The Other Guy's Bride

by Connie Brockway

  At this, LeBouef burst into laughter. “But how wonderful! My former purveyor is a duke.”

  Haji could almost see the plans for some future blackmail unrolling in LeBouef’s mind. He wished him joy with that. Haji had never met a man less likely to care about others’ opinions than Jim Owens.

  “All right, Mr. Elkamal,” LeBouef said. “You have a deal. The sandals for Jim’s life. And,” he smiled, “yours.”

  A chill ran up Haji’s spine, but he nodded. Going behind the Frenchman, he quickly cut through the rope binding his hands and leapt back as LeBouef brought them forward and rubbed his wrists. He looked amused.

  “Oh, don’t worry. I have nothing to gain by harming you now and everything to lose. Before your friends return, I wish to be a long ways from here.” He bent and made quick work of untying his legs. “Added to which, Sir Robert seems inordinately fond of you, fond enough to make quite a fuss if something should happen to you. Fusses are bad for business.

  “As for Jim, if things are as you say, the same goes for him. Now,” he rose to feet and held out his hand, “the sandals.”

  A part of Haji felt like he was giving away his first child. He might never come close to something as important again. If only he had an hour, he could make copies of the little figures on the insoles, but LeBouef was snapping his fingers imperiously and Haji doubted he would wait for him to draw pictures. Reluctantly, Haji hefted them into LeBouef’s waiting hands. They had to weigh twenty pounds each. No wonder LeBouef had been sweating.

  “I will, of course, be taking one of the camels.”

  “Of course,” Haji said. “And you will not take it amiss if I hold this gun on you until you’ve left.”

  “Of course.”

  As it was, Haji carried the gun a long time after LeBouef and the sandals left, heading south. He stuck it in his belt and climbed to the top of the ridge’s rocky tip and watched him, the wind whipping his robes about his legs and peppering his face with sand. LeBouef disappeared from sight, and Haji was about to climb down when his gaze was caught by the western horizon.

  He frowned. When they’d arrived the horizon had been mauve-stained, a sort of pinkish brown that he’d taken for far-distant hills. But somehow the horizon seemed to have lifted against the blue sky above, like buff-colored cliffs. He wondered if it was a mirage, embarrassed that he didn’t know. He’d been raised and had lived in cities all his life. He was no nomad, and his knowledge of the desert was slight, most all of his tomb explorations having been done in the Valley of the Kings, and though the terrain was rough, it was within close proximity to a comfortable bed and meals.

  He was still watching the west when he heard someone hail him. He drew his pistol and wheeled around. A gray Arabian horse pawed the ground thirty feet below him with Jim Owens, robed and turbaned like a Bedouin, sitting atop.

  “What are you doing with that pistol, Haji?” he asked. “Planning to shoot it?” He nodded toward the west.

  Haji grinned, glad to see him. “You just missed saying goodbye to your friend Henri LeBouef.”

  Jim straightened in the saddle. “What do you mean? Where’s Ginesse?”

  “She’s fine.”

  “Where is she?”

  “Nowhere near LeBouef, I assure you. I just watched him disappear to the south. Ginesse is, well, I’m not exactly sure, but she’s somewhere in that rift.” He nodded at the entrance to the wadi.

  “Alone?”

  “No. Of course not. She took half a dozen men with her.”

  “Men? As in unsuspecting, inexperienced, incautious men?”

  “Well…yes.”

  “With a khamasin bearing down on us?”

  “What?” Haji exclaimed.

  Beneath Jim, the gray horse began to dance impatiently. “Good God, Haji. What do you think you’ve been staring at?” he asked, and without another word he turned his horse into the wadi.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

  With a groan, Ginesse rose to her feet, coughing and choking on dust while carefully gauging any injuries she might have sustained. She appeared to be all right. Where the hell was she?

  The area all around her was steeped in blackness, scented with the mineral tang of an area closed off for a millennium. A dry, underground riverbed? The Sahara was riddled with them. However, few of them were so close to the surface that one could plunge through to them.

  She looked up. Fifteen feet overhead the hole she’d made plunging through the desert floor glowed like a bright blue disk. It provided a spotlight of illumination on the uneven ground on which she’d landed, but not enough to penetrate the gloom.

  Fifteen feet. It may as well have been fifty.

  She closed her eyes, reining in her fear. Someone would find her. They knew which way she had gone. But they thought she was in the wadi. How long before they realized she’d gone down off the escarpment into the desert on the other side? Hopefully, soon enough.

  She shrugged off her knapsack and opened it. She breathed a sigh of relief. The canteen was intact. Now if only the torch would still work, she could wait until nightfall and shine it through the hole above. With any luck, someone close enough, and looking in the right direction, and with good sight, would see it. With any luck.

  Unfortunately, luck had never been her strong suit.

  Maybe there was another way out…

  She slid the switch on her tubular torch and played the light into the darkness. Her mouth fell open.

  She had found Zerzura.

  In disbelief, she shined the light around what appeared to be a low chamber about fifteen by twenty feet across. While the walls were rugged, certain portions had been smoothed by masons and incised by artisans, depicting figures and images she had seen hundreds of times in other tombs and temples, though there were some fundamental differences she could not at once identify. She moved her torch up toward the ceiling. Her first instincts had been correct; it appeared to be the channel of an ancient underground river, long ago dried up and put to later use by an ancient population.

  She crossed a floor covered with several millennia of dust, peering about breathlessly. Along the walls were thousands of little bundles stacked shoulder height. Tens of thousands. They were roughly the same size, and cylindrically shaped, about eighteen inches in length and as round as a grapefruit.

  Carefully, she picked one up. It was surprisingly light, and brittle. She shined her torch on it, her face clearing with understanding, and tipped it. It was a mummified ibis, the disintegrating linen wrappings revealing the telltale bill and long legs of the sacred bird. She picked up another. It was an ibis, too, and equally as fragile. She shined her light along the wall, nodding. The Oasis of Little Birds.

  But also, she recalled, “home to a dead king and queen.” Most scholars had thought this referred to the antiquity of the city, perhaps its original rulers. Clearly the meaning had been more literal. Zerzura was a burial tomb. She played her light along the walls, expecting to see a doorway leading from the chamber. Sure enough, she found one. Had the tomb been intact, the door would have been sealed. It wasn’t. Rubble was piled at the base on either side.

  With a quick glance at the still-bright sky, Ginesse passed through the door into a chamber three times larger than the one she’d fallen into. It was empty; not even a stick of broken wood remained, and the walls, where she would have expected to find painted scenes, were naked. Likely, this would have been an ante-chamber, filled with the larger items necessary to enjoy life in the afterworld: shrines and furniture, horses, servants, beds and lounges, chariots and boats.

  She spotted another opening. This, too, had been broken open. On inspection, this one proved empty, too. Had it been a treasury? A burial chamber? It was impossible to tell. Nothing remained to relate its history or give a clue to its purpose. In fact, it was too empty. As though everything had been removed wholesale, with calm calculation and efficiency and plenty of time. It was not like the tombs she’d seen that had pillaged, the contents bro
ken and heaped carelessly as the terrified robbers frantically rifled through the contents for only the most precious and portable items.

  She looked around. This room had no other access.

  The torch light flickered against the blank wall. Fear shadowing her steps, she returned to the room where she’d fallen through. The blue disc above was not so bright anymore—it looked muddier. Dimmer. She stepped directly under the opening and looked up. Little particles of sand were siphoning down as she realized that more sand was being blown across the opening overhead…

  She frowned. A stiff breeze stirring the sand or something more…? A sandstorm? She fought down the prickling of fear that started at the base of her spine. It was too early for sandstorms. But then scholars claimed that a freak sandstorm had swallowed King Cambyses’s army of fifty thousand men. To this day, no sign of them had ever been found.

  She looked up at the small hole above her. A large enough sandstorm could move entire sand dunes. A sandstorm could fill this chamber or cover it. At the very least it would obliterate her torch’s weak beam.

  Quickly, she catalogued her options. They were few. She considered and dismissed the idea of stacking the ibis bodies. They would never support her weight; they would crumble beneath her. There was no possible way for her to climb up to that hole.

  She sat down beneath the opening. For perhaps the tenth time since she’d left Cairo, she thought, I might die here. She almost smiled, the thought had become so familiar, so hackneyed. Though this time it might very well be true. Especially if there was a sandstorm brewing out there.

  Because this time, Jim Owens was not lying unconscious in her lap. This time, Jim Owens was not coming for her. This time, Jim Owens wasn’t even looking for her.

  She was on her own in Zerzura. And except for its flocks of dead birds, it was as empty as her triumph in finding it.

  What was she doing here? She looked around and did not see a tomb waiting patiently to reveal its centuries-old secrets to worthy eyes. She did not see the fulfillment of a lifelong dream simply because, she realized, it had never been her dream. It had always been someone else’s: her father’s, her great-grandfather’s, Lord Tynesborough’s, Haji’s.

  Tears began to form, slowly overflowing and trickling down her cheeks. Not because she was going to die, but because she was going to die without ever having truly lived. She was going to die without ever having set her foot on the road she was supposed to follow. Without ever knowing a companion in the journey…

  No, that wasn’t true.

  She had set foot on that road and she had found a companion, but the time had been too short and the journey begun too late. She hugged her knees to her chest, and as she did so something struck the ground beside her. She looked up.

  A rope hung down from the hole, strong brown hands attached to the end. As she stared, a khafiya-covered head and face appeared in the opening.

  “Ginesse!” Jim Owens shouted.

  “Yes! I’m here!” she shouted, bolting to her feet. “Yes!”

  “Are you hurt?”

  “No!”

  “Tie the end of the rope around your waist and call out when you’re done. Hurry. We don’t have much time.”

  She didn’t waste time answering. Quickly, she looped the rope around herself, tied it off tightly, and shouted, “Ready!”

  A second later she was jerked clean off her feet. She shot upward, grabbing the rope, and then Jim was seizing her arms and hauling her through the hole. There was no time for words. She looked to the west, and her blood ran cold. A huge wall of billowing, churning sand nearly a mile high was bearing down on them.

  He dropped her feet to the ground, leaving her to catch her balance as he undid the rope from the Arabian’s saddle. Then he wheeled back, grabbed her around the waist, and tossed her onto the gray’s back. He leapt up behind her, his arms coming tight around her to grab the reins.

  He bent over her. “Hang on!” he shouted over the increasing din.

  And they were in flight, spearing through the raucous, buzzing dust. The storm was fast, but the stallion was faster. He stretched out, his neck almost parallel with the ground, his legs eating up the distance, flecks of foam flying from his wide nostrils. She didn’t see or feel Jim do anything to control or direct him, and yet he flew straight and true toward the escarpment, following its length eastward, trying to outrace the storm.

  “Look for a place to shelter!” he yelled in her ear.

  Frantically, she peered at the ridge’s face, seeing no opening, no gully or—

  “There!” She stabbed her hand out, pointing at a narrow fissure, barely visible in the rock wall.

  By some unspoken transference of intent, the horse broke off his headlong flight and swung back toward the escarpment, slowing as he approached the narrow pass. Jim did not let him hesitate. He dug his heels in, and the horse clattered up the steep defile, loose rock and pebbles spraying beneath his hooves. At the last minute, the defile turned sharply, leading under an enormous rock ledge. Beneath it, time and wind had carved a broad, deep pocket, not quite a cave but just as good a shelter.

  Jim jumped from the saddle and led her and the horse inside. He looked up at her. Bright daylight had given over to a murky twilight illumination as the storm covered the sun. Shadows played over his stern features, the taut mouth, the hard jaw and clear gray eyes. She had never seen a more welcome face.

  “You came for me,” she said, her lips curving tremulously.

  He frowned as if her comment somehow offended him. “Yeah,” he said brusquely. “Didn’t I tell you I would?”

  This wasn’t the reply she’d hoped for. She’d hoped he would take her in his arms, overcome with the joy of finding her alive and…and kiss her and…and…

  He reached up and she leaned down obligingly, putting her hands on his shoulders. Visceral sensation shot through her palms as they molded to the hard muscle beneath. Memory of his body moving over hers flooded her thoughts.

  She bent her head to his, her lips parting—

  “No,” he said flatly, setting her on the ground.

  “No?” she echoed, disoriented and disappointed.

  “No,” he repeated. “I don’t want that kind of reward.”

  And she swung at him again.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

  This time Jim caught her fist a few inches before it hit his face, neatly turning it down and behind her. He spun her around and caught her back hard against his chest. “Would you stop trying to hit me?” he said in a low, calm voice, his lips pressed against her ear.

  “I wouldn’t have to if you didn’t keep saying things that provoke me,” she said, trying to sound equally nonchalant and fearing she missed the mark entirely.

  He shoved her lightly away from him, brushing past her and going to where the stallion danced nervously, his ears flattening and flickering. Gently, Jim soothed his hand down his arched neck. Then he moved back and dug into his saddlebag, removing a rolled blanket. Working quickly, he flicked it open and secured it over the mouth of the cavern. It didn’t entirely cover the opening, but it would deflect a substantial part of any blown-back sand that got caught in the rift. When he’d finished, he tethered the stallion in the far corner, wrapping a shirt over the horse’s eyes to keep him from panicking.

  And then the storm was on them. It filled the air with the angry hissing of a million wasps, so loud it covered any incidental sound. Ginesse crept close enough to the opening to look upward. The wind-driven sand swept over the ledge and streamed almost parallel in the sky.

  “It’s mostly going over us,” she called out and turned to find Jim already at her side, his gaze fixed on the sky above. He’d pulled the end of his khafiya over his mouth and tucked it in at his temple. All that was exposed were his tarnished-nickel eyes, narrowed against the ravaging wind outside.

  “Stand still,” he said, opening a square of woven silk and wrapping it over her mouth. He tied it at the back of her head. “In case there
’s dust.”

  The sand was painful, little needles scoring any exposed flesh, but the dust was worse, filling nostrils and throat, clogging eyes and thickening in the lungs. The heavier sand stayed near the bottom of the khamasin, but the higher up in the storm wall you were, the more likely you were to feel the effects of the talc-like powder that could be driven into the smallest seam, the narrowest opening.

  For long moments they watched, riveted by the sight of the thick curtain of sand, praying they weren’t so high up in the storm that the dust found them. Finally, Jim loosened his khafiya and let it fall from his face.

  “I think we’re lucky,” he said. “We’re situated at the right angle to keep the sand from blowing back on us and not so high up to be in the dust. As long as the storm doesn’t suddenly stop and dump all the sand it’s carrying, we should be all right.”

  “How long will it last?” she asked, untying her veil.

  “I don’t know. It depends on how big it is. It could blow for days, but it’s more how quickly it’s moving that concerns me. It’s early for this sort of storm, but then…” he looked at her pointedly, “there are extenuating circumstances.”

  “You can hardly blame me for the sandstorm.”

  “Can’t I?” he asked, sounding exasperated and resigned at the same time.

  She started to stalk toward the back of the cavern, but he grabbed her wrist. She turned and looked coldly down at the hand holding her prisoner. It didn’t seem to have any effect.

  “Oh, no,” he said. “You’re not going anywhere. Not this time.”

  “Of course I’m not,” she said disgust. “I’m not about to stomp out into the middle of a sandstorm just because I find you offensive. Despite what you and everyone else thinks, I’m not an idiot.”