The Jackal's House

by Anna Butler

  I reached for the oil again. The oil was cool on my cock, but I was so hot that the coolness was welcome, helping me stay in control. Ned rolled to his left side, half twisting to flatten his belly on the blanket and bending his right knee to give me entrance. I slid my fingers out of him, and pressed up against him. He wriggled to get into the right position, tilting up his arse so I could slide inside more easily.

  “Rafe,” he said again as if all he could say was my name.

  I loved watching my cock slide in, seeing the way he opened up for me, let me into his secret places, watching as he slowly swallowed me up. Even in the westering moonlight, it was a glorious sight. I closed my eyes and concentrated on the feeling as I pushed slowly up into him, the blunt head of my cock forcing the entrance, followed by the shaft, every inch of it gripped by his heat.

  When my balls were pressed up against him and I was all the way in, spooned up against his back, his bottom tucked into my lap, I paused for a moment to savor how completely he trusted me, how completely he took me into himself.

  He reached behind him, stretching a hand to rest on my side, his fingers moving in a caress. “Rafe.”

  He didn’t need to say more. That was everything, the soft loving tone as he spoke my name.

  I got my oily hand under him, reaching for his cock to palm it while I loved him. Pulling back until I felt his entrance catch on the head of my cock, I froze for an instant, then drove forward again. And again. And again. I couldn’t reach his mouth to kiss it, but I could kiss his dear back and shoulders, running my tongue over the hardness of bone at the back of his neck. I moved in him so slowly and deeply, pulling almost all the way out and making him whimper, then driving in to fill him again, angling so I was stroking against his prostate on every long, slow thrust forward.

  If ever there is a heaven, then this is it. I could have made love with him all night like this, never wanting it to end, loving the feel of him as he pushed up to meet me on each stroke, the way his arse muscles clenched around me to hold me in tight and hard.

  I wished I could tell him, but words are merely a string of sounds and letters. Instead I showed him.

  I showed him that he’s my heaven.

  Chapter 14

  IT HAD to be after midnight.

  We were dozing when a deep-throated cough came from the desert behind us, carrying over the cooling air. Luckily we’d got our clothing back to “decent and respectable,” because Sam loomed out of the darkness so quickly on the heels of that cough that we’d never have had time to cover anything up.

  “Lion, Mr. Edward.” He had his harquebus at the ready, and politely requested Ned’s return to the expedition house where he could keep an eye on him and make sure he didn’t have to explain himself to the Gallowglass for “letting his Heir get ’et by wild beasts.” He didn’t appear to have the same concern about my potential appearance on the leonine menu.

  “Lions? In this day and age?” Ned stared. “Surely not!”

  “No chances.”

  Ned sighed and got to his feet, then paused to hold out his hand and give me a pull up.

  Sam stiffened and stared, frowning. “There’s something out there, in the shadow of the temple wall….”

  “Lion, you said.”

  “No. Not the lion. That’s out there, somewhere.” Sam waved an arm at the desert behind us and frowned a little more fiercely. “I thought I saw something move over at the temple. Might have been a man’s shadow, but the head’s the wrong shape….”

  We stood beside him and stared in the same direction, toward the temple. The moon was westering to our right, slipping down behind the hills, catching the ruinous walls with pallid gleams and leaving the shadows beneath them thick and black. The village was quiet and dark, barely to be seen. I could see nothing moving on the flat sands.

  Sam shook his head when I said so. “Maybe I was seeing things.”

  The deep cough came again from the desert and, beyond that, the howling ululation of a jackal in full cry. It was answered by another yelping cry coming from somewhere near the temple ruins. In an instant, the whole desert was a-howl with the barking of wild dogs.

  “But I’m not imagining that. Back to the house, both of you, and get your pistols out ready.” Sam pushed the brimstone flashlight into my hands with a “Here. Make yourself useful.” He gave the temple one more glance, then looked behind us toward the low hills. If there was a lion out there, it was invisible in the gloom.

  Ned and I laughed, but we did as Sam asked. For his benefit, of course, and because Ned wanted to check on Harry and reassure him if he’d had woken and was nervous about the thought of a lion nearby.

  If you ask me, I’d put my money on Harry. It was the lion that should be nervous.

  THE REMAINDER of the night was quiet and lion-free. Whatever had stirred up the jackal packs passed, and they gradually faded into silence. After an hour’s uneasy dozing, dreaming of teeth and claws, I treated myself to a nip of scotch from my flask, turned over, and slept well for the rest of the night.

  Next morning Ned switched the main focus of the expedition to the curious structure he’d been longing to investigate ever since we got to Abydos. Sitting just behind the Seti temple, the Osireion had been found and named by Flinders Petrie the previous year but left mainly unexcavated for lack of time and resources.

  It was not impressive. I scrambled over piles of rubble to reach the spot where Ned rejoiced over a few flat-topped stones jutting up out of an awful lot of sand. He was running his hands over one of the stones, humming tunelessly as he caressed it. I envied the stone. I had a fondness for Ned’s hands doing just that with me.

  “They’re substantial stones.” I kicked at one with the toe of my boot, tracing the lines of chisel marks. “And worked by man, I see. Something like the Stonehenge monuments?”

  “The tops of something, anyway, that may be even bigger. Petrie did some test boring. The main structure is below ground level. He didn’t reach the pavement at the bottom until the bore tube hit forty feet.”

  “You’re going to dig it out?” It was a lot of sand and rubble. My blisters twinged at the thought.

  “Eventually, I hope, but not this season. We’ll map out the boundary first, and then we’ll see if we can find how the structure underneath links to the main temple.” Ned scowled at the rubble tips, which were of considerable height and volume. “All this is detritus from Mariette’s excavation of the main temple years ago. We have to shift it, move it farther away.” He turned the scowl to me and let it change to a grin. “One of the hazards of excavating, I’m afraid. Wherever we move it to, it may end up obscuring something else of importance. In ten years’ time, some poor digger will be cursing my name the way I’m cursing Mariette’s.”

  I could only shrug, suspecting that those of us who were less skilled would be put to moving the rubbish heaps and not looking forward to the prospect. I’d happily make the cursing more generalized. “What’s an Osireion?”

  “The whole temple, the whole of Abydos, was the cult center of Osiris.” Ned stooped over a box of instruments with one of his students and pulled the equipment out onto a large tarpaulin. He looked up at me, grinning. “Petrie knew, of course, that whatever it is, this structure would have been connected to Osiris too. It was just a handy name to call it.”

  “I thought you Aegypt men despised Hellenic rubbish, even in naming unknown structures.”

  Ned laughed. “Abydos is the classical Greek form of the old Aegyptian name. So is Osiris. There’s no getting away from Greek, even here.” He left his student to it, took a step closer to me, and lowered his voice. “And no getting away from classicists either.”

  No, there wasn’t. There wasn’t a hope in Hell I’d let him get away. I had him. I was going to keep him.

  The smile we exchanged would have ignited rock.

  “And that’s quite enough lollygagging around, Rafe Lancaster.” The corner of Ned’s mouth twitched. “There are entire spoil he
aps just begging for your attention. Chop-chop!”

  And then again, anyone want a slightly used Aegyptologist? Going cheap.

  WHEN HE heard of it, Mr. Bakhoum dismissed the idea of lions as fanciful. The desert, he said, was full of strange noises at night. While there were still a few lions in the south near the Cataracts, none had been seen as far north as Abydos for generations. “Not since my grandfather’s grandfather’s time.”

  Which didn’t perhaps take us quite as far back as Seti but was still a considerable period.

  “Good,” Ned said. It had been difficult to drag him away from his theodolite to discuss leonine throat clearing, and he had evidently lost patience. “And if we’ve exhausted that theory, can we please get back to work? I’d like to finish here before the next inundation, if at all possible.”

  I glanced over at the cultivated lands, where the drying silt from the last floods was being tilled by the women and younger children. “It’ll flood again? I thought we’d be clear until next summer.”

  “My point exactly. I’m here to excavate, not worry about lions.”

  Ned raised his voice and called out something in Arabic that had the work crews laughing, and within a moment or two, they were back to shoveling sand, singing cheerful songs as they dug. M. Bakhoum stroked his beard to hide his smile behind his hand. Ned, however, gave the spade in my hands a very pointed look.

  I sighed. “I know. Chop-chop.”

  He allowed the smile through. “You’ll make an archaeologist yet, my boy.”

  Honestly, at that moment I’d have given him away free.

  Or I would, if it hadn’t been for the fact that when he turned and walked away, his riding breeches outlined a deliciously delectable arse, and with every step the fabric tightened down the back of his thighs in a most exciting fashion. I found myself lifting the spade and setting to with gusto. That was my archaeologist inside those breeches, and little as I liked manual labor, it would please Ned to have the detritus of previous seasons’ digs moved somewhere out of his way. Quite a motivator, pleasing Ned.

  I spent the rest of that week, and all the week after, clearing the spoil heaps. Ned gave me my very own work crew to supervise, with Hugh as my second-in-command. Hugh was a marvel at energizing the workmen and keeping them up to the mark. He and I learned some basic Arabic commands for “Dig here, please” and “Put that rubbish over there. No, not there. Much farther over there.” While Ned, Causton, and our two German professors mapped out the boundary wall of the Osireion, opened up excavation trenches to find the entrance, and started digging out two millennia of drifted sand, Hugh and I shifted muck.

  Harry normally turned up with Frank at around nine or ten, since Ned didn’t want to overtax the child’s strength and insisted on a light regime for him. Ned had no such compunction about overtaxing me, I noticed.

  I was surprised to see how well Harry got on with the younger children. A few days of shyness on their part and incomprehension on his resolved quickly into a camaraderie that could only do him good. He and Nasr were fast friends, bonding over excavation. Harry was very good at brigading the children into a work crew of his own. And yes, by that I do mean Harry will make an excellent dictator when he grows up. We set the boys to work in a corner where they could do no real damage, sifting through the spoil from Mariette’s mounds as we moved it. Ned was a most proud papa when he first listened to Harry giving me tips on the correct methods for excavating a rubbish heap. Really, the man’s chest puffed out like a pouter pigeon’s. I was less pleased, particularly when Harry insisted I photograph his finds. I sighed, humored him, and labeled them all in approved scientific manner, much to his satisfaction.

  The things a man does for love. Doesn’t bear thinking about.

  A COUPLE of days after we started excavation work on the Osireion proper, Laurent Fouquet slouched over from his own dig to see what we were up to. He greeted Ned with restrained, rather formal courtesy and accepted the offer of a tour. By then, the team had mapped out the temenos, the boundary of the Osireion. Let me just say, it was large. Very large, and the entire belowground structure was full to the brim with drifted sand and compacted rubbish that Ned said was Roman in origin. The very thought of emptying it made me feel faint. Ned had laughed, because in truth, even with the numbers of men we had working for us, we couldn’t hope to uncover more than a fraction of the building in one season. Ned didn’t rush his excavations.

  From the flights we’d taken over the site, Ned had noted the sinking of the land into a long shallow gully to the north of the structure. A passageway, he thought, cut into the marl that formed the floor of the desert below its covering of sand. He was deep in plans for clearing the entrance to this passage, and was working on sinking boreholes along its length, hoping to find a clear space beneath. So far we’d mostly found sand and muck. It would have to be dug out every inch of its length.

  Fouquet looked sour, sneering as only a genteel Frenchman could. “You have made excellent progress, Winter. But then, you have hired most of the men in the region.”

  Was that behind Fouquet’s hostility—that there wasn’t enough manpower for both expeditions? A legitimate complaint, but one I suspected was common between rival digs all competing for the same labor force. If the men preferred to work where they earned more money, that was hardly Ned’s fault.

  “There is a lot of sand and detritus to move” was all Ned said.

  “I have had to bring men down from Bayt Khalaf.” Fouquet did not sound a happy man. “You took even the men from El-Khirba.” That being the village nearest his dig, where, I supposed, he could have expected to find a ready source of workers.

  Ned, however, was schooled in handling the politics of just about any place and any issue with courtesy and grace. He did not rise to Fouquet’s bait. Instead he gave him a kind smile and polite wishes that Fouquet would find his diggers to be hardworking and honest. Fouquet choked audibly.

  We were walking through the main temple, looking for M. Archambault. Fouquet didn’t want to leave, he said, without greeting his countryman. Archambault was drawing the temple’s king list—that is, the wall of a side chapel carved with the cartouches of almost every pharaoh since the merging of the Two Kingdoms millennia before the birth of Christ. The chapel was in the southern part of the temple, an area where Ned hoped to find a direct entrance to the Osireion, and Fouquet had something snide to say for every step we took.

  He was particularly outraged when we passed the painted wall that had been damaged before we’d arrived, likely by one of the villagers hacking out a souvenir for a passing excursionist. Ned, of course, had been just as angry when he’d found the piece missing. Fouquet, though, had no compunction in blaming Ned for it. He scowled blackly at us all. “There was no damage to this when I looked over the temple when I arrived here. There has been gross negligence here, Winter! It is insupportable that you have allowed this to happen!”

  How Ned didn’t haul back and thump the man is beyond me. Instead, Ned managed another of the kind smiles and said something or other about how no one could regret the damage more than he did. Fouquet snorted audibly.

  I did not have Ned’s patience. Fouquet was a living embodiment of the relations between the Imperium and the French Empire since the Hundred Years’ War: complex, difficult, and rife with mutual mistrust and misunderstanding. I peeled off from the tour about halfway through the vast hypostyle hall, preferring the company of old ghosts to that of Laurent Fouquet. As he and Ned turned into the southern chapels, their voices whispered back to me, threading their way through the great columns.

  My aim was to spend a few minutes pottering about on my own before heading back around the temple to my unbeloved rubbish heaps. I wanted to take a look at some of the carved inscriptions and bas-reliefs with the help of a crib—that is, the notes I’d made on reading one of Ned’s books. I worked my way up an incised column. I was nowhere near proficient enough to read the glyphs, but at least I could recognize the sou
nds and letter combinations they stood for. That upside-down pipe next to a vulture was the letter combination “mt,” for example, and the upside-down parasol meant “mw.” How the ancients then used these letters in actual words was beyond me. I was the merest tyro, delighted that I could even recognize a carving was a quail chick and not a vulture.

  The higher up the pillar, the more the darkness clung to the underside of the flat roof, and I was forced to switch on a brimstone light to illuminate the hieroglyphs. Right at the top, where the pillar met a roof beam, the hieroglyphics looked distinctly modern. A submersible? An aeroship? Something that looked like the D’Amécourt heli-pteron machine the Aero Corps had been experimenting with the previous year. Peculiar.

  I grinned all the way back to where Hugh was patiently helping Harry excavate while simultaneously overseeing our work crew take a more muscular approach to shifting the spoil heaps. Perhaps, like Ned, Seti had had his own pilot. I wondered if that ancient pilot’s job benefits mirrored mine, and if his most romantic nights were interrupted by coughing lions and overenthusiastic palace guards.

  Chapter 15

  ONE DAY in early December, half the men didn’t turn up for work. A sluice gate in one of the smaller dykes had breached overnight. Water that had been stored to irrigate the fields over winter had flooded across the growing corn and drowned it. The men were trying to save their crops.

  Mr. Bakhoum shook his head when asked what had happened. “I do not know. The gates were in good repair.”

  “Probably so rotten you could pull it apart with your fingers,” Sam said softly in my ear as Mr. Bakhoum, still shaking his head, went to spur the remaining workers to greater efforts to make up for their missing comrades. Sam glanced at Ned and scowled. “I can’t leave him, but this should be investigated. Would you do it, Lancaster?”