Mara, Daughter of the Nile: Part V

Above them the sky flamed with sunset, trailing scarlet banners of cloud and tinging with pink the myriad white walls and buildings of the city spread out below.

Chadzar the Libyan was leaning stolidly against the far wall, waiting for her.

There was small use arguing with that restless whip and the look in that one eye, which had begun to gleam balefully in the Libyan’s pale-skinned, brutal face.

“Live forever, illustrious one!” she heard herself saying.

‘My princess,' I said to her—very severely, master—‘My princess, His Highness himself believes it better to allow these menials to be present during the audience. Come, they might suspect you are afraid of them!’

In fifteen minutes she could be back in her rags, dodging some new master’s stick, tossed into oblivion like a handful of rubbish.

She paused, feeling herself teeter on the brink of a precipice, tingling in every nerve.

Attracted by the gust of music and laughter, Mara glanced into the room beyond him, caught a glimpse of blue-wigged ladies and courtiers grouped in a semicircle about a sumptuous table, with great platters of fruit, and a harpist playing—and just before the door swung shut, a figure darted into her range of vision, and there was a flash of golden balls.

At last he climbed into the East again, heralded by a rosy glow, bringing a burst of radiance as he crossed the horizon.

Incense rose on the morning air from a thousand altars; cries of thanksgiving and entreaty came faintly to his ears, and the smoke of burned offerings assailed his nostrils.

He was indifferent. Aloof, rigid in his perfection, wreathed in everlasting flames, he sailed slowly to his zenith and down his unchanging path once more into the West.

The men strolled idly, stopping to exchange flatteries, gathering in little groups to mutter with their heads together, laughing at the antics of the pet gazelle which gamboled in the middle of the room with Lord Merab’s naked children.

“That scurvy Architect! Yet he is her favorite.”

“Is it treason to oust thieves, to rid Egypt of enemies? I am not alone, Excellence. Behind me stands an army—nobles, priests, common folk as well as armed soldiers—waiting only my signal. Your future lies with us—not with Hatshepsut. And the time is near.”

Two of the men wore the garments of neocori, servants of the temple; the third was a burly priest, calm and imposing of mien, of obvious importance.

"Think you he is late on purpose?” whispered the other indignantly. “I’ll hear no ill spoken of Sashai.”

Sheftu thanked the gods for that stoic figure; his own composure had been sorely tried by the venture’s inauspicious start—his tardiness, the frantic rush to the meeting place, and the disturbing memory of a certain remark of Pesiur’s.

Sheftu thanked the gods for that stoic figure; his own composure had been sorely tried by the venture’s inauspicious start—his tardiness, the frantic rush to the meeting place, and the disturbing memory of a certain remark of Pesiur’s.

He felt confused and harried.

Would they really be coming out, a few hours hence, with their mission accomplished and the baskets loaded with inestimable treasure?

But as he pushed the large worries to the back of his mind, Pesiur's jibe about Mara came again to dance like a mocking kheft at the front of it.

Djedet advanced a step, his bulk imposing, his carriage haughty.

Sheftu allowed himself a moment’s grim admiration of the fellow in front of him, plodding along half-embarrassed but still doggedly doing his duty.

Nuit, the Starry One, had stretched her dark and spangled body across the heavens, shedding a faint glitter over a vast, rugged wasteland of craggy buttes and sand and rocks, completely bare of vegetation.

There was a scramble of footsteps, grunted curses as the diggers flung themselves upon the guard’s flailing arms and legs. A moment later they had him pinioned, and Sheftu’s muscles knotted for the last strangling jerk—knotted, but never released their energy.

The portal which was to have remained closed and inviolate for three thousand years was swinging open before him, with a creak that woke echoes far back in the depths of the tomb.

I have not committed iniquity against men! I have not oppressed the poor! I have not starved any man, I have not made any to weep, I have not committed that which is an abomination to the gods!

All were loath to leave the stair, which now seemed known and safe.

More and more brilliantly painted figures slid past them in the wavering light—a group of women bent in mourning, with disheveled hair; slaves bearing treasure boxes and furniture, dignitaries pacing behind a canopied sledge on which rested a great sarcophagus.

The moment the wine of the last libation had dried upon the floor, and the silent dark closed in, these figures had been transformed, transmuted, quickened with that mysterious other life which called their kas out of the paint and plaster to be the wraithlike servants of the dead king.

On the walls were his fowlers and herdsmen, his fishermen dragging in their brimming nets, men threshing his grain or pressing out his wine or fashioning his golden collars—all workers laboring ceaselessly for the royal ka, all shocked motionless by the desecrating glare of the torch and the footsteps of living men.

Between them loomed the huge sarcophagus, veiled by a linen pall so sheer the pink granite showed through its folds.

He felt all sense of time and memory fade away, all objects blur except the tranquil faces of the ushabti and the sarcophagus they guarded. Here was the ultimate moment, perhaps his last; for he was in the presence of the dead.

It was not this man, who broke, that was surprising, it was his companion who still held staunch.

Though it was well past midnight, Ashor was still waddling here and there with platters of stew and mugs of Kede beer, and the juggler’s balls wove a glittering pattern in the air before one of the larger and more boisterous cubicles.

Three gilded balls circled furtively above his hand.

She reached for her cloak and rose, moved for the last time through the din of tambourine and conversation and the thick smell of meat, into the chill fresh wind of night.

He was no wraith. He had come, he was here.

The dreams were still there, turret on airy turret.

The moon inched imperceptibly higher in the night sky, and a little breeze sprang up to stir a fold of her sleeve.