The Emerald Embrace

by Briskin, Jacqueline;

Shaking my head, I mumbled, “Remember when you explained the operation that makes a eunuch? Well, it’s as if that’s happened to me.”

  His mouth tightened, two knobs appeared where his jaw met his skull and he looked as furious as he had aboard the Ithaca, when he had risked his life to shout challenges about me to Rais Guzman. “The Pasha did it to you?”

  “When he discovered I wasn’t a virgin, he needed to pay me back. He was only brutal that once. But since then, no matter how tender he is, I feel nothing.” I stumbled over the words, glad of the veil that hid my burning face.

  “So now he takes you against your will?”

  I shook my head.

  “But you just said—”

  I murmured, “Sometimes I’m not really … myself.”

  “He mesmerizes you?”

  I bent to pick up a pebble, giving myself time to think of an explanation that wouldn’t make me sound a lunatic. “It has nothing to do with him or me,” I said finally. “Stephen, I have waking visions of a woman married to a Pharaoh. She’s a blonde, and she was brought as a slave from the Island of the Western Mists—I’m positive that means England. You know, my father believed that the ancient Egyptians voyaged far out beyond the Mediterranean. Of course, there’s no proof, but—”

  “Liberty,” Stephen prodded. “How does this woman affect you?”

  “During these, well, seizures, I know details about her. I can actually smell her perfumed salves. She has a tiny beauty mark on her chin that she enhances with kohl. Sometimes I catch fragmentary thoughts, but it’s her emotions that reach out to me.” I inhaled and mumbled, “She loves the Pharaoh in a wildly physical manner.” I couldn’t look at Stephen. “And I become her.”

  “I’ve heard tales of possession,” he said carefully.

  “At home I never believed in such things! Never!” I grasped the pebble tighter. “But Egypt has its own logic.”

  “In the stories,” he said, “the past is connected to the present by some object.”

  “My antique necklace. I don’t have to be wearing it, and I’ve never seen it on her, yet I know it’s the link between us. At times I hate it. The passion is hers, but I have to act it out.”

  “So it’s after these visions that the Pasha—that she acts through you?”

  “She takes over my actions.” My face was burning. “And lately it’s been very frequent.”

  “When you leave Egypt,” he said firmly, “you’ll be as you were that night on the Hassam.”

  “My desires were killed before the Pasha ever gave me the Emerald Embrace,” I said sadly. “Don’t you understand, Stephen? It’s impossible for us.”

  “I’ve searched four lonely years for you. I could accept it if you refused to come with me because of the deep affection you and the Pasha bear one another.”

  “We don’t love one another at all. The Pasha’s not a man to love any one woman romantically. I amuse him, I make him laugh.” And there was our David, I thought, gripping the pebble until it cut my flesh. I gave him David.

  “If I’d lost an arm and an eye like Lord Nelson, would that have altered your emotions toward me?”

  “Of course not!”

  He smiled. “Even with your veil, I can see your indignation. Can’t you recognize then, Liberty, that what you’ve told me is no true barrier?”

  That’s not so, my heart cried. My frigidity was the greatest barrier there could be between a man and a woman. Yet my love for Stephen went so deep that I couldn’t argue further.

  He squatted to sit near me. “I told you before that my plan’s dangerous,” he said. “You must hear it through before you make any decision. Will you be missed if you don’t return for the midday meal?”

  “Uisha carries a waterskin, bread and hard eggs in the satchel. Generally we wander around until near dusk.”

  “That’s good, very good. For two days now, my servant’s been hiding with camels in the Bir Oman Pass.” He pointed westward to a gap in the distant pyramid-shaped hill that guarded the Valley of the Kings. “There are two trails up to the pass. The wadi’s one. I’ll take the other. After about four miles we’ll meet.”

  “You’re saying we’ll leave now?” My voice rose in surprise.

  “Every minute counts. We must get through the pass and into the Great Western Desert by tomorrow. Huge caravans pass there on their way to the port of El Alamein. Yacub has Persian clothing for us. We’ll join the caravan, he and I as two brothers, rug dealers on our way from Tabriz to Venice. You’ll be my son. The robes are loose. And as Persians, foreigners, we’ll be accepted.”

  “Those disguises won’t fool the Pasha.”

  “I’ve hired a fast dahibeyeh to sail back down the Nile. He’ll be pursuing that.”

  “He’ll learn of the caravan and track that as well. Stephen, he’s a brilliantly shrewd man.”

  “You trusted me more when you didn’t know who I was,” Stephen said. He paused, then added, “Liberty is your name and your element. You were never meant to be veiled and shut behind walls.”

  He took my hand.

  His touch calmed my fears. Somehow his bravery reached through my skin.

  “What about our tracks?” I asked.

  “Then you’re coming with me?”

  “Yes.…”

  With a smile he stepped his boot onto amber sand. Breezes ruffled the grains and in less than a minute the imprint was gone. “The desert,” he said, “is as cleanly impartial as the sea. The wind that destroys can also protect.”

  Uisha came toward us. Dropping Stephen’s hand, I went to her.

  “The commodore’s taking me home to our own country.…” My voice faded.

  She was looking at me with dark, anguished eyes. In my preoccupation with Stephen’s pleading, I had forgotten this silent, dark-skinned woman who was always at my side when I needed her. She touched my right hand to her heart, then extended her palm to me, the odd gesture that had puzzled me that Sunday in the Tripoli slave souk. Now I knew what it meant: her life was mine.

  I accepted that I couldn’t send her back to the Pasha. She was safer with us—whatever dangers lay ahead.

  Stephen came to my side. “Liberty, there’s no time.”

  “Come,” I said to Uisha.

  Hoisting his canvas bag over his shoulder, Stephen said, “I’ll meet you both at the entry of the pass and lead you to where Yacub has the camels hidden. We’ll have to ride through the night.” He said that in his accent-flawed Arabic, then looking deep into my eyes, he switched to English. “Sweetheart, from this time on, I’ll cherish and protect you.”

  He clambered easily up the rockslide, his slender, dark-clad form disappearing over the hilltop.

  Uisha and I set briskly off. The wadi curled up through tawny cliffs where the scholars were overseeing diggers. As usual, all eyes were kept politely averted. But everybody sees us, I thought with a shudder, everybody knows who we are. They’ll remember that we were climbing toward the Bir Oman Pass.

  Thirteen

  About an hour later, as we reached the narrow entry of the pass, we found Stephen waiting in the shadows. Swiftly he led us up the gorge, halting by a sheared segment of cliff.

  “Yacub,” he called.

  I had seen no sign of a cave. But at the muffled clop of hooves, I realized that the cliff hid its entry.

  Yacub emerged, leading a line of six camels. He was a stout young Coptic Christian with a black beard that curled about his jolly red cheeks. He greeted us cheerfully. Stephen was already unbuckling a tassled saddlebag.

  With it, Uisha and I hurried into the cave. Since a middle-aged woman could never pass as a boy, Stephen had determined Uisha would play an aunt, and rely on Eastern masculine courtesy not to question her—or her silence. She found a gray robe and a large black shawl that she used as a chador, tying it about her forehead and swathing it above her cheekbones the way Persian women do in lieu of veil. She helped me bind my breasts with a broad woven belt. Wearing loose cotton breeches, a fa
ded Tabriz robe, my hair clubbed up and hidden by a cap, my face dirt-smeared, I was a credible Persian boy.

  Stephen, wearing a long blue coat and rope-circled headdress, and Yacub, similarly garbed, spaded up the soft dirt in the rear of the cave. “We must get rid of everything from the past,” Stephen said.

  I went to get my clothes and jewelry.

  The Emerald Embrace was by far the most incriminating of my possessions. But when I reached for it, a physical compulsion overcame me. My hand grew heavy and numb, prickling as if it were asleep, and my arm muscles clenched. My traitorous fingers clenched on the golden feathers, thrusting the ancient piece deep into a corner of my tasseled saddlebag.

  Hastily I carried my other things to the shallow hole. Rings and bangles clinked softly.

  “Weren’t you wearing your necklace?” Stephen asked.

  Trembling all over, I heard myself lie, “No, not today.” I avoided the questioning gleam of Uisha’s eyes.

  And then we began our flight, swaying along in the camel’s sharp, loping canter. When the sun reached its zenith, the narrow gorge became an oven. Wiping the sweat from my forehead, I kept glancing back into the shimmering heat. That day was a dizzying, terrifying inferno.

  Night fell. The abrupt drop in temperature made riding more comfortable. A breeze stirred on the path ahead, raising the sand so that in the moonlight it resembled drifting snow. The eerily beautiful scene relaxed me a little, and I began to think of the Pasha without so much fear. I had a strange sense of loss.

  It’s almost as if I’m leaving part of myself with him, I thought with a dart of surprise.

  After David’s death, my life in Egypt had been desolate, yet riding through the moonstruck pass, I accepted that the Pasha—contraditory, irritating, vengeful, brilliant, generous, ordinary yet extraordinary, a man of quick and mordant humor—had dominated me and made me part of his world. My years with him were an ineradicable part of me.

  Pebbles crashed, echoing in the canyon behind us.

  Instantly my musing thoughts were erased. I wheeled my camel. The two men had shouldered their rifles already. We peered in the direction the sound had come from. The near vertical inclines were luminous silver etched in black, and the only motion was swirling sand.

  A minute passed. Two minutes.

  Stephen said, “It must have been an animal.”

  “Many jackals prowl here,” Yacub said, nodding.

  “Stephen,” I whispered hoarsely in English. “The Pasha’s troops have caught up with us.”

  “The Pasha has no horses with him, Liberty. Only donkeys and camels. He can’t move any faster than we can. And we have a long head start.”

  “There are a hundred Citadel guards in the entourage. They’re armed, trained—”

  “We would have heard a troop of heavily armed men,” Stephen interrupted.

  His quiet firmness cut through my panic: he was Commodore Delaplane, victor of many battles. “Yes, you’re right,” I admitted.

  We began to move again. The path twisted and grew rocky and uneven. We were forced to a walk. I peered back continually into the moonlit night.

  Maybe an hour had passed when a stone clattered nearby.

  The men lifted their rifles.

  We waited. The constricting bands on my breasts trapped my breath so I could hear my own soft little gasps. Uisha clasped her throat. Yacub stirred constantly in his saddle.

  Danger had driven the three of us to the edge of panic.

  It had the opposite effect on Stephen. He sat absolutely calm, sighting down his rifle. But how could he not be terrified? He was fully aware that if we were taken prisoner, he would be hung on the Citadel gate tower.

  Suddenly, high in the cliff, a shadow flitted, then was gone.

  “Up there!” I shrilled. “Look.”

  A howling bark echoed through the gorge.

  Yacub lowered his weapon. “It’s a jackal,” he said, his relieved laughter too loud.

  Stephen continued to aim upward. Like me, he must have seen that the brief shadow was human. For a long time he remained like that, alert yet easy. “All right,” he said finally.

  And Yacub softly called, “Harrooo!” Our line of camels moved onward.

  The sun had risen before we wound out of the Bir Oman Pass. We were in the Great Western Desert, which is part of the Sahara. The south wind came at us in strong, hot gusts, throwing loose sand at us.

  Pulling our robes so only our eyes were exposed, we bent our bodies close to our camels, and rode on for several hours.

  Yacub braved the wind to sit erect in the saddle. He pointed to a jagged formation of rocks that resembled the long teeth of a skull. “There,” he said. “That’s where we wait.”

  “Wait?” I cried.

  “It’s one of the markers that caravans use as a guide,” Yacub explained.

  “But how can we stop?” My voice was ragged with exhaustion. “The Pasha’s men are trailing us!”

  Yacub turned, raising a hand to squint at the distance-hazed hills through which we had traveled. “I see nobody,” he said, his merry eyes abeam. “Nephew, you must stop imagining that jackals are after us.”

  Stephen said, “The second time it was a man. Yacub, we’ll have to take turns standing watch.”

  We rode toward the teethlike rocks. The outcropping was far larger than I originally had thought. Some of the stones were well over thirty feet high, overlapping to form a break against the strong wind blowing from the south. We didn’t reach their shaded shelter until noon. By then we had been riding more than thirty hours, and my anxiety was eroded by great waves of weariness. The men unrolled several carpets. After gulping warm, leather-tasting water, I stretched out, closing my eyes to the brilliant, hot desert.

  Sleep rolled over me.

  Two thunderous cracks awoke me.

  I popped to sitting position. Stephen and Yacub, crouched by the lowest rocks, were pointing the barrels of their Hall rifles through swirling sand devils at a long, low hill about a hundred yards to the east of us.

  I saw nothing there. Uisha, too, sat up, and as she adjusted her robe, she gave me a frightened glance.

  My first instinct was to cry out questions. Instead, I took a tremulous breath. I couldn’t disturb the men’s concentration with my panic. We remained frozen. My muscles, aching from the unaccustomed long ride, quivered.

  Finally I asked, “What’s out there?”

  Yacub half turned to answer. His bearded, merry face was drawn into lines of seriousness. “It was my turn to watch,” he said. “I fell asleep. Thanks be to God, though, the master roused to see them crawling toward us. His fire woke me, and I shot, too. They fled.”

  “They?” I asked.

  Stephen, sighting down his rifle, answered, “Four men are hidden behind that hill.”

  The hill was long enough to hide an army. I clenched my palms, which were blistered raw from riding. “How do you know there are only four?”

  “That’s how many attacked us,” Stephen said. “They have no reason to keep a reserve.”

  “But why would the Pasha dispatch so few?”

  “I’ve been thinking about that,” Stephen retorted. “Uisha feared you were being watched.”

  “I’m sure she’s right,” I interjected. “After the Pasha found you and me together, he wanted me to have guards. I talked him out of it—but he must have ordered me trailed.”

  “Those are his men,” he said.

  “Maybe there were more. Maybe some went back to him,” I cried. “Maybe he’s coming—or a troop of Citadel guards!”

  Stephen continued to keep his eyes glued to the metal sight at the end of the barrel. “They have old-fashioned rifles that fire inaccurately. We can stand them off. And as for Citadel guards—Liberty, there is no point imagining dangers.”

  Four heads raised above the brown sand of the hill. Shots rang out. Bullets whizzed by my head.

  I threw myself flat on the rug, as did Uisha. Being under fire was l
ess terrifying than I had imagined. I couldn’t truly believe that the swift, impersonal bullets were real.

  Stephen and Yacub answered the volley, reloading in less than fifteen seconds. Then there was only the whining howl of the wind. Stephen was sure he could stand them off; I comforted myself with the thought. But fears nagged at me.

  The wind grew in intensity, shrieking in deafening gusts. Pebbles hammered against the protective curve of rocks.

  “There they go!” Yacub had to yell to be heard.

  The four riders were retreating in the direction of Bir Oman Pass. The legs of their mounts were invisible, and they seemed to be breasting the clouds of sand as though their camels were swimming.

  “What’s happened?” I screamed. “Why are they running?”

  Stephen raised his hand, pointing to the south. Until now I’d fixed all my attention on our attackers to the east.

  I turned. And for the first time looked on an awesome desert hamseen. Into the heavens it rose, a monstrous pillar colored like smoke, jet black at the bottom, gray at the top. And I remembered that when I crossed the Sahara from Tripoli to Cairo, Ahmed had mentioned soberly that his greatest fear—and the fear of most travelers in a caravan—was neither bandits nor heat nor thirst but being caught in a desert hamseen.

  The column of sand was advancing rapidly toward us.

  “We must get to the protection of the pass, too!” I yelled over the wind.

  Stephen fastened his rifle in its canvas cover. “We’re safest here,” he shouted.

  “Safe? I’d rather face the Pasha himself, and all his men, than that.”

  “Those poor creatures are doomed. They’ll never make it to Bir Oman Pass. And neither would we. But, Liberty, these rocks have withstood centuries of storms.”

  His look of steadfast courage more than his words convinced me.

  “We’ll make sure you’re both safe,” he shouted in Arabic for Uisha’s benefit.

  She turned to him, her eyes glittering with an emotion that wasn’t fear. Uisha was facing the hamseen with the same mute dignity she faced other blows life dealt her. She and I crouched to help the men tether the camels to the rocks. The secured animals lay down, their tails to the wind. Yacub was circling two stout ropes around the largest rocks while Stephen laid two pairs of rugs nearby. The heavy carpet flapped in his grasp like ordinary sailcloth, and he needed all his strength and seaman’s agility to work. The sky was black and the air so thick that it was impossible to see more than a few feet.