Cheop's Daughter
Wherever else he might be, Hall decided some time later, he was no longer in the cave. Nor was he, apparently, in the belly of the Sphinx. There was the softness of eiderdown beneath his back and a pleasant perfume upon his nostrils. He was completely relaxed, and the throbbing in his arm had died away. Feeling fingers lightly touch his forehead, he opened his eyes.
There was a girl standing over him. Her face was narrow, the forehead high and rounded, the nose high-bridged and slender, me chin somewhat pointed. She had night-black hair, and her head was fitted with a ridiculous headdress that flared up into a flat crown. She was stim, but startlingly welldeveloped, and she was wearing a tight-fitting hatter and a tight-fitting knee-length skirt. The headdress, the hatter, and the skirt were golden in color, and, peering over the edge of the padded platform on which he lay. Hall saw that webbed sandals of similar hue encased her small feet. Her skin was the color of olives.
Despite her unusual attire and her equally unusual development, plus a queenly hauteur that somehow went well with both, her eyes still managed to be the most remarkable items in her feminine inventory. They were almond-shaped, slightly slanted, golden brown, and pretematurally large. In addition, there was a liquid quality about them that came close to devastating the defenses which Hall made haste to throw up around himself.
Well anyway, she made as much sense as the pyramids and the Sphinx did, he thought resignedly. As a matter of fact, she seemed to belong in such a setting. "I suppose you're going to tell me your name is Cleopatra," he said, even though he knew that the all-purpose English words were bound to be Greek to her.
She had withdrawn her hand from his forehead and had stepped back from the platform the minute he opened his eyes. But she hadn't been in the least disconcerted, nor was she in the least disconcerted now. "Behold, I have dressed thy wound," she said. "Is it not enough that a pharaoh's daughter should have thus demeaned herself without her having to demean herself still further by giving thee her name?"
Suddenly puzzlement crinkled her forehead, and she looked intently at his smartly tailored inner spacesuit. Actually, in combination with his snappy black spaceboots it constituted as sharp an outfit as the Terran Space Navy had ever come up with, but she certainly didn't seem to think so. "Where didst thou learn to speak the language of Egypt, slave from a far land?" she asked.
Clearly, NRGC 984-D was a planet of surprises, and by this time Hall should have been sufficiently acclimated to have been able to take each new development in his stride. He was not, though-not quite-and for a while he just lay there gaping at the girl. Then he propped himself up on one elbow, noting as he did so that she had indeed dressed his wound and noting simultaneously that in the process she had somehow eliminated its soreness and brought about at least a partial return of his strength. She had also, he reminded himself quickly, called him a slave. He said snidely, "I guess you might say mat I learned to speak Egyptian in the same place you learned to speak APE."
She blinked, and it was obvious from the blank look she gave him that she had missed the point completely. He had the feeling that she was just dying to put him in his place with a few well-chosen epithets but that she wasn't quite sure enough of herself to risk doing so. "Great indeed must be my disfavor in the eyes of Amen-Ra," she said presently, "for me to have been afflicted by such circumstances and by such company."
Hall sat up on the platform, which, he saw now, was a bed of some kind. The room in which it stood was on the small side, and surprisingly pleasant. The ceilings and the walls had been carved out of pink granite, and the illumination was provided by candles burning in niches that looked a lot like light fixtures. Besides the bed, there were two marble benches, a marble table, and a slender diorite pedestal supporting a shallow diorite bowl that looked like a bird bath but which was probably a stone brazier. In the wail opposite the one against which the bed stood, a tapestry-hung doorway gave access to another room. The tapestry was heavily decorated with tiny humanoid figures with cowlike heads.
Hall had a hunch that he was inside the largest of the three pyramids-an upsetting enough possibility in itself without having a pharaoh's daughter to contend with too. "Which pharaoh are you the daughter of?" he asked.
She drew herself up as straight as could be and looked at him as though he were a chunk of mud mat had just dropped from a chariot wheel. Nevertheless, the hauteur in her voice did not ring true, and he was certain that he detected a note of shame. "His Majesty King Khufu the blessed, slave! Dost thou dare profess ignorance of his reign?"
Khufu. he thought. That would be old Cheops himself.
Which meant that the giri standing before him was in the neighborhood of fifty-two hundred years old. He sighed.
"Well anyway, you dress a mean dressing," he said.
She just looked at him.
He regarded her shrewdly. "I take it we're in the neighborhood of Memphis," he said presently, "and that this pyramid we're in is the one your father took twenty years to build."
For the first time the underlying uncertainty which he had sensed in her from the start rose to the surface, instead of bringing to mind a princess, she now brought to mind a little girl who had strayed out of her own back yard and become hopelessly lost in the next. "I-I know that what thou sayest must be true," she said, "but I know also that it cannot be true. Only the first mastaba of my father's sepulcher has been built, and it is to be the first sepulcher of its kind, yet here there are three of them, and each has been completed. I-I do not understand wherefore 1 am in this place, nor wherefore I am alone."
"But surely you must know how you got here."
She shook her head. "Behold, two nights ago I was sitting in the-" She paused, took a deep breath, and began all over again. "Behold, two nights ago 1 lay me to steep, and when Amen-Ra climbed upon his throne the morning after, here I lay in this strange place in this strange land. I do not know what to do."
She looked as though she were going to cry. Hall would have felt sorry for her if the memory of her arrogance hadn't still been fresh in his mind. He didn't think much of people who went around calling other people slaves. Another reason he didn't feel sorry for her was that he couldn't bring himself to believe that she was on the level. How could she possibly be Cheops' daughter?
All right, who could she be then? A Uvelian Mata Hari?
Nonsense! A Uvelian Mata Hari might try to pass herself off as a lot of things, but unless she was hopelessly out of her mind, she would never try to pass herself off as an Egyptian princess who had been dead for more than five millennia.
Besides, what would a Uvelian spy be doing on a planet which, other than on an abstract level, neither the Terran nor the Uvelian empires had ever heard about until a few days ago and which they wouldn't have heard about even then if it hadn't been for the fact that NRGC 984-D was going to be occupying almost the same point in space that the major Uvelian and Terran forces, which were ineluctabty drawing closer and closer together, would be occupying when they met in the cruciai battle of the hundred-year galactic war-in the ultimate Armageddon that would decide whether me Uvelian demosocialistic ideology or the Terran sociocratic ideology was to endure?
"Tell me." Hall said presently, "is there really a monster the size of a young mountain hanging around these parts, or did I just imagine there was?"
He expected the question to disconcert her. It didn't in the least. "Oh yes," she said, as calmly as though a sphinx were no more awe-inspiring than a common alley cat, "She-whobuilds-sepulchers is still with me. I feared at first that she. too, had deserted me, but she had not. But as she will not communicate with me, I have been unable to leam wherefore she interrupted her labors in my father's behalf to build these sepulchers in this strange land, or for whom she built them."