Sunrise on the Mediterranean Page 2

  I had gone stiff as a board to stay over his shoulder: he certainly wasn’t holding me! I tensed my legs and tried desperately to keep from swinging out. He grunted and groaned as he pulled us up the ship’s side. Beneath me, the sea, the sailors, and the boat grew smaller and smaller. Suddenly a cold breeze blew across me.

  “Watch out for her gaze,” the climber gasped out as he tossed me down on yet another wooden deck.

  When next I opened my eyes, they were grouped around me. Men in dresses, with hairy knees and fish cologne.

  “HaDerkato,” one of them said slowly, as if speaking to a foreigner. “Welcome aboard Dawn’s Battle.”

  I insulted his heritage beneath my gag; my head was killing me.

  “She curses you,” one of them said.

  I looked at him immediately and they all stepped back, averting their eyes.

  What the hell was going on? “Where’s her tail?” one of them whispered, staring at my bare white legs. Thanks to my streetwalker attire, there was plenty to see. Why was everyone concerned about my tail? How many people actually had—

  Oh, duh, I thought. They pulled me from the sea, they are scared of my voice, they think I’m a mermaid? I couldn’t help it; I started laughing, drooling around my gag as I realized they thought I was a sea siren. I doubled over, howling, deaf to their reactions.

  A mermaid? Oh, this was rich. Priestesses and oracles I have been. Never been a mermaid before.

  Then I sobered.

  Why were they pulling me out of the sea, and who was Dagon?

  And what was this about propitiation?

  As another verse of the Dagon song trickled through my understanding, I remembered. Before I stepped through the red sandstone portal, its lintel inscribed with the words of passage, the words of my final prayer in 1996 were, “Please God, let me find Cheftu. Give me everything I need, especially language, to be with him again.”

  “Dagon, Lord of Corn and Sea …” I understood! My body ran hot, then cold. So if that part of the prayer came true, then Cheftu was here? Somewhere?

  With a shout, we set sail. Still trussed up like a Cornish hen, I watched the sails fill with wind. I heard the slow beat of the timekeeper as the oars creaked and groaned, speeding up. Big ships, square sails, and men in dresses—it was all vaguely familiar.

  But who was Dagon?

  The rhythm of the ship rocked me quietly, even though I was spinning with confusion and discomfort—gags are not comfortable. Then I heard the whispers. They must have thought I was asleep.

  “I don’t understand. Where is her tail?” one man hissed. “She only has it when she’s in the water. How else would Dagon be able to stump her?”

  The first man grunted, “Are you certain she is ha Find?” Although I’d never heard ha before today, somewhere between hearing it and understanding it, I learned that it was “the.” In this case the “the” was a term of honor, as in “the Big Kahuna.”

  “She answered to haDerkato, did she not? Besides, who else would be in the middle of haYam on the day of the Find, if not Dagon’s intended?”

  Ha, the big “the,” and Yam? Yam was sea. Again, the translation was taking place somewhere between my ear and my brain. This time the internal translator wasn’t only explaining the words, but giving me a cultural context as well. To these people the Mediterranean needed no other name, for there was no competition. It was the Sea.

  “Look at her jewelry; do you think she is less than that? No one save the bride of the king of the seas would have such a thing as that. It glows with the light of the moon.”

  “Colorful, too,” the other man mused.

  They must have been talking about my neon jewelry. I fought not to smile.

  “She is very pretty,” the suspicious one said. “Ken.”

  I tried not to blush. “Pity she will die.”

  What? “Ach, well, the desires of Dagon.” “B’seder.”

  They walked away, discussing ropes, as I lay there trying to still my racing heart. Pity about me dying? What was going on? I grappled against my bonds for a moment, irrationally trying to get free, though there was nowhere to go.

  I opened my eyes when it got quiet and was surprised to see that it was dark, yet we were still sailing. Did these people sail all night? Ancient Egyptians were notorious for tying up their ships at dusk, I knew this from personal experience. The Nile was treacherous enough without compounding the problem with a lack of visibility. But the Egyptians didn’t have ships like this.

  A low buzz of activity came from over my shoulders and behind my back. The sailors were moving around the ship quickly, shouting orders—drop sail, double time, then the anticipated drop anchor.

  Stars were sprayed across the blackness of the night. The temperature had dropped too, so now I was freezing. The bonds I wore were almost warming. I lay there shivering as the men ran to and fro. The sound of a skiff falling to the water below startled me. Just seconds later I was hoisted across another man’s shoulder and carried down another rope ladder. I kept my eyes closed. What was unnerving going up in daylight was petrifying going down in the dark with a sailor whose odor of alcohol mingled disagreeably with his aroma of fish guts.

  They stood in the skiff, sailing into the harbor. Consequently my first view of the city, this time, was upside down between a set of hairy knees. Lights sprinkled the hills, lending the scene a sense of being 2-D, like a matte painting for a stage production. Again blood rushed into my head, giving me a headache that throbbed in time with his step. Between my head pounding, his bony shoulder digging into my stomach, and being in a small boat on a rocky sea, upside down, I felt way sick.

  As the revolting taste of hot bile filled my mouth, thump, we were docked. I was handled with the tenderness of a ton of potatoes. I could barely hear the surrounding sailors and merchants compliment the men who had captured me. My ears were ringing as I was dumped into the back of a cart. My hair once again covered my face, and the smell and taste of near vomit stayed on my gag. I was lying on my side, unable to pull myself upright. The cart moved slowly, dragging across rutted dirt paths. Cats, no surprise with our fishy odor, trailed us, swatting at my hair hanging over the edge of the cart.

  Cart. Think, Chloe, you could be figuring out where you are. Why the hell should that matter? I groused back at myself. Cheftu isn’t here, at least not yet, and I’m in my own body with no mental tour guide to wherever I am. Moreover, I think I’m scheduled to be some kind of sacrifice.

  The word propitiation haunted me. I’d spent too many summers attending vacation Bible school to not be nervous. Propitiation was compensating for doing something wrong, trying to work your way back into someone’s good graces.

  I noticed, despite myself, that I was in the back of a two-person, chariot-style cart. I couldn’t tell how many horses it had, I couldn’t see them. All the elements were here, though. Men in dresses, sandals, gods, and horse-drawn chariots.

  I was back in ancient times.

  Cheftu had to be here. He had to be. I just needed to keep my eyes—

  The vehicle stopped so suddenly that I was pitched out, into the dirt. I felt the abrasion on my face, my shoulder. I wanted to cry; I’d been here less than twenty-four hours and already I was bruised. Not to mention tired, hungry, and confused.

  Another man threw me over his shoulder—my stomach was getting sore from this treatment—and carried me from the cart into a building. Suddenly the flooring was different, as was the lighting, the smell, and the sound. He tossed me down, cracking my head against the floor so loudly that I heard the echo.

  The sounds around me slowly unfolded into decipherable words. I heard a woman’s voice. “You’re supposed to set her down gently!” she shouted at him. “She isn’t a catch!”

  “I was being gentle,” he said defensively.

  “I hope you didn’t kill her, then we’ll be in worse trouble than we are now!”

  He mumbled something, but I couldn’t discern the words beyond the aching
of my head. She told him to get out, he was a lug and an oaf. Cool hands touched me. “Sea-Mistress, he shall be punished. He is a sailor; sea urchins have been his parents! Please do not hold him against us.”

  A pillow was slipped beneath my head—which hurt. My hair was brushed from my eyes—which also hurt. My bonds were cut, and as the blood flowed back into my limbs, they hurt, too. My face and shoulder were cleaned off and a salve put on them—which hurt. I felt tears squeeze from beneath my lashes.

  Silence fell, blessed peace. When the throbbing in my body had settled down, I cautiously opened one eye.

  Holy Isis, here we go again!

  All I had wanted to do was find Cheftu, to be with him. Instead I was in a temple, not like any I’d seen before, but identifiable by the smell, the layout, and … the twenty-foot-tall statue of a merman with food, gold, and jewels strewn at his, uh, tail.

  This was not Egyptian artwork. Not Aztlantu. Neither Greek nor Roman. Pillars rose up on all sides of me, providing the studs for a wall that went up only seven or so feet. Incense clouded the air, filled it with the cloying odor of … coriander? Burned coriander? The acrid smell took me back to my childhood in Morocco. Definitely coriander.

  The colors were the tints of the sea and sky, blues and greens that blended like watercolors from one into another. A braid pattern wrapped around the columns and edged the ceiling. The floor was a mosaic of shells and colored sand. The room was pretty, very gentle and soothing.

  Where was this temple? My head still throbbed, but the nausea had passed. I was lying on my back, on the top part of a set of stairs. To my left was the idol.

  He was carved from one piece of marble. It had been broken at least three times around his waist and each arm. Stone must be very expensive, I thought as I looked at him. Why else would they use such a blatantly flawed piece? He was kind of clunky and block shaped, recognizable as a merman but nothing that would set the art world on fire.

  Marks had been pressed into the base of the statue. An ancient language. Then, before my eyes, the duck foot– looking wedges re-formed into letters that I understood. Dagon, Lord of Thunder, King of the Sea, Ruler of the Cornfield, Father of Ba’al, Beloved of Derkato.

  Dagon was the merman?

  How did this relate to reuniting with Cheftu? Why else would I be here, in my own skin, unless my prayer had been answered? I’d been looking for him. Instead of finding him, though, I’d been fished out of the Mediterranean and left in a temple. Maybe Cheftu was a fisherman; or a priest?

  However, that would be odd. Cheftu had always been an Egyptian. Always arriving from Egypt. Then again, I’d always been someone else, and now I was myself. In my experiences—of which I’d had two, vivid, life-changing ones, when I went back in time, when I stepped into history—I had stepped into another person, her body, her voice, her life; I would put on some ancient woman’s skin like a cloak.

  I felt dazed, because suddenly everything was new— even the rules seemed different. But I’d time-traveled again, despite these differences. I noticed the red hair falling over my white-skinned shoulder; I was cloakless. Hello? I asked my echoing cranium. Anybody in there? Yoo-hoo?

  Would Cheftu look the same? He always had before. Now it would be up to me to identify him, for he’d never seen me in my own twentieth-century “cloak.”

  “Sea-Mistress Derkato, would you care for refreshing?” Glancing up, I saw a young girl, her head bowed, her robe covered in fabric scales. “Water,” I said, suspicious of anything else. I didn’t think they would try to poison me, but I wasn’t positive about that.

  She looked up at me, then ducked her head and backed away. Unlike the citizens of both other cultures I’d lived in, where black hair and dark eyes were the norm, this girl was honey colored. Though she was on the tall side, she was slightly built. Long, straight gilded brown hair that matched her eyes hung in elaborate braids to her waist. She gleamed like well-polished wood.

  “Please,” I called after her. While I thought “Please,” what came from my mouth was b’vakasha. Was that “please” in this language? I lay back down on the mosaic floor, staring up at the ceiling. Flat roof with clerestory windows; it was good to be in a place with an architecture I knew.

  I was in the Mediterranean. In a temple of Dagon. As a mermaid/goddess who was going to die. When I raised a hand to tuck my hair behind my ear, I saw the neon on my arm. I glowed.

  Neon. The priestess RaEmhetepet, who had had my body for the past two years, had been on her way to a Ramadan/Christmas party in 1996, dressed with her customary bad taste, which I was now wearing, when she had wandered by the portal and gotten sucked back. Or something like that, I guessed. In modern times RaEm had become obsessed with neon and electricity and things that glittered, which is why I now glowed like some B-film alien.

  “Sea-Mistress, your water.” The girl slunk forward, placed a seashell precariously on the floor, and backed away, watching expectantly. Was I supposed to lap up the water? Raise the shell to my lips and drink it all?

  This was an etiquette question. I could use an “other” right now.

  In each of my previous time-travel experiences, I’d moved into someone else’s body in that time period, complete with her knowledge of the culture, the language, and some memories. The liaison between the actual owner’s mind and my own, I’d called the “other.” Now, I was otherless.

  I was on my own. What did that mean?

  When in doubt fake it, Chloe.

  I lifted the seashell to drink it.

  Instead I spewed it. Salt water? “Fresh water,” I clarified, wiping my mouth with the back of my hand.

  “Sea-Mistress, forgive me!” the girl wailed, falling to her knees and beating her chest. “Find mercy! Please don’t curse us! I thought you had to have salt water! Please, take your fury out on me, but spare the people!”

  Her eyelashes were about two feet long and curly. She still had babyish innocence in her face, but her body was almost a woman’s. “Who are you?” I asked.

  “Tamera is how the goddess named me.”

  “Which goddess?” Was there more than one? “The great goddess, Sea-Mistress Ashterty.” She looked up. “B’vakasha, do not curse us.” She looked as though she might start beating her chest again.

  Curse her? Over water? “I, I won’t,” I said. She crawled to me on her belly, kissing the mosaic floor by my feet. They could bind and gag me, but now they were worried about my cursing them over water? Where was the logic in that? “Find me fresh water,” I said. “Then tell me of your people, the ones you seek to save.” It sounded imperious enough without being rude.

  Mumbling thanks, she backed away from me and ran from the room.

  Tamera returned in seconds, this time with a clay bowl. It was wide, shallow, and decorated with stylized birds, squares, circles, and fish, reminiscent of Aegean designs. The water was cold, refreshing. I sipped it and wondered if they had an equivalent of aspirin. My head was killing me.

  “HaDerkato is to be honored, so what does she require of me?” Tamera asked, her head bowed once more.

  “The men who, uh, I let catch me, where were they sailing?”

  She looked at me, frowning slightly. “It is the day of the Find, haDerkato. They set sail from Gaza. Throughout the way they prayed for a worthy consort for Dagon. A Derkato for him to love. They were sailing to us here in Ashqelon, since the festival takes place here.” Tamera smiled a little. “Dagon must be pleased because haYam gave us you!”

  Words were flying at me as I strove for comprehension. “Did you find anyone else out there?” I asked. Maybe Cheftu had arrived the same way. Then her other words penetrated my mind. “Did you say Gaza? Ashqelon?”

  “Ken, haDerkato.”

  Gaza—as in Gaza Strip? Ashqelon—that was a famous Philistine site in Israel! My mother had worked in Ashqelon, long ago and far away.

  “Sea-Mistress, haYam gave only you to us.” Tamera frowned slightly.

  The pieces were falling
into place in my brain, knowledge firing at me: Was I in Israel? Were these Philistines? Cheftu hadn’t been netted? “And this temple here is … where?”

  “We are in Ashqelon, Sea-Mistress.”

  “Why were these men finding someone for Dagon?” I asked, sipping my water, hoping that the last sea-mistress they netted had been as inquisitive. As the object of this ritual, should I already know why?

  Again she frowned. “It is the tradition, Sea-Mistress.” Tamera looked down at her hands in her lap, twisting at the “scales” of cloth on her skirt. “Dagon has been very angry with us.”

  Hence the term propitiation, I reasoned. “Why do you say that?”

  “The seas are as blood, Sea-Mistress. We think it is because in our last battle with the highlanders they took our teraphim and burned them.” She looked back up at me. “Without the proper sacrifice, we fear Dagon will not bless the corn harvest.”

  Sacrifice. The word made the hair on the back of my neck stiffen. “How, exactly, does, uh, Dagon accept his sacrifice?”

  Tamera smiled. “Sea-Mistress, it is not your worry! You are our beloved lady!” She rose up, beaming. “Would you care for food? Drink? Would you like to spend time with Dagon, alone?”

  I thought of the marble statue looming above us. What did they expect would happen if Dagon and I spent time alone? “That isn’t necessary,” I said. “Tell me, when is the corn harvest?”

  Tamera frowned again; her face had two expressions. Frown or smile. “The harvest is not for months, Sea-Mistress. But we must select the seeds, and for that we need the counsel of Dagon, Progenitor of the Field.”

  A few more questions later I realized that good seed meant good corn. If Dagon’s wisdom didn’t prevail, they could plant bad corn, then starve all year. “At least you have fish,” I said, feeling the merman’s stony stare on me.

  Tamera’s honey brown eyes grew round; she was appalled. “Sea-Mistress, how can we eat sacred food? We would rather die! The creatures of the deep are for you, Dagon, the gods and goddesses! We are only mortals, we would not dare.”