Authors: Carol Thurston
“Surely the meaning lies in the eye of the beholder,” I replied. It is known that certain priests and oracles use hallucinatory plants to induce visions in order to forecast or interpret certain events, but to suggest that the Sacred Council is guided not by Amen but the smoke of self-indulgence and greed is a sin of the highest order. Some would even call it treason.
Ramose laughed, but not because he was amused. “This is only the latest, not the first. Another time it was the baboon who so fears the lambs that he must slit their defenseless throats, leaving the ground beneath
him
barren and brown while the earth under the lambs is made fertile by their blood and so sprouts green. She is not satisfied with skewering the rich and royal. Now she ridicules Amen’s Sacred Council as well.”
“Your daughter has always been one to stand up for the runt of the litter,” I pointed out. “Surely it comes as no surprise that she feels as she does about the shedding of blood under Pharaoh’s Edict of Reform.”
He sighed as if the wind had died from his sail, leaving him suddenly becalmed. “It appears that she believes Amen himself gives life to the Rebel’s flock by trying to eradicate them. Did I mistake her meaning?” I shook my head and he stared at me for a moment. “Even I will not be able to keep her safe if she continues,” he admitted finally.
I could not say that in the very act of begetting her he had put her in danger. “Aset will never be safe so long as any man believes she is his path to the throne,” I pointed out instead, “but she follows the teachings of Thoth and Isis, as you intended. Surely you take pride in her strong sense of
maat.”
“Never speak to me again with an oily tongue!” he thundered. “Whatever she has become, you and I must share the blame as well as the credit!”
“But you are the one who chose me,” I replied, “just as you are the solid rock on which she built her house, the light that holds the darkness at bay for her. No wonder she holds you so high … too high, perhaps, for even the High Priest of Amen to rise to her expectations. If you drop one of the balls now and then—” I shrugged, for I had no doubt that Ramose was the juggler at the end of her picture-story.
The bargain he had struck with Horemheb to erase the Aten heresy from the memory of the People of the Sun and at the same time constrain his lady’s boundless ambition has always been a double-edged sword. That is because, instead of falling into disarray after Akhenaten went into exile, the Heretic’s followers kept faith with their god by erecting shrines and approaching Aten themselves. In this way did they discover they had no need for a priest to intercede on their behalf. And should such a practice spread, the power of the Amen priests would be threatened as never before, even under the Heretic. Now Aset threw the risk Ramose took for her back in his face by portraying his god for what Horemheb made him—as cruel and evil as any mortal who ever lived.
But he said nothing of this to me. Instead he asked, “And her mother? What does Aset expect of her?”
“Since the night her sister went to Osiris, it is as if her lady mother does not exist.” I held up the scroll. “But she is here, too.” I pointed to the tabby with yellow eyes and bared teeth, who lurked behind the lotus column.
“Bastet. Of course.” He sighed. “Can you not find another way to fill her time?”
“She does not sit idle now, but looks after Tamin’s children when she is not helping Khary with our medicines.”
“My daughter is a servingwoman to children?”
“In this as in all else she follows the dictates of her
ka.”
‘To my utter despair and heart’s delight,” Ramose admitted, glancing to where Pagosh stood in the shadows at the edge of the room. “Word has come that Horemheb makes his way to Waset as we speak, so guard her well, even against
herself. Both of you.” With that he turned and strode to his writing table, picked up the ring he had taken from his finger, and slipped it over the end of a tightly rolled papyrus. “Tell her I—no, just take care this does not fall into any hand but hers.”
As we came away from the temple I glanced up at the twin pylons, soaring high into the starry heavens, banners waving in the evening breeze, and could hardly believe my good fortune—unless I had misread Ramose’s intentions. As usual, Pagosh brought me back to earth.
“High Priest or not, he dances to her tune.”
Apprehension quickened my breath. “Nefertiti?” I asked.
“Do not act the fool,” he muttered.
I decided to hold my tongue, not wanting to spoil what I have with anticipation of what may yet come to pass.
But I understand now why some men cling to this world with such tenacity rather than embrace the heavenly one that lies just over the western horizon, where the pure in heart go to join Osiris. Which I am not and never will be. For I not only love but lust after the half-royal daughter of the High Priest of Amen, a god I neither believe in nor respect, and feel no regret whatever for one transgression or the other.
It was Thursday. The week was running out and so was her time for deciding what she was going to do next. But tonight Max was taking her to dinner at some Greek place, and Kate was determined to make the most of it. So she’d brushed her hair into place while it was damp, sweeping it back from her face on one side to reveal a single earring with a hundred tiny slivers of silver. It was the earring, in fact, a souvenir from Cleo’s last trip to Istanbul, that had demanded the little black dress.
Almost painfully plain, the soft wool jersey hugged her throat in front, draping her breasts and throat in fluid shadows before plunging to a deep V in back. “Ready?” She offered her coat to Max and waited for him to take it before turning around.
“Jesus!” he whispered to himself. Kate turned to look at him and inadvertently brushed her lips across his cheek. Max backed away while she slipped into the sleeves, then gave her shoulders a quick squeeze. Not exactly what she had in mind.
When they arrived at the restaurant, several male diners were lined up on the small dance floor, arms on each other’s shoulders, while three musicians plucked out the theme from
Zorba.
Max requested a table away from the music, where they sat scanning the menu in silence while the waiter went to get the bottle of wine Max ordered. When he
returned, Max waved him away and filled their glasses himself, then waited for her to taste it.
“It’s different,” she acknowledged. “I like it.”
Satisfied, he lifted his own glass. “I’m going to tell you something, McKinnon. And if you laugh, I’m taking a hike. Remember me telling you I’d been thinking about switching to academic medicine so I could spend more time on research?” She nodded. “Felt like I needed some fresh air, but I couldn’t seem to get myself off the fence, about that or anything else. I finally decided I had to do
something,
even if it was less drastic, so I grew a beard. Then I walked into that museum, ran into you and Tashat, and suddenly there wasn’t a fence anywhere in sight.”
Kate smiled, but she could tell by the look on his face that he wasn’t finished. “A few days after I got back from Denver that first time, I got a call from a guy I knew back in high school who’s now a patrolman with the Houston Police Department. It was pretty late and EMS had taken his father to Ben Taub.” Max paused, apparently in a storytelling mood. “Hank and I still have a beer together every now and then, and he knows I’m fond of his father, partly because his old man didn’t act like most parents. I never will forget the night the three of us sat on their back steps eating watermelon, having a seed-spitting contest—his idea, not ours.” He smiled at the memory and drank some more wine. “Anyway, some idiot wanted to give him heparin without knowing what was going on inside his head. Hank’s no dummy. He knew an anticoagulant could be a disaster if his father was hemorrhaging. I went down there, did an MRI, and located the clot. Afterward I hung around for a while, just to keep Hank company. It was coming up on five the next morning by the time I got home. I went into the bathroom to shower and made the mistake of looking in the mirror. Want to know what I saw?” Bemused, Kate shook her head. “Twenty-five years between you and me! That’s when I shaved the damned beard off, right then and there.”
The punch line was so unexpected she couldn’t help laughing. “Are you hung up about my age?”
He gave her a look she hadn’t seen before. “Let me put it this way. I think that
sunu
walking the path to eternity with Tashat had to have a damn powerful reason to risk his life for her. Ask yourself what that could have been. Gold? Land?” He shook his head. “Uh-uh. The odds were stacked too high against his being able to save her, and I’ll bet he knew it. That means he had a far more compelling reason for trying to keep her alive. More irrational. Yet Tashat was somewhere between twenty-two and twenty-five, to his forty to forty-eight. At a minimum that’s eighteen years between them, twenty-six at most.” By that time his eyes were bright with suppressed laughter. “I’m not looking to lose my head, but I figure I ought to be able to handle twelve.”
Kate stared at him, her heart clogging her throat, hardly able to trust what she thought he was saying, not wanting to make a fool of herself. Without thinking, she lifted her glass to sip some wine, half hiding her face behind the rim of the glass. The moment passed when the waiter arrived carrying a tray filled with small bowls of hummus, cucumbers in yogurt, dolmathes, and a couple of other dishes she couldn’t identify.
Max had ordered the tasting dinner, so that’s what they did for a while, forcing whatever was going on between them to wait. Somehow they made it through the entree, talking about the food and the ancient Greeks.
“So what else did the Greeks get from the Egyptians, besides fluted columns?” Max asked as the waiter took their plates.
“Those four golden goddesses guarding Tut’s viscera look so sad and vulnerable—the way their heads are turned, their outstretched arms and softly draped bodies, like the Elgin Marbles. That kind of genius didn’t come from following a set of rigid conventions no matter what historians say about Egyptian art being so stylized that it all looks alike, the product of a totalitarian system rather than a democracy like
Greece.” The smile in his eyes reminded her of something. “Maybe it was the newspaper I picked up in New Mexico that made me think of it, or going over my photographs of those scenes on Tashat’s cartonnage, but—do you read the comics on Sunday?”
“Sometimes.”
“Each cell has a frame around it, yet we read them as one continuous story, right?” He nodded. “Well, I decided to ignore the gold bands and read the hieroglyphs as text, not just isolated pictographs. This is what I came up with.” She dug for the piece of paper in her purse, unfolded it, and handed it to him.
Kate watched his eyes and knew when he finished reading what she had written. Then he went back to the beginning and read it aloud.” ‘
Enter me and I shall make you a god! Enchantress and wife, she dances and draws down heaven. Under her spell I come to myself Under her body I come to life. I take her in my arms. I taste her lips. I lose myself in beauty and chaos. To love is to believe in goddesses.’ “
He glanced up. “It’s a love poem.”
“Yes, but the operative word is
‘wife.’
That means it was written by her husband, or by someone’s husband, which someone had copied onto her cartonnage.”
“Then why—?”
“I don’t know.”
Max looked around, searching for their waiter. “Do you want dessert?” Kate shook her head. “How about some coffee?” She shook her head again. “Then let’s get the hell out of here.” He pushed back from the table. “I’ll settle with the waiter on the way out.”
She slipped her coat on without any help from Max, who seemed suddenly impatient. Watching him pay the bill, she wondered if he could be feeling what she did—an attraction so strong it was difficult even to think about anything else. It wasn’t just physical, either. What she felt was more complicated—the physical attraction intertwined with intellectual stimulation in a way that made them inseparable. The way
his mind worked turned her on as much as the touch of his hand, and for the first time in her life she realized that, at least for her, one could not exist without the other.
As they walked across the parking lot he took her elbow, then let his hand slide down into the pocket of her coat to clasp hers. But once in the car they drove several blocks in silence, Kate wondering if he had any idea how she felt about him. And then what he was thinking. Max certainly wasn’t the careless type. He would need to know more about her, personally, before—maybe he just didn’t know how to ask.
“I don’t sleep around, Max, in case you were wondering. I’ve been with one man and that was a long time ago. Six years”—she tried to put a humorous twist on it—“back when I was young and foolish.”
He glanced at her, then back to the car ahead of them. “I never thought you did. Sleep around, I mean.”
Kate waited, hoping he would say more, but instead of encouraging him to be equally forthcoming, her confession seemed to have the opposite effect.
Back at his house, Max held the door for her, then muttered something about having some work to do before he could hit the sack. When he beat a hasty retreat to his study, Sam looked as crestfallen as Kate felt, obviously torn between following him or going upstairs with her.
In the yellow bedroom Sam jumped on the bed, slumped against the pillows, and gave her a doleful look. “I know how you feel,” Kate told him as she kicked off her shoes, peeled off her dress, and tossed it over a chair. “Maybe
he
can handle the twelve years between us,” she muttered under her breath, “but I’m not so sure I can.”
What was it with him, anyway? Maybe it was a case of smothering the fire with too much fuel—too much togetherness. She stomped into the bathroom, echoes of Cleo’s warning reverberating in her head. Had Max been pulling her string all along, only she’d been too thick to see it? She
scrubbed her face, brushed her teeth, and put on her pajamas. When she came out of the bathroom, Sam watched her with sleepy, bloodshot eyes, until she jerked the pillow out from under him and pointed to the foot of the bed. “There or down on the floor.”
He chose the bed, so she stacked the two pillows and picked up
The Cerebral Symphony
, a book she’d lifted from the shelves in Max’s study. The jacket blurb called it “a lyrical documentation of the inner voice that gives form to our thoughts, passes judgment, and makes choices—the narrator of our mental life who convinces us that we exist as individuals.” Just the ticket to cool the blood and induce sleep.
Except it didn’t work worth a damn. She kept seeing the smile in his eyes, feeling his hand on hers, then on the back of her neck. Had she imagined the special sense of intimacy she felt when they were bouncing ideas off each other, in recognizing that their minds were different yet matched in some fundamental way? Something she had never felt with anyone else.
How did we end up at such an impasse?
She threw back the covers, unable to lie there any longer. When she went to the little table by the window to draw, Sam jumped off the bed and ran to the door, waited a minute, then scratched to let her know he wanted out.
“Dammit to hell and back, Sam!” she exploded, strode to the door and jerked it wide open. The dog trotted down the hall to Max’s bedroom. ‘Traitor!” she hissed after him in a half whisper.
The stairwell was dark but she could see that Max’s bedroom light was still on because he’d left the door open a crack for Sam, who liked to check on him in the night. Before she could get cold feet, Kate marched down the hall, tapped on the door with her knuckles, then barged right in.
Max glanced up over his half glasses, snapped his book shut, and slid it under the covers, guilty as a teenager caught with a porno magazine.
“What’s wrong?” He started to get up.
“Nothing. I just wanted to tell you, uh, that I’ll be leaving tomorrow, after my meeting with Tinsley. It’s time I got back … to Denver.”
He froze with one leg dangling over the side of the bed. “Why? What’s your hurry?”
“I’ve already stayed much longer than I intended.” Too long, she thought, taking in the white T-shirt and boxer shorts. Somehow it didn’t surprise her that Max wasn’t a pajama man.
“That was when you still had a job to go to.”
“I know.” She glanced around the room to avoid meeting his eyes. “But I have bills to pay, need to pick up my mail, stuff like that.”
“Your rent must be paid through the end of the month, and you can always call Cleo, have her forward your mail.”
Kate took a step back and came down on a soft paw. Sam let out a wounded yip, then circled her with his tail tucked but wagging, to let her know he forgave her.
“What are you running from this time?”
That hurt, more than she wanted him to know. “I wish you wouldn’t treat me like a truant child.”
“Then stop acting like one. At least tell me what rubbed your fur the wrong way.”
“You’re driving Sam crazy, that’s what!” Her voice sent the dog scurrying for the folded quilt Max kept on the floor for him. “How can you be so great at figuring out what’s wrong with people’s brains and not see that having to run back and forth between my room and yours all night is making him schizo.”
Hot tears stung her eyes, putting a brake on her runaway tongue. “I appreciate all you’ve done, really. Letting me stay here. Tom McCowan. Putting me in touch with Tinsley, showing me around Houston. I even kind of liked it at first … that you weren’t coming on to me. I know you said—” A tic at the corner of his mouth hinted at a smile, making her see hot, raging red.
“I guess maybe I
am
too young for you,” she exploded, “because I resent the hell out of you playing games with me. Eager to talk one minute, stony silent the next. And you think Dave is a control freak! Not that it isn’t my own fault for getting into a position where I’m beholden to you, so you can call all the shots.”
He started to say something, but she raised her hand. “Don’t bother. I’m not letting you pull my chain any longer.” She wheeled around, needing out of there.
“Come back here, dammit!” he yelled, freezing Kate in her tracks. She’d never heard him raise his voice before, even when he cursed Dave that day after they left the museum.
When she turned around, he was pulling out the top drawer of the night table next to his bed with one hand and motioning her to him with the other. Curious, she moved toward the table and saw that the shallow drawer was full of what looked like different-colored candies, all individually wrapped.
“I fantasize about making love to you a dozen times a day,” Max confessed. That’s when she realized they were condoms, some packaged in shiny foil, others in colored plastic. “I even wake up in the night reaching for you, only to discover—well, just say I’ve developed an irrational fear of being caught without. Lately, every time I get near a drugstore I have this overpowering urge to go in and buy a few more, just to be sure I’m prepared. If ever.”