A River in the Sky

by Elizabeth Peters

  Cooking smells and the reek of charcoal fires mingled with the stench of too many bodies, animal and human, occupying too small a space. Ramses thought he caught a whiff of hashish too. At first glance he believed the room was unoccupied. Then the curtains covering a door at the back of the room stirred. A worried face peered out.

  “I came to ask you a question,” Ramses said. “One question only, one truthful answer, and then I will go.”

  The curtain parted and Mitab edged into the room.

  “Only one?”

  “Yes. The answer will be locked in my heart, no one else will hear it.”

  “You swear?”

  “By God and the Prophet, may his name be blessed, I swear.”

  “I meant no harm. It was a warning.”

  “It was you who threw the stones, then?”

  “I meant no harm.”

  “Did someone tell you to throw them?”

  “They said you must all go. All the unbelievers. Yusuf and I meant you no harm. It was a warning, that you must go before greater harm came to you.”

  “Who are ‘they’?”

  Mitab gave him a blank stare. Ramses took out his tin of cigarettes and offered it. “Take it,” he said. “Smoke, be at ease. Who are they?”

  Mitab accepted the offering with a childish smile of pleasure. “They are the Those Who Come Before,” he said simply. “One of them spoke to us in the mosque and told us of the time when we must rise up against the infidels who want to steal our land.”

  “When was that?”

  Mitab counted on his fingers. Notions of exact time were too difficult; he said simply, “Two…three times—and again…I do not know.” He accepted the box of matches Ramses handed him, lit up, and drew the smoke into his lungs. A blue fog of expelled smoke veiled his face. “But he was angry when he heard what Yusuf and I had done, and we had heard of the great and powerful magician who is your father, and Yusuf and I did not want his wrath to fall on our heads.”

  You were in trouble enough already, poor devil, Ramses thought.

  Aloud he said, “I promise you I will appease his wrath. You meant no harm, you will take no harm from him or from me. I will tell the one in the mosque the same, if you—”

  “Will you? Will you?” In his excitement Mitab dropped the cigarette. “I saw that you spoke with him that day on the tell, when he was there with the lady. You know him, you have power over him. I will pray for you at the mosque today, Brother of Demons.”

  He picked up the stub of the cigarette from the filthy floor before he vanished behind the curtain.

  Ramses hurried back to the dig house. He’d been gone longer than he had anticipated. For once, Reisner wasn’t working. Pipe clenched in his teeth, feet on a packing case, he was reading a book whose lurid cover depicted a body with a knife protruding from its chest, lying in a pool of blood—one of his favorite mystery novels. He had decided to take part of the day off too. Looking up, he asked, “Did you find a suitable gift?”

  Wrapped in thought, Ramses had forgotten his purported errand. “No,” he said.

  “The local bazaar doesn’t have much of interest. But there’s one fellow, a wood-carver, who does some excellent work.”

  “I didn’t see him there today.” His mother would have approved the statement; it was the literal truth.

  “I understand our visitor hasn’t left yet,” Reisner said.

  “Yes. I mean, no, she hasn’t.” He had been trying to think of an excuse to leave the house so that he could visit the camp. Now it occurred to him that it might be prudent to inform someone of his destination, if not his purpose. As his mother had once been heard to remark, “If a good lie won’t serve, try telling the truth.” He was wearing the same coat he had worn the day before. After some fishing about he extracted von Eine’s handkerchief. “She dropped this the other day. It would be only courteous to return it, don’t you think?”

  Reisner inspected the now grubby item and burst out laughing. “She dropped her handkerchief? I thought women quit doing that fifty years ago. Fisher, what do you think of this? The lady dropped her handkerchief. Didn’t I tell you she had her eye on Ramses?”

  Fisher had emerged from his room, yawning. He found the handkerchief as amusing as Reisner had; the two of them teased Ramses until he left.

  As he made his way toward the camp, Ramses began to have second thoughts about carrying out his plan. Even supposing he was admitted to the lady’s quarters, the tactics he had employed with innocent Mitab and the imam, a combination of intimidation and persuasion, were unlikely to succeed with the lady and her enigmatic companion. He pictured himself demanding answers to his questions, and imagined their reactions: a contemptuous smile from the lady, a dismissive shrug from the other.

  On the other hand, what did he have to lose? Humiliation was a small price to pay for the chance of satisfying his curiosity.

  He came close to paying a higher price when he stepped into view from among the trees and found himself face-to-face with a guard who was pointing a gun at him. Ramses raised his hands and said quickly, “Is this how you greet visitors? I have come to see the lady. Take me to her.”

  He had spoken Turkish. That, as much as the self-confident words, had the effect he had hoped for. The guard lowered the gun. It was only a slight improvement, since his finger was still on the trigger and the gun was now pointing at Ramses’s knees. He resisted the impulse to step back out of the line of fire, folded his arms, and fixed the guard with a stern stare.

  “Take me to her,” he repeated.

  The fellow raised a hand to caress his luxuriant mustache. “She said to keep everyone away…Wait here. I will ask.”

  Ramses stood waiting, loftily ignoring the dozens of pairs of eyes focused on him. He didn’t have to wait long. The guard was back almost at once.

  “The lady is seeing no one. Leave now.”

  Arguing with an underling would lower his prestige. Retreating with as much dignity as he could command, he found a spot among the trees where he could see without being seen, and sat down to consider what to do. Didn’t she ever leave the tent? Behind him the sun was setting, casting long lingering fingers of light across the shaded landscape. As the shadows deepened the canvas walls of Madame’s tent glowed yellow with lamplight; he saw indistinct silhouettes move about inside, too vague to be identifiable. The tent flap opened, and two women came out carrying an object Ramses couldn’t identify at first. They tipped it up and water poured out; watching in fascination, he decided it must be a portable bathtub, made of canvas and collapsible. Porters and guards gathered round newly lighted campfires. The smell of food reached his nostrils and reminded him he was getting hungry.

  So far his investigations had only raised more questions. Mitab wasn’t the most reliable of informants, but Ramses believed he had told the truth—as he saw it. He had identified Frau von Eine’s “fellow traveler” as one of Those Who Come Before—not once, but a number of times—and if poor Mitab’s interpretation of their purpose was accurate, they were stirring up antagonism toward infidels and foreigners. From what he had observed so far, it appeared to be a fairly ineffectual operation, but he would like to have found out more about the plan and what part, if any, the lady played in it.

  It was now so dark that venturing closer might get him shot, and there were too many people about. He started to get to his feet.

  There was no warning, not even the snap of a twig or an indrawn breath. He fell flat under the impact of a heavy body. A hand clamped over his mouth and a voice hissed in his ear.

  “For God’s sake don’t make a noise or you’ll get us both scragged!”

  The voice had spoken English. Unaccented, idiomatic English.

  Ramses forced his taut muscles to relax. After a few seconds the hand over his mouth lifted.

  “Who—”

  “Ssssh! Let’s get farther away. Someone may have heard you fall.”

  It struck Ramses as excellent advice. He followed the c
rawling figure as it made its way rapidly but silently through the grove. When they were some fifty yards away from the camp the other man stood up. Ramses couldn’t make out his features, only the general outline of someone wearing a loose dark garment and headcloth. The large leaves of the fig tree against which his back was pressed provided deep shade.

  “Well done,” said the unknown, in the same barely audible murmur. “We should be all right now. But keep your voice down.”

  “Who the devil are you?”

  After a moment of hesitation the other man said resignedly, “I’ll have to come clean, I suppose, although it’s against regulations. Name’s Macomber. We met at Oxford two years ago. Hogarth’s rooms at Magdalen.”

  Macomber’s name meant nothing to Ramses, but Hogarth’s did. Distinguished scholar, experienced archaeologist, rabid imperialist, Hogarth despised “men in the lump” and believed in the God-given superiority of the white “races”—particularly the British. He gathered round him young men whom he inspired to share his vision, who asked nothing more than to serve their country in the great game of empire, without recognition or reward. Ramses had been invited to join the select circle because of his long years of experience in the Middle East, but he had only attended one of the meetings: he had found Hogarth’s beliefs and air of certitude thoroughly offensive. He remembered Macomber now—a pale young man with a shock of yellow hair and eyes that glowed with adolescent fervor as he listened to his mentor hold forth. Officially Hogarth had no connection with any of the intelligence organizations, but Ramses wasn’t the only one who suspected he recommended worthy acolytes for recruitment.

  “Regulations,” he repeated. “Which lot are you working for?”

  “Never mind that, just listen. I spotted you when you came here with her the first time, been trying to speak with you ever since, but you were always with someone, and I wasn’t allowed to leave camp except once or twice to go to the mosque, and—” A rustle of leaves nearby brought him up sharp. He wasn’t as cool as he had tried to appear. Ramses was getting uneasy too. If they were found together they would both be in trouble.

  “Get to the point,” he said. “Why is MO2 interested in Mme von Eine?”

  “She’s high up with the German government. They are trying to move into the Middle East, preparing for war eventually—”

  “I know. Be specific. Why her, why here, why now?”

  “She’s after something. Some talisman, some document, some…I don’t know what, but she and that fellow Mansur consider it vital in their plot to unify Islam against us. I overheard them talk about other places to look—Jericho, Jerusalem—” He glanced over his shoulder. “I’ve got to get back before I’m missed. I’m telling you this so you can pass the word on if something happens to me.”

  “Why do you think it might? Has something gone wrong?”

  Macomber swallowed noisily. “Mansur caught me listening outside her tent the other night. He’s been watching me ever since. Tell them they were right about von Eine, she’s a major player; tell them about the talisman and about Mansur—I don’t know who he is or what his particular game is, but they can—”

  “Tell them yourself,” Ramses said. The sixth sense his mother often spoke of, the feeling of being watched, was raising the hairs on the back of his neck. He put his hand on the other man’s shoulder. “Come with me now. I can supply you with clothes, you’ll be a friend from university on a walking tour.”

  “I have to finish the job.” The muscles under his hand stiffened.

  Ramses bit back a blistering expletive. “You’ve done the job. The chance of your finding out anything more is negligible, especially since you are now under suspicion.”

  “One more thing. I overheard them mention the Sons of Abraham. I don’t know what it means, but it sounded important.”

  To Ramses’s heightened senses the night seemed to be alive with movement and sound. “Don’t go back there,” he said urgently.

  “I’ll be all right.” Ramses’s face was so close to Macomber’s he saw his teeth flash in a smile. “I was getting a little…Well, you know. It’s helped, talking to you.”

  He moved quickly, slipping out from under Ramses’s restraining hand, and was gone into the night before Ramses could stop him.

  Ramses stood listening for several minutes before he dared hope Macomber had slipped back without being spotted. There had been no outcry, no gunfire. His skin was still prickling, though, and he concentrated on moving with exaggerated caution, slipping from shadow to shadow and tree to tree, making use of every bit of cover. It wasn’t until he had reached the outskirts of the village that he was able to relax a bit and consider the implications of that extraordinary encounter.

  Macomber had not answered him when he asked who had sent him on his mission. Some section of MO2, probably; the Ottoman Empire was under its jurisdiction. Whoever they were, they had no business sending a novice like Macomber out into the field. He could get in deep trouble just for being what he was: a lone Englishman trying to pass as a native of the area, for purposes unknown and therefore threatening. It was a miracle he had pulled it off as long as he had. The knowledge necessary to pass as a member of a completely different culture couldn’t be drilled into someone, like cramming for an examination. It took years of living the life, learning the language fluently and idiomatically, and a thousand little things that could mean the difference between success and failure—or life and death.

  He could only hope that Macomber had got carried away by the thrill of a secret mission and let his imagination run away with him. What had he actually learned, after all, that could put him in danger? Germany’s aspirations in the Middle East were a matter of public knowledge. Vague references to conspiracies and amulets, mysterious phrases…It sounded like the plot of a spy novel, and there hadn’t been a single hard fact in that rambling narrative. As for the Sons of Abraham, it was the sort of romantic name that might have been selected by a religious cult or one of those strange American fraternal organizations.

  He had to put up with more teasing when he returned. “You’ve been gone quite a long time,” Fisher said, with a sidelong glance at Reisner. “Enjoy yourself?”

  “I wasn’t admitted to the presence,” Ramses said. “They kept me waiting awhile. I’ll just go finish copying the ostraca now.”

  “That’s right, you’re leaving tomorrow,” Reisner said.

  Don’t you wish, Ramses thought. “Day after tomorrow,” he corrected. “If that’s all right with you.”

  “If you think that gives you enough time. You wouldn’t want to be late meeting them.”

  “Plenty of time.” Enough, not only to finish tracing the ostraca but to give Macomber a chance to reconsider his offer.

  The others set off for the dig early next morning, leaving Ramses bent industriously over his work. As soon as they were out of sight, Ramses headed for the camp.

  But when he reached the spot, the camp was gone. Only the blackened scars of campfires and a stretch of trampled earth littered with animal droppings and miscellaneous trash showed where it had been.

  He walked slowly across the area where Frau von Eine’s tent had stood, on the unlikely chance that something of interest had been overlooked among the scraps of packing material and other debris. He picked up a crumpled paper and smoothed it out. It seemed to be a page torn from a diary or notebook, bearing only a few words in German—the beginning of a letter to Mein lieber Freund. A disfiguring blot on the last word showed why it had been discarded. The only other unusual item was a scrap of baked clay, so close in color to the earth on which it lay that he almost missed it. Roughly triangular, it bore a few marks that might have been the wedge-shaped cuneiform script that had been used in the Middle East for international correspondence and diplomatic documents during the second millennium B.C. Could this have been broken off one of the clay tablets employed for such letters? If so, it would explain why Madame had reacted to his casual statement about tablets miss
ing from Boghazkoy, and why she had been so wary of admitting where else her travels had taken her.

  All this, inspection and theorizing, was only postponing the discovery he hoped he wouldn’t make. He put the scrap in his pocket and moved on. The ashes of the fires were cold. They must have left before dawn, not lingering to cook breakfast or make coffee. It would have taken a long time to break camp, pack the lady’s furniture and belongings, and load the carts, so they must have started not long after…The sky was clear and the sun was bright, but a shiver ran through him.

  He searched the area, walking in widening circles, his eyes on the ground. He didn’t know what he was looking for until he found it—a rectangle of recently disturbed soil, on the edge of the encampment. The dirt had been trampled down, but it was still loose. He dug with his bare hands. He’d only got down a few feet when his fingers touched something hard. Hard and cold. He scraped away enough of the soil to expose a pair of bare feet.

  It was all he needed for identification. Some of the brown dye had worn off and the soles, though calloused, lacked the thick integument acquired by years of going without shoes or sandals. He sat back on his heels, swallowing strenuously. He should have made Macomber come back with him, by force if necessary. He should have realized that the faint sounds he had attributed to birds or wind meant that they were being watched.

  Squatting there in a blue funk, struggling with guilt, wasn’t doing any good. He tried to remember what his mother had said about rigor mortis. The bare feet were ice-cold but flexible. Did that mean rigor had set in and was starting to pass, beginning with the extremities? If so, Macomber had been dead for approximately twelve hours, give or take an hour. He had been killed shortly after he had left Ramses.

  He didn’t want to do it, but he forced himself to dig at the other end of the rectangle. There was no doubt in his mind that Macomber had been murdered, but there were other things he needed to know.