Children of the Storm (39 page)

“What do you need?” Ramses asked.

Nefret didn’t look up. “Your coat. Yours too, David. Splints. Bandages. For starters.”

“Thank God,” Ramses whispered. He had been afraid to ask. “He’s alive?”

“So far.”

Naturally enough, Selim’s two young wives wanted him brought to their house. Nefret overruled them, curtly and coldly. The burden was on her now, and Ramses, aching with sympathy for her, knew she was desperately afraid. She had always agonized over losing a patient. Losing this one would devastate her.

Carrying the litter on which Selim lay wrapped as rigid as a mummy, Emerson and Daoud started along the road home. Cyrus had offered the carriage; Nefret had refused in that same chilly voice. The patient must not be jolted, and the two strongest men could move him more gently than any other means of transportation. Subdued and anxious, the Vandergelts left, taking their guests and Sennia and Dolly with them. Nefret didn’t wait for the rest of them. She mounted Moonbeam and headed her down the hill.

“DO YOU WANT ME TO stay?” Ramses asked.

Selim was lying facedown on the table in her examining room; it had been scrubbed and covered with a white sheet. The lights glared down on his naked body, still clotted with blood where it wasn’t dark with bruises.

“Yes,” Nefret said. “Scrub and put on a gown. You too, Mother. Everybody else out.”

His mother nodded and began rolling up her sleeves. “Selim will have a fit when he finds out we undressed him,” she said calmly.

It was precisely the right note—her unquenchable optimism and her “little joke.” Nefret’s tight lips relaxed a trifle.

“He’s got several cracked ribs, plus cuts and bruises. Not too bad. But . . .” She ran a gentle hand over Selim’s black head. “Mother, put your fingers here.”

His mother complied. “Fractured skull,” she said evenly.

“Depressed fracture. Probably bleeding in the brain.”

“You will operate, then.”

“Mother, I can’t! I’ve only performed the procedure once, and that was years ago.”

“There is no surgeon of your competence closer than Cairo,” his mother said remorselessly. “Would he survive the journey? Would not his condition worsen with delay?”

The answer was engraved on Nefret’s white face.

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CHAPTER TEN The sun rose behind me as I climbed, and my long pale shadow leaped ahead, racing me to the summit. Abdullah was waiting for me in the usual place, at the top of the rocky slope behind Deir el Bahri. Instead of offering a hand to help me, he stood with folded arms, his bearded face grim.

“Will he live?” I gasped, collapsing onto a boulder.

“Thanks to the goodness of God and the skill of Nur Misur. You could have prevented this, Sitt Hakim.”

The cruelty of the charge brought me to my feet, shaking with anger. “No, but you could have. Why didn’t you warn me?”

“There are many futures. The final shape is not known until it takes place.” His thin lips curled. “I never thought to see you behave like a woman, Sitt.”

“I’m not sure I want to know what you mean by that.”

“Tending babies, ordering food to be prepared, beds to be made ready, while a web of evil is woven round you.”

Behind him the path, white in the dawn, went on across the tumbled rocks of the plateau toward the Valley of the Kings. It was a well-traveled path, but in these dreams there was never a human form but ours. A scorpion rattled over a stone, its envenomed tail raised. A long brown shape, thin as a rat’s tail, left a twisted trail through the sandy dust.

“As usual,” I said bitterly, “you talk of danger but not how to prevent it.”

Abdullah let out a little sound of exasperation. “I am not allowed. I have told you before—in attempting to prevent one danger, you may run headlong into another. You must work out the pattern for yourself. There is a pattern, Sitt. You will see it if you try. Come,” he went on, in a kinder voice, “let us look across the valley.”

I let him draw me to the spot where the path plunged down. “The sun is born again from the womb of night,” he said. “See how the light spreads, remaking the world.”

The shapes of mountain and sown land, ruined temples and homely houses seemed to spring into existence out of the nothingness of the night. He was trying to tell me something, but I was cursed if I knew what. My black mood lifted a little, though. His hand was as firm and warm as that of a living man.

“So you have become a poet as well as a saint, Abdullah?”

“Ah, that.” Abdullah looked pleased, but he shook his head. “It is part of the pattern too, Sitt. Go now. Be careful on the path—not only this one, but the one you must follow.”

He had never descended with me, not even a few steps. Always his path led toward the west.

EVEN EMERSON WAS IN NO fit state of mind for work the next day. None of us had got much sleep; it had been impossible for anyone to seek repose until I brought the news that Selim had survived the operation. Further comfort than that I could not honestly offer at the time, but Nefret, who had stayed with him all night, turned up for breakfast to report that he was holding his own, and indeed seemed a little better.

“I must get back,” she went on, looking with distaste at the heaped plate Fatima promptly set before her. “Kadija is with him now, but—”

“Eat something and then go to bed,” I said firmly. “You cannot risk falling ill. Kadija and I will look after him.”

“He will be all right, won’t he?” Sennia raised tragic black eyes.

“Yes,” I said.

“He wouldn’t dare die with your aunt Amelia and Nefret looking after him.” The speaker was Sethos, who had just entered, after snatching a few hours’ sleep on the dahabeeyah. He patted the child’s curly black head and glanced at his daughter, but contented himself with a nod and a smile.

I put my serviette on the table and rose. “I am going to Selim now. Get some rest, Nefret. I will notify you at once if there is any change. You can trust me to do that, I presume?”

“Yes, Mother.”

“The rest of you carry on. Keep busy.”

“Yes, Mother,” said Ramses.

“And you, Emerson,” I began.

“Yes, Peabody,” said Emerson, with only the slightest note of irony. “Are you certain you can trust me to carry out an investigation without your assistance?”

“In this case,” I conceded, “you are probably better qualified than I.”

“Good Gad,” said Emerson. “Probably?”

FROM MANUSCRIPT H

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They had been too worried and distressed the night before to discuss what had caused the accident. Anyhow, it would have been unproductive to speculate before they had all the facts, and the wreckage could better be examined in daylight.

In the end, six of them rode to Gurneh. Walter would not be left behind—although, to the best of Ramses’s knowledge, he knew very little about the workings of motorcars—and Bertie turned up as they were leaving, to offer what assistance he could. They spent a little time with Selim’s wives, who went about the conventional gestures of hospitality with better spirits than Ramses had expected. They knew Selim had got through the operation.

“The Sitt Hakim sent Daoud to tell us,” one of them explained.

Of course, Ramses realized, she would think of that. He hadn’t.

Guiltily, praying he was not holding out false hope, he added additional reassurance. “He is better this morning. She says he will live.”

They had never doubted it. Not with the Sitt Hakim’s magic working for him. Nur Misur was loved and trusted, but a little magic never hurt.

Half the village followed them to the scene of the crash. Nothing had been touched. Emerson had left orders.

In bright sunlight the wrecked motorcar looked even worse than it had the night before. It had gone off the path to the left, fallen onto its side, and slid down before it turned over, leaving a wide swath of disturbed soil littered with broken glass and bits of metal before crashing into the ridge. If that outcrop had not been there, it would have rolled on down to the bottom of the path—and if Selim had not been thrown out before it fell he would almost certainly have been crushed in the wreckage.

Almost all the structural damage was on the left side of the vehicle: the door ripped off its hinges, the windscreen bent and shattered. One wheel was missing; the wooden spokes of the other were splintered and the tire was flat. The radiator had burst and the petrol tank had been ruptured. By now the petrol had evaporated, though the smell lingered.

“Here’s the wheel,” David called from farther up the hill. They scrambled to join him. Emerson swept the area with an eagle eye, measuring distance and trajectory.

“If it came off as a result of the impact, it would be under the car, or lower down,” he muttered.

“The lug nuts are missing,” Ramses said. “All six of them.” Even though he had expected this, he felt slightly sick. “They must have been deliberately loosened. The car toppled over when the wheel came off.”

“It wasn’t an accident?” Bertie looked as sick as Ramses felt.

“Not a chance of it,” Emerson replied grimly. “Selim is a first-rate mechanic, and he kept the cursed thing in top condition.”

A murmur arose from the watching audience. Some of them understood English; they were passing the news on to the rest. A slender black-robed woman picked up the child playing at her feet and hushed it. One of the squatting men lit a cigarette. Otherwise no one stirred. Intent dark eyes followed their every movement as they went over the vehicle inch by inch. Emerson insisted that it would have taken a man’s strength to loosen the bolts. Ramses wasn’t so sure of that; a long-handled wrench might have done the job if it were in the hands of a determined woman who knew something about motorcars.

“When was it done?” he asked.

Emerson fingered the cleft in his chin. “We put the wheel back on day before yesterday. It was the wheel on the front right—not this one. The job must have been done that night. If I had put the damned car in the stableyard, as your mother kept telling me to do . . .”

The lines around his mouth deepened. “It wouldn’t have made any difference,” Ramses said. “The stableyard is easily accessible and Ali sleeps like the dead. Loosening the lug nuts would take only a few minutes.”

“He, whoever he was, counted on the wheel coming off when Selim hit a steep stretch,” Sethos said musingly.

“The car was bound to turn over once it lost a wheel,” Ramses argued. “Wherever that happened. He had to keep up a fair speed, that’s the only way to drive over rough terrain.”

“Agreed. But the damage, to Selim and the vehicle, would have been considerably less if it had happened on a level stretch. It was a gamble—supposing that murder was the intent.”

“Just like all the other cases,” Ramses muttered.

Emerson looked round. “Daoud. I want the motorcar brought back to the house. Collect every scrap.”

“It’s a total wreck, sir,” Bertie exclaimed. “You’ll never repair it.”

“Do you suppose I give a curse about that?” Emerson demanded.

Daoud flexed big brown hands and nodded vigorously. “It shall be as you say, Father of Curses. Selim can repair the motorcar. You will see.”

Emerson’s features twisted into a painful grimace. His voice was hoarser than usual when he replied. “You are right, Daoud. He can and he will.”

“And,” said Daoud placidly, “you will find the man who did this and give him to me.”

“Inshallah,” said Sethos under his breath.

Daoud repeated the word and, after a moment, so did Emerson.

I HAD SENT WORD TO Katherine and Cyrus that morning, for I knew they would want the latest bulletin. Shortly thereafter they came in person.

“We won’t stay unless we can be of use, Amelia,” Katherine assured me, seating herself next to me and taking my hands. “What can we do to help? Is he really better?”

I had just left the sickroom, where Kadija sat like a large ebony idol, her very presence reassuring. “He is still unconscious, but his breathing is easier.”

“It must have been horrible for Nefret,” Katherine murmured, with a little shiver. “The knowledge that the life of someone she knows and loves was in her hands . . .”

“She has always come through when she had to,” I said. “Cool and steady as a machine. She will break down eventually, but not before she is certain he is out of danger. You will stay for luncheon, won’t you?”

Fatima, who had been trying to force me to eat again, let out a murmur of pleasure and hurried into the house. Cyrus stopped pacing—he had been up and down the length of the veranda a dozen times—and put his hand on my shoulder.

“Sure we won’t be in the way?”

“Not at all,” I assured him. “We could use some help with the children. I am very grateful to you for getting Dolly and Sennia away so quickly, but they all know something is wrong and they are, of course, behaving like fiends.”

“How well I remember.” Katherine rose. “Where are they?”

“Lia and Evelyn have corralled them in Sennia’s courtyard. At least I hope they have.”

She hurried off. I motioned to Cyrus, who was still pacing. “Sit down, Cyrus. The men will be back soon. They went to Gurneh to inspect the motorcar. Will you wait for them here? I promised Nefret I would sit with Selim while she got a little rest.”

She was in his sickroom when I hastened in, bending over the bed. Guiltily I began, “I am sorry, Nefret. I was only away—”

She looked up. Her eyes were luminous. “He’s conscious. Kadija came for me.”

I dropped to my knees beside the bed. Selim’s eyes were open. He saw me; he recognized me. His lips parted.

“Don’t speak,” I said gently. “Don’t move. You had an accident and were badly hurt, but Nefret has taken care of your injuries. You are in her clinic and you are going to be fine.”

I thought that answering the most obvious questions would keep him quiet, but he had something else on his mind.

“Did my father tell you—”

“He told me you would live.”

“Ah.” It was a soft, relieved sigh. I have long been convinced that the mind affects the body in ways we cannot define. With that assurance Selim had gained additional strength and will to live. Who could deny the wisdom of a saint?