by Anna Butler
And so it went on, for hours.
Twist to the left to take a bucket from Ned, filled to the brim with cold river water. Slop as little as possible onto your clothes and boots as you can manage. Twist to the right to hand it on to Hugh. Try to ignore the growing ache in your upper left arm, where every hefting of a bucket pulled at the new scar. Cough to clear the smoke stinging the back of your throat, sometimes bent double, hands on your knees, if the wind shifted a fraction and the tarry smokes and vapors changed direction with it to wreathe around your head instead of sidling amongst the columns of Seti’s temple. Slap at tiny fragments of burning straw floating past you, extinguishing the ones landing on your clothing. By the end of the night, your clothes will be leopard-spotted with small charred spots. Wipe your forehead against your sleeve, because the heat from the aether is hotter than the desert at noon. Rub your eyes with your hand; the smoke has them red and weeping. The next bucket is coming. Cough again to clear your throat and take another lungful of the biting air. Twist to the left to take a bucket from Ned. Slop as little as possible. Ignore the ache. Twist to the right to hand it on to Hugh….
And repeat, ad nauseam, for what felt like most of the night.
A couple of hours after the generator failed, the flaring aether column started to thin and waver, gradually dying down. Hani Saadauri had returned to the village an hour before, confirming that all three sequential sets of safety valves on the supply pipes were closed and the aether would burn itself out. It couldn’t happen fast enough for me.
The fading column took another three hours to die out absolutely. By that time the Eldegheidy house was lost, but our work in wetting the thatch of the remaining houses and keeping them soaked against the heat had been enough to save them from the fires.
When all was declared safe, I took the opportunity to rest, sitting with my back against the wall of a house along with three or four others. Someone handed me a cup of cold, refreshing peppermint tea. Young Adrians. He looked self-conscious when I glanced at him.
“Everything’s all right at the house, sir. Mr. Hawkins sent word to get this”—he held up the big carafe of tea—“and to tell Cook to make as much as he could manage. I thought I should bring the first batch myself.”
I stared at him, letting my expression speak for me, until he grimaced and shifted from one foot to the other.
“The danger’s over, sir,” he said, evidently rather aggrieved.
“Luckily for you.” I drained the cup. The tea had been a benison to my sore, scratchy throat. I handed the cup on to the villager sitting beside me, and Adrians bent to fill it for him. “Everyone’s safe up there?”
“Fine, sir. We had a bit of a scare when the wind blew a few sparks our way, but our chaps were up on the roof with wet blankets to beat out anything that caught. The ladies were all quite anxious, of course, but they’ve been sterling, really.”
“Good.” My eyes stung like fury. I leaned my head back and closed them for a moment. Lord, I was tired. My upper left arm jabbed with pain, and my back and shoulders ached from twisting back and forth under the weight of all those buckets. I wondered how many I’d handled that night. It felt like thousands.
I rubbed some of the dirt and sweat from my face with a handkerchief and turned to the man on my left. Good Lord. Laurent Fouquet. He was as grubby and sooty as I felt. “Hello! I wasn’t expecting to see you.”
“We heard the bang when it went up and saw the aether flare. We came to do what we could. Harper and Symington came too.” Of course, his camp was a bare half mile from us, where he’d hired a small house in the next village up the canal. He nodded when I thanked him for his aid, and added, “Many of the men from El-Khirba followed us down. They are close-knit, the men of this region.”
“All related, I expect.” I glanced around. We were in the village’s tiny central square. Ned and Sam were a few yards away from me, Todd and Hugh to my left. Thank God they were all right. I caught a glimpse of Symington across the square, talking to one of the village men. He was flushed even more than usual with the heat and exertion. Beside him, Harper was shrugging back into his shirt. Most of the villagers sat with their heads down, their normal cheerfulness deserting them. “Poor devils. They’ve paid a high price for Ned’s excavation of the temple.”
Fouquet gave me a sharp look. “What has been happening has been the talk of all the local villages.”
“So I imagine. All the incidents so far have been aimed at the villagers, presumably so they’ll refuse to work for Ned and drive us off. I hope to God this doesn’t do the trick.” I held his gaze, rubbing at the ache in my left arm. “All the incidents except for the letter to Maspero, of course, that brought Howard Carter here. That had Ned squarely in its sights. A gross calumny too. A baseless canard.”
Fouquet’s gaze slid away from mine. He looked… well, he looked something. Hard to tell if it was guilt or just that he felt uncomfortable, or he was too tired to keep his sangfroid. Was that a tinge of color over his cheekbones? I couldn’t really tell for the dirt. But I had my suspicions. Yes, indeed I did.
“Yes. Certainement,” he said.
Oh yes, my fine French friend. Certainement.
WE GOT to bed around dawn and slept late. Fouquet and his company had gone back to El-Khirba when all the excitement in the village drew to a close. Harper and Symington, since they had farther to go, stayed with us. Some of the women insisted on returning to their homes and were escorted out through the security fence; we managed to fit the remaining ladies and their children into the rooms and dormitories. Ned went in with Harry. The rest of us bedded down in the courtyard, wrapped in blankets. I never thought I’d be able to sleep on hard tiles with nothing but a rolled rug under my head and a thin blanket for a covering, but I went out as swiftly as a snuffed candle. I woke hours later, stiff and still aching, but feeling infinitely better than when I went to bed.
It was well into the afternoon when Ned and I walked down to the village to see how the repair and cleanup work was coming along. We left Todd guarding Harry, and took Frank Sutton, our resident explosives expert, in Todd’s stead.
Mr. Bakhoum met us in the square. He had to be a good thirty years older than Ned and me, probably more, but he looked a great deal more spruce and energetic than either of us. He called Hani Saadauri to join us, explaining in a low voice that Saadauri had been left with a weak, withered leg after an illness as a child—“Infantile paralysis” was Ned’s guess—and had been unable to join the family business of excavation diggers. He had instead trained at the Technical College in Luxor to be the village mechanic. He had kept the generator going for more than a decade.
The men of the village were working in teams to tear down the wet straw and reeds from the houses and replace the roofs. While we waited for Saadauri, Ned went among them to talk and shake their hands and reassure them that he would continue to help as the village recovered. Sam and Saadauri had spent the morning realigning the power conduits in the village to the expedition house generator, an unforced generosity, which had guaranteed Ned a good reception. He spoke to Osman Eldegheidy, whose house had been destroyed, for some minutes. I didn’t understand anything he said, but his sympathetic tone was unmistakable.
“He’s moving in with his brother for a while.” Ned rejoined us as Saadauri limped toward us, and we set out for the generator hut. “I’ve said I’ll get his house rebuilt for him.”
But of course. Ned would do no less. I could wish Fouquet had been there to witness it. His certainement couldn’t have failed to hold more genuine conviction.
The hut housing the generator was gone. The roof had vanished in the original blast, and the walls had been incinerated by the heat. The remains of the generator, a little warped by the high temperatures but surprisingly less damaged than I’d expected, sat on its brick-built plinth in the open air. The top of the machine was missing, blasted off when the aether blew.
“Probably landed somewhere in Cairo.” Sam poked ging
erly at the remains while I silently hoped he was right and it had landed on the bastard who had knifed me. “Still bloody hot.”
“The aether went straight up. Must have caught light above the main generator chamber rather than in it, otherwise there’d be nothing left.” Frank took over from Sam, looking over the generator, prodding it with a stick. I’m sure it was a perfectly scientific examination, but it looked very much like a boy poking at an ant’s nest, with the same air of curiosity and tension and a readiness to leap back at the instant all the ants boil out to see who’s attacking their home. After a few minutes, he stepped back. “If I was going to blow this up, I’d put the Nobel’s powder in the mixer chamber—here—and where the pipes come in, here.” He pointed at areas in the still-intact casing, considerably below the missing top. “The whole machine would have gone up, and likely the fire would have flashed back down the supply pipes and set off the aether and phlogiston storage tanks. Would have flattened the entire village.”
Ned breathed out a sigh. “So not a deliberately set explosion?”
“I wouldn’t say that, sir. Looks to me like the regulator valve blew. It would have been about here, in the exhaust chamber.” Frank gestured to a point about eighteen inches above the remains. “It lets the aether out if pressure in the generator gets too high, usually enough to release the load on the valves. But something caught the aether alight. Then it’s like a candlewick, with the flame pulling up all the aether in the pipe, and it just goes up, taking the exhaust chamber with it. Nothing to suck it back down, see?”
“We were bloody lucky, then,” Sam said. “No one killed, and no serious injuries.”
“The point is, Frank, could it have been a malfunction, or was it another act of sabotage?” I glanced behind us as I spoke. Many of the village men stood close by, quiet and watchful. One or two who had better English than the others appeared to be translating for their comrades.
“That I can’t tell you.” Frank gestured to the space above the generator. “Not enough of it left to tell. But I can’t see what in here would have sparked off the aether, sir, without some help. Could be that a small charge took out the valve and the flash was enough to light the column.”
Mr. Bakhoum had been quietly translating for Saadauri, who burst out in a torrent of Arabic, his hands waving in excitable gestures. Mr. Bakhoum listened patiently, nodding.
It was Ned, however, who interpreted for us. “Hani insists the pressure readings were normal and that he would have seen anything that hinted at the generator failing.” He grimaced. “This was his livelihood, and I know he’s nursed the generator along for years. I don’t think he’s lying. We can assume something unprecedented happened here.”
In ordinary circumstances, I’d be more cynical about Hani’s protests. But these were hardly ordinary times, not with all the villagers had suffered already. Behind us someone whispered the dreaded “Djinn!” and almost instantly they were all at it, murmuring and whispering amongst themselves. The hairs on the back of my neck prickled. Not that I thought we were in any danger, for these were peaceable men on the whole. But they were being persecuted by a heartless villain who thought it was a good tactic to vandalize the meager possessions of the poor in order to put pressure on Ned.
Was it Fouquet? That he’d looked self-conscious the night before was undeniable. But was that anything other than chagrin at my being so pointed about Ned’s honor and integrity? Or because he was behind this campaign of vandalism out of spite at not getting Seti’s temple to excavate?
“This is catastrophic for them, poor devils.” Ned rubbed at his eyes and sighed again. “The men are skilled excavators, and they have a good income over the winter from whoever is digging here. That’s good steady work each year and gives them a relative level of comfort, but they’re terribly poor in real terms. They can’t possibly replace the generator.”
I sighed. I knew who would be buying the village a new generator. This was turning out to be the most expensive archaeological dig in recorded history. I was glad Ned’s pockets were deep enough to pay for it.
I SUPPOSE it wasn’t unexpected that Harry should have nightmares.
He wasn’t quite eight years old. He was in a land very foreign to his own. He had just been through a night when the entire village was on fire and he’d huddled in his room with Molly and Frank, scared for his father. He knew, for all Ned’s attempts to keep him in a childlike innocence, that something had been afoot for weeks and was worrying all the grown-ups around him. He knew that Frank and all the other guards were being especially watchful and that Sam was as tense as a bowstring with an arrow on the nock. And most of all, for all his precocity and confidence, he was really a polite child who didn’t want to cause his adored father any difficulty. He didn’t voice any of his fears, so naturally they erupted at two o’clock in the morning, bringing him screaming out of sleep.
Ned was out of bed so fast I doubt Harry screamed more than twice before Ned was in the room. I stumbled after him, still pulling on my dressing gown, heart hammering and cold fingers running a staccato arpeggio up and down my spine. Frank and Sam came through the door to the courtyard, pistols in hand.
Harry’s room was chaotic for a moment or two. He was yelling, although he was wide-awake and standing at the window. Molly barked and growled, her teeth showing. She too was at the window, front paws planted on the windowsill, snarling out into a night riven with bright flashes. I thought it was lightning at first.
“Something’s tripping the bloody flash boxes.” Sam turned and made a sharp gesture to Todd and Forde, who were crowding into the door to the courtyard. “Check it out. If you have to shoot, use your neural disrupters.”
They left at a run. Ned scooped up Harry and carried him to the bed. He sat with the child on his lap, keeping his arms around him. At the window, Molly snarled and growled a moment more before dropping to all fours and trotting over to the bed. She jumped up to lean against Ned’s arm.
“Bad dream?” Ned asked.
“I saw it, Papa! A big dog. Bigger than Molly. She told me the big dog was there, Papa. She barked.” Harry struggled to get free of Ned’s embrace to sit upright and turned to fling an arm around Molly’s shaggy shoulders. “It ran away when it heard Molly. She showed it! Isn’t she a good girl!”
Ned’s gaze met mine. “Yes. Very good.” He tightened his grip on his son. “Did you really see a dog, Harry?”
“I… I don’t know.” Harry twisted a hand in Ned’s nightshirt, pulling the soft cotton tight across Ned’s shoulders and distorting the stripes. “It didn’t look… I don’t know.” He was suddenly tearful, his small face puckering. “It was big. Molly didn’t like it being so big. She barked hard to make it go away.”
And that was all we could get out of him. Ned soothed and consoled, rocking Harry, crooning something I could only half hear. I backed out into Ned’s room through the communicating door and left him to it. I’d be far better grabbing my pistol and being ready for trouble. I went on through to my own room, through the other communicating door, taking my clothes with me. I pulled my trousers on and tucked in my nightshirt. I was pretty decent when Hugh knocked and came in, flourishing his own pistol.
“Told everyone young Harry was dreaming. They’ve all gone back to bed,” he said.
“Good. Let’s wait out in the courtyard. I haven’t heard anything that suggests Forde or Todd have found anything out there, but something got close enough to the security barrier to trip those lights. Sam will want to review everything before he lets us return to our slumbers.”
Hugh raided the kitchen and found a pot of coffee still warm beside the stove. Turkish-style coffee is an acquired taste for most Westerners, but the thick sweetness of it, stirred with a cinnamon stick for an extra burst of flavor, was just what we needed to brisk us up. Todd and Forde happily accepted a cup when they returned. They had done three rounds of the perimeter fence and seen nothing.
“Whatever it was didn’t break through
, or the alarm would have set off and they’d have every nerve and sinew rattled by the fence,” Forde said when Sam and Ned joined us ten minutes later. “They stayed on the outside, but they got close enough in to trip the flash boxes. We reset the lot as we went around.”
Sam had a portable datascope with him. “Let’s see what they picked up. Give me a minute.”
“Harry all right?” I asked Ned.
He looked strained and unhappy, his mouth pulling down at the corners. “Just dropped off. This is all too much for him, I think.”
“Got something on the third flash box on the north side… the one nearest Harry’s window.” Sam, hunched over the datascope screen, went very still. “Well, I’ll be damned.”
He turned the screen in our direction so we could all see.
“Oh” was all I found to say.
Whatever had made Harry start yelling wasn’t a nightmare. Molly hadn’t been barking at dreams. If I’d seen what was on the datascope screen, I’d have done a little barking and screaming myself.
The lower half of the figure was in shadow, but the torso, naked from the waist up, was clear: pale skin, broad shoulders, well-developed musculature, defined pectorals lightly dusted with hair, a strong-looking forearm. The pectoral collar around its neck was the blue of lapis lazuli, interwoven with lines of bright yellows and ochres. The head was turned toward the flash box, slightly tilted as if listening attentively. A huge head, black, with large upstanding ears, eyes gleaming obsidian set on either side of the long nose and jaw of a jackal.
The dog.
No.
The Dog.
He who is upon his mountain. Lord of the Westerners.