Thirty
W ith its large sail and light hull, the felucca turned out to be reasonably river-worthy as it skimmed across the water, carried by a steady breeze from the south. There were only a handful of moments when Neil was convinced they were going to drown.
They sailed through the length of the day, stopping only once for food. As the sun declined in the west, turning the deserted landscape a deeper gold, Constance asked Neil about the contents of the cuneiform tablet.
Twenty minutes later, he was still talking.
“And so you see, Genesis is full of references to other gods,” he explained as the Nile breeze tousled his hair. “Which begs the question—what caused the shift from monolatry to monotheism among the proto-Hebrews? There are strong indications that the Hebrews themselves attributed the change to the time of Moses, who by all accounts was raised as an Egyptian. And then we have the roughly contemporaneous cult of Akhenaten—a clear early case of monotheism, whatever Flinders Petrie might have to say about it…”
“Come about to starboard,” Constance ordered with a vague wave of her hand.
It was the only comment she had made since Neil had begun giving her a detailed summary of his theories on the relationship between the Exodus story and the history of the Eighteenth Dynasty. Neil did not let that bother him overmuch, continuing his lecture as he adjusted the rigging.
“The only thing we have been missing is an explicit link between the Hebrews and the Atenists. But if hard evidence exists that Moses was an official in Akhenaten’s court—”
“Are you an atheist, then?” Constance asked abruptly.
“I… What?” Neil squirmed in the face of her renewed attention.
“It is only that you keep talking about the Egyptians inventing God—which is a very clever theory, of course,” she allowed in conciliatory tones. “Only it does make one wonder whether you actually believe in God after all. Not that I would be bothered about it one way or another. My Aai has a shrine to Durga in her suite that is hardly a secret to anybody. I have not ruled out becoming a Hindu myself.”
“Can you just… do that?” Neil asked, bewildered.
“Whyever not? Being a Hindu sounds altogether more interesting than attending services at St. Matthew’s Bayswater. Reverend Spencer gives the most abominably dull sermons.”
She flashed him a considering look, and Neil realized that she was still waiting for an answer to her question.
“I don’t know that the Egyptians invented God, as such,” Neil replied carefully, feeling as though he were stepping out onto ground as fragile as porcelain. “One might just as easily suppose that Akhenaten came to acknowledge something that was already there.”
“Oh! Like a prophet, you mean,” Constance concluded easily.
Neil tried not to choke. “I am not sure that most people would find that equivalence… er, entirely inoffensive.”
Constance’s eyes narrowed. “Are you offended by it?”
“No!” Neil blurted out in reply.
“Then why would you worry about what most people think?”
“Because…” Neil began automatically, then caught himself. He drew in a breath. “Because I am not as brave as you are, Connie.”
Constance considered Neil quietly. “I am not sure you have ever called me brave before. There’s been reckless, menacing, ‘a short and holy terror,’—”
“That was when we were children,” Neil cut in nervously, “and you were trying to use my spectacles to burn holes in the carpet.”
“Which never did work,” Constance complained.
“That’s because I’m nearsighted,” Neil automatically explained. “Nearsighted vision is corrected by concave lenses, and concave lenses spread light out rather than focusing it.”
Constance’s look grew a little more thoughtful—and a touch more intense. Neil felt the weight of it like a prickling electricity.
“I would have told you that, if you had asked first,” he finished awkwardly.
“I shall keep that in mind for next time,” Constance replied.
Silence lingered. The hull of the ragged boat creaked beneath them as they glided along with the current. The waters of the Nile lapped softly at the boards. In the reeds on the shoreline, an ibis startled, lifting into great-winged flight.
“I am still cross with you,” Constance noted.
“I am still rather cross with myself,” Neil admitted.
“And you are an abysmally bad haggler,” she added.
“Yes,” Neil agreed. “Nor do I have any wish to get better at it. It makes me extremely uncomfortable.”
“I will say, I was surprised that someone like Mr. Bates would choose to be friends with you,” she mused, and then caught herself. “Sorry. I think that might have come out wrong.”
There had been nothing particularly vicious in her words. Neil still stiffened with a quick, reflexive hurt—perhaps because the question she had just voiced was one that he had wondered about himself on more than one occasion.
“Sometimes I think he just adopted me out of pity, like a three-legged cat,” he offered a little glumly.
Constance studied him quietly from her place by the tiller. Her dark curls were gilded by the falling sunlight. Neil was once again struck by how extraordinarily lovely she had become, and for perhaps the first time since she had skidded into his tomb at Saqqara, he met her eyes without feeling like he had to steel himself to it.
The moment stretched like a held breath, woven through with the creak of the lines and the soft rhythm of the rippling water.
“For a scholar, you have quite a few things left to learn,” Constance finally said, her voice surprisingly soft. “Though do tack us to port, please, before we run into that rock.”
“Oh, bugger!” Neil swore, hurrying to tug the lines.
?
An hour later, the landscape opened into a broad, flat plane. Beyond a fringe of green marsh, the arid ground was painted orange with the decline of evening and peppered with crumbling ruins.
Though Neil had never been there, he still recognized the lines of those ancient foundations from dozens of sketches and reports. He was looking at Tell al-Amarna, home to the dusty remnants of Akhenaten’s empire.
Little was left of the heretic pharaoh’s once-great capital. The palaces and temples had been reduced to low, ragged boxes on the ground, punctuated by the lonely sentinel of the odd surviving column.
The gleaming white length of Julian Forster-Mowbray’s dahabeeyah was tied up at a wharf below a small mud-brick village that crouched at the edge of the plain. The Isis was alight with lanterns, silhouetting the figures that moved across the deck.
Neil crouched lower into the felucca, hoping the sun at his back would help shadow his features.
“That’s Reis Hassan and some of the crew,” Constance said, lowering herself a bit as well. “But I don’t see Julian or his mercenaries, and there are fewer crewmen than there ought to be.”
“I suppose it was too much to hope that they might have rested for the night before going after the tomb,” Neil grumbled.
“But where will they have gone?” Constance demanded.
Neil pointed across the rubble-strewn plain to where the sunset painted a ragged ridge in hues of mauve and ocher. “See that gap in the cliffs? That’s the entrance to the royal wadi, where the tombs of Akhenaten and his chief ministers are located. The tablet said the tomb of Neferneferuaten will be on a branch about three miles up.”
Past the Isis , the shoreline thickened with palm trees and tangled shrubs. Constance steered the felucca into a gap in the growth. The prow caught up against the muddy earth.
“Then we’d best start walking,” she declared.
They climbed the steep, slippery bank, pushing through scratchy young acacia trees. Beyond the brush, the fertile land gave way to an arid expanse of sand and stone.
Neil looked out over a landscape peppered with tumbled fragments of the city Akhenaten had raised from the virgin desert as a tribute to his revolutionary god.
He had planned to come here before, of course. How could he not wish to visit a place that had loomed so large in his studies for the better part of a decade? Somehow, even after two years in Egypt, he hadn’t found the time. The excavation at Saqqara had eaten up nine months out of the year, and then there had been visits to home and reports to make.
Little of the city’s former splendor remained. Akhetaten had not been built of great limestone slabs like the pylons of Thebes, but of smaller talatat blocks and mud-brick. Later pharaohs had ravaged the place for materials for their own monumental projects, leaving nothing behind but low rubble, the sand-swept platform of a road, and the bases of shattered columns, all whispering of ghosts.
Neil didn’t realize that he had stopped until Constance turned back to look at him.
“Is something wrong?” she asked.
Neil struggled for the words to answer her. How could he possibly explain what it meant to him to be standing here in the ruins of a city that had loomed so large in his imagination for so long?
A rogue breeze stirred the sand by Neil’s boots as he stepped forward. He looked down and realized that he was standing on the weathered paving stones of an ancient courtyard.
That he had stepped into Akhetaten.
An electric chill shivered through him, along with a scent of ozone like the breath before a storm. Neil raised his head—and Akhetaten rose around him.
Monumental buildings soared over clean-swept boulevards, their walls painted with bold murals. Silk curtains bloomed from palace balconies. Pools shimmered coolly in palm-shaded courtyards.
The Temple of the Aten was visible to the north, crowned by the smoke of offering fires. To the south lay the records office and the police barracks beside the house of the high priest.
He smelled incense and roasting lamb. Heard chariot wheels clatter over paving stones.
Women laughed in gardens lined with lemon trees. Flower petals drifted from an open window, dancing to the rattle of a sistrum.
“It’s beautiful,” Neil breathed, awe and wonder washing over him until he felt like he would break.
“Neil?” Constance asked carefully.
Neil blinked, and his gaze fell across a field of rubble, colorless and still.
“What’s beautiful?” Constance pressed, standing beside him at the edge of the ruins. “What were you looking at?”
“Nothing.” His voice was rough in his throat. “Just… imagining things.”
That was all it had been, of course. Years of research and the shock of finally being in this place that he had studied for so long must have combined into something like a hallucination.
The reaction was perfectly natural… and should not have left Neil feeling as though something had been taken from him when it winked out of view.
Constance eyed him thoughtfully as a dry wind tugged softly at her dark curls.
“We should keep going,” she finally said, her voice uncharacteristically solemn.
“Right,” Neil agreed tightly. “Of course.”
They picked their way through the vast plain of debris, the rubble silent save for the crunch of their boots against the ground and the quick scurry of a mouse. A scarab beetle clicked its wings, suddenly taking flight.
The disk of the sun slipped below the line of the horizon as they reached the edge of the ruins. A mile of rocky desert lay between them and the entrance to the Royal Wadi—the steep, bone-dry canyon that split the high face of the ridge like the jagged cut of a knife.
The eastern sky, which lay over the ridge ahead of them, dropped into a rich violet-blue. The moon had just slipped above the hills, a pale sliver that offered fair illumination through the still, clear air.
“We’ll need to be quiet from here,” Constance said. “They might have left someone behind to watch the entrance to the wadi, and we can’t know how sound might carry against the cliffs. If there’s anything you need to say, best say it now.”
Constance likely meant for Neil to share his questions or thoughts about their plans, but something else spilled out of his lips in a desperate torrent.
“If I don’t make it out of there, I want you to tell Ellie and Bates that I’m sorry,” he burst out. “I… also want to beg you to stay here and let me go on without you, but I know you wouldn’t do it, and I know how utterly ludicrous it would be for me to even try, as you are far more capable of handling whatever we might encounter in there than I am. I am not at all sure what use I can possibly be in all this, and I’m very afraid that is going to get me or someone I care about killed.”
The storm of words petered out. Neil drew in a long, unsteady breath, then carefully let it back out again.
Constance’s gaze flashed with sympathy.
“What do we do when we find Julian and the others?” Neil asked more calmly.
Constance tipped up her chin, eyeing the wadi with determination. “Whatever we must.”
A realization swept through Neil in the wake of her declaration.
“I used to think you were mad, you know,” he blurted, and then caught himself. “Or reckless, at least. Utterly blind to all the things that could go wrong. But that isn’t it at all.”
Constance startled, her eyes wide and just a little vulnerable.
“You’re too clever not to know what we’re walking into,” Neil went on. “You know perfectly well how dangerous it’s going to be. You’re just… choosing to be courageous, over and over again, even when the whole world rises up against you. Aren’t you?”
Constance had gone very still. The silvered moonlight painted her features. Neil could see the ghostly echo of the girl he’d known in the angle of her chin and the line of her nose—but changed, merged into the elegant form of the woman who stood before him.
“I don’t know how to be like that.” Neil looked away from her, the weight of her liquid gaze becoming too much to bear. “But I admire it—a very great deal.”
A hand slipped into his own—slender but strong, holding him with a tender determination.
“Thank you,” Constance said quietly.
“For what?” Neil replied with a choking laugh.
In answer, she gave his hand a squeeze.
They stood together in silence as they faced the looming shadow of the ridge and the shadowy gap of the wadi.
“Are you ready?” Constance finally asked.
The answer rose through the rock under Neil’s boots, putting steel into his spine.
“Yes,” he said and stepped forward.
?
Millions of years ago, ancient waterways had come together in the hills above Amarna to empty into the larger river that carved out the plain. Those waters had dried up long before Akhenaten had set the first stone of his capital city into place, leaving behind only the dry, silent gorges they had rent in the earth.
Steep cliffs rose to either side of the entrance to the ancient canyon that the heretic pharaoh had chosen for his royal cemetery. Moonlit rock formations towered over Neil in fantastical shapes that reminded him of hulking sphinxes or hungry crocodiles.
The wadi was broader up close than it had looked from a distance. Constance kept to the edge where the shadows ran deeper. Neil joined her there, even though the footing felt more treacherous. He kept his steps light, painfully conscious of every scrape or rattle of shifting stones against the exquisite silence.
His brain screamed with the possibility that at any moment, a cry of alarm and a blast of gunfire would see both him and Constance perish in a spray of blood on arid stone.
He tried not to think about it too much.
It took them nearly an hour to reach the branching canyon mentioned in the tablet inscription. As it came into view, the breeze that tugged at Neil’s hair began to ring with the sound of metal clanging on stone.
Constance tucked herself against the ragged cliff that framed the entrance. Neil leaned out from behind her as she peered around the corner. Light spilled down into the chasm from somewhere ahead.
“Julian has set up on a ledge about forty feet high,” Constance reported in a whisper. “The whole thing is lined with lanterns.”
“Have they found something?” Neil demanded, his nerves tightening.
“There’s no way to see from down here.” Constance looked up, nearly bumping into Neil’s chin. He took a quick step back. “But I think I know how we can find out. Follow me.”
She led him to a spot where the wall of the canyon had been softened by an ancient spill of water. The path formed a rough trail that wound up the side of the ridge.
Constance climbed it confidently. Neil struggled after her, biting back a yelp as loose rocks shifted under his boots.
At the top, the path decayed into a scramble up a steep wash. As Neil painstakingly scaled it, he glanced back at the way they had come.
It was a mistake. Though their path had looked reasonable from the floor of the canyon, it revealed itself to be sheer madness when viewed from above.
Neil tore his eyes away, forcing himself to breathe as visions of plummeting to his doom danced through his mind. He set his boot carefully to another foothold—which promptly crumbled beneath him. The loosened stone tumbled down the cliff with a racket like a peppering of gunfire.
Constance shot him a warning look.
Sorry , Neil mouthed.
Several terrifying minutes later, he collapsed onto the top of the mountain with blissful, shaking relief. He rolled, flipping onto his back to better relish in the feeling of being on solid ground.
He gazed up at a sprawling blanket of stars. They pierced the ebony fabric of the sky in astonishing quantity, stealing his breath—the same stars Akhenaten might have seen had he slipped from his palace out into the desert to gaze up at the firmament that had given him his god.
“I’ve… It’s…” Neil started in a hoarse whisper, unable to find the words.
“Entirely lovely,” Constance agreed, glancing up. “But do refrain from nattering on about it, lest we get ourselves shot.”
Neil slammed back to earth, turning over to squirm forward on his elbows to where Constance crouched at the edge of the cliff.
From their perch, Neil could see Julian’s work site halfway up the wall of the wadi in perfect detail. Several crewmen from the Isis were digging out a section of the hill that was buried in loose rubble. A smattering of Al-Saboors were positioned at various places around the excavation. Neil counted three rifles and a pistol among them, along with an assortment of swords, cudgels, and knives.
The weapons were all held loosely. The men were obviously bored.
“I don’t see any sign of the tomb entrance,” Constance whispered as she studied the site. “They must not have reached it yet. We’ll have to find a way to thwart them before they do. Perhaps if we…”
A creeping sensation flared at the back of Neil’s neck. He turned—and found himself staring at the point of a large sword.
The blade was steadily held by a bearded man whose layered robes fluttered elegantly in the ghostly breeze that winged across the cliffs. The kaffiyeh scarf on the stranger’s head suggested he belonged to one of the Bedouin tribes who roamed Egypt’s deserts in search of pasture—or things to raid.
The man was gray-eyed, hawk-nosed… and possibly the most objectively attractive person Neil had ever seen.
“C-Connie…” Neil stammered softly, flailing out a hand to bat at her without taking his eyes off the sword.
“Just a minute, Stuffy,” she retorted crossly. “I’m thinking.”
“But there’s, ah…” Neil swallowed thickly. “There’s a very nice gentleman here with a large… er, sharply pointed...”
Constance whirled. Instead of flattening herself to the rocks like a bug—as Neil had done—she whipped into a dangerous-looking crouch, her hands raised for battle.
Her aplomb faltered as she stared at their assailant with surprise. “Goodness! That fellow is unreasonably good-looking.”
“Emshi,” the sword-bearing Bedouin ordered flatly.
“He is strongly implying that we should go with him,” Neil translated.
He was still the one at the wrong end of the Bedouin’s sword, which struck him as rather unfair. Constance was by far the more substantial threat out of the two of them.
“He doesn’t look like one of Julian’s people,” Constance noted thoughtfully.
“Yalla,” the Bedouin elaborated.
The point of his sword descended a bit closer to Neil’s throat.
“Perhaps we ought to…?” Neil squeaked.
“Oh, fine,” Constance allowed.
She raised her hands peacefully and stood. Neil inched himself from beneath the sword and joined her.
Constance’s gaze drifted over the gentleman’s admittedly fine figure. “Do you think he might be a sheikh?”
“How should I know?” Neil protested. “And why does it matter?”
“Just an idle thought,” Constance replied in a manner that did not sound at all idle. “Shall we, then?”
Without waiting for Neil to answer, she confidently set out across the cliff.