called out to him, he ran from me. Like the woman, he ran from me! That same look in his eyes.'
'He wanted to come back to you. Others stopped him. Now I must go to get him. Do you understand? You must stay here. You must wait for me.' She stared past him. 'Ramses has the medicine,' he said. 'I shall bring it back here.'
'How long?'
'A few hours,' he said. 'It's mid-afternoon. I'll be back before dark.'
She moaned again, and pressed her curved thumb to her teeth, staring at the floor. She looked like a child suddenly, a child wrestling with an enormous puzzle. 'Ramses,' she whispered. Clearly she was not certain who he was.
He patted her shoulder gently; then with the aid of his cane, he approached the body of the girl. What in the name of heaven was he to do with it? Let it lie here and rot as the hours passed? How could he bury it in the garden, when he could barely walk as it was? He closed his eyes and laughed to himself bitterly. It seemed a thousand years since he had seen his son, or Julie, or the civilized rooms of a common place like Shepheard's Hotel. It seemed a thousand years ago that he had done anything normal or loved anything normal; or believed in it; or made the sacrifices that normality required.
'Go, get the medicine,' she said to him. She stepped between him and the dead woman. She reached down and lifted Malenka by her right arm. Effortlessly she dragged the woman across the carpet, past the clucking bird, which had the good fortune to be silent, and threw the corpse of the woman out into the yard as if it were a stuffed doll. The body landed on its face against the far wall.
Do not think now. Go to Ramses. Go!
'Three hours,' he said to her, again using the two languages. 'Bolt the door after me. You see the bolt?'
She turned and looked at the door. She nodded.
'Very well, Lord Rutherford,' she said in Latin. 'Before dark.'
* * *
She did not bolt the door. She stood there, her hands on the bare wood, listening as he walked away. It would take him a long time to move out of sight.
And she must get out of this place! She must see where she was! This could not be Egypt. And she could not understand why she was here, or why she hungered so, and could not be satisfied, or why she felt this sharp, enervating desire to be in a man's arms. She would have forced Lord Rutherford again if she had not wanted him to go on his errand.
But the errand; it was not clear to her suddenly. He meant to get the medicine, but what was the medicine! How could she live with the great gaping wounds she had?
Yet only a moment ago she'd realized something about this, something to do with that dead woman, that shrieking slave girl whose neck she'd snapped.
Ah, but the thing to do was leave here, while Lord Rutherford was not here to scold her like a teacher and tell her to remain.
In a haze, she remembered the streets she had glimpsed earlier, full of great rumbling monstrous things made from metal; full of foul smoke and deafening noise. Who were the people she had seen around her? Women in dresses such as she wore.
She'd been terrified then; but her body had been full of aches and misery. Now her body was full of cravings. She must not be terrified. She must go.
She went back into the bedchamber. She opened the 'magazine' called Harper's Weekly and looked at the drawings of pretty women in these strange dresses that pinched them in the middle like insects. Then she looked at herself in the mirror on the cabinet door.
She needed a covering for her head, and sandals. Yes, sandals. Quickly she searched the bedchamber, and found them in a wooden closet-sandals with gold worked into the leather, and small enough for her feet; and a great strange thing with silk flowers all over it, a thing such as one would wear to keep off rain.
She laughed as she looked at it. Then she put it on her head, and tied the ribbons under her chin. Now she looked very much like the women in the pictures. Except for her hands. What was she to do about her hands!
She stared at the naked bones of the first right finger. A thin covering of skin overlaid them, but it was like silk, more sheer than the dress. She could see blood in it; but it was transparent. And the mere sight of the bones caused her to become dizzy, confused again.
A memory-someone standing above her. No, don't let it begin again. She must wrap her hand in something, a bandage. The left hand would do well enough. She turned and began to search through the cabinet of female clothes.
And then she made the loveliest discovery! Here were two little silk garments made for hands. They were white; they had pearls sewn on them! Each had five fingers and had been cut to fit closely over the hand. This was perfect. She slipped them on; they hid the naked bone completely.
Ah, the wonder of what Lord Rutherford had called these 'modern times.' These times of music boxes and 'motor cars,' as he called them, the things she had seen this morning, all around her, like great roaring hippopotami from the river.
What would Lord Rutherford call these things, these clothes for hands?
She was wasting tune. She went to the dressing table, gathered up a few small coins that lay there and put these in the deep hidden side pocket of the heavy skirt.
As she opened the front door of the house, she glanced over at the dead body, out in the courtyard, heaped against the wall. Something, what was it, she had to understand it, but it simply would not come clear to her. Something . . .
She saw again that hazy figure standing over her. She heard again those sacred words. A tongue she knew speaking to her. This was the tongue of your forefathers, you must learn it. No, but that had been another time. They had been in a bright room full of Italian marble, and he had been teaching her. This time, it had been dark and hot and she'd been struggling upwards as if from deep water, her limbs weak, the water crushing her, her mourn full of water so that she couldn't scream.
'Your heart beats again; you come to life! You are young and strong once more; you are now and forever,'
No, do not weep again! Do not struggle to grasp it, to see it. The figure moving away; blue eyes. She had known those blue eyes. As soon as I drank it, it happened. The priestess showed me in the mirror , . . blue eyes. Ah, but whose voice was this! This voice that had said the prayer in the darkness, the ancient sacred prayer for the opening of the mummy's mouth.
She had called out his name! And here, in (his strange little house, Lord Rutherford had spoken the name also. Lord Rutherford was going . . .
Be back before dark.
It was no use. She stared through the archway at the dead body. She must get out into this strange land. And she must remember that it was extremely easy to kill them, to snap their necks like brittle stems.
She hurried out, without closing the door. The whitewashed houses on either side of her looked familiar and good to her. She had known such cities. Maybe this was Egypt, but no, that could not be.
She rushed along, holding the ribbons tight so that the strange headdress would not fly from her hair. So easy to walk fast. And the sun felt so good to her. The sun. In a flash she saw it flooding down from a high portal in a cave. A wooden shutter had opened. She heard the creak of the chain.
Then it was gone, the memory, if it had even been a memory. Wake, Ramses.
That was his name. But she didn't care now. She was free to roam this strange city; free to discover, to see!
4
SAMIR PURCHASED several Bedouin garments in the first shop in old Cairo that sold such clothes. He ducked into a small restaurant, a filthy alleyway of a place full of down-on-their-luck Frenchmen, and there put on the loose, concealing garb and tucked the other garments-those heft bought for Julie-under his arm, inside his robes.
He liked this loose peasant costume, which was infinitely older than the tailored robes and hats which most
