Guardian of the Horizon - Elizabeth Peters [7]
He broke off and David gave him a curious look. “The years when she lived with the missionaries in the Sudan? What could have happened, with them looking after her?”
It was the story they had concocted to explain Nefret’s background when they brought her back to England. Not even to David had Ramses told the true story—of the Lost Oasis with its strange mixture of ancient Egyptian and Meroitic cultures, and Nefret’s role as the priestess of a heathen goddess. Like his parents, he had sworn to keep the very existence of the place secret.
“You’re on the wrong track, I tell you.” David leaned back, long legs stretched out, face sober. “I believe that in this case I can claim to understand her better than you. I had to make the same transition, from one world to another, practically overnight—from a ragged slave, beaten and filthy and starved, to a proper young English gentleman.” He laughed. “There were times when I thought it would kill me.”
“You never complained. I didn’t realize…I ought to have done.”
“Why should I complain? I had to wash more often than I liked and give up habits like spitting and speaking gutter Arabic and going about comfortably half-naked, but I was at least familiar with your world, and I still had ties to my own. Can’t you imagine how much more difficult it was for Nefret? Growing up in a native village, completely isolated from the modern world…It must have been like Mr. Wells’s time machine—from primitive Nubia to modern England, in the blink of an eye. Perhaps the only way she could manage it was to suppress her memories of the past.”
“I hadn’t thought of that,” Ramses admitted.
“No, you are obsessed with her—er—sexuality. If I may use that word.”
“It’s a perfectly good word,” Ramses said, amused by David’s embarrassment. “I think you’ve gone a bit overboard with the English-gentleman role, David. Perhaps you’re right, but it doesn’t help. Being away from her for a while will let me get my feelings in order.”
“Maybe you’ll fall in love with someone else,” David said cheerfully. “A pretty little fräulein with flaxen braids and a nicely rounded figure and…All right, all right, I’m going. Just think about what I’ve said.”
Ramses put down the vase he had raised in mock threat and sat on the edge of the bed, with his chin in his hands, remembering. David’s words had brought it all back—the strangest adventure of his life. They didn’t speak of it, but he thought about it often. How could he not, with the daily sight of Nefret to remind him of how she had come to them?
They had made plans to work in the Sudan that autumn. The region south of Egypt, from the second cataract to the junction of the Blue and White Niles, had been for ten years ruled by the Mahdi and his successors—religious fanatics and reformers. The Europeans who had not managed to flee were imprisoned or killed, along with a good many of the local inhabitants.
Emerson had wanted for years to investigate the little-known monuments of the ancient civilizations of Nubia—or Cush, to give the region another of its many names. He believed that the Napatan and Meroitic kingdoms had been more powerful and vibrant than most Egyptologists admitted, genuine rivals to the ancient Egyptian monarchy instead of barbarian tribesmen. When the reconquest of the Sudan by Anglo-Egyptian forces began in 1897, he talked his wife into following the troops as far as Napata, the first capital of the kingdom of Cush. Then came the appeal on behalf of Willoughby Forth, a friend of Emerson’s, who had vanished with his young wife during the conflagration of the Mahdist revolt. Emerson had scoffed at the message, which purported to be from Forth himself and gave directions to a remote oasis in the Western Desert filled with treasure.
For once Emerson had