Imhotep Page 7

He placed his open palm against his chest and quietly said, “Bakr.”

  Brian repeated the guard’s name. Then he took the guard’s right wrist and pulled his arm toward him. Reaching with his right hand, Brian clasped the guard’s hand in a handshake, their palm’s pressed together, thumb’s interlocked and fingers pointed up.

  The guard looked up at the large god, his eyes glowing with excitement. “Brian,” he said softly.

  “Yep,” Brian said, squeezing the guard’s hand and then releasing him. “Now, let’s ride us some camels.”

  He turned and lifted Diane by the waist, easily swinging her atop the kneeling camel. Then he walked to a second camel and mounted it. “Yo, Bakr, you coming?”

  The guard looked to Djefi who nodded his head curtly. Bakr mounted the third camel and shouted “Hup.” The three camels rose ungainly.

  “Whoaa!” Brian laughed, almost pitching forward from the camel.

  Diane held the reins tightly, her body tense.

  Bakr turned his camel and climbed out of the wadi. Brian’s and Diane’s camels followed, swaying from side to side, heading away from Ineb-Hedj, across the desert to the oasis of To-She.

  As soon as the three were out of sight, Djefi took Paneb and Ahmes aside. He told Paneb not to tell anyone about the gods. “Sobek wishes to speak with them. Sobek alone.”

  Although he didn’t understand why Djefi was being secretive, Paneb nodded his head.

  Djefi reached out and patted Ahmes’ head. The movement seemed unnatural and, although Paneb flinched, he felt a flicker of pride that Ahmes did not offend the priest by moving away from him, possibly because the boy’s attention was still rooted on the strangely dressed gods.

  “Understand, Chief Artist, Sobek does not want you to speak of these netjrew,” the boyish voice took on a hard edge. “There should not be even rumors of them. No one is to know of them. Understand?”

  Paneb nodded again, unable to meet Djefi’s eyes.

  “You do not want to anger Sobek.” Djefi’s voice grew even higher pitched. “Sometimes, in his rage, Sobek takes children.”

  Djefi’s sweaty hand rested for a moment on Ahmes’ head. His face was bland as he watched Paneb to be sure the artist understood. “Sometimes, he takes children.”

  Paneb could not speak. He looked at Djefi. The priest’s dark eyes stared back unblinking. Then the priest frowned down at Ahmes, turned away and waved the remaining guard to his side. The guard helped Djefi walk away, back toward the sedan chair to return to Ineb-Hedj.

  Paneb stood staring after them, his stomach a knot of fear.

  “Are they truly netjrew, father? Did they come from Khert-Neter?” Ahmes whispered.

  Paneb looked sadly at his son. “We cannot speak of this,” he said.

  “Not to Mother?”

  “No, Ahmes, not to anyone.”

  “Because Sobek will take me? I am the ‘children’ the first prophet meant?”

  Paneb’s eyes filled with tears. He wiped them away with the back of his arm.

  “Yes, Ahmes. But, we won’t let that happen. There is a proverb from before my father’s time. It says, ‘People bring about their own undoing through their tongues.’

  “Our tongues will not bring about our undoing, Ahmes. We will honor Djefi’s demand. I do not understand why he wants it so, but he does. So, my son, we will talk no more of the netjrew.”

  “But we can when we are alone, can’t we?”

  Paneb shook his head. “No, Ahmes, not even then.” He saw the disappointment in his son’s eyes. “Except when we are here and there are no workmen with us. Only then.”

  Ahmes looked at the tomb entrance, his eyes still seeing the gods who had emerged there.

  “Father, did you see how strong his arms were? Did you see how he threw the spear?” Ahmes threw a pretend spear, mimicking the god’s motion and swagger.

  Paneb reached down and stroked his son’s smooth head.

  “Yes, Ahmes, he was the tallest and strongest netjer I have ever seen.”

  Paneb and Ahmes entered the tomb to search for the entrance the gods had used to journey from Khert-Neter, but they found only what they expected - walls and rock.

  Later, instead of returning home, Paneb decided to spend the day alone with Ahmes, hoping to exhaust the topic of gods and spears by letting him talk and ask his questions. Paneb thought it would be easier for them to keep the secret if Ahmes had a chance to ask all the questions he could find.

  The next day they worked alone in the tomb and Ahmes remained full of questions.

  Was the goddess Bastet? And shouldn’t her head have been a cat’s head like all the statues? Why did she have red hair? Which god was he? Was he a god from some other land? Could a god even be “hesy” - from outside Kemet? What was outside Kemet? Did anyone go there? Did they have different gods? I wouldn’t want to share our gods, would you? If a god could come here from Khert-Neter, could we go to Khert-Neter and then return? Would we see our ancestors there?

  By the evening of the second day Ahmes at last grew quiet. Although Paneb welcomed relief from the constant questions, he wondered what the reflectiveness meant.

  Now as they approached the tomb on the third day since the gods’ arrival, Ahmes had grown more interested in repeating what he had seen, as if planting the memories so that one day he would be able to tell his children about the time gods had walked out of a tomb.

  It was too early for Paneb to breath a sigh of relief, the threat Djefi had made still clutched at his heart whenever he thought of the fat priest, but he felt at last that it might be possible that they could keep the secret.

  He wondered how much longer they would need to. Eventually, he reasoned, the gods would leave Sobek to visit other gods at their temples.

  Paneb and Ahmes sat on stools under the palm shelter. Paneb had removed his kilt and hung it from the canopy.

  A sack with rolls of papyrus lay in the sand at their feet.

  Ahmes looked at the rolls and realizing what they were, tried to sit quietly and erect, like an adult.

  “You’ve guessed, haven’t you?” Paneb asked.

  Ahmes nodded. “You’ll let me draw today.”

  Paneb reached into the sack and pulled out a papyrus.

  “Thoth?” Ahmes asked, remembering which god his father had been drawing the day before.

  Paneb shook his head. “Yes and no.”

  “No, Father, not baboons,” Ahmes slid off his stool and sat on the sand, his arms touching the ground like a baboon, which often represented the god Thoth. He grunted like a baboon as he reached one arm high in the air and scratched his armpit with the other.

  “Wait, don’t move,” Paneb said suddenly. “That is a perfect pose, let me sketch it.” Then he smiled and Ahmes started to laugh, happy to have been tricked by his father.

  A noise from the tomb stopped their laughter.

  Ahmes looked anxiously at his father.

  Paneb reached into the bag and pulled from it a stone mallet.

  He stood slowly, Ahmes moved closer to him. Together they watched the tomb entrance where a shadow had separated itself from the background and a figure stepped out into the morning sunlight.

  Ahmes gasped and Paneb raised the mallet.

  Seeing the fear in their faces and the stone hammer in the man’s hand, Tim Hope raised both his hands to show he was unarmed. In his best Arabic he said the first thing that seemed helpful: “I come in peace.”

  Lost City of Ineb-Hedj

  Horus swept in from the west, riding updrafts from the hot desert sand. The hawk was watching the man and boy in the wadi when it saw a shadow move at the bottom of the sandstone outcropping. Tucking its wings, it dove closer and saw that it was another man. Calling out once in a raspy cry, the hawk spread its wings and veered away toward the river leaving the desert necropolis behind.

  Tim had an unsettling premonition that something fundamental was about to change.

  Earlier, after the wall had slid back into pla
ce inside the tomb, he had waited a few minutes to be sure the taxi driver and guard had not found a way to follow him. Then he had pulled the plastic toothpick from his Swiss army knife and wedged it into the nearly invisible crack at the top of the section of wall that had opened for him.

  It had taken only a minute to see that Brian and Diane were not in this section of the tomb. During that time, Tim had felt a strange lightness settle over him as if the air were richer and cleaner.

  The hallway he had found himself in was different from the other parts of the tomb.

  Although most of the paintings were unfinished, the outlines were cleaner and stronger. The scenes that were painted seemed artificially bright and vivid, as if they had been painted yesterday. They looked as if paint would come away on his fingers if he touched them.

  And the floor here was clean, as if it were swept on a regular basis.

  He had followed the corridor toward the morning light and stepped outside the tomb to see a naked man with a stone hammer standing under a small palm-topped canopy made of four poles stuck into the sand. Near him, a boy crouched by some papyrus rolls; one of them was unfurled showing a baboon. The sky above them and the desert beyond them was vast and empty.

  Tim’s appearance at the tomb entrance had startled Paneb and Ahmes into stillness as they waited to see what the strange god would do. Paneb lowered his arm from his baboon pose and waited by his father whose fingers tightened on the handle of his stone mallet.

  They had watched the flight of Horus as the sacred hawk approached and then called to the god outside the tomb. Now the god spoke to them.

  “Sabah el-kheir,” Tim spoke slowly in Arabic and then in English, “Good morning.”

  For Paneb, the appearance of another god from this tomb was more than he could absorb. He dropped his stone mallet and stood unmoving, his eyes wide and fearful.

  Tim wondered how bad his Arabic was. Had he mistakenly said something threatening?

  “Do you speak English? Parlez-vous Francais?”

  “Father,” Ahmes said quietly. “Is he another netjer?”

  Paneb nodded his head and whispered back, “Did you not see Netjer Horus greet his arrival?”

  Tim shrugged out of his backpack and swung it in front of him. Squatting, he dug through a pocket until he found his Arabic-English phrasebook.

  Paneb took a hesitant step toward Tim.

  “Welcome, Eternal Netjer,” he said, remembering how Djefi had addressed the gods. “I am Paneb, chief artist of the necropolis of Saqqara. This is my son, Ahmes.”

  Ahmes stepped up beside Paneb, beaming with joy that his father had thought to introduce him to a god.

  Tim looked up from his book. Whatever language they were speaking, it was unlike anything he had heard. He knew there were dozens of dialects of Chinese, but he thought that Arabic was pretty standard.

  Saqqara? The man had said Saqqara.

  He tucked the phrase book back into a pocket.

  Standing, he opened his arms and looked left and right to show that he was taking in the entire area. “Saqqara,” he said.

  The man and boy both nodded vigorously.

  Tim took his bearings from the sun and then pointed east toward the river and Memphis.

  “Memphis.”

  The man and boy looked at each other. The man shook his head and said, “Ineb-Hedj.”

  The limestone wall into which the tomb entrance was cut blocked Tim’s view of the plateau behind him. He waved his hands toward the monuments that he knew sat atop the plateau.

  “Step Pyramid. Bent Pyramid. Any of this ring a bell?” he said, smiling in frustration. “King Djoser?”

  “Netjerierkhet Djoser,” Paneb said quietly, unconsciously nodding his head

  Tim pointed to the tomb behind him. “The tomb of Kanakht?”

  The artist nodded and repeated Kanakht’s name.

  “OK,” Tim said to himself, “We’ve got the nouns down.”

  He worried that Memphis didn’t seem familiar to them and their nudity bothered him, but they seemed comfortable, like a nudist family.

  He picked up his backpack and walked over to them.

  “I’m Tim,” he said, extending his right hand.

  The man looked curiously at Tim’s outstretched hand.

  Ahmes, who had seen Brian shake hands with the bodyguard Bakr, understood what Tim wanted to do. He stepped forward and took Tim’s hand. “I am Ahmes, son of Paneb,” he said.

  Paneb’s knees suddenly felt weak. What was his son doing, touching a god? But the god seemed pleased and was gripping Ahmes’ hand firmly.

  “Pleased to meet you, Ahmes,” Tim said, repeating the sounds that he hoped were the boy’s name.

  Paneb hesitantly reached out to the god with his hand. Tim released Ahmes and took Paneb’s hand.

  “I’m Tim,” he repeated to the artist, emphasizing his name.

  “Tim,” Paneb said, marveling at the soft, warm touch of the god’s skin. He had feared that the god’s touch would have been burning, or perhaps as cold and hard as stone.

  Ahmes spoke for his awe-struck father. “Paneb,” he said gesturing at his father.

  “Paneb. All right, then,” Tim said, careful to keep his voice cheerful. “We’ve got the introductions out of the way, and I know you don’t understand a word I’m saying, but I want to find out where Brian and Diane went.”

  Ahmes caught the name of the god ‘Brian.’ He looked at his father and pointed across the desert to the path Bakr had taken when he led Brian and Diane to the oasis of To-She. “Brian,” he said.

  “You understand me? That’s great!” Tim said. “Now, it was two days ago, right? Did they say where they were going? Were they, oh, I don’t know, lost, confused, injured?”

  Ahmes and Paneb waited for the god to say another word that they could understand.

  “You have no idea what I’m saying do you? You just pointed over that way and said ‘Brian’ because ‘Brian’ means desert or something else that’s over there.”

  Tim scratched his head, trying to think of a way to communicate.

  Ahmes saw his frustration. He ran back to the shelter and took a long-handled brush from the bag. Kneeling on the sand by Tim’s feet he drew a smiley face. “Brian,” he said, pointing to it.

  Tim looked at the round face and wondered if ‘Brian’ meant happy. But why did they point across the desert when they heard ‘Brian’ if the word meant happy?

  Paneb, shaken out of his daze by his son’s fearlessness, finally moved. He touched Ahmes shoulder and gestured for the brush. Then he cleared a space on the sand and recreated his drawing of Brian wearing his baseball cap and riding a camel.

  “Of course,” Tim said, looking at the cleanly drawn profiles. “You’re the guy who’s recreating those tomb drawings. You’re an artist.”

  He held out his hand for the brush and then, copying Paneb’s flat style, drew a second camel with a woman on it, her head covered with the straw hat he remembered her wearing.

  Paneb and Ahmes nodded their heads eagerly. Tim pointed at the drawing of the woman and said, “Diane.” Then he pointed to the man and said, “Brian.”

  Then he pointed off across the desert and shrugged, hoping they would name a town he recognized.

  “To-She,” Paneb said.

  Tim dug out his map of Egypt and spread it on the desert floor. Paneb stood, looking over his shoulder; Ahmes sat beside him, his eyes bright with excitement as he looked at the colors and shapes on the map.

  Tracing the blue wavering line that ran down the center of the map, Tim looked at Ahmes and said, “The Nile River.”

  When he got no response, Tim dug through his backpack and pulled out a plastic bottle of water. He splashed some on his hand and then pointed again to the river. “The Nile,” he repeated.

  Paneb understood and spoke first. “Iteru,” he said.

  “Iteru?” Tim said. He looked at Paneb and Ahmes. How could they live along the Nile and know it by anoth
er name?

  Suddenly his fearful premonition returned.

  Leaving his backpack behind he ran to the edge of the wadi and scrambled up its loose sand. He reached the top of the steep bank and looked toward the tomb, expecting to see the top of the Step Pyramid rising above the plateau.

  Impossibly, he saw nothing but sky.

  He kicked off his sandals and ran across the desert, climbing the slight rise to the plateau’s top. He came to the desert highland where half an hour earlier he had arrived with Musa, where he had walked through the reconstructed entrance-way and entered the small building that housed the plateau entrance to Kanakht’s tomb. Now the colonnades and the walls, the cars and the parking lot, the temple pillars and the huge pyramids themselves were gone.

  He stopped, breathless from exertion and panic.

  Standing there shaking and wobbly, he stared across the flat expanse. It was broken only by a few low mastabas, sand and emptiness. Two nights ago he stood here and squinted at the Step Pyramid at night making its form seem to disappear in the darkness. But even as a dark shadow, the pyramid had been massive and eternal.

  Now it wasn’t here.

  He slowly turned, taking in the ancient burial ground’s spacious emptiness. And then, continuing to turn, he saw in the distance the green of the Nile’s valley, richer and darker and fuller than he remembered it. And along the river, rising from its banks he saw a city of mud brick homes surrounded by a thick white wall: The long-dead city that Tim knew as Memphis, the city that Paneb and Ahmes had called Ineb-Hedj.

  He didn’t know how long he stood there, his mind struggling to make sense of what he wasn’t seeing.

  The last time this plateau had been empty was five thousand year ago, before the Step Pyramid had been built. He thought of the sweep of days, the billions of lives that had not yet been lived, the dreams not yet dreamt.

  The faces of his friends, his dead parents, of Addy, swept past him. Here in this incredibly distant past none of them had been born. And none of them had died. They each had lived, or would live, in a small sliver of time that was yet to come.