Sunrise on the Mediterranean (71 page)

Pausing, I listened for footsteps. None. No other breathing, just mine. Down I went, then farther twisting and turning, following
the path. Beneath another man-made archway leading to a chamber. I’d walked through many, unsure if I were walking straight
or in a circle. Did I know this room?

Instead I stepped into another space, a different one than I’d thought. I wasn’t going in a circle. This place was a maze!
I raised my oil lamp and looked around.

From within this stone tangle I could hear the battle above. Had I heard something else? A whimper, perhaps? Rather than returning
the way I’d come, I followed the sound through the walls, going farther and father back. Had Dion stumbled on all of this
when he was quarrying for stone down here?

I halted, listening. Had I heard a gasp, a moan? I walked a few steps farther. Yes! After turning a few more bends in this
snarl of passages, I found her, crumpled on the floor. “RaEm?” I said.

She turned toward me, and I fought the urge to vomit. She wasn’t going anywhere. Ever again. “My God,” I whispered.

“He is your god,” she said, her voice hoarse. “He is your god and you are welcome to him, to your cold modern world and your—”
She hissed in pain.

“Save your curses,” I said. “You are—”

“Dying. Yes, I know.”

She’d been torched; the right side of her body was black, burned. Her hand had become a scorched claw, and she cradled the
right side of her face in it. I was glad the light was so bad. Something was wrong, grotesquely so, with her face. “Why?”
I asked, staring at her. “You were pharaoh of Egypt. How did you even become that?”

“You know what they say,” she said in English. “You’re either born into money or you marry it.”

“You married it?”

“The brat Meryaten.”

I hadn’t heard correctly—had I? “A girl?”

She snorted. “Why does that amaze you so much?”

“Because you are a woman? Or did she know? Are you a lesbian?”

“I’m no fool! Of course she didn’t know.”

“So you didn’t consummate the relationship?”

“Of course I did.”

My confused silence prompted her. “You are an idiot. She was an untried child. All I needed was to draw the curtains, extinguish
the lights, and do what I would with her.”

“Omigod.” I stared at her in shock.

RaEm whimpered a little, swallowing her tears. “But then she killed herself, the weakling.”

“I’m sorry.” Maybe I didn’t know the whole story. “That must have been very hard on you?” I said hesitantly.

“It was. Akhenaten was despondent; everyone was so obsequious. It was a great nuisance.”

“Why did she … ?”

“She couldn’t get pregnant.” RaEm shrugged. “So she overdosed on a sleeping draught I kept. Which forced me”—she winced—“to
pretend she had died of the plague.”

Her story took a moment to sink in. “You are sick,” I whispered. My skin felt grimy just from being in her presence.

She turned to me, one side of her face flawless and gorgeous, a face I had seen in the water mirror for a year; the other
side ravaged, blistered, and peeling. She moved her hand, and I saw that yes, the other side of her face looked like an exit
wound, covered in blood. “You are no different from I,” she said. “You would have done the same things, made the same choices.
Your life was easier, which is why you stand there in judgment.”

I stared into her face. “I wish you had a mirror, RaEm. Because this is the truth of you. Rotten to the core, hidden beneath
a veneer of beauty.” I stood up. “There are no excuses. What made you think you could get away with it? You drove a child
to suicide? You tried to blow up the Ark of the Covenant?”

“Don’t forget the murders and whippings,” she said.

“And you boast about it! What made you think you could do it? What put you above the laws of human decency?”

“I always have.”

I stepped back from her.
“Avayra goreret avayra,”
I murmured.

“Don’t leave me,” she said, suddenly panicked.

I retreated another step. “Please, not alone. I’m dying. Don’t let me die alone.” Another step away from her. “Did that child,
Mary—”

“Meryaten.”

“Did she have someone hold her hand?”

“You don’t understand—”

Another step back. “Do you think—”

“Please don’t leave, Chloe,” she pleaded. “Why should I stay?”

“Don’t make me be alone, please.” She crawled after me, her burned body glistening in my lamplight. Couldn’t she feel that
physical pain? She was frantic. “I’ll tell you where the portal is, just don’t leave me.”

“You ruined my relationship with my parents,” I said. “Though I’m realizing now that was probably a prebreakfast act for you.”

“It’s here, in these caverns,” she said. “My reputation, my sister, my company. Did you think of no one besides yourself?”

“This is the day, did you know that? The twenty-third power is the ability to move through the portals. It is the compensation
for being born on the unluckiest day of the year,” she said, dragging her body toward me.

“You wrecked my military career. There is a warrant out for my arrest, should I return to the U.S. I have no modern future.”

“When I was initiated as a priestess, they told me about this gift, but I didn’t understand. What power we have, Chloe!” She
pulled herself another foot closer.

“I can never go home,” I hissed bitterly. “I hate you.” RaEm fell with a whimper, crumpled onto her burned right side. Was
she dead? I stepped forward, suddenly horrified at my behavior. I’d watched a human being die? I knelt at her side, holding
my breath. She was dead?

She whipped over, slapping me silly.

I skidded back, but she was on me. Months of pretending at manhood had strengthened her, while kneading bread and carding
wool had weakened me. A burned hand and whole hand were around my throat. “I will not die alone,” she said. I was choking;
I was going to vomit looking at her, smelling her skin. “You mock me as they all did. They all pushed me away. Akhenaten,
but I paid for his murder. Phaemon, whose body will never be found. Hiram, who betrayed me. And your god-loving Dadua, who
spat out my kisses.”

I fought against her hands, my hearing now humming as we struggled. Her skin was pebbled and stiff beneath my hand as I struggled
to push her off me. She sat on my chest, too close to use my legs, too heavy to roll away. “I won’t die alone! I won’t!” she
screamed. Beneath my hand, on her burned side, I felt a tear in the skin—I couldn’t see anymore, I felt the heat in my face
as if it were going to explode. My hand on her burned side relaxed.

Limpness was stealing through me. No more oxygen to my brain, I thought. I wonder how
this
fits into history.

No! I was not going to die by RaEm.

I gripped the edge of skin and pulled. She screamed as her epidermis peeled off like a glove. Blood spattered me as she howled,
holding her arm. I rolled away and crawled for the door, gasping for breath. She grabbed my foot, and every ounce of self-preservation
responded.

I kicked her in the face, slamming the cartilage of her nose into her brain with a sickening crunch, and scrambled into the
hallway, retching.

I crawled farther, desperately wanting away from that room, her body. The shock hit and I collapsed into a ball, shuddering
and terrified. My God, I’d just killed a human being, an earthling.

When I opened my eyes later, I saw a blue spectral glow. Carved into the bedrock of Jerusalem was a portal. Shining beams
of azure, turquoise, and robin’s-egg blue filtered around the room. RaEm had said it was tonight; possibly this was the only
truth she’d ever told. Now was the choice to go? This was the compensation for being born on the unluckiest day of the year?
To travel now? Now? I was too weak to move, too exhausted to care. Now was the time?

I stared, hypnotizing myself, for hours or minutes, I didn’t know. I heard my name, one of the many I’d come to own, bouncing
through the limestone caverns.

“Chloe, Chloe?
Mon Dieu!”

Then he was kneeling before me, sweaty but alive. Cheftu looked over his shoulder and swore. N’tan had halted in the doorway.
“My people, for generations we have heard of this, to see it is …” He trailed off.

“RaEm is—,” I croaked. “We know.”

“I killed her.”

“She was dying,
chère.”

“Dion?”

Cheftu sighed. “Vanished.”

There was something else, something niggling. “The Ark is okay?” My voice sounded awful from RaEm’s attempt to strangle me.

“Sealed, the Tabernacle rebuilt around it.”

Then it hit me again: the knowledge, the bizarre understanding I had of science. “Defuse the Ark,” I said.

Cheftu glanced at the portal. “How do you mean?”

“It’s a bomb, waiting to blow. The fleas could get out any time it’s opened, right?”

N’tan nodded. “Then take them out.”

“Tell me how,” the
tzadik
said.

Cheftu and I spoke in symphony. “Remove the manna and the rod.”

“Why do you say that?” I whispered, stunned. “Why do you say that?” he asked me. “It’s biological soup. The fleas have something
to live on, so they stay and grow. Remove their food and they will die. Why did you say that?”

“Because according to Holy Writ, when Solomon puts the Ark in his Temple, only the tablets remain inside.”

It was silent. “Wheels within wheels,” I whispered hoarsely. N’tan slipped away as I stared at Cheftu.

“It is the day,” Cheftu said, squeezing my hand.

I looked over his shoulder at the deepening blue glow. “Do you want to?”

He sighed. “It is a hard thing to choose. Here, we have everything.”

“Yep. A home.”

“More than that,
chérie
, each other.” He turned me around, facing him. “And the freedom to worship the One God. Never before have we known that.”

I spiraled his sidelock around my finger, weak but needing to touch. “You like being Jewish?”

He smiled, a flash of white in his dark beard. “We are not Jewish, we are living in the Jewish nation.”

“You do have an incredible job,” I mused. “You can do anything you want,” he countered. “You are a darling of the court.”

“But do we belong here?”

He kissed me deeply, completely, holding me up so that I didn’t slide out of his grasp. “Do we belong anywhere?” he asked.

The glow was brighter, deeper, now reaching across this white stone room to touch Cheftu’s face, giving him an alien visage.
“I hope so. It’s depressing to think we may never belong.”

“Lo, chérie
, you do not understand me. Do we belong anywhere, I ask, because we can step into everywhere. Not many people can know all
you know of the future and not use it.”

Witness RaEm.

“Not many people could take in stride changing bodies, learning new societies, new religions, new languages.” He looked at
me, holding my face so that I too glowed in blue light. “This is our chance. Say it and we will stay. We will live in Tziyon,
we will worship the One God, we will raise our children and make love in our fields and travel to other courts, anything you
like.”

I frowned, shifting my eyes away from his imploring gaze. “Why is it my choice?” From here I could see the etching on the
stone, though I couldn’t read it. Was that a sign in and of itself? Was this it for our grand time-traveling careers? “Would
we get bored here? Is there another war or something we need to be careful of? How do you know all these languages, anyway?”
I said, hyperaware but exhausted to my bones. “Do you have a lexicon, too?”

Cheftu shrugged. “No wars that I recall. I know the languages because they are related linguistically.” He frowned. “I do
not know of this lexicon, however.”

I sighed. “What is the point in staying?”

My husband tugged at his side curl. “Somehow, Akhenaten got a psalm of David and rewrote it. I would like to know how.”

“That’s easy. They corresponded for years.”

“How do you know that?”

“My sister. Sometime in my century a bunch of stone tablets were found, letters between Egypt and places in Israel. It’s the
first mention of Israel, I think.”

Cheftu sat down with a thump. “
Ach
, well, there went my reason for staying.”

I chuckled weakly, a raspy sound. The light beckoned. “How can we know?” I mused.

“Any decision we make is not permanent,” Cheftu said. “Every year we can stand here and choose again.”

“Unless we have kids.”

He frowned, repeating my English. “Baby goats?”

I laughed. “Children.
Yeladim
.”

He tugged at his beard. “
Ken
, that would be a hard judgment.”

What did I want? Here, where we had everything?

When I’d jumped from 1996 last year into this crazy world of mermaid-goddesses, biblical characters, and firing Arks, all
I’d wanted was to find Cheftu and live with him. Could I be sure that I would find him again? If we jumped, would we both
make it through? Would we be together or would we have to find each other? “This is the closest thing to forever we have,”
I said. “We know the answers here; what to do, where to live, where to work.”