Robert Silverberg - Thebes of the Hundred Gates

She began to laugh. She wriggled and slipped her knee between his thighs and began to slide it back and forth.

“I’m serious,” he said.

“Yes. Of course you are. Now stop talking and put it in me the way you do so well.”

“Eyaseyab—”

“Like this.”

“I want you—to talk—to the priestess—”

“Shh.”

“Eyaseyab.”

“Yes. Yes. Good. Oh, you are Amon! You are Min! Oh, yes! Yes, Edward-Davis! Oh—don’t stop—”

Was he supposed to include this in his report? he wondered.

The Service had no vow of chastity. But some things were none of their business.

“You are Amon! You are Min!”

She was slippery with sweat in the heat of the night. He said no more to her about going across the river to see the priestess, and eventually they slept.

But when he heard her up and moving about the room a few hours later, getting her things together, he reached out, hooked his finger into her anklet in the darkness, and whispered, “Wait for me. I’m coming with you.”

“You mustn’t!” She sounded frightened.

“I need to see the priestess.”

She seemed baffled by his insistent need to do what could not be done. But in the end she yielded: she was a slave, after all, accustomed to obeying. As they crossed the Nile on the early-morning ferry she still appeared tense and apprehensive, but he stroked her soft shoulders and she grew calm. The river at sunrise was glorious, a streak of polished turquoise running between the two lion-colored strips of land. Two little elongated puffs of cloud were drifting above the western hills and the early light turned them to pennants of flame. He saw white ibises clustering in the sycamore trees along the shore.

They entered the temple grounds through the side gate by which they had left, nearly a week before. A burly pockmarked guard scowled at him as he passed through, but he kept his head up and moved as though he belonged there. On the steps of the House of Life Eyaseyab paused and said, “You wait here. I will see what can be managed.”

“No, don’t leave me here. Take me inside with—”

Too late. She was gone. He prowled outside the building, uneasily looking around. But no one seemed to care that he was there. He studied a pair of elegant stone cobras, one wearing the red crown of Lower Egypt, the other wearing the white crown of the southern kingdom. He dug about in the sandy soil with the tip of his big toe and unearthed a superb scarab of blue faience that any museum would have been proud to own. He touched his hand wonderingly to the flawlessly executed and brightly painted bas-relief that was carved along the wall: Pharaoh before the gods, Isis to his left, Osiris to the right, Thoth and Horus in the background, the ibis-head and the hawk.

Egypt. Egypt. Egypt.

He had dreamed all his life of coming here. And here he was. Well ahead of normal Service schedule for such a major mission, and all because of Elaine Sandburg and Roger Lehman.

“I’m not so sure I want to find out what they’ve turned into,” Charlie Farhad had told him, explaining why he had refused to take on the assignment. “The past’s a weird place. It can make you pretty weird yourself, if you stay in it long enough.”

“They’ve only been there a year and a half.”

“Not necessarily,” Farhad had said. “Think about it.”

Sandburg and Lehman had been heading for the Rome of Tiberius, a ninety-day reconnaissance. But they had missed their return rendezvous and an analysis of the field spectrum indicated some serious anomalies—i.e., an overshoot. How much of an overshoot had taken almost a year to calculate. A lot of algorithmic massage produced the conclusion that instead of landing in 32 A.D. they had plopped down at least thirteen centuries earlier and a goodly distance to the east: Eighteenth Dynasty Egypt, the calculations indicated. “Poor Roger,” Charlie Farhad said. “He was so damned proud of his Latin, too. Won’t do him a fucking bit of good now, will it?” The algorithm was a murky one; the calculation was only probabilistic. Sandburg and Lehman might have landed right on top of the Nile or they could have turned up in some merciless corner of the Arabian desert. The high-probability line said Thebes. The most likely year was 1390 B.C., but the time range was plus or minus ten years. Not a hope in hell of finding them again, right? Nevertheless an attempt to rescue them had to be made, but none of the veteran time-jockeys wanted to touch it. That was their privilege. They hinted darkly about serious risk and the considerable unlikelihood of success. And in any case they had their own projects to worry about.

Davis heard what they had to say, but in the end he had volunteered anyway. Fools rush in, et cetera. He hadn’t known Sandburg and Lehman at all: the Service was a big operation, and he was pretty far down in junior staff. So he wasn’t doing it out of friendship. He took the job on partly because he was in love with the idea of experiencing Egypt in the prime of its greatness, partly because he was young enough still to see something romantic as well as useful to his career about being a hero, and partly because his own real-time life had taken some nasty turns lately—a collapsed romance, a bitter unexpected parting—and he was willing enough to go ricocheting off thirty-five centuries regardless of the risks. And so he had. And here he was.

Eyaseyab appeared at the head of the stairs and beckoned to him.

“The prince is with her. But he will be leaving soon.”

“The prince?”

“Pharaoh’s son, yes. The young Amenhotep.” A mischievous look came into the slave-girl’s eyes. “He is Nefret’s brother.”

Davis was bewildered by that for a moment. Then he recognized the idiom. This was an incestuous land: Eyaseyab meant that the priestess and the prince were lovers. A tingle of awe traveled quickly along his spine. She was talking about the fourth Amenhotep, the future Pharaoh Akhnaten, he who would in another few years attempt to overthrow the old gods of Egypt and install a new cult of solar worship that had only a single deity. Akhnaten? Could it be? Up there now, just a hundred feet away, at this moment caressing the priestess Nefret? Davis shook his head in wonder. This was like standing in the plaza and watching Pharaoh himself come out of the temple. He had expected to lurk around the periphery of history here, not to be thrust right into the heart of it. That he was seeing these people in the flesh was remarkable, but not entirely pleasing. It cheapened things, in a way, to be running into actual major historical figures; it made it all seem too much like a movie. But at least it was a well-done movie. The producers hadn’t spared any expense.

“Is that him?” Davis asked.

Of course it was. The tingle returned, redoubled. A figure had appeared on the portico of the House of Life. He gaped at it: a very peculiar figure indeed, a slender young man in a loose pleated linen robe with wide sleeves trimmed with blue bows. The upper half of his body seemed frail, but from the waist down he was fleshy, thick-thighed, soft-bellied. A long jutting jaw, a narrow head, full lips: an odd-looking mysterious face. He was instantly recognizable. Only a few weeks before Davis had peered wonderstruck at the four giant statues of him in the Amarna gallery at the far end of the ground floor at the Cairo Museum. Now here was the man himself.

Here and gone. He smiled at Davis in an eerie otherworldly way as if to say, Yes, you know who I am and I know who you are , and went quickly down the back steps of the temple’s podium. A litter must have been waiting for him there. Davis watched as he was borne away.

“Now,” he said to Eyaseyab, forcing himself to snap from his trance. “Did you tell the priestess I’m here?”