“And then you’ll come back?”
“Later.”
“Not too much later, I hope.”
“Eat. Rest. That’s what’s important now. Eyaseyab will take care of you.” She smiled and turned away. She could feel his eyes on her as she left the pavilion.
Three
Senmut-Ptah was waiting for her outside, by the great sphinx that bore the inscription of Tuthmosis III. He was wearing a kilt of scarlet cloth into which golden ibises had been woven, and a tall priestly crown with three long feathers set in it. His shoulders and chest were bare. He was a long-limbed, bony man, very broad through the shoulders, and his features were sharp and powerful, giving him a falcon-face, a Horus-hawk face. Just now he looked angry and impatient.
“You know you’ve made me miss the rising of the Bull’s Thigh,” he said at once, when she appeared. “The North Star will be past the meridian by the time I—”
“Shh,” she said. “The North Star won’t go anywhere unusual tonight, and the Bull’s Thigh will look just the same tomorrow. Walk with me. We have to talk.”
“What about?”
“Walk,” she said. “We can’t talk here. Let’s go down toward the Sacred Lake.”
“I don’t understand why we can’t—”
“Because we can’t,” she said in a fierce whisper. “Come on. Walk with me. The astronomer and the priestess of Isis, out for a little stroll by starlight.”
“I have important observations that absolutely have to be made this evening, and—”
“Yes, I know,” she said.
She loathed the all-enveloping obsessive concern with his astronomical duties that had taken possession of him in recent years. He was like a machine, now. Or like an insect of some sort, clicking along busily in his preprogrammed routines. Day and night preoccupied with his viewing apertures and his transits, his reflecting bowls, his azimuths and meridians and ascensions, his sundials and his water-clocks. Once, when the two of them were new here and first struggling with the terrible challenge of building lives for themselves in Egypt, he had been aflame with wonder and eager curiosity and a kind of burning dauntlessness, but that was all gone now. Nothing seemed to matter to him any longer except his observations of the stars. Somewhere along the way a vast leaden indifference had come to engulf all the rest of him. Why was it so important to him, that absurd compilation of astronomical data, probably inaccurate and in any case useless? And where had he misplaced the warmth and passion that had carried the two of them through all the difficulties they had had to face in this strange land in earlier days?
He glared at her now as though he would send her to the Lake of Fire with a single flash of his eyes, if he could. By the chilly light of the stars his eyes seemed cruel and cold to her, and his face, sculpted to harshness by the years, had some of the nightmare look of the gods whose images were engraved on every wall of every temple. She had once thought he was handsome, even romantic, but time had made his face and body gaunt just as it had turned his soul to stone. He was as ugly as Thoth now, she thought. And as horrid as Set.
But he was the closest thing to an ally that she had in this eternally strange land, unless she counted the prince; and the prince was dangerously unstable, and an Egyptian besides. However much the man who stood before her had changed since he and she had first come to Thebes, he was nevertheless someone of her own kind. She needed him. She couldn’t let herself ever forget that.
She slipped her arm into his and tugged him along, through the colonnade that surrounded the Precinct of Mut, down the new avenue that Pharaoh had built, lined by a double row of cobras, and across the field toward the Sacred Lake. When they had gone far enough from the House of Life so that there was no chance the breeze might carry her voice upward to the sick man in the pavilion she said, speaking suddenly in English, “Someone from downtime showed up in Thebes today, Roger. From Home Era.”
The shift to English was like the throwing of a switch. It was years since she had spoken it, and the effect was immediate and emphatic for her. She felt her former identity, so long suppressed, come leaping forth now from its entombment. Her heart pounded; her breasts rose and fell quickly.
The man who called himself Senmut-Ptah seemed shaken as though by an earthquake. He made a choking sound and pulled himself free of her. Then his icy self-control reasserted itself.
“You can’t be serious. And why are you speaking English?”
“Because Egyptian doesn’t have the words I need in order to tell you what I have to tell you. And because I wouldn’t want anyone who might overhear us to understand.”
“I hate speaking it.”
“I know you do. Speak it anyway.”
“All right. English, then.”
“And I am serious.”
“Someone else from downtime is here? Really?”
“Yes. Really.”
The corner of his mouth made a little quirking motion. He was trying to comprehend her news and obviously having a difficult time of it. She had finally broken through that indifference of his. But it had taken something like this to do it.
“His name’s Edward Davis. He’s very young, very innocent in a charming way. He was staggering around outside Luxor Temple this afternoon right about the time the king was leaving, and he passed out with heatstroke and a bad case of temporal shock practically at Hapu-seneb’s feet. Hapu-seneb brought him to me. I’ve got him in the House of Life this very minute. Eyaseyab’s trying to get a little food into him.”
The astronomer stared. His nostrils flickered tensely. She could see him fighting to maintain his poise.
Sullenly he said, “This is all a fantasy. You’re making it up.”
“I wish. He’s real.”
“Is he? Is he?”
“I could take you to him right now. You can say hello to him in English and hear what he says.”
“No. No, I don’t want to do that.”
“What are you afraid of?”
“I’m not afraid of anything. But if you’ve got someone from Home Era up there in your temple, the last thing I would want to do is go to him and give him a big happy handshake. The absolutely last thing.”
“Will you believe me without seeing him, then?”
“If I have to.”
“You have to, yes. Why would I want to invent something like this?”
His lips worked, but for a moment no sound came out.
“Yes, why would you?” he said, finally. And then, after another pause: “When is he from?”
“I don’t know, but it’s got to be a year pretty close to ours. He told me right flat out that he’s from America—what should he care, he must figure the word’s just a meaningless noise to me?—and that he came in today or yesterday on a ship from Canada. He started to say he sailed in from Crete, but maybe it occurred to him that I could check up on that. Or maybe he just enjoys telling whoppers. Did you know an Edward Davis when you were in the Service?”
“I don’t remember any.”
“Neither do I.”
“He must be later than we are.”
“I suppose. But not much. I’m sure of that.”
The astronomer shrugged. “He could come from five hundred years after our time, for all we can tell. Isn’t that so?”
“He could. But I don’t think he does.”
“Intuition?”
“He just doesn’t seem to. Edward Davis. Is that your idea of a Twenty-Seventh Century name?”
“How would I know what a Twenty-Seventh Century name would sound like?” he asked, his voice rising angrily. By the glimmering light of the torches set in the sconces ringing the Sacred Lake she saw agitation returning to his face. Ordinarily he was as expressionless as a granite statue. She had broken through, all right.