by Anna Butler
Beside me, Ned pushed closer to see more clearly. “Well, I’ll be blowed! It’s Howard Carter. What the hell is he doing here?”
NED STOOD very stiff, his back to the door and his arms ramrod straight down his sides. His fists beat lightly on his thighs. I couldn’t see his downcast face.
Out in the courtyard, our colleagues were moving around. Causton and Baumann must have hurried from the office when Sam called the all clear. Causton stood in the doorway to the students’ dormitory; I could hear the low rumble as he reassured them, interrupted now and again by a higher-pitched voice from within. Baumann had greeted our visitor and was escorting him back to the office, with Forde trailing along behind them in the usual untrusting, watchful House guard fashion.
“Papa?” Harry said.
Ned lifted his head. The anguish he’d tried to hide earlier was writ large all over his face. He brought up both hands and rubbed them down over his face from brow to chin, but when he spoke, his voice was light and cheerful. “It’s all over, Harry. It’s a friend of mine. Come on out!”
Harry wriggled out obediently, his small face blotched with tear stains against the dust it had picked up from under the bed. Ned held out his arms, wordless, and when Harry jumped up into them to wrap his legs around his father’s waist and bury his head against Ned’s neck, there was nothing to do but guide Ned and his shaking little burden to the bed. Ned sat with Harry in his lap, rocking him gently and crooning soothing nonsense. Hugh had already gone when I backed out of the room to join everyone on the verandah where Sam, looking grim, waited with one hand on his pistol grips. I had no place in the room, not at that moment. None of us did.
Poor child. I recalled that when Ned pushed him to the floor, he’d gone down with nary a squeak and had rolled quickly out of sight. Poor little mite, trained at even his tender age to deal with potential danger. For all the wealth and privilege that would be his, he’d always face threats that meant he’d be pushed under beds while other men put themselves between him and death. The sans-culottes and the end of the Houses couldn’t come quickly enough for me.
A good ten minutes passed before Ned appeared at the door. Frank went inside to settle into an armchair at the foot of the bed, a charged pistol on his knee. “Keep the lights on for a while,” Ned told him as Frank passed. Ned hesitated, went back to where Harry was already tucked into bed, Molly on guard beside him, and kissed his son on the forehead. He pulled up the bedclothes to fit more snugly around Harry’s shoulders. “Sleep tight, little son. Remember we won’t let anything bad happen.”
He stood for a moment on the verandah after closing the door. “Some days I have every sympathy with your hatred of the Houses, Rafe. I wish to God I could bring my boys here forever and the Imperium didn’t exist….” His voice faltered, trailed into a thick, sad silence.
I had to swallow against that uncomfortable lump in the throat again, my gut churning. My shoulders were so tense they ached, and it took a conscious effort to relax them. No one should have to live under such apprehension for himself and his family. No one. Least of all my Ned.
Ned shook his head when I took his hand and squeezed it. “I know, Rafe. I know. Let’s go and see what Howard wants.”
He tucked his hand through my arm, and I hoped the closeness comforted him. It comforted me.
Howard Carter was ensconced in the office with the rest of the team, inhaling a cup of coffee. From the smell of it, the coffee was liberally laced with scotch.
“It’s good to see you, Howard.” Ned’s smile would have fooled the average observer, I suspect. He held out his hand and gripped Carter’s. “I’m sorry I wasn’t there to greet you. I have Harry with me this season, and the alarms startled him. He needed a little reassurance before he settled down again.”
“One of the perils of fatherhood.” Carter’s handshake when he offered his hand to me was hearty. He was a young man, midtwenties, perhaps, with slicked-back hair and deep-set brown eyes. The line of hair inhabiting his upper lip might one day mature into a mustache. “Glad to meet you, Captain Lancaster. What are you doing with this charlatan?” He gave Ned a friendly cuff on the shoulder.
“Oh, I’m the world’s leading expert on photographing potsherds. You know Ned well, then.”
Carter laughed. He was a genial soul. “I’ve met everyone here at some expedition or other up and down the Nile. Ned and I go back years. Almost a decade, eh, Ned?”
He must have started young.
“I was seventeen when I first came out in ’91,” he said when I made this observation. “Like M. Archambault here”—and he made a queer little sitting bow aimed at our esteemed French colleague—“I was principally the expedition artist.”
“We met briefly then, but really got to know each other the following year in Amarna. We both worked for Flinders Petrie. Tom was part of that dig, too, all of us earning our archaeological spurs under Petrie’s tutelage.” Ned rolled his eyes. “If I never see a potsherd again….”
Which was rich, given how many he’d made me photograph and catalog since our arrival in Abydos.
Carter laughed. “We certainly shared the woes of apprenticeship. I’ve been working at Deir el-Bahari… at least, I was until last year. You’ve heard of my new appointment?”
“Chief Inspector of Antiquities for Upper Aegypt. I was delighted to hear of it.” Ned’s smile broadened. “Do we make obeisance now?”
“You may not wish to. I’m here on official business.” Carter’s smile faded, and the ruddy glow on his cheeks deepened. He shifted in his seat, and his gaze slid away from meeting ours.
Ned’s eyebrow quirked up. “I was expecting you to visit at some point during the excavation season.”
“Maspero sent me.” Carter had had a leather satchel on a long strap over his shoulder when he’d arrived. He made something of a show of opening it and searching through the contents. I had the distinct impression he was embarrassed. “There’s no way to sugarcoat this, Ned. Maspero had an anonymous letter last week that he forwarded to me via facsimile machine. We all know this is nonsense, but it accuses you of robbing the site of priceless antiquities and selling them to collectors back home. I’m here to determine if that’s true and revoke your excavation license if it is.”
“I’M RELUCTANT to leave you right now.” I pushed my overnight bag into the space beneath the passenger seat of the two-seater, jamming it into place. “All these things happening, Ned…. Professor Baumann’s right about how nervy the men are getting. I’m jittery myself. There’s something….” I paused, seeking for the right word. “There’s something malevolent going on here.”
“I know we’re all paranoid enough to think that anything happening is aimed at us because of the Houses, but I don’t think that automatically holds true out here.” But Ned sounded troubled. “I’d be as nervous and suspicious as Sam if we were back in Londinium—”
“I’m just properly cautious,” Sam said. He didn’t look around from where he stood guard outside the large shed we used as a hangar for the two-seater.
“But here, what would anyone gain by stirring up all the workers and disrupting the dig?”
“Except to cause trouble for trouble’s sake, as Causton and Baumann experienced in El Faiyûm,” I said. “And Ned, don’t forget that those palms were brought down with a powered ax. That’s most unlikely to be the work of one of the locals. Nor did someone like Ammar Nabib send for Howard Carter.”
Ned sighed.
Day had dawned with, thankfully, no further incident after Carter’s unexpected arrival the night before. Carter had stayed at the expedition house, although the best we could offer was a camp bed in the office. He would spend the day trawling through all the expedition records.
“A matter of form, Ned,” he’d said the night before, so apologetic it was painful. “But I have to do it. We both know you aren’t selling so much as a grain of sand here, and Maspero knows it too, but we’ll accumulate the evidence to confound any bastard wh
o says otherwise.”
Now, Ned shrugged. “To be honest, I’m not worried about it. Annoyed, of course. Bloody annoyed, actually, as it’s going to waste so much time. But if Petrie taught me anything, it was to have a blow-by-blow account of an excavation, with a complete series of drawings and photographs showing the condition and location of each object before removal—”
“I know, Ned. I know. I’m the poor peon who took the photos and labeled each and every one of those bloody things. Who knew an archaeologist needs a card index filing system more than he needs a trowel?”
Ned smiled, but it looked strained. “It helps at a time like this.”
The letter sent to Maspero had been… odd. That was it. Nothing too overt, but not written in entirely idiomatic English, as if it had been translated. Carter had looked bland when I mentioned this the evening before, claiming he couldn’t possibly comment and this was what he’d received from Maspero.
I wasn’t happy about leaving Ned at such a juncture, though Carter seemed harmless enough. Indeed, he was a pleasant chap. He had reddened when Ned invited him to join us for Christmas, five days hence, his manner gauche and unpolished. For all his bravado when facing up to Sam’s pistols, he struck me as a man who was a little clumsy in his relations with others, viewing the world like a puppy who expected to get his ears pulled. His shy pleasure at the invitation suggested the puppy had received an unexpected caress and a bone instead.
But still he was a shot in someone’s campaign against us, a symptom of the sickness afflicting us, not the contagion itself. It felt like a small betrayal to run off to Cairo and leave Ned to it. Ned had pooh-poohed my concerns, far more worried about maintaining the morale of the team by ensuring I collected all the Christmas mail in time for the festivities and brought back some of the luxuries this little village on the Nile couldn’t supply.
I gestured to Ned to take one wing of the two-seater while I took the other. The little craft didn’t weigh much since, apart from her aether engine, she was all wood struts and canvas. I’d already pulled away the blocks of wood bracing the wheels, and once we’d overcome the initial inertia, we could push her out onto the crude aerostrip.
When we had her in position for takeoff, Sam turned back to stare at the shed. He glanced at Ned. “You know, I’m not sure I like leaving the two-seater out here with nothing to protect it. If the worst comes to the worst, it may be all I have to get you and Harry out. I’ll rig a perimeter security system by the time the captain gets back. It’ll have to be set close in, because I don’t have a lot of spare birefringent crystals, but I’ll work it out.”
I looked at the shed. Couldn’t fault the man on his paranoia. “What about power? It’s a long way from the generator.”
Sam gave me a hard glance, evidently disliking the note of practicality I was trying to inject into his plans for putting the entire country of Aegypt under some sort of security interdict. His scowl soon smoothed away. “Talk to Todd when you get to Cairo. I’ll get a message to him on the long-distance Marconi, and he’ll have a couple of solar panels for you to bring back with you. He can borrow them from the Khedive’s security people. They’ll fit into the storage compartment.”
And take up the space I was supposed to be using to bring back Christmas luxuries. Besides, an alarm system wouldn’t help very much, given that the shed was ten minutes from the expedition house. Miscreants could do a lot of damage to a delicate aerocraft in ten minutes.
Sam’s reaction to this observation was a snort. “You’d make a stuffed bird laugh, you would. I’ll set it to neural disrupter mode. Anyone walking through the field without an armband will be down and wriggling like a landed fish for an hour afterward. That’ll teach ’em.”
“I expect they can count their lucky stars you don’t set it to kill.” I shrugged into my flying jacket and swapped my hat for a close-fitting leather helmet. I looked ridiculous in it, but it kept my ears warm.
“I’m thinking about it.” And Sam’s sober tone suggested that, once again, he wasn’t joking. He never did when it came to Ned’s safety.
Ned and I had said our farewells the previous evening, although not out in our favorite hollow in the sands. Sam had put an end to dalliances outside his security fence. Already on edge because of what was going on in the village, Carter’s unexpected arrival had him wound like a steel spring. Neither of us argued. I wouldn’t put Ned in danger just to roll around in the sand with him, and for all his position as First Heir, Ned knew when to bend his neck to authority.
Dear God in heaven, but I would hate to be in Ned’s shoes. Yes, he was rich. Yes, he was privileged. But being a House First Heir wasn’t all beer and skittles. Set aside living under the constant threat of House assassins, the ordinary, everyday limitations on his freedom would make an owl stare.
At least out here, with no one in sight, I could inveigle him to come back into the storage shed with me for five minutes so I could kiss him goodbye improperly.
We left Sam on guard outside. I wasn’t joking about being improper, and I would have hated to wound Sam’s delicate sensibilities. He was too well armed for that.
CAIRO WAS markedly cooler than it had been six weeks earlier when we’d arrived in Aegypt, but still unseasonably warm for almost-Christmas. Back in Londinium at this time of year, we’d have been shivering under icy rain or even snow. It felt odd to be wandering across the aerodrome with nothing more than a cotton twill jacket over my pullover and open-necked shirt.
George Todd, the chief Gallowglass guard in Cairo, waited for me outside the hangar where we kept the Brunel. He waved to a couple of guards to bring the two-seater in. “I got the message from Mr. Hawkins. I’ve already talked to the Khedive’s people, and they’ll deliver a couple of solar energy panels tomorrow. They’ve even found some spare crystals for us. Mr. Hawkins said there was trouble.”
“It’s hard to put a finger on it, to be honest. It’s unsettling, but until the Antiquities Inspector arrived last night, most of it hasn’t been aimed at us directly, but at the poor villagers. Mr. Causton told us about something similar happening to him a few years ago, caused by a rival expedition.”
“Think that’s what’s going on here?”
I shoved both my hands into my jacket pockets and stood stiff, forcing the restless energy that surged through me into some sort of quietude. “I don’t know. Personally, I can’t get steamed up over pots and mummies, but I’m not an academic with a reputation to build. We have a couple of nearby digs who may resent Ned getting the temple to play with. It’s possible that’s behind it.”
Todd’s grimace was a fine gargoyle face. “May not be serious, then. Still, Mr. Hawkins told us to be alert. I’m loading up the Brunel with extra weaponry, and we’re all living out here at the hangar. If you need to come and get us in a hurry, we’ll be ready.” He tapped out a rhythm on the butt of the pistol holstered on his belt that betrayed, I thought, his unease; but after a moment, he nodded and appeared to accept he didn’t have to go in all guns blazing. Not just yet, anyway. “Well, let’s get you into the city and to the hotel. You’ve got a bit to do, I expect, to get everything ready for Christmas.”
Todd’s calm confidence was soothing. I do like competence in the men charged with safeguarding me and mine. A little of the frustration and annoyance seeped away, the muscles in my shoulders relaxing. “What are you all doing for the festive season?”
“We’ll be here. Ready.” He laughed at me, because I’m pretty sure he could read the expression on my face. “It’s not as bad as it sounds, you know. We’ve got a pretty nice berth here. All the comforts of home.”
He guided me over to a private autocar waiting at the side of the aerodrome. It bore the Khedive’s coat of arms emblazoned on the door. What with that and Todd getting the energy panels we needed, I wondered aloud if everything in the Abdeen Palace that hadn’t been nailed into place would end up being used by House Gallowglass.
“No wonder you lot ended up with the Treas
ury back home.” I tossed my overnight bag into the corner of the back seat and followed it in. The seats were lined with dark crimson velvet, and well sprung. Luxurious. “I’ll bet you just borrowed it when the other Convocation Houses weren’t looking.”
Todd slid into the seat beside me and signaled the driver to be off. “The Khedive is publicly enthusiastic in his support for his sister-queen in Windsor, and of course extends that to the important representatives of her Convocation.”
“Publicly. Ned told me his private feelings were thought to be anti-Imperium. Doesn’t he fund a nationalist newspaper?”
Todd’s mouth twitched, but he managed not to smile. “That’s politics for you, Captain. Stay out of it, is my advice. So, where to first? Hotel or bazaar?”
I eschewed politics, as advised, and opted for Shepheard’s Hotel and lunch. Todd had decided he would be my escort for the trip, despite my protests that I’d long outgrown the need for a nanny—“Mr. Hawkins said we were to be sure to keep you safe, Captain, so that’s that.”—and spent the rest of the day shadowing me as I went to the central post office to collect mail and parcels and then headed into the Khan el-Khalili souk to find presents for my… what should I call them? My family, I suppose. For Hugh, Ned, Sam, and Harry. The people who were important to me.
I planned to buy boxes of chocolates and Turkish delight for everyone else. People love sweet things at Christmas. Todd was content to be my beast of burden, putting the things uncomplainingly into a sort of duffel bag he wore on his back.
On my previous trip at the end of November, I’d found a little shop that specialized in ivory and had ordered a beautifully carved set of dominoes for Hugh, who was a demon player, presented in a sandalwood oriental puzzle box. At the same shop, I bought Sam a damascene steel dagger with a carved ivory handle; I couldn’t think of a better present for a House guard. Harry’s build-it-yourself model of an Aegyptian tomb contained a clockwork mummy that rose slowly from its sarcophagus to an accompaniment of moans and groans. I could only hope Ned wouldn’t mummify me for getting it. Harry wouldn’t have a Christmas tree this year, so I invested in three dozen little brass lanterns with colored glass sides, to string around the courtyard to give us a little festive cheer. Sadly they wouldn’t fit into Todd’s bag and I had to lug the box about myself, slung from one shoulder on a bit of rope, Todd wanting to keep his hands free for essential things like pistols and knives. And finally, for Ned himself, I found a canopic jar in one of the antiquities shops, a representation of Duamutef, one of the four sons of Horus, carved from alabaster with the inscription inlaid with dark green and scarlet paint.