by Kage Baker
“OH!” cried Lewis suddenly, in a theatrical voice. “Oh, Lady, look out, he’ll damage you!” He launched himself at Kiu and bore her backward. Before she had recovered from her shock and begun to claw at him they were both teetering on the edge of the pier, and then they had gone over into the Nile with a splash. Galba ran to see what was happening in the water. He glanced over his shoulder at the mortals, and then made a conscious choice not to notice what they did. Killing wasn’t in his job description, nor was taking the blame for a bad field decision.
Petrie looked at the Vauxhall, still idling.
“Khaled, you know how to work these machines, don’t you?”
“Yes, sir.” Needing no other hint, Khaled vaulted into the driver’s seat. Ali and another Qufti lifted Petrie between them, as gently as though he were made of eggshell, and set him beside Khaled in the front. The rest of them piled into the back or jumped onto the running boards. Khaled swung the motorcar around and sped off into the ancient night, under the ancient moon, while behind them crocodiles scrambled hastily onto the banks of the ancient Nile. Like Galba, they knew when to stay out of a fight.
But as he rode along Petrie stiffened in his seat, for he heard a voice—or perhaps it would be more correct to say that he felt a voice, drifting into his mind from the ether, hanging before his internal eye like a smoke signal.
… we’ll be in touch, mortal…
He looked over his shoulder, and shivered.
“Khaled, drive faster.”
The stars were fading and the yacht was well downriver by the time Lewis was sitting in the laboratory cabin, completing the last pass along Princess Sit-Hathor-Yunet’s case with a whirring saw. On the floor by his chair, a silver bucket of melted ice slopped gently to and fro with the motion of the river, and the champagne bottle in it rolled and floated.
Lady Kiu stood watching him. Both of them wore bathrobes. Lady Kiu merely looked damp and furious, but Lewis looked damp and battered. There were red lines healing on his arms where claw marks had recently been, and one of his eyes was still a little puffy and discolored, suggesting that an hour or two ago he had had a remarkable shiner. Some of his hair seemed to have gone missing, as well. But he was smiling as he heard a crack and then the faint hiss of decompression. The mummy case’s inner seal gave way.
“Perfect,” he said, and set down the saw, and with quick skilled hands lifted the lid of the case.
“Look! It’s a remarkable body of work!” he chortled. Lady Kiu merely curled her lip, but there was a certain satisfaction in her gaze as she regarded the occupant of the mummy case. On first glance it appeared to be a mummy, neatly wrapped in linen strips white as cream. It was, however, a great deal of rolled papyrus, cunningly laid out to approximate a human form. Lewis reached in with a tiny, sharp pair of scissors and snipped here and there. He lifted out a single scroll, sealed in wax, and looked at the inscription.
“The complete text of the Story qf Sinuhe,” he murmured. “Oh, my. And what’s this one? The Book of the Sea People, gosh! And here’s the Great Lament for Tammuz, and… this is the True Story qf Enkiddu, and this one appears to be—wait—ah! This is your prize. The Book of the Forces that Repel Matter.”
He held up a thick scroll bound twice with a golden band, and Lady Kiu snatched it from him. She looked at it hungrily.
“You’ll do the stabilization on this one first,” she ordered, handing it back to him. “It’s the most important. The rest is nothing but rubbish.”
“My predecessor doesn’t seem to have thought so,” remarked Lewis. “What a lovely haul! The Hymns to the God Osiris, the Hot Fish Book (racy stuff, that), the Story the Silk Merchants Told Menes. And look here! Opinions of all Peoples on the Creation of the World!”
“Manetho was a pointless little drone, too,” said Kiu. “It doesn’t matter; we’ll find private buyers for that stuff. But you’ll have the scroll on antigravity ready to go by the time we reach Alexandria, do you hear me? Averill will be waiting there and it’s got to go straight to Philadelphia with him.”
“Yes, Great Queen,” said Lewis, looking dreamily over the scrolls, “Care for a glass of champagne to celebrate?”
“Go to hell,” she told him, and stalked to the doorway. There she paused, and turned; all the witchery of charm she had learned in eleven millennia was in her smile, if not in her dead and implacable eyes.
“But don’t worry about the mission report, Lewis darling. There won’t be a word of criticism about your performance,” she said silkily. “You’re still such a juvenile, it wouldn’t be fair. There was a time when the mortals impressed me, too. There will come a time when you’re older, and wiser, and you’ll be just as bored with them as I am now. Trust me on this.”
She took two paces back and leaned from the waist, bending over him, and ran a negligent hand through his hair. She put her lips close to his ear and whispered:
“And when you’re dead inside, like me, Lewis dear, and not until then—you’ll be free. But you won’t care anymore.”
She kissed him and, rising, made her exit.
Alone, Lewis sat staring after her a moment before shrugging resolutely.
He opened the champagne and poured his solitary glass. His hair was already beginning to grow back, and the retina of his left eye had almost completely reattached. And, look! There was the rising sun streaming in through the blinds, and green papyrus waved on the river bank, and pyramids and crocodiles were all over the place. The ancient Nile! The romance of Egypt!
He had even been shot at by Flinders Petrie.
Lewis sipped his champagne and selected a scroll from the cache. Not The Book of the Forces that Repel Matter; that was all very fascinating in its way, and would in time guarantee that Americans would rediscover antigravity (once they got around to deciphering a certain scroll, long forgotten in a museum basement), but it wasn’t his idea of treasure.
He took out the Story qf Sinuhe and opened it, marveling at its state of preservation. Settling back in his chair, he drank more champagne and gradually lost himself in the first known novel. He savored the words of mortal men. The Nile bore him away.
This story got started in Mendocino at a beautiful restored Victorian hotel, with a new garden-court restaurant built on to the side. To get into the restaurant you have to cross the hotel lobby and pass through the old bar beyond. This is what I was doing when the story arrived, full-blown, out of nowhere-.
The bright summer day went to black and I saw them there, three women and two men, staring fixedly at a cheap radio in a bakelite case on the back of the bar. Everything looked shabby and old. Two kerosene lanterns and the dim orange glow of the radio dial were the only lights. It was dark as pitch outside and raining hard, and ice-cold. The people were frightened about something.
The Hotel at Harlan’s Landing
* * *
There was just the five of us in the bar that night.
The lumber mills were all shut down for good and there hadn’t been a ship come up to the wharf in years. No more big schooners down there in the cove, with their white sails flying in at eye level to the bluff top like clouds. Dirty little steamers stayed well out on the horizon and never came in, going busily to San Francisco or Portland. Nothing to come in for, at Harlan’s Landing.
All this stuff the weekenders find so cute now, the gingerbread cottages and the big emporium with its grand false front and the old hotel here—you wouldn’t have thought they were much then, when they were gray wood beaten into leaning by the winter storms, paint from the boom days all peeled off. No Heritage Society to save us, no tourists with cash to spend. Nobody had cash to spend. It was 1934. I couldn’t keep the hotel open, but after the Volstead Act was repealed I opened the bar downstairs and things brightened up considerably. Our own had some place to go, had sort of a social life now, see?
We come that close to being a ghost town that everybody needed to know there was still a place with the yellow lights shining out through the win
dows, fighting to stay alive. And it wasn’t like there was anyplace else to go anyhow, not with the logging road washed out in winter, which was the only other way to get here from the city back then. I felt I sort of owed the rest of them.
Especially I owed Uncle Jacques and Aunty Irina. I had that awful year in 1929 when Mama got the cancer and I lost Bill, that was my husband, he was one of the crew on the San Juan, see. They were realkind to me then. Stayed by me when I wanted to just die. Aunty Irina baked bread, and Uncle Jacques fixed the typewriter and told me what I ought to write to the damn insurance people when they weren’t going to pay. People who’ll help you clean your house for a funeral twice in one year are good friends, believe you me.
Then, if Uncle Jacques hadn’t kept the Sheep Canyon trail cleared we’d have had nothing to eat but venison, because there’d have been no way I could have got the buckboard through to Notley for provisions most of the time. It must have been hard work, even for him, just one man with an axe busting up those redwood snags; because of course Lanark was no use. But Uncle Jacques looked after all of us, he and Aunty Irina. They said it was a good thing to have a human community. And, see, once I opened the bar, there was some place to go. Lanark didn’t have to stay alone in his shack watching the calendar pages turn brown, and Miss Harlan didn’t have to stay alone in her cottage hearing the surf boom and wondering if Billy was going to come walking up out of the water to haunt her. I didn’t have to sit alone in my room over the lobby, thinking how my folks would scold me because I hadn’t kept the brass and mahogany polished like I ought to have. And Uncle Jacques and Aunty Irina had a nice little human community they could come down and be part of for a while, so they didn’t have to sit staring at each other in their place up on Gamboa Ridge.
I had it real cozy here. That potbellied stove in the corner worked then; fire inspector won’t let us use it now, but I used to keep it going all night with a big basket of redwood chunks, and I lit the room up bright with kerosene lamps and moved some of the good tables and chairs down from the hotel rooms. Uncle Jacques brought me a radio he’d tinkered with, he called it a wireless, and I don’t know if it ran on a battery or what it had in it, but we set it behind the bar and we could get it to pull in music and shows. We had Jack Benny for Canada Dry and Chandu the Magician, and Little Orphan Annie, and even Byrd at the South Pole sometimes.
So Uncle Jacques and Aunty Irina would dance if there was music, and Miss Harlan would sit watching them, and I’d pour out applejack for everybody or maybe some wine. I used to get the wine, good stuff, from a man named Andy Lopez back in Sheep Canyon. Lanark would drink too much of it, but at least he wasn’t a mean drunk. We’d all be happy in the bar, warm and bright like it was, though the rest of the hotel was echoing and dark, and outside the night was black and empty too. And that night it was black with a Pacific gale, but not empty. The wind was driving the sleet sideways at the windows, the wild airblustered and fought in the street like the sailors used to on Saturday nights. Every so often the sky would light up horizon to horizon, purple and white lightning miles long, and for a split second there’d be the town outside the windows like it was day but awful, with the black empty buildings and the black gaps in the sidewalk where the boards had rotted out, and the sea beyond breaking so high there was spume flying up the street, blown on the storm. You wouldn’t think we’d be getting any radio reception at all, but whatever Uncle Jacques had done to that thing, it was picking up a broadcast from some ballroom in Chicago. And damned if the bandleader didn’t play Stormy Weather! Aunty Irina pulled Uncle Jacques to his feet. He slipped his arm around her and they two-step shuffled up and down in front of the bar, smiling at each other. Miss Harlan watched them, getting a little misty-eyed like she always did at anything romantic, and she sang along with the music. Lanark was pretty sober yet and making eyes at me from his table, and I smiled back at him because he did still use to be handsome then, in a wrecked kind of way.
He had just said, “Damn, Luisa, you throw a nice party,” and I was just about to say something sassy back when the music was drowned out by a crack-crack-crack and screeching static, so awful Miss Harlan and me put our hands over our ears, and Uncle Jacques and Aunty Irina stopped short and stood apart, looking like a couple of greyhounds on the alert.
Then we heard the call numbers and the voice out of the storm, telling us that some vessel called the Argive was in trouble, two aboard, and could the Coast Guard help? And I wondered how the radio had switched itself over to the marine band, but it was Uncle Jacques’s radio so I guess it might have done anything. They gave their location as right off Gamboa Rock, and I felt sick then. See it out there? That’s Gamboa Rock. See the way the water kind of boils around it, even on a nice summer day like this, and that little black line of shelf trailing out from it? It used to be a ship-killer, and a man-killer too, and we all knew the Argive wasn’t ever going to see any Coast Guard rescue, if that was where she was. Not in weather like that.
And in the next big flash of lightning we could see the poor damned thing through the windows, looked like somebody’s yacht, rearing on the black water and fighting for sea room. I only saw her for a split second, but I could paint her to this hour the way she looked, almost on her beam-end with her sail flapping. Then the dark swallowed up everything again. There was just a tiny little pinprick light we could still see for a while.
The voice on the radio was high and scared and there wasn’t anyCoast Guard answering, and pretty soon they began begging anybody to help them. They must have been able to see our light, I guess. It would have broken your heart to have to sit there and listen, the way they were asking for lifeboats and lines, which we didn’t have. We couldn’t have got to them anyway.
Lanark had lurched to his feet and was staring out into the storm, and I guess he was thinking how he could have made a try of it in the Sada if she hadn’t been rotting up on sawhorses ever since he’d lost his arm. Miss Harian had put her ringers in her ears and was rocking back and forth, and I didn’t blame her; she didn’t take death too well. I was crying myself, and so was Aunty Irina, wringing her hands, and she was staring up at Uncle Jacques with a pleading look in her eyes but his face was set like stone, and he was just shaking his head. They murmured back and forth in what I guessed was their language, until he said “You know we can’t, Rinka.”
He sat her down and put his arms around her to keep her there. Lanark and I took a couple of lanterns and went out into the street, but the wind nearly knocked us over and there was nothing to see out there anyway, not now. We got as far as the path down the cliff before another burst of lightning showed us the sea coming white up the stairs, and the old platform that had been below torn away with bits of it bobbing in the surge, and the spray jumping high. I think Lanark would still have tried to go down, but I pulled him away and the fool paid attention for once in his life. Coming back I near broke my leg, stepping in a hole where a plank was gone out of the sidewalk. We were gasping and staggering like we’d swum a mile by the time we got back up on the porch here.
It was lovely warm in the bar, but the voice on the radio had stopped. All that was coming through the ether now was a kind of regular beat of static, pop-pop, pop-pop like that, just a quiet little death knell. I said, “We all need a drink,” and poured out glasses of applejack on the house, because that was the only thing on earth I could do. Miss Harian and Lanark came and got theirs quick enough, and he backed up to the stove to warm himself. Uncle Jacques let go of Aunty Irina and stood, only to have her reel upright and slap him hard in the face.
He rocked back on his heels. Miss Harian was beside her right away, she said, “Oh, please don’t—it’s too awful—” and Aunty Irina fell back in her chair crying.
She said she was sorry, but she couldn’t bear sitting there and doing nothing again, when somebody might have been saved. Lanark and I were in a hurry to tell her that nobody could have done anything, thatwe couldn’t even get down into the cove because the
stairs were washed out, so she mustn’t feel too bad. Uncle Jacques brought her a glass, but she pushed it away and tried to get hold of herself. Looking up at us as though to explain, she said, “We had a child, once.” Uncle Jacques said, “Rinka, easy,” but she went on:
“Adopted. My baby Jimmy. We had him for eighteen years. He wanted to enlist. We thought, well, the war’s almost over, let him play soldier if he wants to. He’ll be safe. There wasn’t any record—but we didn’t think about the Spanish influenza. He caught it in boot camp in San Diego. Never even got on the troop carrier. They had him all laid out in his uniform by the time we got there… Only eighteen.” Real quiet, Uncle Jacques said, “There was nothing we could have done,” as though it was something he’d repeated a hundred times, and she snapped back:
“We should never have let him go! Not with that event shadow—” And she started crying again, crying and cursing. Miss Harian offered her a handkerchief and got her to drink some of her drink, and when she was a little calmer led her off to the ladies’ lavatory upstairs to powder her nose. They took one of the kerosene lanterns to find their way, because it was pitch black beyond the bar threshold. A fresh squall beat against the windows, sounding like thrown gravel.
Uncle Jacques dropped down heavy in his seat, and gulped his drink and what was left of Aunty Irina’s. Lanark drank too, but he was staring at Uncle Jacques with a bewildered expression on his face. Finally Lanark said, “Your kid died during the war? But… how old are you?” And I thought, oh, hell, because you couldn’t trust Lanark with a secret when he drank; that was why we’d never told him the truth about Uncle Jacques and Aunty Irina. Uncle Jacques and I looked at each other and then he cleared his throat and said:
“Irina was talking out of her head. It was her kid brother died in boot camp. We did adopt a baby once, but he died of diphtheria. She went a little crazy over it, Lanark. Most times you wouldn’t know, but tonight—”