by L. A. Banks
“You sure about this, man?” Bath Kol called behind Isda as he stared through the dusty windows. “Looks like something out of a spaghetti western, only with camels.”
This time Celeste couldn’t disagree with Bath Kol’s assessment. Camels were tied to posts in front of an adobestyle mud-brick building that had the dome roof blown off it. Buzzards circled above the posts. Flies were everywhere, enjoying camel dung. Men sat in palm-tree shade at scattered wrought-iron and enamel-top tables smoking hookahs and sipping what looked like strong coffee or tea, regarding them with both disdain and suspicion. Again, women were totally absent from the landscape.
Azrael stood and held up a hand, signaling for the others to wait. “Let me double-check with Isda.”
“Yeah, you do that, fearless leader, because I really don’t think this is a joint where the ladies fit in, you feel me?” Bath Kol stooped down, leaning on seat backs with both forearms.
“Absolutely,” Azrael said, moving down the center aisle of the bus.
“But I have to pee,” Melissa whispered over the seat to Celeste.
“Aw … maaaan,” Bath Kol said, then stood. “You ready to do this, brothers?”
Gavreel and Paschar stood.
“I’m sorry,” Melissa said, and hugged herself.
“It’s all right, baby,” Paschar said, and held out his hand to her.
Bath Kol looked at Gavreel with a wide grin and flipped an unlit Camel cigarette into his mouth.
“Whew, what a difference a day makes,” Bath Kol said, then began singing the old tune. “‘Twenty-four little hours …’ “
Paschar shoved him in the back hard as Azrael climbed down.
“Would you guys cut it out,” Azrael said, keeping his gaze moving. “Double-escort the ladies to the bathroom, and Isda and I will go in for food … one of you stay with the bus.”
“Nooo problemmo,” Bath Kol said in a merry tone. He looked at Aziza. “Now, baby, listen to me—when you go back there, don’t freak out.”
“I’m not gonna freak out,” she replied, lifting her chin and frowning.
“Oh, yes, you are.”
Bath Kol and Paschar moved the group of women forward in what could only be described as a safety huddle toward the bathrooms that were undoubtedly inside, while Gavreel hung back and leaned against the bus, returning wary glares to the men that were eyeing him.
“Do you all know what you want to eat?” Azrael asked as they passed him and Isda.
“No time for democracy,” Isda said, walking toward the counter. “Dey got falafel, pita—white and wheat, hummus, grape leaves, dates, olives, figs, lamb, and—”
“No meat,” Azrael said.
“In here? Oh, hell, no,” Bath Kol muttered.
“Den, like I said. Order for the group and get it quick. We got water on da bus—they got soda and juice in here, and chips and junk. Period. Take it or leave it.” Isda folded his arms over his chest.
“I’m good, whatever you decide is fine,” Celeste said, trying to not make a face as the odor from the bathrooms drifted on a hot air current to blend with roasting meats.
When they saw the “bathroom,” Aziza just turned on her heels and walked back toward the bus, not even waiting for Bath Kol to escort her.
A hole was in the floor and a suspicious-looking, yellowed roll of toilet paper was on a stick poking out of the wall. It looked as if it had rolled across the dirt a few times. A plume of flies took to the air upon the invasion of would-be visitors. This was definitely one of those instant-stress situations that triggered Celeste’s old desire for a cigarette. A Newport would have been excellent right now, but she had to quickly jettison the thought before it set in as a real jones for a butt.
“This was obviously contrived by a man!” Maggie announced, folding her arms.
Paschar tried not to laugh as Bath Kol walked back to the bus behind Aziza, calling for her to wait up.
“I knew she was gonna freak—I knew it,” Bath Kol fussed, shaking his head.
“I don’t have to pee that badly,” Melissa said. “I can hold it.”
“Only a man,” Maggie argued in the center of the group, beginning to lapse into a thickening of her Latina mother tongue as she spoke with her hands, thoroughly indignant. “A woman has to pull down her pants, open her legs over that hole? Are they mad! With camel flies diving at your snatch? Really? After those flies have walked over camel poop and been down in that human-refuse hole?”
“I can keep the flies back, ladies,” Paschar said in a sheepish tone, then looked at Melissa with a pleading expression. “I don’t know when the next time will be that we can stop. I really think it’s a bad idea to try to hold it … as much water as we have to consume out here to stay hydrated.”
“Promise you’ll keep the flies back?” Melissa asked in a quiet rush.
“Oh, for the love of Pete!” Bath Kol said, pacing back to the group huddle by the bathroom without Aziza. “We’ll keep the flies off your butts if you just hurry up.”
“See, this is exactly what I’m talking about—no respect for the goddess,” Azrael said with a wide grin, coming up to Bath Kol with two hefty bags of food. “What shall we do with this Roman?”
“Hey, hey—we Romans were very respectful of the goddess, I’ll have you know,” Bath Kol fussed. “But some fancy things we didn’t worry about.”
“Like flies,” Isda said, chuckling as he came up to the group with his bags, chewing a dental stick.
“In the Colosseum, yes, there were flies and ladies—and grilled meats, all right,” Bath Kol said in a peevish tone. “And what?”
“Work with Paschar, will ya, so they can go?” Isda laughed.
“So, what, I’m now lord of the flies? Gimme a break.” Bath Kol pulled out a pack of smokes and tapped the back of it.
“I don’t even know why you bother. You know Aziza hates the odor of that nasty habit, and that will not endear you to her after this pit stop,” Paschar said with a wide grin.
“Stay in your lane, Paschar, and keep the flies off your lovely lady’s rump. Us old heads know how to sling a little ambrosia and desmoke a frickin’ T-shirt.”
Celeste just laughed as Bath Kol lit a cigarette right in the rest stop while each woman took her turn doing the inevitable.
“You know,” Bath Kol said as they filed back to the bus, “groups are a pain in my ass.”
Azrael made no comment; his laughter said it all. As each person got settled, he held up two bags. “Pita and hummus or falafel sandwiches on pita. Pass them back.”
Celeste watched him navigate down the aisle as Isda pulled out of the parking space, careful to clear the lounging camels that had plopped down beside the bus. That’s when she noticed that Azrael had a small, white plastic bag that he’d extracted from the top of one of the larger food bags. He slid into the seat next to her with a smile and handed her the bag.
“What’s this?”
“Open it,” he said like an excited teenager.
“Chips?”
“Special spicy ones,” he said triumphantly. “I knew that you liked them, from before when we first met and you showed me food. When I saw that they had them here …”
“That is so sweet!”
“Aw, man, stop trying to make the rest of us look bad, getting your mack on with the chips, dude,” Bath Kol said, smiling despite his obvious intent to remain peevish.
Azrael threw an empty water bottle toward him that missed. “Mind your business.”
Oddly, that broke the tension and made the entire bus erupt with laughter as food got passed around and shared. A sense of camaraderie took over. Women happily commiserated; the brothers teased each other and talked smack. Everyone marveled at the goatherd roadblock and laughed at Isda’s complaining until the slow-moving obstruction passed.
There was no way to remain removed from and impassive to the land or the people as their small jitney wended its way through narrow village streets. In the distance woman worked in g
reen pastures where the Nile had been bountiful as it had for thousands of years, providing rich black silt for farming. Small children ran along the side of the bus waving at the strange foreigners. Women in full garb hung clothes on lines and shooed goats away from their feet. Men walked with cinder blocks and PVC tubing on their shoulders, while others worked on twenty-year-old vehicles or debated in tavern doorways.
This was the Egypt that was hard to see while in Cairo, though no harder than it was hard to see a real neighborhood while standing at the Empire State Building or down by the Liberty Bell. One had to go into the boroughs or the real residential communities to truly see the people and understand what it was all about.
For Celeste, every little upturned face drew her. She watched the angels and their reaction to the children. Even Bath Kol was moved.
“You know,” he said quietly as they entered a more industrial area that left the children jogging in the roadside dust waving behind their minibus, “when we would march our legions through small towns … man … this was the part that would break your heart. The kids would come out and cheer for us. They knew an army, a legion of support, was passing through. But we knew that if the enemy came behind us, our orders were to march forward. We couldn’t turn back. So we’d dump our pockets and manifest whatever small treats that we could while conserving energy for the battle ahead.” He sat back in his seat and rubbed his palms down his face. “And sometimes, while in a Roman legion, we weren’t there to liberate. We were there to kill and conquer … and the children always got trampled first. My men always tried our best to get the civilians out of the way—sometimes we just couldn’t.”
“Then why did you do it?” Maggie asked softly, no judgment in her tone or her expression. She sat forward, seeming as though she really had to know. “I was one of those children once. In Ecuador … when foreign Jeeps would roll through a town, we were excited. It would give us something to talk about for weeks … until we learned to fear uniforms.”
“Fair question,” Bath Kol said. “A lot of us embedded with the crazy side of humanity, those humans bent on war and destruction, to try to get them to turn their course. We weren’t allowed to just wholesale slaughter humans because they were doing foul things to each other. Demons, yeah—we could hot those bastards on sight. But bad humans … they had the freedom of choice. So, we embedded with human troops, tried to work on people with reason, compassion, blah, blah, blah. If you ask me, that shit is inefficient because some mortals are just stupid. And, since nobody asked me, and I just follow orders from above, for a while they put me in Rome with those crazy sons a bitches. Try working on Roman generals with reason and compassion—ha! Probably where I picked up a lot of my bad habits.”
Aziza reached over and stroked the nape of his neck, causing him to look at her. “All of that time wasn’t bad, BK. Remember the good in it.”
He nodded and took up her other hand and kissed it hard and then fell silent. Witnessing that rare display between the couple sent everyone deeper into his or her own thoughts. Celeste didn’t even want to open the bag of chips now, fearing the sound would disturb a moment that needed to be marked by silent reverence. Another brother was purging and healing in their midst.
Looking out the dust-coated window, she stared at single-story, mud-brick, thatched-roof buildings as they passed. Some were painted in bright strips of color with indecipherable Arabic script running the length of the structures. Donkeys and goats were loosely tied to shade trees in front of some, just as one might lock a bike to a pole or park a car in front of one’s home. Wooden doors sat ajar; clearly no doors were locked in this countryside community. Some homes she could see into. The foyers had hay covering the dirt floor, and small lambs, goats, and a few chickens pecked around in the enclosure while the family was deeper inside the structure.
But in a bizarre collision of cultures, these rudimentary thatched-roof homes with women washing clothes by hand in huge metal tubs would also have a satellite dish for TV on the straw roof.
Completely amazed, Celeste kept her gaze fastened on the passing scenery, growing ever more thankful with every home she passed for her life in America—for being born a woman in the United States, for clean running water and asphalt and streetlights, and parks and temperate weather without flies, and food and shelter and supermarkets, and everything she’d ever taken for granted in her life.
Azrael slipped his warm palm beneath hers, and their fingers threaded into a perfect fit without their even looking at each other. A sense of anticipation swept through her, although she wasn’t sure why as they turned onto a widening boulevard.
“Okay, folks,” Isda said. “The lady told us to come to Dendera. This is her. She’s forty thousand square kilometers, and she’s surrounded by a mud-brick wall that used to make her look like a citadel. Since the beginning of Kemet’s history here—”
“The earliest building that’s still standing is the Mammisi,” Aziza said, standing in the bus with a hand over her heart. Tears filled her large, dark eyes as she clutched the back of a seat to keep her balance. “Nectanebo the Second raised this … he was the last of the native pharaohs.”
“Yeah, baby,” Bath Kol said, standing and hugging her. “C’mon … we can do this, right?”
Aziza nodded and held him as Isda brought the bus to a stop. “I’m okay.”
Isda turned in his seat and looked at Azrael. “This is all set up according to sacred geometry, mon. That’s why I really want you all to pay attention to the layout of the buildings on the complex. It might help us figure out where to begin looking and could save us time.”
“Teach,” Azrael said with respect. “This is your expedition.”
Isda nodded and sat up taller, projecting his voice throughout the van with new authority. “Hathor Temple is the main temple here at Dendera complex. There’s also the Temple of the Birth of Isis, Sacred Lake, Sanatorium, Mammisi of Nectanebo the Second—the one Aziza knows … plus Christian Basilica, Roman Mammisi—the chapel, a Bark shrine, Gateways of Domitian and Trajan, and the Roman kiosk.”
Waiting until he’d received nods from the brothers, Isda began again, “When you roll up on one of dese monuments, mon, it’s like a small city within a city. The mortals here had a different viewpoint of time and scale, you know … they understood immortality from us. Like you go into one of the huge hypostyle halls with massive columns and—”
Celeste’s gasp cut off Isda’s words. Knowing slammed into her chest, making it hard for her to breathe. She could almost hear the stones of the monuments whispering to her, calling to her, drawing her to them as a memory so acute that it became an ache overtook her entire body. Her feet yearned to connect with the sand so that she could feel a part of the very earth.
“I have to get out of the bus,” she said suddenly, hyperventilating.
She pushed herself down the aisle and exited with another deep gasp, pulling hot, dusty air into her lungs. Coughing and sputtering, she turned around in a disoriented circle as Azrael caught her and thrust a bottle of water into her hands.
“I can cover the Roman-era sections with Aziza,” Bath Kol said as Celeste chugged water. “Isda is right—this place is huge and we may have to spread out.”
“Me and Paschar can take the outer buildings that BK and ’Ziz aren’t covering,” Gavreel offered.
“All right,” Azrael said, rubbing Celeste’s back. “But I need Isda with us when we go into the main temple. I need to know what we’re looking at and why.” He turned to Isda, gaining his nod. “You have the history, brother, and without that we’ll just be searching without purpose.”
“Cool, lemme get tickets, all right?”
Celeste stared behind Isda as he took off running fifty yards toward the small exhibit booth. But soon the enormity of the complex stole her attention. Two hundred yards of smooth, polished, perfectly cut stone steps flanked a granite ramp that led to the outer courtyard of the enormous temple. Hathor goddess heads on huge pylons six deep
looked back at them in stoic serenity in front of the sandstone-hued, granite structure that had to be five stories high.
Isda came back in a flash and handed out tickets, allowing the group to be processed forward. They were early, and tour buses had yet to arrive. Warriors on a mission waved off eager vendors and children, and if she wasn’t mistaken, she could have sworn she’d seen a bit of blue flicker in their hands. The brothers were tense, and she knew they didn’t feel like being bothered this morning by petty human concerns such as trading plastic pyramids for a few pieces of silver. When the group split off, that left her and Azrael and Isda.
Enveloped in silence, they climbed the steps, and then stopped in the main courtyard. The building alone was overwhelming, and Isda and Azrael looked at her for answers she didn’t have.
“Okay, here’s the layout,” Isda said, trying to help her, drawing the building’s floor plan in the palm of his hand as he spoke.
Celeste watched his palm, intermittently glancing up at him and then behind him toward the building.
“When you enter, dere’s a large hypostyle hall, then a small one—columns, okay? Then there’s a laboratory, storage magazine, offering entry, treasury, and access to the well and the stairwells.” Turning her body by the shoulders, Isda pointed with one hand and spoke to her calmly. “There’s an offering hall, Hall of Ennead, the Great Seat and main sanctuary, twelve shrine rooms, the Pure Place … Court of the First Feast … a passage, and then a staircase to the roof.”
Celeste lifted her ponytail off her neck in frustration. Isda might as well have been speaking in Greek because none of what he’d just said had any frame of reference. “Don’t say anything else. I just need to go in.”
He nodded and lifted his hands in front of his chest.
“No offense, brother, she just needs you to fall back so she can feel whatever it is.”