by Warren Adler
He had calculated it would take five hours at the outside to reach that spot where the river bent westward and where he would swim to the east bank at a point contiguous to Kom Ombo. It was essential he not be seen. He was sure, if he concentrated and was cautious, that he could accomplish the subterfuge. Beyond that, he dared not speculate.
A vague movement on the sack just above his head alerted him. He presumed at first that it was the bargeman, but it seemed illogical that he could leave the wheel. The sound had an animal-like quality, a movement in fits, as if each portion of energy needed a quick reassessment.
He determined to remain still, muscles taut in case of attack, while his senses strained to track the sound. Whatever it was moved closer to his burrow, where he crouched now, ready to spring. He was sure now it was human, although he could decipher little else. Then the sound was directly above him and he could see the depth of the shadows change as it moved across the burrow and padded lightly onto the wooden deck.
He could not restrain a cautious look at the space between the sacks. Instead of the expected fear, his heart beat with elation. It was Abdel. Samya! She seemed baffled as she crouched and surveyed the line of wheat sacks. He let her watch, amused by her tiny perplexed sighs.
He stirred and pushed aside the wheat sacks, reaching out to drag her into the burrow, a hand clasped over her mouth. Terrorized by the sudden movement, she struggled, relaxing only when she saw his face. He smiled at her, unable to mask his joy.
“You’re crazy,” he said softly, releasing his hand and caressing her shoulders as she bent toward him.
“You sent me away,” she said, the words falling like small coins from a torn purse.
“You came here to tell me that,” he said, feeling the pulse of her excitement. Her nearness made him shiver and he hugged her to him.
“You had no right to do that,” she said, unable to stop the tinkle of the little coins. They stretched out along the wheat sacks, embracing, savoring the joy of reunion. He wanted to ask her how she had managed it, but somehow it seemed irrelevant. Longing had become desire now. He no longer feared to disguise his need.
“Samya,” he whispered.
Her flesh smelled sweet, and her hair seemed perfumed by the soft river breeze. He saw her eye whites above her cheekbones, the pupils that peered back at him offering a bottomless mystery of attraction. His lips did not have to search as they found hers and drank deeply into the softness. The warm dart of her tongue caressed his.
Beyond thought, his body stirred, the blood surged through him. Undressing her, his hands roamed her body, the contours womanly, yielding. Her flesh was smooth as alabaster, his fingers noting that there was not a hair on it, as if she had secretly prepared herself in the Egyptian way, expecting what was about to occur.
“Am I beautiful?” she whispered as his fingers, then his lips explored her. “Am I a woman?” They were questions that words could not answer. He kissed her small, high breasts, her belly, her thighs and between them, tasting the sweetness.
Then he disengaged and, feeling a special joy in exhibiting himself, undressed and showed her the fullness of his body kneeling beside her. She embraced his sex and he felt the gentle throb of her caressing lips, feeling the goodness of her suffuse him. Such feelings had, thus far, eluded him. Now he was grateful. This is joy, he screamed inside of himself.
Then she lay down under him, guiding his sex to the center of her, reaching upward to receive him, pressing him to her. He felt the barrier of her girlhood yield, then the tremor of pain as she shivered. For a moment, he held back his weight, uncertain. But she drew him in, his fullness bursting into her, feeling the ecstasy of her response, shivering with waves of pleasure, culminating in a final explosion of joyousness.
They held each other, merged together in the inevitable response. Her thighs engulfed him, caressing his body with its strong female energy. They did not disengage, holding each other in silence, hearing only the rhythm of their pounding hearts and the distant purr of the barge’s engine.
“When you left, I felt like a piece of me had disappeared,” he whispered.
“I felt that, too,” she said, kissing his eyes, finding his lips, sucking his tongue, staking her claim to his body, which he returned in kind, feeling tumescence begin again and a slow undulating pressure, assuring him of her need. Her body opened itself to him, cleft in two, as he felt now the full joyous depth of her, lingering in the connection until their bodies melded into a syrup of mutual physical love.
“From the moment I saw you,” she said, “I could no longer playact at being a boy. I wanted you to make me a woman.”
The matter of her age, too, had disappeared, as if he had plucked the flower at the moment of its greatest beauty.
“I have never felt such joy,” he said, remembering flashes of the tawdry experiences that left him dry and gasping with humiliation. He could see her eyes watching him quietly.
“You are so beautiful. Osiris. My Osiris,” she whispered, her breath soft and tingling musically against his flesh. “I prayed to Allah that I would please you.”
“More than pray,” he said, unable to resist the recognition of her ablutions, feeling the smoothness of her shaven womanhood. It did not embarrass her, and she held her hand there, reaching gently for his sex.
“I was not afraid,” she said, proving to him that he had unlocked her from the fear of all men. She continued to caress him. “I prayed, too, that you would love me forever.”
He had seen the gulf between them as impossibly wide, unbridgeable, yet this surprise in discovering their sameness moved him deeply. Beyond language and time and culture and education, they had come to each other in this mysterious primordial human dance.
“I will love you forever,” he told her, plumbing the infinite well of his passion. Love, expressed by others, had always puzzled him. No longer.
“You must never go away from me again,” he said, his lips nipping her ear, as he caressed her hair, noting that its curls had lengthened.
She moved tightly against him, her arms enveloping his waist as she pressed her body along his length, her legs opening to caress his thighs.
“Never?” He resented the intrusion of his own sense of doubt, knowing that the resolution of future plans was in his hands.
“I’ll take you to America,” he said, testing his bravado, feeling the uncommon strength of his manhood. “We’ll start a whole new life. After all, America is the land of opportunity.” It seemed suddenly to have the ring of truth, no longer the cliché of a tired slogan. “Now that I have something to live for.” He knew the statement had needed a qualifier. What good was opportunity without inspiration? So this was what had plagued him, he thought suddenly, absorbing the impact of awareness.
Their little burrow, it seemed, had become a vacuum, eschewing everything but love and joy, creating the illusion of an abstraction, as if their bodies had disappeared and the only thing that remained was the melded spirit of a single entity.
He must have briefly slipped into some current of the subconscious, a dream, perhaps. The sensation of floating movement was clear. He was on a boat. Had he died? He saw his face on the sarcophagus, gold-painted, the eyes open, clear, alert. And the boat, in his dream, was a sacred barge with a ram-headed prow, both fore and aft. He was, like the ancient god Amun, being taken through the river of night to be reborn.
The cough of the barge’s motor chased the image and his mind lurched into the present. They lay like twin fetuses, he draped along her naked back, arms engulfing her. Without disturbing her, he disengaged and peered into the spaces between the wheat sacks. The blackness of the night had softened, and he could see the outlines of a hill along the eastern bank. He wondered if he had passed the spot, resolving that if he had, it would be a sign to retreat, proof that the need to find Isis had diminished as a crucial cause.
Why endanger w
hat he had found, he thought, with Western practicality. What did it matter now? The pull of his mother’s guilt was losing its fascination. He wished with all his heart that the barge had passed the spot.
He felt her stir, her arm reach across his shoulder.
“What do you see?” she whispered.
“I think we passed it,” he said, kissing her fingers.
“Kom Ombo?”
He nodded.
“And if we did, that will be the end of it.”
He sensed her hesitation.
“After you have come so close?”
He turned toward her, embraced her, and whispered into her ear. Her response confused him.
“But you were the one that protested all along. What is the point of it… especially now?”
At that moment, he felt the barely perceptible turning of the boat, the creak of its boards as it strained to follow its course midstream.
“It’s turning,” he said. “We must be there now.” He wrestled with irresolution, tormenting himself.
“You must go,” she said.
He tried to mount a protest, searching among the rubble of his confused motivation.
“She will always be between us.”
The boat continued to turn, pressuring his sense of time, goading him to decide. Logic seemed to disintegrate. He felt the inertia of his cunning, the old challenge of his courage. She was right. He would always regret not having bridged the final narrow gulf.
He willed a deliberate suspension of his doubt, and they quickly gathered up their clothes, which he tied in a bundle and fastened with his belt onto the small of his back. Silently, they moved aside the wheat sacks, and crouching along the deck, moved to the flat edge of the deck riding low on the water. He gripped her hand, and they dropped silently into the river. Although the water was cooler than the air, it was surprisingly comfortable, and they remained underwater until the sound of the moving barge ebbed.
Surfacing, they bobbed in the barge’s wake, watching it move smoothly upstream.
The current was strong, and they let it carry them downstream as they pushed closer to the eastern bank. Her stroke was stronger than his and she made greater headway, although she would stop and call to him occasionally in the darkness. He would have preferred silence, but he answered her reassuringly as he struggled to maintain enough forward motion to keep himself heading toward shore.
The effort winded him. Fortunately, his feet touched the muddy bottom, and he was able to slog forward to the bank, where she waited with an outstretched branch.
Crawling to the dry edge, he lay on his stomach, exhausted, waiting for the pounding of his heart to recede. Loosening their clothes, she wrung them out and hung them on a nearby shrub. Then, with a handful of moist grass, she wiped his body, considerably diminishing his sense of protectorship. He recalled her self-assurance when he had first met her in the City of the Dead.
“Maybe I can’t do without you,” he said.
“I am sure of that,” she answered, recalling her earlier attitude of mock rebuke.
Grasping her hand, he used the first vestige of his returning strength to pull her next to him.
“I don’t ever want to be without the need of you,” he said. She placed her hands on his face and kissed his eyes.
“Never,” she said. “That is a promise.”
“Samya,” he whispered. In the quiet air, the sound of her name rang like a strong musical note. “Samya,” he repeated. “I love you.”
It was then, like a drumbeat emphasis to a plaintive string note, that he felt the first clear tremor of fear.
Chapter Thirty-Seven
When they put on their moist clothes, the eastern sky was alight with the promise of another hot, cloudless day. He was certain that they had escaped the net of surveillance, although he had learned that he must distrust that sense of freedom. He had been certain before, only to be proven wrong.
She explained that she had swum back to shore at a point downstream from Edfu, and made her way back to the village dock in the darkness. Actually, she had guessed that he was on the barge only because she saw them watching it. There were three of them, burly men, clumsy in their attempt to fade into the population, but unmistakably them. She had hidden in the grass on a small knoll, watching the barge, then moving upstream and into the river when it became apparent that the barge was getting ready to sail. She was certain that no one had seen her get aboard, explaining that she had grasped a dragline and not hoisted herself aboard until the boat had reached mid-river.
Having seen her swim, and observed the ways in which she had adapted to survival, he was buoyed by her explanation, which buttressed his optimism.
“We must be very cautious,” she said. “No one must see us.”
Sooner or later, Si knew, their pursuers would retrace the course of the barge, combing the villages for any sign of him. Faced with that reality, his confidence ebbed.
“They saw me go away in the felucca. They will not be looking for a girl. It would be wiser for me to search for Dr. Ezzat.”
He knew what she meant.
“It is too dangerous,” he said, shaking his head.
She looked at him with an unmistakable sense of possession. He felt pleasure in it.
“We are together,” she said.
“For always.”
He had not intended to reinforce whatever actions she was about to undertake, but he had lost the sense of authority that age and manhood had earlier suggested. Love, ironically, had brought equality.
“I can’t let you do this, Samya,” he said, gently. It seemed like the old refrain on a soundless instrument.
“There is no choice,” she said.
Again, he rushed through the alternatives in his mind. He could turn back. He could go himself. Turning back would bring inevitable self-recrimination. She was right in this. That stigma would haunt him always. As for his going alone, or even with her, he was increasing the risks of Isis’s discovery. Nevertheless, his objective seemed quite clear. He must see Isis, identify himself, validate their connection, fulfill the silent promise to himself and his mother. In that act, he was certain, he would confront his truth, test his courage.
It was, he knew, a convoluted sense of nobility. And yet he could not deny himself the moment, a grand gesture, beyond logic or safety, a slap at reason and balance, but carrying with it a sense of priority that superseded all else. What was life without courage? He would have to find Isis, see her, touch her, feel the genetic pull of kinship. Was he merely fantasizing some new way to actualize an ancient rite of manhood? He wondered. Perhaps.
If he had insisted, he knew Samya would not have gone, but then the shadow of indecision passed, and his silence gave her permission.
“All villages you see are like a fortress,” she said. “Even bitter enemies unite against strangers. I do not appear threatening. An innocent young girl.” She blushed. The humor had been accidental. “The village mullah is sure to know everyone and everything about this place.”
“And how will you find him?”
She looked at him and shook her head.
“He is always in the shadow of the minaret.”
She stood up and he came toward her, gathering her into his arms. He held her, kissed her face and lips, until she insisted on her release.
“You must wait here,” she said, as his hands slid from hers. The tall grass prevented him from seeing her receding figure, and he obeyed her admonition to stay hidden.
Sitting there, he grew restless and impatient as the sun rose and burned off the layer of mist that hung over the river and its banks like an opaque shroud. That image and the pervasive sense of Samya’s loss reminded him of his mother’s death, the mask of her frozen face as the lifted sheet provided a last glance. He had looked at that face and it had struck him that in death it was as
impenetrable as in life. Was it the loss of her, or the knowledge of her, that had provided the gnawing grief?
“We didn’t know her, Dad,” he had said to his father, turning away from the mask to view his father’s runny face, like a glob of shapeless clay.
“I knew all I wanted to know,” the grieving man had replied.
Yet, he knew his father. There were points of reference. The innumerable Kellys, supernumeraries in the vast IrishAmerican drama with its incessant rituals, its moody brooding alcoholic eruptions and stupors, its endless talk, its books and plays and poets that propagandized the Irish myth. Pride in it had become a cliché.
“It’s all right,” his father told him and his mother at Kelly gatherings, when the level of alcohol had risen in the blood, reddening their noses and cheeks, and all the highs and lows of the Irish mood erupted at once. “They’re Irish.”
The landmarks were common and colorful; the mysteries had been exploited by novelists and poets and actors and playwrights and politicians, burrowing into the American conscience, like some persistent, spreading weed.
“But what was Egypt like?” he had asked his mother. He knew the Irish. The monotony of the inquiry seemed to elicit a flash of futility in his mother’s eyes. Perhaps even she could not explain it. Egyptology, he had learned, was not Egypt. Nor were the cruel caricatures and endless military defeats. Nor the muezzins proclaiming the one god from their minarets, nor the Copts and their Christ worship, nor the blindfolded beast walking the eternal circle, pushing the Archimedes’ screw. Where, then was the real Egypt?
It was as impossible as comprehending why Zakki, a mysterious, evil, obscene force, was pursuing Isis, or why Isis existed in his mind as a child abandoned, deprived of love by a bereaved guilt-haunted mother, this offspring of the king, the fairy princess.
Stretching out, he pulled out stalks of grass and sucked them, remembering his hunger. Occasionally, groups of people and animals passed along the river trail. He heard their voices and high-pitched laughter. In the distance, a dog barked.