Since his recovery we had often made sweetly passionate love, but had never mentioned marriage and this had hurt me to the point I’d found myself unable to speak of it.
A log crackled and flames burst up, and he looked silently at the fire.
“Stephen,” I prompted.
“When I was ill,” he said slowly, “there was a kind of aloofness that I can’t properly describe. It was the strangest feeling. As if part of me could move away and view Stephen Delaplane with absolute detachment. I saw my past actions. And all the wrongs I’d done people.” His voice went deathly quiet. “One wrong overpowered all the others. And the worst thing was that before my brush with death, I’d never accepted that I’d wronged this man.”
“You mean … the Pasha?”
“Yes. I took you from him. Oh, I tried to exonerate myself by thinking that your relationship with him was unwilling, that you’d been given to him as a slave. But in the end I’d come back to one unalterable fact. He’d married you in a way that was meaningful to him. You were his kadine.”
“He didn’t love me.” As I said this I stirred uneasily in the low chair. “Stephen, is this what you’ve been brooding about?”
“I’ve thought of little else,” he admitted. “You always felt guilty toward him. But I—well, I always thought of you as my spirited, clever American girl. My love. Never as his wife, the woman who had borne him a child.”
I felt a painful coldness in my chest. “The marriage is meaningless in Christianity,” I said dully.
“Liberty, you have too much honor to believe that. What chance do we have for happiness if we both start out with troubled consciences?”
I sighed deeply. “It can’t be altered.”
“Maybe it can,” he replied, going to the window, pulling back one of the rose brocade curtains to look out at the darkness. “The Pasha had scholars combing the Valley of the Kings for an unplundered tomb. Why?”
“He believed such a find would bring back Egyptians’ pride in their country—and enough gold to finance his projects.”
“So it was important to him?”
“Very. But what’s it got to do with us?”
Stephen turned to me. “Restitution,” he said quietly.
My brow furrowed. “What?”
“Surely in your years in the East you heard of restitution?”
“Often,” I said. Mohammed, a desert merchant, had molded the tenets of the religion with his own virile mercantilism, so that the greatest crimes could be resolved by payment to the people wronged. Even murder could be expiated if suitable payment were agreed upon. Restitution. An idea incomprehensible to the Western mind, and an accepted practice in Islam. “You mean give him … something in exchange for me?”
“That’s right,” Stephen said.
“The tomb?”
“What do you think?” Hope shone in his eyes. “Would it put matters to rights with the Pasha?”
I shook my head. “He told me often he’d never break the law. I’m a faithless wife and you …” I faltered, my skin crawling with the thought of those great iron hooks embedded in the Citadel gate towers.
“Any fundamental of the Koran—like restitution—outweighs the new laws.”
“That’s true,” I admitted. “But he’s not religious … on the other hand, he is a merchant.”
“Then you do think he might accept this?”
I could almost hear the Pasha’s enigmatic, dry laughter. “I’ve never understood him.”
Stephen’s broad shoulders slumped with defeat. He could not live with a splattered conscience. Neither could I.
I said, “But this idea’s all we have. So we’ll have to find the tomb of Thutmose.”
“We?” Stephen strode over to me. Outraged, he asked, “Do you really believe I’d let you return to Egypt?”
“How do you expect to uncover the tomb without me?”
“Like anyone else. By digging.”
“It was in the Valley of the Kings that I felt this—” I tapped the jewel box with the Emerald Embrace “—most strongly.”
Stephen’s hands clamped on my shoulders, hurting me. “The necklace be damned!”
“You’ve never wanted to believe its power over me,” I retorted hotly.
He drew a deep breath to calm himself. “Liberty, you yourself told me of his unwilling revenge on you. And his men tried to kill you before the hamseen. I risked your life then, and I won’t do it again.”
My anger faded. His hand remained on my shoulder, and I bent to kiss the knuckles. “The danger’s as great for you, Stephen.”
“I’m used to disguises,” he said. “You’re not going back to Egypt.”
Seven
Perspiring as I circled a barren mound that resembled an enormous wheel, halting every few steps, frowning at the protruding limestone wedges, I would ask myself whether this was a natural formation or a tell.
Two dozen men in loincloths and twenty or so young boys were watching me intently from the long morning shadows. The cliff behind them was marked by debris from long-desecrated tombs as well as the more vivid scars left by the Pasha’s expedition the year before.
Stephen came over to me. “Does it look good to you?” He had recovered completely and with his trimmed beard, his desert-intensified tan, he was again the most virile-looking of men—and the handsomest.
“The limestone outcropping might be the remains of walls,” I said uncertainly, and held up the parasol to shield him, too. “But I’ve been wrong every time.”
“In three months you’ve uncovered enough to make any Egyptologist proud.”
“We aren’t risking all this for canopic urns and a few scarabs,” I retorted bitterly. “I convinced you to let me come here by telling you I’d unerringly sniff out a treasure-packed tomb.”
“You convinced me because you’re strong-willed. And because I love you too much to say no to you,” he answered. He was taking off his lightweight twill jacket. “You’ve been examining this mound for days, and the rocks do look hewn. Liberty, maybe the tomb lies under here.”
I lacked his hopeful courage. But in the months we had been in the Valley of the Kings my hope had deteriorated into confusion. I worried constantly that we had staked four lives on what now seemed the irritational idea of restitution—and on finding a nonexistent tomb.
Yacub and Uisha had accompanied us. There had been no arguing them out of it. Yacub, using the first Paris snowfall as an excuse, repeated in his jolly voice that he wasn’t intended to be an icicle, and Uisha kept gesturing that her veil and habarah would disguise her.
As Lord and Lady Bentham, we had arrived with our two servants in Alexandria, using English gold sovereigns to buy supplies and charter a dahibeyeh up the Nile. The local governor permitted us to dig in the Valley of the Kings—and in my anxiety I fretted that his permission, granted so easily, was a trap of the Pasha’s.
But nothing, nothing, had turned out as I expected. There had been no sign of danger yet. And as for the Emerald Embrace—before camp was set up, I unpacked it, hopeful that it would lead me directly to the tomb of Thutmose so we could leave. But when I fastened the lotus clasp, I felt no tingling, no sense of being possessed. The power, once so intense here, was gone. Bewildered and devastatingly disappointed, I had put the necklace back in my trunk, where it had remained. I relied on knowledge gleaned from Father, Monsieur Champollion and my own experience to pick sites.
“Here,” Stephen said, smiling. He handed me his jacket.
I watched him climb up on the glacis and swing onto the plateau, stepping off the trench sites.
He cupped his hands, shouting to the diggers, “Time to start work!”
In a few minutes the picks rang, raising clouds of dust while skinny little brown boys darted around filling shallow baskets with rubble that they bore away atop their heads. At first I had objected to the hiring of children, but Yacub had assured me if the boys returned jobless to their villages they would be beaten. One of th
e men started a monotonous, minor-key song, and the others joined in.
Stephen, wiping sweat from his forehead, jogged down to me. “It’s a furnace today, and nothing will be uncovered for a while. You might as well go on back to camp.”
I agreed. Our headquarters was a temple ruin on the riverbank. A narrow path cut around the base of the cliff and through the desolate ridges. Soon the sound of mournful chanting and ringing hoes faded behind me. The path turned.
A curiously built Arab was striding along. He had grotesquely thick shoulders, and his loincloth emphasized the thin shortness of his bowed legs. I had never seen him before.
“Selam aleikum,” he said.
“Aleikum selam,” I retorted dry-mouthed. The least alteration in routine made me edgy as a cat.
“I’m the new man, Lady Bentham. Didn’t Yacub mention me? Abdullah’s gone and I’m to replace him.”
Though Yacub hadn’t told me of hiring a new man, Abdullah indeed was missing. Still it was odd that this stranger looked so directly at me. In the East, men darted quick, hot glances at my sensible European clothing and my naked face, then averted their eyes. “They’ve begun excavating,” I said too loudly.
“Then, my lady, I’d better get there.”
I rushed away from the misshapen man, panting up the hilly path, hurrying down between tall, green rushes toward the ruin on the riverbank.
Our campsite was a far cry from the Pasha’s mass of tents and the opulent green damask pavilion. A tarp covered the squat little temple’s entry and a canvas awning shaded our cook, whom we had hired across the river in Thebes. Pausing momentarily to greet the old man—inhaling the briefest whiff of the garlic that he was mashing into sesame seeds to make tahini sauce—I ran inside.
The temple’s cool dimness had been cleared of wasp hives and swept of cobwebs. Brown frescoes of an ibis-headed god were visible between the stacked boxes that held antiquities waiting to be shipped to Monsieur Champollion.
Uisha began splashing buckets of Nile water into a painted tin tub for my bath.
An hour later, clean and massaged and wearing a freshly laundered dark blue muslin frock, my anxiety had disappeared. As a matter of fact, I felt more at ease than I had since landing in Egypt. I didn’t question this assurance. Obeying what seemed a happily spontaneous impulse, I knelt, pulling my trunk from under the folding camp bed, and still on my knees clasped the Emerald Embrace about me. As the golden collar touched my throat, I visualized the wadi and rock-strewn ledge. I hadn’t been near the hidden canyon since that morning a year ago when Stephen had convinced me to leave with him.
I looked at the brass clock. It was nearly eleven. “The morning’s digging will be over,” I said. “I’ll go to meet the commodore.”
Uisha handed me the wide-brimmed leghorn hat with blue ribbons that matched my frock.
I started along the path to the dig, but soon found myself curving along the bed of the wadi, moving deeper into the hard-edged shadows.
In the hidden canyon no breeze stirred the heat, no lizards raced between rocks, no beetles scurried in the sand, not one of the omnipresent Eygptian flies circled. This deathlike immobility didn’t bother me. Instead, I felt the satisfaction of having neared a goal.
Up on the ledge, the stones in front, whitened by bird droppings, caught the sun with a blinding glare that turned the rear shadows black. In that impenetrable darkness, Stephen had pulled me from the crevasse, and there, to the right, we had stood, silently looking at one another. There the Pasha had held me, hoarsely whispering, Thank God you’re safe.
My memories were so intense that it was some time before a prickling sensation down my spine told me I wasn’t alone. I wheeled around.
About ten yards away stood a man. The greed with which he watched me made his face seem narrower, and his dandified European clothes fitted his elongated body smoothly, but even in that gaudy light there was an austere almost dark quality to him.
My mouth felt dry and my stomach clenched in a spasm. Then my hand reached up to the Emerald Embrace and my panic lessened.
“Rais Guzman,” I said, and remembered that odd glimpse of him at the Nile Festival.
The corsair captain raised his high beaver hat, bowing his sleekly combed head. “Good morning, Lady Bentham,” he replied in his proud Castilian lisp. “I didn’t frighten you?”
“A little.”
“Only a little? Then you’re as spirited as ever.”
“What are you doing in the Valley of the Kings?”
“The same as you and Lord Bentham.”
“Oh? We would have heard of another archaeological expedition.”
The thin lips curled in a smile. “Certain treasures don’t have to be laboriously uncovered.” He bowed again to me so that his meaning was unmistakable.
With that, I began to flee along the wadi bed to the other entry of the canyon, unaware of the rocks under my soles and the glue-like heat.
As I came to the sharp bend of the cliffs, the oddly built man I had met on the way from the site stepped out of the shadows. I halted, my breath shuddering into the stillness. Rais Guzman caught up with me, grasping my wrist in his long, bony hand.
The bandy-legged man spoke first. “What luck she came here to us.”
“Elsewhere she would have been far more difficult prey,” Rais Guzman agreed.
“That necklace is worth a king’s ransom!”
“Ismael, Ismael, it’s as nothing compared to what the Pasha will give us.”
“You know about that?” I faltered.
“I know,” Rais Guzman replied.
“But how? Who told you?”
For a second his grandee’s hauteur wavered and I saw that my question had frightened him far more than his mention of the Pasha had disturbed me. But he rallied immediately. “With my aid you conquered the Pasha’s heart and wealth.”
“You sold me into slavery.”
Ismael shifted on his bandy legs, peering uneasily about. “We can’t stay here all morning,” he said. “Let’s get her away.”
“Are you taking me to Cairo?”
Neither man replied. Rais Guzman’s grip on my wrist tightened and he pulled me toward the rockfall, then put his hand between my shoulder blades, propelling me swiftly upward. Ismael scuttled after us.
Since my fall the crevasse had been cleared and I saw that there were steps carved into solid rock and at the bottom a square-cornered archway.
“So the rockslide hid a tomb entry,” I said, and wondered why it didn’t come as more of a surprise.
“An empty tomb, completely worthless,” Rais Guzman replied. “The steps are very steep. Be careful.”
There wasn’t space for us to descend side by side so he went first, waiting at each step until my footing was firm, acting for all the world like an attentive beau rather than my captor. The priestly seals at the entry were broken.
“Before you moved the stone were the seals intact?” I asked.
“These were broken,” Rais Guzman replied.
“Inside?”
“A few were whole.”
“So maybe the tomb hasn’t been plundered.”
“We broke into all the chambers. The place is empty, rest assured of that. We’ve searched every cranny.” He stepped into the darkness. “Wait there.” He used a pocket luminary, touching a splint to the sulfur bottle, then lighting a candle.
Normally tomb entries are littered with debris—broken alabaster, shards of pottery, fragments of mummy cloth, but as Rais Guzman lifted the candle I saw only a smooth, empty limestone floor that sloped downward. I was directed inside by Ismael.
“Walk slowly,” Rais Guzman warned me.
After ten paces he halted, raising an arm to bar the way. The tunnel ended in a pit.
“Toeholds are cut into the stone,” Rais Guzman said. “I’ll go first to light your way.”
I descended backward, as one does a ladder, moving cautiously. Above my head, I could see Ismael’s brown curved leg
s.
At the bottom a human skeleton had been swept into an unceremonious heap.
“Some ancient robber must have fallen,” Rais Guzman said as he raised his candle in the warm, still air.
On the walls of the curving hallway blazed magnificent frescoes. Vivid. Alive. A procession of shaven-headed priests carrying a mummy case amid a grieving throng. Though priests and mourners were in that stylized Egyptian pose, face in profile, shoulders and body full front, all else about them was real. One priest had a wen on his nose. Tears flowed on a woman’s wrinkled cheek, a soldier bent over in his grief, children strewed flowers, beautiful girls tore at their elaborate wigs.
“Miraculous,” I breathed.
“Worthless,” Rais Guzman snorted. “In other tombs one finds a few of these golden beetles—”
“Scarabs,” I interjected.
“—or maybe an alabaster jar in good condition. Something an antiquarian will buy.”
Ismael pressed by to take the candlestick, leading the way down the gentle incline. I took note of the details of the masterful paintings.
“You’re a unique woman,” said Rais Guzman. “Cool.”
Why wasn’t I more afraid? I was being led down a tunnel into the depths below the canyon to be held until Rais Guzman could arrange to sell me to the Pasha. Soon I would be dead. And yet I was able to admire the ancient art and speak in the same scholarly tones I’d used in Monsieur Champollion’s study.
Ismael halted. Rais Guzman steadied the light. The dwarfed man’s huge shoulders bunched as he pressed at a segment of the wall. It was a stone set in narrow grooves. I had seen such stones in other tombs.
Ismael grunted.
Rock creaked, shifting.
“Here you are, Lady Bentham,” Rais Guzman announced. “Your temporary quarters.”
Eight
The hollowed-out chamber was a good size, and the single candle flame couldn’t properly light it, but I did note two mattresses, toilet vessels, a row of sweating quellahs—earthenware water jars—and a wooden platter strewn with date pits and cheese parings. There was a faint effluvium of recently cleared human waste.
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