‘Very impressive,’ I said. No point asking again if she could read any of this writing. If she could, it probably told nothing of any value. I thought of the Great Church in Constantinople. Granted, it was a Christian building, and it was smaller than this pile of stone. But I doubted the Mistress could step inside there and not realise the true place of Egypt in the scale of civilisations.
‘Where shall I prepare dinner?’ I asked.
She turned back to her inscription. ‘Do it where you please,’ she said. She straightened up and pointed through one of the inner gateways. ‘Do it in there,’ she added. ‘There is a small room first on the left as you go down the corridor. It still has a roof over it. You will find it convenient in size and position.’
It was a cold dinner of bread and dried fruit. Then again, I didn’t need to share the wine. And at the end of this very long day, I made sure to drink deeply. I looked at the Mistress, who sat on the other side of the fire of dried reeds I’d managed eventually to get alight.
‘No doubt, you have a plan for getting Martin back from the Brotherhood,’ I said. ‘Might it be time to ask what is to be my own part in this?’
‘We have a while yet to go before these matters need to be discussed,’ she said airily. ‘I will prepare you when the time is right.’ She pushed another sliver of dried apple between the folds of cloth that covered her face.
‘I do accept,’ I said – I was beginning to feel decidedly ratty from the pain in my backside and the lack of information about anything at all – ‘that modesty has an eminent place among the feminine virtues. But do you not think this disinclination to show your face begins to border on the excessive?’
‘No man may see my face and live,’ she said, now coldly. She changed the subject to the fitness of Latin as a legal and administrative language. Since she gave no sign of understanding a word of Latin, what she made of my answers was rather hard to say. At length, as the fires burned low, and the sound of the desert winds outside the temple took on a mournful tone, she stood up.
‘It is time for you to sleep, Alaric,’ she said. She motioned inside the temple. In the little room she’d chosen for us, there was a pile of sand in the corner. If I patted it into shape and put my blanket over it, I’d make a fair mattress of it all.
‘Should I suggest taking turns to keep guard?’ I asked. I tried to avoid any note of satire. I probably succeeded. At any rate, the pointed finger didn’t waver. I had thought of asking the Mistress where she would be sleeping. Instead, I went inside and made a bed of sorts.
‘You will sleep,’ she said firmly once she’d followed me in. She lowered her voice and repeated herself: ‘You will sleep.’ It was the tone she’d used to get us out of Alexandria without showing passports and again in the post station.
If it had worked a treat back then, it had bugger-all effect on me now. Sooner or later, I’d have to nod off – and I had packed a box of opium pills, just in case I felt the need of one. On the other hand, I was lying on a heap of damp sand, in a pretty well ruined temple in the middle of a desert, with a being of ambiguous nature, and with a nagging doubt regarding what might be left of Martin. Add to this the increasingly unpleasant moaning of the wind outside, and you’ll appreciate I’d sooner have read that ghastly romance the Mistress had brought along than just fall asleep. I wasn’t at all sleepy. Still, I lay down as ordered and closed my eyes. The fire was burning low just outside the door, and it was soon quite black around me.
I heard her come deeper into the room. Her sandals grated on the sand that covered the stone floor. She stood over me. I lay still and kept my breathing regular. I sensed that she was bending low over me. I grunted softly and shifted position as if I were asleep. She straightened up and stood back. She laughed softly.
‘What a silly little man you are,’ she said. ‘If only you knew what I know, would you be here with me? Or would you put your worthless Martin from your mind and be on the first ship back to your Constantinople?’ She paused. Then: ‘But we must get Martin back – and we will get him. We will get him and much else besides.’
She laughed again, now bitter. Bearing in mind I was still wide awake, her confidence in her powers to command sleep was beginning to worry me. It was one thing to be here with a being of possibly immense power. It was another to be with someone whose confidence in her power was so misplaced. I was relying on her to help do over the Brotherhood. It was beginning to look as if her best contribution would be her choice of fast camels for running away.
‘You are not the one,’ she continued. ‘You are not the one for whom I wait. Yet I have been forced from my solitude to assist in your purpose. Oh, my dear and pretty little man – if only you knew what I know!’
I heard the slow scraping of her feet as she recrossed the floor. I listened and guessed that she was going back out into one of the courtyards. There I supposed she’d be making her own bed for the night. I kept my eyes shut and commanded sleep. I’ve never had much faith in my own power in this respect, and I was more annoyed than disappointed when nothing happened. I lay there a while longer. Then I got up and pulled off the cloak I was using as a blanket. We were safe enough in here, I told myself, and I’d need to get some sleep if tomorrow were to be as hard on the body as today had been. I fished around in my satchel for the lead box of pills. I thought again, but made my mind up. I washed one down with a mouthful of wine. I lay back down and waited to see which would be first to hurry me into an oblivion that would last out the remaining hours of darkness.
Still nothing. I lay there for what seemed an age, calculating price ratios. I felt warmer from the opium, but hardly sleepy. I’d not risk taking a second pill. Instead, I sat up again. I felt round for my shoes, then decided it would be better to do without them. I’d had time for my eyes to adjust to the darkness. There was a tiny sliver of moonlight somewhere overhead. And there were the stars. In the desert, these shone dense and bright. I crept to the doorway, and then out into the inner courtyard. The ground was dark, and I made sure to keep against the walls. I was still dressed in black, and the Mistress, if awake, would need unusual powers of sight to see me as I skulked round the abandoned temple. I shivered in the night chill of the desert. I was glad I hadn’t bothered undressing.
I thought for a while I was making a fool of myself. It was a big temple, with many rooms and courtyards. The most I might do was get lost – that would be embarrassing. Perhaps I should go back to that little room and wait for the opium to do its work. It wasn’t that hard, however, to find the Mistress. She plainly thought I was dead to the world, and was doing nothing to silence her own motions. I heard the rhythmical scrape of sandals on the loose sand. It came from the other side of the entrance to what I’d earlier discovered was the innermost courtyard. I heard the scraping of her feet and a low chanting in what sounded like the language I’d heard her speak on the boat to Canopus. I crept over to the stone doorway and looked carefully round. I pulled back and rubbed my eyes. I wished at that moment I hadn’t bothered with the opium. Was this some waking dream? I thought hard about who I was and where I was. There were no oddities about the situation – other, that is, than the inherent oddity of what I was seeing. I wasn’t dreaming. This being so, what my senses told me must be taken as reliable beyond reasonable doubt. I looked up at the bright carpet of stars that threw an uncertain light, and looked once more.
As on the boat to Canopus, the Mistress was dancing. This time, though, she danced alone and unaccompanied. And this time, she was naked. Her clothes were piled up in a dark heap not two yards from where I was standing. In a slow, circling motion, she danced round the courtyard. She barely moved her head from looking at some part of the reliefs that I couldn’t see in the gloom. But I could see her well enough. The starlight was enough to show that slender white body as it went round and round in its slow, unaccompanied motions.
It was a splendid body. For seeing that alone, it would, in other circumstances, have been worth the risk of discovery. She had good legs, a firm belly and breasts, and a really glorious neck. But I’d been able to guess that already. As I said, she covered up, but did nothing to hide the shape of what she was covering. It was the face that I strained to see in the starlight. I could see every inch of that white and, so far as I could tell, completely hairless body. It almost shone with its own inner light. But her face was either fixed on that patch of relief work, or was covered by the waving of her arms when she did occasionally turn in my direction.
Once and once only I did see her face. It was a brief flash as she turned in my direction, this time with her arms fully outstretched. It really was the briefest of flashes. But that serene and utterly terrifying beauty didn’t need more than an instant to burn itself for ever into my mind. It has never left me. Certainly, if I close my eyes now, I can see it. I see no point in trying to describe what I saw. Words are useful for describing what others can see for themselves, or reasonable compounds of these things. But I do assure you, what I saw has nothing in the common run of things that compares to it. You can turn to some of the more imaginative ravings of the desert saints. If you can find any of these, and understand their language, good luck to you. I’ll not try competing.
I could have hung around, waiting for another look in my direction. But I’d seen all I needed to – and rather
