The Sycamore Song

by Elizabeth Hunter

  Juliette smiled her familiar, jaunty smile. “Me, I am only kind when it suits me, ma mie. You are enough like George for me to want to be friends with you, but I think you don’t like me enough for that. Eh bien, I will try and make you like me a little better tomorrow. Is that so bad?”

  Victoria laughed and shook her head. “It’s getting better all the time,” she said.

  Jim Kerr was already seated at the table when Victoria went over to the communal tent for her breakfast the next morning. His eyes flickered over her pale, shadowed face.

  “Made quite a spectacle of yourself last night, didn’t you?” he greeted her.

  “What if I did? Scorpions can kill, can’t they?”

  “Not they! You’re not cut out for this sort of thing, lass. Why don’t you cut your losses and turn the money over to Juliette?”

  Anger lent a temporary sparkle to Victoria’s eyes. She sat down at the table with dignity. “The decision isn’t mine to make - and it certainly isn’t yours,” she told him.

  “They’re withdrawing the licence?” he declared, whistling through his teeth. “Poor Victoria! Didn’t I tell you it was unlikely they’d allow you to have it in your own name? You’ll have to hand over to Juliette now, or me!”

  “You?”

  He scratched thoughtfully at his beard. “If you’re thinking of getting Tariq to take it on, don’t! He’s a dangerous man. Who else had the opportunity to put the scorpions in your bed? Have you thought about that?”

  He took a swig of coffee and grinned across the table at her, getting slowly to his feet.

  “I thought you didn’t eat breakfast?” she said.

  “I don’t, but I sometimes drink it. Good luck to you, girl! May your escapes be many!”

  Victoria frowned after him, and she was still frowning when Juliette came in and sat down in the seat he had just vacated.

  “Will you be ready in half an hour?” the French girl asked, eyeing Victoria through her eyelashes. “You look terrible!” she added brutally. “Have you forgotten that I’m taking you to see the Pyramid of Unas? It’s only a hundred metres from here and it is something everyone should see. Did you know that the earliest of the Pyramid Texts are to be seen in the burial chamber there?”

  “Really?” said Victoria.

  “You’re not listening!” Juliette accused her.

  “Yes, yes, I am, but I want to talk to Tariq first, Do you mind, Juliette?”

  The French girl shrugged her shoulders. “Mind? No, I don’t mind. But Tariq is not here at the moment. You can see him when we come back, Victoria. We shall only be an hour or so.”

  “Right,” Victoria agreed. “I’m with you, just as soon as I’ve finished my coffee.”

  The Pyramid of Unas looked a poor thing on the outside. When Victoria remembered the awe she had felt when she had stepped inside the massive Pyramids at Giza, she smiled for the first time that morning. This one was tiny by comparison. She felt quite weak with relief. This time there would be no ramps for her to crawl up, which was just as well as there was no Tariq to support her. The shaft here was not high at all!

  Juliette bounced down the catwalk, her feet finding the narrow strips of wood that were nailed across the planks with an ease that Victoria could only envy. Victoria set off at a great pace behind her and found it much easier going than she had feared. It was shorter than she had expected too, and when she found Juliette waiting for her at the bottom, she realised that the worst part of the outing was over, and she became quite excited as to what she was going to see.

  Juliette led the way along a corridor and into the burial chamber itself. At the far end was a stone sarcophagus which had been found empty when Sir Gaston Maspero had first cleared a way into the pyramid. But it was not at that that Victoria found herself looking. This chamber was quite different from the others she had seen. The sloped roof was covered with stars, at least she presumed they were stars, although they looked rather more like starfish, and, more dramatic than anything else she had seen, the walls of the vestibule and the limestone parts of the walls of the burial chamber were completely covered by vertical columns of hieroglyphic inscriptions.

  Juliette, very much at home in a place she obviously knew well, positively glowed faith enthusiasm as she pointed out the various texts on the walls.

  “You see how each hieroglyph has been filled in with blue pigment to make it stand out clearly against the white background?” she enthused.

  “Yes, but what do they mean?” Victoria asked.

  Juliette jerked her head round to look at her. It had honestly never occurred to her that George Lyle’s daughter would have been reading such inscriptions in her cradle.

  “You don’t know?” She took in the expression on Victoria’s face and had the grace to laugh at herself. “No, of course you don’t! They are magical texts. A collection of spells to help the dead king or queen find happiness in the after-life. There are several pyramids that have them, mostly of the Sixth Dynasty. Altogether there are more than seven hundred spells, but they didn’t always choose to have the same ones. In this pyramid there are two hundred and twenty-eight examples. Look, you can see one here!” She picked out the various hieroglyphs with her finger, translating rapidly as she went along. “You see what care was used to avoid using human and animal signs because they had dangerous magical properties. Here we have only birds and good signs that could do no harm.”

  “Oh yes,” said Victoria, entranced by the different signs. “Is that one meant to be a baby chick?” Juliette’s scornful look brought a faint blush to her cheeks. “Isn’t it a chick?”

  “A chick, yes, but of a quail, not a chicken. It represents the sound of ‘w’.”

  Abashed, Victoria’s eye fell on another hieroglyph which looked to her exactly like a pair of sugar-tongs. “And that?” she asked faintly.

  “A rope to tether things. It makes the sound ‘th’. They are all consonants, you see. One has to put in the appropriate vowels oneself to make the words make sense.”

  “Oh,” said Victoria, amazed that anyone could make sense of these strange-looking symbols. “Can Tariq read these spells too?”

  “Of course.” Juliette frowned. “But none of us can read them as your father could! George Lyle could make them come alive. He believed them. It was as if he were an ancient Egyptian himself when he was working here. Can you understand that?”

  Victoria could not. “You were fond of my father, weren’t you?” she said, hoping to gloss over a difficult moment without looking too much of a fool.

  Juliette froze. “I was fond of him, yes,” she agreed, “but it was not as you are thinking. There were no bones broken between us, as you say in English. I have my work, you understand, but one cannot be working all the time.” She shrugged her shoulders. “You think me very hard, no doubt, but I am not half as wicked as you have been told!”

  “I don’t think you wicked at all,” Victoria said impulsively, surprising herself as much as her hearer. “As a matter of fact I was thinking how horrid your husband must have been. He must have hurt you very badly.”

  Juliette blushed to the roots of her hair and she turned away quickly, leading the way back out of the burial chamber. “He did. How did you guess? You are more acute than you look, cherie. Not even your father knew that. He would never listen when I tried to tell him that no one was ever, ever going to hurt me again!”

  Victoria took a last look at the hieroglyphs on the wall before she hurried after her, afraid of falling too far behind. She rushed blindly up the shaft, doing her best to keep pace with the girl in front of her. The old, paralysing fear gripped her stomach when she thought she heard a sound behind her and looked back, but she refused to give in to it. Then she felt another body pressed close in behind hers and leaned back with relief, sure that it was Tariq. But the warm security of his strength failed her, giving way as though it had been no more than a figment of her imagination.

  She felt herself falling. “Tariq!” sh
e called out, but no one answered.

  A blow from an open hand struck her on the diaphragm and she lost her balance completely. Slowly, almost gracefully, she felt herself going over backwards and downwards, down to the bottom of the shaft. She tried to reach out and save herself, but, just as it had always been in her worst dreams, there was nothing there. It was as she had always known it would be, an endless black pit which had no bottom, and down which she would go on falling for evermore.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Victoria winced away from the angry voices that surrounded her. Juliette, sounding shrill and on the defensive, was telling anyone who would listen that it had not been her fault.

  “What do you mean, not your fault? Why did you take her there if you weren’t going to look after her properly?” That was Tariq. A warm wave of joy in his presence spread through Victoria and she roused herself and smiled at him. “Don’t be angry,” she said. “I wanted to go.” Tariq came over to where she was lying on Juliette’s bed and stood there, looking down at her. His face was taut with anxiety and suppressed fury.

  “Angry? I could knock your heads together! I thought I told you always to leave word where you were going?”

  Victoria offered him another, if more tentative, smile. “It wasn’t exactly a secret,” she said.

  “No? I didn’t know where you were, and nor did Abdul.”

  Victoria shut her eyes. “You’d gone out,” she said flatly.

  “Who told you that? I was only in your father’s tent, retrieving this!” He shoved the book that had contained the Sycamore Song into her hands. “I thought you might want it.”

  Victoria opened her eyes in a hurry and took a quick upward look at him. His expression was as unyielding as ever, but it didn’t stop her heart going off into its own ecstatic dance that he should have been thinking about her enough to go and find the book for her.

  “As a matter of fact,” she said, “I thought it was you behind me, or I would have been more careful.” She hesitated. “I mean I would have let him go past, instead of thinking you could keep me from falling.”

  “Victoria, what are you talking about?”

  “But someone was there!” She swallowed. “He pushed me.”

  “There was no one there,” Juliette put in. “You are mistaken, petite. It was my fault that you fell. I had forgotten that you are afraid the moment your feet leave the ground. One minute you were there, following me up the ramp, and the next minute you were gone, a huddled heap at the bottom. I thought you were dead!”

  “I was pushed,” Victoria insisted.

  Tariq’s eyes held hers in silent accusation. “You thought I pushed you?”

  She made a shamefaced gesture. “Of course not! But before, when I felt him come up behind me, I thought it was you. I thought you’d know how I’d feel when I saw that ramp, even if it wasn’t very high. But it wasn’t you, was it?”

  “No.” The bleak syllable made her wince, but she couldn’t think of any way of making it better for him.

  “I’m sorry,” she said.

  “But me, I don’t see how you can be sure it wasn’t Tariq,” Juliette burst out. “It isn’t logical that you should suspect everyone but him!”

  Tariq’s eyebrows rose into a quizzical expression. “My dear Juliette,” he drawled, “I don’t have to kill a girl to get what I want from her, as you should know.”

  “Oh, that!” Juliette dismissed such nonsense with the contempt it deserved. “What has that to do with wanting to take over the direction of the excavation?” She looked curiously at Victoria, and shrugged her shoulders. “But she is not stupid, this one. Did you know that?”

  Tariq took Victoria’s hand in his. “What makes you say that?”

  But Juliette wouldn’t answer directly. “Maybe she knows something about you that I do not,” she mused. “Is she going to make you director anyway?”

  Tariq looked blank. “It’s the first I’ve heard of it.” He looked down at Victoria’s guilty face and gave her hand a squeeze. “Are you sure, habibi, there was someone there?”

  “I’m sure,” she answered him. “He struck me and I couldn’t breathe at all. It knocked all the breath out of me. It was horrid!” She explored her diaphragm tenderly with her free hand. “I shouldn’t be surprised if I haven’t got a bruise - Tariq! Tariq, don’t!”

  But she was too late. He had already pulled back the sheet and, letting go her hand, tucked her shirt up under her chin.

  “Where? Show me!” he said.

  “Tariq! I won’t have you— ”

  “Oh, really, Victoria! You’re perfectly decent, if that’s what you’re afraid of - and Juliette is here.”

  “Much you care!” she retorted, genuinely incensed.

  He nipped her waist with his fingers, which gave her a queer, breathless feeling, and the fight went out of her.

  “Yes, you’ve got a bruise all right, my sweet, and it was certainly caused by a hand, but it was a smaller hand than mine. It could have been a woman’s hand.” He caught sight of the scarab he had given her hanging round her neck and gave it a gentle tug. “This didn’t do you much good, did it? Perhaps it was too much to expect. From now on I’m not going to allow you out of my sight!”

  Victoria touched the scarab too, her fingers meeting his and darting away again. She pulled down her shirt with determination. “It was a man,” she told him. “He smelt like a man!”

  He didn’t laugh as she had been afraid he might. He turned his head away and she couldn’t see what he was thinking at all.

  “That settles it!” he said in a voice she had never heard before. “Do you feel well enough to get up? Because I want to talk to you.”

  “All right,” she said. “But can’t you talk to me here?”

  “No. I don’t want there to be any distractions for either of us. I’ll see you in the communal tent in half an hour. Okay?”

  “Yes,” said Victoria.

  “But what about me?” Juliette protested. “What am I supposed to do?”

  Tariq’s glance looked right through her. “Anything you like. Only stay out of my way for the next couple of hours, will you? I want to talk to Victoria by herself!” With which parting shot he was gone, leaving the two girls staring at one another in mutual shock.

  “Me, I wouldn’t want to talk to him in this mood,” Juliette said at last, her eyes wide. “He has a very nasty temper!”

  “Hasn’t he?” Victoria said. “But he can hardly eat me, and I don’t think he’ll do anything else very terrible to me either, do you?”

  Juliette gave a significant wiggle to her hips. “He is not easy to distract when he has made up his mind to something.” Her hands trembled. “Shall I tell him you are not well enough to speak with him?”

  Victoria was touched by what she saw to be a courageous gesture on the French girl’s part. “I’m not afraid of him,” she said.

  “But—” Juliette began, her eyes dark with memories.

  “Tariq isn’t your husband,” Victoria said gently. “He’d never deliberately hurt anyone, and he knows I know that.”

  “Yes, you are right,” Juliette admitted. “You like him very much, don’t you?”

  Victoria nodded, fingering her scarab. “I love him,” she said.

  “That is easily seen!” the French girl retorted. “But what do you know about Torquil Fletcher? Nothing! Do you think you are the first girl to fall in love with him?”

  Victoria swung her legs off the bed and stood up, her knees feeling like jelly beneath her. “I’d much rather be the last one he fell in love with than the first,” she murmured.

  “You are mad!” Juliette exclaimed with considerable drama. “He is one to have fun with, to lose your heart to a little bit, but not too much. These things do not last with someone like Tariq. He is never serious about these matters.”

  “Perhaps no one has really loved him before.”

  Juliette gave her a despairing glance. “Do you think he will love you?”
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  Victoria splashed some cold water on her face and felt a little better. Her head still throbbed, but the sickness had gone and she felt much more like her usual self.

  “I don’t know,” she answered the French girl. “He may surprise himself when he realises that he can do as he likes about it. I shall go on loving him just the same.”

  Juliette hunched up her shoulders, but not before she had given Victoria a respectful look. “You know that Tariq and I—”

  Victoria tried to smother the niggling dart of jealousy within her. “Did it mean anything to either of you?” she asked before she could stop herself.

  “Less than nothing. He was there, no more than that.” Juliette actually blushed. “I preferred your father,” she confessed, bringing out the words as though each one hurt her. “George was stupid about many things, but he could make me very happy sometimes. I have good memories of him.”

  Victoria supposed she should have been resentful on her mother’s behalf, but she wasn’t. She was only glad that her father had meant something to someone, particularly if it meant that Juliette was giving up her interest in Tariq. She could have anyone she liked, anyone in the whole wide world, as long as she didn’t want Mr. Torquil Fletcher any more.

  She looked at herself in the looking-glass and wished she didn’t look so pale. She pinched her cheeks to give them a little colour, but they remained obstinately grey in a grey, frightened face.

  “I look awful!” she said.

  Juliette shrugged. “You never have much colour. Tariq will not notice, you can be sure of that!”

  But Tariq did notice. He was waiting for her in the communal tent, one eye on his watch, and he stood up with apparent relief when she walked in.

  “Those great shadows under your eyes tell their own story,” he said. “I suppose you’re feeling wretched and not in the least like lending your mind to business matters?”

  “I’d rather be doing something,” she said. “As a matter of fact, I wanted to speak to you too.”

  “I know. I had the letter from your solicitors this morning. But it won’t do, Victoria. It wasn’t the way your father wanted things—”