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Authors: Judith Tarr

Tags: #Science Fiction & Fantasy, #Teen & Young Adult, #Fantasy, #Science Fiction, #Coming of Age, #Aliens, #Time Travel

Living in Threes (8 page)

BOOK: Living in Threes
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Chapter 8

Meritre had had visions since she was small. Sometimes she could see what would happen, or hear or feel it. Sometimes she lived another life, a life full of metal birds that flew across the sky, and nights full of stars that looked almost familiar, but not quite. And sometimes when the night was quiet or the sun was so blinding bright at midday that everyone took shelter to escape from it, she heard the gods speaking to one another.

She almost never spoke of it. She had no desire to become a soothsayer in the market, and since she was neither a king nor a high-ranking priest, there was not much use in it except occasionally to awe her brothers.

She had seen the plague in nightmares, night after night, but she had also seen that it would end. She had clung to that through the worst of it. The world would go on. The people would survive. There would still be a king in the palace and crocodiles in the river, and the sun would beat down at noon and give way at night to the patterns of stars that she had known all her life.

Since the plague retreated, the visions had finally let her be. If she could have wished for one, it would be of her mother and father safe and healthy, and the new baby safely born and blessed with a long and prosperous life. But her gift from the gods had never been that easily controlled.

Meritre was in no mood to lie back and let the gods tell her what they intended to do. She was not in a mood for prayer, either. Prayer might have kept the family safe through the plague, but with Father ill and Mother expecting a baby at her age and in her fragile condition, Meritre dared leave nothing to chance.

She needed magic.

The world was full of it. Even before gods, magic had been; all creation had been born of it. From the charm a woman laid on a man to make him love her to the spell a physician worked to heal an illness, magic made certain what prayer could only hope for.

It did not always work. If Meritre was honest with herself, it often failed.

She had to try. Thanks to Uncle Amonmose who was a scribe in the palace, she had learned to read and even write a little. Also thanks to him, she had a book of her own, made up of scraps that he had given her to practice writing on. Some of the scraps had bits of spells and charms written on them already, and she had made a point of adding to them when she could.

They were mostly minor: how to conjure away a wart, charm a fish onto a hook, or call a breeze on a hot day. But some could be more than that.

She was not arrogant enough to try the great magic, to raise the dead or force the gods to serve her. She only wanted to protect her family. For that, there were more than enough spells; the difficulty was to choose the right one.

The king’s festival was still a handful of days away, but the gods had been looking out for Meritre. That day Aweret had been able to go to the temple and join the choir for its practice, and while she had been somewhat pale and shaky, her beautiful voice had made them all whole again. Then in the evening Uncle Amonmose came by for dinner, bringing with him one of the young scribes it was his duty to train.

Djehuti was tall and quiet, with long, sensitive hands that curled around a cup with unconscious grace. He never said much, but Meritre could tell his eyes and ears took in everything around him. He was a quick learner, Uncle Amonmose said; he had mastered all the books of the younger scribes’ course, and was almost ready to take on his own students.

Meritre had met him a time or two before. She liked the way he had of being so very much there, but not chattering about it. After her brothers, who never stopped talking even when they were asleep, it was wonderfully restful.

That evening after everyone had eaten, they all sat on the roof, watching the last blood-red light fade from the western sky. There was a brisk breeze off the river; it had blown away the biting flies. People were on their roofs all over the city, talking back and forth, laughing and singing. It was a little festival of its own, a celebration that they were alive.

Meritre left the men to their noise and chatter and want to sit by the roof’s edge, as close to the western horizon as she could go. After a moment or two and a little to her surprise, Djehuti came over and sat beside her.

He did not try to talk to her. He simply sat there with the wind in his face. His smooth skull, shaved for cleanliness as every scribe’s was, had a pleasing shape to it in the last of the light. His face was pleasing, too, without being so pretty it made her blush: long clean lines, dark level brows, firm but rounded chin.

Any other time, she might have enjoyed looking at it until there was no more light to see with. Tonight she had too much on her mind.

Something about his silence drew words out of her. “I need advice,” she said, “about magic. I need a spell to protect everybody here. There are so many, and I’m not sure—”

“Why?”

The word hung in the warm darkness. Behind them, Father and Uncle Amonmose and the boys were well into the beer.

The cat appeared out of the night and established itself in Meritre’s lap. Its purring and the softness of its fur under her fingers helped her answer his question. “I want to keep my family safe.”

There was enough lamplight from the other side of the roof to see his shape but little else. She heard him breathing. After a while he said, “Something’s troubling you.”

“It’s not a new plague,” Meritre said quickly. “I just want to do this.”

“You didn’t do it during the plague?”

“I didn’t have to. The gods did it instead. Now they have other things to do, and I’ve been studying. I can’t guard the whole kingdom. I’m not that powerful, and I wouldn’t presume. But this household I can protect.”

He paused for a very long time, until she was sure he was not going to respond, even to refuse. Then he said, “There are incantations that are as safe as magic ever is, that don’t require months to prepare, or ingredients that only a king can afford. Do you need them quickly?”

“As soon as can be,” Meritre said.

He hugged his knees and rocked. “Tomorrow evening I think I can get away.”

Meritre’s heart swelled to fill her chest, making it hard to breathe. But her mind was clear enough for her to say, “Don’t come here. People will ask questions. Meet me in the market by the amulet seller’s stall.”

There were several of those in the market nearest the house, Meritre remembered too late, but Djehuti brushed with his finger the blue scarab she wore around her neck. “I know the one,” he said. “I’ll be there.”

Now that Meritre had made up her mind to do something, she felt strangely relieved. There was fear, of course, and a quiver of excitement, but most of all, it felt right. She slept well that night, barely interrupted by Father’s coughing and the yowl of mating cats in the street outside.

The dream ambushed her just before dawn. She was aware that it was a dream, and that it was true. At first she thought it was a memory of the past: the plague was at its height, death and dying in every house, and those who cared for the dead were dying themselves, of exhaustion as much as of the plague.

That was as she remembered, but she had lived in the midst of it then. Now she stood high above it under a sky full of stars. Death stalked the city below her and the fields that surrounded it, and filled the river with the helpless dead, until the crocodiles could eat no more.

She lifted her hand. The stars dimmed; the earth held its breath. The flood of death began to ebb, slowly at first, then more quickly.

When she lowered her hand, the plague had gone in all but one place. Down below her in the sleeping city, death claimed one final sacrifice. That life, the last one, lay like the petal of a flower in Meritre’s palm.

As she stared down at it, it shriveled and shrank, closing upon itself. When it was no more than a smudge of dust, a breath of wind caught and lifted it and carried it away, spiraling upward until it vanished among the stars.

Chapter 9

All the way from Orlando to New York to Egypt on the long, long flights, I kept sliding in and out of that other life, the one with the cat and the temple and the family in its mud-brick house in the middle of a hundred other mud-brick houses, and that other me standing as tall as the sky. There was a hawk above me, wings spread wide, soaring through the blue heaven.

Except to me, it didn’t look like a hawk. It looked like the jet I was riding in, with its hawk-of-Horus logo on the tail. It was red and gold and blue, and it looked like ancient Egypt.

I was a little excited by then. A little. All right?

Cat would mock me, but there wasn’t any wi-fi on this flight. I was flying blind, with a tablet full of books and music and the craziness inside my own head. I’d have to wait till I landed before I could hook myself back up to the world.

I’d stopped fighting by the time Mom gave me one last rib-creaking hug outside of the airport security gate. “Just six weeks,” she said. “Then everything can get back to normal.”

Whatever normal was. I hefted the backpack full of laptop and supplies for the trip and the shiny new tablet that everybody had got together with Mom to give me for a going-away present, and said before Mom could say it again, for the sixteen dozenth time, “Yes, I’ve got my passport and my visa and my boarding passes and my global phone card and—”

“And your head screwed on firmly and all relevant numbers saved to every electronic device and the notebook in your pocket,” Mom finished for me. “Be safe. Behave. Don’t forget to Skype.”

I could still smell her perfume through the stale and slightly cold smell of airplane air. It wrapped around me like her hug. When I dozed off I could feel her beside me.

That
was a dream. Reality was a long, long flight from morning into night and then into morning again.

On the last leg of the trip, from Cairo to Luxor, I looked down and saw what Meritre’s hawk must have been seeing. I didn’t see the place I’d been dreaming or remembering, at least not the way it was in the dream. The city I was about to land in was the same kind of smoky sprawl you see everywhere else you go—except for all the ruins poking out of it.

The river was there. So was the way the green parts stayed close to the water, and the rest of the world was bare red-brown desert. That hadn’t changed much in however many thousand years.

I was wide awake, so tired I couldn’t remember what sleep felt like. I missed Mom and Bonnie and the usuals deep inside, like a bruise that wouldn’t heal. Mom had e-mailed me once, and we’d texted back and forth every time I was on the ground.

Then in New York I got an actual pleasant surprise: the whole barn had a Skype party for me. They linked up Rick’s tablet and hauled it around the barn and showed me all the horses, and Bonnie got it all smeary when she drooled hay foam on it.

I promised them all to write down everything and take pictures everywhere—starting with a picture of the terminal I was in. I wished I could send them the dreams, too. They were so real I could still feel the cat’s fur under my hand, and taste the stew Meritre had made in that last dream, the one with the boy she liked so much it made her toes curl.

The stew was good. So was the bread when it came out of the oven, though it was grainier than the grainiest whole-grain bread I’d ever gnawed my way through. No butter, either. But it was tasty dipped in the stew.

My mouth was watering. Soda and peanuts didn’t quite come up to it, but they filled my stomach, which was more than dream food could do.

I hadn’t dreamed or remembered Meru again. I admit I was glad. Meritre’s life wasn’t easy, but the grief in it was either worn down with age or it hadn’t happened yet. Meru’s grief was right there, lodged like a knife in my gut.

BOOK: Living in Threes
11.37Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

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