Mr. Impossible by Loretta Chase (11)

Chapter 11

A FEW MILES SOUTH OF MINYA, A ROW OF ROCK tombs had been carved into the Arabian hills on the Nile’s eastern bank. Miles had taken refuge in the first one he reached. He’d expected to die there.

But three days after crawling in more than half dead, he was beginning to recover. He waited until the sun was setting before exploring his surroundings, though. Superstitious Egyptians, fearing ghosts and ghouls, avoided tombs and burial grounds after dark.

Most of the tombs, he found, were ill-preserved. Some were destroyed, the locals having carried away the stones for building elsewhere. He decided to move to one of the better ones, the next to last toward the south. Its walls contained scenes of agriculture, fishing, shipbuilding, and weapon-making.

By the time night fell, he was starved. The food scenes reminded him that he’d eaten almost nothing in the last few days. He’d nothing in the tomb to eat. Something had eaten his stale bread. He was down to his last mouthful of water.

And so, as the stars came out, Miles took up his basket and made his way in the moonlight to the river, to the place where he’d hidden the little boat.

It was gone.

No great surprise, really. The region was notorious. Why shouldn’t someone steal his boat? He’d return the favor and steal someone else’s. Tomorrow.

Tonight, though, he wanted a proper dinner.

He set about fashioning a fishing line.

IN THE EARLY morning hours, he sat in his tomb by his little fire, cleaning a sad assortment of very small fish. A faint sound made him look up.

A pair of beady eyes reflected the firelight.

“You’ll have to fight me for them, friend Rat,” Miles said.

The creature drew nearer. It was not a rat.

It had long, bushy grey fur and a black tail and reddish legs and feet.

Miles smiled. “A mongoose, by gad.”

They could be pests, killing poultry and stealing eggs. On the other hand, they were also partial to rats, snakes, and other vermin. As a result, they were not unpopular. Some natives domesticated them. This appeared to be one of the tamer ones. It was small, a female or an adolescent perhaps. As it came closer, he noticed it limped.

“That had better not be an act,” he said. “I had a dog once who used to do that whenever he’d done something deserving a scold.”

The mongoose eyed the fish.

“No,” Miles said firmly. “I worked hard for these. Go find yourself some rats. Lots of them about. Snakes, too.”

He watched it warily. Mongooses were very quick. That was how they survived their battles with venomous snakes.

But this one couldn’t be as quick as its fellows, given the wounded foot.

It looked at him. It looked at the fish.

“Rats,” Miles said. “Lots of nice, tasty rats down by the river, I’ll warrant. Oh, and big, delicious snakes.”

The creature regarded him with sad, glistening eyes.

“I’ll wager anything you’re a female,” Miles muttered. He scooped up one of the uncleaned fish and tossed it to the mongoose. “The rest are for me,” he said. “Big journey ahead. Fraught with peril. Need my strength.”

He finished preparing the rest of the fish and cooked them. She ate hers and didn’t beg for more. But she didn’t leave, either. She was still there when he woke up the next morning, just as the sky was beginning to lighten.

But later in the day, when the men came for him, one of them kicked her, and she ran away.

Sunday night, 15 April

CONTRARY TO RUPERT’S hopes and Leena’s predictions, the Isis and all aboard it passed the two nights after leaving Beni Suef without mishap. Thanks to a strong and steady north wind, they reached Minya on the third.

Darkness had already fallen by the time they moored, and stars winked in the deep blue sky. Yet in the west, a beam of light lingered on the horizon for an hour or more. Long after this light was altogether gone and the party had supped and gone to bed, Rupert lay awake.

He vowed he wouldn’t do it again. Minya was a large town, the largest until they reached Asyut, nearly a hundred miles away. They must spend all of tomorrow here, replenishing supplies. While the others haggled in the marketplace and Mrs. Pembroke looked at rocks, he would go to one of the cafés where a man could find dancing girls and other women untroubled by morals.

A short celibacy wouldn’t kill him, he knew, but he couldn’t go on like this. He hadn’t enjoyed a good night’s sleep since the night he’d made the tactical mistake outside Mrs. Pembroke’s door.

He was a man of the world who could tell when a woman wasn’t ready. But once he got close enough to inhale her tantalizing fragrance, once he touched his lips to her skin, he didn’t know what he knew anymore.

All the same, you’d think he’d have settled down by now. But no. It was worst at night, when he’d nothing else to do and no warm body to take his mind off hers. Six days had passed, and the restless nights were making him short-tempered and dull-witted.

First thing tomorrow, then, he’d find himself a warm, willing body, and get his humors back in balance.

He was trying to remember the Egyptian word for dancing girl when he heard the splash.

Instantly he was up, and in another moment he was out of the cabin, onto the deck, knife in hand. Something slammed into him, and he went down.

DAPHNE WAS AWAKE, too, sharply awake, her heart pounding because of the dream, so real that when she first woke, she thought she’d actually done it all, every forbidden, unwomanly act.

In the dream she wore only a transparent veil. She stood in the doorway of Mr. Carsington’s cabin and smiled at him and let it drop to the floor.

He lay on his back on the divan, looking up at her, a light dancing in his dark eyes. He laughed a deep, wicked laugh and beckoned with his forefinger.

She went down on all fours and crawled to him, and over him. She bent and trailed her tongue along the bronzed skin near the opening of his shirt. She let her hands roam over his big chest. She undressed him. She kissed him everywhere, touched him everywhere. She used her tongue as boldly as she did her hands. She took him inside her and rode him until she collapsed, satisfied, exhausted.

She broke every single one of Virgil’s rules.

She’d always hated those rules, because she wasn’t like other women. She had a brain that belonged in a man’s head, attached to a man’s body. It put unfeminine ideas in her head, aggressive, animal ideas. It made her want to go after what she wanted instead of waiting for it to come to her. It made her want to crawl on top instead of lying quietly underneath. It made her want to do as well as be done to. It made desire a wildcat inside her instead of the sweet kitten Virgil wanted.

She lay there, eyes wide, staring into the darkness, her nerves taut as though she’d been caught doing what she’d dreamt.

She knew the wildness and wickedness were inside her. But it was like the experience in Saqqara: she knew there were snakes. She knew they sheltered from the burning sun in dark places. But that was an abstract idea, worlds away from the real thing appearing suddenly, fangs bared, carrying instant death.

She was supposed to have grown tamer, to have quieted with maturity and learnt to rule her passions instead of letting them rule her. But Mr. Carsington had come into her life, and then…

She’d thought he was the genie let out of the bottle, the dangerous force released. But she was the one set free. Discovering who and what she’d become was like lifting the rock and seeing the snake spring up.

She lay staring into the darkness, wide awake, painfully alert. That was why she noticed the splash, then the movement shortly thereafter—in a nearby cabin or the passage, she couldn’t tell. But the sound brought her bolt upright. She grabbed her wrapper and shrugged into it.

She didn’t waste time fumbling about in the dark, looking for a weapon, but snatched up one of her boots. She tiptoed past the sleeping Leena to the cabin door and slipped into the passage.

Even before Daphne reached the deck she heard the muffled grunts and thuds. The rational part of her brain told her to run the other way, back to her cabin. She almost did so. Then she noticed the door to Mr. Carsington’s cabin was ajar. He was out there—in trouble, very likely.

She muttered a quick prayer and burst through the entryway onto the deck. A dark form came at her. Not his. She struck with the boot as hard as she could, and the man stumbled backward. Why hadn’t she brought something heavier, deadlier? Where was Mr. Carsington? Not dead. Dear God, he could not be dead.

She was opening her mouth to call for him, when the man growled a curse and sprang at her again—

And let out a yelp and fell hard upon the deck. He did not get up.

The boat was stirring, men coming to life, sleepy voices calling to each other.

Out of the darkness came Mr. Carsington’s deep voice, cool and calm: “Pray don’t trouble yourselves, gentlemen. It is merely a villain come to cut our throats, rob our stores, and ravish our women. No need for alarm. Mrs. Pembroke has the matter in hand.”

LATER, IN THE front cabin, while she picked splinters from Rupert’s hand, Mrs. Pembroke told him the Egyptians didn’t understand irony or sarcasm in any language.

“Perhaps not, but it made me feel better,” he said. “I think you missed one.” He didn’t know or care how many splinters his collision with the deck had given him. He only wanted her to go on holding his hand and peering closely at it while he watched the lantern light make red-gold and garnet and ruby threads in her hair. It streamed over her shoulders, a fiery waterfall against the muslin nightclothes.

Her bedtime attire was plain and severe, the very antithesis of provocative.

So naturally he wanted to get her naked. Naturally his privy councilor swelled with hope.

“You should not have crept out onto the deck to investigate,” she said, plying the tweezers again. “You should have made a stir. If I had not happened to be awake, I should never have heard—”

“You had a sleepless night?” Was he keeping her awake, then, the way she did him? What a tragic waste of nighttime! “I’m sorry to hear it. That is, I would be if you hadn’t turned up at a crucial moment.”

He couldn’t believe he’d allowed a sullen oaf of a villain to take him by surprise. This was what came of too little sleep and too much celibacy: bodily humors horribly out of balance.

“I was not sleepless,” she said. “I woke from a bad dream. That was when I heard the noise. Splashing. And other sounds that didn’t seem right. Then I saw your door ajar, and guessed there was trouble.”

She’d come to help him—to save him, darling girl. It was touching, really. And terrifying. She might have been raped, murdered.

“You should not have crept out onto the deck to investigate,” he said, mimicking her. “You should have cried out and woken everybody. If I’d been an instant slower to recover my wits, the villain would have had you.”

“In future, I shall keep a knife under my pillow,” she said. “It hadn’t occurred to me before to go to bed armed. Even now I can hardly believe a lone prowler tried to sneak onto a vessel containing so many people.” She frowned. “But it would have been worse had several ruffians come. You had better teach me how to use a gun.”

“Mrs. Pembroke, I’m not at all certain I want you shooting firearms in the dark. A pistol isn’t like a boot. If you’d struck me, thinking I was the intruder—”

“Oh, I knew it was not you,” she said. “He was too short and square, and the smell was completely wrong.”

“The smell?”

“Dirty and wet. From the river.”

She smelled wonderful. So clean…with a ghost of a fragrance hovering about her: smoke and herbs, like incense. Rupert leant in a hairsbreadth closer.

“I could have been wet,” he said. “I might have had a whim for a midnight swim.” Now he thought about it, a vigorous swim before bedtime would probably help calm him. Until he found a dancing girl, that is.

“You wouldn’t be so idiotish as to go for a swim in the dead of night without warning anybody,” she said. “You wouldn’t want to throw the crew into an uproar.”

“In case you hadn’t noticed, we’ve manned our vessel with some of the world’s soundest sleepers,” he said.

“All the more reason for me to be better prepared for attack,” she said. She gave him back his hand.

“A heavy candlestick would do,” he said. “You might easily incapacitate an attacker while still giving him a chance of surviving the blow. On the other hand, if you put a ball through a man, he’s likely to die. And the trouble with this is, you might put the ball through the wrong man.”

“All the more reason,” she said, “for you to teach me how to do it properly.”

THE SECOND LOT of villains had proved more civilized than the first. Miles hadn’t been sure, in fact, that they were villains. They came peaceably enough to the cave, weapons tucked into their girdles instead of in their hands.

Still, the leader Ghazi knew his name, and this put Miles on guard—for all the good it did, when he was outnumbered a dozen to one, and none of the others appeared to be convalescing from a bout of fever.

“This is not a fit abode for you, my learned friend,” Ghazi said. “I have a fine tent and food and drink. You must accept my hospitality.”

“Must I?” Miles said, uneasy at the “learned.” Butrus had believed him “learned” enough to read papyri…and had spoken with happy anticipation of using torture to encourage Miles’s brain.

Ghazi smiled. “I hold no knife to your throat, no rifle to your head. But in the village is the young widow who told us where to find you. If you refuse our hospitality, perhaps one of my men will take this as an insult. Perhaps he will kill the woman for sending us to be insulted. Then her baby will be an orphan. Perhaps it would be a mercy to kill the child as well. What is your opinion?”

“I believe I’d better do as I’m told,” Miles said.

Ghazi smiled his approval. Unlike Butrus, he had all his teeth.

They traveled to an encampment a few miles distant. There they fed Miles a good meal and gave him fresh clothing. This was at least more kindly treatment than he’d received from Butrus’s lot, who’d ransacked his belongings. What they’d expected to find he had no idea, but their grim expressions told him they hadn’t found it. They’d left him only one shirt in addition to what he’d worn when they kidnapped him. Both shirts were filthy and ragged, and the one not on his back remained deep in the cave, with the incriminating remnants of his chains.

This new batch of cutthroats most politely invited him to mount a camel the following morning. He decided it was best to follow instructions lest one of Ghazi’s sensitive minions be offended and avenge the insult on innocent bystanders.

They didn’t tell Miles what their destination was. He only knew they traveled south, and he’d as soon have done so on a mode of transportation other than the camel.

The creatures bore heavy inanimate burdens calmly enough. But his showed a marked aversion to being ridden. The camel made insulting noises as Miles circled it, looking for a place to get on. The animal complained loudly and cursed him bitterly in camel language when he was finally seated. It snarled and growled and turned around to give him venomous looks. Then, as you’d expect, it flatly refused to obey him. When Miles tried to turn its head, it tried to bite his feet. When he snapped at the animal to behave, it promptly lay down. When at last the humor seized it to get up, it made sure to throw Miles back and forth violently in the process.

The journey was excruciating, though Miles’s captors made allowances for his inexperience, traveling no more than eight hours at a stretch. Yet even at this pace, with long stops between for rest and refreshment, they left Minya farther behind more quickly than they could have done by water. Instead of following the bends of the Nile, they rode straight across the desert. Furthermore, they could and did travel by night, without worrying about colliding with boats, sandbanks, or rocks. The only concerns, as Ghazi explained on the first night when they stopped to eat, were bandits and sandstorms. The sandstorms were God’s will. The bandits would quickly learn their mistake, he said cheerfully.

“I believe you,” Miles said. “I only wonder what the great hurry is and where exactly we’re going.”

“I sent men to take you from the boat,” Ghazi said. “They failed. This is why I had to come for you myself. But I have other matters to settle, to the south, and must go quickly to make up for the time I have lost.”

“And if you don’t?”

Ghazi laughed. “If I don’t—” He drew a line across his throat with his index finger. “Like that, or maybe not so fast, and with more suffering, ha ha. The man who fails, my learned friend, is the man who dies.”

Zawyet el Amwat, Monday 16 April

THE DAY FOLLOWING their arrival found Daphne on the opposite side of the Nile from Minya. A ways to the north behind her, a small cluster of hovels signified a village. Nearer at hand a larger and more extensive cluster of chapels and domed tombs signified the district’s burial ground.

She stood at a respectful distance from the cemetery proper, staring at a complicated arrangement of metal pieces whose operation Mr. Carsington was explaining.

He had one of the coveted Manton pistols in his hand and was telling her about breeches and priming pans and flints and cocks and such. She was beginning to understand how he felt when she talked about Coptic.

They had an audience. Nearby stood Udail/Tom, several crew members, and a pair of guards the kashef—the pasha’s local representative—had sent to accompany them. As usual, the Egyptians were all talking excitedly. She couldn’t follow their conversation. She had all she could do to follow Mr. Carsington’s explanation.

“Do I need to know how it works?” she said finally. “Can’t I just shoot it?”

“If you understand how it works, you’re less likely to make mistakes,” he said patiently. “If danger threatens, you will not have the leisure for trial and error or even for thinking.”

Daphne became aware of laughter behind her.

She turned that way. Udail/Tom was pointing at the gun, at Mr. Carsington, and at her, and talking too low for her to understand. The men were shaking their heads and chuckling.

She must have looked as slow-witted as she felt.

She turned back to Mr. Carsington.

She told herself that if she could learn Coptic, she could learn this. But it was hard to concentrate. He stood so near, and spoke so earnestly and enthusiastically—nay, lovingly—of the wood and metal thing in his hand. He even took out a handkerchief and wiped his fingerprints from the polished handle.

“I’ll load it for you the first time,” he said.

“Please let me do it,” she said. “I shall learn more quickly that way.” She would have the weapon in her hand and be forced to pay attention to what she was doing, instead of to the angle of his jaw and the arch of his dark eyebrows and the delicacy with which those large, clever hands caressed the pistol.

He shrugged and gave her the pistol and the cartridge.

“Where is the powder you spoke of?” she said.

He briefly gazed heavenwards, then reverted to her. “In the cartridge,” he said. “You have to open it first.”

The cartridge was made of paper, with the metal ball at one end. She needed two hands to open it. She tried to hand him the pistol, but he shook his head.

“You tear it open with your teeth,” he said. “Try not to swallow too much gunpowder in the process.”

“Why? Is it poisonous?” Would she explode? But no. The gunpowder needed a spark. He had just explained all that. What was the matter with her?

“I daresay it’s toxic,” he said. “But the point is, if you swallow too much, you won’t have enough left to fire the weapon.”

She used her teeth, as he insisted, and definitely tasted powder, which was horrid. She spat it out, but the taste lingered.

Then she simply followed his directions, carefully tipping powder into the priming pan, closing the pan, tipping into the barrel the remaining powder, then the paper cartridge containing the ball. Then she rammed it all home, using the tool he gave her.

She became aware of silence behind her.

She glanced that way.

The men were gaping at her. An instant later, they turned and ran back to the cemetery. She watched them take shelter behind one of the domed structures. Udail/Tom grinned and waved, then trotted after them.

“You were right, after all,” Mr. Carsington said.

She turned back to meet his deep brown gaze, serious now. “About what?”

“About learning to take care of yourself,” he said. “The Egyptians have been beaten down cruelly time and again. What reason have they to stand and fight to protect us—a lot of foreign invaders? It makes more sense to run away. You and I shall have to rely upon each other.”

She could hardly believe her ears. He had been so reluctant to teach her how to shoot. But these were words used between equals, words of trust—in her judgment, her skill—from a man. Her heart leapt—with pleasure or fear, she wasn’t sure. Perhaps both.

He pointed to a large mound some twenty yards away. There were many such mounds of rubble hereabouts.

“Don’t I need a target?” she said.

“Choose a spot to aim at,” he said. “For now, you mainly need to practice loading, aiming, and firing. Later we can work on your sharpshooting skills.”

He showed her how to fully cock the weapon. He stood behind her, and holding his arm alongside hers, showed her how to aim. The weapon was heavy, and she was more than a little afraid of it. These weren’t the only reasons her hand shook. She’d caught his scent. She was acutely aware of his nearness.

“Hold the pistol with both hands, if you need to,” he said.

She did so, and it helped, but the shakiness went deeper than unsteady hands.

Then he moved away, and her head cleared.

“Fire when ready,” he said.

She took a deep breath and pulled the trigger. There was a click and a little puff of smoke, then a blast so powerful that she nearly dropped the weapon.

“Excellent,” he said. “You hit the mound.”

The mound was the size of Bedford Square. Blindfolded, she could hardly miss it. Still, a wave of happiness surged through her. She wanted to jump up and down. She wanted to dance. She wanted to throw her arms about his neck and kiss him senseless—for teaching her how to do something, a useful thing that men knew how to do, a skill that even her indulgent brother hadn’t taught her.

“Try it again,” Mr. Carsington said. “This time, see if you can do it without any prompting from me.”

This time she went through the preliminaries a degree more confidently, aimed, and fired. Again the ball struck somewhere in Bedford Square.

She fired several more times, and it seemed the ball struck nearer and nearer to the spot she aimed for.

“It is not so very difficult, after all,” she said casually, while her heart pounded with happiness. “Now I should like to try the rifle.”