Really vivid. I was ying along the Nile watching...it seemed like all of history. But it ended with a kind of slaughter and me shouting something in Egyptian. I think it was the words from the amulet, the ones I don't understand. And then I woke up here."

"Yeah, tell me about it! I've been having dreams like that ever since I spent that night with Rekemheb. Scenes like out of a Hollywood spectacular." He nished tying neat double bows in his battered shoes.

* 187 *

"They always end in some disaster."

She looked around, puzzled again. "Where are the others?"

"At the well, getting water for today's march." He tied on his nemes again and smoothed the wings down over his shoulder. "So what do you think? Of the dreams, I mean? It almost seems like they're coming from someplace." He looked heavenward. "Like a message that we're just not getting."

"You mean like Pharaoh's dream of the fat and lean cows?" She ran her ngers through tangled brown hair. Impatiently she pulled it back with both hands, resnapped the clip around it, and covered it with her fedora. She felt the usual strands pull loose immediately and fall in spirals over her ears. "I don't think so."

Derek had stood up and was folding his blanket. He stopped. "Yes, exactly like that. You don't think there can be messages in dreams?

Why don't you get off your 'I'm-a-scientist' high horse and accept that there's a world out there you know nothing about?"

She bit her lip. "I've been off that high horse for a while now, Derek. And you're right. These dreams were de nitely different from any I've had before."

"Mine too. Now we just need a Joseph to interpret them."

Valerie got to her feet and began to roll up her sleeves. A faint and agreeable smell came from them-the smell of cedar.

"I think we have one."

Valerie looked toward the spot where the Bedouin woman's tent had stood the night before. It was gone. Of course. Hit and run seemed to be the pattern. Valerie went down to the center of the wadi, where the tribe was far along in its preparations for the day's march. Women were rolling up the tent panels into tight cylinders and loading them onto camels. They nodded in greeting but did not stop working. Several very young girls, no more than six or seven, tied pots together on a cord. She marveled again at their intense bright faces under wild hair.

Bemused, Valerie climbed a rocky elevation and looked below to where the tribe's ocks were being driven together into a tight circle.

Shading her eyes with her hand, she gazed back eastward the way the tribe had come. It looked rather much the same as the way they had still to go. "Plus a change," she thought. No progress or purpose.

"Do you still fear the red land now?"

She spun around toward the familiar voice. Blood rushed to her face.

* 188 *

The mysterious Bedouin stood a meter away, unveiled. The severe and stunning face held her glance again. Valerie felt a wave of affection, desire, anger. "Last night. What did you do to me?"

"I did what you wanted."

"What? To be knocked unconscious?" Valerie frowned. "It was the coffee, wasn't it? You put something in the coffee."

"You needed to sleep. You were troubled, exhausted."

"I was expecting something else. I mean, you did kiss me." Valerie heard a whine creep into her voice and was annoyed with herself. She was not going to grovel.

An expression ickered over Nekhbet's face, concern perhaps, or even affection. Valerie could not tell. Then it passed and the air between them grew cold. Nothing more embarrassing than the morning after, Valerie thought.

"You dreamt, didn't you?" Nekhbet stepped closer. "Strong, violent dreams, and now you want to know what they mean."

Valerie would have preferred to talk about their embrace, but the subject was dreams. "Yes, I guess so. But I don't like it that someone is playing with my mind."

"No one plays. The dreams are your own, from all the old memories. You dream the things you know, what your ancestors knew."

Warmth had crept into her voice again.

"But I spoke words I don't know. How could I do that?" She touched the cloth of the abaya that uttered in the slight morning breeze.

Nekhbet looked down at the hand. "You also dreamt of a cave."

"Yes, how did you know?" Valerie closed her eyes, trying to visualize the scene again. "It was at the base of a cliff. The ridge over the cave had odd markings. Like this."

She knelt down on one knee, and with her penknife she scratched a simple drawing in the sand. "There were three long vertical ssures, like so, and odd curves on both sides."

Nekhbet knelt beside her. "Yes, the cave is close by, in that direction." She pointed westward. "But you remember the image crudely." She rubbed away the lines that Valerie had cut in the sand and redrew it with her nger. "At midday, when the sun is highest, it looks like this."

She drew three descending lines connected by a bar across the top. The two outer lines dropped three-quarters of the way and ended * 189 *

in narrow isosceles triangles with concave bases. The archaeologist recognized the image in an instant. "A balance."

"You must see it at midday, for these lines are shadows, and they reveal themselves only then."

They got to their feet. Valerie looked in the direction of the ridge.

"How do you know all of this? What I dreamt, where the cave is? Who are you? Did Rekemheb send you?"

Nekhbet laughed, a strange sound that seemed foreign to her. "You ask small questions when the great ones wait to be answered." She touched Valerie's face lightly, letting her ngers linger for a moment over the fresh scar. "It is half a day's walk, and you must hurry. If you arrive after midday, the shadows will be gone."

Valerie looked back toward the Bedouin tribe. The families were beginning to ow westward. "Will you continue on to El Dakhla? I mean, when I come back."

"The shepherds stay at El Dakhla for the summer. But you have your own concerns. See?" She raised her hand to the side. "Your friends are also already on their camels and wait for you."

"I will come to El Dakhla," Valerie said with nality. She embraced the shepherd woman and closed her eyes for a moment. Then she kissed the dark cheek near the lips, ambiguously, as Jameela had kissed her. "I will look for you."

Nekhbet nodded wordlessly and gently pushed Valerie away, her tattooed hands lingering for the briefest moment on her forearms.

Valerie turned and walked away, feeling the dark eyes on her back like a protective cloak.

v Four mortals and a spectre stopped before the cliff wall. Derek cupped one hand over his eyebrows. "There are cracks all along this ridge, Valerie. Big ones, little ones. How are we supposed to know what to look for?"

Perched on her camel, Auset made a little tent over her head with her scarf. "I don't know about this, Valerie. Shadows pointing to a hidden tomb. This sounds much riskier than Yussif's farm at Al Dahkla.

This may be a wild-goose chase."

"If it is, it's my fault," Derek said. "I'm the one who's been hammering at Valerie to give the supernatural a chance. Let's just go as * 190 *

far with this as we can."

Valerie fanned herself with her fedora and looked at her watch.

"This is as far as we can go. It's noon. More or less. If we don't nd it fast, we'll have to go back to El Dakhla after all."

"Look!" Yussif pointed toward two horizontal lines that slowly sharpened as the sun reached its zenith. As they crossed the three vertical cracks, the image of a huge balance came into view.

Valerie exhaled as if she had been holding her breath and set her hat back on. "She was right. Now let's go see if there's a cave under there." She hurried the remaining distance, pulling Auset's camel after her.

Yussif stayed beside her, with the reins of Derek's camel. The two riders dismounted at the foot of the cliff, and Yussif staked the camels.

Valerie pulled aside the desiccated brush that had once sprouted and then withered at the base of the ridge. "There's something here, all right, but hardly big enough for a lizard." She gripped a small boulder at the side and it fell away suddenly, causing a small rock slide. The dust settled gradually, revealing an opening to a tunnel. "It looks good.

I think we have our cave."

"Gods, I hope so," Derek answered and began to untie the battered casket from its high perch. As he carried it on one shoulder toward his friends, the Ka appeared. "Hey, Rek. It looks like we've got something.

Can you go in ahead and see what's in there? I mean, nothing bad can happen to you, right?"

"Let us see if it pleases the gods to give me a new resting place."

Rekemheb appraised the cliff face like a new home owner and oated into the tunnel.

Behind him, Valerie took the rst step into the darkness. She stood for a moment, letting her eyes adapt, and then clicked on the ashlight.

Yussif helped Auset into the tunnel, then stopped behind her. "Is very quiet here. I do not like this place."

"You're right." Valerie directed the light beam at their feet. "No echoes. It must be the silt we're walking on. Absorbs the sound."

Derek hefted the crate onto his shoulder and came in behind them.

"Less talk and more walk, please. This thing is cutting into my neck."

The four crept down the tunnel, by the light of the single ashlight.

Valerie's boot shattered something with a muf ed snap, and she shone the light downward. "Pottery shards."

* 191 *

"Grave robbers, you think?"

"Only if it's a grave."

The tunnel ended suddenly. A stone lintel showed where a doorway had stood, but the space below was lled with dirt and rocks to within a few centimeters of the ceiling. From the other side came the sound of a voice, unintelligible.

"A shovel would be good right now, wouldn't it?" Valerie kicked the pile. "It seems to be soft. Maybe we can move it away with our hands."

The four of them covered their faces against the dust and set to work. In a short while they opened a channel. Valerie shone the light into a chamber and stepped into it. She stopped short.

In the midst of broken pottery and splintered wooden chests, Rekemheb knelt over a low sarcophagus, his forehead pressed against its rim and his arms stretched over the lid. In the quiet tomb all could hear that he wept.

* 192 *

CHAPTER XXVII:.

RECKONING.

Derek hurried to the priest's side. "What is it? Have we done something wrong?"

The Ka raised his head. His eyes glistened in the ashlight beam, the only part of him that re ected light. "Not wrong, dear child. Rather a great right. Look where you have brought us." He lifted his hand from the lid of the stone sarcophagus. An inscription ran down the center of it in two lines, lacking only a single hieroglyph where the stone had been broken in two.

"It is the Hotep di nesu invocation," Valerie said. "'The King has given an offering to Osiris, lord of Abydos, and to Hathor, Lady of Dendara, that they may bestow such offerings of bread and beer, oxen and fowl, alabaster and raiment to the Ka of the revered, the justi ed servant and priest of Hathor...Hator-em-heb.'"

She looked again at the Ka, who had stood up. "Why do you weep for a priest of Hathor?"

"This priest of Hathor...Hator-em-heb...was my son."

"Omigod!" Derek bent over the sarcophagus. "Another ancestor.

But why isn't his Ka here? Or is it?" He looked up at the dark ceiling.

Rekemheb shook his head. "He was only a child when I was taken, a boy of gentle nature, his sister only a year older. I waited for them in the afterlife, Hator-em-heb and my daughter Merut-tot, but the Kas of my children never came to the Duat. It can only be because their mummies were destroyed."

Valerie nodded toward the broken stone, the unmistakable sign of pillaging.

"This tomb held him once." The Ka raised his hand. "There is our story."

* 193 *

Valerie directed the light where he pointed high on the wall behind the sarcophagus. Cut in low relief and painted in still-bright pigments, the Barque of the Sun seemed suspended over the chamber. Ten gods, faceless but elaborately clothed and ornamented, stood decorously in two lines along the sides, attending the orb of Ra. Before the barque two gures knelt, one behind the other, their hands raised in adoration.

"The gods in glory circling the world," Valerie con rmed. "The icon of perfect harmony. Even Apophis is harmless here at the bottom."

She pointed beneath the boat where a snake curled, distinguishable only by its color from the river itself.

"But the gods are ruined," Yussif said somberly.

"Yes, every face but one is hacked away." Valerie moved the light beam along the barque to the prow. "All but Seth."

"Who would do such a thing?" Derek asked.

"Coptic Christians, maybe. Or some other sect that hated the old religion. They did it in the temples too, to 'kill' the gods." Valerie walked around the sarcophagus to the wall. "Look at what they did to Seth standing there next to Horus. Whoever smashed the gods and spared Seth also erased his original arm. See? Someone painted in the new one hurling a spear, not at Apophis, but at the men."

Auset shifted her weight impatiently. "I don't get it."