Living in Threes (23 page)

It could be an omen, if she chose to see it as such. She hugged its memory to her as the ferry touched the bank and the crowd jostled and chattered its way toward the harsh beauty of the Red Land.

She had never been across the river where the dead were. Her father had gone there sometimes to work on tombs, as he did now, and Aweret had gone in processions, singing a late king or a king’s wife into eternity. Meritre would do that for the princess when the time of embalming was over.

Today she had a different errand, one she could not have explained to anyone. She balanced her basket on her head again and walked up from the landing, following the track that led toward the cliffs.

No one else was going where she was going. After such a crowd, even with predators in it, she felt very much alone under the vault of the sky.

The sun was well on its way toward the zenith by the time Meritre made her way up the last steep ascent into the valley where the queens were buried. The king would have liked to build her heir’s home for eternity among the kings, but some things in this world, even a king knew better than to try.

Sounds of hammering and grinding and shouts of workmen echoed down the track long before Meritre had climbed far enough to see the temple. It had gone up almost overnight, but it looked well made, with tall columns and smooth paving and statues of the king on either side of the entrance.

There was scaffolding up against the left-hand statue. Men perched on it, painting the king’s headdress in stripes of blue and gold.

One of the artists painting the inscriptions down below pointed Meritre toward the place where her father was working. There were guards everywhere; they did not offer to help, but they did not try to stop her, either.

The painter’s directions took her to the back of the temple and then out onto a sort of porch, where masons and sculptors worked in the shade of a canopy. Meritre found her father almost at once.

The statue was nearly done; it was so lifelike it made her stop short, though it was no taller than a newborn baby. That was the princess’ face to the life, with its round cheeks and soft mouth. He was painting it with such skill that it seemed almost to breathe.

Meritre waited until he paused and straightened, setting the brush down. He stretched, frowned and then smiled as he saw Meritre. “You forgot this,” she said, lowering the basket from her head and holding it out to him.

“You came a long way,” he said as he took the basket and dived into his breakfast. “Does your mother know you’re here?”

“Yes,” said Meritre. “She didn’t want you to go hungry all day.”

He grunted. “And you were curious. Weren’t you?”

“Well,” she said, “yes.”

“You’ll pay for that,” he said. “I’m not letting you go back alone. You’ll stay here till we’re done, then we’ll take the ferry back together.”

Meritre hoped she managed to conceal the surge of relief when he said that. She had been avoiding the issue of how she was going to get back to the city, but that took care of it. It gave her half the day to do what she had come to do.

The gods were with her. She should never have doubted it.

“Here,” he said, passing her one of the jars of beer. “Drink up, but take your time. You’ll be here for a while.”

She nodded, wide-eyed. His glance was suspicious, but the statue was waiting, and it had to be done before the princess came back from the embalmers. In a breath’s space he was engrossed in his work again.

When she slipped away, she more than half expected him to call her back. But he had forgotten her. No one else seemed to care what she did. The guards were all in the front of the temple, making sure no one got in from the road or the river.

The tomb had to be somewhere nearby. She would expect it to be under heavy guard, but except for the workers in the temple and the guards at the gate, the valley was deserted.

She wandered back into the temple. The part she was in was finished, except for an artist working on inscriptions in a passageway that sloped down from the north side of the temple. He bent close to the wall a handful of man-lengths down the passage, tracing the shapes of hieroglyphs with a steady hand. Meritre gambled that he would be as oblivious as her father, and slipped past him on silent feet.

“Meritre?”

She knew that voice. She stopped and spun. Djehuti looked up at her from where he knelt on the floor.

“What are you doing here?” she demanded.

His lips twitched. “You’re always asking me that.”

“Really,” she said. “Aren’t you supposed to be working with the king’s scribes?”

“Usually I am,” he said, “but the king wrote this, and she wanted it written here.”

“Why?”

He set his lips together.

Meritre knew a secret when she saw one. She bent and peered at the line he had already painted. It was a poem, a verse that told of a mother’s love for her child.

She stood up straight. When she moved, she saw something odd. The floor slanted slightly but distinctly downward. The passage went on into darkness, much farther than she had expected.

Might this be...?

The gods were here, watching her. She could feel them. She took a deep breath and let it out, and laid it all in their hands. “This is it, isn’t it? This is the way to the tomb.”

She watched Djehuti make up his mind to lie, but then change it when his eyes met hers. He must feel it, too: the gods’ hands on them both. “Yes,” he said. “You know you’ll die if you tell anyone.”

“I know,” she said. She moved past him down the passage.

There was no light but the little that came from the chapel, and Djehuti had bolted. He was going for the guards after all.

As he should. Why did it hurt so much? He was just a boy she liked to look at, and sometimes talk to. He was not betraying anything that had honestly been between them. He was saving his life and livelihood, and doing his duty.

She should run back to the sculptors’ porch before the guards came, but she had come too far to give up. She kept on going.

Light flickered behind her. She flattened against the wall.

There was only one shadow, leaping and dancing. Djehuti had a torch, and he was alone.

Meritre could die here if that was his intention, and it would be days before anyone found her. But as she peered up the tunnel at the shadowy blur of his face, she knew he had not come to kill her. Nor had he betrayed her.

“You don’t have to do this,” she said.

“I know.” He brought the torch up beside her. She could smell the oil in it, and the hot smell of the flame. “It’s farther than you might think.”

“Really,” she said. “You don’t. Just let me have the torch. If I’m caught, and anyone asks, I stole it myself.”

“It’s not stolen,” he said. “I need light to work. And to look over what I’ve done already, in case of mistakes. The whole spell could fail for the lack of a single glyph.”

“That…is a good story.”

“It happens to be true.” He raised the torch slightly, so that she could see the painted words marching away into the shadows. “Would you like to see?”

“Am I supposed to?”

“No,” he said. “But you were intending to, weren’t you? What have you seen?”

“I’m not a performing ape!”

He swayed in the wind of her outburst. She clapped her hands over her mouth.

When the echoes were well and truly dead, she lowered her hands. Djehuti stood still, steady on his feet, slightly wide-eyed.

“I am sorry,” she said. “I don’t know where that came from.”

“I understand,” he said. “If you can’t tell me—if the gods want you to keep the secret—”

It would be easy to let him think that was true. And in its way it was. But she owed him something more, for what he was doing for her, and for the price he might have to pay for it.

“I need to see the tomb,” she said. “Just see it. Not touch, or tell—not in this age of the world. That I promise you. I will take the secret to my own tomb.”

She held her breath. If he asked what she meant, she was not sure she could answer.

He frowned. She braced herself. After a moment he said, “Scribes have secrets, too. And magic doesn’t always make sense outside of itself.”

He was talking to himself, she thought, more than to her. Reciting a lesson, maybe. Making a decision.

Finally he said, “Follow me.”

The breath ran out of her so fast she nearly fell.

He was there, catching her hand, holding her up. His grip was warm and strong. His trust was even stronger. What it meant…

What was between two people did not always make sense out of itself, either. Still hand in hand, they descended toward the tomb.

It was a long way under the earth, down the slowly slanting shaft that was just a little higher than Djehuti’s head. There had been no time to paint any of the walls there; everything that anyone could do had to be done in the tomb itself, down deep where, gods willing, the grave robbers would be less likely to find and strip it.

Grave robbers were like rats in a granary. One did all one could to keep them out, but if there was any possible way in, they would find it.

Djehuti had done what he could to help, painting curses and strong spells on the walls and door of the deep chamber. The niche where Father’s statue of the
ka
would go was finished and painted to look like a room in a house, with a window showing a garden of palms and fruit trees. When the statue went into it, it would be walled up, all but the narrow door that would let the
ka
go back and forth.

Meritre shivered. It was almost cold down here, as if the spells on the walls and door had drained the heat out of the air. She bowed and murmured a prayer to the gods who hovered all around her, invisible but clearly perceptible.

The torch had begun to flicker. Without a word spoken, they both turned and walked quickly away from the tomb.

When they were halfway up the long ascent, they heard voices ahead. There was no way out but the one, and no side path, no room to hide in. All they could do was go forward and hope they could talk their way out of it.

Meritre’s heart was beating so hard she was sure the people outside could hear it. Even when the voices passed, she could not force herself to be calm.

Djehuti edged ahead of her. The torch had almost burned out. He stopped and stood listening.

After a long count of heartbeats he nodded, stubbed out the torch against the floor, and strode quickly toward the glimmer of daylight at the end of the tunnel.

Meritre hesitated. The darkness around her was thick and strangely cool. Djehuti’s painted images glowed ahead of her.

Without stopping to think, with a gesture as inevitable as the advance of time through thousands of years, she slipped off the amulet that her mother had given her when she was tiny, knelt down and laid it on the floor. She heard the faint clatter and the barely audible sound of the bead rolling toward the wall.

She felt naked without it, and her heart wrenched. She might never talk to her other selves again now she had let go the key to the spell.

She had to. Otherwise Meredith would never find it, and it would not come to Meru.

The spell was set. She had made her sacrifice. She could go; she could return to the world of the living.

Djehuti knelt where she had found him when she first came. He picked up his brush just as a pair of guards strolled past the chapel. They hardly deigned to notice the workman in the passage, or the flushed and tousled girl who held his palette for him. If they thought anything, Meritre could all too easily imagine what it was.

It was worth the price. Djehuti was, too, she thought, turning her mind deliberately away from thousands and thousands of years, toward the future that was directly ahead of her. A future, she thought, that she would like him to keep on being part of.

She caught him glancing at her. His ears were slightly but distinctly red.

He was blushing. She wanted to laugh—but her ears felt as hot as his.