The alley took a sharp bend twenty feet beyond the donkeys. He paused there for a long careful look, fixing the details in his mind: the graffito, the rubble-heap, a bare place where the whitewash had worn through, the angle of the bend, the height and declination of the palm tree. He was going to have to find his way back here, of course, on the thirtieth day. They would be trawling through time for him, and that was like fishing with a bent pin: he had to give them all the help he could. For a moment his heart sank. Probably there were fifty thousand alleys just like this one in Thebes. But he was supposed to be an intelligent life-form, he reminded himself. He’d make note of the landmarks; he’d file away all the specifics. His life depended on it.
Now at last he was at the end of the alley.
He peered out into the street and had his first glimpse of Thebes of the Hundred Gates.
The city hit him in the face with a blast of sensation so heavy that he felt almost as shaken as he had in the first instant of the time-jump. Everything was noise, bustle, heat, dust. The smell of dung and rotting fruit was so ripe he had to fight to keep from gagging. There were people everywhere, huge throngs of them, moving with startling purposefulness, jostling past him, bumping him, pushing him aside as though he were invisible to them as he stood slackjawed in the midst of all this frenzy; this could be New York’s Fifth Avenue on a spring afternoon, except that many of them were naked or nearly so in the astonishing furnace-like heat, and huge herds of goats and sheep and oxen and asses and weird longhorned hump-backed cattle were moving serenely among them. Pigs snorted and snuffled at his feet. He had emerged into a sort of plaza, with tangled clusters of little mud-walled shops and taverns and, very likely, brothels, all around him. The river was on his right just a few dozen steps away, very low but flowing fast, a swift green monster cluttered with hundreds of ships with curving prows and towering masts, and right in front of him, no more than a hundred yards distant, was a vast walled structure which, from the double row of giant papyrus-bud stone columns and the hint of intricate antechambers beyond, he supposed was the building that in modern times was known as Luxor Temple. At least it was in the proper north-south alignment along the Nile. But what he saw now was very different from the temple he had explored just two weeks ago—Two weeks? Thirty-five hundred years!—on his orientation trip to contemporary Egypt. The Avenue of the Sphinxes was missing, and so were the obelisks and the colossi that stood before the great flaring wings of the north pylon. The pylon didn’t seem to be there either. Of course. The Luxor Temple sphinxes were Thirtieth Dynasty work, still a dozen centuries in the future. The obelisks and the colossi were the doing of Rameses II, whose reign lay five or six kingships from now, and so too was the north pylon itself. In their place was an unfamiliar covered colonnade that looked almost dainty by Egyptian architectural standards, and two small square shrines of pink granite, with a low, slender pylon of a clearly archaic style behind them, bedecked with bright fluttering pennants. He felt a small scholarly thrill at the sight of them: these were Twelfth Dynasty structures, perhaps, ancient even in this era, which Rameses’ inexorable builders would eventually sweep away to make room for their own more grandiose contributions. But what was more bewildering than the differences in floor plan was the contrast between this temple and the bare, brown, skeletal ruin that he had seen in latter-day Luxor. The white limestone blocks of the facades and columns were almost unbearably brilliant under the sun’s unblinking gaze. And they were covered everywhere by gaudy reliefs painted in mercilessly bright colors, red, yellow, blue, green. From every cornice and joist glittered inlays of precious metaclass="underline" silver, gold, rare alloys. The temple pulsed with reflected sunlight. It was like a second sun itself, radiating shattering jolts of energy into the frantic plaza.
Too much, he thought, beginning to sway. Too much. He was overloading. His head throbbed. His stomach lurched. He was having trouble focusing his eyes. He felt chills even in the midst of all this heat. Because of it, most likely. He imagined that he was turning green with nausea.
“You are ill? Yes, I can see that you are ill, very ill.” A sudden deep voice, virile and harsh. A hand closing tight around his wrist. A man’s face thrust practically up against his, thin lips, hawk nose, shaven scalp. Dark brooding eyes bright with concern. “You look very bad. You will be an Osiris soon, I think.”
“I—I—”
“To die like a pig in the street—that is not good, not good at all, my friend.”
It was astonishing that anyone had spoken to him and even more astonishing—despite all his training—that he could understand. Of course they had filled his brain with Egypt, pumped him to the brim, language, art, history, customs, everything. And he had learned a good deal on his own before that. But still he was surprised to find that he had comprehended the other man’s words so easily. His tutors hadn’t guessed quite right on the pronunciation, but they had been close enough. The vowels were wrong, everything shifted into the back of the throat, “e” turning into “i,” “o” turning into “u,” but he was able quickly enough to adjust for that. His benefactor was holding him upright with that vise-like grip; otherwise he would fall. He tried to think of something to say, but no words would come. His fluency failed him when it was his moment to speak. He couldn’t frame a single sentence. You will be an Osiris soon. Was he dying, then? How strange, putting it that way. He must be starting to look like Osiris already, the dead god, green-faced, mummified.
The stranger was drawing him out of the sun, into the sparse shade of a five-branched palm at the edge of the plaza.
“I am very ill, yes—” he managed finally. “The heat—my head—”
“Yes. Yes. It is so sad. But look, my friend, the god is coming now.”
He thought at first that some apparition was descending, that Horus or Thoth had come to carry him off to the Land of the Dead. But no, no, that wasn’t what the stranger meant at all. A stupefying roar had gone up from the crowd, a bursting swell of incredible noise. The man pointed. He managed to follow the outstretched arm. His vision was blurring again, but he could make out a commotion near the front of the temple, brawny men wearing nothing but strips of blue and gold cloth advancing, wielding whips, people falling back, and then a chariot appearing from somewhere, everything gilded, blindingly bright, falcons on the yoke-pole, a great solar disk above them, winged goddesses on the sides, horned creatures behind; and out of the temple and into the chariot, then, there came a slow portly figure, ornately robed in the stifling heat—the blue crown on his head, the khepresh, and the two scepters in his hands, the crook and the flail, and the stiff little false beard strapped to his chin—
The king, it was—it must be—the Pharaoh, getting into the chariot—he has been at some ceremony in the temple, and now he will return to his palace across the river—
Drums and trumpets, and the sound of high-pitched things something like oboes. An immense roar. “Horus!” the crowd was crying now. Ten thousand voices at once, a single throat. “Horus! Neb-Maat-Re! Life! Health! Strength!”