Authors: L. A. Banks
“That is so sweet!”
“Aw, man, stop trying to make the rest of us look bad, getting your mack on with the chips, dude,” Bath Kol said, smiling despite his obvious intent to remain peevish.
Azrael threw an empty water bottle toward him that missed. “Mind your business.”
Oddly, that broke the tension and made the entire bus erupt with laughter as food got passed around and shared. A sense of camaraderie took over. Women happily commiserated; the brothers teased each other and talked smack. Everyone marveled at the goatherd roadblock and laughed at Isda’s complaining until the slow-moving obstruction passed.
There was no way to remain removed from and impassive to the land or the people as their small jitney wended its way through narrow village streets. In the
distance woman worked in green pastures where the Nile had been bountiful as it had for thousands of years, providing rich black silt for farming. Small children ran along the side of the bus waving at the strange foreigners. Women in full garb hung clothes on lines and shooed goats away from their feet. Men walked with cinder blocks and PVC tubing on their shoulders, while others worked on twenty-year-old vehicles or debated in tavern doorways.
This was the Egypt that was hard to see while in Cairo, though no harder than it was hard to see a real neighborhood while standing at the Empire State Building or down by the Liberty Bell. One had to go into the boroughs or the real residential communities to truly see the people and understand what it was all about.
For Celeste, every little upturned face drew her. She watched the angels and their reaction to the children. Even Bath Kol was moved.
“You know,” he said quietly as they entered a more industrial area that left the children jogging in the roadside dust waving behind their minibus, “when we would march our legions through small towns … man … this was the part that would break your heart. The kids would come out and cheer for us. They knew an army, a legion of support, was passing through. But we knew that if the enemy came behind us, our orders were to march forward. We couldn’t turn back. So we’d dump our pockets and manifest whatever small treats that we could while conserving energy for the battle ahead.” He sat back in his seat and rubbed his palms down his face. “And sometimes, while in a Roman legion, we weren’t there to liberate. We were there to kill and conquer …
and the children always got trampled first. My men always tried our best to get the civilians out of the way—sometimes we just couldn’t.”
“Then why did you do it?” Maggie asked softly, no judgment in her tone or her expression. She sat forward, seeming as though she really had to know. “I was one of those children once. In Ecuador … when foreign Jeeps would roll through a town, we were excited. It would give us something to talk about for weeks … until we learned to fear uniforms.”
“Fair question,” Bath Kol said. “A lot of us embedded with the crazy side of humanity, those humans bent on war and destruction, to try to get them to turn their course. We weren’t allowed to just wholesale slaughter humans because they were doing foul things to each other. Demons, yeah—we could hot those bastards on sight. But bad humans … they had the freedom of choice. So, we embedded with human troops, tried to work on people with reason, compassion, blah, blah, blah. If you ask me, that shit is inefficient because some mortals are just stupid. And, since nobody asked me, and I just follow orders from above, for a while they put me in Rome with those crazy sons a bitches. Try working on Roman generals with reason and compassion—ha! Probably where I picked up a lot of my bad habits.”
Aziza reached over and stroked the nape of his neck, causing him to look at her. “All of that time wasn’t bad, BK. Remember the good in it.”
He nodded and took up her other hand and kissed it hard and then fell silent. Witnessing that rare display between the couple sent everyone deeper into his or her
own thoughts. Celeste didn’t even want to open the bag of chips now, fearing the sound would disturb a moment that needed to be marked by silent reverence. Another brother was purging and healing in their midst.
Looking out the dust-coated window, she stared at single-story, mud-brick, thatched-roof buildings as they passed. Some were painted in bright strips of color with indecipherable Arabic script running the length of the structures. Donkeys and goats were loosely tied to shade trees in front of some, just as one might lock a bike to a pole or park a car in front of one’s home. Wooden doors sat ajar; clearly no doors were locked in this countryside community. Some homes she could see into. The foyers had hay covering the dirt floor, and small lambs, goats, and a few chickens pecked around in the enclosure while the family was deeper inside the structure.
But in a bizarre collision of cultures, these rudimentary thatched-roof homes with women washing clothes by hand in huge metal tubs would also have a satellite dish for TV on the straw roof.
Completely amazed, Celeste kept her gaze fastened on the passing scenery, growing ever more thankful with every home she passed for her life in America—for being born a woman in the United States, for clean running water and asphalt and streetlights, and parks and temperate weather without flies, and food and shelter and supermarkets, and everything she’d ever taken for granted in her life.
Azrael slipped his warm palm beneath hers, and their fingers threaded into a perfect fit without their even looking at each other. A sense of anticipation swept through
her, although she wasn’t sure why as they turned onto a widening boulevard.
“Okay, folks,” Isda said. “The lady told us to come to Dendera. This is her. She’s forty thousand square kilometers, and she’s surrounded by a mud-brick wall that used to make her look like a citadel. Since the beginning of Kemet’s history here—”
“The earliest building that’s still standing is the Mammisi,” Aziza said, standing in the bus with a hand over her heart. Tears filled her large, dark eyes as she clutched the back of a seat to keep her balance. “Nectanebo the Second raised this … he was the last of the native pharaohs.”
“Yeah, baby,” Bath Kol said, standing and hugging her. “C’mon … we can do this, right?”
Aziza nodded and held him as Isda brought the bus to a stop. “I’m okay.”
Isda turned in his seat and looked at Azrael. “This is all set up according to sacred geometry, mon. That’s why I really want you all to pay attention to the layout of the buildings on the complex. It might help us figure out where to begin looking and could save us time.”
“Teach,” Azrael said with respect. “This is your expedition.”
Isda nodded and sat up taller, projecting his voice throughout the van with new authority. “Hathor Temple is the main temple here at Dendera complex. There’s also the Temple of the Birth of Isis, Sacred Lake, Sanatorium, Mammisi of Nectanebo the Second—the one Aziza knows … plus Christian Basilica, Roman Mammisi—the chapel, a Bark shrine, Gateways of Domitian and Trajan, and the Roman kiosk.”
Waiting until he’d received nods from the brothers, Isda began again, “When you roll up on one of dese monuments, mon, it’s like a small city within a city. The mortals here had a different viewpoint of time and scale, you know … they understood immortality from us. Like you go into one of the huge hypostyle halls with massive columns and—”
Celeste’s gasp cut off Isda’s words. Knowing slammed into her chest, making it hard for her to breathe. She could almost hear the stones of the monuments whispering to her, calling to her, drawing her to them as a memory so acute that it became an ache overtook her entire body. Her feet yearned to connect with the sand so that she could feel a part of the very earth.
“I have to get out of the bus,” she said suddenly, hyperventilating.
She pushed herself down the aisle and exited with another deep gasp, pulling hot, dusty air into her lungs. Coughing and sputtering, she turned around in a disoriented circle as Azrael caught her and thrust a bottle of water into her hands.
“I can cover the Roman-era sections with Aziza,” Bath Kol said as Celeste chugged water. “Isda is right—this place is huge and we may have to spread out.”
“Me and Paschar can take the outer buildings that BK and ’Ziz aren’t covering,” Gavreel offered.
“All right,” Azrael said, rubbing Celeste’s back. “But I need Isda with us when we go into the main temple. I need to know what we’re looking at and why.” He turned to Isda, gaining his nod. “You have the history, brother, and without that we’ll just be searching without purpose.”
“Cool, lemme get tickets, all right?”
Celeste stared behind Isda as he took off running fifty yards toward the small exhibit booth. But soon the enormity of the complex stole her attention. Two hundred yards of smooth, polished, perfectly cut stone steps flanked a granite ramp that led to the outer courtyard of the enormous temple. Hathor goddess heads on huge pylons six deep looked back at them in stoic serenity in front of the sandstone-hued, granite structure that had to be five stories high.
Isda came back in a flash and handed out tickets, allowing the group to be processed forward. They were early, and tour buses had yet to arrive. Warriors on a mission waved off eager vendors and children, and if she wasn’t mistaken, she could have sworn she’d seen a bit of blue flicker in their hands. The brothers were tense, and she knew they didn’t feel like being bothered this morning by petty human concerns such as trading plastic pyramids for a few pieces of silver. When the group split off, that left her and Azrael and Isda.
Enveloped in silence, they climbed the steps, and then stopped in the main courtyard. The building alone was overwhelming, and Isda and Azrael looked at her for answers she didn’t have.
“Okay, here’s the layout,” Isda said, trying to help her, drawing the building’s floor plan in the palm of his hand as he spoke.
Celeste watched his palm, intermittently glancing up at him and then behind him toward the building.
“When you enter, dere’s a large hypostyle hall, then a small one—columns, okay? Then there’s a laboratory,
storage magazine, offering entry, treasury, and access to the well and the stairwells.” Turning her body by the shoulders, Isda pointed with one hand and spoke to her calmly. “There’s an offering hall, Hall of Ennead, the Great Seat and main sanctuary, twelve shrine rooms, the Pure Place … Court of the First Feast … a passage, and then a staircase to the roof.”
Celeste lifted her ponytail off her neck in frustration. Isda might as well have been speaking in Greek because none of what he’d just said had any frame of reference. “Don’t say anything else. I just need to go in.”
He nodded and lifted his hands in front of his chest.
“No offense, brother, she just needs you to fall back so she can feel whatever it is.”
“No offense taken,” Isda said, sounding calm. “BK gets like that with his visions, so does Paschar … like big ole huntin’ dogs.”
Celeste took off running, unable to wait. The guards at the door let her pass but held up Isda and Azrael for the tickets. Something was pulling her past thirty-foot columns deeper and deeper into the temple. She spied a room with a metal ladder that went up two stories to another high, open-air room, but kept running. Then she made a hard bank right and ran right into a blue-robed guard.
Seeming amused by the collision, he smiled until he saw Azrael and Isda come around the corner. He held up his hands, clearly not speaking English, but appearing as though he wanted to show the men behind her that there was no attempt to inappropriately touch her. Even though he had an AK-47 draped over his chest, for the guard it appeared to be a matter of good-humored honor.
Celeste dropped to her knees and began touching the floor, ignoring the men as she frantically felt around for a break in the stone seal there. Her fingers caressed the large, carved ankh embedded in a stone disk and surrounded by sunrays and symbols she couldn’t understand with her mind, but could comprehend with her being. This was a source of Light and life.
Almost on the verge of tears when the man began to protest, she slapped the floor with her palm and looked up at him, frustrated by the language barrier.
“There’s steps!”
The guard shook his head and struggled to find words. “Not for tourists. Dangerous. Is close now.”
Celeste scrambled to her feet, and before Azrael could stop her, she thrust her hand in his pocket and pulled out everything in it and shoved it toward the guard. The guard clutched at the falling dollars laughing and looked at Azrael, clearly expecting him to either slap her or protest. But when Azrael shrugged, the man extended his hand.
“Nubian brother!”
“Yeah, yeah, Nubian brother,” Isda muttered, picking up $100 bills and handing them off to the ecstatic guard.
The guard looked around, then went up into his sleeve to produce a long brass key shaped like an ankh. He placed his automatic weapon down carefully on the floor and put his finger to his lips. Celeste stooped down beside him and nodded, understanding that, bribe or not, he could get in trouble or possibly lose his job.
Flipping back a small, oval-shaped stone, the guard revealed a lock, inserted the key, and gave it a hard turn.
Then with a grunt he lifted up what looked like the reverse of attic stairs.
Pleased with himself, he smiled a tobacco-colored grin, waved before the steps like a game-show host, then added, looking in Azrael’s direction, “Dangerous.”
“Cool. Cool,” Isda said, talking with his hands.
Unable to wait, Celeste headed down into the darkness on the rickety, sloping steps that were barely Azrael’s shoulder width wide. When she got to the bottom, she made the sign of the cross over her chest, sat on the cool stone, and slid beneath the lip of a huge granite block. Thankfully, the guard had flipped on the modern emergency lights that had been added for the convenience of archaeological work.
Regardless, her prayer had been simple:
Please, God, let there be no snakes, scorpions, or anything else really creepy or deadly
. Nothing was between her and the frightening but blind faith as she entered the chamber feetfirst and then drew a breath. Twelve chambers were carved into the stone, connected by a long stone hallway that featured divinely inspired markings of priestly processions bearing offerings of fruit and incense, with celestial patterns covering every conceivable inch of the ceilings, floors, and walls.