by Judith Tarr
Chapter 15
Dad stayed longer than I thought he would. A week after he showed up at Luxor House, he was still in town. He and Kelly were doing tours of all the greatest hits. On Friday, which is the Muslim Sunday so everyone has the day off, Aunt Jessie got us into King Tut’s tomb and we got to stay for as long as the heat would let us.
It wasn’t till after that that he and Kelly made it to Aunt Jessie’s dig. I was still on shard-and-scarab duty. I was getting good at it, maybe too good: nobody would want me down in the trenches, where things were getting frustrating and Aunt Jessie was about to give up on the latest tunnel and try somewhere else.
I kept trying to find ways to get through to Meru or Meritre when I wanted to, and not just at random. Nothing worked. I wasn’t dreaming about them, either, but small things kept me from thinking I’d imagined the whole thing. I’d smell beer or feel the starwing close by, or look up and for a split second the daylight sky would be full of stars.
They were still there, just not on top. When I did dream, I’d be riding Bonnie through the palmettos to the river, or counting turtle eggs while the moon shone on the ocean. Sometimes I was alone. More often, especially if I’d been Skyping or texting before I went to sleep, the usuals were with me.
Those were peaceful dreams, full of ordinary and comfortable and quietly wonderful things; I’d wake happy. Then during the days I was so busy just being in Egypt that I hardly had time to think about anything else.
That was deliberate. I’d been hearing from everybody as often as I could get a phone signal, and everybody told me everything, especially about Bonnie. But there was never much from Mom. A one-liner once or twice a day, saying thanks for the ten-screen epic I’d sent her, and a couple of texts, that was it. No Skype.
She must be busy. Summer in Florida is crazy season; the heat drives people nuts, then they start shooting at each other. Her court docket would be running over.
Then there was the time difference. She probably meant to call, but kept forgetting how late or how early it would be here.
One of these days she’d get around to sending me her own epic. In the meantime I wasn’t going to panic. If anything awful happened, Aunt Jessie would tell me. Wouldn’t she?
The day Dad came to the site, I finished labeling my box of shards before the heat got too ridiculous. Gwyn saw me twitching; she smiled and said, “Go on. I’m almost done, too.”
I didn’t wait for her to change her mind. I grabbed my water bottle and sunglasses and dived out of the tent.
After the first shock, the heat really wasn’t bad. It helped to slow down, chart a path from shade to shade, and keep sipping from the bottle.
The crew was working in the tunnel that slanted down off the side of the temple. Aunt Jessie had been playing a hunch, and arguing with her students over it. They said there couldn’t be a tomb that close or that obvious. Aunt Jessie kept saying, “Have you ever heard of hiding in plain sight?”
The digging had gone down a good hundred yards, and so far all they were finding was sand, rubble, and a lot of nothing. The first twenty yards or so were painted from floor to ceiling with hieroglyphs, but then those stopped and there was just bare brick, not even covered with plaster.
If they didn’t find something today that would encourage them to keep on, they were going to give up and go back to one of the other tunnels. They might even try somewhere new—Hamid had a theory about a cave he’d found up under the ridge.
Things were tense on the site this morning. Dad and Kelly showing up didn’t help much. Aunt Jessie left the tunnel to show them around the parts of the temple that were already excavated.
I wasn’t supposed to go in the tunnel without someone to babysit, but everybody was either down there, in one of the tents doing the same sorts of things Gwyn and I did, or playing tour guide. I sneaked down a little ways, not so far I needed the lights that were strung up along the ceiling, but far enough that the light outside barely made it. I could hear voices farther down, and scraping and pounding. They must have hit another wall of rubble.
I stopped because I felt weird all of a sudden: not sick exactly, or scared, but not normal, either. It felt like something soft and cold walking down my spine.
The wall paintings stopped just past where I was standing. This was where they’d found the scarab, more or less.
I still had it, wrapped in its napkin; I kept it in my pocket every day and slept with it under my pillow at night. It didn’t do anything magical. When I rubbed it or concentrated on it till I gave myself a headache, nothing ever happened.
I couldn’t bring myself to sneak it back where it belonged, though guilt dug like a splinter under my skin. My hand was in my pocket now, curled around it, the way it kept doing if I didn’t pay attention.
I knelt down and touched the floor with my other hand, and saw the scarab lying there, where it must have rolled down the slight but obvious slope.
The eyes that saw it weren’t mine, and neither was the time they lived in. I knew that because when I looked up, the paintings on the walls were bright and new.
They told a story of a king who loved her daughter as much as any mother had ever loved a child. Then the gods demanded a sacrifice, and the king had this temple built, raising it in seventy days while the princess’ body lay in its vat, being preserved for eternity.
It wasn’t an enormous feat like building Pyramids, but for people without wheels or machines to shape those columns and carve those stones and paint those walls in just over two months, I thought it was impressive. The paint was still damp in the corners when Meritre was there, and in one place it had dripped a little, so the bird with the human head looked as if it was winking at her.
I bent toward that part of the wall. It was worn and faded, but not so much that I couldn’t see where the line of black paint had gone a bit crooked.
My skin was all goose-bumpy. Somehow, more than anything else, this made it real. Meritre had been here, in this exact place.
Four thousand years. For most people I know, four years is forever. Before you were born? It might as well be the beginning of the universe.
It was too much. I had to get out of there. I scrambled up and out, toward the line of canvas roofs where all the modern people were.
I heard Aunt Jessie’s voice around the corner, inside the main part of the temple. She must be showing Dad the statue they’d dug up, that had them all excited: it showed the king dressed like a woman but wearing the crown and the beard like every other pharaoh.
Then I heard Dad say, “We have to tell her.”
“Janet doesn’t want that,” Aunt Jessie said. She sounded flat, the way I did to myself when I was trying not to scream at somebody. “She wants Meredith to enjoy her time here, and not have to worry.”
“She already is worried,” Dad said. “She’s bottling it up, but it’s obvious to me. Don’t you think she’d rather know what’s going on than get slammed with it as soon as she gets off the plane?”
“There’s time enough,” Aunt Jessie said. “She deserves not to go crazy because she can’t be with her mother.”
“What if there isn’t time enough? What if she comes home to a funeral? What will that do to her?”
“Mark,” Kelly said. I imagined she’d put her hand on his arm, the way Mom would, to calm him down. “You know what the doctors said when I called them. It could be a week, but it could be three months. They’ll let us know if anything changes.”
“Thank you,” Aunt Jessie said with a hint of snap in it, though the snap wasn’t for Kelly. “Meanwhile I think it would be a very bad idea to let Meredith know her mother has gone into hospice. We will have to tell her, I’m not arguing with that at all, but let’s not do it until we have to.”
“I think we have to,” Dad said, but Kelly must have given him a look, because he said, “All right. Not today. We do have to talk to her, and the sooner the better. I know Janet talked to you about taking her to Massachusetts after you’r
e done in Egypt, but now I’m moving to Chicago, I’ll be set up to have her with me. She’ll be a sophomore in the fall, right? So—”
“Junior,” Aunt Jessie said. “September birthday. Did you forget? She started high school two years ago.”
“Oh,” said Dad. “Right. That doesn’t change much. There’s a great school near where we’ll be living, that we can get her into even this late—Kelly’s mother is a trustee. The house we’re renting is big enough for all of us. We’ve got it all figured out.”
“Have you?” Aunt Jessie said. “Does Janet know that?”
“We’re planning to tell her,” Dad said. “I don’t see how she can argue with it. Meredith will be uprooted no matter what happens. Unless you’re moving to Florida?”
Aunt Jessie didn’t answer that. I didn’t burst in, either, to see what her face said.
The ocean was roaring in my ears. I was cold all over. Inside I felt small and sharp and very, very hard, like a chip of diamond.
Mom had insisted there was nothing wrong. She was still in remission. It was all right for me to be here on the other side of the planet, because she wasn’t sick any more. She wasn’t going to die.
She lied. She pretended the doctor hadn’t found anything in the last checkup, the one in March, right about when I was suddenly getting that surprise birthday present I didn’t even want.
He had found something. He’d found death.
Death was all around me here.
I pressed my forehead against the wall. They’d stopped talking around the corner. That was good. I needed the quiet.
A week, Kelly said. She’d said three months, too, but. A week.
Mom was in hospice. People go to hospice to die.
That’s why she sent me away. So I wouldn’t be there when it happened.
They all knew, and they hadn’t told me. They hadn’t even hinted.
I wasn’t angry yet. They were good, they really were. I’d fallen for the scam.
Oh, I’d guessed, deep down. There was a reason why I didn’t want to come to Egypt. But I hadn’t let myself admit it. Just that I wanted a nice normal summer with Bonnie and the usuals.
And Mom. Especially Mom.
I went back to the place where the scarab had been. I wasn’t trying to time-travel or turn into Meritre or whatever else might be happening. I just needed to be somewhere that Dad and Aunt Jessie weren’t.
This time I kept on going down the tunnel. I couldn’t hear people working, and nobody was talking. The crew must have quit for the day.
A tiny part of me thought about running back and hiding somewhere more obvious, like the tent I did my work in. I was emphatically not supposed to be down in a tunnel alone with no phone signal and nobody who knew where I’d gone.
The rest of me didn’t care. It was cool down here—surprisingly. I thought I’d heard people say it was horribly hot, and the crews needed fans to keep from passing out.
This was like the cave Dad took me to once, where after you got in, the temperature was always the same. The string of lights stretched down ahead of me. It wasn’t very bright, so there were a lot of shadows. I couldn’t see all that far ahead.
It should have been spooky. It felt weirdly safe.
I needed safe. Something inside of me, some part I couldn’t name or describe, was crumbling, bit by bit. When it was done, I’d be completely empty. There wouldn’t be anything left of me at all.
I came to the place where the crew had been working, where they’d been picking away at the rubble. I could see why they’d stopped: they seemed to have hit a dead end.
Aunt Jessie would be disappointed. Hamid might get to explore his cave after all.
The end of the tunnel looked like solid rock, but something about it made my eyes go narrow. I picked up a trowel that someone had left.
This was a bad idea. I wasn’t cleared to do any digging. I’d picked around a few sites around home; I knew how to dig out a mammoth bone or an arrowhead. I had no business messing with a real archeological dig.
What difference did it make? This was a big fat zero, and so was I.
I went down on my knees and scraped away at the place where the floor met the rock. For rock, it was soft. It flaked like plaster. Very old plaster, with brick underneath.
My heart started to beat harder. I really ought to stop. But I needed to see. I needed to be sure.
It was a clever piece of plasterwork. It looked exactly like sandstone. If I hadn’t had this gut feeling, or maybe it was a memory, I’d never have thought to run a trowel down along the floor, and find the place where the plaster gave way.
Someone’s shovel had dug in there, but whoever it was had stopped before he realized he was hitting brick and not solid rock. I worked my way carefully along the crack until I found the next one, the one that went up instead of sideways.
I’d found a door. I knew what was on the other side—what had to be there.
The question was, what did I do about it? Did I tell Aunt Jessie? Or did I let it stay?
That wasn’t me thinking. That was Meritre. A tomb was sacred, a home for eternity. Who was any of us to violate that? If we did, we weren’t any better than the robbers who forced the builders to play all these elaborate tricks to keep the tomb hidden.
I put the trowel down. Anybody could see what I’d done now, and what shape I’d uncovered. The light caught it just right.
I could cover it up again. But I didn’t make any move to do that.
It was almost noon. The air around me was suddenly cold.
I shivered. I could almost see the princess standing in the tunnel, staring at me. Or was it Meritre?
Now I was spooked. I got up and turned. I won’t say I ran, but I walked awfully fast back up into the light.
Chapter 16
It was a long while and many questions before Lyra could accept that Meru knew nothing about the blue bead or the carefully preserved flower. Finally she let Meru go.
She let her take the bead in its packet with her. Maybe the Decider was hoping that once Meru thought she was by herself, she would stop lying and use the bead for whatever Jian had meant her to use it for.
Meru had not been lying. She could not begin to understand what she was supposed to do. All she could think of was that Jian was not there to ask, and would never be there again.
It did not get easier with time. The dark inside her was deeper, the emptiness more profound, than it had been an hour ago, or a day.
Meru’s new cell was high up the levels of Containment, equipped with every luxury but access to the web. It had a clear view of the spaceport and the stilled and silenced cable.
It might have been meant to comfort her. She would not have liked to think that the Decider intended to be cruel.
Meru could eat or drink anything she asked for here. One wall was installed with games and entertainments: primitive, awkward, but better than nothing. She set it to spin through random alternations of music and light, darkened the rest of the walls, and ordered the floor to become a bed.
She curled up with the bead closed tight in her hand. It was thousands of years old, Lyra had said, and it came from Earth. That was another mystery: how Jian had found it and why, and what it had to do with the epidemic in the old city.
Holding the bead that Jian had held, Meru tried to think as Jian might have thought. It helped a little. It brought her mother closer, and blunted the edges of grief.
Consensus had found nothing in or on the bead. It was no more or less than a blue stone bead with a hole drilled through it, wrapped in a package with a flower many thousands of years old. The pictures on the bead’s flat bottom were writing, a prayer or incantation in a common and ancient form.
There were thousands of such beads in the world still, stored in museums and temples and old tombs. This one was in no way different, except for the flower that came with it—and there was nothing terribly rare or dangerous about that, either.
Meru needed the web. If Jian
had left an explanation anywhere, she would have left it there.
Meru had come close to begging Lyra to restore her access, but something stopped her every time she opened her mouth to try. If Jian had meant Consensus to know what she had found, she would have left the key for them, and not for Meru.
The link was still there, far down in Meru’s awareness, with Yoshi on the other end. But it was too weak, the data capacity too small. It could not do much more than make her feel as if she was not alone in the universe.
There was a way to change that.
First, Meru needed to rest. Then she had to find a way out of Containment.
It was a clear plan. It kept her from spinning in the room, screaming with rage and grief and sheer helplessness.
The starwing drifted down from the top of the vault, melted through the cell’s walls and surrounded Meru like a blanket. In the wash of its calm and the soothing sound of its purring, she slid into sleep.
She dreamed of that other world, those stiff square walls and unyielding floors. This time the walls were painted from floor to ceiling with strange and brightly colored images, some easy to recognize—an arm and a hand, a bird, a flower—and some not. They were same writing she had seen on the bead.
Everything seemed doubled, as if she was dreaming two dreams at once, but one version was sharper and brighter and seemed newer than the other. In both, the blue bead rested in a persona’s hand: the rounder, paler one that Meru remembered from the odd game on the web, and one almost as narrow but not nearly as dark as Meru’s.
The bead was the key. It held the answer to all her questions: the epidemic, the strange game or dream or whatever it was, and the bead itself.
Meru woke to find the starwing gone. It had retreated once more to the roof, feeding on the sunlight that poured through the field.
For a moment she did not remember where she was or why she was there. For the fraction of a second, her world was whole.
Then memory crashed down on her. It flattened her to the floor. She pushed herself up and out of it, and fixed on the thing she had decided to do.