The Jackal's House

by Anna Butler

  When most of the food was gone and we were nibbling to fill up the corners, the games began. We played snapdragon, sculptor, and thus says the grand seigneur until even Harry tired of them, then acted out charades like good ’uns. Harper proved to be top-notch at the latter game, a skill he imputed to a passion for amateur theatricals. Not having two functional arms got me out of playing some of the more vigorous games, but since I have never seen the point of lying blindfolded on the floor trying to bash my opponent’s head with a rolled-up newspaper, I did not repine. I didn’t at all mind cheering on those who were playing Moriarty, however, while drinking a very fine after-dinner brandy and smoking a cigarillo. Astonishingly, Fouquet took to the game with gusto and proved hard to beat and, after belaboring Howard Carter with the Times until Carter rolled away and curled into a protective ball, was loudly and cheerfully acclaimed champion.

  It was all rather Pickwickian in its good fellowship, friendliness, and mirth. I have endured worse Christmas dinners than that. Much worse.

  That night, with our guests bunking down wherever we could find room for them, I slipped into Ned’s room to sleep with him. Again, no chance of making love. Again, just kisses and caresses and wrapping myself around his warm body, burying my face in his hair.

  I would have liked more, but this gentle intimacy was satisfying enough. Retiring for a chaste Yuletide embrace with the man I love… well, very best Christmas ever.

  BY THE time the new century rolled around with the dawn of 1901, it looked as though the incidents had been contained. Hugh’s idea of a village home guard appeared to have worked, coupled with Ned providing the funding to run the village’s aether generator so it lit the village all night, and the week between Christmas and New Year’s was quiet. It seemed that better-lit alleys and an occasional patrol of a couple of villagers armed with ancient muskets were enough to dissuade the marauding djinns.

  Howard Carter left us on New Year’s Day to return to Luxor. He had examined our dig, Fouquet’s, and Harper’s and Symington’s, on the basis that it saved him having to come back for a few months, getting us all in one fell swoop. Carter had smiled when he said it, but his inspection of our work had been painstakingly thorough. I didn’t doubt that Fouquet and our two English friends had likewise come under scrutiny.

  Ned and I walked him to his boat, with Sam and Todd trailing along in our wake. I was growing accustomed to Todd’s presence never more than a few yards away from me. It must be what being an important House member felt like. I strove not to let it give me too great a sense of my consequence.

  Carter had already assured Ned that the expedition records could have rebuffed inquiry from the Spanish Inquisition and that everything he had observed was exemplary. That coupled with an account of the incidents around the expedition was conclusive: his report to Maspero would be unequivocally in Ned’s favor. “Not that it will surprise Maspero. He knows you, Ned, and has every respect for you.”

  “Thank you, Howard.” Ned had looked briefly relieved. “I just wish I knew who sent the letter to him. It might help us find whoever is behind the trouble here.”

  Carter grimaced, but it was only later, as he shook hands with us again before he walked across the narrow gangplank to his boat, that he said, his voice low, “I suspect, Ned, that the original letter was not in English. Maspero hinted as much, but whether it was French or German or even ruddy Hindustani….” He stopped and shrugged. “I don’t know that helps matters much.”

  I glanced northwest for an instant, toward the place out near El-Khirba, where Fouquet’s dig was located. Would Fouquet make so overt a move? It wasn’t very subtle. I had to balance that against his increased friendliness on Christmas Day too. Could even a Frenchman be that duplicitous?

  “One more strand to think about.” Ned sighed, but he quickly shook it off and smiled. “Have a good journey home, Howard. I hope we’ll see you again before the end of the season.”

  “I hope so too. And I really hope this is the last of your troubles. Everything will go swimmingly from now on, I’m sure. Good luck, Ned!”

  We waved him off, watching as his steam-felucca chugged out into the middle of the canal and turned south to the juncture with the Nile itself, pushing upstream against the current.

  “I hope he’s right,” Sam said from behind us.

  I sighed. I, too, hoped to every god in the Aegyptian pantheon that Carter was right. Because I was still uneasy about what had happened so far, from broken sluice gates to sneaky, mendacious letters to the Director General of Excavations and Antiquities. If we were swimming, someone somewhere was the crocodile lurking beneath the surface, ready to pull us down.

  I rather regretted not having packed my water wings.

  Chapter 20

  FOR A fortnight or so, our wishes were granted. Things were quieter, and talk of djinns faded—or perhaps was muted in our presence. We were able to focus on our work rather than worry about destroyed date palms or deliberately holed fishing boats. The region was quiet again, the only news of note being the arrival of the Theban Princess at the dock at Al Masaid. The Englishman who had hired her was reportedly seen at the various sites and digs in the area, although he hadn’t yet graced the temple with his presence. We hadn’t even seen him at a distance.

  Ned got a little vexed when Symington said he thought there may be more than one mysterious English traveler “…messing about somewhat to the north of us. I saw two in Western dress and only one in a galabeyya.”

  Ned’s scowl was blacker than the Earl of Hell’s best weskit. “Messing about? You mean they’re doing some unauthorized digging? Damn it!”

  Now that made more sense than someone spending two or three weeks sightseeing in such a restricted area. While Abydos and its surroundings were crucially important to the history of Aegypt—so Ned assured me—the early tombs for which it was famous were hardly rich in grave goods, having been robbed thousands of years before Christ was even born. Not that the lack of treasure ever dissuaded anyone from looking, of course. Much of the thrill was in the chase.

  “I can understand them being here, then,” I said. “The bigger sites and Luxor are too close to Howard Carter’s base. Too risky for a treasure hunter.”

  “I wish Howard was still here to see to them.” Ned was glum. “I’ve half a mind to go up there and give them a piece of my mind.”

  “If they are treasure hunting, Howard will deal with them.” Causton was unusually sharp. “You can’t police the entire area, Ned. Send a message south to Howard and be done with it.”

  “Perhaps we can set the djinns on them.” Hugh’s tone and looks were more innocent than a dozen choirboys.

  Which at least made Ned laugh. He took Tom Causton’s advice and turned his attention back to his own dig.

  We worked dawn till dusk on the excavation. The more professional, less muck-shifting part of the team mapped out the long entryway tunnel to the Osireion that we’d found to the north. Causton explored the southern end of the temple, looking for an entry there. He did indeed find a passage that led to the terrace outside the main temple, beneath which lay the Osireion, but nothing to connect to the structure itself.

  “The Osireion would have had a mound over it,” Ned explained to Hugh and me at dinner one night, “to represent the primeval mound formed when the gods created the world. That alone would have been a place of veneration, and it makes sense that the worshipers at the temple could walk out to pay their respects.” He turned to Causton. “But since there’s no evidence of a direct passageway, Tom, we’ll give up on that, and you’d better join us tomorrow on working on the north entrance.”

  This proved to be a long passage with a roof of slabs cut from the desert marl. The part we’d managed to clear so far was decorated with scenes and text from some fascinating tome called the Book of Gates. From the little I managed to glean from our two German comrades, who were excited in a dry, academic sort of way over the bas-relief carvings, this was the ancient equivalent of
a crib, giving a dead man’s soul the passwords to get through the gates to the Aegyptian version of Paradise.

  Still not much of a plot, then.

  My task was to photograph their progress. My arm had healed neatly, although I had an impressive scar from upper arm to shoulder. Sam was handy with the first aid kit and had removed the stitches a few days after the turn of the year. Still, Ned decreed light duties for me. Big of him. In lieu of digging, I trailed after our resident archaeologists, lugging the various photographic devices, and recorded every last thing they found. Thankfully, there weren’t many potsherds. I was done with pottery.

  We had hoped the villagers would feel more confident, once encouraged to see that their random patrols around the cultivated lands had slowed the incidents of vandalism down to a trickle. Sadly, the home guard would only patrol close to the village—very close—and always in groups of four or five. They wouldn’t go out into the desert and wouldn’t even hear of venturing near the temple after dark.

  “They know they must protect themselves and their fields,” Mr. Bakhoum said when discussing the situation with us one evening after work had ended. “Yet still… they are concerned about disturbing the spirits who live in the old places. They do not want to risk angering them.”

  The logic of that escaped me. “If there are spirits, surely digging at the temple at all would anger them more than three or four men walking past the temple at night?”

  He merely spread out his hands in a helpless gesture and smiled, rather rueful.

  “Have they seen anything? Anything at all?” I asked.

  Another helpless gesture. “Youssef Koura swears he has seen a great dog, but then Youssef Koura would swear he saw the Prophet himself if he thought there was something to be gained by it.”

  “Old Mahmoud blames the dog spirits for his dates,” Causton said. “I’ve heard more than one of them talk about dogs.”

  Baumann looked up, his normally cheerful face grave. “As an anthropologist in my spare time, I collect folktales because they tell us so much about a society. The image of dogs runs through the local folklore. We should take care. Tales of the djinn’s work will be spreading throughout the entire region.”

  Mr. Bakhoum sighed. “There are more of the wild ones nearby than is usual, many jackals coming down out of the high desert. We hear them. And there are so many old tales….” He stopped and shrugged. “They will think it is a dog… the Dog… because where else would a dog live but where he has always been, running with the wild ones?”

  “Folktales run deep, I know, but I don’t want to make the men even more uneasy.” Ned echoed Mr. Bakhoum’s rueful smile when he glanced at him. “We won’t insist on them patrolling near the temple, so long as they keep up their nightly patrols of the village. Do, please, try to dampen talk of dogs and djinns if you can. You will tell us if things worsen?”

  “Of course.” And Mr. Bakhoum touched his mouth and forehead in the traditional way as he bowed and murmured wa ʿalaykum as-salām before departing for his own home.

  “It’s some sort of race memory,” Ned said to me, when the old man had gone. “All the folktales and fears of a dog djinn have a basis in the past. Tracing the history of this place is complicated, and there are many gaps. But it seems likely that long before Abydos became the cult center for Osiris sometime in the Fifth Dynasty, it belonged to a god called Khenti-Amentiu, probably a form of Wepwawet, who was often shown with the head of a wolf or a jackal.”

  “Surely that was Anubis?” Great Caesar, didn’t I sound authoritative! Under other circumstances I’d have smirked about how much Aegyptian knowledge I’d absorbed.

  Ned’s hand slipped into mine under cover of the table. “Gold star, Rafe. Khenti and Wepwawet were both probably avatars of Anubis, with his role later taken over by Osiris. This has been Osiris’s place for more than three millennia, yet the villagers remember he wasn’t always here, and before him was the Dog God.”

  Who was still in residence, it seemed. That was a sobering thought.

  MOST EVENINGS Ned and I managed to get some time together. Never alone, mind you. Sam and Todd were rarely more than a few yards away. If I listened hard enough I could hear them breathing, though when I turned, they were seldom looking at us directly, but glancing around with narrowed eyes and keeping their hands ready on charged harquebuses.

  Their joint impersonation of Banquo’s ghost may have put a stop to our feasting, shall we say, but at least we weren’t completely confined to the expedition house. We got to walk out into the desert fringe, where the starry skies lowered themselves over our heads, and do a little stargazing. Mind you, if all the astronomical observation I did was to admire Ned’s profile against the midnight sky, then that’s between me and a portion of my anatomy best not mentioned in mixed company.

  Sometimes we called in at the village to socialize in the tiny coffeehouse there. Afterward we would walk on to encourage the nervous home guard patrols who picked their way across the dark fields armed only with the old guns originally belonging, from the look of them, to their great-grandfathers, and lanterns set with candles as faint as anemic glowworms. Sam had lent them a few charged brimstone flashlights, but when we ran into a patrol headed by our old friend Ammar, he of the withered grapevines, the patrol members looked blank when Sam, via Ned’s translation, mentioned them.

  “We did not wish to waste them.” Ammar smiled, nodded, and led his patrol away, leaving Sam staring.

  “We’ll be lucky if we get them back with their parts uncannibalized.” Ned’s mouth twitched, and he was obviously trying not to laugh.

  Sam snorted. “We’ll be bloody lucky if we get them back at all.”

  “I can afford a few brimstones, Sam. Especially if they persuade the villagers to keep an eye on the dig at night too.”

  And good luck with that, was all I could say.

  Sometimes when I stood with Ned, looking at walls washed with moonlight at the tops and their feet shrouded in black shadow, I could sympathize with the villagers’ reluctance to come too close. At night Seti’s temple to the god of the dead was a place of ghosts and specters, thick with shades and shadows. It would not have surprised me to see Pharaoh and all his retinue moving in a procession across the sands under the waning crescent moon hanging bright and low in the skies above us.

  But then, I am sometimes too imaginative for my own good.

  “Not half!” Ned agreed when I mentioned this personal quirk on the night of 17 January—a date engraved in memory, given what followed. He gave me a rather wicked sidelong glance. “And believe me, there are moments I give thanks for it. Right now, though, a little humdrum prose is better than melodrama. I’d rather the men weren’t looking over their shoulders for djinns and ghosts, Rafe.”

  “Of course not!” I tucked my arm through his. “Time to turn back for home and a nightcap before bed, I fancy. A wee dram to chase away the ghoulies and ghosties.” My affectation of a Scottish accent was abysmal but enough to make Ned laugh. I laughed too, and waved a hand toward the temple. “It may keep them there, where they bel….” I let my voice trail away. “Huh.”

  I saw something move. We were slightly to the north and west of the temple, looking across the first courtyard, long fallen into ruin and missing its walls and pylons, to the portico wall. The entrance to the second courtyard pierced this wall—in effect, the way into the remainder of the temple. Much of the ruined courtyard was in shadow now. But surely that had been someone… something moving.

  Ned gripped my hand, hard. “What is it?”

  “I don’t know. I thought I saw something moving, very close to the second courtyard pylon. Going toward the entrance.”

  “A man?” Sam was at my side in an instant, Todd beside him.

  “I can’t be sure. Perhaps. There was something wrong with the shape—it wasn’t quite right.” I looked at their intent, alert faces. “It went inside, I think. It was just a glimpse.”

  Had it even been a figure? I st
ared harder at the temple, a couple of hundred yards away. The merest impression of movement, yes, but I was increasingly sure I’d seen something vaguely human in shape.

  “It didn’t walk like a man,” I said. “Too stiff-legged. It stalked, like a soldier on parade.”

  Sam glowered. “I thought I saw something there myself. Weeks ago, now.” He glanced at Ned. “Let’s get you two back. Then you and me, Todd, will take a look around.”

  “Let’s not.” Ned slid his pistol out of its holster. “Four’s better than two.” He stared Sam down as the latter started huffing out protests. “If someone is messing about with my temple, I want to know about it.”

  “We won’t find much anyway, falling over one another in there in the dark,” Sam grumbled.

  We were walking quickly toward the temple as he spoke.

  “Still, we can take a look,” I said. Like Ned, I carried my pistol ready in my hand, the charge on full. “Someone is playing silly buggers with us, Sam, and I’d rather like to stop them.”

  By this time we were picking our way gingerly across the ruined first courtyard toward the second courtyard wall. The courtyard was littered with broken stone, and the two Absolution Wells, where once priests cleansed themselves before the rituals, were Stygian pits. Threading a way through that in daylight was easy, providing we watched where we put our feet. Not so easy at midnight. Progress was slow.

  The pillars of the second courtyard wall had been infilled with brick and plaster, each panel carved with the typical iconography of Aegypt. Pale moonlight created odd effects with the carvings, some incised lines looking shallow and others deep and black as slits opening onto the Pit. We all paused at the entrance. The moonlight allowed us to see into the courtyard, though shadows gathered in the corners and the walls cast immense black bars across the pavement. But beyond that, the first hypostyle hall was as black as Sam had mentioned earlier.