kind offer is refused with thanks. No deal. No rescue. That’s the whole story. Please don’t try to hassle us about it.”

  Davis looked at them in disbelief.

  “I wouldn’t dream of it,” he said. “Stay here, if that’s what your choice is. I can’t force you to do anything you aren’t willing to do.”

  “Thank you.”

  Davis helped himself to a little more of Lehman’s wine.

  They were both watching him in a strange way. There was something more, he realized.

  “Well, what happens next?” he asked. “Now do you take me back to that beautiful little room under Ms. Sandburg’s temple so I can get a little sleep? Or am I supposed to catch the night ferry over to the City of the Dead, so that I can learn a little more about how to make mummies before my time in Egypt runs out?”

  “Don’t you understand?” Sandburg said.

  “Understand what?”

  “Your time in Egypt isn’t going to run out. You’re staying here too, for keeps. We can’t possibly let you go back. You mean to say you haven’t figured that out?”

  TEN

  At least this time they had given him a room that was above ground-level, instead of returning him to the cheerless subterranean hole they had stashed him in before. He actually had a window of sorts—a rectangular slot, about fifteen feet high up in the wall, which admitted a long shaft of dusty light for five or six hours every day. He could hear the occasional twitterings of birds outside and now and then the distant chanting of priests. And, since the Egyptians evidently hated to leave so much as a square inch of any stone surface uncovered by incredible artistic masterpieces, there were superbly done bas-reliefs of gods on the walls of his cell to give him something to look at: good old ibis-headed Thoth aloofly accepting an offering of fruit and loaves of bread from some worshipful king, and the crocodile-faced god Sobek on the opposite wall holding a pleasant conversation with winged Isis while Osiris in his mummy-wrappings looked on benignly. Three times a day someone opened a little window in the door and passed a tray of food through to him. It wasn’t bad food. They gave him a mug of beer or wine at least once every day. There could be worse places to be imprisoned.

  This was the fourteenth day of the thirty. He was still keeping meticulous count.

  Through the niche in the wall came the sound of singing voices, high-pitched, eerily meeting in harmonies that made his ears ache:

  O my Sister, says Isis to Nepthys,

  Here is our brother

  Let us raise up his head

  Let us join his sundered bones

  Let us restore his limbs to his body

  O Sister, come, let us make an end to all his sorrow.

  He had no idea where he was, because they had brought him here in the middle of the night, but he assumed that he must be in one of the innumerable outbuildings of the Karnak Temple complex. What Sandburg and Lehman intended, he assumed, was to keep him bottled up in here until the thirtieth day had passed and the jump field had come and gone in the alleyway near Luxor Temple. After that they would be safe, since he’d have no way of getting back to Home Era and letting the authorities know where and in what year the two missing renegades were hiding out. So they could afford to let him go free, then: stranded in time just like them, forever cut off from any chance of making his return journey, one more unsolved and probably unsolvable mystery of the Time Service.

  Thinking about that made his temples pound and his chest ache. Trapped? Stranded here forever?

  Over and over again he tried to understand where he had made his critical mistake. Maybe it had been to reveal the nature of his mission to the supposed priestess Nefret before he knew that she was Sandburg and Sandburg was dangerous. But she had already known the nature of his mission, because he evidently had been muttering in English during that time of delirium. So she was always a step ahead of him, or maybe two or three.

  If he had been able to recognize Nefret as being Elaine Sandburg, either the first time when she was taking care of him, or a week later when he had walked back into her grasp, so that he could have been on his guard against—

  No, that wouldn’t have made any difference either. He hadn’t had any reason to expect treachery from her. He had come here to rescue her, after all; why would she greet him with anything other than gratitude?

  That was his mistake, he saw. Failing to anticipate that Sandburg and Lehman were deserters who didn’t want to be rescued. Why hadn’t anyone warned him of that? They had simply sent him off to Thebes and let him blithely walk right into the clutches of two people who had every reason to prevent him from returning to Home Era with news of their whereabouts and whenabouts.

  He heard a sound outside the door. Someone scrabbling around out there, fooling with the bolt.

  He felt a foolish surge of hope.

  “Eyaseyab? Is that you?”

  Yesterday, when his evening food-tray had arrived, he had been waiting by the window in the door. “Tell the slave-girl Eyaseyab I’m here,” he had said through the tiny opening. “Tell her her friend Edward-Davis needs help.” A desperate grasping at straws, sure. But what else was there? He had to escape from this room. He didn’t want to spend the rest of his life in ancient Egypt. Egypt was remarkable, yes, Egypt was astounding, he’d never deny that; but as a member of the Service he had the whole range of human history open to him, and prehistory too, for that matter, and to have that snatched away from him by these two, to be sentenced to a lifetime in the land of the Pharaohs—

  The bolt slid back.

  “Eyaseyab?”

  He imagined her bribing his guards with jewels stolen from Nefret’s bedchamber, with amphoras of royal wine, promises of wild nights of love, anything—anything, so long as she was able to let him out of here. And then she and that one-eyed brother of hers, maybe, would help him make his way across the river to the City of the Dead, where he could probably hide out safely in that maze of tiny streets until the thirtieth day. Then he could slip aboard the ferry again, entering Thebes proper, finding his alleyway with the graffito and the palm tree, waiting for the shimmering rainbow of the jump field to appear. And he’d get himself cle
ar of this place. To hell with Sandburg and Lehman: let them stay if that was what they wanted to do. He’d report what had happened—he was under no obligation to cover for them; if anything quite the contrary—and then it was up to the Service. They could send someone else to bring them back. The defection would be expunged; the unauthorized intrusion into the domain of the past would be undone.

  If only. If.

  Now the door was opening. The dim smoky light of a little oil lamp came sputtering through from the hallway, just enough illumination to allow him to see that the veiled figure of a woman was entering his room.

  Not Eyaseyab, no. Too tall, too slender.

  It was Sandburg. “You?” he said, astonished. “What the hell are you doing—”

  “Shh. And don’t get any funny ideas. The guards are right outside and they’ll be in here in two seconds if they hear anything they don’t like.”

  She set her lamp down on the floor and came toward him. Close enough to grab, he thought. She didn’t seem to be carrying a weapon. He could twist one of her arms up behind her back and put his hand on her throat and tell her that unless she issued an order to have him released and gave him a safe-conduct out of this building he would strangle her.

  “Don’t,” she said. “Whatever you’re thinking, don’t even toy with the idea. You wouldn’t stand a chance of finding your way out of here no matter what you did. And you’d be throwing away the only chance you have to salvage things for yourself.”

  “Where do I have any chance of salvaging anything?”

  “It’s all up to you,” she said. “I’ve come here to try to help you work things out.”

  She came closer to him and pulled aside her veil. In the flickering glow of the lamplight her violet-flecked eyes had an amethyst sheen. Her face looked younger than it did by day. She seemed unexpectedly beautiful. That sudden revelation of beauty jarred him, and he was startled by his own reaction.

  He said, “There’s only one way you could help me. I want you to let me out of here.”