He began to pace rapidly along the perimeter of the lake. She was hard pressed to keep up with him.
Then he turned and looked back at her.
Hoarsely he said, “What do you think he wants here, Elaine?”
“What do you think he wants? What else would he be doing here but to study Eighteenth Dynasty Egypt? He speaks the language so well that he must be trained in Egyptology. So he’s come on the usual kind of preliminary exploration mission, the sort of thing we were going to do in Rome. Did you really believe that nobody was ever going to come here? Did you, Roger?”
“I wanted to believe that.”
She laughed. “It had to happen sooner or later.”
“They’ve got five thousand years of Egyptian history to play with. They could have gone to Memphis to watch the pyramids being built. Or to Alexandria to see Antony screwing Cleopatra. Or to the court of Rameses II.”
“They’ve probably been to all those places,” the priestess said. “But they’d want to come here too. Thebes is a fabulous city. And it’s absolutely at its peak right now. It’s an obvious destination.”
The man who called himself Senmut-Ptah nodded glumly. He was silent for a time. He walked even faster. He held his shoulders hunched in an odd way and now and then one of them rose abruptly as though he was being swept by a tic.
At length he said, in a new and oddly flat, unresonant tone, a dead man’s voice, “Well, so someone came at long last. And fell right into your lap on his very first day.”
“Was dumped.”
“Whatever. There he is, up there in your temple, not more than five hundred feet away from us. He could have landed anywhere in Thebes and used up his whole time here without ever laying eyes on either of us or having the slightest notion that we’re here, and instead somehow he finds his way to you in a single day. How neat that is.”
“He doesn’t know anything about me, Roger.”
“Are you sure of that?”
“Positive.”
“You didn’t tell him you aren’t Egyptian, did you?”
“I didn’t tell him anything.”
“Do you think he could have guessed?”
“He doesn’t have a clue. He’s still groggy from the jump and he thinks I’m a priestess of Isis.”
“You are a priestess of Isis,” the astronomer said.
“Of course I am. But that’s all he knows about me.”
“Right. You didn’t say a thing. You wouldn’t have.” He came to a halt and stood rigidly with his back toward her, staring off toward the Precinct of Amon. There was another long silence. Then he said, his voice still flat and dead, “Okay. So we’ve got a young man from Home Era on our hands, and you know what he is, but he doesn’t know what you are. Well. Well, well, well. All right: what are we going to do about him, Elaine?”
“Is there any question about that? I have to get rid of him.”
“Get rid? How? What do you mean?”
“Get him out of the temple, is what I mean. Move him along, send him on his way. See to it that he uses up his time in Thebes without finding out anything about us.”
He gave her a long peculiar look. She had no idea what was going on in his mind. He seemed to be cracking apart. He frightened her, reacting to the coming of the visitor as he was, in all these different contradictory ways.
He moistened his lips and said, “So you don’t want to speak to him at all?”
“Speak to him about what?”
The look on his face grew even more strange. She couldn’t remember a time when he had ever seemed so disturbed, not even in the first chaotic days after their arrival. “Anything. The news from Home Era. What’s going on in the world. The Service, our friends. He may know some of them. We haven’t heard a thing in fifteen years. Aren’t you even curious?”
“Of course I am. But the risks—”
“Yes,” he said.
“We’ve talked about this so many times. What we would do if somebody from down there showed up.”
“Yes.”
“And now that someone actually has—”
“That changes everything, having someone from down there actually arrive here.”
“It doesn’t change a thing,” she said coolly. “You only think it does. I’m amazed, Roger. You said only a couple of minutes ago that revealing yourself to him was the last thing you’d want to do. You aren’t seriously suggesting now that we do it, are you?”
He contemplated that.
“Are you?” she asked.
“No,” he said. “Not seriously. And you don’t want to either.”
“Of course I don’t. I just want to be left alone to live my life.”
“Well, so do I.”
“Then we can’t let him know anything, can we?”
“No.”
“But you’re tempted, all of a sudden. I can see that you are. I didn’t expect this of you, Roger.”
He looked past her, into the night, as though she were not there at all. He seemed once again to be rebuilding some of his old glacial indifference. But she knew now that it was only a pose. He was more confused than she had ever imagined.
“Maybe I am tempted, just a little,” he said grudgingly. “Is that so surprising, that the idea should cross my mind? But of course I don’t mean it.”
“Of course not.”
“Of course.”
“Good. I’ll take care of this, then. I just wanted you to know what was happening. You can go back to your observatory, now. Maybe there’s still time to find the North Star tonight. Or whatever it is that you do.”
She realized that somewhere during the conversation she had gone back to speaking Egyptian, and so had he. She wasn’t sure when that had been.
Four
In the morning the slave-girl Eyaseyab came into the pavilion where he was lying on the sloping bed and said, “You are awake? You are better? You are strong today?”
He blinked at her. It must be well along in the morning. The sky was like a blue shield above him and the air was already warming toward the midday scorch. He realized that he was awake and that he felt reasonably strong. During the night the worst effects of the shock of his arrival in Eighteenth Dynasty Egypt seemed to have left him. His throat was dry and his stomach felt hollow, but he was probably strong enough to stand.
He swung his legs over the side of the bed and cautiously got up. The flimsy cloth that was covering him fell away, leaving him naked. That was a little strange; but Eyaseyab was just about naked too, as naked as any of the girls in the tomb paintings in the Valley of the Kings, just a little beaded belt around her hips and a tiny loincloth covering the pubic area. Little anklets of blue beads jingled as she moved. She was sixteen or seventeen, he supposed, though it was hard to tell, and she seemed cheerful and healthy and reasonably clean. Her eyes were dark and glossy and so was her hair, and her skin was a pleasing olive color with a hint of red in it and a golden underhue.
She had brought a basin of water and a flask of perfumed oil. Carefully she washed him, in a way that was the nearest thing to being intimate, but wasn’t. He suspected that it could be, if he asked. He had never been washed by a woman like this, at least not since he was a child, and it was enticing and unnerving both at once. When she was done washing him she anointed him with the warm, fragrant oil, rubbing it into his chest and back and thighs. That too was new to him, and very strange. She is a slave, he told himself. She’s accustomed to doing this. Now and again she giggled. Once her eyes came up to meet his, and he saw provocation in them; but it seemed unthinkable for him to reach for her now, in this open place, in this temple. To draw her to him, to use her. She is a slave, he told himself again. She expects to be used. Which makes it all the more impossible.