Robert Silverberg - Thebes of the Hundred Gates

Davis trembled. He had been with the Service for five years; and it seemed to him that it was only in this moment that the full power of the meaning of being able to travel in time came home to him. The awesome privilege, the utter magnificence of having the gates of the past rolled back for him. For him!

I must not have much of an imagination, he thought.

“You! Standing and watching!”

A whip came out of somewhere and coiled around his bare shoulders like a fiery cobra.

He turned. An overseer was laughing at him.

“Work to do. Who do you think you are?”

Work, yes. Soiled rags to collect. Blood-stained rags, left-over salts, broken pots. He entered one booth where a fat man lay on his back, staring through empty sockets at the darkening sky. A vivid line of stitches crossed his belly, holding in the packing of myrrh and cassia. The fat man’s jaw sagged in the stupefaction of death. All those fine dinners: what did they matter now? Look on my works, ye mighty! On a table in the adjoining booth was a woman, a girl, perhaps fifteen or twenty years old, small-breasted and slender. She had just arrived; the craftsmen of the necropolis had not yet begun their work on her. The elaborate wig of dense midnight-blue hair that she had worn in life sat beside her on the table. Her shaven skull was like porcelain. Her fingernails and toenails were dyed dark red with henna and there was blue-green eye-paint around her sightless eyes. A gold bracelet encircled her lovely arm: maybe she had worn it since a child and it could no longer be removed. Her nakedness was heartbreaking. He felt an impulse to cover it. But he moved on, only remotely aware now of the odor of death and of the chemicals of the embalmers. It was dark now. The Anubis-masked embalmers had gone home. His body ached everywhere from his day’s work, and he knew the pain was just beginning. He was stained with oils and assorted aromatics. His shoulders burned from the sting of the overseer’s whip. The real Egypt, all right. Seen from the underside. Could he leave now, or would he be whipped again? No, no, all the workers were leaving. Night-guards were coming on duty; one of them glanced at him and made a jerking motion with his head, telling him to get out, go back to his village, call it a day.

He had grilled fish for dinner again, and rancid beer.

Later he sat up, staring at the impossibly brilliant stars in the astonishingly clear sky, and wondered whether Eyaseyab would come to him again. But why should she? What was he to her? A comet in the night, a random visitor to whom she had granted a moment of kindness. After a time he went inside his foul little cubicle and lay down on the straw that was his bed.

I must get back across the river, he told himself. I need to find—

And sleep came up in the midst of the thought and took him like a bandit who had thrown a heavy hood over his head.

Four days went by very much like the first one, in a dreamlike haze of hard work and overmastering strangeness.

He knew he needed to get out of this place, that he had to go back across the river and set about the search for the two missing members of the Service whose trajectories had gone astray and who—so the calculations indicated—were somewhere hereabouts. And, while he was at it, take in as much as he could of mighty Thebes. He had no business settling down like this in the necropolis. He had been sent here in part to rescue the vanished Roger Lehman and Elaine Sandburg, and in part as a scholar of sorts who had been trained to observe and report on one of the most glorious of all ancient cities; and although it might be useful for him to be learning the things that he was concerning the village of the embalmers, it was definitely time to move along. He owed that much to Sandburg, to Lehman, to the Service. Yet a curious trance-like lassitude held him. He sensed that the exhaustion of the day of his arrival had never really lifted from him. He had seemed to recover, he had gone past that frightening stage of dizziness and fainting, he could even cope with the hellish heat, he was able to put in a full working day at manual labor, some of it quite nasty; but in truth he realized that he had drawn back into this awful place as a kind of refuge and he was unable to muster the energy to get out and get on with his real work.

On the fourth night Eyaseyab unexpectedly returned. He had given up all hope of her.

When she appeared, trudging into the compound wearing little more than a shawl over her shoulders, the other men looked enviously at him, with a certain puzzlement and awe in their expressions. A slave-girl of the temple, a young and pretty one at that, coming to see him! Why, the stranger must not be as stupid as he seems. Or else he has some other merit that must not be readily apparent.

He wondered about it himself. And decided that he must seem elegant and exotic to her, courtly, even, a man with manners far beyond those of the class to which he obviously belonged. He was a luxury for her.

As she lay beside him that night she said, “You like it here? You are doing well?”

“Very well.”

“You work hard, you will rise in the House. Perhaps your children will be embalmers, even.”

He brought his hand up her side and cupped her breast.

“Children? What children?”

“Of course you will have children.”

What was she talking about? The children that she would bear for him?

“Even if I did,” he said, “how could they become embalmers? Isn’t the guild hereditary?”

“You could marry an embalmer’s daughter,” she told him. “They would have you. You are very handsome. You are very intelligent. An embalmer’s daughter would do well to be married to a man like you. You could choose the best of the daughters of the House of Purification. And then your wife’s father would bring your children into the guild. How fine that would be for you and all your descendants!”

“Yes,” he said dispiritedly.

The conversation was drifting into strange places. He imagined himself sitting at his dining-room table at the head of his clan, with his sons around him, each one wearing his little Anubis mask, gravely discussing the fine points of embalming with his father-in-law. How fine that would be, yes.

He was struck by the realization that Eyaseyab seemed to expect him to remain in the House of Purification for the rest of his life. A wonderful career opportunity, evidently. And of course she had automatically ruled herself out as a potential mate for him. She was a slave; he was a free man, and handsome and intelligent besides. Not for the likes of her. Perhaps slaves weren’t allowed to marry. He was a divertissement for her, a novelty item who would pass swiftly through her life—like a comet, yes, the image was a good one—and disappear.

To distract himself he stroked the plump pleasant spheroid of her breast. But it had lost all erotic charge for him. It was flesh, only flesh. He had a sudden horrifying vision of good-hearted Eyaseyab lying face-up on a wooden table in one of the booths of the House of Purification. But no, no, they wouldn’t send a slave’s body there. What did they do with them, throw them into the Nile?

Abruptly he said, “In the morning I want to go across the river. I have to see the priestess Nefret again.”

“Oh, no. That would be impossible.”

“You can get me into the temple.”

“The priestess sees no one from the outside.”

“Nevertheless,” he said. “Do it for me. Tell her it’s urgent, tell her that Edward-Davis has important business with her.” He hovered over her in the darkness. His thumb lightly caressed her nipple, which began to grow rigid again. In a low voice he said, “Tell her that Edward-Davis is in truth an ambassador from a foreign land, and needs to speak with her about highly significant matters.”