“Welcome back.” It was one of the slaves whom I’d bribed to send me through, a man with a deep voice and dark brown skin who spoke in Greek. It had been a week in travel time, but only a few minutes here. Bringing a hand to my face, I realized the catastrophic headache I’d had in 1993 was mostly gone. It was such a relief that I almost started crying again. Though my memory was blotchy, I could move without wincing. I stepped out of the circle and drifted into the shadowy atrium, wondering if I would ever reconcile the two histories vying for dominance in my mind.
Beth was dead. Beth was alive. I had finally changed my past.
On the street, I stared at the shuttered shops and tried to figure out who I was. I’d known exactly what I was doing right up until that moment when I hugged Beth and alien memories started to pour into me. It was like suddenly remembering a vivid dream, except it was an alternate version of my own life. Not completely alternate—I was still here, still on the same mission for the Daughters. I was a traveler, teaching at UCLA. But there was a violent sense of emotional dislocation. Especially when I tried to remember what had happened during my undergraduate years at college, when Beth was there and not there at the same time. Or maybe it was more like she wasn’t there in two different ways. And the new way was so much more painful than the old one had been. How could her survival hurt more than her death?
I wove between stone houses, slowly finding my way to the rooms we’d rented at an inn. A sleepy goat crashed into my knees and I tripped on the offerings at a shrine outside somebody’s family tomb. The moonlight was blinding.
When I slipped back into bed, I was shaking with exhaustion. I wedged myself into the cot next to Soph and fell asleep instantly.
“Wake up, Tess! It’s almost midday.” Anita stood over me, brandishing three scrolls and a small basket of grain. “I’ve got everything we need for tonight.”
My anxiety latched on to a new target as I remembered our plans for Soph’s sacrifice to al-Lat. “What is all that?”
“Some background material and an offering.”
“Isn’t Soph our offering?”
“I hope so, but I figured it wouldn’t hurt to bring a little extra. Every goddess likes some grain, right?”
I had to laugh. “I don’t know about goddesses, but I’m a huge fan of grain.” The headache twisting in my sinuses had ebbed away completely. As long as I focused on my recent history, this mission, my mind was relatively clear. But I still felt unlike myself in a way I couldn’t yet quantify.
During her studies at Raqmu, Soph had written about the goddess al-Lat. Here in the Nabataean Kingdom, she was a multipurpose deity associated with fertility and change. In other times and places, people worshipped her attributes under names like Mefitis, Isis, Venus, Kali, and Madonna. But Anita and I knew something about al-Lat that Soph didn’t. Here in ancient Raqmu, her temple offered protection to the Timeless who were not men—people like Soph, refugees from a moment when they faced death or extreme persecution. In other temporal localities, Soph might have gone to a convent or a women’s shelter. In this one, she had another choice.
Thanks to an unusual loophole in Nabataean law, religious orders could receive gold from the city-state for sacrifices. As long as a refugee claimed to be a “sacrifice,” the Temple of al-Lat had coin to spend on their food and clothing. It helped that the city’s rich women put huge annual donations into Raqmu’s coffers to support this practice. Also, since the “sacrifice” was technically dead, she couldn’t be arrested for traveling without a mark. It was the roundabout and slightly underhanded way that the city made itself a sanctuary.
That evening, Anita led Soph, C.L., Morehshin, and me to an older part of town reached by a long set of stairs curving up the canyon walls. We ascended to the second level of the city here, with houses and shops cut deep into the sandstone along a wide promenade. The Temple of al-Lat was set back from the walkway, behind a garden of fruit and nut trees fed from an elaborate network of cisterns, pools, and pipes.
“This is beautiful.” Soph’s face was radiant. She’d been reading the scrolls with Morehshin and memorizing the ceremony to join the ranks of al-Lat’s protected Timeless. I looked at her sidelong, taking in the kohl-smeared eyes, braided hair, and pale linen robe Anita had dug up somewhere in the AGU quarters. When I first met Soph, I thought she was a sex radical using the language of Spiritualism to spread the cause. Now I knew she was a believer, too. Maybe not a conventional one, but close enough that the Temple of al-Lat meant something more than political asylum to her.
Soph smiled at me and I took her hand.
We entered the temple through an atrium with high windows that brought in sunlight across a brightly painted ceiling. Benches lined a central pool, and people crowded onto all of them, talking and gesturing and eating dinner and staring off into space. Anita introduced us to a dark-skinned woman named Esther, who wore a dress laced up over a loose white blouse that looked vaguely fifteenth century. Her fingertips were dyed with shimmering green ink and she tucked a wooden writing kit under her arm before gesturing us down a long, lamplit corridor. The air cooled as we got further into the rock.
After a minute of walking, we made a sharp left and emerged into a palatial room whose walls were covered in wooden shelves of scrolls, mechanical instruments, and jars. A fifty-foot statue of al-Lat rose from the floor to tower over the center of the room, her three faces seeing into every corner. Beyond her skirts, at the far end of the room, a dais was backed by several rows of semicircular stadium seats cut into the high walls. Fresh air came in through portals in the arched ceiling. Dusty beams of sunlight shot through them to a floor mosaic of astronomical charts.
“Welcome, women and new genders.” Esther addressed us in modern English with an accent I didn’t recognize. “The ceremony will take place in the amphitheater.” She gestured at the dais, where a very bored-looking teenager was setting out some candles and our offering of grain.
“Should we go over there and wait?” I’d read a lot about the Temple of al-Lat, but had never actually visited. From my research, though, I had been anticipating something with a little more ritual to it. Everybody’s nonchalance made it seem like Soph was getting a library card rather than temporal amnesty from a cosmic mother goddess.
Esther ignored my question and knocked on a polished wooden door. “Your sacrifice is here, ma’am!”
A woman whose black hair was wound into tightly coiled ringlets emerged from behind the door, wrapping a blue shawl over the deep brown of her shoulders. “I’m Hugayr. These are my students, but you can ignore them. They’ll be observing.” She spoke in crisp Nabataean, though she obviously understood English, too. Following her were three women with writing kits like Esther’s, all wearing identical harried expressions. We trailed Hugayr to the amphitheater, where the teenager lit candles and joined a few other women on the benches. Everything smelled pleasantly of beeswax.
Hugayr pulled three carved stones from her robes and set them on the dais. Each had been cut to resemble a flower and emitted a blue glow, as if infinitesimal LEDs were embedded in its crystal matrices. “There will probably be a crowd of students here,” she said. “I hope you don’t mind. We only get a couple of sacrifices every year, so it’s a great chance for them to get some experience.”