by Jerry Dubs
While Akila had read Maya to sleep two hours ago, he had studied a street map on the computer. He was sure he could find his way to Saqqara, there were only a few turns to remember. His main worry was driving a car again after all these years. He hoped it would come back to him, like riding a bicycle was supposed to stay in memory.
When he had joined Maya in the examination room, he had quietly, so that Akila wouldn’t hear him, torn open the envelope addressed to Imhotep. It had contained a single sheet of paper, a short, typed message.
He had read it, mystified and horrified by the three short words: Hide Djoser’s knife.
He turned the sheet of paper over, he held it up to the light. There must be more to the message, he thought. But there was nothing more. Hide the knife from whom? From Tjau? From Bata? From Meryt? From Maya? Was someone destined to accidentally cut themselves? The knife was no more dangerous than any other knife in the Two Kingdoms. Why hide Djoser’s knife? Is someone jealous of the favor I have been shown? And ... Who here could know about the knife?
As had happened before, whenever his fears needed a shape, he thought of the strange, albino priestess Merneith. Hetephernebti had warned him of Merneith’s ambitions. He tried to imagine what connection there could be between Hetephernebti’s vague warning, the exotic priestess and Djoser’s knife.
Angrily he had crumpled the message and thrown it into the trash. He had stared at the envelope addressed to Ahmes, but had put it aside. No doubt it contained some other cryptic message.
He was torn between anger at Akila and her mysterious friend – who seemed to know so much but were revealing so little – and appreciation for the tenderness and help Akila had shown him and Maya. She had seemed as upset as he had been about the mystery.
It doesn’t matter, he thought.
Rising from the cot, he tiptoed barefoot to the doorway. A pale light squeezed under the door, but no sounds followed it. He hadn’t heard Akila’s chair move for nearly an hour, so taking a deep breath, he gripped the doorknob and twisted it, listening for the nearly imperceptible sound of the latch withdrawing. Still holding the knob, he leaned against the door, pushing it slowly open.
When he could see into the short corridor he paused and, holding his breath, he listened. Accustomed to the silence of the Two Lands, Tim found that the modern world was filled with background noises that no one seemed to hear. Even now, in the middle of the night he could hear a slight, static buzz from fluorescent lights in the hallway and the hollow, reed-like susurrus from the central air conditioning. Outside traffic sounds – a distant horn, the quiet whir of an electric ignition, the thrum of rubber on asphalt – all were so unusual to him that they sounded as loud as the discordant tuning of an orchestra.
But he heard nothing from the office. Perhaps Akila had gone to the bathroom. Without meaning to, Tim smiled to himself as he thought of his first visit to a modern bathroom in fifteen years. Soft toilet paper and running water were casual pleasures he had forgotten.
He took a step into the hallway, then another, and another. Soon he could see the office. Akila was asleep on the office chair, her legs propped up on an open desk drawer. Searching anxiously he spotted her large handbag on the floor by the desk.
Silently he approached her, snagged the bag and backed away, watching her, praying that she wouldn’t awake and hoping that her car keys were in the bag he was carrying.
Back in the examination room he emptied her handbag onto the unused cot. Rooting through the exposed contents, he picked up and tested a medical penlight. Nodding to himself he put the penlight back into the bag. Then, turning to the cabinet behind him, he added a bottle of antibiotics for Maya, a larger bottle of vitamins for Meryt, and finally the manila envelope addressed to Ahmes.
Earlier he had written a short note apologizing for what he was about to do. He reread the note, folded it and placed it atop the scarf, makeup case, sunglasses, lip balm, and other articles he had dumped from Akila’s bag.
Then he picked up Akila’s key chain, slung the bag over his shoulder, lifted Maya and walked silently back to the doorway.
Listening intently he leaned against the door. Then he stepped into the hallway and turned away from the front office. At the other end of the corridor he opened a doorway which led to an exterior hall on the opposite side of the building.
The concrete floor felt refreshingly cold against his bare feet as he walked rapidly away from the clinic. Maya shifted against his shoulder, murmuring Meryt’s name in her sleep. He caressed her head, relieved to feel the fever still absent. Soon he reached an outside exit and left the building. Breathing a sigh of relief, he walked through the cool night air to Akila’s car.
He settled Maya on the back seat, dropped the bag on the front passenger seat and slid behind the driver’s wheel. Feeling exposed in the empty parking lot, he started the car, listening to the engine cough to life. Anxiously he put the car in reverse and backed out of the parking space.
Glancing at the closed clinic doorway, he was satisfied that his escape had gone unnoticed. He frowned to himself, feeling guilty about not trusting Akila and about stealing her car, but he didn’t know what else he could have done.
He had come to the modern world to save his daughter, not to become caught up in a mysterious manipulation by some secret overseer.
Whoever had anticipated my arrival and orchestrated everything that had happened since I stepped through the time portal will be disappointed, Tim thought to himself. I’m going home, back to Meryt, back where I belong.
Pausing beneath a parking lot lamp, he searched the dashboard for the headlight button. Turning on the lights, he jerkily accelerated away from the clinic.
Behind him, her face pressed against the window of the clinic doorway, Akila watched her car leave the parking lot. She put her hands against the smooth, uncaring glass, wishing that she could touch Tim one more time and wondering if she would ever see him again.
Closing her eyes to the sight of his escape she thought of the horror he would soon encounter.
It was done, so it will be done, she thought and then she leaned her forehead against the glass and wept.
***
Intent on driving safely, Tim kept his attention on the nearly empty streets, oblivious to the palm trees, the smattering of tall buildings and the gasoline stations. At the second intersection he was stopped by a red light. Careful to keep his foot on the brake, he turned to look at Maya in the back seat. She was asleep, tucked into a tight curl.
Smiling and relieved, Tim turned back to the front of the car. The light was still red. He twisted his head to the left, feeling the muscles pull in his neck. He stretched a moment and then releasing the tension, he turned his head back toward the front. As he moved, his attention was arrested by the side of a large warehouse. He blinked, unable to believe his eyes.
The side of the building was covered in a mural.
The edges of the mural were painted to look like smooth concrete. A few yards in from each edge the artist had painted the wall to look as if it had been chipped away, the smooth outside layer hammered away to expose not just the interior of the building, but a glimpse of a hidden, ancient world.
The revealed area was painted as a desert oasis by a glade of date palm trees. A still pool of water was crowded with papyrus reeds and shaded by two looming willows. Along the water’s edge a crocodile raised its bumped snout, its jaws open as it yawned. Off to the left stone pillars marked the entrance to a temple. A hawk, its wings outstretched in soaring flight, wheeled away from the sun.
It was, Tim realized with a chill, almost the same scene that Ahmes had painted on the corridor wall outside Djoser’s chambers five thousand years ago. The composition, the elements, the colors, were all the same, as much a signature of the work as the cartouche that was on the envelope on the car seat beside Tim.
Ahmes was here!
Frantically Tim looked at the building, the sidewalk that disappeared around it, the crosswalk in
front of him, the opposite side of the street. Twisting, he looked out the back window, half expecting to see Ahmes standing in the road, waving a greeting to him.
But there was nothing. The street and sidewalks were empty.
He stared at the mural again. There was no doubt it was Ahmes’ work. Or a copy, Tim told himself.
Perhaps the original mural has been discovered and a modern artist has reproduced it. That has to be the explanation, he thought.
His nerves and anxiety were leading him to impossible thoughts. Ahmes was in ancient Egypt. He had painted the hieroglyphs that had opened the time portal. He was, Tim hoped, waiting on the other side of the wall, five thousand years in the past, below a freshly painted line of hieroglyphs.
The light turned green and Tim forced himself to look ahead, his eyes on his pathway, not the impossible mural. Turning his thoughts to the approaching reunion of Maya with her mother, he forced himself to ignore the coincidence of the mural and the envelope that bore Ahmes’ name.
***
The dashboard clock read one a.m. as Tim parked in the empty lot of the Saqqara complex. As he had promised in the note he had left for Akila, he tucked the car keys out of sight in the space between the back and the cushion of the driver’s seat. Draping Akila’s bag over his arm, he picked up Maya and stalked through the night toward the desert, the tomb and his home.
The broken lock still lay on the walkway, apparently unnoticed in the twenty-four hours since Tim and Maya had arrived. The gate in the fence remained unsecured. Tim felt his way to the spiral steps and began his descent, careful to keep his pace even and safe despite his eagerness to be away from this time and place.
At the bottom of the steps he paused and caught his breath. He found the medical penlight and clicked it on. Maya stirred and he whispered to her. “We’re almost home, darling.”
In answer, she repositioned her head and fell back to sleep.
With the penlight’s help, Tim quickly walked through the chamber, under the low doorway and into the burial chamber. He paused, turned off the penlight and listened. Satisfied that no one had followed him, he walked around the raised granite sarcophagus lid, his eagerness quickening his step.
Approaching the false doorway, he felt his heartbeat quicken. He was so close to home ... if Ahmes had painted the symbols and if the false doorway worked. At the wall, he clicked off the penlight and dropped it into Akila’s bag. Eyes closed in concentration he placed an anxious hand against the rough stone.
He pushed and the stone refused to move. Beads of sweat appeared on his face and he felt a rising panic.
“Come on,” he said and pushed harder. He felt a slight movement. He worried that it was his imagination but then the stone began to pivot admitting a fluttering yellow wash of light. He could smell the burning oil and linen of a torch and he knew that he was home.
As he pushed harder against the stone, the door opened wider and he saw Ahmes standing there, a look of relief and disbelief on his face.
“Ahmes!” he said happily. Then seeing his friend’s astonishment, he asked, “What is wrong?”
Ahmes shook his head, a smile filling his face, his eyes bright with tears.
“You have been gone a year, Imhotep. We thought you were dead.”
Section Five
THE ALABASTER
SARCOPHAGUS
2635 BCE
In the
Reign of King Sekhemkhet
Reunited
The sky overhead was both darker and brighter.
Unsullied by five thousand years of pollution, the atmosphere was a prism that magnified the star light and, with no light escaping from thousands of cities and millions of homes, the majestic dark background of the night sky was blacker and deeper.
Walking through the wadi from Saqqara to Ineb-Hedj, surprisingly satisfied to feel sand beneath his bare feet, Imhotep felt his twenty-first-century persona fade away. The background static of modern civilization was gone; he was home.
Ahmes had taken Maya from his arms, smothering her with kisses until she woke and hugged him.
Now she was chatting, talking to a favorite uncle, telling him about the pretty doctor with the ring in her lip and the sweet food she had eaten and the hard, unforgiving road she had walked on and the strange bed and the magic lights and more. Imhotep, only half listening to her, was amazed that, as ill as she had been, she had taken in so much.
Recognizing that Imhotep wanted time to think, Ahmes kept Maya busy with questions and let his friend walk alone with his thoughts. He had known Imhotep since his childhood, viewing him as both a second father and a mentor. He trusted that Imhotep would tell him his thoughts when he understood them himself.
Walking, his head down, oblivious to the sky above him or the shadowy, sloping walls of the wadi, Imhotep thought, I’ve lost a year with my family. A year’s payment to save Maya’s life.
He worried about the five-year jump the portal had made when he went into the future and now a year difference when he returned. There were no dials, no instructions, no way to calibrate or to understand how the time portal worked.
I should burn the papyrus with the magical sequence of hieroglyphs. No one knows them except Ahmes and myself. He nodded his head. We’re playing with something we don’t understand. It has to stop.
Then he looked at Maya excitedly telling Ahmes about the ice cream she had eaten after their last meal in modern Helwan. He knew that she would have died if he hadn’t chanced walking though the false doorway. The time portal had saved her life.
But never again, he thought. There’s no way to know where I would end up.
He thought of Diane and the horrific death she had suffered by being transported to a tomb that hadn’t been discovered and opened by modern archaeologists. The thought of her lonely death made him shiver.
***
Meryt was asleep, her small frame turned sideways on the narrow bed she and Imhotep had shared for seventeen years. She was nude, a thin linen cloth draped over her, falling against the small curve of her waist, the prominent jut of her hip.
Although he had been gone only a day, Imhotep had been worried that the time portal wouldn’t work and that he would be marooned forever in a future without her and so now he stood breathlessly in the doorway that separated their bed chamber from the rest of their small home and looked at her as if seeing her after a long, long absence.
So small in size, so large in spirit and love, he thought, a smile forming as he looked at his sleeping wife. Their lives together had been one of discovery and excitement, of trust and love, of shameless sensuality and unhesitating acceptance.
She had been eager to teach him about life in the Two Lands and just as excited to hear his stories about the modern world. She had more confidence in his abilities than he ever could, mixing unabashed love with a child-like optimism that everything would work out for the best. Her fierce confidence in the future had frightened him until he had learned that she also held the simple, unshakable philosophy that while she had no real control over how life would unfold, she did have the ability to decide how she would view events.
He knew she would have been worried about him being away for a year but, at the same time, she would have been confident that he would be well and that he would return to her. If not, she would accept that reality and live with it without mourning unrealized hopes.
As he stood there, he felt Maya bump against his leg. Squeezing past him she ran to the bed. Imhotep smiled, remembering how weak his daughter had been just two days earlier. He unslung Akila’s bag and laid it on the floor against the wall inside his room and watched Meryt stir awake.
Hearing Ahmes’ footsteps in the outer room he turned to his young friend and said, “Ahmes, can you wait here a little? I want to talk to you.”
Ahmes nodded. “I’ll be on the roof.”
Imhotep turned back to the bed chamber. Maya had climbed on the bed and was calling Meryt’s name. Meryt had awakened and looke
d unsure if her daughter was real or if she was from a dream.
“We’re home,” Imhotep said, walking quickly to the bed and kneeling beside the low bed to embrace his wife and their daughter.
Tears fell from Meryt’s eyes and she started to laugh.
***
After he had reassured Meryt that he really had returned and that Maya was cured of the illness that had killed Prince Nebmakhet, Imhotep told Meryt that he needed to speak with Ahmes.
Leaving Meryt and Maya, he stopped in the small chamber that Tjau used.
When he had first given him Djoser’s ceremonial knife Tjau had wanted to hide it, but Imhotep had persuaded him to carry it proudly, a sign of his link to the royal family. But when Tjau had returned home from his first military expedition, he hid the knife in a hollow nook in the wall near his bed.
“It draws too much attention, father,” he had explained. “And I worry about losing it or breaking it.” He had shrugged, a young man, his shoulders narrow like Imhotep’s, his nature one of practical acceptance, like his mother’s.
Imhotep retrieved the knife now from its hiding place. He held the knife for a moment, admiring its heft and balance. He traced his finger over the carving of Horus. Turning the knife, he touched the eye of Re carved into the other side of the ivory handle.
The ridges of the carvings were worn smooth from use and Imhotep smiled to himself as he remembered the many times he had watched Djoser flip the knife with one hand while they had talked. He didn’t understand the warning to hide the knife, but he had decided that there was nothing to be lost from following it.
He carried the knife outside and up the steps that led to the flat rooftop. Ahmes was sitting on the low wall that surrounded the roof.