Mr Impossible (39 page)

She left Daphne to
run about the divan. The mongoose ran up Mr. Carsington as though he
were a tree, sat on his shoulder for a moment, sniffing his neck,
then ran down again and out of the cabin.

The baby found this
highly amusing. She let out squeals of laughter. She stood up, fell
down, and squealed some more.

Nafisah came in,
scooped her up, and bore her away, to allow the mistress to enjoy her
breakfast in peace.

Daphne settled onto
the divan at a decorous distance from Mr. Carsington.

Leena entered then,
bearing a large tray heaped with breakfast pastries and fruits.
“Well, why do you stand there like a stone?” she cried to
Tom. “Where is the coffee for your mistress?”

“
I forget
because my heart is so full,” he said. “We are all well
now, and safe. This boat is filled with happiness. The baby who was
dying laughs and claps her hands. My master who was swallowed by the
sandstorm came back to us. He brought back our mistress and made her
well again when death tried to take her. He will find our master—our
other master—and take him from the foreign devils who carried
him into the desert. There are twelve of them, but Yusef and I will
fight by his side, and we will fight like a hundred demons and
devils.”

“
What’s
he on about now?” Mr. Carsington asked Daphne. She quickly
translated. Tom went on with his rant.

“
Hold on,”
said Mr. Carsington. He held up his hand. “Wait. Stop.”

The boy paused.

“
Foreign
devils?” Mr. Carsington said. “Twelve of them? How do you
know this?”

“
But everyone
knows,” Leena said. “We heard it in the marketplace. The
caravans come to Asyut. They see these men, one or two Egyptians, but
most are foreigners— Syrian, Greek, Armenian, Turkish. They
keep close watch over a tall, fair man who speaks very strange Arabic
and whose camel quarrels with him. Did no one tell you?”

She turned a
reproachful look upon Tom. “Did you not tell him? Of the talk
in Asyut?”

“
Oh, yes,”
said Tom. “I told you, sir, when you came on the boat. Everyone
told you. Everyone heard of it in the
suq
.”

“
Did you tell
him in English?” Daphne said.

The boy considered.
Then he lifted his shoulders and hands. “In your tongue, in our
tongue, I cannot say. My joy to see you was so great. Tears filled my
eyes. So full were our hearts, who can say what words we spoke?”

“
Leena, sit,”
Mr. Carsington ordered. “Tom, sit. Now, one at a time, slowly,
tell us everything you heard in Asyut.”

At this point, the
tale took the dramatic turn.

The
Memnon
was well known in Asyut, the servants reported. As soon as it was
spotted, a number of people fled the town and went into hiding, not
emerging until the boat was long gone.

“
They call
this man the Golden Devil,” Tom said, “because his hair
is the color of gold. He is English, like you. But he is a devil with
an army of men like demons. The people of Upper Egypt have less fear
of Muhammad Ali and his soldiers.”

The Golden Devil
had become a legend, apparently. When children misbehaved, their
mothers told them the Golden Devil would come after them.

Tom went on for
some time about the Golden Devil. Daphne provided her usual, concise
English version.

She offered it
calmly enough.

After Tom left to
fetch the coffee and Leena to bring the maps Rupert asked for, he
said, “These revelations about Noxious don’t seem to have
shocked you.”

Her gaze was
distant, abstracted. “After what I have discovered about my
late husband, I doubt anything more I learn about any man could shock
me. This voyage—or mission—or whatever one calls it—has
been highly educational. No wonder Miles said I was naive and
unworldly.”

“
He’s
your brother,” Rupert said. “Brothers can take the oddest
views of their siblings. Perhaps because I’m not your brother,
I see you altogether differently. From the first you struck me as
levelheaded and clear-eyea.”

“
You’ve
only known me in unusual circumstances,” she said.

“
Maybe
unusual circumstances show us what we’re truly made of,”
he said. “Maybe your life before didn’t give you room
enough to be yourself.

“
I don’t
know,” she said. “I haven’t sorted myself out yet.
Lord Noxley is easier. His activities at least fit a pattern. We knew
he was at war with Duval, competing for antiquities. As to his
lordship’s army of demons and devils, Belzoni said much the
same of his rivals’ agents. He said they were lawless men.
European ‘renegadoes, desperadoes, and exiles,’ he called
them.”

WITH LEENA AND Tom
interrupting each other, and the usual excess verbiage, the report
went on for some time, and to Rupert seemed to grow increasingly
melodramatic. Daphne’s translation reduced the endless saga to
a few bald facts.

Archdale had been
seen, alive, only a few days ago, en route to Dendera. If this was
true, the
Isis
was not so many days behind him as they’d
feared. Sandstorms had slowed the kidnappers’ progress through
the desert. The
Isis
was not far behind Noxious, either.
His
dahabeeya
had stopped at Asyut earlier in the week.

“
It’s
wonderful,” Rupert said.

Her green gaze shot
to him.

“
Your mind,”
he said. “The way you collect evidence, sort it out, and come
to the logical conclusion. It’s amazing, considering how much
you’ve got in there.”

She smiled faintly.
“It’s the one thing I can do.”

“
It isn’t
all you can do,” Rupert said.

The faint thread of
pink over her cheekbones spread and deepened into rose.

“
That wasn’t
what I meant,” he said. “That is, it wasn’t all I
meant, although you’re brilliant at lovemaking as well, and I
do wish—”

Leena bustled in
with the maps. She was no sooner gone than Tom entered with the
coffee.

Rupert waited until
the boy had departed and Daphne had poured the coffee.

He said, “I
know why you’ve donned your weeds again. You didn’t need
to warn me off. I know we’re obliged to observe the
proprieties. That’s why I wish we were elsewhere.”

“
It doesn’t
matter where we are,” she said. “This isn’t
the
Arabian Nights
. It was exciting, once—twice-—to
be carried away—”

“
Was that
all?” he said, and something stabbed inside, making him hot and
cold at the same time. “You were carried away?”

“
What do you
want me to say?”

He didn’t
have an answer.

The silence
lengthened while he looked for words and couldn’t find any,
found only feelings for which he had no names, either.

“
I don’t
know,” he said at last. “But you must say something more
than that. You’re the genius, not I.”

“
The matter
doesn’t require cleverness,” she said. “What we
experienced was lust, pure and simple—well, not pure—”

“
It isn’t
simple for me,” he cut in, stabbed again. “This must be
Egyptian lust, because it isn’t at all what I’m used to.
I have ..
.feelings.”

* * *

DAPHNE LONGED TO
ask, naturally, what kind of feelings they were. She wanted to probe,
as she would a subtlety of grammar or vocabulary.

She wanted, in
short, to grasp at any straw.

But that was
emotion, not reason.

Reason reminded her
that in normal circumstances she was bookish and reclusive while he
was a man who hungered for excitement. He was dashing; she was
boring. They came from different worlds. The world of fashionable
aristocratic society was far more alien to her than Egypt was.

She didn’t
need to know what these feelings of his were. She knew they were
fleeting, because he was not the sort of man whose interest in any
woman could last. She knew she could not trust her heart to his
feelings, and that was all she really needed to know.

“
It’s
Egypt,” she said. “It’s the excitement. It’s
the narrow escapes from death. These make us feel more than we would
do otherwise. That’s what I meant about the
Arabian Nights
. We’re living a romantic adventure. But it’s only
temporary. Once we find Miles—”

“
It will be
over,” he finished for her.

“
Yes,”
she said.

“
What a
pity.” He shrugged and unrolled a map. “Your brother is
headed to Dendera. Is that near Thebes?”

What a pity. That
was all. He accepted her decision. Why should he not? What had she
expected him to do: plead with her?

She turned her
attention to the map. “There is Qena,” she said,
pointing.

“
Three or
four days from here, it looks like, if the wind holds,” he
said.

“
There is
Dendera, you see, across the river near the site of ancient
Tentyris,” she went on. ‘The famous Temple of Hathor is
there. She is the Egyptian goddess of… love.“ She added
quickly, ”Thebes is forty or fifty miles upriver, if I recall
aright.“

“
Another few
days, then,” he said without looking up from the map. “That’s
supposedly Noxious’s stronghold at present. What do you wager
he’ll head that way rather than turn back to Cairo?”

She stared at the
map while possibilities chased one another through her mind.

“
You said the
papyrus was reputed to describe a Theban tomb,” he said.
“Perhaps Noxious would like to help your brother find it.”

IT WAS TYPICAL of
Faruq to hide right under his enemy’s nose, in Lord Noxley’s
own domain.

The remains of
ancient Thebes sprawled over both banks of the Nile. On the west
bank, close by the river, lay the ruins of the village of Qurna,
destroyed some years earlier by the Mamelukes. Rather than rebuild
their huts, the Qurnans decided it was more efficient to live where
they worked, in the Theban tombs. They did not, like other Egyptian
peasants, get their living from agriculture. They got it from
excavating tombs and selling papyri and other “
anteekahs”
they’d
stripped from mummies.

They were reputed
to be the most independent people in all of Egypt, with the possible
exception of the Bedouins. One army after another had come to subdue
the Qurnans… and failed. They did succeed, however, in
reducing the population from some three thousand to about three
hundred.

The survivors had
hidden in the distant Theban hills, which contained thousands of
tombs and an intricate network of passages connecting them. Here
Faruq had taken refuge.

Unluckily for him,
Ghazi had a way with tomb robbers. He set fire to the nearer tombs,
where the old women resided, shot their vicious watchdogs, and killed
their cows, sheep, and goats. Had he been after one of their own,
this method would have failed. But the Qurnans were disinclined to
sacrifice their mothers, grandmothers, and livestock to protect a
foreigner.

This was how Ghazi
located Faruq so quickly, within days of leaving Lord Noxley. The
Qurnans, who knew all the best hiding places, also helped him find
the dispatch bag under a heap of ransacked mummy parts. Once Ghazi
had made sure the objects he wanted were inside, he rewarded the
Qurnans generously, as his master would wish. He also rewarded Faruq
as the master would wish, by beheading Duval’s chief agent
before a large audience of Qurnans.

April

WHEN LORD NOXLEY
and his friend disembarked from the
Memnon
at Luxor, they found Ghazi awaiting them. He proudly produced not
only the papyrus and the interesting copy with its numerous notes but
also—in a basket rather than a dispatch bag—Faruq’s
head.

Lord Noxley’s
face lit at the sight of these offerings, and he felt as sunny within
as he appeared without.

Miles Archdale’s
face was ashen.