The Buried Pyramid (28 page)

The boy colored under his tan and salaamed himself away, promising to deliver their reply to his uncle.

Uncle Neville’s amusement at Ahmed’s juvenile embarrassment didn’t last beyond the boy’s departure.

“This doesn’t look good,” he said. “I had hoped Eddie wasn’t included in last night’s fracas. I wonder what he has to tell us? It sounds as if his man didn’t escape. Certainly something could have been learned from the costume, if from nothing else.”

Stephen fidgeted. “We can guess all we want,” he said, “but it won’t tell us anything Eddie can’t after he arrives. I suggest we look at that letter.”

Sir Neville nodded, and removed the paper in question from the inside pocket of his light jacket.

“I’m surprised you didn’t remove it from my keeping while I slept,” he said as he handed the sealed envelope to Stephen. “I noticed you eyeing it as soon as you awoke. Here. I’m a bit clumsy still. You open it.”

Stephen flushed slightly, but took the envelope with such eagerness Jenny didn’t doubt her uncle’s description of Stephen’s impatience was perfectly accurate.

“It’s in cipher, again,” Stephen said, spreading the letter out for them to see.

“Different,” Jenny added. “It’s just a long list of numbers, not a single letter.”

Stephen produced clean paper and writing implements from seemingly nowhere.

“Let’s give it a shot,” he urged. “At least working on it will pass the time. I just wish I believed the Sphinx is going to tell us something we don’t already know.”

“You mean,” Jenny replied with an attempt at lightness, “like the fact that apparently we’re marked for death?”

10

Miriam’s Tale

Eddie arrived while they were still recopying the long list of numbers that made up the Sphinx’s most recent missive. He was not alone. Walking beside him, a veil drawn across the lower part of her face, was a woman whom he introduced as his wife, Miriam.

Neville thought Miriam much changed from the lovely, lithe girl who had courageously stood by Alphonse Liebermann’s small expedition ten years before. Her eyes were still dark and lovely, but the bearing of several children had forever robbed her figure of its girlish grace. Yet the change was not without benefit. There was a poise about this older Miriam, a centered strength, that the fiery Bedouin girl had lacked.

A Madonna now,
Neville thought,
rather than Joan of Arc.

The courtyard was quiet now. Papa Antonio’s staff was busy repairing the damage from the night before, and his other guests had gone about their business. None had blamed the attack on their host, though a few had looked slantwise at Neville and his associates, and had markedly avoided sitting too near to them at breakfast.

As if cobras might crawl out from beneath our kippers,
Neville thought with grim humor,
or scorpions from the sausage.

In this relative privacy, Miriam put her veil aside. Apparently, living within Cairo had not completely undermined her Bedouin independence—or maybe she simply felt herself among friends. Only the most restrictive Mohammedans kept their women permanently within harems.

Introductions completed, Eddie did not waste breath on idle chatter. “I’ve heard something about what happened here last night,” he said. “My nephews spoke with the servants. I’d like to hear your version, but I think you need to hear what happened at our place.”

No one disagreed. Eddie sighed, fumbled with his cigarette papers, and at last began.

“As you recall, I left here fairly late yesterday evening. I went directly home, keeping to main avenues—at least as many as I could, though you must understand that in the district where we live, ‘alley’ versus ‘street’ is a fine distinction. I stayed alert, for even without the matters we’ve been discussing, Cairo streets are not safe for a man alone.”

“Woman neither,” Miriam said, and from the throaty chuckle that underlay the words, Neville guessed that he was hearing the tag end of a joke.

The flashing smile Eddie gave her confirmed as much, but he did not pause to explain.

“Our house,” he said, “is rather like this one in that it’s built around a courtyard. However, not having European guests to appease, we don’t bother with windows on the outer walls, not on the ground floor at least. The main entrance is a wide door that goes directly into the central courtyard—you pass through a sort of alley between two blocks of the house to do so, if you follow me.”

Everyone nodded that they did.

“There’s a gate set about a foot inside this alley,” Eddie went on, “that we keep locked unless needed. There’s another door that goes right into one of the living areas that is more commonly used for visitors anyhow, so keeping the gate locked isn’t much of an inconvenience.”

Neville had a fleeting memory of himself telling Jenny and Stephen about how he had been attacked on the eve of his abortive second attempt to find the Valley of Dust. Something in Eddie’s deliberate, detailed narration bespoke a similar desire to avoid dwelling on the unpleasant climax of the story.

What could be so terrible? Eddie was here, apparently uninjured, his wife with him, as surely she would not have been had a member of their family been hurt. Neville fought back an urge to ask questions or attempt to hurry the other man along, but his sense of apprehension grew.

“Rather than wake anyone in the house, I decided to go in through this gate,” Eddie continued. “I was working the key in the lock when I heard a footfall behind me. It was the slightest whisper of leather against dirt, and had I not already been straining to catch the sound of the key turning in the lock, I wonder if I would have heard it. I swung around, one hand going instinctively for the knife I wear at my belt, but I don’t think I was really worried.

“Many of my wife’s relatives come and stay with us, and with winter making travel pleasant once more, I thought the newcomer might be one of these. I did wonder a bit about the hour, but there were reasons that someone might arrive so late—including that travel after nightfall is cooler and more pleasant.

“However, such thoughts fled as soon as I had a clear look at the figure approaching me. His head was that of a gigantic jackal, his attire beneath the long cloak he now let fall to the dirt almost as fantastic—that of an ancient Egyptian god or king, complete to the ankh he held stiffly in his left hand.

“I was so shocked I couldn’t cry for help, though my own house stood at my back. The jackalheaded figure came at me swiftly, that ankh raised as if he’d brain me with it, a longbladed knife held expertly in his free hand. There was an awkwardness to his approach that permitted me to dodge clear, bringing my own knife into play. That’s when I realized that the man wore a mask that covered his entire head, and though the eyeholes were cut large enough that I could see the entire of the human eye within, the mask must restrict his vision.

“I didn’t waste my advantage, nor did I give away what I’d realized. I let him see my fear, though it was fear at being attacked, not at some apparently supernatural manifestation. We dodged around each other. He had reach on me, reach and size, but I had greater mobility. He walloped me a few times with that ankh . . .”

Eddie peeled back the sleeve of his robe to show some shockingly purple bruises.

“It was carved from wood, solid as a club. I counted myself lucky, though, because that knife of his worried me and I’d already learned the hard way that the upper part of his tunic was made from overlapping leather scales, while the mask was like a helmet for his head. Neither would have been anything to a gun, but they were plenty to my knife. This chap was bigger than me, too, and had more muscle. My only advantages came from that big mask he wore. It slowed him some, and seemed to be hot and heavy, too, for I could hear his breath rasping like he was panting.

“To make a long story short, I got my knife in, up and under his right arm. I must have hit one of the big veins because blood came out like a torrent. He was on his knees almost before I realized what I’d done. He bled out amazingly fast, but before he stopped kicking I realized I’d better cover my tracks. I finished unlocking my gate, then dragged the body into the courtyard. Then I started hauling buckets of water up out of the well, eager to rinse the worst of the blood off the street outside. When I got out there with my first batch a couple of feral dogs were already licking up the puddle. It fair made me sick, but I was grateful, too.

“I was hauling out a second lot of buckets when Miriam came out; the noise of the bucket crank had woken her.” Eddie looked fondly at his wife. “She’s not sleeping well, in her condition and all, and she’d been worrying about me being out so late. She saw the body, still in its mask, and smothered a scream in one hand.”

Miriam smiled with a sort of shy humor. “You learn not to wake the children no matter what, isn’t that true? I will not lie that I wanted very much to scream loud enough to knock the stars from the sky. That dead monster, my husband all wet with blood, it was all so terrible.”

“You’d never have guessed it from how she acted,” Eddie said proudly. “She realized that no one had better see that body. ‘I am awake,’ she said. ‘Someone else may wake, too. Put it in our room. Only the infant is there.’ I did what she said, having already realized that I was wasting my time trying to do what the feral dogs would do much better. I washed up using the water in those buckets I’d just drawn, and by the time I’d made sure my arm bones weren’t cracked, Miriam was kneeling by the body, pulling off the mask, cool as can be. What she uncovered gave us both a horrible shock.”

Miriam reached out and took Eddie’s hand.

“The dead man was one of my cousins, a fierce man, one who lives more in the desert than the city. We saw him once or twice a year when he brought camels into the city. Sometimes Eddie would meet with my cousin’s family for trade. We had never been very close—indeed, I thought my cousin held us in some contempt—but it was frightening to see him lying there dead.”

“I was worried about more than that,” Eddie added. “I’m not loved by any of the authorities. I’m not Arab, so the Arabs don’t trust me. The English never do like when one of their own goes native. The French and Turks have each had their gorounds with me, usually when my ability to translate for someone makes it easier for my client to avoid a whole lot of unnecessary bribes. I’m useful, though, too useful to ignore completely. If I got taken for murder or involved in a blood feud with the Bedouin, I wouldn’t be useful anymore—and I couldn’t expect much help.”

Neville wanted to protest, wanted to say he’d have stood by Eddie, no matter what, but he knew that Eddie was only assessing the situation realistically. Even with Neville’s help and the bribes Neville’s money could pay, nothing would buy Eddie out of a blood feud, and such a feud within a family could get very ugly indeed. Even Miriam’s immediate relations—her brothers and father—might side with the slain cousin rather than stand by an Englishman.

“We decided that we’d better get rid of the body, fast. That crazy costume wouldn’t make our job any easier, so we stripped it off, and that’s when things got really strange.”

“Only then?” Stephen asked.

Miriam shook her head. “I agree with Eddie, but I also disagree. What we discovered was a strangeness that began to lead us to something like sense.”

“You see,” Eddie said, “when we removed the dead man’s tunic we found two tattoos on his chest where they would pretty much always be covered by his robes. I made sketches. I’d like to see if you recognize them.”

The sketches were rough, but somehow their very lack of artistry added to their impact. One depicted the head of a hawk shown in profile. Its eye was unusual—at least for the depiction of a natural bird—for it had been outlined in the fashion similar to the cosmetics worn by humans in numberless Egyptian tomb paintings. The second drawing showed a stylized female figure wearing an elaborate headdress, a series of hieroglyphs wrapped in a cartouche at her feet.

“Horus,” Stephen said, looking at the drawing of the hawk’s head. “With the Eye of Horus. The Eye was a popular protective charm in ancient Egypt.”

“I couldn’t show it here,” Eddie interrupted, “but the eye was done in a different color than the rest of the tattoo. Most of the tattoo was blackish, but the eye was a really shouting green.”

Stephen looked pleased. “That fits nicely. The Eye of Horus was frequently carved from blue or green stone. You see, it was supposed to represent the eye that Horus lost while fighting Set . . .”

Jenny raised her hand in protest. “Lecture later, Professor. Who is the woman? The headdress looks like Hathor, sort of, but doesn’t Hathor have cow horns?”