by Judith Tarr
I had the map of the beach up on my phone—already marked in a dozen places where we’d seen turtles making nests in the past week or so—and the app was ready to start counting as soon as a turtle came in. It was early for turtles: the sky was dark, but the horizon over the mainland was stained blood-red with the last of the sunset.
The air wrapped around me like a warm blanket. For a few seconds it felt impossibly strange, as if I’d been expecting the biting cold I’d felt in my dream. Memory. Whatever.
The sound of the ocean was the same in the dream and out of it. The long slow heave and sigh was louder than usual tonight. “Must be a storm out to sea,” Cat said.
Rick grunted. It was a comfortable sound. Familiar. Friendly.
The waves were high, and the moon was up, shining down a long silver road like the road from Meru’s island to the spaceport. The foam glowed white against the black water. It was so beautiful it hurt.
I was homesick already, and I hadn’t even left for Egypt yet. Cat and Rick headed off down the beach in opposite directions—covering as much territory as possible. That left me to hold the middle.
I sat on the steps down below the dunes, next to a sea grape that rustled and creaked in the wind off the ocean. When I looked down at my hands in the moonlight, they looked like someone else’s. I was half expecting them to be long and thin and the color of black coffee, like Meru’s. These shorter, fatter, whitey-brown things didn’t make sense to me at all.
Bonnie, Mom, Egypt, the dream that was so real, were all tangled up in my head. I couldn’t tell anybody about it, even Cat, who knew everything else about me. What could I say? Nothing made any sense.
While my mind spun its wheels, my eyes scanned the surf. Dark things floated in the foam—a log, an escaped buoy, a clump of seaweed trapped in plastic.
One thing wasn’t like the others. It was solid and rounded, and it moved against the thrust of the wave. It washed up on the beach just past the foot of the steps, rocking when the wave tried to suck it back.
The turtle didn’t pause to get its bearings, the way most of them did. It was already moving, fighting against the weight of the air, digging flippers in and dragging itself forward.
It was a big one, as big as I was, but much heavier. It left a deep trail cross-hatched with flipper tracks, right up past the foot of the steps.
I saw the water dripping from its shell, and the knots of weeds and barnacles, and the pale line of a scar from the middle to the edge. This turtle had come a long, hard way to lay its eggs.
Out of the water it was almost blind. As long as I didn’t move, it couldn’t see me. With what for a sea turtle was serious speed, it dug in its hind flippers and sent sand flying, digging the hole for its nest.
It was right beside me. I could see its face, and its big scarred head. The moon glimmered on the tears that ran down its cheeks, ran and ran, all the while it made its nest and laid its round white eggs. My finger on the phone’s screen counted each plop as a new egg landed on top of the rest.
It didn’t even know I was there, or if it knew, it didn’t care. I counted ninety-six plops before the turtle paddled sand over them all, burying them as deep as it could. Then it kicked and struggled itself around to face the water.
It went back fast. They always do that: slow coming in, as if the weight of eggs and earth is too much for them, but quick going back, as if they can’t wait to be home again.
It hesitated just before the wave rolled in. Bracing itself, like Meru before she stepped onto the road. Then the water caught it and lifted it up, suddenly weightless, and carried it away.
Chapter 8
Meritre had had visions since she was small. Sometimes she could see what would happen, or hear or feel it. Sometimes she lived another life, a life full of metal birds that flew across the sky, and nights full of stars that looked almost familiar, but not quite. And sometimes when the night was quiet or the sun was so blinding bright at midday that everyone took shelter to escape from it, she heard the gods speaking to one another.
She almost never spoke of it. She had no desire to become a soothsayer in the market, and since she was neither a king nor a high-ranking priest, there was not much use in it except occasionally to awe her brothers.
She had seen the plague in nightmares, night after night, but she had also seen that it would end. She had clung to that through the worst of it. The world would go on. The people would survive. There would still be a king in the palace and crocodiles in the river, and the sun would beat down at noon and give way at night to the patterns of stars that she had known all her life.
Since the plague retreated, the visions had finally let her be. If she could have wished for one, it would be of her mother and father safe and healthy, and the new baby safely born and blessed with a long and prosperous life. But her gift from the gods had never been that easily controlled.
Meritre was in no mood to lie back and let the gods tell her what they intended to do. She was not in a mood for prayer, either. Prayer might have kept the family safe through the plague, but with Father ill and Mother expecting a baby at her age and in her fragile condition, Meritre dared leave nothing to chance.
She needed magic.
The world was full of it. Even before gods, magic had been; all creation had been born of it. From the charm a woman laid on a man to make him love her to the spell a physician worked to heal an illness, magic made certain what prayer could only hope for.
It did not always work. If Meritre was honest with herself, it often failed.
She had to try. Thanks to Uncle Amonmose who was a scribe in the palace, she had learned to read and even write a little. Also thanks to him, she had a book of her own, made up of scraps that he had given her to practice writing on. Some of the scraps had bits of spells and charms written on them already, and she had made a point of adding to them when she could.
They were mostly minor: how to conjure away a wart, charm a fish onto a hook, or call a breeze on a hot day. But some could be more than that.
She was not arrogant enough to try the great magic, to raise the dead or force the gods to serve her. She only wanted to protect her family. For that, there were more than enough spells; the difficulty was to choose the right one.
The king’s festival was still a handful of days away, but the gods had been looking out for Meritre. That day Aweret had been able to go to the temple and join the choir for its practice, and while she had been somewhat pale and shaky, her beautiful voice had made them all whole again. Then in the evening Uncle Amonmose came by for dinner, bringing with him one of the young scribes it was his duty to train.
Djehuti was tall and quiet, with long, sensitive hands that curled around a cup with unconscious grace. He never said much, but Meritre could tell his eyes and ears took in everything around him. He was a quick learner, Uncle Amonmose said; he had mastered all the books of the younger scribes’ course, and was almost ready to take on his own students.
Meritre had met him a time or two before. She liked the way he had of being so very much there, but not chattering about it. After her brothers, who never stopped talking even when they were asleep, it was wonderfully restful.
That evening after everyone had eaten, they all sat on the roof, watching the last blood-red light fade from the western sky. There was a brisk breeze off the river; it had blown away the biting flies. People were on their roofs all over the city, talking back and forth, laughing and singing. It was a little festival of its own, a celebration that they were alive.
Meritre left the men to their noise and chatter and want to sit by the roof’s edge, as close to the western horizon as she could go. After a moment or two and a little to her surprise, Djehuti came over and sat beside her.
He did not try to talk to her. He simply sat there with the wind in his face. His smooth skull, shaved for cleanliness as every scribe’s was, had a pleasing shape to it in the last of the light. His face was pleasing, too, without being so pretty it made her
blush: long clean lines, dark level brows, firm but rounded chin.
Any other time, she might have enjoyed looking at it until there was no more light to see with. Tonight she had too much on her mind.
Something about his silence drew words out of her. “I need advice,” she said, “about magic. I need a spell to protect everybody here. There are so many, and I’m not sure—”
“Why?”
The word hung in the warm darkness. Behind them, Father and Uncle Amonmose and the boys were well into the beer.
The cat appeared out of the night and established itself in Meritre’s lap. Its purring and the softness of its fur under her fingers helped her answer his question. “I want to keep my family safe.”
There was enough lamplight from the other side of the roof to see his shape but little else. She heard him breathing. After a while he said, “Something’s troubling you.”
“It’s not a new plague,” Meritre said quickly. “I just want to do this.”
“You didn’t do it during the plague?”
“I didn’t have to. The gods did it instead. Now they have other things to do, and I’ve been studying. I can’t guard the whole kingdom. I’m not that powerful, and I wouldn’t presume. But this household I can protect.”
He paused for a very long time, until she was sure he was not going to respond, even to refuse. Then he said, “There are incantations that are as safe as magic ever is, that don’t require months to prepare, or ingredients that only a king can afford. Do you need them quickly?”
“As soon as can be,” Meritre said.
He hugged his knees and rocked. “Tomorrow evening I think I can get away.”
Meritre’s heart swelled to fill her chest, making it hard to breathe. But her mind was clear enough for her to say, “Don’t come here. People will ask questions. Meet me in the market by the amulet seller’s stall.”
There were several of those in the market nearest the house, Meritre remembered too late, but Djehuti brushed with his finger the blue scarab she wore around her neck. “I know the one,” he said. “I’ll be there.”
Now that Meritre had made up her mind to do something, she felt strangely relieved. There was fear, of course, and a quiver of excitement, but most of all, it felt right. She slept well that night, barely interrupted by Father’s coughing and the yowl of mating cats in the street outside.
The dream ambushed her just before dawn. She was aware that it was a dream, and that it was true. At first she thought it was a memory of the past: the plague was at its height, death and dying in every house, and those who cared for the dead were dying themselves, of exhaustion as much as of the plague.
That was as she remembered, but she had lived in the midst of it then. Now she stood high above it under a sky full of stars. Death stalked the city below her and the fields that surrounded it, and filled the river with the helpless dead, until the crocodiles could eat no more.
She lifted her hand. The stars dimmed; the earth held its breath. The flood of death began to ebb, slowly at first, then more quickly.
When she lowered her hand, the plague had gone in all but one place. Down below her in the sleeping city, death claimed one final sacrifice. That life, the last one, lay like the petal of a flower in Meritre’s palm.
As she stared down at it, it shriveled and shrank, closing upon itself. When it was no more than a smudge of dust, a breath of wind caught and lifted it and carried it away, spiraling upward until it vanished among the stars.
Chapter 9
All the way from Orlando to New York to Egypt on the long, long flights, I kept sliding in and out of that other life, the one with the cat and the temple and the family in its mud-brick house in the middle of a hundred other mud-brick houses, and that other me standing as tall as the sky. There was a hawk above me, wings spread wide, soaring through the blue heaven.
Except to me, it didn’t look like a hawk. It looked like the jet I was riding in, with its hawk-of-Horus logo on the tail. It was red and gold and blue, and it looked like ancient Egypt.
I was a little excited by then. A little. All right?
Cat would mock me, but there wasn’t any wi-fi on this flight. I was flying blind, with a tablet full of books and music and the craziness inside my own head. I’d have to wait till I landed before I could hook myself back up to the world.
I’d stopped fighting by the time Mom gave me one last rib-creaking hug outside of the airport security gate. “Just six weeks,” she said. “Then everything can get back to normal.”
Whatever normal was. I hefted the backpack full of laptop and supplies for the trip and the shiny new tablet that everybody had got together with Mom to give me for a going-away present, and said before Mom could say it again, for the sixteen dozenth time, “Yes, I’ve got my passport and my visa and my boarding passes and my global phone card and—”
“And your head screwed on firmly and all relevant numbers saved to every electronic device and the notebook in your pocket,” Mom finished for me. “Be safe. Behave. Don’t forget to Skype.”
I could still smell her perfume through the stale and slightly cold smell of airplane air. It wrapped around me like her hug. When I dozed off I could feel her beside me.
That was a dream. Reality was a long, long flight from morning into night and then into morning again.
On the last leg of the trip, from Cairo to Luxor, I looked down and saw what Meritre’s hawk must have been seeing. I didn’t see the place I’d been dreaming or remembering, at least not the way it was in the dream. The city I was about to land in was the same kind of smoky sprawl you see everywhere else you go—except for all the ruins poking out of it.
The river was there. So was the way the green parts stayed close to the water, and the rest of the world was bare red-brown desert. That hadn’t changed much in however many thousand years.
I was wide awake, so tired I couldn’t remember what sleep felt like. I missed Mom and Bonnie and the usuals deep inside, like a bruise that wouldn’t heal. Mom had e-mailed me once, and we’d texted back and forth every time I was on the ground.
Then in New York I got an actual pleasant surprise: the whole barn had a Skype party for me. They linked up Rick’s tablet and hauled it around the barn and showed me all the horses, and Bonnie got it all smeary when she drooled hay foam on it.
I promised them all to write down everything and take pictures everywhere—starting with a picture of the terminal I was in. I wished I could send them the dreams, too. They were so real I could still feel the cat’s fur under my hand, and taste the stew Meritre had made in that last dream, the one with the boy she liked so much it made her toes curl.
The stew was good. So was the bread when it came out of the oven, though it was grainier than the grainiest whole-grain bread I’d ever gnawed my way through. No butter, either. But it was tasty dipped in the stew.
My mouth was watering. Soda and peanuts didn’t quite come up to it, but they filled my stomach, which was more than dream food could do.
I hadn’t dreamed or remembered Meru again. I admit I was glad. Meritre’s life wasn’t easy, but the grief in it was either worn down with age or it hadn’t happened yet. Meru’s grief was right there, lodged like a knife in my gut.
The flight attendant who’d been keeping an eye on me came by and made sure my seat back was up and my tray was stowed for landing and all those other things I already knew. I didn’t tell her that. She was too honestly nice, and I loved her accent. It was worth it just to listen to the way her tongue curled around the English words.
I wished she’d slide into Arabic so I could hear what she really sounded like, but she never did. I had to listen to the PA for that. All the announcements were in Arabic as well as English.
When the plane was down and we were all herded through Customs and I was the only dirty-blonde-haired person anywhere in sight, it hit me right between the sort-of-blue-sort-of-grey-sort-of-green eyes. This place was foreign. And what the hell was I doing in
it?
I started to freak out. What if Aunt Jessie had the wrong time for my flight? What if she couldn’t make it to pick me up and hadn’t been able to call? What if—
“Meredith!”
I’d know that voice anywhere. Aunt Jessie had a hat jammed down over her rusty-colored curls, and her clothes were straight out of Indiana Jones: boots and khakis and a loose white shirt. No tank tops out in public in this country—she’d made sure I knew that before I left.
Her hug swallowed me up. I hugged back so hard she went Oof. I still hadn’t forgiven her, not hardly, but right then the only person I’d have been gladder to see was Mom.
She rounded up my luggage and introduced me to the two people with her—both grad students and both from Egypt, with the same accent the flight attendant had—and herded us all out to an honest-to-Horus Land Rover. I used to dream about riding through the desert in a Land Rover.
Not that Luxor’s desert, exactly. It’s Black Land: riverside Egypt, about as humid as Florida, and about as buggy, too. But there’s desert around it, and across the river where the tombs are.
Ancient Egypt is everywhere. Statues, temples, rows of columns cropping up next to a street that could have come right out of Palm Bay: no matter where you turn, there’s something to remind you that three, four, five thousand years ago, people were here. Right here, where you’re sitting in a traffic jam in your aunt’s Land Rover, with tourists clogging every street and bazaar, and vendors selling everything from genuine reproduction antique amulets to cans of Coca-Cola.
I bought an amulet while we sat waiting for the street to clear, off a tray of them. It was just like the one Meritre wore in my dream, a blue beetle on a string. “Stops Evil Eye,” the man who sold it said. I got him to repeat that in Arabic, so I could start learning what people were really saying.