Children of the Storm - Elizabeth Peters [136]
Ramses was the first to reach him. He searched for a pulse in the limp wrist. It was slippery with blood and his hands were shaking. He couldn’t find one.
Nefret shoved him out of the way. “Don’t anybody touch him. Stay back. Get out of the light, damn it! Ramses, make them back off. Keep Rabia and Taghrid away, they mustn’t see him like this.”
He could hear Selim’s wives keening and begging to go to him; his Aunt Evelyn was reassuring them, her voice calm and authoritative. His mother, of course, was already on the scene, shining a torch onto the broken body. She was the only one who’d had the sense to think of it. Ramses could almost have wished she had not. In its direct beam the bloodstains sprang to life, wet and red and glistening.
“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.
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