Tex’s head tilted to the side, and he looked at me sidelong. “What sort of a name is ‘Heru’?”
I pressed down a blackberry vine as thick as my thumb. “Egyptian.” The plump berries bunched together along the vine were a deep purple, practically falling off with their ripeness. They filled the forest with their sweet aroma, mixing with the scent of decaying pine needles in the most intoxicating way.
Tex whistled. “Can’t say as I’ve ever met an Egyptian. But seeing as they’re supposed to have darker skin like the Indians, I reckon they must be related in some way.” He nodded to himself.
“I suppose,” I said, not wanting to start a debate about evolution, human migration, and the origin of the human species. I really wasn’t in the mood.
“So what are you tracking this feller down for? A matter of the heart?” For a rustic old trapper, Tex sure was a chatty guy.
“It’s more of a matter of life and death,” I said with appropriate gravitas. Once the bonding withdrawals started, it would be only a matter of days until they actually killed me. I placed my hand on my abdomen. Not just me. “I have to find him.”
“Is that so? Well then, we best hurry.” Tex sort of hopped-leapt over a waist-high fallen log, then turned and held his hand out to help me over.
We’d reached a beach, the sparkling Puget Sound stretching out beyond the rocky shore, the tide line strewn with driftwood, seafoam, and kelp. Two seagulls swooped low overhead, calling out to one another.
Across the water some ways, a mass of vibrant evergreens grew out of the sea, several thick plumes of smoke steadily climbing among the dense trees. Before them, a massive wooden longhouse stretched along the top of the beach. I had to be looking at the Port Madison Indian Reservation, a Squamish settlement so unobtrusive in this time that it was barely visible from across the Agate Passage.
I stopped and stared out across the water, dumbfounded. So far as I could tell, I’d landed exactly where I’d been on the northwest tip of Bainbridge Island, just a hundred and fifty years in the past. I’d walked this beach dozens of times. I’d been closer to home than I’d thought; I’d been right on top of it.
“My canoe’s just there, around the bend,” Tex said, pointing down the beach. “There’s a feller who sometimes trades at Port Madison—calls himself the Collector. He makes his rounds out here, going from reservation to reservation, trackin’ people who come out here to get lost. He ain’t no Indian, but he’s darn near as good as one when it comes to trackin’, and he keeps his ear to the ground where civilized affairs is concerned. Makes a good deal of money off huntin’ people, I reckon he does.” Tex glanced at me over his shoulder. “Might be worth asking around about him. And iffen he’s in the area, it might be worth tracking him down to see if he’s willin’ to help you find your Egyptian … for the right price, of course.”
“Of course,” I said, taking a deep breath and letting it out slowly. I would allow myself a full freak-out later. I could ugly-cry and hyperventilate for days. Once I found Marcus. I just had to stuff my panic and fear and terror and worry somewhere deep inside me until then.
Picking up my foot, I jogged after Tex, thinking how lucky I’d been that our paths crossed.
7
Honey & Vinegar
“You just wait here, Miss Larson.” Tex climbed out of the canoe and dragged it up onto the rocky shore, me still in it. “I’ll ask around about the Collector. He don’t linger much when he passes through, so if he’s in the area, you ain’t got time to waste dillydallyin’ around here.”
I nodded absently as I stared around at historic Port Madison. Technically, I specialized in “Old World” archaeology, mostly studying those ancient civilizations bordering the Mediterranean Sea, but that didn’t decrease my interest in this slice of “New World” history. I’d known almost as much as there was to know about ancient Egypt when I’d traveled back to that time; comparatively, I knew next to nothing about the history of the peoples native to my beloved Pacific Northwest, beyond what I’d leaned in my single PNW archaeology course. I was both humbled and mortified by my ignorance.
“Just wait here,” Tex repeated. “I’ll return momentarily.”
I watched him walk away, heading straight for the enormous longhouse up shore, then sort of climb-fell out of the canoe. This “Collector” guy might’ve been my best bet for finding Marcus in the here and now, but he sure as hell wasn’t my only option.
I watched Tex disappear through the longhouse’s left-most door as I climbed the beach, heading toward the myriad of tents and wooden structures erected all around it, most covered with woven mats made from some plant fiber that reminded me of the reed mats that were everywhere in ancient Men-Nefer. I wondered what they used—some sort of bark? Or dried cattail, maybe? This village felt just as ancient as Men-Nefer; the absence of modern technology was just as glaring, the noises just as pure, devoid of the hum of motors and the buzz of electricity. And the people were just as busy, bustling around, carrying out daily tasks.
They wore an unexpected combination of Western and Native clothing—long cotton dresses or skirts with high-collared white blouses for the women and woolen trousers with white button-down shirts and suspenders or vests for the men, all accessorized on varying levels with woven belts, pouch purses, or shawls. Most of the men wore Western-style hats while many of the women tied their hair back with brightly patterned headscarves.
I passed by wooden racks of drying fish, cookfires and roasting spits, lean-tos containing looms or bushels of harvested cattails beside baskets and mats in various states of done-ness, stopping to speak to each person I saw along the way. I asked them if they spoke English, and if they did, then if they knew of a man named Heru—or Marcus or Horus. I struck out, big-time.
As I neared the longhouse, I couldn’t resist the chance to take a peek inside. One of the few things I knew about the history of the Squamish people and the Port Madison Reservation was that this longhouse—called “Old Man House”—had been burned to the ground, supposedly as a preventative measure to stop the spread of infectious diseases. It was iconic—the largest longhouse in what was, in this time, the Oregon Territory—and stood on land that archaeological records showed had been occupied continuously for thousands of years. I couldn’t skip the chance to see this historic sacred communal space firsthand. It was against my nature.
I was maybe a dozen steps away from the central doorway when Tex rushed out through it. I stopped in my tracks and blinked in surprise. I’d expected him to come back out the same way he’d gone in.
He planted himself directly in front of me, hands on his hips and face stern. “Didn’t I tell you to wait at the canoe?”
“I thought I’d ask around while I waited for you.” I tried to step around him, but he sidestepped to block me.
“The Collector was just here yesterday. We can’t afford to waste any time lollygaggin’ around here iffen we’re to have any chance of catching up to him.”
I raised my eyebrows. “We?”
Tex shrugged, then pushed past me and headed back down the beach toward his canoe. “I got business with him anyway, so it ain’t no skin off my back.”
I jogged after Tex.
“Assumin’ you’re still interested in utilizing his services,” Tex said as he trudged along. “Otherwise, I’ll just leave you here to wait for a trader to ferry you back to the city.”
“No,” I said, catching up to him. I fell in step beside him. “I want his help.” I needed his help. Tracking down Marcus truly was a matter of life and death.
“Best be on our way, then,” Tex said with a nod.
We neared a group of three women sitting on more of those cattail mats about halfway down the beach. Several woven baskets were spread out between them, all filled with salmon or their discarded heads and guts, and a wooden rack with three horizontal bars was set up beside them, cleaned fish hanging up to dry. They hadn’t been there when I’d passed this section of the beach on my way up
. They glanced our way as we approached, though their knives continued to work, cleaning and gutting with remarkable efficiency.
The oldest of the trio, a middle-aged woman wearing a long, red-and-black-patterned skirt and a white blouse, stood as we passed, pointing her knife in our direction. Well, more in Tex’s direction than mine. She said something to Tex in her native tongue.
Tex stopped and turned to her, his hands once more migrating to his hips. “It ain’t nothing to you who she is or what her business is with me.” He turned to continue on his way, but I lingered a moment before following.
The woman’s face darkened, her eyes narrowing. She said more in that incomprehensible language, all gibberish to me except for “Collector.”
Tex froze, only a few steps away. “You don’t know what you’re talkin’ about.” Under his breath, he muttered, “Superstitious, primitive, backwards people …”
The Squamish woman let out a string of angry words and reached for me, her strong fingers latching onto my arm. I recognized three syllables: Netjer-At. It was the ancient Egyptian name for my people, translating to “god of time.”
“Now you listen here,” Tex said. “The Collector promised—”
“You know,” I said to the Squamish woman, staring at her. I was totally knocked off guard. “You know about my people?”
Her grip on my arm loosened and she bowed her head, a faint curving of her lips the first hint of the break in her stormy expression. “Yes. And I would ask you to speak with my father,” she said, her English flawless. “He can explain much better.” She leaned in close, her gaze flicking to Tex. “You are in danger. I concealed my words because I did not wish to frighten you, but whatever he promised you—it is a lie.” She met my eyes, hers holding even more warning than her words. “The Collector is looking for a female Netjer-At. It is said he has been waiting for her for many lifetimes, searching this place, where the flow of time is disturbed.” Her eyes never left mine. “Her name is Alexandra. Are you she?”
I stared at her, stunned. “How—how do you know my name?”
“Others are looking for you as well.” She pulled back and glared at Tex. “Others who know you … who would help you, not deliver you to the Collector, however handsome the payment may be.”
I looked at Tex, blindsided. “You were going to—to what? Sell me? But you were kind to me.” I looked from him to the Squamish woman and back. “Why? Why didn’t you just bash me over the head and drag me to this—this …” Dread replaced the hurt, and the blood drained from my face.
I knew who the Collector was. It had to be him—Set, my father, possessed by Apep’s twisted, power-starved soul.
Tex mumbled something about honey and vinegar, then kicked a rock the size of a golf ball with the toe of his boot.
I barely heard him. “It’s Set. That’s the Collector’s name, isn’t it?”
“Please.” The Squamish woman tugged on my arm. “Come into D’Suq’Wub, where you will be safe.”
“But I won’t be.” The sun was already dipping back down toward the horizon; I’d spent valuable hours to get here, to Port Madison with Tex and his deceptive promises, and I only had so much time until the withdrawals kicked in. If Apep-Set found me before I found Marcus, the twins’ sheuts would kick in again, and I’d be dragged further back in time. I’d have to start my hunt for Marcus all over again.
“He can sense me,” I told the Squamish woman. “He already knows I’m here.” I placed my hand over my stomach, hoping the sudden spike of terror didn’t alert the twins that it was already time for another time jump. “He’s coming for me. I have to go.” I tried to pull my arm free. “Let me go, I have to—”
“Not yet.” The Squamish woman’s expression remained compassionate, but her voice was laced with a hard vein of determination. “You must speak with my father, the chief of our people. He knows more of this than I do. He will help you. You will see.”
“No, but—” Hope blossomed in my chest. What if she was right? What if her father, the chief, was Marcus? Or even Nik? Nik had never mentioned having fathered any children, but the guy had been alive for thousands and thousands of years; plus, he’d all but vanished for millennia, only reemerging with his mother a few months ago, my time. I didn’t know why he and Aset had vanished, only that they had. I felt a surge of hope. If this chief was Marcus or Nik …
“Alright,” I said, nodding once. “Take me to him.”
A grin spread across the Squamish woman’s face. It faded when her hawkish gaze slid to Tex. “You. Come. My father would have words with you, as well.”
Tex’s eyes widened and he spun on his heel, making a run for it. He made it all of five steps before the other two women in the salmon-cleaning circle caught him in a fishing net with a single, well-timed toss. Tex struggled against the hand-tied netting until he felt the pointy end of a fishing spear jabbing into his lower back. I stared at the woman holding the spear, blown away by how fast it had all happened.
“You will come with me and speak with my father,” the first woman reiterated, then looked at me. “Let us hurry.”
I nodded. When she released my arm, I followed without hesitation and we made our way back up the beach toward the longhouse.
“I am called Kikisoblu,” she said.
“I’m Lex—Alexandra—but then, you already knew that.”
Kikisoblu let out a dry laugh. “I was told to expect you. I grew up hearing from my father and grandmother about a woman with your name who would come here from another time, seeking sanctuary, but they were just stories. I have seen your likeness drawn on a cave wall, but that was just a picture. I must admit I did not truly believe you were real until this moment.”
Both her father and grandmother had told her about me—told her to expect me. I felt almost certain that her father had to be Nik, her grandmother Aset. After all, nobody knew what they’d been doing all those years they’d been hiding, let alone why they’d hid. Maybe I was about to find out. Hope fanned to anticipation, to expectation. If Nik was there, in the longhouse, then I would be able to find out what happened in the foyer after I jumped back in time. Re could look into the future At. His soul was special—a ren—and he could see through the instability of the At in my native time; he could view the echo of the moment I’d left. He could tell if Marcus was still alive. If Dom had survived his wounds. If Kat and the others had made it through whatever happened after.
“Kikisoblu, what’s your father’s name?”
She looked at me as we neared the narrow doorway at the center of the longhouse’s expansive face, her eyes widened in surprise. “Why, my father is Sealth, of course, for whom the great city of the white men across the sea has been named.”
My hope deflated. Chief Sealth, namesake of Seattle, had been a central figure at this time, someone kids like me who grew up in Washington State learned about in elementary school alongside George Washington and the like. Cameras, however rudimentary, had existed during this era. I’d glued photographs of Chief Sealth onto a trifold poster board for a middle school project and had memorized and recited his most famous speech. Most of those photos had been of him as an extremely elderly man. Which meant Sealth couldn’t be Nik, let alone Marcus. He couldn’t even be Nejeret, because Nejeret don’t age.
So how did he know about me?
8
Bend & Break
Kikisoblu led me into Old Man House—D’Suq’Wub—ahead of Tex and the woman escorting him at spearpoint. The interior of the longhouse was dark and relatively empty, most of the inhabitants utilizing the favorable late summer weather to work outside. This central portion was sectioned off from the rest of the building with wooden walls roughly a dozen yards from the doorway on either side. A sunken rectangular fire pit stretched nearly the length of the room, a single cookfire in the very center of the space providing the only luminescence beyond the late afternoon light leaking in through the doorway and the small opening in the roof over the fire.
&nb
sp; An elderly man sat on a woven mat on the opposite side of the fire pit, a vibrant red blanket draped over his broad shoulders. Two internal totem poles flanked him, one an enormous figure of a man, the other a woman. Both had been carved nude and with serious expressions, seeming to stand guard against the wall behind the old man. Behind Chief Sealth.
The iconic Squamish chief was such an enormous figure in the history of this area, his ideas, deeds, and words living on long after he was gone, that it seemed incongruous to my mind for him to appear so old, so frail. His heavily lined face and the turned-down corners of his mouth gave him an appearance of absolute solemnity, but the sparkle in his eyes hinted at the kind, wise nature I remembered from my studies.
As we approached, he held out a hand with huge, gnarled knuckles. “Please, sit.” His voice was deep, but soft, and a kind smile transformed his wizened features. “I have been expecting you for a very long time, Alexandra of the Netjer-At people.” Much to my surprise, he spoke in the original tongue—Nuin’s ancient language—which was known to all of my people. But not to many humans.
I stared across the fire at Sealth, stunned. “How—” I shook my head. “You are not Netjer-At,” I said, responding in the same language. “How do you know the original tongue?”
“Sit,” Sealth repeated, pointing with his chin to the mats layered on the floor near his right knee, “and I will tell you my story.” He smiled once more. “Or, at least, part of my story.”
I did as he’d bid, rounding the long fire pit and folding my legs beneath me. My fingers fidgeted with the hem of my jeans.
Sealth seemed to be ignoring Tex, standing on the opposite side of the fire with a spear at his back, and waited only for Kikisoblu to settle in beside me to begin his tale.
“When I was a young boy,” he said, still speaking in my people’s ancient language, “first watching Vancouver’s ships, my mother told me a story.” His eyes twinkled with remembrance. “She told me it was a story that must never be spoken of except among my own children, as our bloodline had been chosen as the keepers of the tale. It was the story of the lady in the cave. Of the woman who watches time pass. Of the one time does not touch. It is the story of the woman who waits.”
Ricochet Through Time (Echo Trilogy Book 3) Page 6