“The Time Service is a damned fine life too.”
“Screw the Time Service,” Lehman said. He wasn’t smiling now. “What did the Service ever do for us except dump us fifteen hundred years from where we were hoping to go?” His long skeletal fingers toyed with the pieces on the senet-board. He fondled them a moment; then, in a single swift motion, he swept them brusquely off the board and into their box. “That’s it,” he said. “That’s what we had to tell you. Your kind offer is refused with thanks. No deal. No rescue. That’s the whole story. Please don’t try to hassle us about it.”
Davis looked at them in disbelief.
“I wouldn’t dream of it,” he said. “Stay here, if that’s what your choice is. I can’t force you to do anything you aren’t willing to do.”
“Thank you.”
Davis helped himself to a little more of Lehman’s wine.
They were both watching him in a strange way. There was something more, he realized.
“Well, what happens next?” he asked. “Now do you take me back to that beautiful little room under Ms. Sandburg’s temple so I can get a little sleep? Or am I supposed to catch the night ferry over to the City of the Dead, so that I can learn a little more about how to make mummies before my time in Egypt runs out?”
“Don’t you understand?” Sandburg said.
“Understand what?”
“Your time in Egypt isn’t going to run out. You’re staying here too, for keeps. We can’t possibly let you go back. You mean to say you haven’t figured that out?”
Ten
At least this time they had given him a room that was above ground-level, instead of returning him to the cheerless subterranean hole they had stashed him in before. He actually had a window of sorts—a rectangular slot, about fifteen feet high up in the wall, which admitted a long shaft of dusty light for five or six hours every day. He could hear the occasional twitterings of birds outside and now and then the distant chanting of priests. And, since the Egyptians evidently hated to leave so much as a square inch of any stone surface uncovered by incredible artistic masterpieces, there were superbly done bas-reliefs of gods on the walls of his cell to give him something to look at: good old ibis-headed Thoth aloofly accepting an offering of fruit and loaves of bread from some worshipful king, and the crocodile-faced god Sobek on the opposite wall holding a pleasant conversation with winged Isis while Osiris in his mummy-wrappings looked on benignly. Three times a day someone opened a little window in the door and passed a tray of food through for him. It wasn’t bad food. They gave him a mug of beer or wine at least once every day. There could be worse places to be imprisoned.
This was the fourteenth day of the thirty. He was still keeping meticulous count.
Through the niche in the wall came the sound of singing voices, high-pitched, eerily meeting in harmonies that made his ears ache:
He had no idea where he was, because they had brought him here in the middle of the night, but he assumed that he must be in one of the innumerable outbuildings of the Karnak Temple complex. What Sandburg and Lehman intended, he assumed, was to keep him bottled up in here until the thirtieth day had passed and the jump field had come and gone in the alleyway near Luxor Temple. After that they would be safe, since he’d have no way of getting back to Home Era and letting the authorities know where and in what year the two missing renegades were hiding out. So they could afford to let him go free, then: stranded in time just like them, forever cut off from any chance of making his return journey, one more unsolved and probably unsolvable mystery of the Time Service.
Thinking about that made his temples pound and his chest ache. Trapped? Stranded here forever?
Over and over again he tried to understand where he had made his critical mistake. Maybe it had been to reveal the nature of his mission to the supposed priestess Nefret before he knew that she was Sandburg and Sandburg was dangerous. But she had already known the nature of his mission, because he evidently had been muttering in English during that time of delirium. So she was always a step ahead of him, or maybe two or three.
If he had been able to recognize Nefret as being Elaine Sandburg, either the first time when she was taking care of him, or a week later when he had walked back into her grasp, so that he could have been on his guard against—
No, that wouldn’t have made any difference either. He hadn’t had any reason to expect treachery from her. He had come here to rescue her, after all; why would she greet him with anything other than gratitude?
That was his mistake, he saw. Failing to anticipate that Sandburg and Lehman were deserters who didn’t want to be rescued. Why hadn’t anyone warned him of that? They had simply sent him off to Thebes and let him blithely walk right into the clutches of two people who had every reason to prevent him from returning to Home Era with news of their whereabouts and their whenabouts.
He heard a sound outside the door. Someone scrabbling around out there, fooling with the bolt.
He felt a foolish surge of hope.
“Eyaseyab? Is that you?”
Yesterday, when his evening food-tray had arrived, he had been waiting by the window in the door. “Tell the slave-girl Eyaseyab I’m here,” he had said through the tiny opening. “Tell her her friend Edward-Davis needs help.” A desperate grasping at straws, sure. But what else was there? He had to escape from this room. He didn’t want to spend the rest of his life in ancient Egypt. Egypt was remarkable, yes, Egypt was astounding, he’d never deny that; but as a member of the Service he had the whole range of human history open to him, and prehistory too, for that matter, and to have that snatched away from him by these two, to be sentenced to a lifetime in the land of the Pharaohs—
The bolt slid back.
“Eyaseyab?”
He imagined her bribing his guards with jewels stolen from Nefret’s bedchamber, with amphoras of royal wine, promises of wild nights of love, anything—anything, so long as she was able to let him out of here. And then she and that one-eyed brother of hers, maybe, would help him make his way across the river to the City of the Dead, where he could probably hide out safely in that maze of tiny streets until the thirtieth day. Then he could slip aboard the ferry again, entering Thebes proper, finding his alleyway with the graffito and the palm tree, waiting for the shimmering rainbow of the jump field to appear. And he’d get himself clear of this place. To hell with Sandburg and Lehman: let them stay if that was what they wanted to do. He’d report what had happened—he was under no obligation to cover for them; if anything quite the contrary—and then it was up to the Service. They could send someone else to bring them back. The defection would be expunged; the unauthorized intrusion into the domain of the past would be undone.
If only. If.
Now the door was opening. The dim smoky light of a little oil lamp came sputtering through from the hallway, just enough illumination to allow him to see that the veiled figure of a woman was entering his room.
Not Eyaseyab, no. Too tall, too slender.
It was Sandburg. “You?” he said, astonished. “What the hell are you doing—”
“Shh. And don’t get any funny ideas. The guards are right outside and they’ll be in here in two seconds if they hear anything they don’t like.”