CHAPTER TWO

The shadows of history I smash to pieces. I change and change and change. I am the things left undone, words unsaid, hearts untouched, seeds unplanted. Look, at the shadow against the wall. It moves as you do. Its hands are yours. Clap them. Stamp your feet. Make your shadow dance. Is the dark all you have to fear?

Dreams. Dreams. All are dreams.

--Excerpt from "The Family", Egyptian Book of the Dead, as translated by Normandi Ellis

The dream came to her soon after she fell asleep, as it had every night since her arrival. Eliana moaned, drawing the blanket up further around her shoulders.

It began the same way it always did, with just a shadow of an image forming in her mind—she was standing on a balcony, overlooking an ancient city, except that the city didn't look ancient; rather, it looked brand new, and bustling with the life force that only a vibrant, growing city exudes. It was evening, and while the moon and stars were out and giving light to the night sky, there were still a number of people out on the city thoroughfares, and even the occasional chariot thundered noisily by. Forsaking the balcony, Eliana turned and entered the room behind her—a sumptuously appointed room, one that bespoke enormous wealth and status. It was her chamber, she knew, but didn't quite know how she came to that knowledge. For being such a vivid dream, more of a vision, really, if one thought about it, it felt strange. It was almost as though she were really there, within the dream, rather than experiencing it through the hazy otherworldliness that usually accompanies the dream experience.

Looking down, it occurred to her that in this dream, she had conjured up a new body for herself, as well as new accommodations. Her skin was darker than its usual tanned, but fair tone; she was taller, as well, and certainly more voluptuously endowed (Well, that's an improvement, at least, she chuckled to herself). Picking up a strand of her hair, she noted the thick, glossy ebony of it—quite a departure from her real, wavy, auburn locks. And yet, she felt at home in this body, as if she and it were old acquaintances, getting to know each other again after a long separation. She'd bet that if she had a mirror at her disposal, she would find that her face was no longer the one she recognized as her own, either; instead, she would be staring at some different, exotic, but hauntingly familiar visage that she knew wasn't her own, but still recognized in some primal way. The robe she was wearing was odd, too, at least for Eliana—a flowing, diaphanous garment made out of almost transparent scarlet silk that moved sinuously with her as she walked about the room, molding itself sleekly to her curves when she stopped.

Leaving off her musings over her changed appearance, Eliana resumed her explorations of the room. It was beautifully appointed, decorated in rich, vibrant jewel tones with gold accents. Ornate statues sat on marble pedestals, icons and carvings adorned the walls, and the air was subtly scented with a spicy musk fragrance. Against one wall of the room, what was obviously the sleeping area drew her attention. A mass of silk curtains and pillows, the bed was not raised far from the floor, but if appearances were to be believed, Eliana thought that this was probably the most comfortable place she would ever sleep in. Not, she thought wryly, that this was a bed that looked like it had been made for sleeping. Rather, it looked as though it had been designed to call into reality every sexual fantasy a girl ever had. It was definitely a bed for making love.

Eliana's musings were cut short by the sound of the door being quietly opened and just as quietly shut, and the whispered sound of sandaled feet crossing the room. Turning, she expected to see a servant, or a slave, or…certainly not what she saw. She caught her breath. Walking towards her was the most breathtakingly stunning, dangerously handsome man she had ever seen. Easily over six feet tall, with well-defined yet subtle musculature, he exuded animal grace and magnetism. He seemed powerful, too, but the power he possessed was not that of weapons and armament, but the more subtle power of presence and intellect. How she knew that, Eliana hadn't a clue, but she was as certain of it as she was certain of her own name. This man's very being bespoke power carefully and relentlessly controlled and channeled.

His long stride carried him quickly across the room, causing his black robe to billow out behind him. Eliana, having grown up in the home of an Egyptologist, recognized his garments as the trappings of a priest, from the scarab pectoral he wore to the fine white linen of his loincloth, visible through the open front of the robe. As was the custom among priests of ancient Egypt, his head was shaved, and likewise, the rest of his body was hairless as well. Though it was a custom at odds with what Eliana was used to, she found that it didn't detract from his masculinity at all—rather, he appeared as glorious as a pagan god, a perfect bronzed sculpture somehow miraculously come to life. As he closed the distance between them, she saw that the robe he wore was of the finest ebony silk, shot through with strands of purest gold. But it was his eyes that held her—eyes that gleamed a warm, rich, golden brown, eyes that danced with pleasure as he neared her, eyes that trapped her very soul and seemed to cause her heart to stop in mid-beat. Breathe, Eliana, breathe, she reminded herself, as she mentally shook her head to clear the trance that just watching him walk across the room had induced in her. If watching him walk was this mesmerizing, whatever would happen if he touched her…

Coming to a halt not more than eighteen inches from her, the priest smiled down at Eliana, a small, sardonic twist of his full lips that could have been mocking, had it not been warmed by the gleam of affection in his eyes, and the warmth of the words he spoke.

"You appear shocked, my love," he teased. "Did I not tell you that I would come to you this evening?"

Lifting his hand, the priest reached towards her face. Eliana reflexively closed her eyes, expecting to feel the warmth of his hand against her cheek. When the expected contact did not come, she opened them again, only to see him tracing some gesture in the air in front of her. It was curious, she thought—a gesture that looked almost like a caress, but didn't come close to touching. A simple arc, traced in the air in front of her face, but for all its lack of bodily contact, one of the most surprisingly erotic gestures she had ever witnessed.

Sensing that he was waiting for her to do something, respond in some way, Eliana simply copied the gesture he had made, caressing the air in front of him in a similar fashion, hoping that she had done it correctly. Apparently she had, as his smile grew broader, and he captured her hand between both of his. His grip was warm, and strong, and surprisingly powerful, and the feel of his long, elegant fingers enchanted Eliana as they caressed and massaged hers.

Capturing her other hand, he lowered his head and pressed warm, soft lips to the palm of each in a gentle kiss. They stood like that for endless moments, Eliana with her hands imprisoned, totally enchanted and holding her breath for fear of spoiling the moment, and the priest, who seemed simply to be enjoying the nearness of her and the feel of her palm beneath his lips. In the end, it was he who ended the caress, lifting her hands and placing them against his smooth, well-muscled chest, while he, in turn, ran his strong, warm hands up her arms, pausing briefly to massage her shoulders. With the smallest of tugs, he gently pulled her towards him and erased the distance between them to the merest whisper of space.

Looking up, Eliana saw several emotions flicker through his eyes, in quick succession—passion, longing, tenderness, and lastly, a lingering sadness.

"It has been too long since we have been together, my love," he said, his thumbs moving in slow, smooth circles on her upper arms.

His voice was a rich, deep baritone that sent shivers coursing down Eliana's spine. Its pitch was deep, lovely, almost musical in its intonation and cadence, and he was speaking a language that she knew to be different than her native English; different even than the other languages she was fluent in. She knew the language, knew the words he was speaking to her, but what was it? She couldn't put her finger on it, but she knew the words…It was almost as if she hadn't heard the language actually being spoken before, just knew what they were in an academic sort of way, as if she were reading them, or...

That was it! Suddenly, Eliana's mind worked out the answer to the puzzle—Egyptian! Ancient Egyptian, specifically, and the difference it made to actually hear the words being spoken, rather than simply reading them off dry, old papyrus was amazing! The linguist in her had a thousand questions, but before she could give voice to even one, the priest pulled her to him completely and lowered his lips to hers, and any thoughts she might have entertained about a lesson in Ancient Egyptian winged away as quickly as they had come.

The feel of those warm, full lips moving over hers drove every bit of rational thought out of Eliana's mind, and before she even stopped to think about it, she had twined her arms around his neck and pulled him closer. His tongue teased the corners of her mouth and his teeth nipped at her full lower lip, and all the while his hands were sliding sensuously over the silk-covered planes of her back and hips. She could feel every inch of his body pressed against hers, from the well-muscled expanse of his chest to the rock hard columns of his thighs, to the hard ridge of his desire, straining towards her through the linen of his garment and the silk of hers. Wordlessly, recognizing her hunger, he deepened the kiss, forcing her lips open and driving his tongue inside her mouth to mate with hers. His tongue swirled around hers, exploring the contours of her mouth, her teeth, the inside of her lips. It mimicked the act of sex itself, plunging deep, then withdrawing, only to thrust inside once again. Eliana had never been kissed like this before in her life, yet she responded to this man's kiss like her soul had always known his touch and she answered his possession like too dry kindling in the presence of a lighted match—she simply went up in flames.

She groaned into his mouth, and he swallowed the sound, his hands still on their mission of exploration over her body. Roaming freely, they molded her flesh through the silk of her robe, moving up and around from her back to her ribs, and finally, finally, he moved them to cup her breasts through the sheer fabric of her robe. Eliana pressed herself into him, her breasts filling his hands, her hips and legs moving against him in an age-old message of invitation, which he was only too happy to accept.

His thumbs made slow, erotic circles on the sensitive tips of her breasts, her nipples hard and swollen and aching for him. The slow, massaging rhythm of his hands was in harmony with the movement of his mouth on hers, and Eliana felt heat pooling in her, making her legs weak, her skin hot, and her body throb for fulfillment.

Her hands, too, moved over him, learning the breadth and strength of his shoulders, the sinewy hardness of his upper arms, the smoothness of his strongly muscled chest. His skin was warm to the touch, she could feel his heart beating, hard and fast, and she gloried in the way her touch was affecting him. She wanted to touch him everywhere, as he was touching her, to build in him the raging fire of desire that he was building in her.

Breaking the kiss, the priest lifted his head away from her and looked down into her eyes, his own blazing with a fierceness that should have frightened her, but instead made her even hungrier for his touch. His eyes never leaving hers, he moved his hands to the fastening of her robe, untying it and letting it fall loose around her. She felt the silk of the garment slide down over her shoulders, down her arms, and finally slip the rest of the way down her body, to puddle around her feet on the floor. She raised her own hands to his shoulders, pushing the gold-threaded garment he wore out of her way, and pressing her lips to the golden expanse of skin she had bared. Looking up, she smiled at him, and saw his eyes blaze with desire.

He made a growling sound, deep in his throat, and before she knew what had happened, he had swung her up into his arms and was carrying her towards the cushioned softness of the bed. Her arms looped around the strong column of his neck, she watched with heavy-lidded eyes as he gently laid her down among the linen sheets and silk pillows, and stripped off his linen loincloth. As he bared himself to her, Eliana's eyes widened in shocked appreciation for how compellingly handsome he was. His body was tall and lean, but strong and well proportioned, with broad shoulders tapering to a trim abdomen, narrow hips and long, well-muscled legs. His skin was a golden tan, smooth-textured and infinitely touchable—and how she longed to touch every inch of him! Clothed, he was breathtaking, mesmerizing, but naked, he was the image of a god come to life. She couldn't take her eyes off him.

Arching one eyebrow and smiling that small, sardonic smile, which Eliana was coming to realize was a trademark expression of his, the priest knelt down on the bed beside her.

"I trust that everything is to your liking?"

She laughed, appreciating the slightly mocking and ribald humor, but the laughter died in her throat when she saw his eyes grow serious and darken with unquenched passion. Bending his head, he trailed kisses from the corner of her mouth over the line of her jaw and down the length of her neck, moving inexorably closer to her breasts. Eliana whimpered, her hands cradling the nape of his neck, urging him towards his destination. She would die if he didn't touch her soon, simply die…

The door swung open with a crash, and the sound of hurried footsteps crossed the room. Looking up, Eliana saw a gold-painted priest, winded and obviously frightened out of his wits, racing towards them. When the intruder finally realized where the room's inhabitants were, and what they were doing, his steps faltered, and he had the grace to look mortified. He was undeterred however, and rather than leaving, simply turned his back to the bed and its occupants.

"My lord, come quickly," the priest panted. "Seti has returned, and will be here any moment! You must leave at once!"

Cursing, Eliana's would-be lover sprang from the bed, quickly gathering his discarded clothes. His brow was furrowed in furious anger, and his motions as he quickly dressed were a study in barely controlled rage. Eliana simply lay there, not knowing who Seti was or why his impending arrival should cause such alarm. Surely they couldn't be referring to Seti, as in Pharaoh Seti, could they?

Glancing back over his shoulder to where she still lay, her priest cursed again. Waving off his underling, who had obviously been standing guard at the door, he bent to retrieve Eliana's robe from the floor, and hurriedly approached the bed. Gently, he handed her the garment. His face was no longer drawn in lines of anger, but now reflected only frustration and thwarted desire as he once more knelt beside her on the bed.

"You must hurry, my love, and ready yourself. Seti has returned from Karnak and you will no doubt be called to him this evening." He grimaced, obviously frustrated that he could do nothing to change this development, and her heart went out to him. Reaching over, she gently placed her hand over his clenched fist.

"It is all right," she said, and a part of her mind was amazed to discover that she, too, was speaking in the melodic language of the Old Kingdom. "You must leave now, though."

Bowing his head in frustration, the priest sighed. "I know I must, but I had hoped…"

"It matters not what we had hoped, my love," she answered. "You must leave…"

The priest gave her a long, measuring look, and then crushed her to him, plundering her mouth in a kiss of fierce hunger and furious passion. Releasing her at last, he gazed at her again, then softly sighed. With a look of frustrated helplessness on his handsome face, he gently traced that curious, caressing gesture again, then he stood up, turned and strode swiftly from the room, following in the wake left by their hastily retreating would-be guard.

Eliana woke with a start, sweating and frightened. Glancing around to reassure herself that she was, indeed, still within her own tent, which was still within her father's encampment, she felt her breathing finally slow and her racing heart calm. Why? Why had she dreamt again of that man, that priest? Every night since she had arrived at this site, she had dreamt of him. The setting was always just a little different, and the situation always somewhat changed, but the man was eternally, unfailingly, the same. If she closed her eyes, she could still picture his face, the handsome features, the warm, intelligent eyes, and that haunting, mocking half-smile of his. Hell, she didn't even have to close her eyes to call up the image. She was beginning to know it as well as her own.

She knew that she had never met him before, or anyone like him. Now that's obvious, she thought, with a hint of self-mockery. I don't travel in the same circles, or eras, as ancient Egyptian priests. But the feelings that these dreams, this man, aroused in her, resonated somehow within Eliana's soul. Somehow, he seemed more than a dream, more than simply a figment of her imagination. The dreams seemed more than dreams, too, more like…memories.

Scoffing, Eliana discarded that fanciful notion. She was a scientist. She didn't believe in recovered memories from past lives, even though such thinking was all the rage among the New Age circles back home. She was here to do a job. It would last for several months, perhaps, and then she'd be going home, back to America, back to her work there. The only men she would likely encounter out here would be scruffy, sweating ones who were either being paid to dig in the sand or were paying people to dig in the sand; or maybe, if she was really lucky, she'd even run into a handful of Middle Eastern bureaucrats. She certainly wouldn't be meeting up with anyone like the man in her dreams.

Rolling over and pulling the blankets around her to protect from the cold night air, Eliana went back to sleep, dismissing the recurring dreams as sheer fancy, brought on by the exotic location and the sheer boredom of sitting around waiting for the dig to get started.

In the sand far out in the desert, near the site where the crew would start digging, if the Sudanese ever arrived, a scorpion emerged from a tiny hole in the desert floor and scuttled off across the sand in search of prey.

Agony. Grief. Despair. Endless loss. The pain was unremitting, unrelenting, unforgiving. It had gone on for an eternity, and would last for an eternity still. And yet it was less a physical pain than a spiritual one, since here in the fiery pit of Anubis, physical form lost its meaning and the soul was the only currency of note. Imhotep writhed and fought against the demons that held him, sometimes breaking free of their clawed grasp and managing to run from them for a moment, but never succeeding for long. Indeed, it was almost as though they toyed with him, played this infernal game of cat-and-mouse, laughing and feeding off his agony, and the agony of the others who, like him, had somehow incurred the wrath of the gods and been consigned to this pit of horrors.

Imhotep had been there for endless years; indeed, he had lost track of how long he had been tortured in this hell, for, like flesh, time had no meaning here. It could have been minutes, it could have been millennia—he had no way of knowing, and in truth, it did not matter, as he knew, he felt in his soul, that this would be his only remaining experience for all of eternity.

Agonizing and unceasing though the mental and spiritual torture was, he still had fleeting moments of near lucidity, milliseconds during which his tormented mind and soul would remember bits and pieces of his life before—before this hell, before his damnation, before the Hom-Dai had destroyed whatever chance he might have had to experience the eternal peace he knew awaited the souls of the worthy departed.

His memories were generally too fleeting to be categorized as true flashbacks to concrete events and people—they were more impressions of feelings and thoughts, once felt by him in his human form, than they were anything else. The earliest memories, if they could be called that, were ones of pride and honor, ambition and privilege, the quest for knowledge and power, the bearing of a yoke of great responsibility, and the memories of a life dedicated to a higher calling.

There were other memories of this time, too—again, more impressions than distinct pictures, but still just as potent—the touch of a soft hand, the feel of gentle lips under his, the smell of spice-perfumed skin, the knowledge of a true and eternal love; but along with these came other, darker images—the desperation of hopeless, impotent rage against forces too strong to be challenged openly, the sting of deceit, his own and that of the others he had manipulated into being his accomplices, the guilt of his utter betrayal of a society and an individual that had once been held in high regard, the shame of abandoning ideals and principles once all-important for something else, something more important, but less lofty. Something—no, someone—who had become everything to him, someone more important than his loyalty to his pharaoh, his value for his life, his reverence for his gods, his care for his own soul.

And then, after these, memories of his damnation, when the Med Jai had cursed him with the most unspeakable malediction of their time, the Hom Dai—when he had been physically maimed, imprisoned with thousands of vicious, voracious, flesh-eating scarabs, brutally buried alive, his name and deeds wiped from the books of history and time, and ultimately forged into He Who Shall Not Be Named—a living abomination, a plague upon the earth, a walking reminder of the hell that awaits the damned.

He had been awakened twice from that undeath—the first time he remembered feeling boundless rage, grinding loneliness and a desperation borne of three thousand years of helplessness. He remembered, too, the power he commanded—the power to call forth the elements, to bend the very sands of the desert to his will. Not that it had mattered, for overshadowing it all was a sense of loss, of failure to achieve whatever it was he had been attempting. He had no distinct memory of what that was, but it had been his driving force—the one thing that had kept him somewhat sane during the centuries of his confinement and torture. And he had failed, been consigned once again to the torment of the Hom Dai.

The next time he was called from undeath, he knew that somehow, during the interval between his first awakening and this one, that his goal had somehow been achieved, his desire realized, but not by his hand. He remembered looking down into eyes that shone with love for him, of feeling the burn of requited passion, the joy of love freely given and wholeheartedly returned. And yet, there was the ever present evil taint of what he had become, not a man at all, but some sort of monster, with still-potent powers but a blackened, cursed soul. And she—she was still his love, but somehow not so—and at the end, she had betrayed him utterly.

The sting of that betrayal, her denial of him when he had been stripped of his power, her turning her back on what they had once shared, her refusal to help him when he had freely given his life—no, his soul—up for her, that pain he still carried with him, as fresh as the day it had happened. At times, he believed that the demons in this pit happily allowed memories such as those, as they were as useful for tools of torment as were the demons' own claws and fangs.