by Tim Powers
—E. D. Clarke
On the morning of the tenth of October Doyle came blearily awake and realized that he was out on the deck… and that the planks under his bearded cheek were hot, and when he opened his eyes bright sunlight made him squeeze them shut again… and then it came to him that he could hear talking, creaking cordage, the slap of water against the gently rocking hull—the wind had stopped.
“—Drydock somewhere,” a man’s gruff voice was saying, “though not in this godforsaken outpost.”
Another voice said something about Greece.
“Sure, if it’ll get to Greece. Every damn seam is leaking, just about every sail is shredded, the goddamn masts are—”
The second voice, which Doyle now recognized as the one that was nearly identical to Doctor Romany’s, interrupted with some brief harshness that shut the other up.
Doyle tried to sit up, but only managed to roll over, for he was tightly bound with thick, tarry-smelling ropes. They’re not taking any chances with me, he thought; then he smiled, for he realized that the splintery object biting into his knee was his makeshift wooden dagger, overlooked by whoever had bound him.
“We were none too soon tying him up,” said the harsher voice. “He’s got a sound constitution—I’d have thought the drug would keep him under until this afternoon, at least.”
Though it made his temples throb even more severely, Doyle lifted his head and blinked around. Two men were standing by the ship’s rail, staring at him; one seemed to be a pre-time-jump version of Doctor Romany—that would be Romanelli, he thought, the original—and the other was evidently the captain of the ship.
Romanelli was barefoot, and he padded across to Doyle and crouched beside him. “Good morning,” he said. “I may want to ask you questions, and we probably won’t meet anyone who speaks English, so I’m going to leave the gag off. If you want to yell and make a commotion, though, we can tie it on and conceal it under a burnoose.”
Doyle let his head clunk back onto the deck, then closed his eyes and waited until the throbbing abated a little. “Okay,” he said, opening them again and blinking up at the empty blue sky beyond the tangle of spars and riggings and reefed sails. “We’re in Egypt?”
“Alexandria.” Romanelli nodded. “We’ll row you ashore, and then it’s overland to the Rosetta branch of the Nile, and we’ll sail you upriver to Cairo. Savor the view.” The sorcerer stood up with a loud popping of the knees and an imperfectly concealed wince. “You men,” he called irritably. “The boat’s ready? Then get him over the side and into it.”
Doyle was lifted up, carried to the rail, and after a hook was snugged in under the rope that went under his arms he was lowered like a bundled-up rug into a rowboat that bobbed and banged against the hull in the emerald water twenty feet below. A sailor in the boat grabbed his bound ankles and guided him down to a sitting position on one of the thwarts while Romanelli descended a rope ladder and, after swinging about for a minute on the end of it, waving a free foot and swearing, did a sort of half-slide into the boat. The sailor helped him to another thwart and then the last passenger came swinging wildly down the ladder—it was the Luck of the Surrey-side Beggars himself, the time-ruined Doctor Romany, with two big metal spikes tied to his shoes for weight. After placing this grinning, winking creature on the narrow bow, where it sat like a trained cormorant, the sailor wiped his hands and sat down himself, impassively facing Romanelli and Doyle; he picked up the oars and set to work.
Doyle immediately toppled over against the starboard gunwale, and from this position watched the ship’s hull slide past and eventually give way, as they rounded the high arch of the bow, to a view of Alexandria, half a mile away across the glittering water.
The city was a disappointment to him—he’d expected the labyrinthine Oriental city Lawrence Durrell had written about, but all he saw was a small cluster of dilapidated white buildings baking in the sun. There were no other ships in the harbor, and only a few boats lay moored to the weathered quays.
“That’s Alexandria?” he asked.
“Not what it used to be,” growled Romanelli in a tone that didn’t invite further discussion. The wizard was huddled against the opposite gunwale, breathing in long wheezes. What was left of Romany was giggling quietly on the bow.
The man at the oars let the harbor’s current slant them to the left, east of the town, and on a sandy rise Doyle finally saw some people; three or four figures in Arab robes stood in the shade of a dusty palm tree, while a number of camels stood and sat around a section of ruined wall nearby. Doyle wasn’t surprised when the sailor heeled the boat about and aimed the bow toward the palm tree and Romanelli waved and yelled, “Ya Abbas sabahixler!”
One of the robed men was now walking down to the shore. He waved and called, “Saghida, ya Romanelli?”
Doyle eyed the man’s lean, sharp-chiseled face and nervously tried to imagine the fellow doing anything just domestically pleasant, like petting a cat. He couldn’t.
When the boat was still a few yards from shore the keel grated on the sandy bottom, stopping the little craft and pitching Doyle forward.
“Ow,” he mumbled, his lips brushing the thwart, which was coldly and saltily wet from the splashing of the oars. A moment later Romanelli yanked him upright.
“That hurt?” asked the wide-eyed bow-croucher with mock alarm. “Sa-a-a-ay—did that hurt, Burt?”
The sorcerer had stood up and was barking instructions in Arabic, and two more of the men from under the palm hastened down toward the water, while the first man was already splashing out toward the boat. Romanelli pointed down at Doyle. “Taghald maghaya nisilu,” he said, and lean brown arms reached over the gunwale and lifted Doyle out of the boat.
Doyle was tied onto a camel and in spite of the several rest and water stops, by the time they arrived at the little town of El Hamed by the Nile, late in the afternoon, Doyle’s legs were distant columns of numbness, only recognizable as his own when they were occasionally lanced with tooth-grinding agony, and his spine felt like a big old dried sunflower stalk that kids had used for a blowgun dart target. When the Arabs untied him and carried him aboard the dahabeeyeh, a low, single-masted boat with a little cabin in the back, he was half delirious and muttering, “Beer … beer…” Fortunately they seemed to recognize the word, and brought him a jug of what was, blessedly and unmistakably, beer. Doyle drained it in several long swallows and fell back across the deck, instantly asleep.
He awoke in darkness when the boat bumped gently against wood and rocked to a stop, and when his captors hoisted him up and sat him on the dock, facing inland, he could see lights only a few hundred yards away to his left.
A man with a lantern stepped down onto the dock. “Is salam ghalekum, ya Romanelli,” he said quietly.
“Wi ghalekum is salam,” Romanelli answered.
Doyle had been dreading another camel ride, and he sighed with relief when he noticed the silhouette of a real British carriage up on the road behind the man. “Are we in Cairo?” he asked.
“Just past it,” Romanelli said shortly. “We’re going inland, toward the Karafeh, the necropolis below the Citadel.” He barked at the Arabs and obediently they lifted Doyle by his ankles and shoulders and carried him up a set of ancient stone steps to the road and pushed him into the carriage.
A few moments later he was joined by Romanelli, the Romany thing, one of the Arabs and the man who had met them here. Reins snapped and the carriage surged into rattling motion.
Necropolis, thought Doyle unhappily. Excellent. He pressed his knees together as he sat folded up on the floor of the carriage, and was only slightly reassured by the feel of his homemade wooden dagger. He hadn’t been aware of the tropical smells of the river until they diminished and were replaced by the fainter but harsher dessicated-stone smell of the desert.
After about two miles of slow travel on a crumbled but serviceable road they stopped, and when Doyle was lifted out and propped upright beside the carriage he s
tared at the lightless building they’d arrived at, standing alone in the desert waste. The lantern showed an arched doorway, flanked by wide pillars, in a wall otherwise featureless except for a couple of holes that might have been meant to be windows, though they were too small even to poke one’s head through. Above, he could dimly see a large dome silhouetted against the stars.
At a nod from Romanelli the Arab who’d accompanied them from the boat pulled a mirror-bright curved dagger from under his robe and sliced through three loops of rope around Doyle’s legs. All the rope from his waist down fell to the dusty ground, and Doyle kicked it off his ankles.
“Don’t run,” said Romanelli wearily. “Abbas would certainly outrun you, and then I’d have to instruct him to sever one of your Achilles tendons.”
Doyle nodded, wondering if he’d even be able to walk.
The shrunken ka had taken off its weighted shoes and, gripping the buckles of them, was walking around on its hands, with its legs flailing upward like ribbons tied to a floor heater vent. It grinned upside down at Doyle and said, “Time to go see the moon man, Stan.”
“Shut up,” Romanelli told it. To Doyle he said, “This way. Come on.”
Doyle limped after him toward the door, accompanied by the ka, and when they’d covered half the twenty foot distance to the front door there was a hollowly echoing snap and then the door swung inward and a hooded figure with a lantern was beckoning. Romanelli impatiently waved Doyle and the ka past him into the broad stone hallway and asked a question, in a language that didn’t seem to be Arabic this time, as the hooded man closed and re-bolted the door.
The man shrugged and gave a brief answer that seemed neither to surprise nor please Romanelli.
“He’s no better,” he muttered to the ka as he led the way forward. The man with the lantern followed, and the swinging shadows made the Old Kingdom bas reliefs on the walls, and even the columns of hieroglyphics, seem to move. Doyle noticed that the hall ended a dozen yards ahead at a carefully bricked surface of masonry that was bellied and leaning sharply out toward them, so that the floor extended a good deal farther than the ceiling; as if, he thought, there’s an above ground swimming pool on the other side.
“Was you expecting to hear he’d commenced turning summer-salties?” inquired the still-inverted ka.
Romanelli ignored the creature and, turning into an open arch in the left-hand wall, started up a set of steps. Light touched the pitted stair edges from around a corner above, and the man with the lantern remained—gratefully, it seemed to Doyle—below. The three of them climbed to another hall, much shorter than the one downstairs, and this one ended at a balcony that faced the lighted interior of the dome. The trio moved forward to the balcony rail.
Doyle found himself staring out across the inside of a huge sphere, roughly seventy-five feet across, illuminated by a lamp that hung in the precise center, at the same level as the balcony, from a long chain moored to the highest point of the dome. He leaned over the rail and looked down, and was surprised to see four motionless men in a round stone-walled pen at the very bottom of the spherical chamber.
“Greetings, my little friends,” came a grinding whisper from the opposite side of the sphere, and Doyle noticed for the first time that there was a man—a very old and withered and twisted man—lying on a couch that was somehow attached to the far wall only a foot or two below the horizontal black line that seemed to be the room’s equator. The man lay on the couch, and the couch on the nearly perpendicular wall, with such a convincing appearance of gravity holding them there that Doyle automatically looked around for the edges of the mirror that had to be there… but there was no break in the dome’s inner surface; couch and man actually hung up there, like some disagreeable wall ornament. And just as Doyle had begun to speculate about how the old man stayed on the evidently nailed-up couch with such an appearance of nonchalance, and where a ladder could be footed to get him up there, there was a squealing of casters and the couch rolled upward a little.
The man on the couch groaned, then leaned over and peered at the “floor”; the couch now sat right over the equator line. “Moonrise,” he said wearily. He lay back again and stared across the sphere at the balcony. “I see Doctors Romanelli and Romany, the latter standing as a clear indictment of my ability to cast a decent ka. I would have thought you would last a century without deteriorating to this point. But who is our giant visitor?”
“His name, I gather, is Brendan Doyle,” said Romanelli.
“Good evening, Brendan Doyle,” said the man on the wall. “I … apologize for not being able to come over and shake hands, but having renounced this present earth, I gravitate instead toward … another place. It’s an uncomfortable position, and one that we hope to remedy before long. And,” he went on, “what has Mr. Doyle got to do with the present debacle?”
“He did it, yer Honor!” chittered the ka. “He snapped the Byron ka out of the obedience spell we had him under, and he made the yags go crazy, and then when I jumped back to 1684 he followed me and alerted the Antaeus Brotherhood to my presence there—” He’d let go of his shoes in order to gesture, and he floated upward feet first, bumped against the round brick cowl that extended out around the balcony and rolled over it and began floating up toward the top of the dome, “—and they somehow knew that a weapon fouled with dirt could injure me and they shot my face off with a mud-clogged gun—”
“Jutmoop sidskeen efty door?” sputtered the Master. Romanelli and Doyle, and the ka, who by now was crouching upside-down beside the lamp chain mooring on the ceiling, all stared at him.
The Master squeezed his eyes and mouth tightly shut, then opened them. “Jumped,” he said carefully, “to sixteen eighty-four?”
“I believe he did, sir,” Romanelli put in hastily. “They used the gates Fikee made—traveling from gate to gate, through time, you understand? This ka,” he waved his hand upward, “is obviously too decayed for only eight years of action, and what I’ve pieced together of his story is consistent.”
The Master nodded slowly. “There was something peculiar about the way our Monmouth scheme misfired in 1684.” The couch rolled another few inches upward, and though the Master’s teeth clenched with pain, one of the motionless figures in the pen below groaned echoingly. Startled, Doyle glanced down at them again, and was not reassured to see that they were wax statues. The Master’s eyes opened. “Time travel,” he whispered. “And where did Mr. Doyle come from?”
“Some other time,” said the ka. “He and a whole party of people appeared through one of the gates, and I managed to capture him, though his companions returned the way they’d come. I had a little time to question him, and—listen—he knows where Tutankhamen’s tomb is. He knows lots of things.”
The Master nodded and then, horribly, smiled. “It could be that, in this late and sterile age, we’ve blundered onto the most powerful tool we’ve ever had. Romanelli, draw some blood from our guest and construct a ka—a full maturation one that will know everything he does. We mustn’t take any chances with what he’s got in his head—he might kill himself or catch some fever. Do that right now, and then lock him up for the night. Interrogation will commence in the morning.”
Ten minutes were wasted in getting the Romany ka down from the ceiling—it could no more scramble down to the balcony than a hamster could scramble up out of a bathtub—but it was finally recovered with a rope, and Romanelli led Doyle back down the stairs.
On the ground floor they entered a room where, in the dim light of a single lamp, the doorkeeper could be seen carefully stirring a long vat of some fishy-smelling fluid.
“Where’s the cup of—” Romanelli began, but even as he’d spoken the doorkeeper had pointed at a table against the wall. “Ah.” Romanelli crossed to it and carefully lifted a copper cup. “Here,” he said, returning to Doyle. “Drink it and save us the trouble of tying you down and administering it through broken teeth.”
Doyle took the cup and sniffed the contents du
biously. The stuff had a sharp, chemical reek. Reminding himself that he wasn’t slated to die until 1846, he lifted the cup to his blistered lips and downed the drink in one big, gagging gulp.
“God,” he wheezed, handing the cup back and trying to blink the fumes out of his eyes.
“Now we’ll just impose upon you for a few drops of blood,” Romanelli went on, drawing a knife from under his robe.
“Just pop the cork on a vein, Zane,” agreed the remnant of Doctor Romany. The ka was once more holding the buckles of its weighted shoes and walking on its hands.
“Blood?” Doyle asked. “What for?”
“You heard the Master tell us to make a ka of you,” Romanelli answered. “Now I’m going to free your hands, but don’t do anything idiotic.”
Not me, Doyle thought. History says I’ll leave Egypt in four months, sane and with all limbs intact. Why should I go out of my way to earn a concussion or a dislocated arm?
Romanelli cut the ropes that had bound Doyle’s wrists.
“Step over to the tub here,” he said. “I’m just going to nick your finger.”
Doyle stepped forward, holding his finger out and peering curiously into the pearly liquid. So, he thought, that’s where they’ll grow an exact duplicate of me…
Oh my God, what if it’s the duplicate that gets free and eventually returns to England to die in ‘46? I could die here without upsetting history.
His tenuous optimism abruptly extinguished, Doyle grabbed for Romanelli’s approaching wrist, and though he cut the heel of one hand deeply on the sorcerer’s knife, his other hand clamped onto Romanelli’s forearm, and with the strength of desperation he wrenched the sorcerer forward and off balance toward the tub; but Doyle winced to see several drops of blood from his cut hand plop into the pearly stuff.
