Free Resurrection by Arwen Elys Dayton Page B

reveled in being carried by others. He was fanning himself with a palm leaf.
    Behind the litters ran ten workers, each carrying a small sack full of the medicinals they would be using to tend to the citizens of Memphis. Behind them were three water bearers who periodically brought ladles of water to the others.
    The Archaeologist had many qualifications for being on this mission, aside from being the Captain’s wife. She had spent her professional career in digs all over Herrod, where she had studied dozens of ancient cultures. Her specialty was the evolution of government in society and its relationship to religion.
    The Captain had always been proud of finding a wife so comparable to himself. They had been together for over twenty years. Their one child, a son, was with them on this mission.
    This was to be their first visit to Memphis, capital city of the Egyptian empire. The Archaeologist had been studying the culture from afar to prepare them for this day. They had many local workers at their camp, which sat in the desert between the Nile and the Red Sea. By carefully questioning these workers over the past three months, she had developed a very good idea about how Egypt was organized. She was briefing her traveling companions a final time as they approached the city.
    “Egypt is an interesting place,” she said. “The kingdom stretches over hundreds of miles along the banks of the river. Because of the great distances between the cities, there is a tight-knit bureaucracy in place to ensure things are run properly.
    “The king is the intermediary between his people and their many gods. And there are many gods. Every town or village has its own, and these are lorded over by the higher, more powerful deities. It’s pretty typical, as societies progress, for the local gods to be subsumed within the personalities of the larger gods, until, ultimately, there are only a few left, each with dozens of aspects. Egypt is in the early stages of this.
    “The people are quite superstitious, which is normal for this stage of development. Their science is rather crude. They still have not figured out the wheel, for example. Nature is unexplainable in many ways, so they create gods to explain it.
    “Because the kingdom is so large, it will be important for the king to categorize us. We must strike just the right tone. We want to show that we are powerful so he does not threaten us, but we don’t want to appear too powerful, or we might soon be deified, and then we will have entirely disrupted their religion.”
    The litter bearers slowed now. They had come up over a rise and were passing through the villages that lay outside the walls of Memphis. These villages were groupings of small houses, lined along the sides of the canals that ran out from the river. The houses were all of mud bricks, made from a mixture of riverbank mud and straw that was left to bake in the sun. The mortar to hold the bricks together was a combination of mud, straw, and sand, which was usually smeared over the entire surface of the walls to make them smooth and weather-resistant.
    There were windows facing north, to let in the cool breezes that came from that direction. There were gardens behind walls, where the tops of trees were visible. Trees were considered highly valuable in this desert land.
    Men, women, and children walked along the dirt streets, which were packed as hard as rock on the main throughways. The Captain could see women and men washing clothes and gathering water in the canals. They were a dark-skinned people, with dark hair, most naked from the waist up.
    Children stopped and pointed as the three litters passed through. They chattered wildly to each other as they watched the fair-complexioned people being borne past. News of their ship’s arrival in Egypt had spread quickly through these villages and through the cities, and it was known, or at least rumored, that these golden-haired people were the ones who had come from the sky.