by Jerry Dubs
“Thank you, Ahmes, for being such a faithful friend,” Imhotep said. He sat beside Ahmes and draped an arm around his bare shoulders. “Who else would violate a tomb every new moon for a year?”
The young artist turned to Imhotep and smiled.
“When you didn’t come back the first night or the second, I wasn’t too worried. Even after the first few months, I thought, ‘Well, it is taking a long time to heal Maya.’ But the inundation came and then the waters fell.” He shrugged. “Meryt never worried. She was sure that you were well in your old land and that you would return when you could. Bata,” he chuckled, “he was crazy with worry. Meryt had to keep finding trips for him to take whenever the new moon came. He’ll be happy that you’re back. Well, we all are.”
Imhotep leaned against his young friend and squeezed Ahmes’ shoulders.
“Not as happy as I am to be back. And I was gone for just one day.”
Ahmes grew still, waiting for Imhotep to explain.
Imhotep shook his head. “Maya and I were gone for just one day, Ahmes. We spent a single night in my old world. Then we came back. I don’t understand why it was just one day for me while a year passed here. I know that the symbols were drawn correctly, we both checked them, but something was wrong.” He paused.
“It doesn’t matter. I’m back, Maya is well and you have been a magnificent friend.”
“Thank you, Lord Imhotep,” Ahmes said modestly.
“But there is one more thing I want to ask, Ahmes.” He showed Ahmes the knife and, holding it buy its blade, he offered the weapon to him. “I need you to hide this for me.”
Ahmes took the knife and, holding it close in the dim night light, examined the handle. Instead of asking Imhotep why he had been asked to hide a precious knife, he simply nodded agreement. Then, sighing happily, he said, “I was worried that you wanted me to sneak into another tomb every month.”
“No,” Imhotep said. “I hope we’re done with tombs for a long time.”
Standing, Imhotep stretched and yawned. Then he turned to Ahmes and held out an open hand.
“You have been a wonderful friend. Ever since I first came to the Two Lands you and your father have been steadfast and loyal. I don’t know what I would ever do without you.”
***
“Maya looks well, but she hasn’t grown very much,” Meryt said as she lay in the curl of Imhotep’s arm in the dark after Maya had fallen asleep.
Imhotep tilted his head down and kissed the top of her head.
After Ahmes had left, he and Meryt had sat with Maya, listening to her repeat her stories about Akila, the rooms that stayed bright, the restaurant and the foods. Imhotep had happily watched his daughter and wife, content to listen to Maya’s excitement and to see Meryt’s joy at her daughter’s strength and enthusiasm. When Maya finally grew silent, Imhotep had carried her to her own small room and, checking her temperature one last time, kissed her good night.
Now he and Meryt lay in their small bed, the warmth of their bodies mingling, their skin making contact with an electrifying pleasure that had never dulled for Imhotep. He felt her warm breath cross his chest as she spoke. Her fingers swept up his arm and traced the lines of his face, lingering on his lips, waiting for his answer.
“I don’t know what happened, Meryt,” he said, kissing her fingers after he said her name.
She turned her head and softly kissed his chest.
Imhotep gathered his thoughts, unwilling to alarm Meryt unnecessarily. He had no plans to return to the modern world, so whatever plot was unfolding there would never affect them. Still, someone knew who he was and knew who Ahmes was. And he had seen the mural, although now, removed from it by five thousand years, his conviction that the painting had been Ahmes’ work was already fading.
“I found a doctor, her name was Akila, Maya has that right. She figured out what was wrong with Maya and gave her medicine. It worked very quickly. By morning Maya was better. The next day we went for a walk and Maya was skipping ahead, like her old self. She got tired quickly, but she seemed tired, not ill. Then, that night, I left without anyone knowing it. I took Maya back into Brian’s tomb, there is an entrance from the top of the plateau. The false doorway opened and Ahmes told me that we had been gone for a year, not just a day.”
He kissed the top of her head again.
“I know that I’m not mistaken. We were just gone a day. I never shaved my head and, well, the hair hasn’t grown out. And Maya is the same size.”
He thought about Diane again, how the time portal had left her a thousand years short of her own world.
“What is wrong?” Meryt asked, feeling him shiver.
He shook his head.
“If a year passed here while one day passed for me, what would have happened if I had been gone for a week or a month? Would seven years have passed here? Thirty years?”
He felt Meryt take a deep breath and then slowly exhale it. The air brushed across his chest, as if her calm ka itself was caressing him.
“You have returned,” she murmured. “It was a year, but only a year. Maya is healed. That is what happened, dear husband. You can worry about what might have happened, oh, I know that you will. But this is what did happen – you went to your land to save Maya. You saved her and you have returned.
“Now,” she said, her hand trailing down his chest to his waist and then farther still, “you might have had a single day to rest, but I have been without my husband for a year. I am going to welcome you home properly.”
***
Meryt lay once more in the crook of his arm, her heavy breathing slowing as she drifted off to sleep. Imhotep, who usually found himself heavy-eyed after their love-making, was wide awake. He gently tugged his arm under Meryt. Through years of practice, she unconsciously read his movement and, raising her head, rolled away from him, freeing his arm.
Swinging his legs off the bed, Imhotep stood and walked out of their bed chamber.
Naked, he went outside and walked around his house to the shallow sluice Bata had dug along the northern wall of the home. Three woven reed ropes, one end of each tied to a wooden stake, disappeared into the water, its surface as dark as the night sky. Following one of the ropes, he found a clay pot. He lifted the pot from the water, swirled it to gauge the amount of beer it held, and, satisfied, carried the beer up the steps to the roof.
He settled on a pillow on the roof, leaned against the short wall and sipped at the beer. It had a light taste of honey and figs. He smiled to himself; Bata was experimenting with the brewing recipe.
Meryt had coughed during their lovemaking. She had been on her hands and knees and he had been kneeling behind her, holding her small waist, his attention on the tight softness where they were joined.
Her head had been thrown back, a purring moan from her throat growing in strength, when suddenly she had coughed. Quickly she had put her head down and muffled the sound. He had tried to pull away, but she had reached back with a hand and held him in place and then began to rock against him again.
Afterward she had brushed off his questions, saying that she had probably inhaled some dust. “It was nothing, Imhotep. You worry about shadows.”
He had watched her carefully as she drifted off to sleep, listening for any change in her breathing. Although there had been none, still, he worried.
He had seen the cabinets full of medicines in the Helwan clinic. He had glanced at the thick medical books cataloging symptoms, illnesses, and treatments.
He was regarded as a magical doctor in the Two Lands – a one-eyed man who is king in the land of the blind, he thought – but he knew that there were diseases in the Two Lands that he could never cure, that he might not even recognize.
Was Meryt’s cough a symptom, or nothing more than a cough?
He took a longer drink of the beer.
He had been born at the end of the twentieth century in the United States, the wealthiest country the world had ever known. He had been educated, taught many
more facts than the geniuses of the Renaissance – da Vinci, Michelangelo, Galileo – had access to. Unlike millions of peasants in the Middle Ages he never had to worry about food or housing or medical help. The Black Plague, polio, smallpox, tuberculosis, malaria, the great waves of influenza, all were things of the past by the time he had been born.
But now, here in this ancient world he was exposed to dangers, within and without, that he had never had to consider. The magnitude of his ignorance overwhelmed him.
Blood flukes, he thought. How could I even imagine them?
He tilted his head back and looked at the night sky. The light reaching his eyes had been streaming from far-flung stars for millions of years.
I could tell Ahmes and Meryt that the light from the sun takes more than eight minutes to cross the ninety-three million miles to reach earth. It would mean nothing to them. He sipped at his beer. And really, does it mean anything to me? Does it matter?
Blood flukes, dysentery, contagious illnesses, infected wounds, those things matter, they mean life or death here and I can’t do anything about them.
Akila’s face surfaced in his memory, kindness and compassion and knowledge in her eyes. She had the answers, she would know what to do here, how to improve lives, he thought.
He remembered the way she had touched him, massaging his sleeping arm, cupping his hand at the restaurant. She had reached for him without thought, out of habit, he thought. Suddenly he wondered about the missing five years, the hiccup of time between when he thought he should have arrived in modern Egypt and when he did arrive.
He remembered Akila’s voice reassuring him: All will be well.
She didn’t mean just Maya’s health, he thought with foreboding. She was trying to reassure me about something that hasn’t happened yet.
Closing his eyes, he tried to not think about Djoser’s knife or the pale face of the priestess Merneith.
An invitation
Two weeks after they had returned home, with Maya eating, playing and sleeping as she had before she had become infected, Imhotep stopped giving her antibiotics. He had persuaded Meryt to begin taking the vitamins he had stolen from the clinic and was rewarded by seeing more spring in her step and a brighter flash in her eyes.
“Yes, Lord Imhotep, your heka is strong,” she teased him one evening, reading his thoughts as they walked along the edge of the slow-moving lake created by the flooded river.
It was the first week of Menhet and the river Iteru had ceased its rise and was slowly swirling over the farmland that lay along its banks, emptying itself of the rich soil carried north from beyond Ta-Seti.
Maya was running ahead of Imhotep and Meryt, splashing and playing at the edge of the water with a group of children who were tagging along with them.
Imhotep and Meryt were holding hands, walking in the late afternoon as Re’s muted heat lay on them like a gentle blanket. She squeezed his hand and continued her thought, “Maya is healed and I know that I have more energy.”
He nodded. He had been doing mental arithmetic, calculating how long his cache of vitamin pills would last if Meryt took one every other day or once a week or once every other week. He didn’t know how beneficial they would be if he rationed them, but, he reasoned, they would have some benefit.
“I’ve stopped giving Maya her pills. I think you can just take yours every other day,” he said, deciding that he would wean her from the vitamins, increasing the frequency again if she showed any decline in her health or energy.
Meryt slowed her pace. When Imhotep stopped and turned to her, she reached up with her free hand and pulled his head to hers. A smile playing on her mouth, she raised her face and kissed him.
“In your land,” she said when she had finished, “does everyone take these pills and feel this strong?”
He smiled broadly. “In my land? This is my land and you are the only one who has benefit of my powerful heka.”
“Yes, Lord Imhotep,” she said, teasing once more, “all the Two Lands knows of your powerful heka. I scream praises to it every night.” Then, taking his hand, she leaned into him. “But seriously,” she said, “I know there are wonders in your land – buildings that fly and magic lights and boxes that talk – but the people ... do they all feel this powerful and alive?”
He shook his head.
“No, Meryt. I think most of the people are very tired and sad. They keep themselves busy watching stories on the talking boxes but they don’t do things. They exhaust themselves worrying about running out of money or losing their jobs or if their neighbors have more than they do or if they have the latest telephone. They read about famous people and wish they could dress like them and go the places they go, or even look like them.
“But, they know that will never happen so they just sit around and get fat, so fat that they are unable to walk and have to sit on chairs and roll through the market to get more food. There are even television shows about them, enormous people, too fat to get out of bed.
“And those are the people who live in wealthy countries. In poor countries they worry about getting clean water and enough food to eat. There are roving bands of killers, they call themselves armies, who take what they want – cattle, gold, women, and children. And my country sends killing machines through the air against its enemies, some of them real, some imagined. The machines kill innocent people, but our leaders ignore that.”
He stopped talking, realizing that he was spewing anger that had built while he had read news stories in Helwan and outrage that he had felt when Akila told him about her husband and the Arab Spring.
He looked down at Meryt. “I’m sorry, dear wife.”
“It makes me sad to see your bitterness,” she said simply. “And even if I don’t understand much of what you said, it does help me understand why you stay here in the Two Lands.”
He shook his head. “Yes, many things in my land make me angry, but there are many good things there, too. The reason I stay here is you, Meryt. You and Maya and Tjau and Bata and Ahmes and Teti and Hetephernebti and Paneb and Taki and all of our other friends.”
Meryt studied his eyes for a moment and then said seriously, “But the Two Lands would be better if you had this cream soda you told me about.”
Then she laughed and tugged free from his hand to run along the water’s edge.
***
Another week passed and Imhotep’s concerns faded into the emptiness of boredom.
He was still banned from the palace and still prohibited from visiting the new pyramid being built for King Sekhemkhet. He met once with Paneb and was alarmed to learn that his old friend’s eyesight was fading.
“Too many dark days working by torchlight inside unfinished tombs,” Paneb had said with a shrug as he told Imhotep about his dying vision.
Paneb was nearing the age of fifty and it was not unusual for body parts to wear out. Eyes grew dim, became clouded and milky; ears stopped hearing the calls of birds and the distant laughter of children; hands became stiff, the joints cracking and painful; teeth turned black, gums grew inflamed. Reed gatherers, their days spent carrying heavy bundles on their bent backs, often found themselves unable to stand straight. Quarry workers expected to enter middle age with a crushed finger or two. Veteran soldiers walked on crutches or carried disfiguring wounds. Women aged quickly, spent by the pains of childbirth, the exhaustion of rearing children and the sorrow from too many stillbirths and infant deaths.
Paneb, aware of what others endured, considered the diminishing of his vision a small burden, simply a badge of survival for having weathered so many years in the Two Lands.
Sitting on his roof, sipping his warm beer and staring across the arching palm tree tops at the pale blue sky, Imhotep realized that he was angry about Paneb’s dimming vision and his friend’s acceptance of it. He was sure that modern medicine would be able to help his old friend. He imagined the time portal as a revolving door through which he led his ill or aging friends, returning with them healthy, repaired by A
kila and her pharmacological closet. Then he thought of how unreliable the time portal was, how Diane had passed though it to her death.
He shook his head, aware that his discontent was rooted in his boredom.
Everything had changed since King Djoser’s death and the death of Teti’s son. If Imhotep was unable to work as a scribe or architect or royal doctor, he needed to find some other way to spend his time. He enjoyed playing with Maya, but there was only so much of a two-year-old that he could take. Sitting on the roof drinking beer, as pleasant as that was, would soon turn him into a sad, rotund alcoholic, he knew.
Maybe I could go on a walk-about and map the Two Lands, he thought. Or gather my family, build a boat and sail across the Mediterranean to Greece. Are they civilized there, yet? Or the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, are they built yet? I could follow the river south into Africa, show Meryt elephants and rhinos and gorillas.
He had a sudden vision of himself as Humphrey Bogart in ‘The African Queen’ waist deep in the river, tugging a barge on which Meryt sat fanning herself. Leeches! He thought, I’d be covered in leeches.
Laughing at himself and his ridiculous musing, Imhotep spilled beer on his loincloth.
“Meryt said you were up here,” Bata said as his head appeared on the roof. His shoulders and torso followed as he climbed the steps. “I didn’t think you’d be sloppy drunk already. It is still morning!”
“Bata!” Imhotep said, bracing his hands against the small ledge behind him and pushing himself to his feet.
The men met in a heartfelt embrace.
“Where have you been? Meryt said you had gone into the delta, but that was almost a month ago.”
“I could ask you the same thing, disappearing into an old tomb for a year.”
“I know, I know,” Imhotep said, separating himself from his friend.
“But Maya is healed,” Bata said. “So all is well.”