Chapter One

The Journal of Scarabus the Damned - October 25

Call me Scarabus. Call me the damned. For the gods have set life apart from me.

I am writing this in the early evening and I want to begin the account of my life and existence by telling you what I am. And what I am not. I shall live forever, and perhaps beyond forever, but I am not a vampire. At least, I am not a vampire in any conventional sense of the word. I eat human flesh, but I do not consume human blood exclusively. I rest by day in a stone coffin because strong sunlight disturbs me. I may change my shape, but it is nothing like a wolf or a bat.

Let me personalize the portrait of myself to you. I am shy the six foot mark by a mere inch, which is really quite tall by Egyptian standards. This is partly due to my heritage. I had a true Egyptian father, but my mother was a Cushite noblewoman who fell out of favor with the king she was sent by her people to wed and was forced to take a common husband. Therefore, my skin is nearer to the sable of the Cush and my features the hawkish chisel of the Nile-dweller. The overall effect, I have been told, is one of indefinable origin. I have been called a marvel of nature's architecture by Queen Nefertiti, herself a great beauty, so I will leave it at that.

In this time and place I have a particular fondness for black linen trousers and red smoking jackets and red slippers when I am home, only somewhat more elaborate dress when I am going out or abroad. The only clothes I can wear, or want to, are organic. And except for the massive scarab beetle of green jasper set in gold that I wear on my left index finger, I usually avoid jewelry altogether.

Normally, I retain the form of a man. But when I am resting or feeding, or my ba--the essence of my soul--is otherwise engaged, my body disintegrates into that form which honors immortality, that of a mass of scarab beetles equal to my own body weight. I weighed approximately 150 pounds when I died, and death through the awful beauty of immortality has preserved me exactly as I was on that day so very long ago. And if you have ever observed a beetle of any type, or picked one up, you know how light they are. When in my ba state, I generate an enormous amount of beetles, all of them ravenously hungry and consuming more than ten times their own body weight daily.

And what they consume is flesh. Not to be confused with the common dung beetle, the great scarab is extinct. And perhaps for good reason, since they were desert scavengers, consuming the nomadic flesh of both the dead and the dying at a more fearsome rate than any maggot I have ever heard of. I am their vessel; therefore, I must consume human flesh. There is simply no other way to satisfy the ba. And the ba, if ignored, will visit upon its host terrible agonies and nightmares until it is recognized and fulfilled.

I have asked you to call me Scarabus because it is the name given to me by my creators. It is a name which, when loosely translated to English, means something like Son or Vessel of Scarabaeous. Scarabaeous is one of the lesser-known Ancient Egyptian Forbidden gods, and his cult, the Scarabae, have remained undiscovered by clever archaeologists even to this day.

But I do not want to get ahead of my story by talking about Scarabaeous or his powers or influence. The fiend's story will surface eventually, of that I have no doubt. I want to tell you about me.

Like I said, though I share some essential characteristics with the legends of many cultures which exonerate werewolves and vampires and such other aberrant creatures of darkness, I am really none of those things. I have lived for over three thousand years, and yet I have never come across another of my kind. I have never, in fact, come across any other supernatural creature in all the world.

Therefore, I am an original.

I am Scarabus the Deathbringer.

Scarabus the Damned.

And it is as Scarabus that I wish you to think of me.

Once I would have balked and struck a person dead who called me Scarabus. But since then I have mellowed. I have accepted. Like a dying prey animal does not fight the jaws of the predator killing it, so have I accepted my fate. I do not balk anymore and I do not strike people down without reason. And after so many long years as the Vessel of Scarabaeous, I sometimes awaken in the evenings and have to remember what my true name, my first name, was.

My sarcophagus, the place where I rest and replenish my ba daily, is very grand. It is rectangular as were all the coffins in the time of the Old Kingdom, when it was designed, and it is made of sandstone mixed with gold. The entire thing gleams like old copper and is completely covered in symbols of power, eyes of Horus, ankhs, hieroglyphs and hieratic writings describing my powers and warning against intrusion. Without my sarcophagus, I suffer horrid delusions and pains. When I was cursed, the ones who made me were certain to bind me to my place of rest as a precaution against escape. They did not know what I was capable of, or that I would take it with me wherever I roamed.

Presently, the coffin sits in the gallery under my home, a hundred feet removed from the intrusion of light or life or bustle which only irritates me intensely when I'm sleeping. Even my servant Abdel will not disturb me. When I rest he takes pains to drive visitors away; he takes my mail and phone calls and handles other such household duties. I do not lock the doors leading into my burial chamber. I trust Abdel like my own personal Renfield. But even had a day arrived when I could not, I would hardly be in any danger. The lid alone of my sarcophagus weighs in excess of two thousand pounds. And even had several men conspired to move it off its track and wreck vengeance on this thing called the Demon Scarabus, they would find inside nothing they could kill. Nothing that would die.

Things like me do not die easily.

And sometimes, they will not die at all.

But no, I have never had cause to worry over Abdel's loyalty. Abdel hails from a long proud line dating back to the time of Nefertari, the loyal handmaiden who chose to be interred with her queen, rather than suffer without her. Abdel has served me for close to eighty years, and, a true saint, he has taken every one of my temper tantrums in stride. His father before him, Naan, served me for eighty-six years without fault. Abdel's son Hassan is slated to join us here at the house in four years, after completing his education at Cambridge. And in that way, he will begin his training as successor to Abdel--though I must say I will mourn the day Abdel leaves me for the Afterlife. I have lost so many servants, but it never gets any easier. Already I have commissioned a trusted stonemason out of El Gizeh to create the coffin which will hold my servant's ba. And when it is complete, when the vessel is covered in pictures of my servant's life, I will have it shipped to me and here it will sit in my gallery until the day when Abdel must occupy it. When Abdel goes to that coffin it will be beside the intricate coffins of his predecessors, those who have served me well in the New World.

Yes, I know: Where, you might ask, do you find a house in metropolitan Chicago with a gallery and burial chamber? Well, my answer to you is: You build it.

And so I did. On the heels of the Great Fire, when the city received an unprecedented boost to the professional and artistic development of the nation's architecture, I commissioned an exceptionally talented lad named Daniel Burnham to build me a mansion out of the rubble. It was in fact Burnham who laid the grid for this "Paris on the Prairie" and I could not have been more impressed by his work. It is very modern, my home, very Americana. It belongs on the cover of the Saturday Night Evening Post--and was, in fact, the inspiration for one of Rockford's lesser known works. But it was the self-made purposes of lads like Burnham--and later, Frank Lloyd Wright--to wage a single-handed battle against the ornamental excesses of architecture, Victorian in particular. And in a more positive vein, the goal was to create a new form at once pleasing to behold as well as functional and appropriate to its natural setting. You would pass my home, as grand as it is, with scarcely noticing it. Which is just fine for my purposes. I do not need architectural groupies skulking around my home. And should I have a yen for some of the outlandish excesses of the homeland, I need only visit my gallery with its hand-painted murals of gardens and palaces, the burial chamber with its accumulated treasures, or the adjoining study full of ancient texts written on papyrus and stone and clay.

But I do not grow homesick often. Though I am even to this day not entirely certain what a Scarabus is, I do know he is quite adaptable. A modern in every sense of the word. Why, right now, I am composing this journal on my top-of-the-line Pentium Processor. I have a widescreen television on my lounge wall as thick as a book, and with it an accompanying DVD player, a complete pipeline stereo system so I can listen to Richard Wagner anywhere in the house, and all the other modern facilities associated with a man of the New Millennium. Electronics with their microprocessor minds and bodies of steel and cable are fascinating things. How much easier such things would have made life in my time. But then, I am an artist by trade, and so I belong to the school of marauding belief begun with Ford and other industrials that states that the mundane things of life should be dumped into the laps of our machines so we might pursue higher learning and beauty more freely. Well, in practice we spend most of our time fixing that errant microwave or telephone, so the theory that machines can set us free in obvious bunk.

But theories are idealistic, and sometimes ideals are all we need. I am Scarabus, but I am also a man--or at least, a part of me still is--and so I am fallible. I am susceptible to all kinds of theories and philosophies. Because you are damned does not mean that you cease to think and conjure ideas. I thought a great deal as a youth, and not a lot has changed about me now that I am living my Afterlife on earth. Somehow I thought it would be different. I had this idea that I would transform by every turn of history into some creature completely new. But such hasn't been my experience. I can adapt, but I cannot transform. The world changes, but in me there is no change. If you knew me as a bright and somewhat impetuous youth, and could meet me now, you would see the same entity. My body has changed and my ba has been tainted, but my mind remains intact. If I close my eyes, I can almost hear my brother laughing, or my wife singing, her slender fingers falling eloquently over the strings of a harp. I can still hear the geese squabbling in the family pond among the lotus petals. My past is yesterday.

Perhaps that is the reason I can write this account so free and truthfully. I am not calling back; I am calling forth. And the bas of those who have gone before me are always near.

I do not really know why I have waited so long to tell my tale. I can say what I am writing here is a selective account of my life and Afterlife to set my ideas in stone, so to speak, or to reexamine my beliefs. I can say it is a simple vanity that I was not ready until this very moment to begin, but I do not believe in my heart that any of those reasons is true.

I believe it was the woman in white fur, the one the numbers took last evening. She was victim number 1,999,999. I know she was; I have a natural counter inside of me. And that number terrifies me. At one time, there were that many people in all of Thebes. In my lifetime I have killed not a mass, not a crowd, but a population. And though I am not responsible for how I became this thing, Scarabus, I do know I am responsible for what I have done with it. I am responsible if for no other reason than because there is no one else alive to blame. I have outlived friends and foes. I have outlived nations.

But I cannot outlive what has been done to me, what I have done. I would be lying to say I feel guilt for the lives I have taken. No repentant vampire heart have I. I do not love man enough to mourn his destruction. But my aesthetic eye is offended by such mass destruction. I am not merely a monster, I am a sociopath. I am a destroyer of mass quantity, and such an idea offends me. Once I created beautiful everlasting things, things all my village adored. Things which pleased my family. But now what has happened? How can anyone admire what I have done?

This isn't the way it was supposed to be. I was married and I was to paint tombs for my people until that day arrived when I was interred the same as they. But then everything was turned about. Everything went wrong. There was my brother's good/bad fortune and that awful scribe Tuthmosis...

But again, I'm getting ahead of myself.

I want to begin at the beginning. I want to tell you about Egypt. I want to tell you about a land that to my eyes was infinite in its splendor and riches. I want to tell you what it was like to live there as a lad when the Great Pyramid loomed like a god above us, four times larger than the present-day pyramid of the same name, and how it filled me with wonder. Covered in glistening ivory and capped in gold, it stole away my breath every day upon awakening. And I a native. In those days the Nile was cool and sweet and untainted. I do not know what has become of it now. But these are the things I want to remember. I want to recall them. I want to glory in them.

And a glory it was. Oh those mummy films have misled you! There was no desert in my time, only lushness and green and Sirius shining in late June to signify the swelling of the Nile. And then came the flood soaking all the land and renewing it with life-giving silt. Joy was shared by everyone in Egypt from the lowliest farmer to the fishermen and hunters, from the women weaving flax and brewing beer to the priests who honored our gods in sprawling stone complexes, from the lowliest slave to the most powerful families living in splendor on immense estates. Even His Majesty the King, the vessel of Amun's ka on earth, who could command the building of an entire city or a towering monument to hold his sacred ka for all eternity, put off official duties to declare the new year and festivals of prayer and thanks.

All of us were dependent on the Nile. But nowhere did anyone have such joy as my father. A good flood meant a good crop, and a good crop meant there would be excess wheat and barley to be traded for those things at market that his wife and children were wanting for. In that time my name was Tjanefer and I lived with my older brother Paneb and his wife Hatshepsut and my father's third wife Ipuy. As custom dictated, a married man usually made himself and his wife a home apart from his parents, but we were so poor and the crops for so many years bad that Paneb had chosen to remain with our father to help with the planting.

Father's land was located on the west bank near the village of Nebeseyet, and when the soil was ripe he was radiant. He would send me and Paneb out to plow the fields with a couple of oxen borrowed from a neighbor and a plow so old it scarcely worked anymore and he would say things like "Make haste, my boys, make the most of my land! Dig it with your noses if you must!"

Paneb grumbled the whole while. "Who does he think he is? Do I look like a slave to you, Jan?" he asked me one day as he whipped the oxen on through a knotty bit of earth beset by roots.

I laughed and scattered the barley seeds along the last row Paneb had furrowed. I laughed often in those days because I was essentially a very happy lad. We weren't rich people, but I did not know what being rich was like. I had never been exposed to wealth. I simply knew our life and my family and loved them both. I said to my brother that day, "He trusts you, Pan. Do you know what an honor that is?"

"What, that Father trusts someone besides himself?"

"He won't even let me run the goats."

"Lucky little bastard."

I jabbed him hard in the ribs and Paneb licked his palm and cowlicked my hair in revenge. We roughhoused as we went alone, getting ourselves muddy and distorting the furrow almost beyond use. We were hellions, Pan and I. But I couldn't have made a better brother for myself than Pan if I'd had the plans. Pan's mother died in childbirth, and my own died when I was five years old, and so with Ipuy more or less resenting the children who were not her own, and Father's frequent jaunts out of town as a courier to the priests at Karnak to make up for the poor harvests, Paneb was really the only one in my household I had to talk to.

And it depressed me a little as we went along, trying to fix the mess we had made of Father's field, because I knew that soon I would be completely alone. Our father, on a run the year before, had met a man named Neferhotep in need of a foreman for his quarry. A few weeks later the old stonemason visited our farm. I remember the sight of him standing there dressed like a king in a heavy wool cloak and sparkling red leather slippers and the rich embroidery glinting on his fine pleated linen robe. And the way he had gestured toward the busts Paneb had chiseled from chunks of stone he had found in our fields had made my heart both soar and sink.

I knew then that I would lose Paneb. Well aware that there would be a considerable improvement in his son's status, Father gave his consent for Paneb's adoption by the childless stonemason. Not that I would begrudge Pan's great success, mind you, but my brother leaving me frightened me more than a little. Father was gone more often these days, something to do with trouble at the Temple at Karnak I'd been told, and that would leave me hanging around the farm with Ipuy casting her cold eye on me wherever I went.

I did not wish to be a farmer and live with my stepmother for the rest of my life. I was a young strong boy of almost eighteen summers and I had ambition. I wanted to be a scribe or tomb painter. At night, lying on my earthen cot, I could imagine myself as a learned scribe counting the larder for the priests at the vast religious complex at Karnak. Or, if they wouldn't have me, then painting beautiful hieratic writing on the walls of a nobleman's tomb. Something beautiful and important. I wanted to be someone!

And like Paneb, I knew I had the talent to do it. My family loved the murals I had painted across the stone walls of our little farmhouse, the stylized groves of fruit trees and the grand gardens full of lotus plants and pond geese and frolicking cats which I so loved. Father often winked when he saw some new mural of mine and said someday I would be discovered for the talent I had. "Meanwhile, son, take the plow and sow that field with barley!" he would say, or, "Take down that bow and quiver of yours and use that keen eye to bring us a fat goose for supper!" Oddly enough, I never detected the sinister look in his eyes when he mentioned the bow and quiver, and never thought much of it until much later, when everything had come to pass.

My future was a ferocious familial debate, much as it is for many young men even today. Father wanted me to join the king's army as a bowman; Ipuy wanted me to marry and settle a farm as far from her as I could; Hatshepsut said once "Wouldn't it be nice to have a pharmacist in the family?" even as she patted the ever increasing gibbous of her stomach. Only Paneb was there to rescue me. Why, in the midst of one of these many passionate debates, he actually stood up in the middle of supper in our dining room and said, "Well, Jan, the floor is yours. What do you want to do with the rest of your life?"

I looked at each of them in turn, embarrassed. I don't know, I wanted to say, except I suspected that would make me look indecisive in Father's eyes. And you didn't want that. You never wanted our father to think you didn't have life by both reins. And so I told the truth and regretted it ever since. I said, "A scribe maybe. Or a tomb painter. Probably a tomb painter."

My father chewed his dried catfish and said nothing to my declaration. But I sensed his wrath. His child as a graffiti artist on the wall of some nobleman's mausoleum! he was thinking.

Oh it wasn't that artistry wasn't highly prized and artists weren't well paid by the kingdom. It wasn't like that at all. But to be an artist you needed lineage and more than a little luck--or a good connection. It was much like it is today. Your name sold your services. And who was this man Tjanefer? A peasant boy with his head full of silly ambition! I could almost see the words forming in the air over my father's shaven head.

I went directly to our sleeping chamber and crawled into bed. I think I probably cried. I don't remember. I do remember awakening to Paneb sitting on the edge of my cot, watching me in the dark with what my mother used to call a listening silence.

"Don't listen to Father," he said. "He wants you to be an army man so he can feel important."

"Father didn't say anything," I responded.

"He's a blowhard, the bastard. Father thinks everything is fore written and we're just destiny's victim, you know? But you're different, Tjanefer. You're like me. You don't believe the gods run roughshod over our lives. You'll be truly great someday. You'll be immortalized. I promise."

I smiled at that. My brother always amused me. I loved him more than anyone.

But then I looked about our sleeping chamber, the stone and earthen walls and old woven mats coming undone on the floor, and I felt a crashing wave of despair that I'd never experienced before wash over me. It was a horrible thing. Sometime in the last year I had begun falling out of love with my life. "I have to get out of here, Pan," I said.

"I know you do. That's why I'm giving you a surprise."

I reached down under my cot immediately and began scrambling around, looking for what Paneb had bought me. Paneb always bought me things, even when the crop was so bad we had to go on one meal a day. As a child it was things from the market in town, juggling balls and dolls carved from wooden paddles--and even, once, a really sophisticated wooden cat with a mouth that moved when you pulled a string. Later it was things like my bow. And he always hid them under my cot, which made the discovery that much more exciting.

But the thing I discovered this time was not a toy or weapon. It was scraps of papyrus affixed to a palette equipped with a slot holding five good if slightly abused-looking reed pens. I looked at the thing in my hands for perhaps five minutes, wondering if it was real or if I was only dreaming this. I pinched my thigh. No, it was real. I appeared to be wide-awake.

"I was going to wait until your birthday, but that's a whole six months away," Paneb said. "And I thought you ought to get going. Reading and writing is difficult."

And virtually forbidden. You see, in my time, the mysteries of letters could be deciphered by only a select few. Perhaps one in a hundred Egyptians could read and write--a fact that endowed scribes with enormous amounts of prestige and power. There was absolutely no job without an overseer except the scribe's. And the opportunity to strive for that position only came to those who were powerful by birth or lucky enough to be adopted by a family of means. Peasant boys like myself, the sons of barley farmers, did not learn to read and write. And neither were they allowed to purchase such items.

"Neferhotep gave you these, didn't he?" I asked my brother.

Paneb smiled, his smile burning like a string of pearls in the dark. "Before he left last year he said he wanted his foreman educated."

"And you didn't tell Father?"

"No! Would you?"

"No, of course not!" I agreed and moved closer to my brother.

He showed me a few pieces of papyrus and pointed out the hieratic writing on them, the scrawling script beautiful and mysterious to behold. Not all the papyrus was used, but Paneb said I should use bits of pottery and stones at first to perfect my skills, the way real students did. And then one day he and I would be able to write letters back and forth to one another. And when he went to live in Neferhotep's house, he said, he would show his mentor my beautiful script and maybe Neferhotep would adopt me too someday as a scribe. He said Neferhotep was a fair man who was always in need of a good scribe. And if the god's granted Paneb the opportunity, he'd have his mentor send for me as soon as he could.

And then he told me quite seriously to get off the cot.

"What?"

"Get off the cot!" Paneb said with a grin. "You're not going to sleep there without protection are you?"

Mother had done this for me when I was very young, and it seemed all my life Paneb had felt compelled to carry on the tradition. "I don't believe in Scarabaeous," I told my brother.

"No?" My brother's voice dropped to a sinister whisper. "And will you believe when Scarabaeous comes in the night and eats all the meat off your bones and you look like Ipuy?" And with that he started to tickle me without mercy. We collapsed against each other, laughing and doing the time-old ritual of chanting the name of the god Scarabaeous over and over, nine times in all, and turning our imaginary scarab rings with each recitation, a sure way to keep the voracious god at bay.

Before he left me, I hugged my brother fiercely. I think I was overwhelmed by the whole thing. To think that maybe I really could aspire to the level of a scribe! It was outrageous...and very appealing. Looking back on that memory, I think it was probably the happiest day of my entire life. I finally had a real goal and real means by which to achieve it. I had no riches, but in that moment I considered myself the most privileged boy on the banks of the Nile.

Now here we were, a year later, my brother and I, churning the field--or trying to--when the awful news came. I knew it was terrible the moment I saw Hatshepsut come running over the field toward her husband, half her hair in plaits. She threw her arms around his neck in joy and in that moment I felt my heart break.

I knew by the glow in her smile that I would at last be losing my brother.

I didn't wait around to listen to the news the courier had brought our house. Instead, I did what I usually did when some catastrophe had beset me: I retreated on foot to the little necropolis on the edge of our town where the wealthy were interred. Long ago, I used to go there to study the beautifully painted frescoes on the insides of the tombs. In my day you didn't have your tomb closed against all things unless you were royalty and your tomb filled with treasure. In my day the tombs of the wealthy and elite were spacious caverns hewn from mountainsides and adorned with painted treasures. Every year we held the Beautiful Feast of the Valley, and the loved ones of the deceased came and left offerings in the mortuaries of those they missed and prayed for them and sang and drank quite a lot of beer in their honor. Since my house was too poor to afford a mortuary chamber, we participated in the festivities in spirit and beer alone. But I still loved to visit the tombs of my neighbors and countrymen. Perhaps it was there that I first got the notion of being a tomb painter into my head. I don't know. But as a young boy they had had a strangely inverted affect on me--instead of sorrow, they brought me enormous joy. Now as a young man I felt still that memory of joy, but the memory was tainted with melancholy. In some strange turnaround, the tombs had become the place I wanted to visit when I wanted to be alone with my sorrow or myself.

The last time I had visited the necropolis was when my cat Khufu died on me. And I hadn't visited the necropolis because I was mourning Khufu, but because I was angry with him for leaving me. In those days I had more anger than sorrow for those who had deserted me. I understand that now. And now here I was, sitting on a sarcophagus in the corner of a neighbor's tomb where someone had been kind enough to light a torch, and scribbling across a piece of clay I had hoarded. In the time I had begun my studies I had learned all of the hieratic writing and many of the hieroglyphs that I knew historians sometimes still used on special occasions. I was very proud of my work.

"You're sitting on Uncle Hesire, you know," a voice cut into my bitter independent reverie.

I looked up and spotted a willowy figure limned in the firelight of the torch. She was dressed in a linen gown that fell shimmering to her delicate little feet. In her arms she carried a knot of lotus flowers on long stems. She tilted her head and her shoulder-length hair brushed the tops of her breasts and caught the light and glinted like blue flame.

"Bast's breath, don't do that to a man, Miw," I said.

Miw laughed and stepped forward. She posed for me, showing to full advantage all the supple charms of her beauty. "And are you a man?" she teased me.

I looked on Miw. Gawked actually. Who could not? With a face like a jewel and all that richness of hair shining like ebony and the light from outside the cavern filtering through her almost sheer linen gown and revealing the splendid figure Amun had granted her, she was like a goddess cast to earth. "If I wasn't," I said shamelessly, "I am now."

It was very difficult to be shy or ashamed with Miw. Her real name was Aneksi and her family neighbored us on the east side. The daughter of a scribe and part-time priest at Karnak, Miw--I called her my "little cat" as a term of complete worship and adoration--came from what today would be called old money. She had an older brother who ranched and kept some of the King's warhorses, but she was no lowborn peasant, the child of a farmer as I was. And yet she hated it, the "insufferable bureaucracy" of her family, as she called it.

How could you feel uncomfortable around a girl brave enough to say such a thing about her own family?

But it was more than that: Miw and I had virtually grown up together. In the winter her father called her to Karnak to her studies. But during the summer months she was free to aid her brother with the horses or anything else she wanted to do. And anything else usually entailed ganging a group of local children together so we could build forts of mud and stones and pretend to be opposing armies. Miw and I were always on the same side, always the ones throwing mud at our enemies in the end and breaking most of our own rules.

And then suddenly one day we were fourteen years old, Miw and I, and most of the other children were gone to study trades with their fathers and we were alone. That same year her family and my own visited the Valley of the Kings for the spring festival of Opet. And I remember looking on Miw in her long, tight-fitting pleated linen sheath with its short billowy sleeves, her long hair plaited in masses of tiny braids, and thinking, That is not my Miw. It can't be. A woman has replaced her. But of course it was she. Aneksi born of Miw. But Miw also. Miw always.

That was also the summer we went walking down to a little glade late in the evening while our parents were busy celebrating and learned a completely new game, a game full of soft exploring touches and whispered kisses that ended in broken gasps and shivers. For the past four summers we'd been lovers, but had Hathor's blessing enough not to be discovered. It wasn't that premarital sex was frowned down upon by my people, nor even disapproved of exactly. But the fact remained: Miw's father had plans to offer her hand to one of his fellow priests at the Karnak complex, some stodgy old wretch from the sound of him, and he certainly wouldn't want a farmer's boy interfering with his daughter's future. Also, we often used Miw's father's cattle and horses to stamp our seeds deeper into the newly furrowed ground in the planting season to keep the birds from eating most of them, and a neighborhood feud was unthinkable, the last thing my father needed.

So Miw and I had taken a vow. We would enjoy as much of each other as we could for as long as we were able. And the gods and our respective spouses could have the rest.

Miw laid her flowers on Uncle Hesire's coffin and leaned over so see what I had written. "It's not finished," I told her tentatively.

"She looks like the rising day/At the start of a new way of life/Shine bright, o fair one/Lovely the look in your eyes/When I touch your lips before sleep." She rewarded me with a kiss. "I'm flattered."

"What makes you think I'm writing about you, Miw?" I teased her.

She hit me upside the head with one of her flowers. "You better be! O gods, your father didn't do something awful like divorce Ipuy and arrange you to marry her, did he?"

I grabbed Miw in response to that hideous vision and pulled her against me, punishing her by tickling her where she hated it--and loved it--the most. She struggled and laughed and did a little screaming until we were afraid Uncle Hesire would sit up in his coffin and start to knock.

Then I simply held Miw down and kissed her. It was a slow, thorough kiss, the kind that can steal the laughter from a woman's lips and replace it with a sigh. I simply cannot remember kissing a woman like that in so long. When I kiss a woman now, love her, take her, it is always the savage ba at the forefront driving me on. But it was innocent lust and adventure then. It was love. Pure and new. I kissed Miw until she kissed me back, put her hands into my hair and flexed her body up to meet me and give me its message.

I broke the kiss first. I shook my head and smiled on my Miw, my only, only love. "I am obsessed with you," I told her. "But we can't do this on top of Uncle Hesire."

We escaped to our little private glade and there spent the late afternoon swimming in the shallow waters of a duck pond among the lotus blossoms. Miw came up under me and pulled me under; we wrestled under the water, finally surfacing, breathless, in each other's arms. Then she kissed me lingeringly, teased me, all of her brassy wet and irresistible. We retreated to the grassy bank to make our sweet forbidden love. Afterward, I lay holding her, reciting my poetry to her as we gazed up at the sun warming and drying us. I felt at peace, content like a cat with an enormous amount of milk inside him. And here amidst the grass being swished by the wind and the distant squabble of geese on the pond and the softly beautiful scent of a woman so near, I could almost not feel the severance building inside of me, the ache I had known so terribly with Mother's death, and again with Khufu. Someone else would leave me tomorrow.

"What is it?" my Miw asked as she turned over and laid her palm to my face.

I told her about Paneb and how he was going to live in a rich household hundreds of miles away and not be the son of a farmer anymore. Sympathy brimmed in Miw's eyes. "If I could do something, Jan, know that I would. You have an enormous talent with words. You do not belong here." Then she smiled that smile that could so lift my heart. "I'm sure when Pan has earned his master's trust he will have him send for you. Do not give up hope. You are too special to give up hope."

"You sound like Pan," I told her and kissed her with gratitude and desire. I loved her again, just to show her how much she meant to me. And when we finished and Miw, tired, put her head down on my beating heart, that heart beating just for her, I heard her say, "Paint words of love on my family's tomb one day, Jan. I want to sleep under them forever."

I stroked her still-damp hair, wound wet silken strands of it through my fingers. "If I cannot be a scribe, I will paint your family's tomb with pictures of this glade, I swear it."

She looked up at me. Suddenly she looked frightened, and for a moment I feared I had said something improper. Then she said, quite abruptly, "Don't be a scribe."

I frowned. "Why?"

"They might call you to Karnak."

This confused me. Every aspiring scribe wished for Karnak to request his services. I didn't see why I was any different. I didn't understand why I should be.

But Miw shook her head. She was frightened, truly. "Don't go near Karnak, Jan. Please. There's a lot of trouble now."

"What do you mean?" I sat up. "Why is everyone speaking of late as if Karnak is the lion's mouth?"

"You know about the King's reforms?"

I nodded. Of course I did. Everyone from the loftiest bureaucrat to the lowliest farmer knew how the sun king Akhenaten had turned his back on Thebes and the Great Temple of Amun the Hidden One and founded a new cult at his own newly-settled capital. Many said he was devout or simply mad. But for whatever reason, he had abandoned the god Amun of his forefather's and set himself up as cult leader of the Aten, the Sun God--even going so far as to commission hymns to his god. But many were whispering--or so I'd gathered from creeds stationed in town that I could now read--that King Akhenaten was being motivated by more worldly concerns. A desire, perhaps, to increase his own cult status and undermine the powerful priesthood of Amun. But I didn't see how being a scribe could be dangerous.

Miw said, "I overheard my parents talking last week. Father said the King isn't simply content with distancing himself from rival gods and their followers. He wants them demolished completely. He said the King is working at closing all the temples. And the cult of Amun is his prime target. Don't you see what that means?"

I shook my head. "What are you saying, that the priests of Karnak are using all their time and energy to petition the viziers?" I knew they could do that, could petition the King's first officers, even address the King himself if their first attempts failed. But I was certain they would still need scribes. New scribes, my ambitious mind whispered, perhaps with a flourish for words.

Miw's eyes grew large in her little catlike face. "Don't be naive, Jan. They might do more than that!"

I shook my head, but this time with complete and utter confusion. At the time I did not understand what she meant. I did not understand what more there was. A living tribute to my ignorant childhood, I suppose. Our King was the living god on earth, after all.

"Forget I said anything," she murmured and stood up, gathering her gown up and slipping it over her head. "Be a tomb painter, Jan, and be happy. Or farm and be happy. But don't go to Karnak."

I watched her wordlessly as she slipped on her sandals and started off for home. She was but a reed of darkness against the crimson setting sun. Then she turned back, her face hidden in the shadows. "Please don't go to Karnak," she called back. "Please."

# # #

I lingered in the glade thinking about Miw's words. Well into the evening I started out for home. I detoured through the city and watched the vendors packing their wares away for the next day. I had nothing to trade for anything, but when it looked as if one vendor's baboon had trapped itself on a particularly steep rooftop, I whistled up to it and used the technique I had used to get Khufu out of trees to coax it down. The woman gave me bread and beer as a reward for saving her little leashed thief-nabber, and that made an excellent dinner. I thanked the vendor for the supper and moved on, chewing on the remnants of my bread, thinking and re-thinking on Miw's words but unable to make any sense of them.

Please don't go to Karnak.

They might do more than that.

What could be worse than a petition? And what could a group of priests do but petition? For that matter, why was I worrying over this when it was so very unlikely that the proud lofty priests of Karnak would come hungering after a young scholar cum barley farmer named Tjanefer when they had their pick of thousands of eager young well-trained youths? I wanted to laugh at my own incredible vanity and Miw's concern, but something prevented it. It wasn't anything corporeal--more of an intuition. To say it was a premonition was all wrong, because I did not feel endangered, did not even believe Miw for all the respect I had for her. The priests would recognize our god-king as the absolute power, I told myself, and would probably not even bother to address him. I was overreacting.

That decided, I turned my nose toward home. But almost immediately I was stopped by Paneb's familiar voice calling out to me. I turned around and spotted by brother and his mentor Neferhotep in his richness of finery standing outside the doors of a tavern.

They motioned me over. My head swam from the beer and all these random, troublesome thoughts, but I managed to cross the road without hampering the wagon traffic. And when I approached them, Paneb immediately embraced me. He was still ecstatic. Tomorrow he would be a rich man. I suppose I would be excited too. "You little bastard!" he said playfully, clapping me on both shoulders. "Where were you?"

"I took a walk," was all I said.

Neferhotep stepped forward and I was graciously introduced to the stonemason. I bowed low to the man. Neferhotep for his part looked me up and down like a specimen. "A fine-looking young lad," the man commented on me. "Beautiful even. I have heard of you in this town, Tjanefer, second son of Horemhab. Were you not the one compared to Ipuy as blotting out even her infamous beauty?" I felt any hopes I had to ever join my brother at his master's home crumble in that moment. In a subtle way, the man was making it very clear to me that I was not welcomed in his house. If my beauty could outshine Ipuy, what might it do to Neferhotep's own wife?

It had turned out to be such an awful, bizarre day I wanted to weep. And I felt angry. Inexplicably angry. So angry that for a moment I contemplated hitting him, this old shriveled bastard in his overdone garments looking down on me as if...as if I were but an insect to be removed from his path! I stepped up to Neferhotep, my eyes lowered, fists clenching at my sides.

Paneb, sensing the charge in the air, slid in between us. "We were going to visit the tavern to celebrate," he said. "Will you join us in fellowship, Jan?"

Fellowship. I wanted to laugh. Everything had suddenly become too much for me to bear today in the presence of others. I said, "I think I will pass, brother. I wouldn't want to fall under comparison with any of the barmaids at the tavern." But if my less-than-subtle and caustic response affected Neferhotep, he chose not to show it. Holding the old man's haughty, twinkling eyes, I brushed past them both.

I regret the act even today, walking away like that, not joining my brother in his celebration. I regret leaving him in anger and in jealousy. I regret not being with him, talking to him, saying goodbye. I regret it, because it was the last time I ever saw my brother alive.