CHAPTER XV:.

WIDENING CONSPIRACY.

The transfer of a long and bulky bundle from an export truck to the third oor at 233 Ahmed Sabri Street attracted no particular attention, and when it was done, the four of them came into the living room with glasses of cool water. Valerie threw herself down on the sofa and covered her eyes with her forearm for a moment, as if to avoid dealing with the impossible for a few minutes longer.

Derek stood in the middle of the room and glanced around. "Oh, I love your decor!" He noted the several bedrooms and the carpeted side room that opened to a balcony. "Sort of Ottoman, but eclectic."

Auset did not reply.

Derek coughed. "Okay, I'll get to the point. Would you be able to put us up for a while? At least until we can...you know... gure things out?"

She sat down heavily across from him. "And what might you be trying to gure out? How to get away with this? I can overlook the fact that you've tracked camel dung over my oor and put a cadaver in my guest room, but stealing a mummy is a felony."

Derek opened both hands, presenting his case once again. "Auset, darling, I've told you. He's not just a mummy. He's the ancestor of our baby!"

"Our baby?" She rolled her eyes. "Oh, please." She leaned back and crossed her legs, a movement that required some concentration.

"Be reasonable for a moment, Derek. Surely you realize the danger you're putting us in. We could all go to prison. I don't understand why you had to take this mummy out of its tomb. And those other...things.

Where are they, by the way?"

* 101 *

"They stay with the mummy," Valerie contributed weakly. "And those 'other things,' the things you can't account for, are the reason for this whole situation."

Valerie dabbed with her cuff at her sore ear. "Auset, you're doing exactly what I did when I rst saw them, refusing to accept the Ka and the Ba as real, reasoning around them like a hallucination which you hope will go away." She rested her forehead in her hand for a moment.

"I didn't want to accept them either, but if they are real, we have to protect them. Volker Vanderschmitt, whom you've met, would destroy them."

"They can't be real." Auset struggled to her feet again and lumbered into the kitchen. For several moments, they heard only the sound of running water. Then she came back with a damp washcloth carefully folded.

Valerie took it gratefully and held the cool cloth to her cheek.

After a moment, she sighed. "So here we are, with a mummy and two supernatural creatures that are challenging our credulity to the utmost,"

she said. "How much longer do you think we can pretend they're an illusion?"

Auset sighed. "All right, assuming they are real, what exactly do you propose to do about them?"

"Well, to start, we can try to stay out of jail and salvage my career." Valerie drew the lm canisters from her shirt pocket. "We can take these pictures to Antiquities and at least claim that the sarcophagus was empty. Pillaged in antiquity and so forth. No one will be looking for a mummy. That would give us a little breathing space to hide him in some other place."

"I have good friend," a thickly accented voice said.

All heads turned toward Yussif. Valerie had almost forgotten him, the sullen stranger in their midst whose closed and bearded face she could not read. The Arab continued unemotionally. "This man is photographer. I can take lm to him right away and tell him is emergency.

He can make pictures very fast-for tomorrow." He stood up.

Valerie was reminded again of how big he was. Enormous, an unknown factor, a potential-and serious-problem. Nothing in his eyes or in his manner told her otherwise. "Yes, I suppose that would be...good." Reluctantly, she handed over the canisters of lm.

* 102 *

"Yes, it would be good," he said impatiently, dropping them into his trouser pocket. As he went to the door, his eyes darted one more time around the room, lingering for a moment on Auset, and then he left.

Valerie closed the door behind him and turned back to the others.

"Auset, I'm sorry. I have to ask you this. Can Yussif be trusted? How well do you know him?"

The Egyptian struggled again to her feet. "I know him better than I know you. He's worked for my father's rm for years. In fact, Yussif is the only one here I do trust. What's your problem with him?" she said over her shoulder as she made her second trip into the kitchen. "Is it because he's a Muslim?"

Valerie looked at the washcloth in her hand. "To be honest, yes.

This cut on my face is from Muslim fundamentalists. You know they don't like archaeologists. We glorify the old heathen culture, and we're decadent Westerners. So, on top of all my other problems, I don't want to quarrel with Islam."

"Yussif is not a fundamentalist." Auset came back with a fresh bottle of water. "And he isn't a child, either. He will make up his own mind about Rekemheb. So, for that matter, will I. I think you're exaggerating the religious issue here." She lled Derek's empty glass.

"Not if the Ka is real," Valerie countered.

Derek glowered. "The Ka is real."

"So why isn't he here explaining himself? This would be a good time for that." Auset turned around, looking up at the corners of the ceiling. "Can you conjure him up whenever you want?"

Derek followed her glance. "You act like he's some sort of party trick or an annoyance. He's from the hereafter, for God's sake. Why isn't anyone getting that?"

"Whatever." Auset sat down nally. "I don't want to argue any longer. You two have been up all night, and frankly you look like hell.

Get some rest and we'll talk about everything later. Derek, you'll have to share the room with the mummy, but I take it that's ne with you."

She turned. "Valerie, you can camp out in the little room by the terrace.

You don't mind sleeping with just a pillow on a carpet, do you? Good.

And for now, let's clean that cut with some disinfectant. At least there's one problem I can x."

v * 103 *

Awakening suddenly, Valerie read her wristwatch by moonlight.

One in the morning. Is that all? She lay fuzzy headed for a while on her mat by the open terrace door, feeling the evening breeze waft over her.

Sleep would not return, so she clicked on the lamp at her elbow.

There they were, next to each other on top of her knapsack, the two artifacts that taunted her. She lifted up the palette box and ran her nger over its golden cap. A priceless object, but why had she been given it? Who was the woman who had almost-kissed her?

The amulet was just as puzzling. She picked it up and turned it restlessly in the light, reading the hieroglyphs for the tenth time. Drill, vulture, owl, child and man, and the triple stroke: the word "generation."

Then whip, loaf, and curl: "100th." The inscription stirred nothing in her memory of spells and incantations. And the text at the bottom was beyond her altogether. Rekhi renusen. Djedi medjatsen. She could pronounce it from the phonetic hieroglyphs but knew no such words, not even in Old Kingdom Egyptian. A pity the philologists would never see the amulet before it went back to its owner.

And what was Rekemheb, the phantom that kept appearing, against all law and logic? Derek had been able to accept him immediately, but then the singer had always had one foot in the fantastic. He would have adapted to a leprechaun or saint, Martian or ghost. But she was not an opera singer; she was a scientist, she reminded herself yet again, and could not adapt, in spite of the arguments she kept making to Auset.

A pettier emotion that had been nibbling at the edge of her consciousness since they had ed the excavation suddenly surfaced.

Resentment. She realized she was annoyed, even jealous, that Rekemheb showed no interest in her. After nearly a year of labor, her spectacular discovery had suddenly become Derek's affair. Her life's work was at risk for some inexplicable event that belonged to him and not to her.

She loved him like a brother, but she did not care to be a mere actor in someone else's fate.

The ivory palette, at least, was hers, though its relevance was obscure. "It is for you alone," the woman had said, then almost-kissed her. Where had she gone, the woman who had promised to "follow"? She could almost smell the fragrant hair again, almost feel the provocative pressure of the stranger's body leaning lightly against her.

She lay back, tucking her right forearm under her head, and stared up at the ceiling. It was time to visit Jameela again.

* 104 *

CHAPTER XVI:.

FOOD FOR THE SPIRIT.

The rst call to prayer awoke her, as always, and Valerie began the day gratefully with a hot shower. The vigorous scrubbing she gave herself and the sunshine that poured into the bathroom while she toweled herself dry lifted the depression of the night before. The moist, bright air of the bathroom seemed to promise they would nd a solution.

When she emerged dressed in nearly clean clothes and squeezing handfuls of her hair in the towel, Derek was slouching by the bathroom door in his boxers. His still-puffy eyes indicated that he too was not yet inclined to conversation. She kissed him quickly on both cheeks, Belgian style, and stepped past him into the kitchen.

Auset was already preparing breakfast. She moved about ef ciently in sandals and a blue galabaya, her hair hanging loose down her back. A modern Mary Magdalen, grinding coffee beans.

"I'm sorry if I woke you," Valerie said. "I should have been quieter."

"Oh, no. I always get up early. Hunger, you know. I was about to make breakfast for all of us. You can set the table."

Valerie folded the towel over the back of a chair and opened the glass door to the cupboard. "Hmm. I wonder if we should set a place for the Ka. They eat, you know, according to the mythology."

Auset paused in her work and shook her head. "The Ka? Oh, right.

The ghost. I was hoping I'd just been dreaming. But I guess not. Do you suppose he will uh...materialize this morning?"

"Well, I'm a little new at this myself but, supposedly, if you're offering food, he'll appear."

* 105 *

Auset resumed preparations, laying out disks of pita bread. "Well, maybe you could ask him how he likes his eggs."

Valerie chuckled. "That and a few thousand other things."

The door to the bathroom opened and Derek stepped out in a pleasant cloud of steam. Around his hips he had tied a white bath sheet that hung to his ankles. Valerie grinned at the sight of her friend who, but for the absence of a priestly side lock, was suddenly the image of Rekemheb. He came into the kitchen and kissed both women, smelling of soap and toothpaste. "I have to talk to you guys. Something strange happened last night."

"Strange? You don't say!" Auset broke eggs into a bowl.

"No, I mean even stranger than everything else. I was in bed, ready to fall asleep, and Rekemheb came to lie down next to me. I thought, 'Well, that's nice.' But then he touched me with his whole body, and something amazing happened. It was the most powerful, wonderful thing I've ever felt. It was ecstasy, and I had a sort of vision.

"I was a minister, like my stepfather, but instead of a white collar, I wore a linen kilt like Rekemheb's. I was holding his necklace. You know, the one we found on the mummy. All around me there were angels, but they were animals, not people, and they were in a panic because this great ball of re was coming toward us.

"It shot out a bolt of lightning toward me, so I started singing, I can't remember what. The lightning struck the necklace and everything turned into sparks. They were even coming out of my mouth. I was confused, though. It seemed like I was in heaven, but I couldn't tell what side God was on."

Auset leaned over and watched the ame ignite under a pan. "Isn't a nice Christian boy supposed to know that?"

Derek wrinkled up his face. "There was, well, too much God. I mean, everything was claiming to be God, and I had to save one side from the other."

"Hmm. Sounds to me like a certain opera singer is having delusions of grandeur. All those heroic roles are going to your head," Auset said.

Valerie took silverware from a drawer. "Singing re, heh?

Oookay."

Derek pursed his lips. "I can see I'm not being taken seriously here." Grasping the front of his towel-kilt, he pivoted and returned in * 106 *

long strides to the guest room.

When the two women were alone again in the kitchen, Auset set down the kettle. "Okay, Valerie. Woman to woman. What's going on here? I promise not to be angry if you tell me it was some kind of trick so I would help you steal a mummy."

"I wish it were. It would be so much easier if it were all a hoax. I wouldn't have to accept that an ancient religion seems to be real. That opens up such a chasm."

Auset clasped her hands in front of her. "Valerie, whatever it is, I am not getting pulled into any religious cult, least of all a primitive one."

"I can assure you I feel the same way. I was tormented by child-hating nuns far too long to ever want religion in my life again." She shook her head. "It's a prison."

"Exactly. I've got religion all around me, and I'm sick of it. My Muslim father and my Jewish mother both come from conservative families, believe it or not. Fortunately, both of them broke away from orthodoxy enough to fall in love with each other. But I probably have relatives on both sides who would gladly stone me to death for getting pregnant by an in del." She scrambled eggs with vehemence.

"Derek's parents too, I suppose. They're born-again Christians."

"Dogma and politics have become the same thing here. My mother's relatives in Jerusalem are always going on about God's gift of Palestine-all of it-to the Jews. And my father's relatives are equally convinced that the only truth is the Koran. And the killing gets worse and worse. In Egypt, too. I don't know where it will all end."

"Hey, girls. Guess who's coming to dinner." Derek stood in the doorway in clean shirt and tailored pants. A slenderer, bare-chested version stood translucent behind him.

Auset sighed and nudged Valerie with her elbow. "That phantom that we don't believe in? Ask it if it wants breakfast."

Valerie spoke to the apparition. "Rekemheb, will you join us at table?"

The Ka inclined his head decorously. "We have waited long to sit at table in our kinsman's house."

Valerie translated to the others as the two men took their places.

The Ba uttered in behind them, lighting on the back of Rekemheb's * 107 *