The Jackal's House

by Anna Butler

  An hour in, and Causton called for a change. Those of us on the front line were sent to rest for fifteen minutes, before joining the relay line shifting the loose stones. By the time I got outside for some air, the sun was down and the swift Aegyptian night had fallen. The ruins of the temple stood cold and sharp against the richness of the night sky, the stars so remote and indifferent that only a fool could believe the grim heavens had anything to say to a man’s fate.

  Don’t think. Don’t feel.

  I wiped my eyes and went in search of something to ease my parched throat.

  Our cook had set up a brazier not far from the tunnel mouth and had a kettle singing on it to constantly replenish a great pot of tea. The village women had brought dishes of rice and meat, and I sat with the men, eating with my fingers as they did. No doubt the local mutton was stewed to perfection and delicately spiced. It might as well have been a bowl of thick wheat wallpaper paste.

  That became the pattern. Work for an hour. Take fifteen minutes and back into that hot, chthonic pit to labor for another eternity of torment.

  When I returned after my second break, Hugh was waiting for me. He had a piece of wood in his hands, a fragment of one of the damaged props, just unearthed out of the rockfall. It was splintered and charred at one end, the splinters splayed out like thin, pallid roots.

  The soot rubbed off onto my fingers. “A small charge, by the look of it.”

  He nodded. He looked so weary, my poor Hugh. I’d dragged him into this hell with me, and his only reaction was to give, endlessly, until even his generous heart must quail. I could never repay such loyalty.

  I glanced to where Fouquet stood at one side, his head down while young Nasr poured cool water over the back of the Frenchman’s neck. If it had been him, I truly would kill him. I’d break that damn neck for him. “Later. I’m going back to work.”

  Don’t think. And for the sake of all that is holy, do not bloody feel.

  Stoop and lift, stoop and lift, until every muscle was on fire. Better than thinking, this mindless, painful labor. Much better than feeling.

  I dozed on my next rest. What wouldn’t I give for a hot steaming bath to ease the fierce ache in my shoulders? What wouldn’t I give to have Ned free, to ease the fiercer ache in my chest?

  Just as he had two days earlier when we labored over the aether fire in the village, Fouquet sat down heavily beside me, out in the desert’s clean, cold air. “Did you know I trained in Londinium?”

  I jerked fully awake with a start and stared at him. He gave me a small, wry smile.

  “For all that we French got to Aegypt first, our scholarship cannot match that of England. Berlin begins to come close, but Londinium is still the center of the scholarly world. Lansbach, Baumann, and dozens of others… we all went to Londinium to study because there the great le Page Renouf was director of your museum. It was an honor… oh, such an honor, to be taught by him. I dreamed that he would notice me. We all did.” Fouquet sighed audibly. His voice dropped, and I had to strain to hear him. Now I understood why every foreign archaeologist spoke English so well, but still I had to parse out every word through his accent, the French intonations deepening as he spoke. “It was not me he saw as his greatest student, but a young Englishman who did not have to fight his way into the profession like the rest of us. Not me, no matter how dedicated I was. I could not compare to a boy more than five years younger. He, not I, was the great man’s protégé. He is a quite brilliant archaeologist, you know, your Ned Winter. All the more galling that he does not need to make it his profession.”

  “He would, if he could.”

  Fouquet’s shrug had a peculiarly Gallic character to it. “I could bear that disappointment, were I Ned Winter, in return for unlimited funding for my expeditions. I have always envied him, you understand. I wanted the temple, but Maspero promised it to him last year and would not renege. Yet again I had to take second place. It angered me greatly to see that some of the carvings had been removed. I told myself it was great incompetence or worse…. I know there was nothing Winter could do about it. I knew it wasn’t him…. I do regret complaining to Maspero. I regret it greatly. That was beneath me.”

  “Yes. It was.”

  “But I did not do this, Captain, or any of the other things that have happened to your expedition. That I swear. And I will do everything I can to free Winter.”

  He held my gaze for a moment. I believed him. He was only a thin sort of villain, after all.

  I nodded. “When we have Ned out of there, and the dust has settled a bit, then I expect you will tell him and apologize.”

  Fouquet smiled. “I expect I will.”

  Yes, indeed he would, if I had to hold him at pistol point while he did it. All the same, when he held out his hand, I shook it. He might be a bastard, but right at that moment, he was the bastard working harder than any of Pharaoh’s corvée slaves to get Ned out of the living tomb in which he was trapped. I’d forgive even Fouquet, in the face of that. All that mattered was reaching Ned.

  Don’t think. Don’t feel.

  Chapter 24

  BY THE fourth hour of our labor, an impartial observer would have seen little to distinguish us Europeans from the fellahin toiling beside us. No more clean linen suits against striped galabeyyas, just naked torsos darkened with dirt and sweat. Archaeologist, student, fellahin, Gallowglass guard… we were all just men. No sense of white man and brown, just comrades in arms, slogging along together. If a man, wearied beyond endurance, faltered and slowed, it didn’t matter who he was or whose hand caught him and guided him to one side. It didn’t matter who stood with him and poured water over his dusty head to cool him, or watched over him to see him drink and rest. It didn’t matter that sometimes the arm bracing me up was Hugh’s and sometimes that of a man who perhaps I’d never spoken to before that night, one of the many fellahin who’d worked on the temple and whose name I’d never learned. I’d greeted them daily with a smile and a cheery As-salāmu ʿalaykum, but I was shamed then that I had taken so little time to know them. Now they labored beside me as my peers, my betters at this sort of work, and God knows they deserved that I went to my knees to thank them for it.

  I worked beside Mr. Bakhoum for the last part of my shift, taking over positioning the props as Todd and Harper put the horizontal bracers into place. Even Mr. Bakhoum had stripped to a short loincloth, losing not one whit of his innate dignity. He looked like one of the old paintings on the wall beside him, a supplicant making an offering to the gods. We all looked rather like the ancients in the wall paintings, all the more so since the red, iron-rich dust that coated faces and arms echoed the red ochre paint. Some of us, I thought, as I took a breather to glance around at the actors in this scene, looked rather more ancient than others. Some of us should not have been so careless as to strip off our shirts.

  Later. I’d deal with it later.

  Don’t think.

  Sometime about nine that night, we’d cut our way through more than a dozen feet of rock. Causton was back on roof-bracing duty, up on the right-hand side of the fall, inching the edge of a plank into place. He froze so suddenly that those closest to him stared.

  “Quiet!” Causton dropped the plank. “Quiet!”

  We shushed one another and crowded close, the tension so thick all of a sudden, it felt sticky. Smothering. Causton pressed an ear against the rock, his eyes closed as he concentrated. I don’t think anyone even drew breath in case it was too loud.

  “I can hear something! Banging! Someone’s banging on the other side.”

  The silence broke into whoops, and we all grinned, devils in Hell together, teeth gleaming against the dirt on our faces. Hugh came from the gods knew where to bump against my shoulder in brotherly congratulations. Causton called for the thin, flexible probe Mr. Bakhoum had been using hours before, and for the next few minutes, we all watched in tense silence as he worked it between the stones.

  “It’s through!” Causton waggled the probe and laughed a
loud, his expression half-delight, half-shock. “Someone caught hold of the other end. They’re there!”

  I sat down. Hard.

  Hugh put his hand on my shoulder. “It’ll be fine, sir,” he said, his voice pitched low to reach me below the muted cheering from the tired rescue force.

  I drew up my knees and put my face down on them. Just closed my eyes for an instant, that was all. No more than that, because… well, no time to indulge myself. I had to know. By turning my head against the hardness of bone and aching sinew, I could watch Causton at his work and pretend it was something ordinary and inconsequential.

  Causton withdrew the probe, put his mouth to the small hole it left behind, and called inquiries: who was there, what condition were they in? He huddled up against the rough rock face, his ear pressed against the hole. The rest of us waited. Around me all the men stood, some shifting their weight wearily, others standing with downcast faces and their heads cocked toward Causton as if listening as hard as he was, straining to hear whatever whisper came from our trapped comrades.

  Causton’s expression became a grimace, and he nodded as if Ned, Sam, and Lansbach could see him. He turned his mouth to the airhole again. “Got it! Hold on. We’ll reach you in an hour. Two at most.” He turned to face us, his expression one of jubilation. “That was Sam. He’s unhurt, but Ned got a bad crack on the head and is still disoriented, fading in and out a great deal. Lansbach has a broken arm and, Sam thinks, several broken or cracked ribs. Their main problem right now is that it’s very hot back there and dusty, it’s affecting Lansbach’s breathing, and they have no water.”

  “How far in?” I struggled to my feet, Hugh clamping a hand around my upper arm to give me a hoist up.

  “Only about four feet.” Causton managed a grin. “Not so bad, when we’ve come this far.” He glanced at Fouquet and Mr. Bakhoum, and nodded. “Back to work, everyone. We’re on the last lap now.”

  It lasted forever, this last lap. If the wheel we’d been dragged under by Time had circled us endlessly, it had at least taken a sense of the hours passing with it. I’d always been slightly surprised when my hour’s work rolled around to another rest period and someone took the pick from my hands, or the wheelbarrow, and sent me out for a few minutes of fresher, cooler air. I’d lost the ability to gauge time. But that final hour as we toiled to breach the last piles of stone, that hour waxed and waned, stretched and snapped close…. I’d work through a long, endless epoch of cutting at the rockfall or shoveling away the rubble, several lifetimes of Don’t think and Don’t feel, with no true sense of whether I’d just spent five minutes or five hours heaving rock. And then it would all snap into a clarity of sight and hearing, as we paused while Fouquet and George Todd worked in another support beam or, another lifetime later, Causton eased out a rock near ceiling height and, trying again with the probe, called out that we had only a couple of feet to go. His voice cracked.

  Now we worked like demons. No longer did we take out the entire fall. Now we just took the stones to waist height, and within a few moments, we had a hole large enough to reach through, to shine lights through, and pass canteens of cool water to our poor trapped comrades.

  That’s when Don’t think and Don’t feel became Ned! Oh, Ned! A moment of a joy so intense my body shook with it when I thrust my arm through the widening hole and felt Ned’s warm, living hand clasp mine.

  NED WAS a mess. Despite having been alert enough to take my hand a few moments before, he staggered back when I wriggled through the hole as soon as it was big enough, his hand over his eyes. I scrambled to my feet and caught hold of him as his legs gave way. Sam leapt forward, smothering a curse and a “Not again!” Between us we got Ned to his knees, holding him upright.

  I knelt beside him. God, but I wanted to do more, show him just what he meant to me. But with Lansbach there, I was reduced to getting both arms around him in a way I hoped looked like “concerned friend and supportive” rather than “terrified lover and frantic.”

  “Oh, Ned. Ned.”

  He mumbled something, and his free hand sought for me. I enclosed his fingers in mine and held on for dear life.

  If there’d been time and space for it, I could have let the relief drown me. But this wasn’t about me having a fit of the vapors. This was about getting Ned out to safety.

  I tilted his head toward the light, despite his muttered, rather incoherent complaints about the pain in his eyes. Head wounds bleed—badly. Blood matted his hair, still oozed from a jagged cut on his left temple, masked his face in a raw red, and soaked down the front of his shirt. Close as my face was to his, I could smell the blood’s thick, warm saltiness with its unmistakable metallic tang. Sam would have done what he could in the dark, I knew that, but with no light and no medical supplies, they must have had to let the blood slow and stop by itself.

  “We weren’t sure you were alive,” I said to Sam while Ned drooped between us. “Not when we couldn’t raise you on the Marconi.”

  Sam grimaced. “All this damn dust, the Marconi died on me. We’re okay, really. Ned has that bad cut on his head, but I don’t think there are any fractures. No dents in that thick skull of his.” Sam’s voice had an unaccustomed shake to it. However much I loved Ned, Sam had loved him longer. Sam might have no son of his own, but I suspect that with Ned, he’d never felt the lack. Sam let all that show without his usual mask in place, the expression on his face undisguised anxiety. “He was unconscious for a few minutes, and dizzy and sick ever since.”

  I could sympathize. I was doolally for days after crashing my aerofighter at Koffiefontein, spending the time in a darkened room, giddy and light-headed and sick from the blow I got to the head. Poor Ned was in for the same, it appeared. “Not at all surprising. He might take days to get his head clear.”

  And thank God he was alive to do it.

  Sam closed a hand over my shoulder. We had our deepest moments of comradeship, Sam and I, when Ned was in peril. “Got him steady? I need to talk to Causton about getting us out.”

  I nodded and held Ned a little closer and said soothing things in his ear while Causton and Sam between them organized the rescue.

  “S-sorry….” Ned shivered, his hands trembling as he reached for mine.

  “Don’t be daft. You’ve had your bell rung for you and no mistake.” Hugh had tossed more bottles of water after me when I’d squirmed through the gap, and I managed to reach one with my free hand. With a contortion worthy of a snake charmer, I extracted my grubby handkerchief from the waistband of my undergarments, got the lid off the water bottle, and soaked the cloth. I turned Ned’s bloody face toward me and dabbed at the blood to clear it from his eyes and nose. I didn’t go near the wound on his temple, but still he flinched. Underneath the blood, his skin was darkening with bruises. He looked like he’d gone several rounds against the great Tom Sayers, and he’d have a lovely pair of black eyes by morning.

  I left off trying to clean him up and coaxed him into swallowing a mouthful of water. He pressed his face against me and got an arm up around my neck. I let him be. His head was probably swimming.

  Lansbach spoke from behind me, his voice hoarse and a gasp for breath between every word. “He is well?”

  “I’m sure he will be.” I turned to glance at the professor. “He’ll have a hell of a headache for a while. How are you, Professor? I’m sorry not to be able to reach you.”

  Looking at Lansbach gave me my first real chance to examine the small space where they’d been trapped for so long. It was a miracle they’d survived in there, in a gap barely a dozen feet deep that was hot as Hades, the air thick and heavy. Lansbach sat against the back wall, his face white under the red dust coating him like a second skin, his breathing harsh. His right arm had been tucked inside his shirt as a makeshift sling, and he’d brought his left across his body to cup his right elbow. I wasn’t certain if it was to support the broken arm or the damaged ribs. From somewhere he found enough strength to give me a broad smile, and swore that he was
just splendid and would be even better when we got him out of there. He said nothing of the way I was holding Ned, and I was grateful.

  The carpenter had rigged up a couple of litters while we were on that last stretch. Hugh and Causton maneuvered them through into Sam’s waiting hands, Hugh following to help us get Lansbach and Ned out. Confused, Ned took some persuading to lie on one of the litters so we could manhandle him into the main tunnel, and his vertigo cost him several moments of painful retching before he was steady enough for us to lift the litter and pass it through the gap to the waiting hands outside. Sam scrambled through after him, of course, leaving Hugh and me to handle Lansbach. The professor was an easier patient than Ned, being less all-at-sea and dizzy, although I suspect it cost him all his fortitude. He shifted uncomfortably on the litter, his breathing suddenly doing a sort of dot-and-carry-one. I didn’t like the wheezing noise his chest made, and Hugh and I were as quick as we could be in getting him to a cleaner, cooler space where it would be easier for him to catch his breath.

  It was quite the scene when we got Lansbach out into the main tunnel. Ned lay with his hands over his eyes against the bright lights, while Sam and Causton bent over him and Banger Bill hurried up with a small medical case. We helped Lansbach sit up to ease his breathing, Baumann rushing in to kneel behind him, bracing him against his knee. For all our Teutonic cousins were said to lack humor, no one would deny they were a sentimental race. Baumann held Lansbach’s hand with as much fervor as I would have held Ned’s if I could, and his eyes were wet. Lansbach, in his turn, leaned back against his compatriot with such an expression of trust and relief on his face… well, let me just say that I decided it was fruitless worrying that Lansbach might have anything critical to say about Ned and me. He was no hypocrite.