Going for Gold Read Online Free PDF Page B

time-stream.
    Lola and I cleared our minds, focusing on Maryam’s quiet instructions.
    Her voice started getting oddly faint and fuzzy, like she was talking inside a badly tuned radio. Soon I could hardly hear her, though I could hear my own breathing perfectly clearly. My body felt relaxed and strangely heavy like I was falling asleep. But I wasn’t asleep. My mind was clearly excited to be using this unfamiliar new muscle. I could feel it swooping happily from one time-stream to another, like a swallow chasing gnats, getting closer and closer to our target. Yes!
    As if someone had flipped a dimmer switch, the morning sunshine faded to twilight. Same river, totally different millennium. You could just tell. For a long while nothing happened, then I heard a splash or I saw a movement. Something.
    A ghostly shape shot into view, some kind of boat travelling super-fast.
    Powered by the oars of sweating slaves, (we couldn’t see them, but we could feel their vibes) the boat glided almost silently into the shore. Someone lit a lantern and we caught thrilling glints of gold. Talk about beginner’s luck! We’d only got Queen Nefertiti’s royal barge!
    A slave splashed softly across to the bank to make the boat safe, then carefully manoeuvred a plank into position. Shadowy figures came down the plank. We heard low voices.
    “I hope you remembered the gold for the watchman, Adjo? And everyone knows what they’re doing?”
    “Yes, Baraka, we know what we’re doing!”
    “Mardian says as we go back up the Nile, news will spread. People will soon be volunteering their support.”
    “He’d better hope the news doesn’t spread to the Roman barracks!” commented someone.
    “We’re not risking our lives for Mardian,” the first voice reminded them. “We’re doing it for Egypt and for Cleopatra!”
    Our vision vanished in a storm of pixels.
    “Bums!” Lola moaned. “We got the wrong queen!”
    And not just any wrong queen. I was shaken to the core at this cosmic coincidence. With four thousand plus years of Egyptian royalty to choose from, we somehow had to zoom in on Sky’s fave royal, Queen Cleopatra.
    Maryam hurried over. “Is everything OK?”
    Lola and I explained in whispers. “We did it like you said, truly,” I told her. “How come we got it wrong?”
    “I don’t know that you got it wrong. It was a little unexpected that’s all,” Maryam said gently.
    Not only did we not get Nefertiti, but when we shared our experiences later with the group, we discovered we were a humiliating 1300 years off target!
    It probably wasn’t a real time-stream at all, I thought gloomily. We had the Nile in front of us so we just automatically imagined a glamorous royal barge.
    But why would Lola and I specifically imagine Cleopatra’s barge? And why would we both come up with a scenario of loyal courtiers sneaking into Seshet on some hush-hush mission? And how come we cooked up someone called Mardian, a name neither of us had heard before in our lives?
    Back at the hostel a buffet lunch had been set up in a cool airy courtyard. Lola and I were trying to decide where to sit when Maryam and Khaled beckoned us over. It turned out they thought we’d picked up on a genuinely Cleopatra-related time-stream. The clincher was that name ‘Mardian’.
    “Cleopatra’s most trusted adviser was a eunuch called Mardian.” Maryam explained.
    Of course I had to be the one to ask what a eunuch was!
    Sorry if this grosses you out, but apparently, some ancient Egyptian parents deliberately had their boy children ‘altered’ as my nan used to say, a v. drastic operation which humans only carry out on farm
    animals or torn cats in my time.
    Not being ancient Egyptian myself, I found this
    hard to grasp, but parents actually did this to help their sons get on in the world. Then they could be taken on by important families as tutors, private secretaries or whatever, without the worry of big sex scandals.
    “Since a eunuch couldn’t