Eye of Ra Read online

  Gem of the Setting Sun

  The Egyptians said that topaz was colored with the golden glow of the mighty sun god Ra. This made topaz a very powerful amulet that protected the faithful against harm.

  In the Middle Ages, the Topaz was believed to strengthen the mind and prevent mental illness. A topaz was also believed to prevent sudden death, so men wore them into battle. If the battle went badly, the topaz was said to make the wearer invisible at times of emergency.

  Justifying himself was not easy. Face to face with forty-two gods, the heart of the dead was weighed in the presence of the jackal-headed Anubis, god of the dead, against a feather, representing Maat, goddess of truth. Balancing the scale meant immortality. Should the heart not balance perfectly, Amemet devoured it, and Seth, murderer of Osiris, ate the rest of the body. It was little wonder then that spells, tokens, ushebtis, shabtis, amulets, and charms held such sway over the Egyptians.

  Zachary Taylor knew he was dreaming again when the pottery shards in the tray beneath his hands reassembled themselves. He had time to see the glyph for ‘Ra’ take shape before the artifacts, the classification table on which they lay, and then the entire field tent vanished with a tiny sound, as if some small animal’s teeth clicked together.

  Zachary found himself quite suddenly standing in the midst of the remote desert. The sand was dark and heavy as mud, the silhouette of the temples in the distance. The night was pitch black, yet the stars were like a million halogen bulbs hanging overhead. Zack blinked at his now empty hands, at their bluish outlines, wondering if this would be the good dream or the bad one.

  A sound behind him, like a small beetle scrabbling across a rock, and Zack swiveled his head, his chest filled with a familiar anticipation and dread.

  Sitting on a campstool, head lowered over some object he held in his lap, was Ira, shining black hair looking bluish in the starlight.

  Oh, thank the Gods; it was the good dream.

  Zachary’s feet slid in the shifting sand and Ira looked up from whatever he was studying and smiled. Black eyes shining, lashes so long and thick they seemed to rim his eyes with kohl. A long straight ‘regal’ nose, lips wide and lush, opening easily over straight white teeth. His beauty sent an arrow of pain and need straight into Zachary’s solar plexus. Then Ira stood, his movement fluid and graceful, his limbs golden and smooth as marble, his hips clothed only in the white loin cloth of a hieroglyphic slave, and the pain in Zachary’s chest shot lower and caught on fire.

  “Ira?” he whimpered, holding out his hand in supplication.

  The phantasm before Zachary advanced, stars shining through the dark eyes. The loin cloth swayed enticingly. He held his hand toward Zachary as if offering to dance. His skin seemed to become more transparent as he moved.

  “Don’t go…” Zachary begged, and closed the distance between them. He grabbed both Ira’s hands and pulled him close. Ira came easily, thighs and chest pushing into Zachary’s, his body warm, eyes dark and hot. They searched Zachary’s, full of some need. He leaned forward, and in the darkness, Zack’s mouth found Ira’s closed, silent lips.

  Smooth strong fingers slid down Zachary’s hips, his pelvis pulled against the hard length under Ira’s flimsy loincloth. Zachary opened his mouth, moaning, tongue seeking entrance to Ira’s mouth, palms running hungrily over the remembered planes of Ira’s body.

  And then they were tumbling onto the sand. Zack felt its texture on his knees as his hands ran over Ira’s cool and smooth torso. His mouth and tongue tasted the skin of Ira’s neck.

  By all the Gods, he’d missed this so much.

  “Baby…” Zack kissed the damp hollow of Ira’s shoulder, his hands sliding over the curve of one muscled hip and under, feeling the long wet heat of Ira’s cock slide into his hand. It was so good he thought he might die from it.

  Zachary gave into the dream, his body finding what it craved in the grooves and hollows of Ira’s body. He turned him, compliant beneath him and pushed up the loincloth, palms cupping the cool hard globes of Ira’s ass, thumb tracing the cleft, moving downward.

  Ira’s hips moved in frantic little jerks into Zachary’s hands. Back arching, shoulder and arm muscles flexing in a series of shadowed shapes as his body begged for Zachary’s touch. Zachary could hear his own voice, inarticulate with needy sounds, moans; his own breath harsh with effort.

  Then Zachary’s cock found the slick pucker, slid in easily, enclosed in blissful heat and velvety muscle. Ira writhed silently beneath him, his smooth skin becoming suddenly rough and dry, the silky hair in Zachary’s hands going coarse and then crumbling away until Ira’s body turned to sand beneath him and Zack was screaming and grasping at the dirt as he woke, thrusting hard against the cheap cotton sheets, nothing in his hands but a thin foam pillow, his mouth opened on the cot. He cried out against the mattress in a kind of desperate pain as his cock spent itself onto the lumpy cot beneath him.

  “Fuck.” Zack rolled over, arm across his eyes, gasping for air and control, his whole body shaking.

  “You okay, Professor Brown?”

  Zachary’s entire body almost left the mattress. He flailed and caught the hollow aluminum edges of the cot. “Shit!” he barked, grimacing at the glare of light. “What the hell are you doing in here?”

  First Corporal Brian Swenson stood in his doorway, covered from head to toe in desert khaki, a dust-covered pith helmet with netting crammed over a sun browned face. His eyes were encircled with lighter skin where the ubiquitous sand goggles protected him.

  The goggles hung on his chest now, and there was concern in his sky-blue eyes.

  “You screamed.”

  “I’m sorry,” spat Zachary. “I didn’t mean to startle you, Corporal. And you decided to enter my quarters because?”

  “I thought you might be in danger, sir.”

  Zachary had protested the presence of the Marine guards at his dig from the very beginning. But the increased disappearance of valued artifacts in these areas had become a political issue, and the government had decided to show at least some semblance of concern. Still, the men were here to protect the digs and their contents. Personal tents were definitely off-limits. “There are no artifacts in this tent, Corporal.”

  Corporal Swenson’s face remained dispassionate. “No, sir, but there have been kidnappings.” He gestured vaguely toward the northeast. “Those men at the Nigerian sites were held for two weeks, sir.”

  “Honestly, I’d welcome the change,” said Zack dryly, throwing back his covers and only then remembering the state of his sheets and his shorts. He tensed and shot the Marine a dark look.

  Swenson’s eyes flicked down, then up. His expression stayed schooled to practiced neutrality, but a touch of pink glowed on high, tanned cheekbones.

  Zachary felt unbearably pathetic. “Was there something else?” he snapped, staggering to his feet, rubbing at the damp on his face. Oh Jesus, had the Corporal seen him crying?

  “No, sir.”

  Zachary turned to the small washing table set up next to his cot. “Then can you leave me what little privacy I have left to get dressed?”

  “Yes, sir.” The curtains thumped against the doorway with the speed of the young Corporal’s exit. Zachary bent to the washbasin, and caught his reflection in the hand mirror hanging there.

  Christ. It was worse than he had imagined. His face was grimy with the sand that seemed to be everywhere, tear tracks obvious down his cheeks. His deep brown eyes that Ira had always described as “soulful” were red and swollen with lack of sleep, and he looked hung over. He hadn’t bothered to shave for two days, and his beard came in unevenly, looking like he’d hacked at his face with a butter knife. His wheat-colored hair stuck up in tufts on one side and was flattened and shiny with sleep sweat on the other. He looked
at least a decade older than his forty years. Ghastly.

  Well, he could do something about the beard at least.

  Zachary focused on the ritual of scraping his beard carefully from the hollows and hills of his square face with the bare blade, steadying himself emotionally in order to steady his hand. He rinsed and studied his reflection one more time. Well, that helped, but sleep and food would do him more good. He’d had insomnia since Ira had…since the disappearance. And when he did sleep he was plagued by the dreams.

  Since he’d lost Ira, I lost Ira, he thought miserably…he couldn’t sleep; what little food he could choke down turned his stomach into a knot. And the only time he got hard, it seemed, was during the dreams. He’d accepted it, of course, for a time, but when the symptoms persisted - worsened even - he’d been to see a professional, back in New York.

  “Considering everything you’ve been through lately,” Dr. Patterson had told him, smiling benignly away in his big leather chair. “It's to be expected.”

  “It’s getting worse.”

  Dr. Patterson’s glasses seemed to reflect light. The effect was a lot like the Orphan Annie of comic strips. He looked eyeless. “You know that old saying, ‘it's always darkest before the dawn’. Sometimes things seem worse because they are getting better. It's all perfectly normal, Mr. Taylor.”

  Zachary threw cold gritty water into his face and thought about normalcy and how far he had drifted from it. About the professorship chair he’d tossed aside in order to come back out here; about the strange rituals he’d begun practicing; about his dreams. About the object swathed in oilcloth and bubble wrap and hidden at the bottom of his field duffel.

  Zachary knelt now in front of the duffel and slid it from the wrappings. Even in the dim beige interior of the tent, the thing glowed like something otherworldly. Eight inches in circumference, the gold itself, and only gilt at that, was of a low quality; the red lettering almost worn away. But the enormous topaz stone in the center, a flawless golden emerald-cut square, had been valued at a price higher than any gem on the market.

  Zachary popped the top from a vial of oil and dripped a little onto the stone. His fingers traced the hieroglyphs, his lips reciting the invocation inscribed there. Or the curse, if the Egyptologists in London could be trusted. The Eye of Ra, they’d named it. Zachary turned it over, rotating it three times and reciting the words again. He didn’t know why he did it, except that it seemed the right thing to do. Then he wrapped it back in its coverings and slid it under the clothing in his duffel.

  An archeologist had to be an optimist. He had to have bottomless wells of faith and hope. It took both and a kind of mad zeal to continue to dig holes in the desert when others had long since given up. And a shy, gay man, whose job took him to remote and sparsely populated areas most of the time, needed an insane faith to believe he’d ever find companionship. Zachary had found both in the Valley of the Kings. He'd found the Temple of Ra, hidden behind the famous Ramses tombs, and, more importantly, he’d found Ira.

  “It was supposed to have been forever,” he whispered. “You promised, Ira.”

  Now he was possessed of paranoia and ritualistic compulsion. That was what came of finding that fate was quixotic and cruel.

  Zachary threw on a shirt and grabbed the rest of his things. The little backpack that held a few excavation tools, his watch, and the ID tag he flung over his neck. He was strapping the watch on as he left the room and so did not see Corporal Swenson until he had almost walked over him.

  “Excuse me, sir,” said the young man, holding him erect with two big hands on Zachary’s biceps. Zack almost shook the Marine off, jumping back and staring at him.

  “Is there something else, Corporal?”

  “No, sir.” he shifted in the doorway. A fierce frown brought sandy blond eyebrows to a vee above the bridge of his short, Midwestern farmboy nose. “I… wanted to say… I mean… if you wanted anything else, sir…” His voice faded as his words drifted and he frowned with even more ferocity.

  Zachary had the odd thought that the young Marine was flirting with him, but shook it off as ludicrous. “Thank you, Corporal. I’m fine.”

  “I mean, I… well it’s not the same, sir, but I understand how it is. To lose a friend, I mean.”

  Zachary took a breath, exhaled. “Do you?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Half a dozen questions flew through Zachary’s mind. He focused on the most pertinent one. “How did you know?”

  The Corporal looked surprised. “It's my job to know, sir.”

  Zachary found his mouth open and snapped it shut before sand blew in it. “I wouldn’t talk about it with anyone else, Corporal.” He shrugged, tried to make his grin humorous. “They had me in a psych hospital for a week, you know.”

  “Yes, sir.” Corporal Swenson shifted his weight a bit, and Zachary suddenly became aware of how close the Marine stood, how large his body was, how warm…

  He took a quick step back. “Thank you, Corporal.”

  “Call me Brian, sir. Please.” Corporal Swenson’s, no Brian’s, eyes came up and met his. There was a kind of shy determination there. An appeal. So, he hadn’t imagined it. Zachary felt his own skin heating, his heart beating harder.

  “No,” he said tersely.

  Brian blinked. The frown reappeared above his nose. “I. I…”

  “I have everything I need, Corporal Swenson,” Zachary said crisply.

  “Yes, sir,” he heard Swenson say as he strode away.

  He felt like a prick, but he’d sworn to Ira and the Gods and himself. Off men for life.

  Seth was standing at the edge of the pit on F49 as he walked up.

  “What was that about?” His brilliant blue eyes, incisive and sharp as a steel blade, sent one keen glance back toward the Corporal and then came back to Zachary, seeming almost to pierce his skin. Zachary flinched.

  “Nothing. A security question.”

  “Huh.” Seth’s eyes sliced over him once, then focused their brilliance on the floor of a quadrant of the dig. “Doesn’t look promising.”

  “It didn’t before, either,” said Zachary.

  Together they glared down at the pit.

  ***

  Three years ago, Seth and Zachary had stood at the edge of a numbered anonymous pit just northeast of the famous Ramses family tombs, staring down into an unproductive corner and both wondering why they were still there. Having applied for the same sabbatical, they met at the digs, finding immediate enthusiasm and remarkably complimentary talents in each other.

  “Oh, you’re new here aren’t you?” The boy looked up; his eyes were a dark, dark brown. They widened with awe when he saw the famous Professor Taylor standing over him and Zachary smiled to see the way the boy fumbled to set down the fragile piece of stone, then carefully wiped his fingers before extending one hand.

  Long, strong fingers. A firm, familiar grip that held his hand a bit too long. Warmth spread from Zachary’s palm up his arm, the hairs rising until he jerked his hand away, startled. “I haven’t seen you before,” he said. The statement sounded like an accusation in his own ears.

  “I had to wait.” the boy grinned sheepishly, shaking the longish silky bangs out of his eyes with a self-deprecating laugh. “Professor Taylor. I’ve wanted to meet you for so long, and I… I thought I knew what I’d say when I finally did… but I’ve forgotten.”

  Zachary felt the blush warming his entire body. He laughed, carefully shoving his still tingling hand into the pocket of his khakis. “Probably going to ask for more money. They all do after the first week here.”

  “What, the great food and opulent living conditions aren’t enough?” Ira’s voice was husky, with a slight accent that Zachary couldn’t place.

  Zachary shrugged.

  “Seriously, Professor…”

  “Call me Zack.”

  A blink, an expression of something almost… wise. “Zack, then,” said Ira. “I want to thank you for inviting me to work here this s
ummer. It was my dream for years.”

  “Mine, too,” said Zack. “Though the Gods know why. And it wasn’t a favor, you know. We expect you to earn your keep.”

  “Ira,” said Ira, grinning. “My name, that is. In case you wondered.”

  Zack had wondered. His photographic memory had been flipping through the file folder looking for the resume and passport photo that would match the beautiful specimen that sat before him. He was drawing a blank.

  “I remember,” he lied.

  Ira looked pleased. A slight flush appeared below his sunburned cheeks.

  Zachary had a sudden wild thought. The sort of thought he never had. In those early days, when he first met Ira, they happened frequently until he finally became accustomed to them. But this first one startled him and he was still busy being surprised when he heard himself say out loud, “I occasionally have my dinner on the outer rim of the Kings plateau. It's one of those silly rituals that began when I was just a student myself.” He wondered why he was confessing this to the young man sitting before him when he heard his own voice say, "Would you care to join me?”