by Anna Butler
“There really isn’t much point to this.” I kept my voice low. “Without night goggles, we’ll be lucky not to break our necks in there.”
Far inside the temple something scrabbled against stone.
I am not a nervous man, but I started like a skittish horse, my heart feeling as though it leapt into my throat to pound there like a mad thing in a cage. Ned’s free hand closed on my arm, so tight his curving fingers had me wincing. We were both breathing hard and fast. I tried to pull the air deep down as if to cool the heavy heat in my gut. Sam and Todd brought their harquebuses to the ready.
The clicking, scrabbling sound came again. Something metallic? Hard, at any rate, scraping and rasping against the limestone pavement. Sam swung the beam of his brimstone toward the noise and then swiftly around the second courtyard, but there was nothing to be seen.
Deep inside the temple, a dog barked.
The breath stopped in my throat, and my stomach twisted. Ned gasped audibly.
More clicking. Claws. A dog’s claws, perhaps, catching on the limestone slabs. Another bark, and a yipping howl.
“Blimey,” Ned said, his voice a bare whisper.
“Jackals!” Sam was disgusted. “Bloody hell, all this for a load of bloody dogs!”
I took my first breath for what felt like several minutes, the air shuddering into me. I had to wipe my hand on my trouser leg, shaking out the fidgets in my fingers before swopping hands on my pistol to dry out the other one. “It wasn’t a jackal I saw. Too tall and two-legged.”
A small dog shape, a shade in the shadows, flitted across the corner of the courtyard and disappeared into the hypostyle hall.
“Jackal.” Shaking his head, Sam turned away.
As he did so, his brimstone lit up the windblown sand covering the courtyard pavement. That there were dog prints—jackal prints—was undeniable. The pack had crossed and crisscrossed the courtyard. But superimposed over them were more prints. Different prints. A dog’s paw marks, but what a Goliath of a dog! The pads were six inches across, deeply inset into the sand, each toe and claw mark distinct.
“What the hell’s that?” Todd’s voice was hoarse.
Sam bent over them for a moment. When he straightened, his expression was grim. “Back to the expedition house. Now.”
This time Ned didn’t protest. We walked as quickly as the terrain would allow, out of the ruined courtyard and across the compacted sands to home. Behind us came another series of yipping cries. They held a note of derision.
“Nothing but dogs,” Sam said again.
I HAD no idea what Mr. Bakhoum was saying, but it sounded dramatic. He stalked up and down in front of the gathered villagers, the hem of his galabeyya whipping around his ankles, his arms windmilling to convey his anger and passion, his voice hard and angry. More than once he stopped abruptly in front of one of the workers to jab the unfortunate victim in the chest with one hand, while the other continued to make impassioned gestures.
I beckoned Causton closer. He at least spoke the lingo. “Please tell me what’s going on. I beg you!”
“He’s telling them that they are worse than infidels and women.” Causton’s mouth twitched into a grin as the men muttered and protested, many of them throwing up their hands and shifting from foot to foot in apparent agitation. “They’re rather offended.”
“Which is worse?”
“Oh, definitely being compared to an infidel. We unbelievers rank even lower than women, and that is very low indeed.”
“He’s mad at them because…?”
Causton shrugged. “They’re worried. They’re nervy about all the things that have happened. The impact of a collapsed dyke gate or damaged crops causes hardship, and they aren’t happy about it, even with the compensation Ned’s offered for the inconvenience. But mostly they’re skittish about what’s causing all this. Youssef Koura isn’t the only man to claim he’s seen a great dog in the desert. I know Mr. Bakhoum has tried to quell the rumors, but I had a couple of our best workers plucking at my sleeve this morning to tell me they’d seen something out there the last few nights, and they swore they weren’t the only ones. They’re all talk of djinns and spirits, and despite their Mohammedan faith, they believe in those absolutely. If they get obsessed on the idea that the spirits here are punishing them for the dig, then we could be in real trouble.” His mouth took a wry twist. “Remember what I said a few weeks ago about what happened to Baumann and me in El Faiyûm.”
“Have you told Ned about this?”
“I will, as soon as I can talk to him. Haven’t had the chance yet.” Causton glanced at the students, who were standing to one side and watching Mr. Bakhoum’s performance with wide eyes. I grasped his reason for discretion.
Mr. Bakhoum’s voice rose to an impressive crescendo. I cocked an inquiring eyebrow in Causton’s direction.
“He’s asking if they’re children to be frightened by tales told to infants. Or are they men?”
I gave some consideration to the size of the print I’d seen the previous night and hoped only that no one would ask the same question of me. I’d probably answer with the same nervous laugh that rippled through the crowd of workers, and do the same embarrassed grinning and shuffling of feet. The smile I gave Causton was forced. I hadn’t slept well the night before, and a herd of nervous villagers wasn’t adding to my peace of mind.
The children arrived just then with the small wooden table and the chairs. Hugh had already set up the canvas half-tent to give us shade, and young Nasr, the eldest boy entrusted with the table, turned it right side up and set it into place. Now, normally that child’s tongue ran on wheels. He was full of chatter, laughter, and song. Not that day. He forced out a half smile when Ned thanked him, but didn’t speak. He sidled up to me, so close that if I turned around too fast I’d be in danger of falling over him. The other children stood nearby in a quiet little cluster, more subdued than usual. Nasr’s younger brother, Faaiz, gripped a cousin’s hand.
Mr. Bakhoum sent the men off to work and joined Ned and the most senior student, a Mr. Adrians, in flattening out maps and photographs. Causton joined Ned as our two German comrades approached the table. The discussion was lively, with much studying of aerial photographs and waving of hands and arms toward the rock-strewn landscape and deep excavation trenches. The rest of the students stood to one side in reverent silence as their elders and betters decided their day’s work for them. I left them all to it.
Nasr tugged at my sleeve. “Did you hear the dog last night?”
I just stared at him. “Molly?”
“No. Not the curly-haired one. I meant the wild one.”
“You don’t think it might be a lion? Mr. Hawkins thought he heard a lion once.” My mouth was really quite unaccountably dry, and I had to swallow a few times.
“There are no lions. Not for years and years, my uncle says. More years than a man can count. No, it was the Dog. He barked.”
This time I could almost hear him capitalize the word to signify this was no ordinary dog. I was reminded of old Mahmoud, sitting shocked and heartsick with his destroyed date palms strewn on the ground around him, and Mr. Bakhoum’s rueful smile when he mentioned the claims of Youssef Koura. Now we had more villagers parroting Youssef’s claims, and even the children had heard them. There was too much talking about a dog. And after the previous night, I was prepared to take it seriously. Not that I could hint as much to Nasr. He was a child, and I should do my best to quell his fears.
“The jackals, you mean? Yes. We’ve been hearing them a lot lately, haven’t we? There are packs of them, up over there somewhere.” I waved a hand at the cliffs to the west. “In the desert.”
“Some of them come close. To here.” Nasr looked at the temple and back to me. The child’s eyes were very dark, a mere rim of brown around the pupil. “Do you have dogs in England?”
A mental image of my revered House Princeps floated before my eyes for an instant. “Well, we certainly have a few of the two-legged
variety. And, of course, dogs like Molly—”
The children appeared fond of Molly, if bewildered at her privileged existence. The few dogs in the village were not pets, so Nasr’s snort of not-quite derision didn’t surprise me. “I didn’t mean her.”
“Then no, we don’t have jackals or wild dogs there.”
Nasr came in closer and dropped his voice to a whisper. “The Dog was here first, you know. This was his house before the other old ones came and took it.”
Was he trying to put the wind up me as a dare or a prank? Or was it an oblique warning about the form taken by the djinns of this place? I cocked an eyebrow at him. He gave me a thin little smile in return, and just then, Mr. Bakhoum let loose with an indignant shout and waved all the children away to their normal tasks of ferrying baskets of loose sand and shale to start another rubbish heap.
Nasr jumped back and took a few steps away before turning. “Do you think he wants his house back?” He grinned and ran toward his brother and cousins. “Hey, Faaiz! Hey, Samir! Yalla, everyone! Yalla! There’s work to do!”
LATER, AS the night cooled and we lounged at the table after dinner, talking and nursing glasses of scotch or smoking pipes and cigars, I spoke quietly to Ned under the cover of Professor Lansbach engaging the students in a seminar on some funerary practice or other.
I mentioned Causton’s news and Nasr’s little speech. “God alone knows what I saw last night, Ned. Not a djinn, obviously, but those prints…. I remember what you said the other day about race memory and how that’s become local folktale. Nasr is right, and Abydos was the Dog’s place first… the Dog’s house, he called it, and he wasn’t making fun. What did I see, Ned? What have the villagers seen?”
Ned shook his head, frowning.
Far away, where the low hills and wadis led off into the vast cemeteries of the Western Deserts, the nightly jackal chorus started up. Anubis regretting his exile, perhaps.
And, as Nasr implied, wanting to come home.
SAM WAS reluctant to allow much of an excursion that night. We decided we’d walk only as far as the village and spend an hour in the coffeehouse, socializing with our workers.
While Ned put Harry to bed, I waited at the courtyard gate. The village was only a couple of hundred yards away. Since Christmas, it had glowed all night with yellowy-white lights set on poles around the perimeter, with strings of aether lanterns along each short street and alley. From above, it must look like a chandelier flattened out on the desert. The expedition house too was lit up, its lamps a brighter, bluer-white due to being produced by a much more modern aether generator than the one the village owned. Before Christmas, the expedition house was the only structure showing lights; the villagers had closed down their generator well before midnight most nights, both because they had limited supplies of phlogiston to activate the aether, and to preserve the generator for as long as possible. Stored in a hut on the edge of the village and at least forty years old, it tottered along on its last legs. Ned had bought more phlogiston for them, shipped to us on a passing dahabiya, but that wouldn’t do much to prolong the generator’s life.
I said as much to Todd, pointing out the flickering lights on the perimeter fence. “That doesn’t look promising. That generator of theirs is obsolete.”
Todd made an odd huffing noise. “Don’t get Mr. Edward’s soft heart worrying about that, Captain, or he’ll be all plans to—”
His voice was cut short by a knife-blade flash of light splitting the darkness, followed an instant later by a flat, barked thump that shook the ground. A column of blue fire boiled up into the sky.
The village generator had just exploded.
Chapter 21
“BLOODY HELL!” Todd said, tone and expression blank.
For a moment we stood at the gate, gawping. But it lasted only a moment. The cries and screams from the village jerked me out of the instant of stupor.
“They need help.” I spun on my heel to face the courtyard. I brought my arm around in a sweeping, get-a-move-on wave. “The village generator just went up! Come on! We’ll all be needed!”
The rest of the team and the students struggled to their feet, pushing away from the supper table, their faces pale and shocked. More than one pointed to the sky behind me where the aether column rose, writhing and twisting, the Israelites’ Pillar of Fire returned to the desert. Ned burst out of Harry’s room, Sam and Frank on his heels.
I ran for the village with Todd. I got a last glimpse behind me of Sam holding Ned by one arm, yelling orders to Frank Sutton and Michael Forde. Then all that mattered was haring down the road as fast as I could do it.
The village was a maelstrom. Men and women milled about, half-dressed; children clung to their mothers, dazed with shock and terror. The distressed cries of the village animals, principally goats and cattle, added to the chaos as some of the older boys herded them out of the small byres nestling beside each house and down to the fields near the canal. Chickens, released from coops, flapped about under everyone’s feet, squawking.
Todd and I pushed through the crowd, dodging squalling children and looking for anyone who appeared to be trying to organize the men to save as much of the village as they could. Mr. Bakhoum would be the best bet… yes. There he was, at the center of a group of men, talking and gesticulating. Several of the men started running for the nearby canal, and the others straggled out into a long line, ready to start passing buckets of water from hand to hand.
He looked relieved when he saw me. “Captain!”
“What do you need me to do? Is anyone hurt?”
The roof of the generator hut had been blown off by the vertical aether column, and the nearest house was already catching alight from the heat, its straw roof ablaze and sending clouds of gold-red sparks into the air. Typical. Bloody thatched roofs were firetraps. Acrid smoke had everyone coughing as it bit at the lungs. Indifferent, the aether powered up into the sky, turning everything bluish-white and casting dense black shadows to eat the light.
“I do not think so,” Mr. Bakhoum said. “Everyone in the Eldegheidy house is out, and theirs is the closest. We must put out the fires before they spread.”
Yes, indeed, but we needed to cut off the source. There was no getting near the generator hut, but that equipment needed to be shut down. At the very least, we had to choke off the aether and phlogiston supplies to get the fiery column under control.
“We must close down the pipes.” The same point had evidently occurred to Mr. Bakhoum.
No arguments from me. “We don’t want the burning aether sucked back to the storage tanks. Half of Abydos would go.”
Hugh reached me just then, the rest of the team and a gaggle of students behind him. “What do we do, sir? Sam and Mr. Edward will be along in a minute.”
“First thing is to get as many people out of the village as possible.” Not to mention keeping the students out of danger. I beckoned young Adrians, the senior student, forward. “Organize your chaps to escort the women and children up to the expedition house, will you? Tell Forde to close down the security fence long enough to let them through.” With young Harry to safeguard, Frank and Forde wouldn’t need reminding to put the fence back up again. “Find the cook and get the kettles boiling. The ladies will need tea, the children need to be kept warm, and everyone should be checked for injury…. How on earth are we to do that without offense? Mr. Bakhoum, is your good wife available to take charge of the ladies?”
“She is, Captain. I will tell her what needs to be done.” Mr. Bakhoum sent young Nasr running to find his wife.
I returned my attention to Adrians. “You’re in overall charge up there. As soon as Mrs. Bakhoum arrives, take them to the house. You and the others keep the women and children safe, you understand?”
He gave me a sour look. I think he did understand, perfectly, that I wanted him and the students out of harm’s way. But one glance at the students’ strained young faces was enough to keep him compliant. They were boys of nineteen or twenty,
barely out of leading strings. Adrians grimaced but nodded, straightening his shoulders as he took on the responsibility. I wouldn’t waste a penny wagering against his having been a prefect at school. It was written all over him.
One problem solved. The next was to close down the supply of aether and phlogiston, but Mr. Bakhoum was ahead of me there. He had called up a slight young man, not familiar to me, and spoke to him rapidly. The man left at a fast pace, despite a heavy limp.
“Hani Saadauri will close down the pipes. He looks after the generator.” Mr. Bakhoum turned back to me. “The storage is far away, across the canal. It will take time.”
His wife arrived just then, and Mr. Bakhoum took a moment to talk to her before handing her and the rest of the women and children over to Adrians’s care. Adrians and the other students ran to fulfill their commission. If Adrians gave me an annoyed glance in passing, I didn’t begrudge him it.
“You seem to have things well in hand, Rafe.” Lansbach grinned slightly, despite the situation.
“Not I! Mr. Bakhoum’s the man in charge. I suggest we join the bucket line. They’ll need every possible man jack of us to stop these fires. We’ll all have to take a hand.”
And so it proved.
Much as I dislike manual labor, we all put in hours of it that night. The canal was a good three hundred yards from the center of the village, and it took every able-bodied man to form a long enough chain to pass the buckets of water. There weren’t enough buckets, even with the ones Hugh ran back to the expedition house to collect, but there was little we could do about that. We used anything that could hold water, dipped into the canal at one end and sent, brimming, up the line to where Todd stood at the top of a ladder, wetting the thatch roofs. Todd would then toss the empty receptacle to one of the waiting boys below, who ran with it back to the canal to return it to the first man in the line.