A River in the Sky (3 page)

Ramses had been aware for some time that he was being followed. The night sky was overcast and the grove of olive trees through which he walked cast heavy shadows, but the faint sounds were unmistakable. He had been listening for them. He slowed his pace, ears pricked. When it happened, the attack was sudden and unexpected, for it came not from behind him but from close ahead. A slight stirring of the air and a change in the shape of the shadow across the path gave him just enough warning to duck. It turned out to be a bad move; instead of hitting him in the chest or shoulder, the missile struck the side of his head, hard enough to make him lose his balance and fall to hands and knees. Though dizzy and disoriented, he knew better than to stay where he was. He crawled off the path and among the gnarled trunks of the trees, where he lay still, listening and waiting for his head to clear.

Not a sound, except for the normal night noises.

“Damn,” Ramses said softly.

The pattern was like that of the last attack—a missile flung, a hasty withdrawal. The only difference was that this time there had been two of them, one following, to distract his attention, the other waiting in hiding. He had hoped this time to lay hands on the assailant, or at least get a look at him.

He returned to the path and switched on his torch. His lips pursed in a silent whistle when he saw the size of the stone that had struck him. It was as large as his head. If it had hit him full in the face…A deliberate attempt at murder?

Probably not, he decided. The fellow’s aim wasn’t very good, and
if he had homicide on his mind he would have chosen more lethal weapons. The first stone had hit him in the back, hard enough to get his attention but doing little damage.

He picked up the stone and went on his way without encountering any living creature except a few of the village dogs. When he emerged from the trees he saw the lights in the houses of the village of Sebaste. There weren’t many lighted windows; people in this part of the world went to bed early to save costly lamp oil. The brightest lights came from the house the Samaria crew had rented for the season. Reisner was still at work. Ramses stopped outside the door and after searching his pockets found a grubby handkerchief with which he wiped the blood off his cheek.

When he went in, his superior didn’t look up.

“You’ve been a while,” he remarked, adding a note to one of the papers on the table before him.

“Sorry.”

Clarence Fisher, Reisner’s second in command, was lying on the divan. He sat up, stretching. “What’s that you’ve got there?”

I might have known, Ramses thought, that he’d focus on an artifact instead of asking, “What happened to you?” The cut had stopped bleeding, but his cheek was smeared with dried blood, his clothes were dusty, and his hair was festooned with dried leaves. He handed Fisher the stone and sank into a chair.

“It’s from the dig,” Fisher said, examining the remains of ornamentation on one side of the stone. “Why were you there at this time of night?”

“I wasn’t. Someone pitched that at me a few minutes ago, when I was walking through the olive grove on my way here.”

Reisner put his pen down and leaned back in his chair. His eyes moved over Ramses’s disheveled form. “Not again!” he said.

“Sorry.”

“No, I’m sorry.” Reisner’s sudden grin bared a large number of teeth. “The remark sounded somewhat callous. Were you injured?”

“Oh dear,” Fisher exclaimed. “I fear I was also negligent in failing to inquire.”

The two of them converged on Ramses. Reisner pushed the matted hair away from Ramses’s temple and ran expert fingers over the area. Most field archaeologists had to know something about medical treatment; accidents on a dig were not uncommon.

“You’ll have a nice big lump tomorrow,” Reisner said coolly. “How many fingers am I holding up?”

“I don’t have a concussion, sir.”

“I expect you are only too familiar with the symptoms.”

Ramses couldn’t tell from his superior’s expression whether that had been meant as criticism, sarcasm, or a simple statement of fact.

“Yes, sir,” he said.

“You don’t have to keep calling me sir.”

“Habit,” Ramses said. “Hard to break.”

He got another of those toothy grins. “I understand. I still have to fight the tendency to address your dad that way.”

Reisner went back to his makeshift desk, took out his pipe, and began filling it. Fisher, clucking remorsefully, handed Ramses a glass, which the latter accepted with a nod of thanks. Unlike his parents, who celebrated the end of the workday with a whiskey and soda—or two—his current supervisor kept a scanty supply of liquor for medicinal purposes only. Not very good liquor, either, Ramses thought, sipping.

They sat in silence for a few minutes, while Reisner fussed with his pipe and Fisher rummaged in the box of medical supplies. The small shabby room, the best the village had to offer, was illumined only by two flickering oil lamps. The gloom hid the ramshackle furnishings, such as they were, and the evidence of what his mother
would have described as typical male untidiness—a pair of stockings draped over a chair, papers spilling out of the rough boxes they used for filing documents.

Reisner lit his pipe and puffed contentedly. “You went out tonight in the hope of provoking another attack.”

“Well—yes, in a way. But I only wanted—”

“To find out whether the first attack was an aberration or part of a pattern. Fair enough. If there is trouble brewing we need to know. Have you any idea what could be behind this?”

“No. Perhaps you would prefer that I resign,” Ramses said.

“What the hell do you want from me, an apology?” Reisner clamped his teeth down on the stem of his pipe. Then he said suddenly, “You probably think I’ve been a little hard on you these past weeks.”

“No, sir.” The question almost surprised him into a truthful answer. Ramses was used to criticism. His father was a hard taskmaster; his frequent outbursts of temper had earned him the Egyptian title of Father of Curses. But Emerson doled out praise as readily as blame, and his shouts of laughter were as frequent as his curses.

Fisher let out a whinny of amusement. “Don’t take it the wrong way, Ramses. George is afraid your mother will scold him if anything happens to you.”

Ramses’s jaw dropped. “What does my mother have to do with this?”

“He promised her he’d keep you out of mischief,” Fisher said, with a smile that held a certain amount of malice.

It would have been hard to say who was more outraged, Reisner or Ramses. Ramses was too infuriated to speak, which was just as well. Reisner gave Fisher a hard stare. Then he let out a sudden bark of laughter.

“The truth is,” he said, “your father intimidates me, but your mother absolutely terrifies me.”

Fisher joined in his laughter. Ramses was not amused. “With all respect, sir, I am not a child.”

“Oh, for heaven’s sake, don’t be so touchy,” Reisner said irritably. “If I had any complaints about you or your work you would have heard them. All I’m trying to do is find out what the hell is going on. We had no such problems last year. You are the only one of us who has been physically attacked. It smacks of a personal vendetta.”

“But I was here last year too,” Ramses pointed out. “And I’ll be damned if I can think of anything I’ve done lately to arouse resentment.”

“I can’t think of anything either,” Reisner admitted. “You’re as familiar with the mores and sensibilities of Middle Easteners as I am.”

“More so,” Fisher murmured.

Reisner acknowledged the truth of the statement with a wry smile. “Have you any suggestions, Ramses?”

Ramses shrugged. “Somebody doesn’t like my face. I’m not trying to make light of the situation,” he added. “It’s just that I haven’t any sensible explanation.”

They sat in silence for a time. Finally Reisner said with a sigh, “Neither have I. Just avoid solitary strolls from now on, will you? And—er—you needn’t mention these incidents when you write the family.”

“I’ve no intention of doing so.”

“Good. Put some alcohol on that cut before you go to bed.”

It was a dismissal, which Ramses was happy to accept. Lying awake on the hard cot, he went over the conversation and began to see the humor in it. He wasn’t the only one under his mother’s metaphorical thumb. It was a large thumb attached to a very long arm.

Something else struck him now that he had leisure to think rationally. A personal vendetta implied a personal enemy, but it needn’t be a new one. He had acquired a few over a short and misspent life;
his parents had acquired even more. Did one of them bear a grudge strong enough to follow him here? He began going over the list but fell asleep before he had got halfway through.

I
DID NOT DOUBT
that Nefret’s concern for her brother was genuine, if unfounded, but I suspected she was exaggerating her distress in order to get her own way. Owing to Emerson’s obduracy we had not settled on our plans for the winter season. Having been banned from the Valley of the Kings by the Antiquities Service, Emerson refused to accept any other site, though several had been offered him. He had spoken vaguely of returning to Nubia, where we had excavated before. Nefret did not want to go back to Nubia. (Neither did I.)

“Well,” she declared, “I don’t really give a curse about the Ark of the Covenant or Major Morley. I am worried about Ramses. You know how he—”

“Yes,” I said, with a sigh. “I do know.”

“I am going to write to him at once.” Nefret’s chin set in an expression I knew only too well. “And demand that he reply by return mail.”

“That may take weeks,” I said.

“Then the sooner someone gets at it, the better.”

She closed the door behind her with ominous softness.

“Now then,” I said, fixing Emerson with a stern look. “Out with it. You have not told me everything.”

“I didn’t want Nefret to hear.”

“Why not?”

Emerson got up from his desk and tiptoed to the door. That is to say, he was under the impression that he was tiptoeing. Seizing the handle, he flung the door open, peered suspiciously into the hall, and closed the door before returning to his chair.

“What you know of the matter thus far, Peabody, might be deduced by any informed person. What I am about to tell you is a state secret, known only to a few. It must go no further.”

Emerson’s is not a countenance that lends itself to deception. The furrowing of his noble brow, the slight compression of his well-cut lips, and, most particularly, the movement of his hand to his chin, which he is wont to stroke when in thought, indicated that he was in deadly earnest.

“You have my word, Emerson,” I replied, as earnestly. “And may I add that the confidence you have displayed in me…I will say no more.”

“Indeed?” The sobriety of Emerson’s countenance relaxed into a smile. “Well, my dear, I take you at your word. To answer your question: Morley is an additional complication to a witches’ brew of a situation. If he starts digging around the Temple Mount he is likely to stir up trouble with the Jews and the Moslems, both of whom consider that a holy site. Someone needs to keep an eye on him and try to prevent him from doing something stupid.”

“And that someone is you?”

“I have a legitimate excuse for protesting his activities, Peabody, on purely professional grounds. He’s bound to make a mess of the excavation, but until he does so there is no legal way of preventing him from going out there. What concerns the government is another matter entirely. The fact is, I spent only a few minutes with His Majesty. After the usual exchange of courtesies he left me to the Director of Military Intelligence and another individual, whose name was never mentioned.”

“How extraordinary.”

“It was a most extraordinary conversation, Peabody. These intelligence people—well, you know how they are, seeing plots and conspiracies all over the place. It seems there have been rumors of an uprising—not a violent affair like the Mahdist Revolt in the Sudan,
but a carefully planned long-range project that may be years in the making. The object is the expulsion of foreigners from the Middle East and the creation of an Islamic state in Syria-Palestine.”

“Expulsion?” I repeated. “That is a rather tame word. Are you talking about a jihad?”

“It may come to that eventually, Peabody. At the present time, military intelligence is chiefly concerned with the part Germany is playing in the region. It has been ten years since the All-Highest, as his fawning subjects call the Kaiser, visited Damascus and Jerusalem and declared himself the defender of Islam. The Turks aren’t naive enough to believe his high-flown rhetoric, but they will use him to serve their own purposes. German agents are swarming all over the region, thinly disguised as explorers, engineers—”

“And archaeologists?”

Emerson nodded, and I exclaimed, “We are doing the same, of course. Archaeologists make excellent spies. Please don’t tell me that George Reisner is secretly working for British intelligence.”

“Then I won’t. Come now, Peabody. In the first place, Reisner is American, with no loyalties to Britain. In the second place, he is the least likely individual of my acquaintance to let politics distract him from his work. Speaking of distraction, Peabody, you’ve done it again. Do you want to know why the War Office is interested in Major Morley?”

“I suppose they suspect him of being a German spy,” I said with a sniff.

Emerson’s superior smile vanished. “Curse it, Peabody, how did you know that?”

“Logical deduction, Emerson. The War Office instigated Morley’s visit to us; the War Office doesn’t give a curse about inept excavations; the War Office is obsessed with spies; ergo, the War Office suspects Morley of being one. A spy, that is to say. Utter nonsense, of course. I trust you informed them to that effect?”

“I haven’t had a chance to do so as yet. I had planned to go up to London tomorrow.”

“I will go with you.”

“You have not been invited, Peabody.”

“Nevertheless, I will go.”

“Logical deduction informed me that you would say so,” said Emerson.

W
E CAUGHT AN EARLY TRAIN
next morning. Finding ourselves alone in a first-class carriage, Emerson took advantage of the opportunity to explain to me the organization of the military intelligence services, and the meaning of various confusing initials. The DMO was the Director of Military Operations, which had, at the present time, several subsidiary branches. MO2 was the branch assigned to cover Europe and the Ottoman Empire, and the only one that concerned us. Emerson would have gone on to tell me about the other branches, but fortunately several passengers got into the carriage at our next stop and refused to listen to Emerson’s strong hints that they go away. In fact I had heard all I needed to hear. Men like to create unnecessary organizations and give them impressive or mysterious names; this usually ends in increased confusion, and should therefore be ignored.