Auset shrugged. "If Hathor can make having a baby any easier, then I want to hear about her."

"This little Christian boy does too, as long as I can stay awake."

Derek turned his head toward the spectre. "For starters, I'd like to know how you worshipped Hathor. I mean, did you pray, like we do?"

The Ka lifted his hands, as if to present a sermon. "In the daily service, I sang the hymn during the food offerings. In the great New Year festivals, when she was carried in procession, I went before her singing the anthems."

Derek took off his shoes and set them upside down on the sand.

"Sounds just like the processions I've seen in Italy when they carry the statue of the Madonna through the streets."

"You sing to the Mother Goddess too." Rekemheb beamed.

Derek puzzled for a moment. "Mother? No, not really. In my...uh temple, we sing mostly about Christ."

Valerie explained to the priest, "Jesus Christ is the Son of God who is murdered and then resurrected. The Christian Osiris."

"Really?" Derek massaged his feet. "I never realized I was singing to Osiris, but I guess it's all the same thing. He's still our Savior."

The Ka looked perplexed. "Save your? From what enemy are you saved?"

"No, not from an enemy." Derek frowned. "More like from our own sin."

Valerie searched for a translation. "You can't say 'sin' in Egyptian.

It's a Judeo-Christian concept."

"Really? The gods didn't tell men how not to be evil? Then what do they do?"

The Ka continued. "Osiris gives life. From his own body he sends the inundation and the divine Horus."

"Guiltless procreation." Auset had nally found a suitable position and curled up on her side. Closing her eyes, she gave her nal opinion.

"I think I like Rekemheb's Son of God more than I like yours, Derek."

* 178 *

He stretched out on his blanket, crooking his arm back to support his head. "No original sin. No forgiveness. Mmm. Gonna have to think about that." His voice was already blurring with drowsiness. "So much to gure out. So much...changing..." As he fell asleep, his closed hand slid from his chest to the ground and the ngers curled gently outward.

The Ka moved over to sit next to him, laying his insubstantial hand in the solid palm of his kinsman.

"Yes, so much," Valerie repeated, leaning toward the ashes of the re that no longer gave light but still a bit of warmth. While the others fell asleep, she looked out in the direction the hawk had own, studying the panorama of plain and black hills under the star-peppered sky. On the one side, where the Bedouin re still ickered, the land around it muted to obscurity. But on the other, where no spark broke the sleeping landscape, the plain of sand captured starlight and gave it back in gentle luminescence. Something caught her eye.

Clearly delineated, like a bird, with black wings spread over the sand, one tent stood apart from all the others. As she watched, a single gure emerged from it. Valerie stared awhile, bemused, and then realized what she saw.

"Someone waits for you, Valerie," the Ka said softly.

She looked at him, confused. He had never spoken her name before.

"She waits," he repeated. "Go on."

She stood up, her heart pounding. Pebbles rolled in front of her as she descended the slope, stepping gingerly over blurry obstacles. At the bottom she stopped, suddenly in doubt. Then she started forward again, step by step, until she stood at last before the sinister shape.

"Nekhbet."

* 179 *

* 180 *

CHAPTER XXV:.

THE KISS.

The dark form lifted the tent ap and motioned her inside.

Crouching, Valerie took a step into the interior and sat down, drawing up her knees.

The other woman came in with a tinkling of coins and earrings and sat down across from her on the carpet. A brass lamp hung on a chain from a tent pole near her shoulder but gave scant light, its wick too deep in oil.

Suddenly reticent, Valerie looked around. Some ve meters square, the room was simplicity itself. Six tent poles, the tallest in the center, supported woven goat-hair roof and walls. The only furnishings were a camel saddle that functioned as a backrest and a brass-studded wooden chest. A tasseled woven bag hanging from the center pole held household articles. A smaller one on the oor held grain.

To the side, embers still smoldered in a shallow pit. The woman added charcoal with brass tongs, pressed a tiny bellows several times, and set a battered kettle on the glowing coals.

"It is very peaceful here," Valerie said. "I sometimes think I could live as the Badawi do, uncorrupted."

"Nature is broken here too, and full of sorrow, but it can be made whole again." Nekhbet shook something dark and gritty into a spouted copper pot. The scent of ground coffee and cardamom lled the tent.

"That is why you came, isn't it?"

Valerie watched the other woman's hands, dark ngers with milky white nails. "To save the environment? That needs to be done, of course.

But no, I'm afraid I was more sel sh. I came simply to uncover a bit of Egyptian history, to add a piece to the puzzle. What I found was not a piece, though. It was, in a way, the whole thing." She stared into the * 181 *

gray-brown circle under the veil, trying in the dim light to make out the woman's features. "Some great drama is happening and the piece, as it turns out, is me."

Nekhbet set out a tray with glasses and a dish of rock sugar. She poured heated water into the serving pot and closed the domed lid.

Fragrant steam curled up from the long, curved spout. "The drama is the old one. The battles are the same ones your ancestors fought." Her glance fell on the new scar on Valerie's cheek. "They have left their marks on you." She poured the steaming liquid into the glasses and handed one to her guest, along with the rock sugar.

Valerie took a piece of it in her mouth and sipped the hot coffee over it. The caffeine and the sugar together brought a sudden euphoria.

"My ancestors? No, that's another part of the problem." She sipped her coffee again. She felt foolish, reciting her doubts to a stranger in a tent, as if in a confessional. "The ancestors that have shown up are not mine, but those of my friend." Valerie sighed. "I am wandering in the desert, acting out some sort of prophecy that doesn't even concern me. I have sacri ced a career for someone else's drama."

The Bedouin seemed to measure her words. "It may be that there is still much that you do not know about this drama. Perhaps when you have seen more."

"I have already been seeing more than I can handle. I came to Egypt as a scientist, but what I have seen so far contradicts that science and, worse, has made criminal my entire life's work." She shrugged weakly. "I don't know what to do."

The Bedouin held up her glass on the tips of slender ngers, the pale nails stark against the black coffee. "What did you do before?"

"Before?" Valerie drank slowly, re ecting. "Excavated, studied, wrote. My whole life was writing about Egypt."

The woman drew her knees up and leaned her arms on them. Her bare feet came out from under her abaya. "Those who write are as gods, for they name the things and make them live."

"Is that what we do?" Valerie glanced down at the well-formed brown feet, at the dusty soles and the rings of silver around both ankles.

"Well, I can't write anything at all until this ordeal is over." She set her glass down on the tray and turned it nervously with her ngers.

"It will never be over," Nekhbet said softly.

Valerie looked up again. The Bedouin woman had drawn back her head scarf. Silken black hair that had been hidden hung in a curve over * 182 *

her shoulder. It had a faint sheen from the light of the oil lamp and, astonishingly, the fragrance of cedar.

Cedar. That was it. Impulsively, Valerie reached up to the oil lamp and turned the tiny wheel on its side, lengthening the wick. Suddenly the ame ared up, illuminating the unveiled face.

Valerie heard her own inhalation. The same solemnity, the same dark eyes, deep as history, that had mesmerized her in the souq and in the necropolis looked into her now. The same soft channel descended from between the nostrils to the bow of the lips. There was the same suggestive upward curving at the corners of the mouth. The mouth that had kissed her.

A silver earring poked through strands of hair. A bird of prey of some sort, with wings that hung down like arms. The ornament swayed tantalizingly, catching the light for a moment and glowing dully. Valerie watched it, hypnotized. Both seemed to hold her, the woman and the bird, hinting at protection and grati cation. "It's you, isn't it?" she said.

"You have followed me after all."

Nekhbet blinked slowly in the faintest hint of con rmation.

Valerie felt her hand lift from the carpet. With a separate will her ngers reached out, crossing a vast distance before they touched, at the very limit of sensation, the tiny earring. With half-closed eyes and pounding heart she saw her hand move down slowly along the forbidden hair and come to rest, lightly, on the shoulder.

In the appalling silence, the wick sputtered once in its oil, and Valerie leaned forward toward the slightly opened lips.

"Do not..."

Valerie's hand sprang back, as if from a ame, hung for an awkward moment in the air, and then dropped onto the coffee tray. Her empty glass fell sideways and clattered across the metal tray to the edge.

"Do not falter, as your mother did," the Bedouin continued, unperturbed, and rose up on her knees.

"My mother? What are you-"

Then warm lips were on her mouth. Astonished, Valerie opened her eyes. The woman was slightly above her, for she knelt while Valerie still sat, paralyzed. One slender, strong hand held her behind her head; the other lay along her fevered cheek, soothing it. She tasted bitter coffee, cardamom, felt the hint of moist esh behind the dry lips.

Breathless and aroused, she clutched at black cloth to pull the other woman closer.

* 183 *

It began as all other amorous kisses she had known, touching and withdrawing, teasing between breaths with tongue and teeth, each light touch increasing desire. Craving contact through so much cloth, Valerie slid her hand upward along the folds of the abaya, searching for form and esh.

Then the Bedouin grasped her by the shoulders and urged her down onto the rug beneath her.

Surprised, Valerie gave way and felt the woman's form spread over her and the black-draped leg slide between her thighs. Heat rushed through her, beginning in her sex and moving down her legs.

Then something happened in the center of her brain. Ardor gave way to confusion as something alien and vast broke over her like a wave.

She thrashed for a moment, moaned through lips still locked in the predatory kiss, and slipped into unconsciousness.

Her dream mind soared on wide wings, over the Giza Plateau. Below, the pyramids of Khufu, Khefren, and Menkaur stood majestic, their faces gleaming with white limestone fr om the deser t fl oor. At their tops, the tiny golden pyramidions caught the sun and spar kled. Before them the Sphinx crouched, its haunches to ward the great tombs, its Khefr en face, unbroken, br ooding to ward the N ile. A en all began to cr umble. H er hovering spirit watched in wonderment as they w ere violated, despoiled, abandoned, and fi nally swept over by shifting dunes.

Gliding south, she saw the swelling and contracting of the Nile, as if it pulsed, through countless inundations. Millennia of storms blew over the landscape, interspersed with droughts, and through them came an endless ebb and fl ow of migrations and inv asions. Towns sprang up , fl ourished, and disintegrated; w ere in turn P ersian, Greek, Roman, Byzantine, and fi nally Arab. And as each conquest came, she saw it also reached up to the gods.She was over A ebes. At the end of an alley of ram-sphinxes, majestic Karnak rose to meet her. She saw the scores of temples simultaneously in their glory and in their decay , heard phantom priests dr one incantations while invaders, soldiers, and chattering tourists fl ickered among them like locusts, and centuries of sand fl owed in and out. A en time halted and she cringed at what she saw. Amun, Mut, Khonsu, Ptah, Hathor. A r ough the pylons and columns of their precincts and from their graven images on the walls, she heard them shrieking as Coptic zealots chiseled away their faces and smashed their hands and feet. M utilated, blinded, eff aced from the * 184 *

eyes and minds of men, the gods of Egypt fi nally fell silent.

Overhead the ferocious sun disk hovered, and nature withered beneath its desiccating wrath. Standing guard before the light, the silhouette of a man with a camel's head raised its arm and loosed a spear at her. It struck her but did not pier ce, shattering instead to spar ks that swarmed around her head. Her mouth fi lled with their fi re, and she spat them out, crying, "Khetet! Rekhi renusen. Djedi medjatsen. "

She fl ed, wheeling in a cir cle w estward o ver the deser t to ward a high ridge marked by a familiar pattern of shado ws. She lit upon it for a moment, her oath echoing in her mind, and then she plummeted to its foot. A ere, behind a wall of dr y brush, she found herself at the entrance to a cave, and in the depth of the cave, she knew, something waited.

* 185 *

* 186 *

CHAPTER XXVI:.

DREAM MAP.

Oh, nally you're awake. Are you okay?"

Valerie lifted her head from her blanket and stared blankly for a moment toward the source of a familiar sound. She closed her eyes and then opened them again, as if to give them a second chance to make sense. Then she sat up abruptly. "What am I doing back here?"

On the other side of the camp re ashes, Derek shook sand out of his ruined shoes. "Back? I didn't know you went anyplace. But just before dawn I saw you staggering around with your hand over your face. When I asked what was wrong, you mumbled something and curled up on the ground and fell back asleep. I covered you up."

"I was with Nekhbet-the Bedouin woman who gave us water.

I...I fell asleep in her tent."

"Oh?" Derek's eyebrows went up.

"It wasn't like that. I mean...I don't know what I mean," she muttered, rubbing her face. "This is all getting far too weird."

He laughed. "There's something more weird now than what's been happening all along?" He rubbed sand out of his cap of tight curls.

She shook her head. "I mean what just happened to me. I was in the Bedouin tent. That woman kissed me-well, it started as a kiss, a pretty forceful one. But then I passed out and had a strange dream.