The Emerald Embrace

by Briskin, Jacqueline;

  “You’ve been living down here?” I said, then turned in puzzlement to Rais Guzman. “How can you both breathe?”

  “Somehow the air’s adequate,” Rais Guzman replied. “A week ago by accident we came upon the entry. I saw a crevasse and the top of a doorway. This chamber’s a perfect hiding place. Or prison.”

  “Prison?”

  “For you and Lord Bentham.”

  Suddenly it was as if the coating of a poisoned pellet had dissolved and my entrails were flooded with a killing anguish. How could I have been so benumbed as not to realize my worst nightmare was about to come true? Chains passed under his arms, Stephen’s gallant body dangling, the beautiful face blackened with mortal agony.

  “Mr. Stephens’ account with me is to be settled most satisfactorily,” Rais Guzman said without rancor. “Yes, I know behind the beard he’s my former first mate. Your Commodore Delaplane. Because of him a profitable trade is ended. I’ve had to find other means of restoring the Guzman fortune.”

  “Haven’t you accumulated enough?” I cried.

  “I have now,” he said, giving me that venal smile. “You’re my greatest prize. Can you imagine how much the Pasha will give for the pair of you?”

  “It’s me he wants to punish, not Stephen!” The despairing lie burst from me with great sincerity.

  “To be sure he’ll give the most for you,” Rais Guzman said with a kind of respect. “Still, he’ll pay for the American.”

  “He won’t!”

  “May I have your hat?” Rais Guzman asked.

  At this request, I stared at him.

  Ismael chuckled. “We need something of yours as bait.”

  I pressed the leghorn straw tight to my head. My uplifted arms must have accentuated the curves of my bosom. Both men stared at me, the candle flame glinting on their pupils.

  “What breasts,” Ismael muttered. “She’s like the most beautiful houri in paradise.”

  “I got ten times what had ever been paid in the Tripoli slave souk for her.”

  “Was she sweet to dip into?”

  “That price was because of her virginity.”

  “You restrained yourself?” Ismael asked incredulously.

  “How could I have lessened her value?” Rais Guzman’s voice for once had lost its aristocratic disdain, and his tone, like Ismael’s, had a lustful resonance. “But now …”

  They glanced at one another.

  My legs cold to the knees, I stepped backward. There was the slithering sound of Ismael’s bare feet on the stone floor, and then he pinioned my wrists behind me. I jolted to life, kicking and twisting, but the hard fingers jabbed deeper into the tendons of my wrists.

  Rais Guzman pulled off my hat, and hair fell over my face. As he unclasped the Emerald Embrace, my movements became spastic, and I jerked about like a landed fish. With difficulty the corsair managed to unbutton my dress and slide the chemise from my shoulders. The acrid smell of Ismael’s bare, sweating flesh had grown thicker.

  I struggled vainly until I was naked except for my gartered stockings, then I bent my head and closed my eyes. Ismael’s grasp loosened.

  “Dios,” Rais Guzman muttered. “I’d forgotten her beauty. No wonder the Pasha gave up the wealth of Constantinople to have her in his bed.”

  How did Rais Guzman know that? The riddle was swallowed up in the wild thudding of my terrified heart. Ismael jerked me back onto a pallet, and Rais Guzman bent over me, touching my triangle. “Gold, pure gold.”

  “I want her now, now,” Ismael panted.

  “A Guzman never follows a peasant.” He was yanking at his breeches.

  “But I need—”

  “After me. You’ll satisfy yourself after me.”

  Rais Guzman forced my clenched, quivering thighs apart. As his penis touched me I was swept by a wave of revulsion greater than any frigidity I’d ever known. The nausea. The darting pelvic agony. The taut dryness. As he pressed my buttocks upward, forcing himself into me, an involuntary screaming welled from my throat. He paid no attention. He was sweating and galloping above me as if I were an untamed mare that he must break.

  After an endless time Rais Guzman shouted and fell to my side.

  Immediately Ismael sprawled on me. His lust was brutal, but quick.

  For a long time after the stone slid closed in its grooves, I lay sobbing feebly and shivering in the warm air. They had left me the candle. My hand on the wall lest I stumble, I tottered like a very old woman to the washbowl to sponge the blood from myself. Laboriously I gathered my clothes and dressed. The Emerald Embrace was gone. And so was my leghorn hat, which Ismael had called the bait.

  The candle had burned to a nub. Soon the chamber would be plunged into darkness. Groaning, I forced myself to move about and learn where the necessities were positioned. Near the water quellahs was a dish of dates, but no other food.

  Raising the candle, for the first time I let the flame shine directly on a fresco.

  The light jumped and I gasped.

  In a series of scenes a Pharaoh wearing the double crown, the red of Lower Egypt and the white of Upper Egypt, tended the shrine of a jackal-headed god, taking the carved god from its pedestal, purifying the shrine, replacing the statue and offering its gifts. In each painting just behind the Pharaoh always stood a woman, the same woman.

  The Pharaoh had a proud hawk nose and the woman’s hair was light.

  As I shone the light around the walls, a shiver went down my spine and I realized I was being held captive in the funeral chamber prepared endless centuries ago for Pharaoh Thutmose. No sooner had I accepted this than questions swarmed at me.

  Why was the tomb empty? Was it this place that had drawn me along the wadi, or had it been the powers of the Emerald Embrace, dormant these past months, yet vibrantly alive today?

  How did the necklace connect me with these two? Monsieur Champollion theorized that the necklace was intended to unite lovers in eternity, but could it have another purpose—to tie the living to the dead? In the paintings neither Thutmose nor Nefer was wearing the Emerald Embrace.

  The tomb had been skillfully tunneled, masterfully decorated, so why hadn’t Thutmose been buried here? That was the biggest riddle of all. Why was the tomb empty?

  I jerked at a faraway sound as thinly faint as the thumping of a gnat.

  The sound was repeated.

  To anyone else imprisoned as I was, the two nearly inaudible thumps might have been the blessed sounds of rescue. But I knew better. Grasping the candlestick, I held a protective hand over the flame and ran to the sliding section of the wall.

  “Stephen, go away!” I shouted. “Go away!” At the candle’s flickering, the painted royal linen seemed to stir. “It’s a trap!”

  The knocks grew louder, and I accepted that my warning, muffled beyond comprehension, had served not only to lead Stephen to me but to distract him from every precaution. Clasping my mouth, I leaned against the smooth, cool stone.

  The stone shifted. A draft extinguished the candle and yellow brightness gleamed.

  “Open it just a little more.” Rais Guzman’s voice. “Here. Give me a hand, Ismael. There. Let him fall inside.”

  I grasped the limp body with all my strength. As the wall groaned shut and the chamber became black, I eased my heavy burden to the floor. I knelt over him with the same nervous terror as on the foggy morning of the duel, and when I felt his warm breath, my heart leapt.

  He’s alive, I thought, and forgot the torment ahead. Tilting an earthenware quellah until a little cool water dampened my handkerchief, I wiped his forehead.

  He stirred, groaning.

  “Don’t try to move,” I said. “You were hit over the head.”

  “Something’s wrong with my eyes,” he said, not afraid but with a drowsy bafflement as if he had just been shaken out of a sound sleep.

  “The candle went out. It’s pitch black.”

  “The tomb, yes.” His voice suddenly clear, he pushed to a sitting position. “Last yea
r the entry was hidden. What made you explore the canyon?”

  “I … I don’t know.”

  “You should have told me you were coming. Liberty, who hit me?”

  “Either Ismael or Rais Guzman.” At the memory of their violation, my bruises twinged painfully and my face burned, but I was grateful for the darkness so that Stephen would not know how they had abused me. “They were waiting for you.”

  “Ismael? Rais Guzman?”

  “They brought me down here,” I said, hurriedly explaining that Ismael worked for Rais Guzman, who had tracked us for the enormous reward the Pasha surely would pay.

  “I should have realized something was wrong. Your hat was on the rockslide, neat as a road sign. But by then I was too upset to think clearly. Uisha kept pointing that you’d come along the wadi to meet me. She wanted to help search for you, and so did Yacub, but I told them to stay in camp in case you returned.”

  “They’ve probably been captured by now too,” I said, sighing.

  Stephen’s fingers groped and he enfolded my cold hand in his warmth. After a long silence, he said, “I think it was Rais Guzman who followed us through the Bir Oman Pass.”

  “But why would he have been after us then? He had no way to know that we’d run off together. And unless we did, what were we worth to him?”

  “He might have been after me. He might have wanted to repay me for tricking him.…” Stephen’s voice faded. “But simple revenge doesn’t ring true of him.”

  “But it does of the Pasha,” I said shuddering.

  Stephen pushed to his feet. “I’ve got to get you out of here,” he said. “The wall moved. You told me there was a candle?”

  I felt along the smooth limestone floor for the stub, pressing it into the nearby candlestick. The quiet determination in Stephen’s voice had roused my hope, yet something told me that this tomb was my destiny.

  “Here it is,” I said.

  There was the acrid odor of chemical, then a splint bursting into a sulfurous blue flame. Stephen lit the wick. Glancing at the frescoes, he said, “Magnificent.”

  “It’s the couple I saw in my visions. Pharaoh Thutmose and the Lady Nefer. But I don’t understand why he’s not buried here.”

  “Liberty, there’s no time. The candle’s almost gone. Show me the movable wall.”

  “This one,” I said.

  Handing me the candle, he felt around the scene of Thutmose tending the shrine, his fingers pressing horizontally and vertically. He squatted to touch near the floor. At last he said, “There’s an indentation—but no seam.”

  “There has to be!”

  “This was where it shifted?”

  “Yes,” I said and began tracing around the panel. But my urgent fingers encountered only a four-inch indentation that felt carved into solid limestone.

  “Show me the spot I fell.”

  I pressed my toe down. “Here.”

  “You’re sure?”

  “See. It’s still damp where I put my handkerchief.”

  The muscles under his jacket tensed as he pushed sideways against the stone. I moved behind him, pushing too.

  We were both panting and drenched with sweat when he said, “The entry must have been designed to open only from the corridor.”

  “What are we going to do?”

  “They’re going to turn us over to the Pasha, so they must take us to Cairo. It’s at least ten days with a good wind. Either on the dahibeyeh or when we camp there will be opportunities to escape—and I’ll make the most of them. Liberty, coming here was my idea, and I’m not going to let you die.”

  And with that the candle sputtered out. Blackness washed over us.

  We pulled the mattresses to the movable wall, prepared for their return. The darkness was absolute, there were no sounds to give a clue to the hour, the subterranean chamber had been drained of time. The cumulative effect was terrrifying and though Stephen kept his arm around me my heart often jumped. How long have we been waiting, I would think. How long?

  Determined to show him my bravest side, I never mentioned my fears and terrors, and though hungry, I waited for him to suggest we share the dates.

  “We’ve been down here a day and a half,” he said.

  “It’s longer than that.” My gnawing stomach told me so. “Far longer.”

  “Close to it. I’ve stood enough night watches to gauge pretty well.” He hesitated. “Leaving us this long can mean only one thing. Rais Guzman’s not taking us to Cairo. He’s bringing the Pasha here.”

  My heartbeat grew erratic and I had trouble breathing. “But the round trip takes three weeks!”

  “Yes. I can’t understand why his servant hasn’t brought us food.”

  “Maybe they both left.”

  “I doubt that.” Stephen’s voice rang grimly in the dark. “We’re worth a lot more alive.”

  “Then why haven’t we been given food?”

  “I don’t understand it.”

  “There are so many things that don’t make sense,” I puzzled. “How did Rais Guzman discover that I was the Pasha’s Little Kadine?”

  “The greatest mystery of all,” Stephen said bitterly, “is why I didn’t take you home with the treaty. I knew you should never come here—though to be honest, I expected the dangers directly from the Pasha.”

  “I did, too.”

  “Whatever made me come up with the idea of restitution?”

  “It was as if, uh, there were no free will involved, as if we were being drawn back by a lodestone.”

  “Amos Thornton’s bullet must have affected my head.”

  “Stephen, don’t blame yourself.”

  “How not? Whatever possessed me, sweetheart, to risk your life this way?”

  I closed my eyes on the pitch blackness. “That night in Washington,” I whispered, “if I’d been given a choice of my time with you, or living an eternity without you, I would say then—and now—forget eternity.”

  His fingers caressed my shoulder.

  And despite our hopeless situation, a wave of desire flooded me. I turned, raising my trembling lips to his. The festering silence was banished by my heart’s loud thudding. There was a near holy sweetness to our kiss that enabled me to forget the brutality that had taken place in this chamber, and in Stephen’s arms I stretched on the straw pallet and the yearning abundance of love rose in our caresses. When, finally, we were joined there were salt tears on both our faces, and we shared such awed tenderness that our twined bodies became an affirmation of spirit. In that time-drained place, our love bound us inextricably.

  After that my hunger pangs faded, uncertainties ceased plaguing me, and the endless night no longer frightened me. It was almost as if the cool, dry air was drugged with consoling peace.

  I held Stephen’s hand and thought often of the couple who worshiped a jackal-headed god in the frescoes surrounding us.

  Nine

  “Stephen,” I said, touching his shoulder. “I hear something.”

  Instantly he was awake. We had been here three days, or so he estimated, with only a handful of dates between us, yet the body pressed against mine had no weakness in it at all. Shifting, he rested his head on the floorstones. “Footsteps,” he said. “A lot of them.”

  “It must be Yacub bringing the diggers to rescue us.” I sat up. “Yacub!”

  I shouted the name over and over and my cries mingled with their echoes in the hollowed space.

  Stephen gripped my arm. “There’s too much noise out there for anyone to hear you.”

  “Yacub!”

  “Liberty, stop it,” he commanded, and when I quieted, he said, “It doesn’t have to be Yacub with the digging crew. It could be anybody.”

  I heard his boots crossing to where we stored the quellahs.

  “The Pasha’s come,” I blurted out.

  “There hasn’t been enough time,” he said. “Sweetheart, get over to the far wall.”

  Dizzily I pushed to my feet, groping my way forward.


  Across the chamber the panel grated. With a noise like the roar of a mighty avalanche that preceded the light of a thousand suns, it opened. With a small cry I covered my face, then cautiously parted my fingers to squint.

  After the darkness it took me a full minute to realize that what seemed uncanny brilliance was but one flickering, smoky meshal.

  Outside the chamber stood a form I could see only in outline. A caftan hid the bowed legs but nothing could disguise the brutish shoulders. It was Ismael. Clustered behind him were ferociously mustachioed Citadel guards.

  The guards meant my guess about the Pasha’s presence was correct. I forced myself to lower my hands and stand erect.

  “You said you’d discovered treasure.” A guard moved around Ismael. His boots sank into the mattress as he crossed the threshold. “All I see is a pair of prisoners.”

  Stephen, gripping a water jar, stepped protectively in front of me.

  “The man’s a fighter,” Ismael said. “You better hold him.”

  “I’d much rather hold your other captive.”

  Several guards came in, chuckling.

  “What a magnificent wench,” muttered the one holding the torch.

  “These unveiled Frank women drive a man wild,” said a third guard.

  “Don’t come any nearer,” Stephen ordered, raising the quellah to shoulder height.

  The guards halted.

  “I don’t blame you, Frank,” laughed the sergeant—his red sash proclaimed his rank. “I’d guard such a golden woman. By Allah, even blear-eyed and rumpled she’s beautiful.”

  Ismael said, “You should see more of her.”

  I stared at him thunderstruck. Was he going to boast? Needless to say I hadn’t burdened Stephen with that hideous encounter. Ismael moved proprietorially toward me.

  “You filthy bastard, I told you to keep your distance,” Stephen growled.

  And he raised the water jar. Ismael’s eyes widened with fear, and there was a sharp crack as the earthernware landed on his forehead. Momentarily the bull-like shoulders slumped, but he didn’t fall. Stephen raised the quellah again, but this time two guards reached for his arms, scuffling and pulling at him. The jar fell, breaking loudly.

  “Bravo, master,” cried Yacub from the entry. Next to him was Uisha, her expressive eyes glowing. Though both showed their happiness at seeing us, they, too, were prisoners.