‘And for getting out of it, thanks to you.’ Now I saw a stain of red on his robes. ‘You’ve been wounded!’
‘Bah! Another scratch from a nest of snakes, enough to keep me from finishing the coward, yes, but not enough to kill me.’ Yet he was leaning now, clearly hurt. ‘Someday I will catch him alone, and then we’ll see who is scratched. Or perhaps fate has another misery in store for him. I can hope.’
‘You need to get that dressed!’
‘Let me look at it,’ Astiza said.
He stiffly dismounted, breathing shallowly and embarrassed as the woman sliced open the robe at his torso to inspect the damage.
‘The ball passed through your side as if you were a ghost, but you’re losing blood. Here, we’ll use your turban to bind it. This is a serious wound, Ashraf. You’re not going to be riding for a while, unless you’re anxious to get to paradise.’
‘And leave you two fools alone?’
‘Maybe that, too, the gods intended. Ethan and I must finish this.’
‘If I leave him for a moment he puts himself in peril!’
‘I’ll look after him, now.’
Ashraf considered. ‘Yes, you will.’ Then he whistled. Two fine Arabian mounts came trotting over the rise, saddled and with manes and tails flouncing. They were better horses than I’d ever had. ‘Take these, then, and give a prayer for the men who recently rode them. Here is a sword from Murad Bey, Gage. If any Mamelukes try to take you, show it and they will leave you alone.’ He glanced at Astiza. ‘Are you going back to the pyramids?’
‘That’s where Egypt begins and ends,’ she said.
‘Ride hard, for the French and their Arabs will be after you soon enough. Safeguard the magic you bear or destroy it, but don’t let it fall into the hands of your enemies. Here, a robe against the sun.’ He gave her a cape, then turned to me. ‘Where’s your famous rifle?’
‘Silano stuck his sword in it.’
He looked puzzled.
‘It was the oddest thing. Jammed his rapier down the barrel, and I was so angry that I pulled the trigger and my oldest friend blew up. Served him right when Astiza pulled a roof down on him, but the bastard survived.’
Ashraf shook his head. ‘He has the luck of the demon god Ras al-Ghul. And someday, friend, when the French are gone, you and I will sit and try to make sense of what you just said!’ He painfully mounted and slowly rode down to meet the others, amid the wreckage and the bodies of war.
We galloped north as he instructed, following the river. It would be more than two hundred miles back to the pyramids. There were satchels of bread, dates, and water on the horses, but by sunset we were exhausted from travel and tension, having had no sleep the night before. We stopped at a small village by the Nile and were given shelter in the simple hospitality Egyptians habitually display, falling asleep before we could finish our dinner. The charity we were shown was astounding, given that these people were taxed unmercifully by the Mamelukes and looted by the French. Yet what little these poor peasants had they shared with us, and after we fell asleep they covered us with their own thin blankets, after dressing the cuts and scratches we’d received. As we’d instructed, we were roused two hours before first light and pushed north again.
The second night found us sore but somewhat more recovered, and we took our own private shelter in a riverside orchard of palms away from houses, humans, or dogs. We needed some time to ourselves. Since the attack of the Mamelukes we’d seen no forces from either side, just timeless villages in their timeless cycle. The inhabitants were working from reed rafts because the risen Nile had flooded their fields, bringing fresh silt from the mysterious centre of Africa.
I used some flint and Ash’s sword to make a fire. As the night deepened, the nearness of the rolling Nile seemed reassuring, a promise that life would go on. Both of us were in shock from the events of the past days and weeks, and we sensed this interlude of quiet wouldn’t last long. Somewhere to the south, Bin Sadr and Silano were no doubt discovering that we weren’t dead and starting their pursuit. So we were grateful for the quiet of the stars, the cushioning embrace of sand, and the lamb and fruit we’d been given by the last village.
Astiza had taken the medallion out again to wear, and I had to admit it looked better on her than me. I’d decided I trusted her, because she could have warned Silano of my tomahawk, or fled from me with the talisman after the pillars came down, or left me after the river fight. She hadn’t, and I remembered what she’d said on the boat: that she hadn’t loved him. I’d been turning the phrase over in my head ever since, but still wasn’t sure what to do with it.
‘You’re not certain exactly what secret door we’re looking for?’ I asked her instead.
She smiled sadly. ‘I’m not even sure it should, or can, be found. And yet why would Isis allow us to come this far, if not for a reason?’
In my experience, God didn’t care much about reasons, but I didn’t say that. Instead, I gathered up my courage. ‘I’ve already found my secret,’ I said.
‘What?’
‘You.’
Even by the light of the fire I could see her blush as she turned away. So I put my hand to her cheek and turned her back toward me.
‘Listen, Astiza, I’ve had a lot of hard desert miles to think. The sun had the breath of a lion, and the sand burnt through my boots. There were days when Ashraf and I lived on mud and fried locusts. Yet I didn’t think of that. I thought of you. If this Book of Thoth is a book of wisdom, maybe it would simply say to find what you already have, and to enjoy this day instead of worrying about the next one.’
‘That doesn’t sound like my restless wanderer.’
‘The truth of the matter is, I fell in love with you, too,’ I confessed. ‘Almost from the very beginning, when I pulled the wreckage off you and saw you were a woman. It was just hard to admit to myself.’ And I kissed her, foreigner though I was, and damn if she didn’t kiss back, more greedily than I expected. There’s nothing like surviving a scrape or two to bring a man and woman together.
Isis, it turns out, is not as prudish a god as some of the more modern ones, and Astiza seemed to have as good an idea of what she wanted as I did. If the medallion looked fine on her tattered harem clothes, it looked positively glorious on her breast and belly, so we let the moon clothe us, made a little bed of our meagre things, and lived for this night as if another might never come.
The trinket did prick when it got between us, so she took it off and left it for a time in the sand. Her skin was as perfect as the sculpted desert, her scent as sweet as the holy lotus. There is more sacred mystery in the soul and presence of a woman than in any dusty pyramid. I worshipped her like a shrine and explored her like a temple, and she whispered in my ear, ‘This, for one night, is immortality.’
Later, lying on her back, she let the medallion’s chain curl on her fingers and pointed to the sky and its crescent moon. ‘Look,’ she said. ‘The knife of Thoth.’
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
Our ride back north toward Cairo was a journey through layers of time. Grassy mounds marked the remains of ancient cities, peasants told us. Rolling dunes sometimes revealed the tip of a buried temple or sanctuary. Near Minya we came across two colossal stone baboons, fat and polished, their serene gaze toward the rising sun. They were twice the height of a man, draped in what looked like feathered cloaks, as majestic as nobles and as timeless as the Sphinx. The gigantic apes were manifestations, of course, of the mysterious Thoth.
We skirted hundreds of mud-brick villages by riding on the desert fringe next to ranks of date palms, as if the green sward were a sea lapping at a beach. We passed a dozen pyramids I hadn’t seen before, some crumbled into little more than hills and others still showing their original geometry. Fragments of temples littered the sand around them. Ruined causeways sloped down to the lush green bottomland of the Nile. Pillars jutted into the air, holding up nothing. Astiza and I moved in our own small bubble, aware of our mission and possible pursuit, yet oddly content.
