Closing my eyes, I concentrated my mind on Khufu’s great pyramid. Every particle of my being I attuned to that massive pile of stones and the burial chamber hidden within it. I saw it clearly, shining against the night, standing out before the dark starry sky, glowing intensely with a light that no mortal eye could see.
I stood before the great pyramid and it pulsated with inner energies, glowing, beckoning. Suddenly a beam of brilliant blue shot skyward from the very tip of the pyramid, a scintillating shaft of pure energy rising to the zenith of the bowl of night.
I was standing before the pyramid. My physical body was there, I knew. Yet the guards standing evenly spaced along the edge of the great plaza before it did not see me. They did not sense the light radiating from the pyramid, did not see the coruscating shaft of brilliant blue energy that blazed skyward from its tip.
And I could approach no closer. As if an impenetrable wall stood before me, I could not get a single step nearer the pyramid. I stood out in the night air, straining until the sweat streamed down my face and chest, ran in rivulets down my ribs and legs.
I could not enter the pyramid. The Golden One had sealed himself inside, I realized, and would not let me reach him. Was he protecting himself against me, or against the other Creators who sought to eliminate him?
No difference, as far as I was concerned. Unless I could get inside the pyramid I could not possibly force him to revive Athene. I screamed aloud into the night, bellowing my anger and frustration at the stars as I collapsed onto the stone paving of the great plaza before Khufu’s tomb.
Chapter 36
HELEN’S face was white with shock. “What is it? Orion, what’s the matter?” I was in our bunk aboard the boat, soaked with sweat, tangled in the light sheet that we had thrown over ourselves.
It took two swallows before I found my voice. “A dream,” I croaked. “Nothing…”
“You saw the gods again,” she said.
I heard bare feet running and then a pounding at our door. “My lord Orion!” Lukka’s voice.
“It’s all right,” I yelled through the closed door. “Only a bad dream.”
Still ashen-faced, Helen said, “They will destroy you, Orion. If you keep trying this mad assault against them, they will crush you utterly!”
“No,” I said. “Not until I’ve had my vengeance. They can do what they want to me after that, but I’ll avenge her first.”
Helen turned away from me, anger and bitter regret etched in every line of her.
I felt distinctly foolish that morning. If Nefertu wondered what had made me scream, he was too polite to mention it. The crew cast off and we resumed our journey upstream toward the capital.
All that morning I spent staring at the great pyramid as we slowly sailed upriver, watching its great Eye of Amon open and gaze solemnly back at me. The Golden One has turned it into his fortress, his refuge, I told myself. Somehow I will have to get inside it. Or die in the attempt.
For weeks we sailed the Nile, long empty days of sun and the river, long frustrating nights of trying to reach the Golden One or any of the other Creators. It was as if they had left the Earth and gone elsewhere. Or perhaps they were all in hiding. But from what?
Helen watched me intently. She seldom spoke of the gods, except occasionally at night when we were drowsing toward sleep. I wondered how much she really believed of what I had told her. I imagined that she did not know, herself.
Each day was much like every other, except for the changes in scenery along the riverbanks. One day we passed what looked like a ruined city: buildings reduced to rubble, stone monuments sprawled broken on the ground.
“Was there a war here?” I asked Nefertu.
For the first time, I saw him look irritated, almost angry. “This was the city of a king,” he said tightly.
“A king? You mean this was once the capital?”
“Briefly.”
I had to pull the story out of him, line by line. It was clearly painful to him, yet so fascinating that I could not resist asking him more questions until I had the entire tale. The city was named Akhenaten, and it had been built by the king Akhenaten more than a hundred years earlier. Nefertu regarded Akhenaten as an evil king, a heretic who denied all the gods of Egypt except one: Aten, a sun god.
“He caused great misery in the land, and civil war. When he at last died, his city was abandoned. Horemheb and later kings tore down his monuments and destroyed his temples. His memory brings great shame upon us.”
Yes, I thought. I could see how uncomfortable the memory made Nefertu. Yet I wondered if Akhenaten’s heresy had not been one of the Golden One’s schemes run awry. Perhaps I had been there, in one of the lives that I could not remember. Perhaps I would one day be sent there by the Creators to do whatever mischief they wanted done.
No, I told myself. My days of serving them will be finished once I have brought Athene back to life. Or so I hoped.
We sailed on, and watched crocodiles slithering along the reed-choked banks of the river, and mountainous hippopotami splashing and roaring at one another, their huge pink mouths and stumpy teeth looking ludicrous and terrifying at one and the same time.
“Not a good place to go swimming,” Lukka observed.
“Not unless you want to end up as their midday meal,” I agreed.
Finally we neared Wast, the mighty capital of the Kingdom of the Two Lands. Along the eastern shore of the river, reedy swamps gave way to cultivated fields, and then to low whitewashed dried-brick buildings. Across the river we saw more tombs cut into the western cliffs.
As we sailed onward the buildings became larger, grander. Dried brick gave way to dressed stone. Farm houses gave way to handsome villas with brightly painted murals on their outer walls. Graceful date palms and orchards of citrus trees swayed in the hot wind. In the distance we began to see massive temples and public buildings, tall obelisks and gigantic statues of a standing man, magnificent in physique, his fists clenched at his sides, his face smiling serenely.
“They all have the same face,” Helen said to Nefertu.
“They are all statues of the same king, Ramesses II, father of our current king Merneptah.”
The colossal statues towered along the river’s eastern bank, row upon row of them. The king must have quarried out whole mountains of granite and barged the rock along the river to put up such monuments to himself.
“Ramesses was a glorious king,” Nefertu explained to us, “mighty in battle and generous to his people. He erected these statues and many more, even larger ones, farther upstream. They stand to remind our people of his glory, and to awe the barbarians to the south. Even to this day they are afraid of his power.”
“ ‘Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair,’ ” I said. The phrase sprang from my memory, and I knew it had been written for this egomaniac Egyptian king.
There were more tombs along the western cliffs, including one that was so beautiful it took my breath away when I first saw it. White, low, columned and proportioned in a way that would some day grace the Parthenon of Athens.
“It is the tomb of Queen Hatshepsut,” Nefertu told me. “She ruled like a man — much to the unhappiness of the priests and her husband.”
If Menefer was impressive, Wast was overwhelming. The city was built to dwarf human scale. Enormous stone buildings loomed along the water’s edge, so that we tied our boat to a stone pier in their cool shadow. Avenues were paved with stone and wide enough for four chariots to run side by side. Up from the riverside rose many temples, massive columns of granite painted brightly, metal-shod roofs gleaming in the sun. Beyond them, up in the hills, handsome villas were dotted among groves of trees and wide cultivated fields.