Lord of the Silent - Elizabeth Peters [136]
No, not local men. They wouldn’t have the guile to use me as a means of getting at Sethos. They had used Sayid too. He must have been laughing in his ragged sleeve while he bargained with me. He’d been paid to give me that information, and I thought I knew why. They must have tried to trap him before. They had failed because he was too quick for them, and too well-prepared. But if I turned up at his door, innocent and stupid and incompetent—a woman, in other words—I might delay him just long enough.
We were lying flat in one of the muddier irrigation ditches at the time, while footsteps passed slowly along the raised embankment and faded. I hated to leave that ditch. For a few minutes I didn’t believe I could, but I finally managed to get him to his feet and moving.
He hadn’t spoken for quite a while. He didn’t speak again until I finally saw the lights of the dahabeeyah ahead and made the mistake of offering what I thought was a word of encouragement.
“There it is. Just a little farther.”
The violence of his reaction caught me off guard. He pulled away from me and staggered back. “Where are we?”
I told him. He wrapped one arm round a tree trunk and fended me off with the other hand. “No.”
“You need a doctor. Would you rather I found a boatman to take us across to Luxor?”
“You would, wouldn’t you?”
“Yes. Make up your mind. It seems to me this is the lesser of two evils.”
He let out an odd, choked laugh. “Lesser of . . . three evils. No, that’s wrong. Least of three. Staying here . . . the worst . . .”
He slid through my outstretched hands and fell heavily to the ground. I knew I’d never get him up again; except for the spasms of shivering that shook his body, he lay unmoving and unresponsive. I took off my coat and put it over him. He’d been thinking more clearly than I; with the goal I had sought so close, I might have made the mistake of trying to drag him across the dock and up to the gangplank, and then everyone in Luxor would be gossiping about it next day. A visit from me, even at this hour, would not arouse surprise, though. I had already acquired a local sobriquet: “the woman who looks for secrets.”
Though I tidied myself as best I could, brushing the dried mud off my skirt and coat and tucking straggling locks of hair into what remained of my once neatly coiled chignon, the man on watch by the gangplank was visibly taken aback by my appearance.
“Was there an accident, Sitt?”
“Oh, good, you speak English,” I said gratefully. “I lost my way and fell into an irrigation ditch. Will you tell Mr. and Mrs. Emerson I would like to see them?”
“They are not here.”
The fact that the gangplank was still out should have warned me, but I felt as if I had been hit a hard blow in the stomach. “When will they be back?”
“I do not know, Sitt. They are at the Castle of Vandergelt Effendi,” he added somewhat doubtfully. My appearance clearly had not inspired confidence.
I thanked him and turned away. I hadn’t realized how I had looked forward to thrusting my responsibility on someone else; it was like a heavy burden settling back onto my shoulders. There was nothing I could do but wait. The Vandergelts were old friends of theirs, they might not come back for hours.
It seemed like days.
From Manuscript H
Ramses said, with grudging respect, “You got him all the way from the Tarif? No wonder you look as if you’d been dragged