“The beautiful silent priestess, the color of ivory,” said Pharaoh, “will be perfect.”
Pen-Meru nodded.
Pankh nodded.
The soldiers, the priest and his acolyte nodded.
Renifer nodded. Ancient custom might erase some of what her family had done. Only the whitest bulls and cows were sacrificed, and was this not the whitest of females? Had not Renifer’s own nurse seen from the first that the girl was intended for sacrifice?
The girl of ivory was not aware of their survey, nor had she any way of knowing what Pharaoh had just decreed: that she was to serve Hetepheres for eternity. She was staring at Pharaoh’s Pyramid as if she could not believe that she stood beside it.
Soon, thought Renifer, you will stand below it.
It was imperative that the girl should neither scream nor fight. She must not understand what was happening. Normally she would have been given a special drink to prepare her body, but none was prepared for this event. Renifer wondered how to be sure that the girl participated graciously and fully.
An extraordinary thing occurred. Pharaoh Himself began to clothe her in the gold he had brought along. Around her neck He fastened a gold pectoral of spread wings, which not only covered her throat but fell almost to her waist. He Himself adjusted the weight behind her neck to keep the pectoral at the right height. One by one, He slid gleaming bracelets over her wrist and past the curve of her elbow, until her arms were solid with gold.
When He was done, the girl could scarcely have moved, so weighted was she now by gold. And such was the glory of gold that the girl was hypnotized by it. They needed no specially prepared drink to control her behavior. Wearing the gold was her drug.
It is good, thought Renifer. Her heart eased, knowing that the queen had this lovely servant for eternity.
Pharaoh studied the awesome triangle of His Pyramid. When at last He spoke, His voice seemed directed to the stars in the sky. “Such a perfect sacrifice,” He said finally, “must have an escort into the tomb.”
Pankh and Pen-Meru stiffened with panic. If Pharaoh designated a priest to go down the shaft, the priest would see there were hardly any tomb furnishings; that the seal on the sarcophagus was brand new and the tomb pitifully small for a queen. He would bellow the news, Pharaoh Himself might descend, and all would be executed after all.
“It worries me a little,” said Pharaoh, “that the girl of ivory might cry out and defile the moment of her sacrifice.”
There was sand and dust and the cold wind of night.
Renifer with her bare shoulders shivered.
Pharaoh looked into her eyes and she tried to keep her eyes on the ground where they belonged, but her eyes were caught on His and she could not even blink.
“Perhaps, my little singer of song,” said Khufu, his smile broad and kingly, “you would lead the sacrifice into the tomb. With you by her side, she will be smiling.”
Renifer listened to the faint lap of water from the lagoon, the distant voices of the crew on the barge. Khufu was asking her to travel down into the tomb. He was not suggesting that she would ever travel back out of it.
Her father said, “What an honor for my daughter, Great King.”
Her once beloved said, “What an honor for my bride, Great King.”
Wind whistled through stones stacked for future tombs.
“Will you, little singer of song, do me this honor?” asked Pharaoh.
As if Renifer had a choice. As if she were permitted to say, “No, thank you,” and go home to her mother.
To the Lord of the Two Lands, Renifer said, “I will.”
ANNIE
Annie did not see how they were all going to descend into Hetepheres’ tomb. Especially her. With all this gold she probably weighed as much as the Statue of Liberty.
Renifer was lowered first, in a basket, like some scary ride at an amusement park. Annie was clearly next, then Pharaoh himself. Renifer held a torch in her hand but Annie was not given one. Renifer was lowered gently and without any bumping or lurching. Annie swallowed nervously and went down after her.
Pharaoh said something, his thin smile flickering like a flame or a snake’s tongue.
That’s who he reminds me of, she thought. A viper.
She was relieved when her basket fell below the level of the earth and beyond the power of his eyes. The shaft was very steep. She touched gouges in the stone, toeholds, perhaps for those without ropes or baskets.
At the bottom of the shaft, yet more gold glittered in the light of Renifer’s torch.
Where do they get all this gold? she thought. Is Egypt full of gold mines? Or do they send pirates abroad, to loot and pillage?
At the bottom, she was surprised and disappointed. It was just a small stone room. Nothing there except the few pieces shifted from the other tomb. The vast sarcophagus, the bed canopy, the sedan chair. The gold she had seen from higher up was just one tray, far less than she had on her own body.
Well, it sure isn’t Tutankhamen’s tomb, she thought. But probably this is just the outer room. Once we start exploring, we’ll see the better rooms.
She wondered what ceremonies would take place underground.
She could hear Pharaoh being lowered, his basket not coming down quite so lightly as her own, for it seemed to smack the walls. She looked toward the shaft, but the feet of Pharaoh did not appear. A great slab was being lowered on ropes. Renifer’s torchlight showed it to be no beautiful painted object. Just rock.
Annie could make no sense of it.
When the huge stone had settled onto the bottom, the person above let go of the ropes. They fell into a coil of their own. Were she and Renifer meant to do something with those ropes?
A second stone was lowered onto the ropes from the first stone. Together, the two stones sealed the shaft. There was no longer an opening. Nobody else could come down.
Nobody could go back up, either.
A terrible racket began. It took Annie several moments to realize that rocks were being dropped down the shaft. Rocks that hit and ricocheted and echoed. Filling the shaft. Filling it for eternity.
Annie and Renifer were being buried alive.
V
Time for Ghosts
STRAT
Strat was sitting about ten courses up the Pyramid, feet dangling, head resting in the corner made by two huge stones. Across the Giza plateau, by carriage and sedan chair, by donkey and camel came the party guests, having spent the night in Cairo, and only now returning to the dig.
Miss Matthews and Dr. Lightner were astride donkeys so small their feet dragged in the dust. Strat hoped Miss Matthews had enjoyed herself. In his youth, he had been to many parties and enjoyed them. But he was nineteen now and felt no desire to attend more. The girl whose company had made him happy had been lost.
He was touched to see the stern Archibald Lightner so smitten. It was in part Miss Matthews’ height: Dr. Lightner need not stoop to deal with her, as if she were a child. It was in part her independence. Elderly British ladies traveled alone all the time (although of course with a maid and a companion). But Miss Matthews had come truly alone, not even a maid. Strat tried to imagine a father or brother permitting her to be a reporter at all, let alone voyage by herself to a place quite primitive.
Laughing, Dr. Lightner and Miss Matthews dismounted easily, since they were taller than their rides, and walked the last quarter mile holding hands. Strat wanted to embrace them both in his joy for them.
He could hardly wait to tell the archaeologist about his latest discovery.
When the great man had left yesterday evening for Cairo, the entire camp had been distressed by the missing gold sandal. All spirits had sunk. Had the only true treasure in the tomb waited thousands of years—only to be stolen in 1899?
This morning, Dr. Lightner’s college assistants had decided to search every tent and trunk, but Strat, unwilling to trespass upon the belongings of others, continued his own investigation. He had convinced himself that if on
e pile of rock turned out to be plaster hiding a tomb entrance, another pile of rock would surely turn out to be plaster, and hiding a tomb entrance.
Since dawn, he had been walking about with a small ball peen hammer, swinging it against rocks, hoping each time for a sifting of plaster. A hour ago, such an event had occurred.
Strat put up no flag to mark the location, but he knew exactly where it was. If he paced parallel to the causeway precisely forty-six steps, heel pressed against toe, from Hetepheres’ shaft, he would see the tiny white smash mark of his hammer on a long flat thin stone.
A surprisingly large group was returning with Dr. Lightner. Clearly he intended to show off his excavation to many who had attended the French party. Strat hoped the gold sandal had been located by now, as it was sure to impress the visitors.
He recognized two German scholars from a dig in Saqqara; two Italians who wished to study Dr. Lightner’s finds; a handful of British army officers; the hieroglyphic expert; and even the French military attaché.
Finally, in a small open carriage pulled by two straining donkeys, their keeper hitting them continually with sticks lest they give up and fall down, rode a very heavy man, all belly and jowls, with a dusty wrinkled hide like a rhinoceros.
No, thought Strat. It cannot be.
He closed his eyes for a moment, and tried again. The image did not change.
It was good that he wasn’t at the top of the Pyramid, Strat thought, or he would have followed the example of the two young Frenchmen, and just rolled off. Arriving dead at the bottom would be better than encountering his father.
Father was a word that should be precious, redolent of respect and honor; of example and pride. This was not the case for Strat.
What mattered to his father were investments. All life was an investment: a servant, a wife, a factory, a dinner party. All investments must pay off or be discarded. At no time would a losing investment be kept … even if that investment were his only son.
Chained up in the asylum, Strat had promised God that if he ever got out, he would not follow his father’s example. Rather, he would help others. Much harder, he would accept help, and not arrogantly insist that he could stand alone.
But it was Katie who had fulfilled those promises. She was help even to lepers beneath the feet of the Lord. And her greatest gift, the one that dazzled and shamed him, came when Katie chose to say good-bye, so Strat might have a life unencumbered by a deformed girl he could not forever pretend was his sister.
I have helped nobody, he thought now. I have leaped into adventure and thrown away my promise. And the Lord knows exactly how I have behaved.
Dizzily, Strat stared at Hiram Stratton clambering out of the carriage. Now Father stood inside Strat’s new life; touched Strat’s tent and cot; spoke to Strat’s friends and colleagues.
How could Hiram Stratton, Sr., have located Strat? And why would he care enough to travel all the way to Egypt? His father loathed exercise and particularly loathed hot weather. What could he be doing here? Such a man might have anything in mind, but not anything good.
A commotion sprang up among the tents, of course. His father could not bear peace or calm. He must have action and argument. He must provoke and antagonize, because destroying the serenity of others demonstrated power. Nobody, not anywhere on this earth, not even in the desert, could hide from the personality of Hiram Stratton, Sr.
From this distance Strat was indistinguishable from the hordes of tourists, both European and Egyptian, climbing and picnicking on the rugged edges of Khufu’s Pyramid. In a trice, Strat could mingle with the crowd below; buy from a vendor a robe of the sort worn by local men. He could wind around his head a turban and then hire a camel. He could vanish up the Nile, as British troops were vanishing into the misty unknown of darkest Africa.
This time he would be sufficiently intelligent to use another name.
Strat slipped down from his perch. What name to use? Perhaps Annie’s. He could call himself Lockwood. Yes, that was it. He would be Strat Lockwood.
Yet if he fled, he would lose the respect of Dr. Lightner; lose his precious camera; lose Katie’s letters; lose the chance to become a brilliant photographer; lose the glorious moment in which he showed Dr. Lightner the second tomb entrance he had found.
And lose, above all, the miniature envelope with the lock of Annie Lockwood’s shining black hair.
Strat looked up at the peak of the Pyramid, five hundred feet above. The sky around those bronze stones was blue as a child’s paint box. There had Strat knelt and asked Time to give Annie back to him.
In a few short weeks, a new century would arrive: the twentieth. Its first decade would belong to science and science alone. And here was Strat, abandoning rational thought, pretending Time was a power to move souls.
It might even be that Father was correct, and Strat had lost his sanity when he believed in the existence of a girl from another time.
At the dig, men were running back and forth and gesticulating. He could tell Dr. Lightner and Miss Matthews apart by their great height and he could tell his father by his great width.
Strat walked behind the Sphinx, briefly blinded by the shock of shadow. Usually when he stood by the Sphinx, the past overwhelmed him, but now he felt only the future. Future hovered around the great paws and blew sand on its back. Future gnawed its face and chewed its broken nose.
In Father’s presence, he thought, my future is also broken, swallowed in the desert of his hatred. But I will not flinch from it. I will not run.
He squared his shoulders. He would not go slouching and timid into his father’s presence.
The sand across which he trekked sucked at his boots and the wind tore at his face. The blue sky turned slightly yellow as the sand whirled across it.
The members of the dig saw Strat coming and they grew silent and still. Strat had the appalling thought that it was not his father of whom he must be afraid, but his companions. How could that be?
The visiting scholars, the French attaché, the Egyptians, the college boys … all in a row, staring at him. They looked like a firing line. Strat wanted to bolt, but kept his stride even and his face calm. He wondered what his father would say to him, after two years with no word between them.
But it was Archibald Lightner who spoke. “You lied to me, young Stratton. You claimed mere estrangement from your father. In fact, you are an escapee from an asylum, where you were incarcerated for the safety of your neighbors. You attacked and badly hurt an innocent physician who dedicated his life to helping his desperate patients. Most wretchedly, you kidnapped an innocent girl and defiled her to accomplish your escape.”
That he could be accused of hurting Katie! Katie whom he loved as a sister! And that anybody could call Dr. Wilmott a dedicated innocent physician! The man was a monster who had delighted in torturing the helpless, smiling as they suffered.
Anyway, Strat had just hit him over the head with a lamp. Far from being badly hurt, Dr. Wilmott gave chase himself.
“And now,” cried Dr. Lightner, “you have defiled my excavation!”
Strat could not believe that statement. What of his contribution to the dig? His photographs, saving for all time the accomplishments of the entire group?
“You stole that gold sandal,” accused Dr. Lightner. “You squirreled it away in your own bag. You who travel so lightly, burdened only with lies, no doubt planning to run away and continue your life against society.”
The insult was too deep to be borne. That he would take a possession belonging to another man? Never!
The wind rose higher, engulfing them in dust, drying their throats and hurting their eyes, making them hotter and angrier.
At last the father spoke to the son he had not seen in two years. “I had you found,” said Hiram Stratton. “I hired a detective. I plan to bring you back to America to stand trial for kidnapping and attempted murder. I considered the possibility that you were attempting to become a better person and thus deserved mercy. But I
arrive to find you are a common thief.”
“Father, I stole nothing. I never have. Nor did I hurt Katie in any way.”
“I stand here as future patron to this excavation,” thundered his father, “and this is what I must deal with first. The low base treachery of my own son.”
Patron? Impossible. His father had never shown generosity. Unless, of course, he got something in exchange. And what might that be? The Stratton name on a museum wing? Strat doubted that his father had ever entered a museum.
“You stole the gold,” said his father. “Nor can you deny it. You hid it deep inside your own miserable pile of clothing.” Gladly, he waved the gold sandal as proof.
Strat, aghast, looked at his former friends. They met his eyes steadily and with contempt. “I found it,” said the boy from Princeton. “Hidden among your clothes.”
How could it have gotten there? It could only be that he had some enemy; some person in this very company who wished to destroy him.
His eyes sought understanding, and found it immediately. Miss Matthews, head and shoulders above the gloating bulk of Hiram Stratton, was staring out into the desert, cheeks red, chin high and eyes wet.
She stole the sandal, thought Strat, and made it look as if I did. She must be the detective Father hired. Father paid her to make me a thief.
Poor Dr. Lightner, in love with one who betrayed people for a living. There was no point in accusing her. Father paid so well. Impossible for truth to override that much money.
He faced his father again, and saw in his father’s hand, almost invisible in the grip of that fat thumb and forefinger, the tiny envelope in which Strat kept Annie’s lock of hair. It was the only possession Strat could never replace. Father, too, was a thief, having taken it from Strat’s Bible, where it lay pressed when he did not keep it against his heart.
He made the error of showing that it mattered. Father, quick to see the weakness of others, opened the envelope and shook out the contents. The wind, which swirled around knees and raced, dust-laden, through shirts, now whisked away the silken tresses of Annie’s hair and flung them out across the sand.
The Time Travelers: Volume Two Page 24
