Guardian of the Horizon - Elizabeth Peters [136]
“How? You are a fugitive too.”
He had thought of two possibilities: the woman in the rekkit village, and the arrangement he had made with his parents to leave a message in the ravine. His mother wasn’t the woman he knew her to be if she couldn’t figure out a way of lowering the necessary supplies down to him. He didn’t relish either prospect; but one or the other had to be tried, and the sooner he got it over, the better. He pulled himself to his feet, wincing as bruises reminded him he hadn’t got away scot-free either.
“Where are you going?” she asked.
“To get the things we need. I’ll not be long.” He opened the bundle he had carried. “There’s some food and water left.”
There were also a candle, matches, folded sheets of paper, and pencils—and a small flask of brandy. He scribbled a message on one of the papers and tucked it into his belt.
The huddled shape looked as if it had shrunk. “Please. Leave the candle.”
So small a light couldn’t be seen from without. “All right. Just be careful it doesn’t fall over and set the dried leaves ablaze.”
“If you don’t come back, I will die here.”
“That should give me sufficient incentive,” Ramses said caustically. “I’m sorry, Daria, I didn’t mean to sound…If I don’t come back, you may as well give yourself up.”
He left everything with her except the rope, the matches, and his knife, which he had every intention of using if anyone got in his way. He wasn’t sure why he was so angry. Uncertainty, for one thing, he supposed; he was making it up as he went along, and he was tired, tired of skulking in shadows, tired of his own indecisiveness.
The second of the two alternatives seemed safer, and he was anxious to communicate with his parents. They were so damned unpredictable, they might go looking for him if he didn’t report.
Guided by a significant lighted window, the only one in that block of apartments, he made his way to the far side of the ravine, and blessed Daoud again for thinking of the rope as he lowered himself down. The uneven floor of the narrow canyon was littered with broken pottery and rotting food; the servants must be in the habit of pitching refuse over the wall. He was about to fumble among the trailing vines when he saw it—a pale, dangling shape like that of a hanged man.
It turned out to be one of his own shirts, tucked neatly into a pair of trousers and pinned in place, with boots tied by their laces to the legs of the trousers. After he had recovered from the sight, he realized there was writing on the back of the shirt. It was too dark for him to read the words. After replacing it with his own message, he stood for a moment, looking up at the lighted window and wishing he dared take the risk of calling to them. His self-confidence was as low as it had ever been; all he could think of were the innumerable mistakes he had made over the course of a misspent life. Was this another one? Had he done the right thing, or made matters even worse?
He ran into a slight snag on the way back; one of the men who guarded the entrance to the cemetery was awake, yawning and stretching. Ramses gripped his knife, but forced himself to wait, motionless in the shadow of the pylon. There was at least one other guard, his snores reverberated. A scuffle might waken him.
Finally the insomniac stretched out and after a while his regular breathing told Ramses he could go on. Once inside the deserted villa he lit a match and read the message. The firm handwriting was his mother’s and he smiled a little when he saw she had used pencil instead of pen. No sense in ruining a perfectly good shirt.
“We have four more days. Must all escape and join Tarek. No war!” Then came an obvious afterthought: “Captain Moroney here. Says it is not his button. Suspect MacFerguson also here.”
Ramses remembered Moroney, but who the hell was MacFerguson?
Four more days. No war. She was thinking along the