In Which Promises Are Made to Be Broken
The crossing had been rough for Xian-Li, and Arthur felt bad about that. He put a comforting hand on her back and murmured encouragements as she bent over retching. It was only her third otherworld journey, and she had yet to develop the physical mastery that would greatly reduce the more unpleasant effects and make travel between dimensions bearable if not entirely comfortable.
He remembered his first few times-leaping blind into the unknown and arriving in a strange world disoriented and incapacitated. To be so helpless in an unfamiliar place and time was alive with dangers of every kind, some of them lethal. That he survived those early exploits, he put down to Providence looking out for him when he did not know how to look out for himself. For that he was abundantly grateful.
“There, there, my love,” he cooed. “Breathe deeply. The worst is over. The sickness will soon pass.”
She retched again.
“You’ll feel better now,” advised Arthur.
“I’m sorry,” she gasped, wiping her mouth with her husband’s proffered handkerchief.
“Not a thing in the world to be sorry about, my dear.” Taking her elbow he raised her up. “There. Better?” She nodded without conviction. “The important thing to remember is that it won’t always be like this. Your timing and skill will improve, as you will see. And your body will soon grow adept at weathering the changes.”
“I hope so for your sake.” Xian-Li offered a weak smile. “But I want you to know that even if it never gets better, I still want to come with you. I can happily endure a little travel sickness if that is the cost of joining you on your journeys.”
Her determination made Arthur proud. His young wife was a fighter, no doubt about it. As she had so ably demonstrated that day in the back alley when driving away the odious Burleigh and his thugs with nothing but courage and naked skill, she was a capable and coolheaded combatant. For that, if for no other reason, he was glad to have her by his side.
“Are we here?” she said, looking around for the first time. They seemed to be standing in a great expanse of desert with nothing but shattered, buff-coloured, rock-strewn hills in every direction. “I do not see the temple.”
“The old temple is in the city, and the new one has not yet been built,” he told her. “But it will be, and very soon. This is the Eighteenth Dynasty, as we would call it-probably somewhere around the twentieth year of Amenhotep the Third. I won’t know for certain until we talk to my friend here.” He shouldered the small pack he had brought. “Ready? The city is just beyond those hills.”
“The priest, yes,” replied Xian-Li, falling into step beside her husband. “I remember.”
“You will like him. He’s a wise and gentle man-very high up in the royal family, too, as it happens. His mother was married to Yuya-who was grand vizier of Egypt, second only to the pharaoh, and his sister is great royal wife to the current pharaoh.”
“Brother to the pharaoh,” considered Xian-Li. “He sounds very powerful.”
“It is useful to have friends in high places,” replied Arthur lightly. “There are none higher than Anen. I wouldn’t be at all surprised if he became high priest one day.”
They walked easily in the dawn light. The land was dry as sun-burnt bone, and there was not a blade of green to be seen anywhere, apart from a single, blasted, dust-covered acacia bush. The early-morning air was alive with coveys of sparrows and gangs of starlings, and high, high overhead larks sent down their liquid song. “Insects,” said Arthur in answer to his wife’s wondering glance. “They draw the birds but will vanish again before noon and not be seen again until this evening at sundown-the birds too.”
“Where do the insects come from?” asked Xian-Li.
“You wouldn’t guess by looking,” Arthur said, indicating the bleak landscape surrounding them, “but just beyond that line of hills ahead, there is one of the greatest rivers of the world watering one of the most fertile valleys in the world.”
“The Nile,” declared Xian-Li proudly.
“The very same,” confirmed Arthur. “You have been studying.”
When they reached the foot of the nearest hills they found a narrow and very crooked sheep trail winding up the hillside. “Our ladder to the stars,” he said. “After you, my dear.”
They followed the path and, upon reaching the top, paused to survey the landscape. To the north, at the wide mouth of a valley leading back into the desert, lay a jumbled assortment of low stone buildings, some obviously under construction. To the south, asprawl in the brilliance of the early sunlight, spread the city the Egyptians called Niwet-Amun, the City of Amun. Nestled on the edge of the desert between the arid desert hills and the fresh verdant fields of the Nile valley, it gleamed with the lustre of a moonstone. They gazed down upon the tangled clusters of whitewashed houses scattered arbitrarily along the lowland that stretched off toward the majestic river, just visible as a clear blue line dancing on the far horizon. The air was bright and clean, the breeze soft. The sound of barking dogs could be heard drifting up from the houses below.
“It seems our arrival has been noticed,” said Arthur. “Dogs are always the first to know.”
“They are alert to every change in their world,” Xian-Li observed. “In China the old ones say a dog can hear and smell change before it happens.”
They descended to the valley, keeping an eye on the houses below. Though the dogs kept barking, no people appeared until they reached the road scratched on the hard-packed earth. Once on the track leading to the city, they noticed faces appearing briefly at the small dark windows and doorways of the whitewashed mud houses they passed. “We’re being watched now,” murmured Arthur. “Don’t be afraid; just smile and keep walking.”
Glancing behind them, she saw two brown men standing outside their houses, arms crossed, dogs by their sides and children hiding behind their bare legs. Xian-Li was glad for her linen robe-not all that different from what she had worn in China, but more in keeping with the local dress. Arthur had the harder part; even dressed in his loose-fitting full-length shirt, he would never blend in with the locals: he was too tall and, it had to be said, too white.
The farther into the city they went, the closer and more crowded the houses became, the streets and pathways between them more tangled and twisted. They passed through districts of wealth and ease, hard by areas of mean description. In the more affluent quarters the dwellings were made of cut stone, shaded by fig trees or date palms, and surrounded by well-tended gardens; in the humbler neighbourhoods, homes were made of mud brick and plaster, chickens and pigs wandered among rows of cabbages and beans, and the yards were used for small industry: pottery making, carpentry, weaving, and the like.
Xian-Li found fascination in everything she saw. Even the smallest glimpse brought a frisson of excitement as some new surprise revealed itself: young girls dressed in sky-blue shifts carrying reed baskets of laundry wet from the river; little boys herding flocks of geese with willow switches, stirring up more chaos than order; women spinning raw flax into thread and weaving at outdoor looms; all-but-naked youths working in dye pits, their limbs stained bright blue and green and yellow; stonecutters roughing out grindstones for hand mills; a butcher cutting up the carcass of a cow with an axe and hanging the bloody pieces on hooks all over the front of his house; a potter and his wife toting their wares to the oven on boards balanced on their heads. All of the life of a busy city was on display.
“It is wonderful!” she breathed. “The people are so… so beautiful.”
They were slender and lithe, with black hair and eyes, their skin colour darker than her own-as dark as some of the folk from the islands in the South China Sea-and Xian-Li swiftly formed the opinion that they were the most attractive people she had ever seen.
“They are a handsome race,” Arthur agreed. “Very peaceable, in the main. Inquisitive as the day is long too. Very little passes their regard, and they’re terrible gossips.”
“Just like in China.”
“Worse,” laughed Arthur. “They will all have noticed that we are here, but they don’t want to be seen to notice. I can tell you they’re all itching with curiosity right now, but they prefer to pretend otherwise. That’s why they’re making such a show of ignoring us.”
The roads and paths grew more crowded as they approached the centre of the city. Here also, the Egyptians maintained a polite distance and their air of indifference towards the obvious strangers in their midst. At the heart of Niwet-Amun lay the sprawling Temple of Amun, a square building on a low platform of three tiered steps; an odd conical pillar stone stood before the entrance. Three young priests dressed in loincloths were busy anointing the
