Guardian of the Horizon - Elizabeth Peters [116]
Keeping to the shadows, he moved through the antechambers onto the terrace, observing with satisfaction that the family had got the entire group of guards out of his way. He could still hear his father, and he grinned as piercing soprano shrieks blended with Emerson’s bass bellowing. The night air was cool, the stars were bright, and he felt an enormous sense of relief at being on his own, able to act without interference from the king’s men and—to be honest—from his parents.
The moon was a slender crescent. He knew what he had to do, but it was hard to turn away from the little shrine of Isis, glimmering like mother-of-pearl in the starlight. Anxiety about Nefret gnawed at his mind. However, common sense—and his mother’s forceful arguments—had told him that his initial plan of scaling the wall to what might or might not be her window was as impractical as a fairy tale, for the time being, at any rate. His parents had a better chance of communicating with her, and he had other things to do.
He hitched up the long skirts of his robe, tucking them into his belt, and felt his way down the steep stairs to the village. The darkness was opaque. If he hadn’t counted the steps earlier he would not have known when he was nearing the bottom. He stopped before he reached it and strained his eyes and ears. Hearing rather than sight told him that the guard he had expected was there, huddled on the ground to the right of the stairs, sound asleep and snoring. Obviously the fellow didn’t expect trouble—or a visit from an officer. He stirred, muttering, when Ramses ran light fingers along an outflung arm, up to his exposed neck. Leaving him in an even sounder sleep, Ramses went on along the narrow street.
He felt his way with bare feet, following the mental map he had memorized, not daring to use his torch or light a candle. The houses were dark and silent. Then he went round a sharp curve in the street and saw ahead the sign he had hardly dared hope for—only a narrow strip of light along the edge of a curtained window—but it was long past the hour when a poor villager would have extinguished a lamp, and the house was the one he had noted. He scratched lightly at the window frame, ready to turn and run for it if he had been mistaken. The ragged curtain was drawn aside, exposing a single apprehensive eye and a tangle of gray-streaked black hair.
Ramses pushed the hood back from his face. “Friend,” he whispered.
She extinguished the lamp before she let him in the house and made sure the cloth over the window fit tightly before she lighted it again. It was a single room, with a few pots and a few mats on the bare floor and in one dim corner a pile of what appeared to be rags or decayed matting. There were three other people present—a boy who might have been ten or eleven, a pregnant girl, and a man who rose from the mat on which he was lying. As he limped toward Ramses, supporting himself with a crude crutch, Ramses saw that his face was horribly scarred and that one foot was missing.
“Friend,” he said, and his ruined face twisted into a travesty of a smile. “You came.”
He tried awkwardly to kneel, as the others were doing. Ramses caught him by his shoulders. “Friends do not kneel to friends. Sit, rest. What happened to you?”
“I lifted a weapon against the usurper. It should have been my hand they took off, but I am a skillful potter.”
“Dear God,” Ramses murmured. “You kept the lamp burning. What if I hadn’t come tonight?”
“She said you would come.”
The object he had taken to be a pile of rags stirred.