“With the embalmers,” the girl said. “You will be an apprentice in the House of Purification, in the City of the Dead.” She tugged at his wrist. “Come quickly! If we miss the ferry, there won’t be another one going across for an hour.”
Too astonished to protest, he stumbled on board after her. Almost at once, the overseer bellowed a command and slaves along quayside tugged on the ropes that tied the barge down, pulling them free of the bollards that held them. A huge man wielding an enormous pole pushed the vessel loose and it drifted out into the channel of the Nile. The great red and yellow sails scooped up such breeze as was there for the scooping. The lunatic bustle of Thebes receded swiftly behind them. He stared back at it in dismay.
An embalmer, in the City of the Dead?
A lodging-place on the wrong side of the river?
Some of yesterday’s confusion and panic began to surface in him again. He looked toward the distant western shore. His assignment here was difficult enough as it was; but how was he supposed to carry it out while living over there in the mortuary village? Presumably the two people he had come here to find were living in Thebes proper, if they were here at all. He had expected to circulate in the city, to ask questions and generally sniff about in search of unusual strangers, to pursue whatever clues to their whereabouts he might discover. But the priestess, in her great kindness, had essentially exiled him from the place where he had to be. Now he would have to steal time from his work—whatever that was going to be!—and get himself somehow back to the main part of Thebes every day, or as often as he could arrange it, if he was going to carry out his little Sherlock Holmes operation. It was a complication he hadn’t anticipated.
In the crush of passengers aboard the greatly overcrowded ferry, the slave-girl was jammed right up against him. He found himself enjoying the contact. But he wondered how often one of these boats foundered and sank. He thought of the crocodiles that still inhabited the Nile in this era.
She laughed and said, “It is too many people, yes?”
“Yes. Many too many.”
“It’s always this busy this time. Better to go early, but you were sleeping.”
“Do the ferries run all day?”
“All day, yes, and less often in the night. Everyone uses them. You are still feeling all right, Edward-Davis?”
“Yes,” he said. He let his hands rest on her bare shoulders. “Fine.” For a moment he found himself wondering what he was going to use to pay the ferry fare; and then he remembered that this entire empire managed somehow to function without any sort of cash. All transactions involving goods or services were done by barter, and by a system of exchange that used weights and spirals of copper as units of currency, but only in the abstract: workers were paid in measures of grain or flasks of oil that could be traded for other necessities, and more complex sales and purchases were handled by bookkeeping entries, not by the exchange of actual metal. The ferries, most likely, were free of charge, provided by the government by way of offering some return on the labor-taxes that everyone paid.
The ferry wallowed westward across the green sluggish river. The east bank was no more now than a shadowy line on the horizon, with the lofty walls and columns of the two temple compounds the only discernible individual features. On the rapidly approaching western shore he could see now another many-streeted tangle of low mud-brick buildings, though not nearly as congested as the very much larger one across the way, and a towering row of dusty-leaved palm trees just behind the town as a sort of line of demarcation cutting it off from the emptiness beyond. Further in the distance was the sandy bosom of the western desert, rising gradually toward the bleak bare hills on the horizon.
At the quay-side Eyaseyab spoke briefly with a man in a soiled, ragged kilt, apparently to ask directions. They seemed to know each other; they grinned warmly, exchanged a quick handclasp, traded a quip or two. Davis felt an odd, unexpected pang of jealousy as he watched them. The man turned and pointed toward the left: Davis saw as he swung around that his face was terribly scarred and he had only one eye.
“My brother,” Eyaseyab said, coming back toward him. “He belongs to the ferry-master. We go this way.”
“Was he injured in battle?”
She looked baffled a moment. “His face? Oh, no, he is no soldier. He ran away once, when he was a boy, and slept in the desert one night, and there was an animal. He says a lion, but a jackal, I think. Come, please.”
They plunged into the City of the Dead, Eyaseyab once more going first and leaving him to trudge along behind, keeping his eyes trained on the tapering glossy wedge of her bare back. On every side the industry of death was operating at full throttle. Here was a street of coffin-makers, and here were artisans assembling funerary furniture in open-fronted arcades, and in another street sculptors were at work polishing memorial statues. A showroom displayed gilded mummy-cases in a startling range of sizes, some no bigger than a cat might need, others enormous and ornate. Silent priests with shaven heads moved solemnly through the busy, crowded streets like wraiths. Now and again Davis caught a whiff of some acrid fumes: embalming fluids, he supposed.
The district where the workers lived was only a short distance behind the main commercial area, but the layout of the village was so confusing that Eyaseyab had to ask directions twice more before she delivered him to his new lodging-place. It was a cave-like warren of dark little mud-walled rooms lopsidedly arranged in a U-shaped curve around a sandy courtyard. Misery Motel, Davis thought. A florid, beefy man named Pewero presided over it. The place was almost comically dismal, filthy and dank and reeking of urine, but even so it had its own proud little garden, one dusty acacia tree and one weary and practically leafless sycamore.
“You will take your meals here,” Eyaseyab explained. “They are supplied by the House of Purification. There will be beer if you want it, but no wine. Check your room for scorpions before you go to sleep. On this side of the river they are very common.”
“I’ll remember that,” Davis said.
She stood waiting for a moment at the door to his little cubicle as though expecting something from him. But of course he had nothing to offer her.
Was that what she wanted, though? A gift? Perhaps that look of expectation meant something else.
“Stay with me this afternoon,” he said impulsively.
She smiled almost demurely. “The priestess expects me back. There is much work to do.”
“Tonight, then? Can you come back?”
“I can do that, yes,” she said. There wasn’t much likelihood of it in her tone. She touched his cheek pleasantly. “Edward-Davis. What an odd name that is, Edward-Davis. Does everyone in your country have such odd names?”
“Even worse,” he said.
She nodded. Perhaps that was the limit of her curiosity.
He watched her from his doorway as she went down the dusty path. Her slender back, her bare plump buttocks, suddenly seemed almost infinitely appealing to him. But she turned the corner and was gone. I will never see her again, he thought; and he felt himself plummeting without warning into an abyss of loneliness and something approaching terror as he looked back into the dark little hole of a room that was his new home in this strange land.
You wanted this, he told himself.
You volunteered for this. Going back to find a couple of Service people who hadn’t come back from a mission was only the pretext, the excuse. What you wanted was to experience the real Egypt. Well, kid, here’s the real Egypt, and welcome to it!
He wondered what he was supposed to do next. Report for work? Where? To whom?
Pewero said, “In the morning. Go with them, when they leave.”