Living in Threes

by Judith Tarr

  Meritre would go to the temple. The gods might speak to her if she did that, or she might see where the tomb was. She might even find a way to tell Meru without Meredith to carry the words onward.

  It was worth doing. Certainly it was better than fretting uselessly at home.

  Her father was to work in the temple today. He had to finish carving and painting the statue there before it was put in place in the tomb.

  She was not foolish enough to ask him where the tomb was hidden. He would not answer; he was sworn to silence. But she knew a way.

  She managed to distract him enough with fuss and chatter that when he left the house, he forgot the basket of bread and beer that should have been his morning meal. Someone had to take it to him or he would be hungry all day.

  Meritre had made sure she had to be that someone. Her brothers were busy in the king’s workshop. Aweret was feeling the weight of the baby and needed to rest.

  By the time Meritre reached the river, the ferry was nearly full. That was almost enough to convince her that the gods did not approve of her plan. But her father needed to eat, and Meru’s world needed much more than that. She balanced the basket on her head and squeezed in among the crowd.

  Most of them were mourners going to visit their relatives among the tombs. They were a big family, not wealthy enough to own their own ferry, but much sleeker and better dressed than Meritre.

  Some of the younger men eyed her with clear intention. She kept her own eyes bent downward.

  When one of the men moved toward her, she measured paths of escape. There were not many, and most of those were also occupied by well-fed young men.

  A clear voice rang above the murmur of conversation. “Khafre! Come here and hold my sunshade.”

  The man with the wandering feet stopped short. Meritre had to crane a bit to see through the thicket of bodies, but after a moment she saw who had spoken: a woman who must be Khafre’s mother or aunt, seated on a chair that must have been brought for just that purpose. She looked as high and haughty as one might expect, noblewoman that she clearly was.

  But as her eye caught Meritre’s, there was something else in it. A surprising warmth; a flicker of sympathy.

  She reminded Meritre of the king, a little. Meritre bowed to her, slightly but visibly.

  And she bowed back. That left Meritre feeling somewhat off balance, but somehow, out of nowhere in particular, rather ridiculously happy.

  It could be an omen, if she chose to see it as such. She hugged its memory to her as the ferry touched the bank and the crowd jostled and chattered its way toward the harsh beauty of the Red Land.

  She had never been across the river where the dead were. Her father had gone there sometimes to work on tombs, as he did now, and Aweret had gone in processions, singing a late king or a king’s wife into eternity. Meritre would do that for the princess when the time of embalming was over.

  Today she had a different errand, one she could not have explained to anyone. She balanced her basket on her head again and walked up from the landing, following the track that led toward the cliffs.

  No one else was going where she was going. After such a crowd, even with predators in it, she felt very much alone under the vault of the sky.

  The sun was well on its way toward the zenith by the time Meritre made her way up the last steep ascent into the valley where the queens were buried. The king would have liked to build her heir’s home for eternity among the kings, but some things in this world, even a king knew better than to try.

  Sounds of hammering and grinding and shouts of workmen echoed down the track long before Meritre had climbed far enough to see the temple. It had gone up almost overnight, but it looked well made, with tall columns and smooth paving and statues of the king on either side of the entrance.

  There was scaffolding up against the left-hand statue. Men perched on it, painting the king’s headdress in stripes of blue and gold.

  One of the artists painting the inscriptions down below pointed Meritre toward the place where her father was working. There were guards everywhere; they did not offer to help, but they did not try to stop her, either.

  The painter’s directions took her to the back of the temple and then out onto a sort of porch, where masons and sculptors worked in the shade of a canopy. Meritre found her father almost at once.

  The statue was nearly done; it was so lifelike it made her stop short, though it was no taller than a newborn baby. That was the princess’ face to the life, with its round cheeks and soft mouth. He was painting it with such skill that it seemed almost to breathe.

  Meritre waited until he paused and straightened, setting the brush down. He stretched, frowned and then smiled as he saw Meritre. “You forgot this,” she said, lowering the basket from her head and holding it out to him.

  “You came a long way,” he said as he took the basket and dived into his breakfast. “Does your mother know you’re here?”

  “Yes,” said Meritre. “She didn’t want you to go hungry all day.”

  He grunted. “And you were curious. Weren’t you?”

  “Well,” she said, “yes.”

  “You’ll pay for that,” he said. “I’m not letting you go back alone. You’ll stay here till we’re done, then we’ll take the ferry back together.”

  Meritre hoped she managed to conceal the surge of relief when he said that. She had been avoiding the issue of how she was going to get back to the city, but that took care of it. It gave her half the day to do what she had come to do.

  The gods were with her. She should never have doubted it.

  “Here,” he said, passing her one of the jars of beer. “Drink up, but take your time. You’ll be here for a while.”

  She nodded, wide-eyed. His glance was suspicious, but the statue was waiting, and it had to be done before the princess came back from the embalmers. In a breath’s space he was engrossed in his work again.

  When she slipped away, she more than half expected him to call her back. But he had forgotten her. No one else seemed to care what she did. The guards were all in the front of the temple, making sure no one got in from the road or the river.

  The tomb had to be somewhere nearby. She would expect it to be under heavy guard, but except for the workers in the temple and the guards at the gate, the valley was deserted.

  She wandered back into the temple. The part she was in was finished, except for an artist working on inscriptions in a passageway that sloped down from the north side of the temple. He bent close to the wall a handful of man-lengths down the passage, tracing the shapes of hieroglyphs with a steady hand. Meritre gambled that he would be as oblivious as her father, and slipped past him on silent feet.

  “Meritre?”

  She knew that voice. She stopped and spun. Djehuti looked up at her from where he knelt on the floor.

  “What are you doing here?” she demanded.

  His lips twitched. “You’re always asking me that.”

  “Really,” she said. “Aren’t you supposed to be working with the king’s scribes?”

  “Usually I am,” he said, “but the king wrote this, and she wanted it written here.”

  “Why?”

  He set his lips together.

  Meritre knew a secret when she saw one. She bent and peered at the line he had already painted. It was a poem, a verse that told of a mother’s love for her child.

  She stood up straight. When she moved, she saw something odd. The floor slanted slightly but distinctly downward. The passage went on into darkness, much farther than she had expected.

  Might this be...?

  The gods were here, watching her. She could feel them. She took a deep breath and let it out, and laid it all in their hands. “This is it, isn’t it? This is the way to the tomb.”

  She watched Djehuti make up his mind to lie, but then change it when his eyes met hers. He must feel it, too: the gods’ hands on them both. “Yes,” he said. “You know you’ll die if you tell anyone.”

>   “I know,” she said. She moved past him down the passage.

  There was no light but the little that came from the chapel, and Djehuti had bolted. He was going for the guards after all.

  As he should. Why did it hurt so much? He was just a boy she liked to look at, and sometimes talk to. He was not betraying anything that had honestly been between them. He was saving his life and livelihood, and doing his duty.

  She should run back to the sculptors’ porch before the guards came, but she had come too far to give up. She kept on going.

  Light flickered behind her. She flattened against the wall.

  There was only one shadow, leaping and dancing. Djehuti had a torch, and he was alone.

  Meritre could die here if that was his intention, and it would be days before anyone found her. But as she peered up the tunnel at the shadowy blur of his face, she knew he had not come to kill her. Nor had he betrayed her.

  “You don’t have to do this,” she said.

  “I know.” He brought the torch up beside her. She could smell the oil in it, and the hot smell of the flame. “It’s farther than you might think.”

  “Really,” she said. “You don’t. Just let me have the torch. If I’m caught, and anyone asks, I stole it myself.”

  “It’s not stolen,” he said. “I need light to work. And to look over what I’ve done already, in case of mistakes. The whole spell could fail for the lack of a single glyph.”

  “That…is a good story.”

  “It happens to be true.” He raised the torch slightly, so that she could see the painted words marching away into the shadows. “Would you like to see?”

  “Am I supposed to?”

  “No,” he said. “But you were intending to, weren’t you? What have you seen?”

  “I’m not a performing ape!”

  He swayed in the wind of her outburst. She clapped her hands over her mouth.

  When the echoes were well and truly dead, she lowered her hands. Djehuti stood still, steady on his feet, slightly wide-eyed.

  “I am sorry,” she said. “I don’t know where that came from.”

  “I understand,” he said. “If you can’t tell me—if the gods want you to keep the secret—”

  It would be easy to let him think that was true. And in its way it was. But she owed him something more, for what he was doing for her, and for the price he might have to pay for it.

  “I need to see the tomb,” she said. “Just see it. Not touch, or tell—not in this age of the world. That I promise you. I will take the secret to my own tomb.”

  She held her breath. If he asked what she meant, she was not sure she could answer.

  He frowned. She braced herself. After a moment he said, “Scribes have secrets, too. And magic doesn’t always make sense outside of itself.”

  He was talking to himself, she thought, more than to her. Reciting a lesson, maybe. Making a decision.

  Finally he said, “Follow me.”

  The breath ran out of her so fast she nearly fell.

  He was there, catching her hand, holding her up. His grip was warm and strong. His trust was even stronger. What it meant…

  What was between two people did not always make sense out of itself, either. Still hand in hand, they descended toward the tomb.

  It was a long way under the earth, down the slowly slanting shaft that was just a little higher than Djehuti’s head. There had been no time to paint any of the walls there; everything that anyone could do had to be done in the tomb itself, down deep where, gods willing, the grave robbers would be less likely to find and strip it.

  Grave robbers were like rats in a granary. One did all one could to keep them out, but if there was any possible way in, they would find it.

  Djehuti had done what he could to help, painting curses and strong spells on the walls and door of the deep chamber. The niche where Father’s statue of the ka would go was finished and painted to look like a room in a house, with a window showing a garden of palms and fruit trees. When the statue went into it, it would be walled up, all but the narrow door that would let the ka go back and forth.

  Meritre shivered. It was almost cold down here, as if the spells on the walls and door had drained the heat out of the air. She bowed and murmured a prayer to the gods who hovered all around her, invisible but clearly perceptible.

  The torch had begun to flicker. Without a word spoken, they both turned and walked quickly away from the tomb.

  When they were halfway up the long ascent, they heard voices ahead. There was no way out but the one, and no side path, no room to hide in. All they could do was go forward and hope they could talk their way out of it.

  Meritre’s heart was beating so hard she was sure the people outside could hear it. Even when the voices passed, she could not force herself to be calm.

  Djehuti edged ahead of her. The torch had almost burned out. He stopped and stood listening.

  After a long count of heartbeats he nodded, stubbed out the torch against the floor, and strode quickly toward the glimmer of daylight at the end of the tunnel.

  Meritre hesitated. The darkness around her was thick and strangely cool. Djehuti’s painted images glowed ahead of her.

  Without stopping to think, with a gesture as inevitable as the advance of time through thousands of years, she slipped off the amulet that her mother had given her when she was tiny, knelt down and laid it on the floor. She heard the faint clatter and the barely audible sound of the bead rolling toward the wall.

  She felt naked without it, and her heart wrenched. She might never talk to her other selves again now she had let go the key to the spell.

  She had to. Otherwise Meredith would never find it, and it would not come to Meru.

  The spell was set. She had made her sacrifice. She could go; she could return to the world of the living.

  Djehuti knelt where she had found him when she first came. He picked up his brush just as a pair of guards strolled past the chapel. They hardly deigned to notice the workman in the passage, or the flushed and tousled girl who held his palette for him. If they thought anything, Meritre could all too easily imagine what it was.

  It was worth the price. Djehuti was, too, she thought, turning her mind deliberately away from thousands and thousands of years, toward the future that was directly ahead of her. A future, she thought, that she would like him to keep on being part of.

  She caught him glancing at her. His ears were slightly but distinctly red.

  He was blushing. She wanted to laugh—but her ears felt as hot as his.

  Chapter 22

  My world was breaking apart. I needed to be alone. Completely alone—all by myself, with no one yammering at me, inside my head or out.

  I felt guilty, of course I did. Meru’s world was literally breaking, and she’d already lost the person who mattered the most to her. But I couldn’t help. I could barely help myself.

  I should march out of my room and face down Dad and Aunt Jessie and Kelly and make them tell me the truth. I meant to. I just couldn’t bring myself to start.

  I lay on the bed and stared at the knot of mosquito netting directly above me. I’d been crying off and on. Mostly off, now. My throat was raw. I was sick to my stomach.

  Part of me kept spinning the story that might be real and might be absolute craziness. In that story, time was getting short. The princess’ tomb wasn’t going anywhere, any more than it had for the past four thousand years.

  But I had this inescapable feeling that we had to find it now, and not wait till the next digging season, or whenever Aunt Jessie could get back here. The connection, the Triple, wasn’t so much like three points on a line as three wires twisted around each other. We were beads on those wires, and our beads were touching. If one moved, they all moved. If one refused…

  My now and Meritre’s now and Meru’s now were happening, well, now. And I was the big fat wrench in the works.

  Time-travel stories always gave me a migraine. Now I was trapped in one.
I hadn’t written any stories of my own since I started slipping in and out of the past and the future.

  I had my tablet in bed, with a book I’d been not-reading for I don’t know how many days. My laptop was shut down and my phone was buried in my knapsack, but when the tablet pinged, I remembered I’d forgotten to turn the wi-fi off. That meant Skype was on, and instead of a screen of text, I was glaring at a blurry, pixilated, and totally familiar face topped with a halo of short purple spikes.

  “Ha!” said Cat. “Caught you. Where have you been? What’s wrong?”

  She sounded so much like Yoshi and Djehuti that I almost let out a howl. Damn. Were we all cursed with people who cared about us?

  “Hey,” said Cat. “Talk to me. Everybody else is going on about how you’re busy and you’re on the other side of the world and who has time for the folks back home any more. Except Rick. You know him. He just says you’ll get around to it when you get around to it.”

  That was Rick. I didn’t mean to burst into tears again. God, no. But I couldn’t stop once I started.

  Cat got it. Cat always got it—even when she only had a fraction of the data. “It’s your mom, isn’t it?”

  Funny thing about meltdowns. Sometimes they go all Fukushima. And sometimes you find bedrock. Like when you’ve got a friend looking at you on a tablet screen from six thousand miles away.

  I wished I could touch her. Just for a second. Just to feel the warmth, and be close to something real and solid and human.

  “It’s Mom,” I said. “She’s in hospice. They didn’t tell me. They shipped me out and they didn’t—tell—”

  “Bastards.”

  Cat’s voice was cold murder. It made me yelp. “Don’t kill anybody!”

  “I’m not ready for humans yet,” she said. “I can’t even pass the torturing-animals phase. I look into their little eyes and go all squooshy.”

  “You are a miserable failure as a serial killer,” I said. My eyes were still trying to run over, but Cat had me laughing, even if it was a horrible bad excuse for a funny.