The Jackal's House

by Anna Butler

  Let me see. An amble across the fields to look at a broken dyke or toiling under the warm winter sun with a shovel. What do you think?

  Hugh went with me. We both felt we were due a break from shifting spoil heaps.

  “I wonder where Mariette is buried?” I dug one of my cigarillos out of my breast pocket and lit it.

  Hugh preferred gaspers to cigarillos and produced one of his carefully hoarded Woodbines. Neither of us smoked much, but we’d earned these. It had been a hard week.

  “He’s dead, then?” Hugh’s disappointed tone was judged to a nicety.

  “Nearly twenty years, so Ned tells me.”

  “Shame. I was hoping to have words with him.”

  “Oh, me too. I’m thinking about digging him up and giving him my opinion on his working practices. Wherever his soul rests right now, I hope his ears are burning.”

  Hugh laughed softly. “I was thinking… when we get back, d’you mind if I take some classes? Mr. Ned told me about some at the museum, and it’s right to hand, so to speak. If we’re going to be coming here every year, it’d be good to graduate up from manual labor. I’d like to know more about what we’re doing.”

  I stopped dead and stared at him. “Every year?”

  He grinned at me and shrugged. “You’ve sort of broken the back of it now, sir. I reckon you’re caught.”

  I could only sigh, but didn’t get the chance to tell him if that was the case, we’d probably both be taking the classes. We were interrupted by a loud shout coming from behind us. Harper and Symington approached, accompanied by a lugubrious donkey pulling an empty two-wheel cart.

  “Good day!” Harper beamed, almost as if he were glad to see me.

  I shook his hand and Symington’s. “How are you both? We haven’t seen you for a week or two.”

  Since their first visit with us, they’d been back several times, joining us for a meal on a Friday when the workers took their rest day to attend the mosque. I hadn’t had much to do with them beyond exchanging the usual courtesies—I wasn’t an archaeologist, and they had far more in common with Ned and his team than with Hugh and me. At least they were polite to both of us. I merited a proper greeting and the easy chat that marked the meeting of gentlemen no matter how unusual the circumstances. Hugh, however, was merely granted a cheerful nod and no handshake. Ah yes. Even when we’re out in the desert in grubby linen shirts and riding breeches that have seen much better days, the distinctions of class must be preserved. Hugh, I was glad to see, nodded back but certainly wasn’t in the least servile. He stood quietly at my side as I inquired about progress at their dig.

  “We’ve made some interesting discoveries.” Symington shifted his weight from one foot to the other and added, in a rather constricted tone, “Which we aren’t prepared to talk about yet.”

  Harper scowled. “We had that Frenchie come sniffing around last week. Fouquet, or whatever his name is. You’d think he’d have enough on his plate looking into the New Kingdom tombs without him bothering us. We still aren’t sure what he was after.”

  Archaeologists. As paranoid as they come, always terrified someone will publish before they can or steal their dig from under them. I couldn’t see a way of saying I was profoundly indifferent to anything they could conceivably find, at least not without being appallingly rude, but I managed a grunt, a smile, and an inquiry about their current destination.

  They were, apparently, on their way to the canal to meet their regular supply ship and collect the next month’s supplies. They’d walked the two miles from their excavation site, and the donkey was obviously to be pressed into service as transport back. No wonder the poor beast looked pensive.

  Harper rolled his eyes when they got this far in their explanation. “What Sym means is a month’s worth of corned beef. We’re cheeseparing out here.”

  Symington snorted out a laugh. “Without the cheese!”

  His round, amiable face, much reddened by the Aegyptian sun, reminded me of a nice Dutch Edam, but I refrained from the obvious quip.

  “At least we can pick up our post.” Symington pushed back his hat and wiped his brow before waving the hand holding his sweaty handkerchief over toward the fields. “Is something amiss?”

  In the near distance, a group of men could be seen at work on the dyke. Their voices carried easily over the slight, warm breeze.

  “One of the sluice gates in a dyke gave way, I understand, and flooded a field or two. Hugh and I thought we’d see if any help was needed.”

  “Good of you! Noblesse oblige and all that.” Harper grasped the donkey’s bridle. His execrable accent would have provoked a fit of the vapors in Laurent Fouquet. “Well, we’ll be on our way and leave you to it. The dahabiya should be here shortly, and her captain won’t wait around.”

  Dahabiyas were the domain of rich tourists who thought that hiring a boat to take them up and down the Nile granted them unfettered access to anything on either bank that caught their fancy. A very few tourists, or the Inspector of Antiquities on one of his visits, would be welcomed and given a tour, but the majority of them were nothing more but a plaguey nuisance. At one point Ned threatened to ring our excavation with a fellahin guard from the village men, otherwise every Tom, Dick, and Harry of a tourist, along with his wife and children, would be in the excavation trench with us, demanding to know what was going on and what we thought we were doing. They were a menace. I was surprised a dahabiya would do anything so mundane as carry stores to archaeological expeditions, and said so.

  “We managed to contract with a captain who’s willing to lower his standards for regular cash,” Symington said, his amiable smile unwavering. “So far he hasn’t let us down. He supplies the Frenchies as well.” He pointed to the south, and I turned to see a couple of men and donkeys pick their way down to the canal along a parallel dyke a couple of hundred yards away. The Frenchmen returned our waves with a halfhearted raising of one hand. “Miserable blighters, that lot, and as strapped for funds as we are. I don’t suppose you have this problem, not with Professor Winter funding his own expeditions. I’ll bet you fly to Cairo for everything you need.”

  A less-than-subtle hint, but I was too much the gentleman to jeer. “I was there last week, and I’ll be going up again on the twentieth, as it happens, to collect a few things for our Christmas celebration. Is there something you’d like me to bring back for you?”

  They were profuse in their thanks and rather diffident in asking if I could square it with my conscience to bring back a couple of bottles of scotch.

  “Medicinal purposes only, of course.” Harper tapped the side of his nose in conspiratorial fashion.

  “Of course. I expect we’ll see you over Christmas so I can hand it over. Ned said he was going to invite you to join us. In the meantime, drop in anytime for a glass and a smoke. You know you’re always welcome.”

  “You’re a true gentleman.” Harper grasped my hand and shook it hard, as if working a village pump handle. “Thank you, Captain. We appreciate it.”

  A sharp siren’s howl ripped through the air. As one, we turned to face the canal and the dahabiya steaming down from the canal’s confluence with the Nile to our south.

  The pleasure boats plying the Nile were lopsided and clumsy, looking like the collision between two different boats. A low deck at the front held a mast and a bank of oars. At about amidships, the sides were raised to enclose staterooms for the passengers, reached through a passageway that led to the saloon-cum-drawing room at the stern. During the day, the passengers trotted up an ornate external stair to the roof of their deck, from which shady, canopied space they could watch the ancient lands slide by. Sometimes another deck had been added above the staterooms, making the boats positively hunchbacked. A second mast jutted up from the blunted stern—even steam-dahabiyas were oared and masted, either from a sense of nostalgia or the captain’s lack of faith in his engines.

  In short, naval architecture as applied to the Aegyptian dahabiya did not make much sen
se and would win no prizes for beauty. How the monstrosities didn’t capsize in the merest whisper of a zephyr is beyond me.

  “Our supply boat,” Symington said. “The Theban Princess.”

  We stared at each other. That had to be the most ludicrous name for an Aegyptian boat in the long history of travel up and down the Nile.

  “You jest!” I said.

  “Well, they do cater to tourists and excursionists. Those poor fools don’t know any better.” Harper choked down his laughter, shook hands again, and with that, they meandered on their way, the donkey trailing along in their wake.

  “Doesn’t seem to me they’re all that well prepared and kitted out.” Hugh reignited his gasper, which he’d considerately pinched between thumb and forefinger to avoid blowing smoke during the conversation. “Not like us.”

  “Ned’s been at it longer, and money’s no object for him.” I sighed. It would be nice to be so nonchalant about finances.

  Over at the dyke, the men’s voices rose into shouts, and they splashed away to one side, kicking up sprays of brown water. There was no knowing what they’d shied at, but a moment later peals of nervous laughter rang in the air, and they crowded around the gate again.

  “Hope it isn’t a crocodile,” Hugh said.

  I laughed at his deadpan delivery. “Hell, me too! Come on. We’d better get this over with.”

  Mind you, when we got there, I couldn’t see much of interest. To my untutored eye, the gate planks seemed sound enough, but I suppose years of holding back the Nile could have left key elements rotting under the surface. Several spars on the gate had snapped, leaving jagged white teeth jutting over the breaks. The village carpenter was busy repairing them, up to his waist in the silty water, dovetailing in new lengths of wood and tapping them into place.

  One of our diggers told us, in halting English, that the evil ones, the djinns, had broken their fine gate out of spite. His neighbors stood behind him, nodding and frowning, and more than one muttered, “Djinns!” in agreement. They shuffled from one foot to another, sharing glances and keeping in a tight knot.

  Aegypt was undeniably the land of mystery, but lack of maintenance was more likely to blame than malign daemonic forces. I explored the area for clues but wasn’t entirely sure what I was looking for, being neither a detective nor a paranoid House guard. I supposed I could report that I couldn’t be certain that the splintered wood was rotten. Sam would undoubtedly find that suspicious, but if he wanted an expert opinion he should have sent a dendrologist. Or at least another carpenter.

  Time to return to digging. Hugh delved generously into his pack of Woodbines and distributed smokes to each of the men there, an act that earned us their goodwill. We cut back across an intersecting dyke to a chorus of farewells and smiles, more cheerful now they were curving around cigarettes, leaving the men to work the system of gates and ponds to drain the excess water from where it wasn’t wanted. The mud on the dyke gleamed a rich brown—the compacted silt the Nile had brought all the way from the torridly hot south crisscrossed with the prints from the villagers’ sandals. Farther out, toward the desert, the sandal prints vanished, to be replaced by the paw marks of what must be every dog in the area, one or two very large and deep.

  The mud smelled, surprisingly, of chocolate.

  Chapter 16

  IN RETROSPECT, the incident of the lion’s cough in the nighttime signaled the start of it all, the trumpet starting the race.

  At the time we barely noticed. It was just something to laugh about together, an oddity of an event that didn’t appear to have any real significance. But yes, it was the beginning. There was no immediate impact. Instead it was the cumulative effect of the disturbances, petty as they seemed at the outset, that we saw only when we were looking back to trace patterns and similarities.

  But as the days wore on and December tipped over the halfway mark and started the slide toward Christmas, the atmosphere at the dig changed. The workmen were a trifle less cheerful, the singing less free and heartfelt, the boys’ enthusiasm more forced.

  We noticed that, at least, and it got a mention after dinner in the courtyard one evening. The cook had treated us to kofta and falafel, served in a spicy gravy and mopped up with warm flatbread. We were at the coffee stage, smoking and talking while nibbling on fruit and slices of sweet, sticky baklava stuffed with nuts and apricots. The occasional late-season dragonfly swooped and hummed overhead, attracted to the lights, and lizards scampered over the cooling walls to their nesting places.

  Professor Lansbach pulled hard on his noxious-smelling pipe. “The men are ängstlich… nervous… have you noticed? They are still arguing about the dyke breach, and other oddities are happening. Two of the fishing boats were holed below the waterline after they’d been beached, and no one can explain how it happened. Ammar Nabib’s grapevines wilted and died, but not with any blight they’ve ever seen before. Ammar is talking about evil spirits and curses. And this morning, Herr Bakhoum told me that our friend Osman Eldegheidy lost all his wheat when somehow the village goats got into his fields despite the fences.” The pipe bowl glowed a volcanic red-orange and wreathed Lansbach in daemonic blue smoke.

  “Are you smoking old mummy wrappings again, Professor?” Not even my spectacles saved my eyes from the noxious fumes. I waved aside the smoke and pulled a dish of rich hayani dates toward me. I snaffled several, each the shiny reddish-brown of polished chestnuts. I bought them fresh daily from the old man who owned the palms lining the road from the village to the rickety dock on the canal. “Which one’s Osman?”

  “Leader of the second work crew. Mr. Bakhoum’s nephew.” Ned filched one of the sticky rich fruits right off my plate. He was lucky I didn’t skewer his hand with a fork. “He told me his woes this morning. He beat the goatherd in retaliation, and now the boy’s father is angry. They got into a shouting match at the dig, but it came to nothing more than a few pushes and shoves before Mr. Bakhoum and I broke it up. I hope that’s the end of it. The last thing we need is a feud. They can last for years.”

  Causton laughed. “Sounds like Kentucky. They specialize in shooting wars there.”

  “Dear Lord, I hope not. I want them focused on their work at the dig, not taking potshots at one another from behind the obelisks.” Ned’s grin belied his protest. “And have you seen the guns around here? Most of ’em are ancient projectile muskets their great-grandfathers stole from Napoleon’s troops. I wouldn’t be worried about Osman being hit by a bullet, but anyone within a fifty-foot radius of him could be collateral damage. Those old gun barrels are so warped they’d shoot around corners.”

  “I have seen them.” Baumann commandeered the dates. He smiled at me across the table. “Sie schmecken ausgezeichnet, Captain. Most tasty. Thank you for buying them for us.”

  “I’m not entirely sure I intended to share.”

  Baumann just laughed, darn him. And some people claim our Germanic friends have no sense of humor. But he sobered when he returned to the previous topic. “We shall have to keep an eye on things, Ned. They are all good Mohammedans, natürlich, but they also have a healthy respect for afreets and djinns. I have seen more than one expedition disrupted by such things.”

  “Djinns?” I hesitated, my hand hovering over the plate of dates. Which one to take before my esteemed colleagues ate them all? Then I remembered the men at the broken dyke gate and turned my attention to the professor.

  “The stories of the Arabian Nights have their roots in such superstition, Captain. You are familiar with them, yes? Sehr gut. The stories have a long history, perhaps as long as the building of the temple itself. Here in Aegypt, where everywhere lies the corpse of a dead civilization, the very age of the ruins, their mystery, the old gods, the queer paintings on the temple walls—all are enough to explain the villagers’ unease and their belief that spirits haunt the ruins. If the villagers get the idea that the djinns are displeased by the excavation and taking their revenge, that could be trouble.”

  Somewhe
re close by, a jackal called its love song to a moon quartering away from the full, joined after a moment by a wavering chorus. Under the table, Molly growled in answer. She pushed her head up against my hand when I reached down to tousle her ears, but I doubted she needed comforting. The growl had been more of a low warning to her wild cousins that she was on the job and watchful. The jackals sang on, indifferent.

  “They’re close in tonight,” Archambault said, turning his head toward the sound.

  “The jackals?” Ned’s eyes gleamed in the lamplight when he looked up. “They’re never far away.”

  Here in Aegypt, man had lived close to the wild dogs for millennia. Or perhaps more accurately, had died close to them. The cohorts of Anubis had long ushered the dead to the western horizon.

  Archambault’s mild gaze returned to us, and he smiled. “Getting to know us, do you think? After all, we are the souls that one day they’ll be taking to be weighed on the great balance.”

  Cheerful! But it was enough to divert the talk onto funerary rites and rituals, and that night I learned more of mummification techniques than I ever wanted or needed to know.

  The problems of our neighbors in the village were forgotten.

  For the moment.

  THE FOLLOWING day, Ned succumbed to pressure from the villagers to go and look at Ammar Nabib’s withered vines and give his scholarly opinion on the cause. As he said, given that he was an archaeologist whose only knowledge of viticulture consisted of knowing which vintages to ask for in restaurants, he wasn’t entirely sure what he could do about Ammar’s loss.

  “Pay for it, likely,” Sam said. “What else?”

  I went with Ned and Sam out of sheer nosiness. The vines had clustered thickly over the mud walls enclosing Ammar’s garden on the banks of the canal, but now were very sorry specimens indeed. Ammar was vocal in his misery, swearing that he had been diligent in watering them, that the night before he found them withered, they had borne the brightest and glossiest of green leaves and were so laden with sweet black grapes the walls groaned under the weight of them. Now the stems were blackened and rotting, the leaves as dry and rustling as old papyrus scrolls. The grapes were the epitome of the saying about withering on the vine—dried up, wizened little nubs. The vine stem I touched was sticky, and the wall behind the vines was spotted with more sticky black residue. Ammar had no idea what it was. Something had been sprayed there, though.