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When Ahkmenrah’s eyes snapped open on day forty five, he didn’t know where he was…again. There was cold metal under his body, and a blank white ceiling above him. Slowly he sat up and looked around.
He was laying on a table in the center of some sort of strange workshop. On three sides, there were counters filled with boxes, all sorts of strange instruments, and his family’s possessions. There were more boxes stacked by the door, concerningly haphazardly. What did these looters want with all of this?
Before he could look at anything else, the door swung open, and two people entered. Ahkmenrah started and tried to get himself off the table and somewhere out of sight before they noticed that he wasn’t dead, but he didn’t have a chance. The first person to enter, a girl, spotted him right away.
She shrieked and clutched at the arm of the boy who had followed her in, talking rapidly to him in a strange language. He gave Ahkmenrah a terrified stare, brown eyes huge in a bone-white face, even paler than that of the Greeks. His lips moved softly and he started to edge backwards toward the door.
I’ve scared them, Akhmenrah realized with a start. He’d never thought that these looters might not even have an inkling that this was possible. His greatest fear since being taken from his tomb in Egypt was that someone would realize he was alive and try to steal the secrets of the tablet, or the object itself. He had never considered that he himself might be in danger.
Holding up his hands to show he didn’t have any weapons, though there was a dagger hanging at his belt last he checked, Ahkmenrah mirrored the strange boy and took several steps backward until the table was between the newcomers and him. The boy still looked ready to bolt, but something had changed in the girl’s face. Letting go of his arm, she took a small step forward and spoke.
“I can’t understand you,” Ahkmenrah told her, shaking his head for emphasis in case she didn’t speak Egyptian.
“Oh,” The girl’s mouth dropped open when he spoke, shock painting her delicate features. She was half a head shorter than Ahkmenrah, and as pale as the boy, with a thin wiry frame and hair the color of desert sand that fell to the nape of her neck and curled inward (a bizarre style). She had a soft splash of freckles across a small nose under dark, long lashed eyes.
Now it was the boy’s turn to grab the girl’s arm, trying to pull her out and talking in an urgent tone. The girl shook her head and tugged away from his grip, pointing instantly at Ahkmenrah. He finally heaved a deep sigh and didn’t move any farther backward, though the wary look remained in his eyes.
The girl fixed her full attention on him. She knit her brows in confusion and chewed on her bottom lip, clearly trying to figure out how to communicate with him. Finally, she slowly reached out a hand toward him and said, slowly and clearly “Ahkmenrah?”
Her pronunciation was off, and her accent was odd, lilting and slurred, but that was definitely his name. “Ahkmenrah,” He affirmed hesitantly. If these people were going to make a move against him, they probably would have done it by now, but he was still worried. Revealing his identity to people who were clearly so scared of this power might make things worse, but he didn’t know what else to do. Ahkmenrah had no idea where he was, or what had happened to his parents, or what was going on, and if he could communicate with these people, he might get some answers.
The girl’s face lit up when she heard him reply. Smiling widely, she turned to the boy and said something to him, practically bouncing on her toes with excitement. He, on the other hand, looked like he was about to pass out.
Swallowing, the girl pointed to herself this time and said, in the same tone as before “Claire.”
She’s trying to tell me her name, Ahkmenrah realized. But how to communicate to her that he understood. He felt stupid just parroting things back at her, but what else was there to do?
“Claire?” Again, she lit up at his voice. It was a glow he knew, the excitement of learning something new, the thrill of discovery. Looking around again, a startling thought occurred to Ahkmenrah. Maybe this wasn’t looting. Maybe it was discovery . He wasn’t here to have his wealth and earthly possessions stripped away, he was here to be studied by these people. He’d never considered it, but it wasn’t unreasonable. Enough years had passed that his family would be just a distant memory, and Egypt had clearly been conquered. The thought was both scary and comforting. At least he and his family, wherever they were, and the tablet, were safe, but what was going to happen now? Was he going to be interrogated, not only for the secrets of the tablet but for the secrets of his kingdom? Would he ever get to go home, or be kept as a foreign curiosity forever?
Claire and the boy, apparently James, were heedless of his newfound concern, however. They went around the room, teaching Ahkmenrah the words for different things there (some of which made sense, some others, like “microscope” nonsensical), a couple of adjectives, and yes and no.
Everyone lost track of time, which Ahkmenrah couldn’t tell anyway, and so it was a horrible shock when the sun rose and Ahk hit the ground in a cloud of dust.
Claire, dark circles under her eyes, was back the next day and a group of crisp pieces of papyrus called a notebook and a stylus called a pencil in her hand. She taught Ahk the alphabet and some directional prepositions, then left.
These sessions continued for almost a year. Claire, James, or both would appear just after sundown and stay for a couple hours, first teaching him, and later, learning some Egyptian in return. Sometimes, they were accompanied by James’s younger brother Richard (who thought Ahkmenrah was a normal person who kept odd hours) or their fellow research assistant Peiro, who taught him some Italian, but considered this magic Devilish and didn’t want to be involved.
Ahkmenrah came to understand that he was on an island far to the north of Egypt, called Britain. They controlled his country now, but they had conquered it not from his people, but a different group. Claire and James were research assistants in the Egyptology wing of Cambridge University, which was some sort of educational facility.
In return, he helped them with the Egyptian language and explained the uses of certain artifacts to James. Claire was happy to take his language lessons, but would not take this help. However James insisted that it was just using their resources wisely, Claire couldn’t be convinced that citing Ahkmenrah in her papers (as speculation, of course) or making discoveries after he had explained something wasn't cheating. Claire had tried to explain it to him once, something about having to prove herself as a woman, but it went over Ahkmenrah’s head. He was still having trouble believing the fact that women were even allowed these types of jobs, and that they wanted more. He wasn’t opposed to this per say, it was just a shock.
Occasionally, the three of them just spent time together. They played card games, learned about the tablet brought to life, held discussions about politics, philosophy and religion that James jokingly called “Ahkmenrah’s salon” (whatever that meant), and even sunk off campus on a few occasions.
Ahkmenrah was still confused, still lonely (his parents were apparently at the British Museum in London), sometimes he missed Egypt, and sometimes he worried that another researcher or student at Cambridge would discover that everything came to life at night and then his modicum of freedom would end, but all in all things weren’t that bad for the first year. He mostly had fun, made some new friends, and learned a new language, and saw a little bit of what life had become while he had been sequestered away from it all for centuries. In a sense, it was almost like college for him too.