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The truck didn’t stop. It slowed, spitting up sand as the big wheels struggled for grip and jolted over ridges. The rear door hung open. Only a fool would try to escape in this lifeless landscape and they knew Jessie was no fool.
No fool? So what was she doing tied up in the back of a truck, driven by men who clearly had orders to get rid of her? A bullet in the head, a body buried in the sand far from habitation. Fareed had finished with her. In his cave hideout he would fight on to protect his country’s heritage from theft and to lift the yoke of British rule from Egypt’s neck, and she didn’t blame him. He had squeezed what he could from her and when she was no further use to him, fit only to be thrown on the refuse heap along with the city’s trash, he had given the order.
She didn’t blame him but that didn’t mean she had to agree with him. Even more urgently now, she had to find Tim. To warn him.
Dawn had painted the desert floor a vivid blood-red and the sun’s warmth was tempting the snakes and scorpions from their holes for another scorching day. There was no wind, nothing but the tracks of the truck biting into the sand and shale.
Jessie edged closer to the rear opening. Dust kicked up in her face. She wished she had the use of her hands but wishing was a pointless waste of effort. She took a deep breath, relaxed her shoulders, chose her spot and jumped.
Alone in a desert was nothing like she imagined.
The emptiness, she expected. The raw barren rocks and the utter loneliness, they were all part of the desert images in her head, the ones she had gleaned from photographs and pictures of camel trains and Lawrence of Arabia stirring up the sands.
What she was not prepared for was the silence. It crushed her. The overwhelming grinding silence that reduced her mind to dust and numbed any attempt at thought. It shocked her that she was so easily stripped of what made her who she was – her rational mind and her ability to think. The silence crept inside her head and spread its tentacles until even the act of blinking became an effort.
And with the silence came fear.
Cold. Irrational. Unrelenting.
Fear of no one and nothing; fear of everyone and everything. It stalked her footsteps, climbed up the bare skin of her legs, stuck spikes in her heart and raked her tongue with its claws. Fear held her hand and wouldn’t let go.
She had not expected that.
As the sun slipped loose from the horizon and rose higher, the shadows shortened and the colours of the desert changed. The reds became browns, yellows merged into a bleached soulless beige that nudged the purple and grey into dark crevices under rocks.
She saw the zigzag trail of a snake.
Concentrate, just concentrate on getting out of here. She forced her mind to work out that the tomb valleys were situated west of the Nile, so probably the cave system of Fareed lay even further west than that. Therefore she must walk east. If she kept heading east, she would have to hit the Nile eventually and she knew which direction was east because that’s where the sun still hovered.
What she didn’t know was how far. Or how long.
She put one foot in front of the other and walked.
*
Sand chafed her feet. It was impossible to keep it out of her shoes, or out of her mind. Her sunhat had vanished in the caves but she still had her handbag strapped across her body from her shoulder to her hip like a bandolier and she took time to winkle out the small penknife it contained and open its blade to saw through the rope at her wrists. It was painstakingly slow and she took a chunk out of the base of her thumb but when finally the rope fell away, it felt like an achievement.
She was in control.
She shook out her sore arms and narrowed her eyes against the glare as she stared ahead of her. Endless ridges of arid rock. Stretching on and on to eternity.
No. Don’t even think that.
She shook her head and regretted it immediately. A pounding headache leapt into life and she knew the sun would fry her brain if she didn’t do something about it. Her fingers touched the hair on the top of her head and she was startled by the heat of it. She felt her cheeks. They were burning. She removed the chiffon scarf from her bag and tied its flimsy material around her head.
The blazing sun was sucking moisture from her body at an alarming rate, desiccating and dehydrating her vital organs, but her feet kept moving. One step. Another step. Up a gravel ridge. Down a scree slope. Into a dried-up wadi where large rocks had been carried down from up-river and here she crouched for two minutes in a patch of shade from a boulder. She tore off her petticoat and wrapped it around her head as well, across her forehead, looping just above her eyes to cut down the glare.
Her throat was parched.
Her tongue was growing too large for her mouth, as unwieldy as a pillow, and she picked up a small round pebble. She placed it in her mouth and retched for a moment at the sour taste of it, as though a camel had pissed on it, but it was just the taste of the desert, bleak and bitter on her tongue. But sucking the pebble brought a trickle of moisture into her mouth.
Monty.
His name murmured like a wind through her mind. What was he thinking? What was he doing? He would be searching Luxor, ransacking its homes, trying to find her. Don’t wander off, he’d said.
Monty, I’m sorry. I’m coming back.
The thought of him speeded up her feet. Above her the sky was immense, a vast sheet of intense blue that seemed to take up the whole world, with just a smear of sand at the bottom that she was trudging over. No wonder Fareed had set up his headquarters out here, where only scorpions cared to venture. As she walked, she went over in her head their conversation in the cave, forcing her mind to consider each of his words. They frightened her. It was only a matter of time before he let those black galabayas loose on the group in the house they were watching.
She scrambled up a steep bank of slippery sand and could not suppress the hope that from the summit she would see something in the distance. Her heart plummeted when from the top she saw nothing but desert. It had swallowed her and was never going to spit her out.
She stepped over snakes. Squirming masses of them. Yet when she blinked they were just ripples in the sand. Her heart banged noisily in her chest. She was seeing things. Trees waving their branches in the wind, a cool inviting lake floating in the sky. Scarab beetles scuttling around her feet and crawling up her legs. Worst was Tim’s head. It kept bobbing up disembodied on ridges and boulders, rolling like a football down into gulleys or lying half-buried in wave after wave of sand. Eyes wide open.
She tried to be rational. How much can dehydration warp the brain?
She didn’t know. The landscape seemed to throb with heat and the desert became a blur around her. She lost track of time and spent hours thinking of nothing but placing each foot in front of the other. She felt something start to grow inside her, something hot and hard in her chest and it took her a while to recognise it as hatred. She hated the sun, hammering on her head. She hated the desert that would not relent. She hated each grain of sand and grit that rubbed her skin raw. She hated Fareed. She hated his moral fervour, she hated his passion for his country, she hated him for being right.
She clung to the hatred, cradled it to her, and used its strength to drive her forward. It was when she realised that the sky was starting to grow darker and that for hours she had still been following the sun that she collapsed on to her knees in a rocky wadi and screamed her rage. She lifted a stone to hurl at the laughing face of the sun in the west.
Instantly she felt a needle-sharp pain in her hand. She dropped the stone and watched a dark crab-like creature scuttle away from it. It was a scorpion.
‘Montague, stop it. You’ll get yourself killed.’
Monty was not going to get himself killed. Nor was he going to stop. He was searching the riverbank, checking the interior of every hut, every mud-brick house and every boat this side of the river. There was a row of houseboats moored along the Nile and he barged his way aboard each
one, using every scrap of his English charm to make it work and a good deal of the money in his pocket when it didn’t. He had convinced himself that the Nile was the key – so the logical action now was to search the riverbank for her.
‘Jessie! Jessie!’
He bellowed her name, but there was no answering call. He headed for a mud hut with a rush mat roof that was isolated from the rest. It looked promising.
‘Montague, you daft bugger. I mean it. What you’re doing is dangerous. You’re asking for trouble.’
‘Jessie!’ he called.
‘Are you listening to me or have you got cloth ears?’
‘I’m listening, Maisie.’
‘This isn’t helping.’
For the first time since he’d heard of Jessie’s disappearance, something snapped in Monty and he drew to a halt. Maisie was right. This wasn’t helping. All he was doing was blocking out reality, replacing pain with activity, in an attempt to forget that he had left her alone at a moment when she had needed him. This blind search was not the way to find her. Even he knew that.
‘Montague,’ Maisie said, taking both his lapels in her hands, ‘what would you do if you were chasing a fox?’
He frowned at her tall grey figure. ‘I’d follow the hounds.’
‘Well,’ she gave him a shake, ‘let’s do that.’
Jessie heard the figure beside her as a soft murmur in the sand. Her own shadow stretched far ahead of her, as the sun sighed and sank down on to the horizon behind her, so it struck her as odd that the figure had no shadow.
When she turned her head she realised why. Serket had come to her. It took an effort to decide whether this was good or bad. Her hand was extremely painful, the poison seeping along her arm and burning her flesh. She had tied it with her blouse across her chest, keeping the hand higher than her heart. She kept telling her mind that most scorpion bites were not fatal but her mind kept arguing that what if this was one of the scorpions of Egypt that carry deadly poison? What then? She should not be pumping poison around her body by walking. She should rest.
If she rested, she would die.
Red welts had risen on the skin of her arm like burns. Her vision kept blurring, so that she stumbled over stones and missed her footing on the sand, so that time and again she was on her knees, the broken landscape distorted and swollen around her, a strange hissing sound coming from her parched mouth.
And now Serket was here.
Goddess daughter of Ra. She was beautiful, draped in red garments with raven-black hair and bearing an ankh in her hand, the Egyptian key of life. Because Serket can kill or Serket can heal. On her crown she wears an enormous scorpion and her name can be translated as ‘she who tightens the throat’ or ‘she who causes the throat to breathe’. The bringer of life and the bringer of death. Serket had come for her.
‘Sir Montague Chamford, sir, I have fine news for you. I have learned who Anippe Kalim is.’
‘Yasser, you are a man of rare ability.’
‘Allah is mighty and bountiful in bestowing his blessings,’ Yasser beamed, but his eyes were sharp and more nervous than previously.
‘So you know where this young woman lives?’ Maisie Randall asked. She discarded the mint tea with scorn. ‘Come along, cough it up. Where can we find the girl?’
The handsome young Egyptian focused his attention only on Monty. ‘It is not all good news, bey.’
‘I’m waiting!’
‘The price has gone up.’
‘What?’
‘You did not tell me that your Anippe Kalim is running with dangerous dogs.’
‘What do you mean by that?’
‘She is an archaeology student from Cairo University. When she was there, she became part of a revolutionary group who are known to use violent methods to achieve their aims.’
‘And what are their aims?’
‘To rid Egypt of the invading forces and give Egypt back to the Egyptians.’ He said it in a toneless voice which carried no hint of his own opinion. ‘They are not to be crossed, bey.’
‘Why would they be interested in Jessie Kenton?’
‘That I don’t know, I’m sorry.’
‘So where does this revolutionary organisation have its headquarters?’
‘No one knows for sure. But there are rumours.’
Monty sighed elaborately. Yasser was playing a strong hand. He reached into his pocket for his wallet but it was Maisie who folded her arms across her chest and addressed Yasser firmly.
‘Listen here, sonny. We are talking about a young woman’s life here. I want you to get that into your head right now. It’s not a game played for money, dangling scraps of information in front of us till Sir Montague digs deeper into his pockets again. A young woman’s life, Yasser. Remember that! Imagine if it was your daughter.’
The Egyptian was taken aback by her outburst, and for the first time Monty stepped closer than politeness allowed. He stood a good head taller than Yasser and could smell his hair oil.
‘What are the rumours?’ he demanded.
Yasser glanced quickly from Monty to Maisie Randall and back again. The smile faded. ‘There is talk of caves. Somewhere off to the west.’ He bowed his head respectfully to Maisie. ‘Mrs Randall, I have a daughter, my little Rabiah. She is my treasure, Allah be praised.’
‘So help us.’
‘I warn you, there are stories of the desert devouring any trucks that dare to enter that area. Even whole camel trains have vanished. People are frightened. Some say that Set, the god of the desert, takes revenge on non-believers who would steal his secrets.’
‘That’s poppycock, and you know it,’ Monty asserted.
Yasser shrugged. ‘It is still dangerous, bey.’
‘If we track down Anippe,’ Monty insisted, ‘we’ll find Jessie.’
‘God willing,’ Yasser murmured unhappily.
‘And if we find Jessie,’ Maisie added, ‘we’ll quickly run her brother to earth.’
Monty had a sense of something unexpected having slipped into the room. He turned to her and the woman’s face looked soft and changed in the slanted light from the window blinds, for once more human than heron.
‘How do you know about her brother?’ he asked.
‘She told me about him in Cairo.’
‘Really?’
‘Yes, the poor kid was all chewed up at losing him. But I told her at the time, we all lose things, honey. That’s the way life is. What you’ve got to do is learn to live without.’
Monty swung back to Yasser. ‘Any news on the whereabouts of Timothy Kenton?’
‘No, sir. I think you must be mistaken. He is not in Luxor or I would know by now.’
He looked sincere. But Monty didn’t believe him for a second. Something had scared him. A chill ran through Monty and for a long moment he stared at the street outside going about its business, a laden donkey chewing on weeds in the dust.
‘Yasser,’ he said steadily, ‘it is the nature of man to want to survive, is it not?’
‘Most certainly, yes, sir.’ His words were uneasy.
‘Then let us assume that Miss Kenton is surviving. You may have written off her chances, but I have not, and I intend to track her down.’
‘It is not wise, Sir Montague.’ He shook his head dolefully.
Monty lost patience. ‘Just find me a damn camel!’
Maisie unfolded her arms. ‘And one for me.’
The moon hung over Jessie’s head. It was so vast and so bright that Jessie feared it might fall on her. Its light slid in and out of the dips and hollows of the desert, turning them into silvery blanket-folds that invited her to lie down and rest.
She was cold. So cold she couldn’t feel her feet properly or push the strange fogginess from her brain, and her ears were filled with the night hum of the desert. The vibration of it ran through her whole body and through the ancient stones under her feet. Sometimes she looked around her, startled, convinced the vibration came from the hooves of horses, but t
here was never anything but rocks and ridges and the taste of sand between her teeth.
Her arm was on fire. But it was only when she stumbled and fell to her knees that she realised Serket had abandoned her. The goddess had gone. Left her alone. That was when she began to suspect that she might be dead. If Serket had vanished, it was because she had completed her job with her poison and her sting, and now Jessie was wandering through the blackness of Duat, the ancient underworld peopled by monsters and demons. Waiting to have her soul weighed against Ma’at’s feather.
She tipped her head back and howled at the black sky and for answer a shooting star streaked across the heavens, so fast she would have missed it if she’d blinked. It made her force herself to her feet once more and walk. As long as she had breath in her body she would walk, because there were no shooting stars in Duat.
Something touched her infected arm. Jessie drew a quick stunned breath, but she did not dare take her eyes from the shadowy patch of ground in front of her in case she fell again. The falls were happening again and again, jarring and disorientating.
‘Jessie.’
She took no notice. Keep walking. A thousand times in the last hours she had heard Monty whisper her name in her ear, and she had steeled herself to ignore it.
‘Jessie.’
Tears rolled down her cheeks, warm on the icy skin of her face. She could feel his breath, sense his touch on her shoulder, and she became aware of the warmth of his chest as he drew her against him. She knew then that the balance of her mind had gone and reality had become a thing of her own making.
‘Monty,’ she breathed.
Again it came in a gentle whisper. ‘Jessie.’
But it wasn’t Monty. She could smell the galabaya this person wore and hear the bad-tempered groan of a camel. It couldn’t be Monty. When strong arms lifted her, she struck out with her good hand and heard a grunt of pain. She wanted to see another shooting star to prove to herself she wasn’t dead, but blackness slithered up from within her and spread as cold as the desert night through her head.
Shadows on the Nile Page 34
