Going for Gold

by Annie Dalton

  I waggled my eyebrows. “Kind of good looking, I’d say!”

  Handsome Khaled was currently charming the socks off a group of trainees. Every few minutes his hip pocket produced an urgent blast of Egyptian pop music to let everyone know he had an incoming call. Khaled seemed to get a LOT of calls!

  After we’d refilled our plates a few times, Lola said we’d better mingle.

  “Do we have to?” I said nervously.

  Lola reminded me that a stranger was only a friend I hadn’t met yet.

  “Yeah, yeah,” I sighed.

  I wandered around, clutching a glass of sparkling pomegranate juice. This course was a bigger deal than I’d realised. Trainees had come from all-different Heavenly schools.

  I kept saying “Hi” hopefully to other trainees, but you know how it is, when you’re not good in groups, you blurt it out just as they turn to greet an old friend, or else they don’t hear you over the music. After what seemed like a tres long half hour, Lola came to find me, looking flushed and happy. “Isn’t this great?”

  “Fantastic,” I fibbed enthusiastically.

  “I’ve been talking to one of the musicians. He says we lucked out getting on to this course. Khaled and Maryam are the time-stream teachers apparently.”

  “Wow,” I said.

  “There’s still some kids to come from the celestial college. They had a portal malfunction but they should be here by tomorrow.” Lola gave me a nudge. “Celestial college? Indigo’s school?”

  I pulled a face. “I doubt he’ll show. The heat would muss up his hair!”

  Lola giggled. “That’s so mean!”

  Indigo was a v. posey boy Reuben and I met on our soul retrieval course. Reubs was convinced he fancied me.

  My friend couldn’t stop herself bopping to the beat. “Don’t you LOVE this band? If Reubs was here, he’d be up there jamming. Wouldn’t mind jamming with them myself…”

  “Go for it,” I told her.

  Lola looked torn. “You wouldn’t mind? It’d just be one song.”

  “Go!” I gave her a friendly push

  I watched her threading her way through the party goers. We’d been in Egypt five hours max, yet Lola felt confident enough to jump up on stage and strut her stuff with a bunch of foreign musicians. Everyone would love her. They always did.

  Here I was at the exact same party, totally alone. Suddenly I couldn’t bear to stay and watch.

  My flip-flops made pathetic slapping sounds as I hurried from the roof garden. Lola would look for me in the middle of her song and wonder where I’d gone.

  As I reached the bottom of the steps, a flicker of white lightning silently lit up the sky, followed by another. Must be a storm somewhere in the desert. I was shivering in my thin top but I stayed where I was, watching the dramatic cosmic light show. It felt like the storm and I were rushing to meet each other, like we’d been travelling towards each other forever.

  Are you willing to go for gold? Are you truly an angel - or was that just a beautiful dream?

  In just a few hours now I was going to find out.

  Chapter Five

  You were yelling, babe, are you OK?”

  I woke briefly to find Lola peering anxiously into my face, then got sucked down into a new dream where Sky was getting v. excited about her new job.

  “I’m working on a really special perfume counter,” she kept telling me. “Can you believe I get to make the perfumes myself!”

  Next thing I heard someone calling my name. I sat up with a gasp, but the voice must have been in my dream. Lola was still sound asleep, one bare brown foot sticking out from under the sheet.

  With that strangely familiar voice still ringing in my ears, I softly opened the door on to the balcony and went out. It was so early, the palm trees looked like pencil sketches waiting to be coloured in.

  Someone came sauntering into my line of vision, talking on her phone. “Yeah, finally! No, not yet. OK, baby cakes, I’ll let you know how it goes. Call you later, byee!”

  I was practically hanging off the balcony. Not only did this angel girl have my style of talking, she even had my daffy giggle. It sounds vain, but I was mad-keen to know if she looked like me too. Don’t they say everyone has a cosmic double?

  The fuzzy pre-dawn light made it hard to see her properly, as she wandered off through the garden in the direction of the river.

  I remember how her trainers left dark furrows in the dew.

  At no point had she looked up, yet all the time I was watching I had the strangest feeling, like she totally knew I was there.

  Thirty minutes later, I was trailing my arm over the side of a stylish white jeep enjoying the cool rush of air.

  Lola and I were squashed in the back seat with two angel girls called Yoko and Tegan. Yoko’s boyfriend was up front with Maryam. The other trainees were following in the tour bus with the delayed celestial college kids.

  Lola hadn’t said anything about me leaving the party. I’d asked her if she had a good time. She said fabulous, thanks. End of conversation.

  We passed a cluster of flat-roofed houses surrounded by a patchwork of tiny fields. Men and women were at work in the early morning cool, throwing bundles of straw into a cart. Except for a satellite dish on the side of one of the houses, it could have been any time in the last thousand years.

  Yoko and Tegan said they’d been having weird dreams all night long. Maryam said it was probably the local vibes. Apparently Egypt was well-known for giving you a hyperactive dream life.

  Our tutor half-turned to us, smiling. “Ancient Egyptian temples often had a Corridor of Dreams. Humans would rent a room there for the night, hoping the gods would send a dream to shed light on their problems.”

  I shivered. The conversation had broken my first dream; not the one about Sky and the perfume, the one that made me yell in my sleep.

  I was back in my old school hall taking an exam, but every time I tried to read the question paper to find out what type of exam exactly, a freak wind came whooshing out of nowhere and blew it away!

  Suddenly all the lights went out, and these terrifying beings, half-divine, half-animal, were storming towards me, kicking over the desks.

  “In ancient times, angels and gods did occasionally work together,” Maryam was saying to the others. “Not often, just when something of real cosmic importance was at stake.”

  “Not now though?” I said shuddering, picturing those exam hall monsters with their scary beast heads. “We don’t join forces now?”

  We heard cheerful toots as the tour bus scorched past in a yellow cloud of dust. Khaled was in the driver’s seat, pulling mad faces.

  Maryam sighed. “He is so competitive.” Then her foot hit the accelerator so hard the jeep’s wheels spun in the sand. Relieved to be distracted from bad dreams and surreal old-style gods, I joined in blowing cheeky kisses to Khaled as we surged past the bus and into the lead under a cloudless African sky.

  Eventually our jeep lurched to a standstill by a grove of dusty date palms. Maryam switched off the engine. In the sudden hush, the only sounds were the clicking of palm fronds and the slap-slap of the Nile against its banks. Maryam was serenely smoothing down her headscarf as the bus pulled up alongside.

  Trainees began piling off. The celestial college kids were easy to spot in their vintage-style tropical threads.

  Lola nudged me. “Can you see Indigo?” “I told you already,” I sighed. “This isn’t his kind of thing!”

  Khaled sprinted over, jamming his phone in his pocket as he ran. “I decided to let Maryam win,” he beamed.

  “He let me win last time too,” Maryam told us in a stage whisper. “And the time before that and—”

  Khaled interrupted her breezily. “All that matters is we have reached today’s time-stream site! Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the ancient town of Seshet!”

  We clambered out doubtfully, clutching our bottles of water.

  I’d been hoping for an atmospheric ruin, but there
wasn’t even a pile of stones to show humans had lived in this desolate place.

  “You are feeling cheated, I can tell!” Khaled beamed, obviously enjoying our disappointment. “Why has he dragged us out into the desert to look at nothing! But once you’ve mastered time-streaming, you will be seeing with different eyes!” He gestured at the desert. “What would you say if I told you that under this sand, the streets of long ago Seshet silently wait to be discovered, as they have waited for centuries?”

  The idea of a buried city instantly perked everyone up.

  We spent the next half hour or so wandering around the site, as our tutors pointed out where major buildings would have been, like the temple and the house of mummification and whatever.

  “Over there on the outer limits was the Street of Leather Workers.” Khaled waved vaguely. “A very smelly street I’m afraid! Where you are standing, Melanie and Lola, was a street with much pleasanter smells, the Street of Perfume Blenders!”

  “They had a street of perfumers?” Lola said enviously.

  Khaled beamed at her. “Didn’t you know? For thousands of years Egypt was like the perfume counter of the ancient world?”

  Perfume counter. A tiny shiver went down my backbone. Our tutor had used almost the exact words Sky had used in my dream.

  “And as Khaled was just about to say, the best blenders were usually women!” Maryam pointed out

  mischievously.

  Khaled pretended to mop his forehead. “Yes, sorry, almost got myself in big trouble there! And by the way, these female blenders guarded their secrets very fiercely. You might be interested to know that a Seshet perfumer was once commissioned to create a perfume for Queen Nefertiti.” He noticed a few blank faces. “Have you all heard of Nefertiti?”

  “I know she was pretty,” Yoko said shyly. Khaled made a tisking sound. “No, Nefertiti was not pretty. She was the most beautiful woman the world has ever seen! She ruled Egypt with her husband, the Pharaoh Akhenaten, more than three thousand years ago. They were an extremely eccentric couple, possibly a little bit mad!”

  I imagined the perfume maker sleepily opening up her shop one morning, to find a royal messenger waiting on her step with a summons to design an exclusive fragrance for the supernaturally beautiful, possibly a little bit mad, Queen Nefertiti.

  “Does anyone know what was in Nefertiti’s perfume?” an angel girl asked in a hopeful voice.

  Maryam laughed. “Women have been asking that for centuries! The blender had to swear to keep the ingredients secret on pain of death. This perfume was for Nefertiti and only her until the end of time.”

  “Was it really special?” Lola asked wistfully. “It would seem so!” smiled Maryam. “Apparently no man could refuse her anything when she wore it.”

  I pictured the lovely Nefertiti removing a golden stopper from an exquisite glass bottle, dabbing a single precious drop behind her ear, and calmly going about her day leaving a trail of dazzled males.

  Khaled sneaked a hasty glance at his watch, “However, we didn’t bring you to Seshet to speak of perfume. Being virtually untouched by the twenty-first century, this site is an ideal place to practice time-stream skills for the first time.”

  Several kids whipped out their palm pilots, but Khaled said we didn’t need to take notes. “Time-stream theory can be summed up in a simple sentence,” he smiled. “Vibes never die.”

  Khaled explained that every soul has its special cosmic signature, a totally unique vibe. Because vibes don’t die, you can still detect that special vibe in the planet’s energy field centuries after the soul in question has left his or her human body. Not just that, once you learn to tune into someone’s soul vibes, you can literally see events from their life playing over again, like a cosmic DVD!

  “But really, why go to so much trouble?” Khaled asked us. “In times gone by, sure, but we have made technological advances since then. We can program a capsule to take us to a specific moment in history and see these events unfolding in real time. Why do

  it the hard way?”

  “To make us more effective celestial agents?”

  suggested someone.

  Everyone hooted. Every time our teachers make us do something that strikes us as completely pointless, they always say it will make us more effective agents!

  Maryam looked amused. “Khaled and I could give you a long list of reasons why acquiring time-stream skills is a good thing, but hopefully you’ll discover them for yourselves!”

  As this was our first attempt, we were allowed to work with someone we knew. I grabbed Lola and we found ourselves a patch of shade under a date palm.

  “Once upon a time, trainees learned time-stream skills as a matter of course,” Maryam told us. “After they had mastered the more advanced techniques, they would be taught how to use them to travel through time.”

  “Don’t worry,” Khaled put in with his warm smile, “we won’t be asking you to attempt time travel today!”

  We had to get into a comfortable sitting position and link hands with our partner. We were instructed to keep our eyes open, as Maryam got us to imagine we were floating in a vast ocean of cosmic energy, with multicoloured currents swirling this way and that. These were the time-streams. Since Nefertiti’s name had come up, our brief was to try to pick up this ancient queen’s time-stream.

  Lola and I cleared our minds, focusing on Maryam’s quiet instructions.

  Her voice started getting oddly faint and fuzzy, like she was talking inside a badly tuned radio. Soon I could hardly hear her, though I could hear my own breathing perfectly clearly. My body felt relaxed and strangely heavy like I was falling asleep. But I wasn’t asleep. My mind was clearly excited to be using this unfamiliar new muscle. I could feel it swooping happily from one time-stream to another, like a swallow chasing gnats, getting closer and closer to our target. Yes!

  As if someone had flipped a dimmer switch, the morning sunshine faded to twilight. Same river, totally different millennium. You could just tell. For a long while nothing happened, then I heard a splash or I saw a movement. Something.

  A ghostly shape shot into view, some kind of boat travelling super-fast.

  Powered by the oars of sweating slaves, (we couldn’t see them, but we could feel their vibes) the boat glided almost silently into the shore. Someone lit a lantern and we caught thrilling glints of gold. Talk about beginner’s luck! We’d only got Queen Nefertiti’s royal barge!

  A slave splashed softly across to the bank to make the boat safe, then carefully manoeuvred a plank into position. Shadowy figures came down the plank. We heard low voices.

  “I hope you remembered the gold for the watchman, Adjo? And everyone knows what they’re doing?”

  “Yes, Baraka, we know what we’re doing!”

  “Mardian says as we go back up the Nile, news will spread. People will soon be volunteering their support.”

  “He’d better hope the news doesn’t spread to the Roman barracks!” commented someone.

  “We’re not risking our lives for Mardian,” the first voice reminded them. “We’re doing it for Egypt and for Cleopatra!”

  Our vision vanished in a storm of pixels.

  “Bums!” Lola moaned. “We got the wrong queen!”

  And not just any wrong queen. I was shaken to the core at this cosmic coincidence. With four thousand plus years of Egyptian royalty to choose from, we somehow had to zoom in on Sky’s fave royal, Queen Cleopatra.

  Maryam hurried over. “Is everything OK?”

  Lola and I explained in whispers. “We did it like you said, truly,” I told her. “How come we got it wrong?”

  “I don’t know that you got it wrong. It was a little unexpected that’s all,” Maryam said gently.

  Not only did we not get Nefertiti, but when we shared our experiences later with the group, we discovered we were a humiliating 1300 years off target!

  It probably wasn’t a real time-stream at all, I thought gloomily. We had the Nile in front of us so we ju
st automatically imagined a glamorous royal barge.

  But why would Lola and I specifically imagine Cleopatra’s barge? And why would we both come up with a scenario of loyal courtiers sneaking into Seshet on some hush-hush mission? And how come we cooked up someone called Mardian, a name neither of us had heard before in our lives?

  Back at the hostel a buffet lunch had been set up in a cool airy courtyard. Lola and I were trying to decide where to sit when Maryam and Khaled beckoned us over. It turned out they thought we’d picked up on a genuinely Cleopatra-related time-stream. The clincher was that name ‘Mardian’.

  “Cleopatra’s most trusted adviser was a eunuch called Mardian.” Maryam explained.

  Of course I had to be the one to ask what a eunuch was!

  Sorry if this grosses you out, but apparently, some ancient Egyptian parents deliberately had their boy children ‘altered’ as my nan used to say, a v. drastic operation which humans only carry out on farm

  animals or torn cats in my time.

  Not being ancient Egyptian myself, I found this

  hard to grasp, but parents actually did this to help their sons get on in the world. Then they could be taken on by important families as tutors, private secretaries or whatever, without the worry of big sex scandals.

  “Since a eunuch couldn’t marry or have children, his work became his whole life,” Maryam told us. “Highly educated eunuchs, like Mardian, often secured good positions at court. Mardian had known Cleopatra since they were children. He was devoted to her and worked tirelessly for his country.”

  “Wasn’t she a bit of a minx?” I asked, remembering Sky’s story.

  Khaled laughed. “You’ve heard how she made Julius Caesar fall in love with her?”

  I nodded. “She had herself smuggled into her own palace in a rug.”

  “She knew how to use her charms to her advantage, that one!” Maryam chuckled. “After they’d become lovers, Cleopatra made Caesar promise he would never invade Egypt. They had a little boy together, Caesarian, which means Little Caesar. Unfortunately Caesar was assassinated in Rome a few years later. Once again Cleopatra and her kingdom were vulnerable to Rome. The new leaders distrusted this feisty Egyptian queen and summoned her to go to Tarsus, to appear before Mark Antony and answer for her ‘crimes’ against Rome.”