“Everything.”
“Wonderful.”
“He needs to hear your side of the story, Richard.”
“You mean the way I played with you and why? That is the juiciest part, isn’t it? The whole world will label me a sadistic bastard because I led you to believe I was dead and then impersonated my own ghost. No one will understand I was protecting our love.”
This statement makes her long to put her arms around him and just hold him. Instead she has to settle for boarding the bus.
During the bumpy ride through mazes of rock outcroppings, the only distinguishing feature of the barren landscape, their driver attempts to rally their enthusiasm for the tombs they will be seeing by way of an obnoxiously loud intercom.
Probably wishing he was back in Georgia, Ian rides by himself across the aisle from her, staring out the window, while Ellen keeps turning around in her seat to chat about everything and nothing.
* * * * *
The first of the four tombs open to the public is that of Khety. While everyone else follows the guide inside, Richard and Lucia make their way alone into the tomb next to it.
The detailed reliefs carved into the limestone bedrock are, in a way, much more powerful than the life-size paintings produced in the Valley of the Kings and Queens dynasties later.
“I’ve always preferred Old Kingdom tombs,” she remarks. “And this one is just as…what’s the word I’m looking for here?”
“Virile?” Richard offers helpfully.
“Yes! There’s nothing soft about these drawings. These people were in complete…” She searches for the right word again.
“Command of themselves?”
“Yes, exactly.”
“Virile, hard and in command, just your kind of men.”
“You know what I mean. They really believed in the eternal energy animating their bodies. Their sensuality was completely profound, if that makes any sense.” She moves over to another wall. “Come here. See this dog giving birth?”
“I see it,” he says patiently. “What about it?”
“See her tail? That’s Set’s erect, forked tail. But she has a collar around her neck, which means that chaos and darkness, or matter, devoid of spirit, has been brought under control.”
He caresses her hair, which she wore down to please him despite the heat. “Is that what I’m doing whenever I put a collar around your throat, my love, taming your Sethian nature?”He grabs a handful of her soft brown mane and pulls her over to the wall covered with copulating animals. “See this?”
“When are you going to stop resenting me for something that was entirely your fault?” she asks mildly.
He lets go of her and moves over to a vibrant scene of acrobats and dancers.
She follows him, her feelings in a similar state of upheaval.
The rest of the tomb appears to be devoted to inventory and accounting scenes, which bore her but which Richard seems to find quite interesting, either that or he is simply concentrating on ignoring her.
Despair begins carving out a hollow space inside her. “I’ll see you outside,” she tells him and he lets her go, again.
Everyone is emerging from Khety’s tomb when she steps out into the unforgiving sunlight.
She slips on her sunglasses and quickly starts up the path toward a third opening in the cliff face above her.
The day is still young but the air is so dry it sucks the salty moisture out of her before it can even manifest as sweat. A fine white dust swirls around her ankles like a ghostly wraith.
Her heart rate already higher than normal from fighting despair, she runs up the last steep stretch of the path.
“What’s the rush?” Ian smiles at her from where he is perched on a convenient rock next to the dark entrance. “Running away again?” He tosses his cigarette away and brushes limestone powder off the seat of his pants as he rises.
“I just felt like being alone for a moment.”
“Then I’ll get out of your way.”
“You’re not in my way… Are you in touch with Mark?”
“Why do you ask?”
“Because I’d like you to give him a message for me. Tell him it’s over. Tell him I love my husband.”
“And that you’re afraid of him?”
“You only know Mark’s side of the story, Ian. He seems to think I’m a battered wife or something and nothing could be further from the truth.”
He approaches her. “Don’t move.”
Her cry as he grabs her arm and pulls her to him is lost in a deafening sound like the ground beneath their feet suddenly splitting open.
“It’s okay,” he says, cradling her firmly against him with one arm. “I got it.”
“Got what?” she gasps, clinging to him.
“The mess there,” he points with a small black gun, “that a second ago was a scorpion going for your leg.” He drops the weapon back into one of the deep pockets of his slacks as she stares down at the abstract little canvas of blood and guts decorating the sand. Then he lets go of her abruptly and she sees Richard running up the path toward them.
He immediately spots the blood gleaming like fresh paint a few inches from her feet. “Jesus.”
Morbidly fascinated by the eerily intact tail, Set’s tail, she can’t look away from the scorpion’s remains until Richard draws her gently into his arms and holds her close. Then she relaxes, knowing nothing can harm her while she is surrounded by the horizons of his arms.
“I owe you one, Ian,” he says without a trace of sarcasm.
“Well, you know what you can do for me. I’ve got Mark’s side of the story, now I’d like yours.”
“Are you the ape that guards the balance?” Simon asks soberly. “Do you plan to weigh each version against Maat’s feather?”
Ian’s silence indicates he has no idea who Maat is.
“Richard,” she separates herself from him to look up into his eyes, “let’s just tell him the truth.” She turns in his arms and leans comfortably back against him. “The truth is I knew my husband was alive all along, Ian. I was only pretending to be a widow. We’ve always enjoyed playing games with each other. At first we just wanted privacy while he was recovering, that’s why we let the world believe he was dead. And all that time in the hospital, we entertained ourselves planning this trip. We knew Egypt’s dry climate would be the perfect place for him to finish healing and the little fantasy we planned gave us something to look forward to. Mark made it even more exciting but his part is over now and now I have to be punished for being such a bad girl.” She lets her head fall languidly back against Richard’s shoulder. “Don’t I?”
“You’ll wish you were dead by the time I’m finished with you,” he assures her tenderly.
* * * * *
Richard and Lucia are dining by themselves at a small table privately situated in a corner of the dining room. The Sistrum’s hedonistic little universe pulses with candlelight in which silverware gleams like distant lightning and the white china plates are full moons against the black tablecloths.
“Do you think Ian believed me, Richard?” she asks.
“Hell, even I believed you.”
Smiling, she takes another sip of her martini. “You know, shaken not stirred really does make a difference. I guess it’s true what they say, the devil is in the details. I love that expression.”
Sitting across from her, Richard ignores his drink. “They also say God is in the details.”
White crumbs rain down from the roll she splits in half and create a faraway galaxy on the black tablecloth. “What are you looking at?”
“At the mess you’re making.”
“Sorry.” She moans with pleasure biting into the cloudy mass of enriched dough.
“I’ve never seen a woman eat as much as you do. Where the hell do you put it all?”
She shrugs. “I really need to start working out again soon. I haven’t jogged or weight-lifted or done anything except walk since I came to Egypt.”
“Yes, but Mark did most of the work.”
“Touché.”
She is feeling in rare form tonight and has no intention of letting his jabs get to her. She is getting back into the rhythm of his relentless verbal fencing and not allowing him to make an emotional mess of her. All she has to do is remind herself that he loves her and that, paradoxically, he put her through hell in order to spare her feelings.
“You know how much I love good food,” she continues. “Everything the earth has to offer. I think eating is one of the main reasons we incarnated in the first place. Digestion is a miracle, if you think about it. It’s not just a mystical concept that everything is somehow part of us. We put all this stuff in our mouth and our body makes use of it, or disposes of it, in an amazing system.”
“You’d better stop talking about things you like to put in your mouth before I get mad.”
“Fine, you say something. You’re just sitting there, staring at me.”
“Am I not allowed to look at you?”
She glances shyly over at the other diners. “I thought Ellen was going to pass out when she saw what was left of that scorpion.”
“It’s a good thing she didn’t. After my accident, I’m not allowed to lift more than two hundred pounds.”
She laughs. “Ian must eat dinner in his cabin or with the crew. He’s never here.”
“Or he’s a bloodsucking vampire who doesn’t need food. I don’t much like the fact that I’m indebted to him now.”
“You had to face the press eventually, Richard. Now at least it’ll look like I was in on it with you and that I spent all that time helping you recover, which would have been the normal thing to do.”
“The day I do anything even remotely normal, feel free to shoot me.”
“Would you care to order now?” Their waiter is a dignified old man in an immaculate white robe and turban whose wrinkles possess the mystery of dried-out riverbeds in the candlelight.
“Aywa, shukron,” Richard answers respectfully and orders roast duck for both of them, as they agreed, along with a bottle of red wine.
“Do you have any idea how many women I’d been with before I met you, Lucia?”
“I can imagine.” She frowns.
“And yet why is it that I asked you to marry me and not someone else?”
“I don’t know.” She glances across the dark room at the other diners. None of them look as though they are enjoying interesting conversations. “Why did you?”
“The chemistry between us, for one, and because from the very first moment we were best friends. I could express myself with you. I could talk to you like I couldn’t talk to anyone else. I could tell you everything and anything and you understood. We think alike, you and I.”
“Which may come from living together for so long.”
“We’ve been together this long because we feel things so similarly. It isn’t habit or children or financial necessity or mere lethargy that keeps us together.”
She sweeps breadcrumbs into her hand. “I thought it was love.” She tosses them into the basket.
“I didn’t say it wasn’t. But what is love? You might as well try to define God.”
“I believe they’re the same thing.”
“Maybe they are.”
“I’m starving.” She sighs happily.
“That’s my girl, always hungry for something.”
She laughs. “I’m a voracious user.”
“I’m going to hurt you, my love,” he promises quietly. “Really hurt you.”
The excitement she experiences feels like her soul feeding on her spine like the candle flame on the wick.
“And by the way, I’ve asked our good-looking reporter to join me for brandy and cigars later. I might as well get it over with.”
“I wouldn’t mind some brandy and a cigar myself.”
“I’d rather talk to him alone if that’s all right with you.”
The candle sputters in an unseen draft as anger flares up inside her. “So the whole world can know more than I do about the seventeen months you were dead?”
Even in the soft light, she sees his eyes harden. “Don’t use that tone with me, Lucia.”
Reflected fire burns steadily in her dark eyes. “I’m sorry, it’s just that I can’t forget how miserable I was without you and I keep expecting to wake up from this dream.”
“Hopefully you won’t,” he says gently. “Not for a very long time.”
* * * * *
Lucia leaves Richard with Ian out on the deck, a faint bluish smoke weaving above their heads like djinns released from their lamps after centuries of imprisonment. Ian is getting something he wished for, a sensational story, and Richard already has everything he wants. The brandy in their snifters is a warm, molten gold in the trembling light from the gas lamps.
She strolls leisurely away from them. The night is so beautiful she can easily believe she is inside a virtual reality simulator looking up at a make-believe sky. The multitude of stars burning through the atmosphere is at once humbling and reassuring. With the heavenly host enjoying so many hydrogen and helium cigars, the dimmer lights of mortal dwellings along the shore are hardly worth noticing.
She pauses to lean over the railing and listen to the river lapping against the hull as she watches the slow-moving constellations of other boats traveling up and down the river around them. The subliminal echo of their motors merges with the deep hum of the Sistrum’s engines so that the soft swell of the shoreline takes on the mysterious look of a cat curled up between heaven and earth, purring contentedly.
With her own fulfilled body digesting the remains of a duck that once bobbed on the currents below her, her mind languid from the wine washing over it in her blood and years of sunshine and rain captured in a bottle playing themselves out inside her, Lucia finally lets herself think about Mark.
Compared to Richard, remembering Mark is like catching sight of the moon during the day, the white fingernail of the crescent tearing through the atmosphere’s veil scratching at her heart. During the night of her grief, Mark had seemed as intensely beautiful as moonlight in the Dark Ages.
She stares down at the river’s dark, heaving mass filled with an abundance of marine life, bacteria, chemicals and garbage. In that moment she feels that Richard was right to let her have Mark. Sexual pleasure relaxed her enough to withstand the shock of the man she thought was dead abruptly entering her life again, then guilt diluted her anger at his deception. It was as if he had used Mark to prime her in every way.
She looks up and down the deck to make sure no one is approaching, namely Ellen. The woman’s aimless chatter is more frightening than the pit in the tomb of Amenhotep III.
“Mark,” she whispers. She wonders if he is still in Cairo and what he’s doing. There is no denying the fact that she cares about him and that Richard knows she cares. He knows better than anyone else how she gives herself to a man.
She stands there leaning against the railing for a long time. She is remembering everything. The energetic play of Mark’s tongue in her mouth. The look in his eyes the first time he spread open her thighs. The feel of his cock everywhere he could possibly put it inside her and that she let him put it. The teasing quality of his smile when he described what she was eating… She lets herself remember everything.
With a sigh, she turns back in the direction of her husband and the reporter interviewing him. She wonders if Richard can tell she is attracted to Ian and realizes that is a silly question. Richard literally knows her better than she knows herself.
As she catches sight of the two men beneath the gaslights, she can tell right away that the interview has burned out along with the cigars. The cognac is still flowing however, which pleases her because she would like a taste herself.
As though his pulse is attuned to the sound of her high heels, Richard is the first to look up. Then Ian looks at her and their silent focus makes her feel shy and beautiful and strangely
weak.
She ignores Ian’s regard as she walks up behind Richard’s chair and rests her hands on his shoulders. She squeezes them briefly, to alleviate her own inner tension as much as to soothe his physical ones. “How did it go?” she asks, finally looking at Ian.
He is leaning forward in his chair, the snifter cupped lightly in his hands. The flames above him do incredible things to his hair as he stares up at her. His intensely sober expression surprises her and catches her off guard, she is so accustomed to his casual smile.
“It went very well,” Richard says and she can feel his quiet voice rumbling gently up from deep in his chest as she lets her hands slide down from his shoulders then up again. She still isn’t convinced that he’s real. She constantly has to reassure herself by touching him, or at least by being as close to his strong warmth as possible. “And what have you been up to, my love?” He catches one of her hands in his as he raises the snifter of cognac to his lips and drains it.
“Just walking along the deck looking at the river and the sky and thinking.”
“And what were you thinking about?”
Her pulse stumbles over the question. “Nothing in particular.”
“She’s a terrible liar, isn’t she, Ian?”
The reporter smiles briefly and, sitting back in his chair, drains his glass.
She slips her hand out of her husband’s grasp and moves around him, intending to pull up a chair beside him, but he abruptly sets his snifter down on a small table and rises.
“If you’ll please observe, Ian,” he says mildly, but his fingers brand themselves into the skin of her upper arm as he pulls her roughly over to the railing.
“What are you doing?” she asks in a small voice, possessed by the irrational fear that he can see all her thoughts of Mark as clearly as a pornographic slideshow flashing straight from her mind into his.
He stops her about two feet away from the railing. “Lean forward and brace yourself on it,” he orders in that tone of his that brooks no argument whatsoever.
Her confusion is like a cloud in which a lightning of excitement flashes against her will as she obeys him. And her arousal moves in like a storm when behind them she hears Ian scrape his chair back and get up. She longs to ask Richard what he’s doing but she doesn’t dare and when he begins lifting her long white dress up out of his way, she can’t believe it. He has never taken her in public. The deck is deserted, the rest of the passengers are in their cabins, but anyone could appear at any moment. And then there is the small matter of another man’s presence. She more feels than hears Ian walk up to the railing to her right.
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