Living in Threes (9 page)

The flight attendant who’d been keeping an eye on me came by and made sure my seat back was up and my tray was stowed for landing and all those other things I already knew. I didn’t tell her that. She was too honestly nice, and I loved her accent. It was worth it just to listen to the way her tongue curled around the English words.

I wished she’d slide into Arabic so I could hear what she really sounded like, but she never did. I had to listen to the PA for that. All the announcements were in Arabic as well as English.

When the plane was down and we were all herded through Customs and I was the only dirty-blonde-haired person anywhere in sight, it hit me right between the sort-of-blue-sort-of-grey-sort-of-green eyes. This place was
foreign
. And what the hell was I doing in it?

I started to freak out. What if Aunt Jessie had the wrong time for my flight? What if she couldn’t make it to pick me up and hadn’t been able to call? What if—

“Meredith!”

I’d know that voice anywhere. Aunt Jessie had a hat jammed down over her rusty-colored curls, and her clothes were straight out of Indiana Jones: boots and khakis and a loose white shirt. No tank tops out in public in this country—she’d made sure I knew that before I left.

Her hug swallowed me up. I hugged back so hard she went
Oof
. I still hadn’t forgiven her, not hardly, but right then the only person I’d have been gladder to see was Mom.

She rounded up my luggage and introduced me to the two people with her—both grad students and both from Egypt, with the same accent the flight attendant had—and herded us all out to an honest-to-Horus Land Rover. I used to dream about riding through the desert in a Land Rover.

Not that Luxor’s desert, exactly. It’s Black Land: riverside Egypt, about as humid as Florida, and about as buggy, too. But there’s desert around it, and across the river where the tombs are.

Ancient Egypt is everywhere. Statues, temples, rows of columns cropping up next to a street that could have come right out of Palm Bay: no matter where you turn, there’s something to remind you that three, four, five thousand years ago, people were here. Right here, where you’re sitting in a traffic jam in your aunt’s Land Rover, with tourists clogging every street and bazaar, and vendors selling everything from genuine reproduction antique amulets to cans of Coca-Cola.

I bought an amulet while we sat waiting for the street to clear, off a tray of them. It was just like the one Meritre wore in my dream, a blue beetle on a string. “Stops Evil Eye,” the man who sold it said. I got him to repeat that in Arabic, so I could start learning what people were really saying.

“That’s a scarab,” Aunt Jessie said, “but you know that, don’t you? Do you know what it says on the bottom?
May Isis grant healing.”

In my dream it helped people fend off the plague. I wondered if it could fend off cancer, too.

Meritre believed in magic. I just wrote stories about it. I hung the scarab around my neck under my shirt.

Aunt Jessie’s expedition worked out of Luxor House, right by the river and the ferry across to the desert and the tombs. On the outside it was a blank white wall with a gate painted brilliant turquoise. Inside was a chain of courtyards and a whole lot of rooms and labs and classrooms and a dining hall, and a library that took up a whole wing.

I called dibs on the library, but first I had to move into my room. Because the digging season was over for everybody but us, I had it to myself. I put up the actual hardcopy picture of me and Mom and the one of me on Bonnie and the one with all the usuals from the midwinter show at the barn, tacked up the map of the Valley of the Kings that I’d got out of one of Dad’s
National Geographic
s from before I was born, plugged all my tech in to charge and made sure the house wi-fi would talk to it, and that was as close to home as I was going to get.

While I was unpacking my wheelie duffel, Cat shot me a text.
Now tell me you hate it.

I shot straight back.
Love Luxor. Hate how I got here.

That’s fair,
she said. Then she sent me a picture of Bonnie and Dora giving each other scritchies in the pasture. Bonnie had to stretch her neck to reach Dora’s withers, because Dora is a good foot taller than she is, but she still managed to look almost as big on the outside as she is on the inside.

Stop making me homesick,
I said.

Don’t be
, Cat answered.
Dig up a mummy for me.

Keep bugging me and I’ll ship you a cat mummy just to shut you up,
I said.

Oooo!
she said.
Do it! I dare you!

Maybe not a cat. Baboon.

Triple cat dare!

Not in three lifetimes,
I said.

I don’t know why I shivered. Must have been a draft.

Aunt Jessie had told me to go to bed and sleep off the jet lag, but I couldn’t sit still. I took a shower and changed my clothes, and that was almost as good as sleep. Then I wandered out.

A cat attached itself to me outside the door. It was a little round tortoiseshell cat with a marking like a flame on her forehead, and extra toes, so she looked as if she had thumbs. She didn’t look anything like Meritre’s sleek brown cat, but she had the same eyes, ancient and self-satisfied and wise.

I could never have a cat at home: Mom was deathly allergic. Having one find me here made up for a lot of things, though not nearly all of them.

I scratched her chin and she mewped at me. When I went on she went, too, following from in front the way cats do.

I meant to go down and find the door to the library, but with the cat for company, I found myself going up instead. The house had two floors and a roof, and the roof was a garden.

There were orange and lemon trees up there, more pots of flowers that I could count, and a kind of gazebo with a couch in it and a clutter of chairs.

The roof had a wall around it, low enough for me to lean on. With the sun shining straight into my eyes, I couldn’t see much of the river or the cliffs on the other side, so I turned and looked across the city instead.

There was an excavation right below the house, in between it and a neighborhood of shops and hotels and what looked like apartment buildings. I don’t know why I hadn’t expected that. They were still digging right in the middle of the main temple, the temple of Amon, Aunt Jessie had told me on the way from the airport, and finding new things in places that had been dug and re-dug for two hundred years.

This wasn’t anything so spectacular: just rows of trenches and the straight lines of walls with breaks that might be doors. I knew enough to think it must have been a neighborhood like the modern one on the other side of it. If I squinted just right, I could see how the houses went down in rows, with a street in the middle, and an alley that ran right up to the wall of the house I was in.

Suddenly I was so dizzy I had to grab the wall to keep from falling down. I don’t know what did it—the angle of the light, the way one wall met another, or maybe it was that I looked up at just the right instant and saw the exact line of hills across the river that Meritre saw when she stood on the roof of her house.

If I closed my eyes I could see the rows of mud-brick houses, some of which had gardens on the roofs, and most had tents or shades for people to sleep under when the weather was hot. There was no huge temple of Amon yet: the one Meritre sang in was bright and new, but it wasn’t any bigger than the mosque I could see from Luxor House.

I could see it, feel it, hear it,
smell
it: smoke and sweat and sicky-sweet perfume, baking bread and sour beer and a really tasty lentil stew with onions in it.

That was ancient Thebes, capital of Upper Egypt, but Luxor was there, too, with motor exhaust and cooking oil and flowers. It was Luxor I opened my eyes to. Thebes was gone except for the bare outline of streets and houses.

I clutched the scarab amulet so tight it dug into my palm. I must have seen a photo of the excavation somehow, with one of those artist’s recreations drawn over it. The other things, the smells and sounds, were too much imagination and my stomach telling me it was ready for dinner.

I hoped that was what it was. Because what else could it be? Reincarnation?

Hello, this is your past life speaking. Sorry you weren’t Cleopatra, but some kind of singing priestess isn’t bad.

Singer of Amon. That’s what I’d seen, been, whatever. The way I knew that was like the way Meru rode the web, which was her world’s version of the Internet, more or less, but instead of a computer she had a chip in her brain that connected her to it. All I had to do was think a question, and the answer was there.

The cat wrapped herself around my ankles once, twice, and then a third time to make sure the job got done. Then she jumped onto the wall and butted her head against my arm. She was purring so hard her whole body shook.

She didn’t start talking. That was a good thing. I rubbed the soft fur behind her ears while she went nuts, purring and leaning into my fingers.

I liked it that she was just being a cat. I needed her to be normal and ordinary and everyday.

The sun sank so low it touched the horizon, and the mosquitoes started to come out. They might not be sparrow-sized like Florida mosquitoes, but there were ten zillion of them. They drove me off the roof.

Chapter 10

After all that, I slept like the dead. If there were dreams, or whatever else my crazy brain was doing to me, I didn’t remember them. The alarm knocked me out of bed and into the dig clothes Aunt Jessie had ordered me to get, and while I wasn’t the first one down to breakfast in the dark before dawn, I wasn’t the last one, either.

I grew up listening to Aunt Jessie’s stories and looking at pictures of hot, dusty, grinning people holding up bits of pottery or chips of old bones. King Tut’s gold is a once-in-a-century kind of find. Mostly, archaeology is dirt and potsherds. And digging. They call it a dig for good reason.

Now, like it or not, I was inside one of Aunt Jessie’s stories. She’d really meant it about putting me to work. She was going to the site this morning, and that meant so was I. Jet lag or no jet lag.

There were six of us at breakfast: Aunt Jessie and me and three grad students, the two I’d met yesterday plus two Americans who were so obviously a couple they might as well have been wearing matching collars. They were wearing pretty much the same pants and shirts and hats, but so were the rest of us. It was a uniform.

At that hour nobody had much to say except the occasional grunt around a cup of coffee. I got names—Gwyn and Jonathan, those were the Americans—and Gwyn sort of smiled in my general direction, but mostly we were all half-asleep.

When we were all fed and caffeinated, we trudged out to the two Land Rovers we’d be riding in, both of them loaded with gear. There was just about enough room for the six of us to squeeze in around it.

Nobody was particularly nice to me, but they weren’t hazing me, either. They were treating me like everybody else. That was a compliment. I think. Or else they were just too sleepy to care.