Conquer the Dark

by L. A. Banks

  Celeste sighed with contentment. She had heard Azrael come into the room; knowing his footfalls anywhere and able to feel his aura, she didn’t even have to open her eyes. In the far recesses of her mind she heard the shower go on and then smelled fresh soap drifting on the cool, forced air. Then she felt his warmth and the bed depress behind her, and a kiss caress her shoulder as she slipped into the peaceful abyss of sleep.

  Although it felt as if many hours had passed, only a few had. The late-afternoon sun was now an angry orange and painted the lush banks of the Nile in shimmering sienna.

  Gently extracting herself from Azrael’s hold, she slipped from the bed and went to the sliding-glass doors to stare out at the passing landscape. Tall, robust palms and elephant grasses created a velvety green oasis between the sapphire river and the endless sand dunes beyond it. Cranes and an endless array of waterfowl took off and taxied in for landings as suspicious logs lay in wait for a misstep so they could reveal powerful jaws.

  She pressed her palms to the glass and soaked in the majesty before her. A graveyard high on a hill looked as if it had been there since time immemorial. Small village fishing boats carrying the day’s haul and hardworking fishermen home added additional color and humanity to the moving landscape. Then peach- and sand-hued buildings slowly came into view, and what was once serenity ebbed into a bustling metropolis again.

  The bed sounded but she didn’t turn around. Soon she heard Azrael stir and sit up, then heard him pad toward her to wrap her in his arms.

  “You look like you’re trapped in this room,” he said against her hair as she leaned into his warmth.

  “It’s all so wonderful and crazy at the same time … like, we are cruising down the Nile. The Nile. I just didn’t want to miss any of it.”

  He pulled the door open and ushered her to the rail, still standing behind her and holding her around her waist. She turned her face to the sun and closed her eyes as the breeze off the water caught in her hair. Now she could smell the water, the river of life that had never stopped flowing, that flowed from south to north. She could now hear the birds, hear the water’s gurgle and whispers. Could hear the splashes of predators and the distant babble of workingmen … and knew she was home.

  “You seem different,” he murmured, nuzzling her neck.

  “How can one not be transformed here?” she said quietly, leaning back against him with her eyes closed.

  Reluctant warriors gathered in the ship’s ornate lobby awaiting the lowering of the gangplank. But after a couple hours’ rest, a decent meal, plus a shower, how could one argue against pressing forward to fulfill the mission? There was no room in the equation for just not feeling like it.

  Resigned, they all waited silently without complaint—or enthusiasm—as Isda haggled with a minibus tour driver at the front desk for a private bus, knowing that Isda would ultimately prevail. When the doors finally opened, everyone in their retinue took his or her time, strolling down the narrow, wobbly plank to the street toward the waiting minibus.

  “It’s not far from Luxor, like a coupla miles,” Isda said to no one in particular as he sat down behind the wheel. “Listen, I know everybody has had it already with this expedition, but I don’t have to remind you what’s at stake.”

  “We hear you, brother,” Azrael said, then glanced around. “I’m as guilty of emotional fatigue as anyone on this bus. But if we’re going to find anything out there, we’ve got to pump up the energy level.”

  Gaining nods from the group, he passed a fist pound over the seat to Bath Kol, and it lit, then Bath Kol sent it up the row to Gavreel, who sent it forward. When it reached Isda, he nodded.

  “Now, dat’s whot I’m talkin’ ’bout.”

  Bath Kol leaned forward, his eyes slightly glowing blue-white as he pointed at the bus floor. “When we get to this site, we’ve gotta be extremely cool—as in low-key, people. The temple complex at Karnak is the second-most-visited tourist spot here, second only to the Pyramids.” As he spoke a large grid opened out on the floor like an electrified map. “The center is huge.” As he gestured with his forefinger, sections of the map brightened. Check it out. The section that all the tourists see is the Great Temple of Amun—that’s here when you first walk in—”

  “Ramses was a baaad man!” Isda said, laughing and cutting off Bath Kol and beginning to drive faster. “Forty-two wives, a hundred and sixty-five children, and was only half one of us? And was married to Nefertari, too? His favorite without question! Have you seen her? Aw, maaaan! When he brought her to me, I laughed and tol’ ’im, ‘You best be glad we’re blood,’ you know, ’cuz otherwise … whew. Dat was a son dat did me proud. You gotta take a look at his joint in Aswan. The man got up one day and said, ‘Carve a freakin’ mountain out for me and my lady—my favorite wife, yo, den—”

  “Can I finish?” Bath Kol said, cocking his head to the side to stare at Isda down the aisle.

  “Yeah, yeah, my bad—just some good memories been had here, too, mon.”

  Bath Kol shook his head and Celeste repressed a smile. The other brothers were chuckling and shaking their heads, while the women in the group smiled hard and shared glances. Nobody wanted to ruin Isda’s mood after the pain he’d been through here. Just seeing his perspective shift from the memory of the losses to all the good times he’d obviously had in ancient Kemet made everybody feel good.

  “As I was saying …” Bath Kol returned his focus to the glowing, iridescent lines on the bus floor. “This joint is a campus of buildings. It’s like a huge, and I do mean huge, open-air museum, but it’s also the largest ancient religious site in the world.”

  “Then that definitely makes sense and syncs up with Aziza’s feeling that Daoud was trying to hide the tablets in a knowledge center, one that was also consecrated ground.” Azrael leaned forward more to stare at the floor, but Bath Kol held his gaze.

  “Here’s the thing, brother,” Bath Kol said. “There’s gonna be tourists climbing all over the place. This campus is set up in four clusters of buildings with a sacred lake in the middle—which we can hot, just do our thing and turn it into holy water, just to be on the safe side. These four areas, or precincts, are spread out and consist of the main one that’s open—Amun’s, the unseen God’s, the one dedicated to the Source. Then there’s three that are currently closed to the general public … the Precinct of Mut—Amun’s wife or, better stated, the yin side of the energy of the Source of All That Is.”

  Bath Kol looked up. “The ancients got it. The Source is both male and female, whole. Yin and yang, masculine and feminine, balanced.”

  “I can feel that energy moving all through the grounds,” Aziza said, scanning the group and getting nods from the other women.

  “But the feminine energy feels weaker here, somewhat constricted for some reason,” Melissa said, hugging herself.

  “Yeah, like something else happened … I don’t know.” Maggie glanced at Celeste for moral support.

  “Like the feminine goddess energy here got shut down somehow.” Celeste lifted her ponytail up off her neck. “It makes it harder to intuitively read the site, from our perspective.”

  “Yeah, well,” Bath Kol said with a weary sigh, “unfortunately, when the patriarchies moved in, by the first century the worship of Mut stopped, and humans only started looking at the single aspect of the Source. The male side.”

  “True dat,” Isda said, shaking his head. “It was a crying shame, too. How can you only give praise to one-half of the Source, mon?”

  “Right.” Bath Kol looked around as though trying to get a layout of the buildings in his mind’s eye. “Okay, so they also put up the Precinct of Montu and then there’s the Temple of Amenhotep the Fourth—who was otherwise known as Akhenaten—”

  “Who got himself in a shitstorm with the priests,” Isda excitedly interjected, obviously unable to contain himself. “I told him the politics were dicey. He was going monotheistic on them, and the priests were vested in keeping the temples and e
nergies as separate representations of the Source. So, dat temple you talkin’ ’bout, mon, got torn down as soon as the man died. Another crying shame, because dey tried to blot his name out—scratching it off temple walls and razing all he’d built. But his wife was fine, too, mon, Nefertiti … what can I say?”

  Trying not to laugh and thus encourage Isda, given Bath Kol’s serious attempt at keeping the conversation on track, Azrael interjected with logic.

  “If I were attempting to hide something,” Azrael said calmly, glancing around the bus, “I’d bring it to somewhere that it would seem unlikely—here. It’s so open, so accessible, so many unrestricted and unguarded areas, it would seem like putting money in a vault and then never locking it. But I assure you it won’t be where normal tourists can trip over it. So, the Temple of Amun is just a place we must pass through to get deeper inside the complex. The Precinct of Montu is a possibility, but we know if the Temple of Amenhotep the Fourth has been reduced to rubble, one might not want to risk something valuable getting damaged there. But the Temple of Mut …”

  “We’re right on the same page, man,” Bath Kol replied, nodding. “See, right in the center of her complex is the sacred lake, and the inside bend of that faces her actual temple.”

  “Water,” Celeste said, leaning forward. “Today I was drawn to the water, and so far we know for a fact that the men hiding the sarcophagus initially had it in a place where there was feminine energy … back at the Temple of Hathor in Dendera.”

  “Mut’s believed reign was of the earth, creation … also very symbolic for what’s being hidden—something that can re-create life to come up from the earth and not down from the heavens,” Azrael added, glancing around.

  “Not to mention, feminine energy traditionally isn’t warlike, but in the case of Mut, she was represented by the lioness head—so that energy is not to be messed with. Just ask any man that has truly pissed off his ’oman,” Isda said over his shoulder. “Plus, with a lake, dat’s a nice natural barrier for a priest to light up, you know?”

  “Same page, yet again, brothers,” Bath Kol said, now enlarging the section of the map that dealt with the Precinct of Mut. “All right, here’s the challenge. The area is blocked off and this campus is crawling with guards. From the main entrance of where we wanna go, there’s a four-hundred-meter-long avenue of ram-headed sphinxes that leads north directly to the tenth pylon of Amun. So if we create a bit of a diversion, we can backtrack from the Temple of Amun right into it. Or, there’s another avenue of sphinxes that leads two hundred and fifty meters west to catch the flow into a three-kilometer-long avenue of sphinxes that connects the Precinct of Amun to Luxor Temple.”

  “Or,” Celeste said with a shrug, “rather than going all Green Beret commando, we could just walk directly to it like dumb Americans, put up a good-natured pleading fuss, and bribe our way back there.”

  The brothers looked around at each other and smiled as they realized it had distinct possibilities.

  “Feminine energy works like a charm every time,” Isda said with a wide grin.

  Bath Kol shrugged and turned off the lit floor map. “Works for me.”

  Luxor could just as easily have been any bustling city in the United States. Congestion was rampant, vibrant shops crammed themselves into every available inch of real estate. Vendors argued for their fair share of the pavement, and bodies endlessly milled. Local shoppers and the few tourists that had braved to come back after the civil unrest coexisted in an uneasy truce, all made palatable by the almighty dollar. But the thing that most fascinated Celeste as she stared out of the dingy bus window was how a modern city had imposed itself so thoroughly upon antiquity.

  They rode over a busy overpass like one you would see in any major urban business district; however, beneath it were cranes, excavation equipment, and construction workers unearthing a two-mile-long stretch of an ancient road. Ten-foot-high sphinxes lined the road with one of the spectacular monuments evenly placed every three feet. That someone could have ordered such an arduous feat of building to be done blew her mind. Sphinxes, every three feet, for two miles, that led from your palace to your wife’s palace? Dayum. And it now just so happened to run through what was like their downtown Manhattan? The contrast was unbelievable.

  She better understood Isda’s pride and excitement as they neared the Karnak complex. Hundreds of buses packed the lot, and thousands of tourists moved along the huge granite path, the prior unrest notwithstanding—people still came to see this world marvel. The crush of humanity looked pitifully insignificant against the monuments, like swarming ants beneath two-city-block-long rows of giant stone baboon statues seated in repose as they approached huge obelisks to enter the Temple of Amun.

  Everyone looked up the moment they got off the bus. It was impossible not to walk in awe, almost tripping over ground stones. Celeste found herself completely unable to turn away from the enormity of the architecture or the supernatural engineering that could be the only thing that accounted for what they were witnessing. In her heart and soul she knew something beyond human had assisted in creating what she now saw.

  As they entered the gigantic Hypostyle Hall, every human in the group gasped. It was like standing in the middle of a fifty-thousand-square-foot redwood forest where the huge trees were man-made of granite.

  Isda nodded and turned around slowly with pride, his focus toward the top of the massive pillars. “Check it out … one hundred and thirty-four columns set up in sixteen rows. A hundred twenty-two are ten feet tall, the other twelve are twenty-one meters tall, and all are like three meters wide. The architraves on top of the columns are seventy tons each.” He folded his arms and looked at the group, even though they were still staring at the structures. “And dey still don’t know how we did it.” He chuckled and began walking with his chest poked out. “We wasn’t bullshitting back den.”

  “Not at all,” Celeste said in awe.

  What amazed her was that not only were the columns huge, just as the entrance statuary and obelisks had been, but they were also just as detailed, telling a gorgeous story in stone relief on what seemed like every inch of granite.

  “In the womb of the Precinct of Mut is da crescent lake,” Isda said, gathering their group in a small huddle. “Now, if we do like da lady says, we may need a coupla brothers to peel off and make sure all these other tourists don’t see us get special treatment and then try to use dat as leverage to get in dere, too. If dat happens, da guards won’t go for it.”

  Gavreel and Paschar nodded and broke off from the group.

  “Okay, Mut’s Precinct has several small buildings in there, but if we focus on the one that has the holy of holies first and then fan out, maybe we can make quick work of this,” Bath Kol said, glancing around concerned.

  “Holy of holies?” Melissa frowned.

  “Main altar. Each temple has one,” Aziza said with a nod to the much larger Temple of Amun.

  “Okay, you ladies work your magic,” Azrael said with a half smile. “My pocket replenishes itself.”

  Celeste chuckled as she led Melissa, Maggie, and Aziza far away from the brothers toward a group of guards that were gathered by a small barricade outside the Precinct of Mut.

  “We heard that Mut was the goddess of fertility and the earth,” Celeste said, using her most coy demeanor. “Couldn’t we just go in for a quick peek?”

  The guards smiled at them as Melissa’s voice chimed in with Maggie’s to harmonize on, “Please.”

  “We would be ever so grateful,” Aziza said in a sensuous but dignified rush.

  The men smiled and took several long drags on their cigarettes, and the leader stepped forward, addressing Celeste.

  “Nubian sister, I would like to, and my men would like to accommodate such beautiful women, but … it is after all dangerous. Plus, if I allow you—the others will see.” He nodded in disdain toward loud-talking tourists that milled past them. “All do not appreciate the beauty as you do, but I must disappoint you.
Are you married?”

  Celeste released a theatrical sigh that the other women in the group also picked up on and mimicked. “No, not yet. That’s why we all wanted to go inside.”

  “None of you are married?” The man looked at his fellow guards as though the concept was impossible.

  “No,” Celeste said, telling the truth, but pouting for extra emphasis.

  “What is wrong in America? This cannot be!” The lead guard turned around and translated for his men, which set off a rapid-fire Arabic conversation that Celeste and the other women didn’t need a translator to understand.

  “No boyfriend?” The guard smiled a dashing smile and waited.

  Again Celeste released a heavy exhale. “Yes, but I don’t think he can marry me.”

  “He has a lot of money, but the man has issues … uhm … entanglements that prevent that, I think,” Melissa offered, smiling at Celeste.

  “Yeah—big entanglements. Cosmic.” Celeste laughed, shaking her head.

  “Oh, so sad, a beautiful woman should be married and have lots of children, and, well, if he cannot …” The guard shrugged and stepped closer. “I am Hakim. I would like to make you many children.”

  Celeste laughed hard, for a moment at a loss for words. African men had a level of forwardness, she’d noticed, that made the average guy on a street corner in Philly look downright timid.

  Maggie giggled and filled in the gap. “Hi, Hakim.”

  Another eager guard stepped up, and although he didn’t speak English, he bowed and placed a hand over his chest. “Yusef.”

  “Hi, Yusef,” Magdalena said with a wide smile as another, shier guard approached.

  The lead guard named Hakim pointed to the shy man and shoved him forward a bit as the other men laughed. “This is Amir,” he exclaimed. But Hakim then walked over to Aziza and took up her hand. “Hakim can have two wives. You and her—one beautiful and young, one beautiful and wise, such makes a man’s household rich and peaceful, too. Please say yes, both of you!”