Mr Impossible (20 page)

THE SAQQARA
PYRAMIDS were reputedly older than those ofGiza. They were still
imposing structures, Daphne thought as they crossed the plain. The
main one, the Pyramid of Steps, was their destination.

When they reached
the pebbly sand slope leading to the pyramids’ plateau, she and
Mr. Carsington dismounted, to spare the donkeys.

Debris littered the
way. He paused for a time, studying it, an odd expression on his
face. She said nothing, simply watched, surprised, as his countenance
hardened and he turned into someone she scarcely recognized. The cold
mask reminded her of the change in his voice when he found the bodies
in the pyramid. He’d sounded like a stranger then, so cold and
detached.

She saw the same
stranger now. Usually, even when he wasn’t smiling outwardly,
she’d felt the smile was there all the same. In his dark eyes
she usually discerned a gleam of amusement, as though he knew a very
good joke. That, no doubt, was why one was so easily deluded into
believing him an amiable idiot.

The good humor was
completely gone. He straightened and, without a word, walked quickly
on, taking long, angry strides she couldn’t hope to match.

Puzzled, Daphne
squatted to look more closely at the rubbish covering the ground.
Bits of marble and alabaster.

Pottery shards.
Shiny blue and green slivers. Shreds of dirty brown linen. Some odd
bits of dark material. And white… bones.

She rose and gazed
about her.

The place was a
pillaged burial ground. These were the contents of graves. The pieces
of dark material were what remained of mummies. The linen was the
remnants of then-winding sheets. The other bits must be the vestiges
of burial objects.

“
Oh, you poor
things,” she whispered. Her throat closed and ached.

She rubbed her eyes
and sharply told herself to stop being maudlin. Her collection of
papyri had been plundered from the graves of ancient Egyptians. The
same was true of her little wooden Egyptians.

“
What an
idiot—and a great hypocrite—you are, to weep about them
now,” she chided herself. But she’d been an idiot from
the time she woke up this day, it seemed. She rubbed her itching eyes
and took a steadying breath, and continued to the pyramid.

She found Mr.
Carsington at an ominous-looking black hole in the north face. The
cold, hard look was gone, and the gleam was back in his eyes. A
European in Arab garb stood with him. Mr. Carsington introduced the
man as Signor Segato. He was excavating the pyramid for the Baron
Minutoli, she learned.

“
He tells me
the interior is wonderfully complicated,” Mr. Carsington said.
“Makes Chephren’s tomb look like child’s play, by
the sounds of it. This is the way in.”

Daphne ventured
nearer the hole. It was much larger than the entrance to Chephren’s
pyramid.

“
The shaft is
only eighteen feet deep,” Mr. Carsington sdersaid.

“
It can’t
possibly be that easy to get inside,” she said.

“
No, that’s
the beginning,” he said. “The burial chamber’s
about a hundred feet below, under the pyramid.”

“
A hundred
feet,” she repeated while her heart beat a fearful
No, no!
No, no! No, no
!

“
It’s
gradual,” he said. “Miles of descending passages and
stairs. Some pits and such. And a place where the stones are
threatening to fall in. Are you game, Mrs. Pembroke?”

She did not want to
go down into that hole, be it ever so large. Every natural instinct
recoiled, and common sense warned against it.

“
There are
hieroglyphic signs on a doorway,” he said.

“
Inside?”
she said. “
Inside a pyramid
?” She’d never
heard of anyone’s finding hieroglyphs inside a pyramid. But
this excavation was very recent. She turned her gaze to Signor Segato
and fired a series of questions at him in Italian.

Yes, yes, he agreed
with the
signora
: this was most unusual. He was greatly
surprised when he found them: birds, snakes, insects, and the other
little pictures. The chamber itself was decorated, very beautiful.

She swallowed.
“Very well,” she told Mr. Carsington. “I should
like to see this inscription.”

It was a beastly
long and uncomfortable way to the chamber, and the heat so far below
ground was sufficient to bake bricks. But once they’d amassed
torches enough, and she stopped coughing from the smoke, she could
appreciate the interesting labyrinth of passages and the complex of
chambers, so unlike the simplicity of Chephren’s pyramid
atGiza. This one, too, was empty of treasure, which could surprise no
one. InEgypt, plundering tombs had been not simply a fact of life but
a profession since the time of Cheops at least.

She found treasure
enough for her, though, deep in the bowels of the pyramid.

The chamber was all
and more that Signor Segato had promised. Upon the dark blue painted
ceiling gleamed golden stars. Turquoise-colored tiles covered the
walls. But most wondrous of all was the doorframe. Above it and along
the sides were hieroglyphs, beautifully cut in low relief.

A repeated motif
adorned the sides. A falcon wearing the pharaoh’s crown stood
upon a rectangular pedestal divided into two squares. The top square
contained three signs: at top, the hatchet that signified a god;
beneath this, the almond shape she’d decided must be the
r
sound; and under it a sign less familiar: a rattle, insect, flower,
or mu-sical instrument, she couldn’t be sure. Four vertical
sections divided the bottom square. Did these signify pillars? she
wondered. Doors?

“
Is that the
god Horus?” came Mr. Carsington’s deep voice from behind
her.

The voice went
straight down her spine and up again. In self-defense, she adopted
her pedantic mode. “So it appears,” she said. “The
sign below him is the one Dr. Young interprets to mean
god
. As
you see, Horus wears a pharaoh’s crown. The kings were believed
to be gods. Perhaps this one was closely associated with Horus.”

“
The signora
can read the ancient writing?” Signor Segato asked.

“
Ah, no,”
Mr. Carsington said quickly. “She has read a little Greek,
though.”

“
Herodotus,”
Daphne said quickly.

She really
must
learn to keep her hieroglyphic speculations to herself. As Noxley had
remarked, the Egyptians loved to talk, and news traveled swiftly. If
the explorer mentioned an Englishwoman who could read hieroglyphs,
all ofEgyptwould soon hear of it… including the mad villains
who’d kidnapped Miles—and who wouldn’t hesitate to
come after her.

“
She uses a
little Herodotus and a great deal of woman’s intuition,”
Mr. Carsington said, in precisely the patronizing tone one would
expect from a superior male.

Normally, the
condescension would have had her seething. Now she almost
laughed—with relief—at how adeptly he’d covered her
blunder.

Ironic that she
could trust
him
to keep her secret better than she could do.

She did not half
understand him, she realized, and she apparently had a less than
perfect understanding of herself.

It seemed she
understood only her work. She gazed at the hieroglyphs, at the
familiar cobra and vulture and bee and hatchet. She pondered the
significance of the semicircles under most of the figures. Baskets,
the larger ones with the round side down? What of the smaller ones,
round side up? Sound or symbol? Thus questioning, speculating,
theorizing, she swiftly forgot everything else. * * *

GETTING MRS.
PEMBROKE away from the confounded falcons and what-you-call-‘ems
took steady and patient coaxing.

This was not what
Rupert wanted to be doing.

While he watched
and listened to her, he wanted to get her naked.

There was the
seeing-stars kiss, from which he still suffered aftereffects,
something like the morning after a debauch—except that his head
wasn’t what ached.

There was whatever
she was doing to him now, and he wasn’t sure what that was.

She managed—just
barely—to hide her learning from Segato. She couldn’t
conceal her excitement, though. It set the very air vibrating.

Since she couldn’t
run about the place, openly gesticulating and theorizing and talking
six languages simultaneously, she stuck close to Rupert. And when she
couldn’t contain herself—which happened every few
minutes— she’d clutch his arm and tug to bring his ear
near her mouth, so that she could whisper.

He had to feel her
breath on his ear and neck and cheek and be aware of how close her
mouth was and how all he had to do was turn his head to taste it
again—and see stars.

But he couldn’t
turn his head. He had to behave, because they weren’t alone,
which was why he had to endure the whisper torture.

Luckily for her,
Segato was Italian. Assuming the whispers were romantic rather than
pedantic, he kept a tactful distance.

This belief
wouldn’t do Mrs. Pembroke’s reputation any good. Still,
the alternative was worse.

It wasn’t
hard to guess what Duval and his underlings would do if they found
out they’d kidnapped the wrong sibling. They’d come after
her, and they’d murder whomever happened to be in the way:
captain, crew members, Leena, and Tom.

If Mrs. Pembroke’s
secret got out, none of them would be safe.

Keeping the secret
was going to be more difficult than Rupert could have foreseen. Every
time she met a hieroglyph, she’d act like this: vibrating like
a tuning fork, the gigantic brain bubbling over and spilling out its
secrets: Greek and Latin and Coptic and names of scholars and who
believed what and this alphabet versus that one and phonetic
interpretations versus symbolic ones.

The day was waning
when they finally climbed out of the pyramid. She was not waning in
the least.

Several members of
their party had come up from the plain to wait nearby. Though they
carried food and water, the lady paid them no heed. A heap of stones
a few feet away caught her eye. She wandered thither.

Tom trotted over to
Rupert with the clothes he’d discarded en route. Though it was
late afternoon, the air had not yet begun to cool. In any case,
Rupert wanted to wash off the layer of sand and sweat first. Shaking
his head at the boy, he turned away to watch Mrs. Pembroke.

Beside him, Segato
watched her, too, remarking how unusual it was to find a woman who
shared one’s enthusiasm for exploration and who bore hardship
so cheerfully.

There was an
understatement.

She must be at
least as hot, dirty, and tired as Rupert was. Like him, she’d
had nothing to eat since morning. Yet instead of hurrying to the
waiting servants who carried food and water, she crouched to peer at
a slab of rock poking out of a pile of rubble.

She brushed it off,
bent close, shook her head, and with an impatient twitch, knelt in
the pebbly sand. She dug under, and after a moment, unearthed the two
outer corners. She grabbed the edge and rifted it up. It seemed to be
a tablet of some kind, for it was covered in writing.

Rupert saw that,
and the shadowy form revealed when she rested it against the rubble
heap. He saw the snake rear up, and his heart froze. She sank back on
her knees, and, “
Don’t move
!” he roared.

He was moving as he
spoke. He grabbed the clothes from the boy, discarding all but the
tunic while swiftly covering the few feet to where she remained
immobile. The snake swayed in its place, still confused perhaps after
the abrupt awakening, or not sure where the threat lay.

Mrs. Pembroke was
leaning as far back over her heels as she could, balanced on one
hand, her green gaze riveted upon the serpent.

“
Don’t
move,” Rupert repeated more quietly. He shook out the tunic, as
a bullfighter would shake out his cape. The snake made a quick dart
at it without moving farther away from her. The creature was still
aware of her, a larger and more solid threat. She was still within
its range, and it was fully alert now, waiting. If she moved, it
would attack her.

While gently waving
the tunic, to fix the snake’s attention there, Rupert inched
nearer to her. When he’d finally got the cloth between her and
the snake, he said softly, “Now. Back away. Try to make as
little disturbance as possible.”