Heart of the Gods

by Valerie Douglas

  Bullies? Something every culture had, or was it something more?

  Everyone around them went still. The shouts and cries died away, leaving only the boomboxes wailing into the growing silence.

  Raising his hands slightly, Ky said in English, “We’re not looking for trouble.”

  They weren’t looking for it but if it found them he knew he could deal with it if need be. He simply didn’t want it to be necessary, it would only make things more difficult than they already were.

  Behind him, he heard Raissa translating his words, pitching her voice loud enough to be heard to the shop owners without shouting.

  Raissa had seen the young man earlier as they entered the souk. She knew him. And his friends. She’d seen them around before, looking for trouble, harassing people, especially foreigners. Now, it appeared they’d found some. Behind her she could sense someone standing, not yet too close. Glancing sideways beneath her lashes, she noticed two more of the troublemaker’s friends off to one side.

  They were effectively surrounded, something she could not relay to Ky. Professor Farrar.

  Without turning his eyes from the bully, Ky spoke over his shoulder, “Gentlemen, Raissa, I think we should head back to the hotel.”

  The tough made a derisive comment in Arabic to the one standing behind Ky and Ky didn’t like the look and tone of that at all. He gestured to Ryan and John to step back, shaking his head a little in warning at the slightly belligerent expression on John’s face and the way he thrust his chest out. It was a bad time for John to prove he was tough enough for a fight.

  Over John’s shoulder and a step sideways behind Ky could see Raissa.

  She winced.

  The words the young man used were not complimentary and Raissa saw one of the other young men glance at John angrily as he puffed up at Ky’s suggestion they leave.

  This was not going well.

  There might be a way to calm the situation if perhaps she gave them another target for their wrath…

  She slipped past Ryan and John respectfully, being careful not to touch either one, keeping her eyes averted from any of the men.

  The tone the toughs used was enough for Ky to understand the gist of what was said and he knew enough rough Arabic to get the meaning but he was wise enough to keep it from his face where John might see his reaction.

  Then Raissa was stepping between him and the first young turk, her eyes lowered, speaking in rapid Arabic, trying to defuse the situation. Her tone was apologetic, her head bobbed in quick bows, never raising her eyes to challenge.

  It would be enough provocation that she was speaking to them without being spoken to and she was clearly in the company of the Americans. At the very least employed by them.

  Turning her head, she said to Ky, softly, “Go,” before turning back to the young tough, apologizing for any insult he might have taken, agreeing that the Americans were difficult but they had helped discover the fort and that was good for the village.

  Ky understood that much.

  Around them, people listened to her soft voice, pitched loud enough to be heard.

  Nodding, Ky turned to John and Ryan, the last wisely retreating, John a little more reluctantly.

  Ky looked back at Raissa.

  Negligently, the man backhanded her for her insolence in speaking to him unasked as he lifted his chin to his friends in their direction.

  Ky flinched at the blow, his jaw clenched but he knew the culture. As much as he hated it, though, he knew she’d done it deliberately.

  She said nothing. Her lowered eyes watched everything, everyone from beneath her lashes…

  Their line of retreat was abruptly cut off by more of the young men stepping out from between the stalls. They were clearly looking for trouble.

  “We don’t want any problems,” Ky said, keeping his hands a little raised. There was still a chance to get out of this. “Just let us leave in peace.”

  Incredibly, he heard Raissa’s voice translating his words into Arabic in the background, her voice carrying so everyone there would know he’d tried to avoid the confrontation. Her eyes never left the man who had struck her.

  Somehow Ky wasn’t surprised she was keeping so calm in the face of the situation.

  The blow hadn’t been entirely unexpected given the culture so Raissa had been prepared for it but she’d hoped to, if not calm the situation, perhaps redirect it.

  That hadn’t worked.

  Some of the shopkeepers were hastily grabbing their more fragile items and moving them to safety. Others folded their tents, literally, to weather the elemental storm that gathered in the middle of the souk.

  That didn’t bode well either.

  “Ryan, John,” Ky said, quietly, and indicated a defensible corner with a tip of his head, a fold in the walls of the buildings.

  As much as Ky hadn’t looked for trouble, these men might find they’d taken on more than they’d bargained for.

  Unlike John, Ky didn’t just talk the talk he walked the walk. Tough guy that John wanted to be, Ky was. His training had been far more extensive than John’s basic U.S. Army self-defense and a few bar fights.

  Of the four of them, only Raissa was still out in the bazaar but she was stepping back under cover and she lived here. That might afford her some little protection from what was coming.

  Ky began to retreat, warily.

  As one, the men began to move and Ky found himself boxed in.

  There were Ryan, John and Raissa to consider as well.

  If possible, he wanted to just walk away. Worst case, he wanted to draw the worst of it away from them, give them an opportunity to escape.

  “You shouldn’t have come,” one of young men said, belligerently, as if they’d forced him to this simply by their presence.

  “Let’s send them home,” another, more aggressive, suggested.

  For some, retreat could be seen as a sign of weakness, of cowardliness. Apparently these were some of them.

  The first fist lashed out.

  Ky caught it easily and turned it aside, still trying to defuse the situation, and pushed the man, sending him stumbling across the souk.

  “You don’t want to do this,” he cautioned.

  In the background, Raissa repeated his words, her voice astonishingly steady.

  Another of the young men closed, as adrenaline overcame sense.

  Ky blocked the punch, let it pass as he caught the man’s arm and brought the man’s face down into the table behind him with a hand in the man’s collar. He held him there easily, concerned about Raissa behind him.

  “Just let us leave,” he said, evenly, calmly, looking at each of them.

  It wasn’t good. There were too many of them.

  Then knives appeared.

  Going still, Ky looked into their eyes. They’d committed themselves to drawing blood here, he could see it.

  That changed things considerably.

  “Let him go,” one of them said.

  Carefully, Ky obeyed, pushed the young man away.

  That one immediately turned, pulled his own knife and drove it toward Ky’s abdomen.

  Ky brushed it aside and the young man with it, sending him sprawling across the floor of the souk.

  If possible, he wanted to hurt no one here and give them no cause for complaint later, or to fuel the simmering resentment in the town.

  But the battle was joined.

  Another blade lashed at him and he blocked it, caught the hand to divert it, a kick stopped the next.

  To his surprise he saw movement from the corner of his eye, a swirl of black fabric.

  Raissa rammed her elbow into the stomach of the man behind her even as he grabbed at her. He crumpled on a whoosh as the air left him. Spinning on her toes, she struck him in the jaw with the heel of her hand, hard and fast. He dropped as she saw the flash of steel from the corner of her eye.

  Ky trapped the hand with the knife with his hands, turned it, spun the man away from him and sent him f
lying into one of his friends.

  Another knife flashed toward him…

  To his surprise, a broken tent-pole thrust between him and his assailant to block the blade, Raissa hooking the hand with the pole in the same movement, turning and twisting the broken pole in one swift motion to send the man stumbling away. A swift hard jab with the blunt end of the broken pole into the man’s chest and that one stumbled back to sit down hard, coughing, with a hand to his chest.

  She’d already spun away to block the blow of the next.

  The young turk wasn’t the only one surprised.

  Even as Ky caught the blade of another, smacking the wrist down on his knee so that the man released the blade, he saw Raissa fade back from the thrust of another of the bullies in a swirl of black fabric, the blade whispering through the abaya as she stepped away, caught the arm, kicked the leg out from under the man and let him drop, hard.

  She constantly surprised him.

  Another drove at him and Ky stepped in to grab the arm, turning and twisting it until the man dropped the knife and then he shoved him away. A punch to his jaw, another to his chin, sent the man sprawling.

  As suddenly as it had begun it was over with all of the men down and no one really hurt.

  John punched the one that looked like he might be getting belligerent again and then shook his hand.

  “Nice moves, boss,” he said, in admiration, “where’d you learn that?”

  Details were not a good idea here and bragging wasn’t Ky’s style. He’d served with both the Israeli and U.S. armed forces, the last partly to help fund his education in the States. It wasn’t something he talked about much. Nor what he’d done while he’d been with them.

  Still, the training came in handy every now and again.

  “Here and there. Explanations will have to wait,” he said. “We need to get out of here.”

  Raissa said, “And quickly, before the police get here. They wouldn’t be inclined to be kind to Americans, I think, or to women who fight with men. I wouldn’t do well in jail here.”

  “Me, neither,” Ryan said. “I saw the movie…”

  Breathlessly, both Ky and John laughed.

  “Wrong country, Ryan.”

  But it broke the tension.

  Raissa just looked at them. She shook her head in bemusement.

  “Let’s get out of here,” Ky said.

  With a twist of her head, Raissa said, “This way, follow me, quickly.”

  “Where did you learn to fight like that?” Ky asked Raissa, as they made their way through the alleys.

  Those blue eyes met his from above the niqab and twinkled. “Here and there. Explanations can wait.”

  He eyed her, lifting an eyebrow.

  “When you live in a country not your own, an undocumented citizen, you had best learn to defend yourself very quickly. Failure to do so can be quite painful. It could get you killed, or worse.”

  “How do you survive here?” he asked, as they wended their way through alleys and what seemed to be back yards. “Where do you live? Can’t you take us there until they stop looking?”

  Those were questions he’d asked himself more than once. There was no provision in this culture for unmarried women without a family and she was clearly all of that.

  She glanced at him over her shoulder and grinned, he could see her eyes crinkle at the corners.

  “I live in the whorehouse, although of course they don’t call it such here. It’s a school for bellydancers. They needed protection and some of those who were willing to perform that office demanded service as partial payment for the protection. I protect them instead. I’m better in many ways, especially as there are few men who will speak of being beaten by a woman.”

  Hearing a noise ahead, she glanced around the corner and then signaled them to take cover behind some crates, watching through the slats.

  Standing in the shadows, he, Ryan and John pressed into the small space and waited, listening.

  She looked up.

  Ky followed her gaze.

  A woman appeared on a balcony, nodded, and then disappeared back inside once again.

  “Come,” Raissa said. “It’s clear.”

  She gave him a mischievous look.

  “In return, they taught me to belly dance,” she said, with an impish smile. “I’m quite good.”

  Ky took a sharp breath as that picture filled his head and muttered, “I didn’t need to know that. I really didn’t need to know that.”

  From behind him a soft voice, Ryan’s, said avidly, “I did.”

  “Shut up, Ryan,” Ky said.

  Ahead of them, Raissa laughed, softly, as she led them to the safety of the plaza in front of their hotel.

  Chapter Ten

  The area around the hotel was quiet. It was a relief to enter the suite and find it undisturbed except for Komi, who paced the room with the cell phone at his ear, explaining in his usual halting fashion what they needed and why―apparently to some official, judging by his patient, long-suffering tone. He was clearly exasperated.

  It was almost shockingly normal after the sudden violence in the souk.

  There would be repercussions for the events there, of that Ky was certain. It was just a matter of how long it would take to be felt and how severe. A part of him fretted even as he went over it in his mind. There had been nothing he could have done to have changed the way it had turned out.

  Ryan and John were relating their adventures of the morning to Komi, who looked mildly shocked and distressed.

  As usual, John altered the events somewhat and Ryan let him, rolling his eyes behind John’s back.

  To hear John tell it, he’d been protecting Ryan.

  Ky made himself let it go. What had happened had happened. It couldn’t be changed. They could only wait to see what happened next.

  Turning from them, he smiled.

  Raissa had already settled into her chair, this time with her feet up on the wall, to work on the papyrus from their find in the wall of the fort. It was a good thing she was wearing shorts, or both he, John and Ryan were likely to have been very uncomfortable. As it was, those lovely smoothly muscled legs were clearly on display, Raissa oblivious to the effect, propping the clipboard against her thighs to study one of the papyri she’d discovered.

  For himself, beyond admiring those legs from time to time to his personal discomfort, he read the transcripts of her translations of the others that had been found. Then he reread them, frowning slightly… If Raissa’s translations were correct… On the computer he pulled up another, older set of translations, studying both the hieroglyphics and the translation.

  Ky had always had questions about that interpretation. Something about the translation just hadn’t rung true or sounded right. Either way, it was crucial to his own search. If the original was correct―and he’d factored that in, considering the eminence of the source―then the possible location of the tombs shifted north by a number of miles, turning more west than he thought it should. Raissa had interpreted it differently.

  As there was both a good clear picture of the tablet and the translation available on the internet through his satellite connection, it would be an interesting exercise, especially since she could zoom in on some of the characters.

  “Raissa,” he said, “could you come here please?”

  Unfolding herself from the chair, an interesting exercise for his heart rate, she came to join him.

  Without appearing to, he breathed in the soft scent of her, sweet, faintly spicy.

  “Take a look at this,” he said.

  She leaned closer and her hair swung forward to brush his arm before she gathered it in her hand and drew it over the other shoulder to expose the slender curve of her throat. For only a second, her blue eyes met his…

  Raissa forced her gaze from his gold-tinted deep brown eyes to the computer screen, taking a slow deep breath.

  Every time she was this close to him her breath came short.

  Swallow
ing against the tightness in her throat, she studied the text.

  It was actually an intriguing challenge and there were a few places where she would have quarreled with the previous translator.

  Ky noted her frown as she reread a passage.

  “What is it?” he asked.

  Looking at him, she asked, “Why does he prefer the masculine to the feminine?”

  “That’s what she said,” Ryan quipped from his desk, where he was piecing together a lovely little clay lamp they’d recovered from the ruins.

  With a laugh, Raissa shook her head at him.

  Ky gave him a quelling look, smothering a laugh.

  “Why?” Ky asked Raissa. “Does it matter?”

  “It depends on which you prefer,” Ryan explained patiently, grinning.

  Chuckling, Ky said, “I was talking to Raissa.”

  “Her, too,” Ryan said, still grinning.

  This time it was Raissa who gave Ryan a look, rolling her eyes.

  He just grinned, unrepentant, looking like a slightly demented and oversized elf with his round face, dimples and incongruous knitted hat.

  “May I?” Raissa asked, indicating the chair.

  Nodding, Ky vacated it, switching places with her.

  Leaning a hand on the back of the chair and another on the table, Ky angled over her to look at the portion of the text she was translating.

  He could smell the scent of her hair and that scent, sweet and slightly spicy, from her skin. It did wonders for his heart rate but nothing for his concentration. Not to mention the view, looking down at her now he had a clear view of the tops of her breasts beneath the t-shirt she’d worn beneath the abaya.

  “Perhaps,” she said, looking up at him.

  Her breath seemed to catch a little to find him standing there so close but she didn’t move away.

  It took a second for him to realize what she was talking about.

  “The ancient Egyptians didn’t differentiate, they were very egalitarian but that bias shows in him,” she said, quietly. “I would read it slightly differently here and here, giving equal weight to the accounts given, something he didn’t, assuming the priestess’s account to be less important than that of the priest.”