Thebes of the Hundred Gates

Four

In the morning the slave-girl Eyaseyab came into the pavilion where he was lying on the sloping bed and said, “You are awake? You are better? You are strong today?”

He blinked at her. It must be well along in the morning. The sky was like a blue shield above him and the air was already warming toward the midday scorch. He realized that he was awake and that he felt reasonably strong. During the night the worst effects of the shock of his arrival in Eighteenth Dynasty Egypt seemed to have left him. His throat was dry and his stomach felt hollow, but he was probably strong enough to stand.

He swung his legs over the side of the bed and cautiously got up. The flimsy cloth that was covering him fell away, leaving him naked. That was a little strange; but Eyaseyab was just about naked too, as naked as any of the girls in the tomb paintings in the Valley of the Kings, just a little beaded belt around her hips and a tiny loincloth covering the pubic area. Little anklets of blue beads jingled as she moved. She was sixteen or seventeen, he supposed, though it was hard to tell, and she seemed cheerful and healthy and reasonably clean. Her eyes were dark and glossy and so was her hair, and her skin was a pleasing olive color with a hint of red in it and a golden underhue.

She had brought a basin of water and a flask of perfumed oil. Carefully she washed him, in a way that was the nearest thing to being intimate, but wasn’t. He suspected that it could be, if he asked. He had never been washed by a woman like this, at least not since he was a child, and it was enticing and unnerving both at once. When she was done washing him she anointed him with the warm, fragrant oil, rubbing it into his chest and back and thighs. That too was new to him, and very strange. She is a slave, he told himself. She’s accustomed to doing this. Now and again she giggled. Once her eyes came up to meet his, and he saw provocation in them; but it seemed unthinkable for him to reach for her now, in this open place, in this temple. To draw her to him, to use her. She is a slave, he told himself again. She expects to be used. Which makes it all the more impossible.

She handed him his white kilt and watched without embarrassment as he clambered into it.

“I have brought food,” she said. “You will eat and then we will go.”

“Go where?”

“To the place where you will live.”

“On the temple grounds?”

“In town,” she said. “You will not stay here. The priestess Nefret has said I am to take you to a lodging in the town.”

That was upsetting. He had been hoping to stay here, to be taken into the service of the temple in some fashion. He wanted to speak with that serene, mysterious, aloof priestess again; in this profoundly unfamiliar place she had already begun to seem like an island of security and succor. He had felt a strange kind of rapport with her, some curious sort of kinship, and he would gladly have remained in her domain a little longer. But finding some safe nest to hide in, he knew, would not be a useful way of achieving the goals of his mission here.

Eyaseyab went out and returned shortly with a tray of food for him: a bowl of broth, a piece of grilled fish, some flat bread and a few sweet cakes and a little stone pot of dates. It seemed much too much food. Last night he had only been able to nibble at the meat and beer the girl had brought him. But to his surprise his appetite was enormous today; he emptied the broth bowl in gulps, gobbled the dates, went on to the fish and bread and cakes without hesitating. Vaguely he wondered what sort of microbes he might be ingesting. But of course he had been loaded to the brim with antigens before leaving downtime: one whole division of the Service did nothing but immunological research, and travelers setting out for the past went forth well protected, not just against the great obsolete plagues of yesteryear but against the subtlest of intestinal bugs. He probably had been at greater medical risk during his orientation visit to modern Cairo and Luxor than he was here.

“You want more to eat?” she asked him.

“I don’t think I should.”

“You should eat, if you’re hungry. Here at the temple there’s plenty of food.”

He understood what she was telling him. All well and good; but he couldn’t pack away a month’s worth of eating at a single sitting.

“Come, then,” she said. “I will take you to your lodging-place.”

They left the temple precinct by a side gate. A dusty unpaved path took them quickly to the river promenade, just a short walk away. The temples were much closer to the Nile than they would be thirty-five centuries later. Millennia of sedimentation had changed the river’s course to a startling extent. In this era the Nile flowed where, in modern-day Luxor, there was a broad stretch of land covering several blocks, running from the riverfront promenade to the taxi plaza that served the Karnak ruins, the ticket-booth area, the approach to the avenue of sphinxes at the temple’s first pylon.

She walked swiftly, keeping half a dozen paces in front of him, never looking back. He watched with amusement the rhythmic movements of her buttocks. She was heading south, into the bewildering maze that was the city proper.

He could see now why he had been so dazed yesterday. Not only had he had to cope with the shock of temporal displacement far beyond anything he had ever experienced on his training jumps, but the city itself was immense and immediately overpowering. Thebes of the Pharaohs was far bigger than the modern Luxor that occupied its site, and it hit you with all its force the moment you set foot in it. Luxor, its splendid ruins aside, was no more than a small provincial town: a few tourist hotels, a one-room museum, a little airport, a railway station and some shops. Thebes was a metropolis. What was the line from the Iliad? “The world’s great empress on the Egyptian plain, that spreads her conquests o’er a thousand states.” Yes.

The general shape of the place was familiar. Like everything else in Egypt it was strung out along the north-south line of the Nile. The two ends of the city were anchored by the great temples he knew as Luxor and Karnak: Luxor at the southern end, where he had made his appearance yesterday, and the vast complex of Karnak, where he had spent the night, a mile or so to the north. As he faced south now, the river was on his right, cluttered with bright-sailed vessels of every size and design, and beyond it, across the way to the west, were the jagged tawny mountains of the Valley of the Kings, where the great ones of the land had their tombs, with a long row of grand imperial palaces stretching before them in the river plain, Pharaoh’s golden house and the dwellings of his family. When he looked the other way he could see, sharp against the cloudless desert sky, the three lofty hills that marked the eastern boundary, and the massive hundred-gated walls that had still been standing in Homer’s time.

What was so overwhelming about Thebes was not so much its temples and palaces and all its other sectors of monumental grandeur—though they were impressive enough—as it was the feverish multifariousness of the sprawling streets that occupied the spaces between them. They spread out as far as he could see, a zone of habitation limited only by the river on the one side and the inexorable barrenness of the desert on the other. City planning was an unknown concept here. Incomprehensibly twisting lanes of swarming tenements stood cheek by jowl beside the villas of the rich. Here was a street of filthy little ramshackle shops, squat shanties of mud brick, and just beyond rose a huge wall that concealed cool gardened courtyards, blue pools and sparkling fountains, quiet hallways bedecked with colored frescoes; and just on the far side of that nobleman’s grand estate were the tangled alleys of the poor again. The air was so hot that it seemed to be aflame, and a shimmering haze of dust-motes danced constantly in it, however pure the sky might be in the distance. Insects buzzed unceasingly, flies and locusts and beetles making angry, ominous sounds as they whizzed past, and animals browsed casually in the streets as though they owned them. The smoke of a hundred thousand cooking-fires rose high; the smell of meat grilling on spits and fish frying in oil was everywhere. And a steady pounding of traffic was moving in all directions at once through the narrow, congested streets, the nobles in their chariots or litters, ox-carts carrying produce to the markets, nearly naked slaves jogging along beneath huge mounds of neatly wrapped bundles, donkeys staggering under untidier loads half the size of pyramids, children underfoot, vendors of pots and utensils hauling their wagons, everybody yelling, laughing, bickering, singing, hailing friends with loud whoops. He had been in big exotic cities before—Hong Kong, Honolulu, maddening gigantic Cairo itself—but even they, with all their smoke-belching trucks and autos and motorbikes, were no match for the wondrous chaos of Thebes. This was a disorder beyond anything he had ever experienced: indeed, beyond anything he had ever imagined.

They were near the southern temple now. He recognized the plaza where he had collapsed the day before. But abruptly Eyaseyab turned toward the river and led him down a flight of stone steps into a waterfront quarter that had not been visible from above, where squalid taverns and little smoky food-kiosks huddled in a cluster beside a long stone wharf.

A flat barge crowded with people was waiting at the wharf, and a burly man who seemed obviously to be an overseer was waving his arms and crying out something unintelligible in thick, guttural tones.

“It’s going to leave,” Eyaseyab said. “Quick, let’s get on board.”

“Where are we going?”

“To the other side.”

He stared at her blankly. “You said I’d be lodging in town.”

“It is also the town over there. You will be lodging near the place where you will work. The priestess has arranged everything. You are a very lucky man, Edward-Davis.”

“I don’t understand. What sort of work?”

“With the embalmers,” the girl said. “You will be an apprentice in the House of Purification, in the City of the Dead.” She tugged at his wrist. “Come quickly! If we miss the ferry, there won’t be another one going across for an hour.”

Too astonished to protest, he stumbled on board after her. Almost at once, the overseer bellowed a command and slaves along quayside tugged on the ropes that tied the barge down, pulling them free of the bollards that held them. A huge man wielding an enormous pole pushed the vessel loose and it drifted out into the channel of the Nile. The great red and yellow sails scooped up such breeze as was there for the scooping. The lunatic bustle of Thebes receded swiftly behind them. He stared back at it in dismay.

An embalmer, in the City of the Dead?

A lodging-place on the wrong side of the river?

Some of yesterday’s confusion and panic began to surface in him again. He looked toward the distant western shore. His assignment here was difficult enough as it was; but how was he supposed to carry it out while living over there in the mortuary village? Presumably the two people he had come here to find were living in Thebes proper, if they were here at all. He had expected to circulate in the city, to ask questions and generally sniff about in search of unusual strangers, to pursue whatever clues to their whereabouts he might discover. But the priestess, in her great kindness, had essentially exiled him from the place where he had to be. Now he would have to steal time from his work—whatever that was going to be!—and get himself somehow back to the main part of Thebes every day, or as often as he could arrange it, if he was going to carry out his little Sherlock Holmes operation. It was a complication he hadn’t anticipated.

In the crush of passengers aboard the greatly overcrowded ferry, the slave-girl was jammed right up against him. He found himself enjoying the contact. But he wondered how often one of these boats foundered and sank. He thought of the crocodiles that still inhabited the Nile in this era.

She laughed and said, “It is too many people, yes?”

“Yes. Many too many.”

“It’s always this busy this time. Better to go early, but you were sleeping.”

“Do the ferries run all day?”

“All day, yes, and less often in the night. Everyone uses them. You are still feeling all right, Edward-Davis?”

“Yes,” he said. He let his hands rest on her bare shoulders. “Fine.” For a moment he found himself wondering what he was going to use to pay the ferry fare; and then he remembered that this entire empire managed somehow to function without any sort of cash. All transactions involving goods or services were done by barter, and by a system of exchange that used weights and spirals of copper as units of currency, but only in the abstract: workers were paid in measures of grain or flasks of oil that could be traded for other necessities, and more complex sales and purchases were handled by bookkeeping entries, not by the exchange of actual metal. The ferries, most likely, were free of charge, provided by the government by way of offering some return on the labor-taxes that everyone paid.

The ferry wallowed westward across the green sluggish river. The east bank was no more now than a shadowy line on the horizon, with the lofty walls and columns of the two temple compounds the only discernible individual features. On the rapidly approaching western shore he could see now another many-streeted tangle of low mud-brick buildings, though not nearly as congested as the very much larger one across the way, and a towering row of dusty-leaved palm trees just behind the town as a sort of line of demarcation cutting it off from the emptiness beyond. Further in the distance was the sandy bosom of the western desert, rising gradually toward the bleak bare hills on the horizon.

At the quay-side Eyaseyab spoke briefly with a man in a soiled, ragged kilt, apparently to ask directions. They seemed to know each other; they grinned warmly, exchanged a quick handclasp, traded a quip or two. Davis felt an odd, unexpected pang of jealousy as he watched them. The man turned and pointed toward the left: Davis saw as he swung around that his face was terribly scarred and he had only one eye.

“My brother,” Eyaseyab said, coming back toward him. “He belongs to the ferry-master. We go this way.”

“Was he injured in battle?”

She looked baffled a moment. “His face? Oh, no, he is no soldier. He ran away once, when he was a boy, and slept in the desert one night, and there was an animal. He says a lion, but a jackal, I think. Come, please.”

They plunged into the City of the Dead, Eyaseyab once more going first and leaving him to trudge along behind, keeping his eyes trained on the tapering glossy wedge of her bare back. On every side the industry of death was operating at full throttle. Here was a street of coffin-makers, and here were artisans assembling funerary furniture in open-fronted arcades, and in another street sculptors were at work polishing memorial statues. A showroom displayed gilded mummy-cases in a startling range of sizes, some no bigger than a cat might need, others enormous and ornate. Silent priests with shaven heads moved solemnly through the busy, crowded streets like wraiths. Now and again Davis caught a whiff of some acrid fumes: embalming fluids, he supposed.

The district where the workers lived was only a short distance behind the main commercial area, but the layout of the village was so confusing that Eyaseyab had to ask directions twice more before she delivered him to his new lodging-place. It was a cave-like warren of dark little mud-walled rooms lopsidedly arranged in a U-shaped curve around a sandy courtyard. Misery Motel, Davis thought. A florid, beefy man named Pewero presided over it. The place was almost comically dismal, filthy and dank and reeking of urine, but even so it had its own proud little garden, one dusty acacia tree and one weary and practically leafless sycamore.

“You will take your meals here,” Eyaseyab explained. “They are supplied by the House of Purification. There will be beer if you want it, but no wine. Check your room for scorpions before you go to sleep. On this side of the river they are very common.”

“I’ll remember that,” Davis said.

She stood waiting for a moment at the door to his little cubicle as though expecting something from him. But of course he had nothing to offer her.

Was that what she wanted, though? A gift? Perhaps that look of expectation meant something else.

“Stay with me this afternoon,” he said impulsively.

She smiled almost demurely. “The priestess expects me back. There is much work to do.”

“Tonight, then? Can you come back?”

“I can do that, yes,” she said. There wasn’t much likelihood of it in her tone. She touched his cheek pleasantly. “Edward-Davis. What an odd name that is, Edward-Davis. Does everyone in your country have such odd names?”

“Even worse,” he said.

She nodded. Perhaps that was the limit of her curiosity.

He watched her from his doorway as she went down the dusty path. Her slender back, her bare plump buttocks, suddenly seemed almost infinitely appealing to him. But she turned the corner and was gone. I will never see her again, he thought; and he felt himself plummeting without warning into an abyss of loneliness and something approaching terror as he looked back into the dark little hole of a room that was his new home in this strange land.

You wanted this, he told himself.

You volunteered for this. Going back to find a couple of Service people who hadn’t come back from a mission was only the pretext, the excuse. What you wanted was to experience the real Egypt. Well, kid, here’s the real Egypt, and welcome to it!

He wondered what he was supposed to do next. Report for work? Where? To whom?

Pewero said, “In the morning. Go with them, when they leave.”

“Who?”

But Pewero had already lost interest in him.

He made his way back through the confusion that was the village, staring about him in wonder at the frantic intensity of it all. He had known, of course, that to an Egyptian death was the most important part of life, the beginning of one’s true existence, one’s long residence in eternity: but still it was astonishing to see these hordes of men hard at work, turning out a seemingly endless stream of coffins, scrolls, grave-goods, carvings. It was like a gigantic factory. Death was big business in this country. A dozen guilds were at work here. Only the embalmers were not to be seen, though he suspected their workshops would not be far away; but doubtless they kept to one side, in some quieter quarter, out of respect for the corpses over whom they toiled. The dead here were an active and ever-present part of the population, after all. Their sensibilities had to be considered.

He wandered down toward the river and stood by the quay for a while, looking for crocodiles. There didn’t seem to be any here, only long ugly fish. Unexpectedly he felt calmness settle over him. He was growing accustomed to the heat; he barely heard the noise of the town. The river, even though at low ebb, was strikingly beautiful, a great smooth green ribbon coming out of the inconceivably remote south and vanishing serenely into the unimaginable north, an elemental force cutting through the desert like the will of God. But it stank of decay; he was astounded, standing by it, to see what was unmistakably a dead body go floating by, perhaps a hundred yards out from the bank. No mummifying for that one, no tomb, no eternal life. A beggar, he supposed, an outcast, the merest debris of society: yet what thoughts had gone through his mind at the last moment, knowing as he did that for him death was the end of everything and not the grand beginning?

A trick of the sunlight turned the muddy banks to gold. The corpse drifted past and the river was beautiful again. When Davis returned to the lodging-house, four men were squatting outside, roasting strips of fish over a charcoal fire. They offered him one, asking him no questions, and gave him a little mug of warm rancid beer. He was one of them, the new apprentice. Perhaps they noticed that his features were those of a foreigner and his accent was an odd one, perhaps not. They were incurious, and why not? Their lives were heading nowhere. They understood that he was as unimportant as they were. Important men did not become apprentices in the House of Purification. The priestess Nefret, meaning to do well by the stranger, had buried him in the obscurity of the most menial of labor over here.

It was going to be a long thirty days, he thought. Here in the real Egypt.

To his utter amazement Eyaseyab appeared in his doorway not long after dark as he sat somberly staring at nothing in particular.

“Edward-Davis,” she said, grinning.

“You? But—”

“I said I would be back.”

So at least there would be some consolations.