Tomb of the Sun King, page 51
part #2 of Raiders of the Arcana Series
“And you have it memorized?” Neil protested. “How long did you look at it for—three minutes?”
“It might have been more like five,” Ellie admitted.
“You really do have a knack for that sort of thing,” Constance commented. “I always said you ought to try a turn on the stage.”
“Nonsense!” Ellie said. “That would be an entirely frivolous use of one’s memory.”
Zeinab’s eyes narrowed thoughtfully. “It sounds as though that spell might simply bury the tomb in sand.”
“But what if they just dug it out again?” Jemmahor protested.
“Presumably, that’s where the ‘drive thy enemy away’ part comes in,” Constance replied confidently.
Ellie felt a quick lurch of fear—and of guilt, as her memory was flooded by the image of collapsing temples and shattering white stone. “But what about in the future? We can’t possibly destroy it forever. It’s… It would be…”
Adam set a steady, warm hand to her back. The strength of it gave her enough fortitude to draw in a breath, forcing down the panic that threatened to choke her.
“‘Drive thy enemy away,’” Constance emphasized. “That doesn’t mean everyone. Just Sayyid’s enemies.”
“Sayyid’s enemies?” Ellie echoed in confusion.
“Me?” Sayyid protested.
“Of course!” Constance returned. “You would be the one doing the spell. You’re still the only one among us who speaks Egyptian.”
“But who are Sayyid’s enemies?” Ellie pressed.
“I should say they include Julian Forster-Mowbray,” Constance replied dryly.
Adam stroked his hand along her spine. At the comforting feeling of his touch, Ellie’s panic steadied enough to allow her a little space to think. “And perhaps… they might also include anyone else who wished to take Egypt’s historical resources for reasons of greed or power,” she added tentatively, thinking of what she knew of Sayyid’s principles—as well as his anger and grief over the ravaging of his culture.
Sayyid had been looking a bit green at the notion of using the staff again, but at Ellie’s words, his expression grew more thoughtful.
“Yes,” Constance agreed authoritatively. “I should say it would.”
“How do you know so much about all of this?” Jemmahor’s narrowed eyes were both skeptical and intrigued. “Are you an expert on curses?”
“I have read a great many books about them,” Constance explained.
“Novels,” Neil burst out with an edge of unease. “You’ve read novels.”
“I… do think a strict rhetorical analysis of the curse text aligns with Constance’s interpretation,” Ellie allowed.
“See?” Constance smiled triumphantly.
“You can’t apply modern Western rhetorical analysis to Middle Egyptian!” Neil protested. “You haven’t the foggiest idea of the social context!”
“Actually, I do not think it is far off, in this case,” Sayyid countered.
Ellie thought once more of a world that she had watched crumble into dust—the legacy of thousands of years and countless lives collapsing into rubble at her feet. Guilt snaked up from inside of her once more. “But to bury it all in the sand…”
Adam’s hand slipped over her fingers. He gazed down at her, his eyes shadowed with both sympathy and understanding. “We’re not in Tulan. And… maybe some stories have to be hidden for a little while, before they can live forever.”
The truth of his words washed over her. Adam was right, of course. The world wasn’t ready for everything history had to teach it—not yet.
But someday, she vowed to herself with a quiet, fierce determination. Someday, it would be. Ellie would do everything she could to make sure of that.
“It is the best choice.” Zeinab rose to her feet. “And it is nearly dawn.”
Ellie was surprised to realize that the eastern horizon was turning a soft pink that rose to merge with the deeper violet of the desert night.
“I’m afraid I don’t recall the actual Egyptian words from that excerpt,” Ellie apologized.
“‘I surround with sand…’” Sayyid mused, frowning. “Nuk ahu sai… teb ament?”
He glanced at Neil for confirmation. Neil flashed him a tired smile. “It sounds right to me, for whatever that’s worth.”
“Driving away,” Sayyid continued. “Xesef-a. And the enemy…”
“Xeft,” Neil offered.
“You always forget your pronouns,” Sayyid automatically corrected him. “Thy enemy. Xeft-k.”
“It sounds splendid to me.” Constance hopped down from her perch with unfair energy. “But perhaps before we do any spells, we ought to cross the wadi. If we are trying to bury this tomb, we might not want to do it while we are standing on top of it.”
⸻
Dawn continued to climb the eastern horizon as they hiked across the canyon. Ellie’s legs ached as she picked her way along the narrow, winding track. The path was the same one that they had taken when they descended earlier that night, but it felt like a thousand years had passed since then.
By the time they reached the opposite side of the gorge, the sky was streaked with pink and gold, casting the wadi into hues of burnished red and purple.
Ellie glanced behind her to where the camels of the Ibn Rashid lingered in a sandy hollow. Most of them were sleeping, their long necks stretched out across the sand. Yusuf leaned against the rocks to watch contentedly over the flock. Mustafa gazed to the south, a soft desert breeze tugging at his quftan and headscarf as his hand rested on the pommel of his sword in a posture that would have given a Romantic painter convulsions of joy. The skinny yellow dog lay at his feet, its head resting on its paws.
“Might have been nice if they had helped out while we were being shot at,” Neil grumbled beside her.
“They only care about the camels.” Adam clapped a hand on his shoulder. “We’re just the baggage.”
Ellie turned back to the wadi. Beyond the shadowy cut that held the tomb, the ridge flattened into a broad plateau of undulating dunes that stretched out to the east, where the flame-red orb of the sun would soon slip over the horizon.
“It is time,” Zeinab declared solemnly.
The rest of them quieted, gathering near the edge of the cliff—except for Adam, who remained a few prudent steps back. Sayyid drew in a breath, steeling himself, and raised up the was-scepter in his hand.
“Nuk ahu sai er teb ament,” he called out in a clear, steady voice. “Xesef-a xeft-k.”
The canyon caught his words and echoed them softly back and forth against its rocky walls until they faded.
All of them waited in an instinctive, reverent silence. A breeze pulled gently at the bottom of Ellie’s skirt, sand rasping over the toes of her boots.
As the silence stretched, Ellie felt a pang of dismay. Had she remembered the words wrong? She didn’t think she had—but then, perhaps the call to the Flame of Isis hadn’t been a proper spell after all.
She tried to think of an alternative. Perhaps something else from the Book of the Dead? There were quite a few protective spells in its earlier chapters, though most of them referred to the decay of the body. But surely if she wracked her brain, she could think of something…
She was filing through her memories of the Spell of Going Forth By Day when the ground began to rumble.
Little stones bounced and rattled beside her feet. Ellie danced back, struck by a sudden terror that the cliff was about to collapse from beneath her.
Zeinab’s hand clamped around her arm, stopping her short. “La ilâha illa Allâh,” she croaked, her voice raw with astonishment.
Ellie looked up—and realized that the desert was moving.
The sands beyond the wadi shifted like the waters of an impossible golden sea, rising and falling in the fiery light of the moment before dawn. With a sibilant hiss, a wave lifted from the plateau and rolled toward them.
It grew as it approached—and grew. The shadow of it fell across Ellie’s boots, then rose to cover her entirely as it raced at the wadi, roiling and building like an impossible tsunami.
Adam’s arm tightened around Ellie’s waist. He pulled her back against him, and she knew that he was also wondering if this was the last moment they would have together before the desert itself ruthlessly devoured them.
The wave fell.
A roaring cascade of sand spilled into the wadi, spraying up against Ellie and the others with a stinging heat. Adam whirled, shielding her with his body as the air filled with a maelstrom of dust and grit.
She braced herself for the impact—for the hot, suffocating crush.
The wind softened. Clouds of sand drifted down around her boots.
The air was filled with a shifting, deafening hiss. Ellie twisted in Adam’s grip, far enough to look back.
The sun had crested the horizon, blazing from red to gold. It spilled a clear, wild light out over the scene that lay before her.
The wadi was gone. Where the deep cut of the canyon had once lain was only a river of dawn-gilded sand. Nothing remained of the crown of high cliffs that had cradled Neferneferuaten’s tomb, save for scatter of jagged rocks that poked up here and there from the settling, drifting mass of sand.
Ellie took a careful step forward to where the ridge ended. Instead of a steep fall into the ravine, the ground dropped only a single step onto a softly whispering dune.
Neil gaped at the transformation, adjusting his spectacles as if that would make it more believable. Constance had a hand clapped to her mouth, her eyes wide with shock and wonder.
Sayyid swayed.
“I believe I might be sick,” he announced flatly as his knees gave out.
Adam darted forward to catch him, softening Sayyid’s collapse into an abrupt sit.
Sayyid promptly leaned forward and put his head between his knees. He held out a shaking hand, which was still holding the was-scepter. “Could someone please take this from me?” he asked a little desperately.
Zeinab stepped forward and gently removed the staff from her husband’s grasp.
Gravel crunched behind them. Ellie glanced back to see Mustafa climb up from his place by the camels.
The early sunlight highlighted the perfect angles of his cheekbones. His hawk-like eyes took in the impossible change to the landscape, then dropped to the arcanum Zeinab held in her hands.
“We must return the camels,” he announced imperturbably. “It is time to depart.”
He left without any further to-do. The breeze tugged at his elegant layers of robes as he returned to the place where Yusuf waited with the saddled beasts, the bells of their harnesses jingling softly.
Zeinab gazed solemnly down at the relic. With a neat twist of her wrist, she plucked the bronze head from the ancient tamarisk.
She tugged the tail off as well, slipping both ends of the was-scepter into the voluminous pockets of her abaya. Her eyes lingered on the unadorned stick of ancient wood—and then rose to the newborn desert that sprawled before her.
Zeinab took three neat steps out onto the gilded river where the wadi had once been and drove the tamarisk rod into the sand.
Jemmahor carefully joined her. Without speaking, she unwrapped a black scarf from around her waist and tied it to the top of the staff.
She stepped back.
A breeze drifted over the ridge, brushing across the newly minted dune and twisting up little eddies of sand. It picked up the fine, soft fabric, setting it dancing as it pulled toward the west.
Ellie’s chest tightened with grief as she realized what she was looking at—the only surviving monument to the final resting place of a woman who through love, loss, and principle had helped reshape the world.
A place now deeply, safely concealed beneath an impossible river of sand.
𓇶
Forty-Four
Ellie slumped against the warm, sturdy back of her riding companion, her eyelids drooping.
“Wake up, Ellie!” Constance said cheerfully, reaching back to tap her on the shoulder. “You’re about to fall off the camel.”
She yanked herself upright, blinking painfully as she held loosely to Constance’s waist. The day had sunk into early evening. They had been riding since dawn, returning along the same desert route that had brought them to the royal wadi of Tell al-Amarna. The addition of Neil and Constance to the party had made them two animals short, so the ladies had been paired up.
Jemmahor rode with Umm Waseem, her confiscated rifle proudly slung over her back. She kept up a running commentary in indignant Masri as they crossed the fifty miles of desert. Ellie heard the word ingilyzy often enough to guess that the apprentice midwife was still railing against the way in which Jacobs had used her as a hostage.
“What does ‘ibn kalb’ mean?” she called over to Neil.
“Er—son of a dog, I believe,” Neil returned awkwardly.
Sayyid snorted. He wore a kaffiyeh scarf around his head, loaned to him by Yusuf after the Bedouin cast a sympathetic look at Sayyid’s bald spot.
Adam rode up to join them. He looked perfectly at ease seated on his enormous camel. Though perhaps not quite as dashing as their exceptionally handsome Bedouin guides, with his bruises and stubble, Ellie still drank in the sight of him like water.
He caught her looking and flashed her a grin.
“We are here,” Zeinab announced, bringing her camel to a stop.
Ellie pulled her gaze from Adam to see that the camp of the Ibn Rashid lay before them. Three new tents had joined the assemblage, reminding Ellie that there was to be a wedding that night. The celebrations were clearly already in full swing, based on the music and the smell of roasted lamb that drifted to her across the evening air.
Lanterns had been lit against the approaching dusk, and a band of children played in the scrubby grass beyond the tents. The clear, high sound of their laughter rang through the evening air like small bells.
The figures clustered in front of the sheikh’s tent were already cast in shadow against the setting sun. One of them detached itself from the others to approach the incoming riders. Something about the tall, exceptionally well-tailored form struck Ellie as oddly familiar.
“Goodness!” Ellie exclaimed, straightening as she held onto Constance’s waist. “Isn’t that your grandmother’s dragoman?”
“Oh drat!” Constance blurted out. “It certainly looks like him.”
Mr. Mahjoud stepped into the light. His elegant ivory suit was set off by a bright red silk waistcoat—and the leather strap of a scabbard hung across his back.
“But is he wearing a sword?” Ellie asked with surprise.
“It is ceremonial. For the wedding,” Zeinab explained.
“That’s what you think,” Constance returned skeptically—and then stiffened as a smaller figure stepped into the light from behind the dragoman.
The form was distinctly feminine and slightly stout with age. Folds of midnight blue silk studded with golden embroidery peered out from under a dark traveling cloak… and Ellie was fairly certain she could feel the force of a penetrating, mildly sardonic glare from across the hundred yards of desert that still separated them.
“Er…” Ellie began awkwardly. “It would appear that he is accompanied by your grandmother.”
The word Constance used in response was significantly less polite than ‘drat.’
⸻
A few minutes later, Ellie inelegantly dismounted her groaning camel and brushed out her skirts. She hurried over to join Constance where she stood before the petite, regal, and extremely intimidating Maharajkumari Padma Devi.
“Aai!” Constance called out with forced brightness. “What a lovely surprise to see you here!”
“And how convenient that you have arrived,” Padma replied dryly, “as Mr. Mahjoud and I were just about to mount up to pursue you.”
Ellie swallowed against a dry throat as Constance plastered a desperate smile on her face.
“Is that right?” Constance asked with a bit of a squeak.
“Mr. Mahjoud, do let Samir know that we shall not be requiring his assistance after all.” Padma made a little wave of her hand in the direction of a trio of flawless Arabian stallions, which were being held in place by a tall, leanly muscular Bedouin gentleman in his mid-forties. His perfectly trimmed beard was spiked with silver while fine lines accented his golden eyes. Beneath his gently wind-tossed robes, his figure was straight and powerful.
He was possibly even more mouthwateringly attractive than Mustafa. He was also bristling with weapons—two daggers at his belt, a rifle over his shoulder, and a pistol in a holster under his arm.
“And who did you say that was?” Constance asked distantly as she drank up the sight.
“Samir is Sheikh Salah Mohammed’s younger brother,” Padma replied.
For a brief moment, Ellie wondered that Constance’s grandmother was already on comfortable terms with a remote Bedouin chief… but then, nothing ought to surprise her when it came to Kumari Padma’s cords of influence. Either she had already been acquainted with the sheikh through some arcane network of royal obligation, or she had simply marched up to his tent and bowled him over with her natural authority.
Mr. Mahjoud reached Samir and delivered his message. With perfect grace, Samir swung himself into the saddle and led the three horses away at a gallop.
Ellie only realized she was still gaping after him when Padma continued speaking.
“Now that’s settled,” she began neatly, “shall we talk about why you ran off without any word after being shot at by a pack of villains?”
“I sent a telegram!” Constance protested stoutly. “And we didn’t ‘run off.’ We were with a party of organized professionals.”
Padma raised a single eloquent eyebrow and allowed her gaze to brush over the company behind them.
Zeinab and the other Egyptian ladies were already gone, striding purposefully toward the brightly lit women’s tent. Instead, there was Neil, wobbling as he stumbled free of his camel. He still wore his bent glasses and open, tattered waistcoat, his brown hair sticking out at odd angles. The canvas bundle of Julian’s sword was tied awkwardly against his back with a length of rope.
