by Amber Benson
“You see,” Senenmut continued, “I fell out of favor with my one true love, the Queen Hatshepsut, and she condemned me to death. She was a wildly jealous woman, and I can imagine some members of her retinue whispering my imagined misdeeds into her ear to gain her favor.”
“So, you were a good boy and kept it in your pants, then?” I asked, expecting him to get all defensive on me.
“Why would I need another woman when she fulfilled every part of me?” he replied in all seriousness. “She was my best friend and my partner in both the literal and physical sense.”
I nodded. Obviously, this woman had it going on if she could keep a man like Senenmut madly in love with her for thousands of years.
“As the living consort of the all-powerful creator, Amun-Ra,” Senenmut continued, “Hatshepsut had ultimate power. With her hatred for me overflowing, she ordered me to be mummified while I was still alive and placed in the tomb of her beloved daughter, Neferura, for all eternity. This is how I know that she had not fully forsaken our love. Otherwise, she would not have placed me so close to the one she loved best, so that we all might meet again in the Afterlife.”
“Oh,” I said, not really sure what to make of Senenmut’s story. I didn’t think a girl who was still in love with a guy would have him mummified alive like that. Maybe castrated if she thought she was being cuckolded, but the murdering part didn’t sit quite right with me.
“There is more,” he continued, his eyes wide with remembered pain. “When my earthly body finally succumbed to starvation, I was greeted by Anubis and his twin, Bata—”
“I’ve always just called them the Jackal Brothers,” I interrupted. “I didn’t know they had different names.”
“They are so alike that there is none who can tell them apart,” Senenmut said. “But while they both represent Death, each one embodies a different aspect: Anubis sits in judgment, while Bata enforces that judgment.”
“Okay,” I said, shaking my head. “So, what happened when Anubis and his brother came to get you after you died?”
“The brothers told me that I had not respected Hatshepsut, Amun-Ra’s earthly consort, and for that they would punish me themselves. They refused to judge my heart and discover its worthiness. They knew if they did, they would be forced to let me pass into the Afterlife because all I had in my heart was my love for Hatshepsut. And that would be my redemption.”
“I knew those guys were just two jerkoids,” I said angrily.
Senenmut smiled wearily at me.
“But then you came to rescue me, and for that I thank the Gods,” he said. “Now I am free to find Hatshepsut, discover what I did to displease her, and save my past self from the horrible fate he will be forced to endure upon this day.”
“Look, I would love to help you out, Senenmut,” I said, “but I don’t think we really have time for this. If I had known that you were doing all this under false pretenses . . .”
I trailed off. It didn’t matter what I would or wouldn’t have done anymore—all of that was in the past now. And you can’t change the past, no matter how hard you try. That was what Senenmut didn’t understand. This was our future—albeit in the guise of the past—and all we could do was make smarter decisions from here on out.
I found the rubidium clock in a small pocket at the side of my sheath dress. Since it was a magical device, I wasn’t surprised to see that it had followed me through time.
“This clock tells me how long I have before I have to get you to Cerberus,” I said. “If I don’t get you there before it runs out, we will be in serious three-headed doggie doo-doo.”
Senenmut watched as I held up the clock and whispered to it:
“How much time is left?”
The numbers came to a stop and the tiny screen went black.
“That’s weird,” I said, shaking it. “Must’ve gotten messed up when we went back in time.”
Suddenly, a string of numbers flashed in front of me. I still had over six hours until Senenmut was due in Hell.
“What does it say?” Senenmut asked.
I looked up and smiled at him. I didn’t have the heart to begrudge him a few more hours in Egypt. Besides, what harm could it do? If things started to get out of hand, I’d just grab Senenmut and tell the little clock to take us to Cerberus.
“We have time,” I said. “So if you want to look for Hatshepsut for a few hours, I’m okay with it.”
Like I said, it was gonna be all about the decisions we made from here on in. Senenmut let out a whoop and grabbed me in a hug, swinging me around like a rag doll.
“I could kiss you,” Senenmut said, grinning like an idiot as he set me down, making me blush.
“Why don’t you save it for your lady love?” I replied, but his positive attitude was rubbing off on me.
“All right, just plant one right here,” I said, indicating my cheek. As Senenmut leaned forward to give my cheek a thank-you kiss, I saw a flash of white streak across the sand a few hundred feet away from us.
“Wait a minute,” I said, stopping Senenmut. “I just saw something over by those bricks.”
Instantly, Senenmut was on the alert. His swiveled his head around to see what I was pointing to, but there was nothing there.
“Are you sure you saw something?” he asked me. “Maybe you only imagined—”
He was interrupted by the whoosh of an arrow as it sliced the air between us, embedding itself in the sand at my feet.
“Damn it, I didn’t imagine that,” I yelped as Senenmut grabbed my hand and we began to race toward the place where the arrow had come from.
Wait a minute, I thought to myself, this doesn’t feel right. Why the hell are we running toward the bad guys?
“Shouldn’t we be going the other way?” I screeched at Senenmut, but my query was ignored as I was suddenly shoved down behind an outcropping of brickwork.
“Stay here,” Senenmut whispered to me before disappearing around the other side, leaving me to my own devices should the bad guys decide to circle back around to where I was hiding and get me.
“I am not sitting here like a goddamned duck,” I whispered to myself, noticing a small opening between the bricks. It looked dark and totally uninviting, but I decided that I would be safer inside it than hanging around out in the open.
Here goes nothing, I thought before dropping on my hands and knees and crawling into the hole.
It wasn’t what I’d thought it would be like inside the hole because it wasn’t actually a hole.
Yep, yours truly had crawled into the opening of a tomb.
“Hello?” I said, expecting my words to echo inside the cavernous entrance chamber, but the sound was absorbed into the emptiness without repeat.
Okay, I thought, it could be a lot worse. You could be in utter darkness. Luckily, someone has been here recently and left behind a couple of burning torches to keep you company.
I stepped farther into the entrance chamber, my eyes dazzled by all the beautiful hieroglyphic writing that’d been painted onto the walls, even extending onto parts of the ceiling as well. I liked how the hieroglyphics weren’t just abstract images, but actually pictorial representations of the words they represented. I tried to deduce whom the tomb belonged to by the images that surrounded me, but the only thing that gave any kind of hint as to who was buried here was a small black stone statue pushed far back into the corner of the room. It was of a man in a headdress, holding a young girl in his arms. The man’s face looked sad, like maybe the girl in his arms had died or something—
“Who dares trespass against my daughter’s burial place?” a voice called, interrupting me.
It was a woman’s voice, but when I turned around, I found a man standing in the doorway that led to the next room.
“Uhm, look, I don’t mean to trespass against anyone or anything,” I said, but the man only glared at me.
I stared at him, something about the guy’s face striking me as familiar. I took in his white linen sheath, the thi
ck beard on his chin—wait a minute. There was something wrong with the beard.
“Hey, you’re not a man,” I said. “That’s a fake beard.”
I walked over and pulled on the man’s beard. It easily fell away in my hands. The man/woman was so shocked by my forwardness, that he/she did nothing to stop me when I yanked off its headdress to reveal a topknot of thick, dark, womanly hair.
“How dare you!” the woman said—I was sure she was a woman now—as she shoved me away from her, scooping up her golden headdress and ramming it back down on her head. “You will pay sorely for your misdeeds!”
“Oh Jesus,” I said, holding out her fake beard. “Just take your stupid beard and put it back on already.”
She stared at me and I could tell that she was not at all used to being talked to this way. Reluctantly, she took the beard and slipped it into her pocket.
“What? No thank-you?” I asked, but my sarcasm was lost on her.
“Hey, I know you,” I said, recognition slowly dawning on me as I gazed at her beardless face.
It was Madame Papillon—only, like, a zillion years younger and prettier.
“It’s Calliope Reaper-Jones. Remember? You said you were gonna teach me how to call up wormholes . . . ?”
The woman had no idea what I was talking about. She pursed her lips and frowned, perplexed.
“I do not know of what you speak,” she said, cocking her head as she tried to size me up. “What is this Papillon you talk of?”
I didn’t know where to start.
“Uhm, well—” I began, but was interrupted by a ray of sunlight that slit the semidarkness and slammed into my face, nearly blinding me. I could hear someone shifting the bricks away from the entranceway, so that more and more light began to spill into the burial chamber.
“My King! I have seen something terrible!”
The voice was low and mellifluous, more masculine than feminine, but this time I didn’t let any gender assumptions throw me. I knew that voice and I could picture exactly whom it belonged to.
It was Madame Papillon’s Minx, Muna.
Only, the creature that stepped out of the light and into the dimness of the chamber wasn’t the Muna that I remembered. This Muna was tall, dark-skinned, and decidedly male. He was wearing a short black leather tunic, a black headdress, and carrying a quiver of arrows and a bow on his back. Behind him were three other men, dressed similarly, but with gray tunics, not black.
“Mustafa, take this woman away from me,” the young Madame Papillon said, pointing at me.
Mustafa signaled the other guards forward and they instantly surrounded me.
I wondered if the Guinness Book of World Records had an entry for the most time spent under armed guard. If they did, I thought I might actually have a chance at beating the record because the last—almost—twenty-four hours had to have set one of some kind.
A guard grabbed my wrists and bound them really tightly behind my back with a piece of twine.
“Ow!” I said. “That hurts.”
The guards seemed mystified by what I was saying, so I repeated myself again, only slower.
“Ow. That. Hurt. Loosen them, please!”
Once again, all I got was a mystified look from the three guard boys. It took me a moment to understand what was going on, but when I got it, it made total sense. These guys didn’t understand a word I was saying. In fact, my English probably sounded like gibberish to them, the ravings of a mad woman, even.
Oblivious old me hadn’t thought twice about the fact that Senenmut—and the younger Madame Papillon and Muna/ Mustafa—could understand me. I mean, we were in Ancient Egypt, where I bet pretty much no one spoke English—if the language had even been invented yet, which I doubted—so why were the four of us able to understand each other? It didn’t seem possible, yet it was happening.
It didn’t take a big leap to figure it out: We all possessed magical abilities.
“Hey, as one magic user to another—” I began, but one of the guards slammed his fist into the small of my back, knocking the wind out of my lungs and sending me to my knees.
“What is this terrible thing that you have seen, Mustafa?” the younger Madame Papillon said impatiently, ignoring me as I tried to catch my breath from my place on the floor.
Mustafa looked over at me, his eyes full of fire and piss.
“O great King Hatshepsut, this wretched creature was seen consorting with the architect Senenmut.”
Oh Jesus, I thought miserably, my heart in my throat. This is Senenmut’s true love? Madame Papillon?
“What do you mean?” Hatshepsut, a.k.a. Madame Papillion, said, a catch in her voice. She looked down at me, her beautiful eyes stricken.
“We chased the architect away, but not before we saw with our own eyes his indiscretion,” Mustafa said.
“What do you mean?!” Hatshepsut screamed, clutching her fist to her breast. “What do you mean?”
Mustafa had a gleeful look in his eye that I did not like one little bit. I watched, shocked, as the man opened his mouth and bald-faced lied to Hatshepsut’s face.
“We caught them fornicating upon this very spot where your daughter, Neferura, lies interred.”
“That’s not true. It was totally benign—” I yelled out, but a kick from one of the guards to my right kidney made sure no more words came out of my mouth.
Seriously, the pain was so intense I really thought I was going to be sick right there on the floor. I could just imagine some modern-day archeologist scratching his head over why there were cupcake remains in what was supposed to be an ancient Egyptian’s upchuck.
I was ripped out of my pain-induced fantasies by the most bloodcurdling scream I had ever heard escape from the lips of a human being. I looked up to see Hatshepsut’s face contorted in rage.
“You will die for this!” she screamed again, her voice like nails on a chalkboard.
I wanted to say something pithy in response, but before I could draw together my strength, she pounced, attacking me with every ounce of rage she possessed. She raked her nails across my face, then grabbed me by the hair and started slamming my head into the compacted mud brick floor. Of course, with my hands tied behind my back, I was helpless to defend myself. I could feel the blood spurt out of my broken nose, tasting it on my tongue as it dripped down and mingled with the blood from my split lip.
As the pain overwhelmed me and my brain began to cease functioning properly, one thought floated in and out of my consciousness:
I was the reason that Senenmut was put to death.
I had been here before.
twenty-three
I woke up with a headache so terrible, so awful . . . so all-powerful , that I was convinced I had drunk my way through an entire bar, starting with Captain Morgan and working my way down the alphabet.
“Oh God,” I moaned involuntarily as I tried to turn my head.
A shot of raw, white-hot pain ran up my spinal column and into my brain, making me decide that if I needed to move my head again, I was going to hire someone else to do it for me.
I tried to open my eyes, but they were caked in what I hoped were dried tears—not blood. I wanted to reach up and rub away whatever was in them, but I was too scared to try to lift my arm. I was not interested in encountering another shot of pain like the one I’d just experienced.
With a little work, I was able to crack my right eyelid open a little bit so I could see where the hell I’d been stashed. The light was very low, but I could just make out the shadow of a statue before me. I cracked the other eye open, and together, my eyeballs were able to discern that the statue was the one I had seen earlier in Hatshepsut’s daughter’s tomb. Which meant that they hadn’t stashed me anywhere; I was in the exact same position and place I’d been in when I’d fainted.
I had to get up. I didn’t want to, but in my heart I knew that I had to make myself do it. Being immortal might’ve had its perks, but getting trapped in a tomb with a bunch of mummies until Howar
d Carter—or someone of his ilk—stumbled on me thousands of years later sounded about as appealing as getting myself defingernailed.
I gritted my teeth, glad to see they all seemed to be where they were supposed to be, and lifted my head off the ground. There was more horrible pain in my head, but I sucked it up as best I could and used my elbows and hands to bring myself into a sitting position. The room spun around like a carousel, only there were no pretty horses in brightly painted colors on this ride. Instead, the hieroglyphics on the wall were my companions, weaving in and out of my peripheral vision as I tried to keep my eyes open and the encroaching blackness at bay.
“Oh God,” I moaned again, raising my hand to my head to steady the spinning—which so didn’t work.
I probed around my skull, feeling for bumps or lacerations, but couldn’t find any. Next came the nose check and I immediately knew the bitch had broken it. Even worse than that, when I pulled my hand away, there was blood all over my fingers—and not the dried stuff, either. I’m talking fresh, newly exposed blood with lots of clots and crap in it.
I almost lost it right there. I don’t like blood. It makes me nauseous and unable to think straight. It’s better when it’s someone else’s blood, but not much.
“Oh God, Oh God, Oh God . . .”
I was starting to get a little hysterical, and if I didn’t calm down soon, I was really gonna lose it.
“Okay,” I said to myself as calmly as possible, “just relax and pretend that you’re at Barneys.”
Just the word “Barneys” was enough to get the magic working.
“Now,” I murmured to myself, “they’re having a big sale and, guess what, there was a glitch on your tax return and you just got a ten-thousand-dollar refund check in the mail.”
My breathing eased as I imagined myself trolling the aisles at Barneys, my ten-thousand-dollar check burning a hole in my real Hermès Birkin bag—just like the one I’d seen Liv Tyler carrying in the photo splash pages of In Style magazine.