Lord of the Silent - Elizabeth Peters [72]
And that is why she dreams of it, Ramses thought. He found it rather moving, though, and because he was embarrassed to admit it, he said practically, “I wish I could dream about him; I’d ask for advice on where to look for our hypothetical tomb robbers.”
“My dear boy, they aren’t hypothetical. Just because we haven’t found them yet—”
“It’s not likely that we will. This whole trip is a waste of time. Do you suppose I don’t know why everyone conspired to get me to Luxor?”
“Do you mind?”
“Mind being alone with you, sans friends, family, and Sennia? I expect I can endure it a little longer.” She twined her fingers more tightly through his, and he went on, “If we were looking for one mastermind, like Sethos or Riccetti, we might have a chance of solving the case, but this is the same old business that’s always gone on here. There are probably a dozen people involved, all local men and all extremely good at their trade. Catching one or two of them wouldn’t put a stop to the thefts.”
He waited for her to contradict him, hoping she would—and hoping she wouldn’t—but she accepted his statement without appearing to question it. “A more sensitive woman might consider she’d been insulted by that remark about wasting time,” she remarked, dimpling. “It’s true you’ve only kissed me in eleven tombs—”
“So far.” He put his arm round her and kissed the dimples and her smiling mouth. It might have seemed incongruous, even profane, in the silence of that deserted cemetery, but if he had been given to fancies, which of course he was not, he might have imagined he heard a deep, satisfied chuckle in a well-remembered voice.
So they climbed the cliff behind Deir el Bahri at dawn and stood in silence watching the sunrise, and wandered around the village of Gurneh, where ancient tombs stood side by side with modern houses, and he kissed her in ten more burial chambers. Getting into several of them were exercises in endurance, since they were partly filled with rubble and popular with bats. On only one facade did he find the strange cryptogram. The tomb, which had belonged to the vizier Ramose, was of great historical importance and outstanding beauty. Ramose had served under Amenhotep III and his heretic son, and one wall of the tomb showed the latter king in two startlingly different ways: on the left, King Amenhotep IV, depicted in conventional Egyptian style, with the goddess Maat; on the right, the same man after he had changed his name to Akhenaton and abandoned the classic canons of Egyptian art and the gods of his fathers in favor of the one god, Aton.
If Nefret had observed the cryptogram she made no comment. Ramses was not surprised to see it there. The reliefs of the vizier and his family were among the most exquisite in Egypt. They were particular favorites of his mother.
Among their other obligations was to be royally entertained by various members of the family. When they returned to the Amelia one evening after an interminable dinner given in their honor by Yusuf, Nefret flung herself down on the divan in the saloon and groaned.
“I can’t go on eating like this! And did you see the way Jumana was glowering at us? We promised we’d let her come with us, and we haven’t.”
“I will be damned if I am going to feel guilty about not encumbering myself with that child.” Ramses stretched out next to her, wondering if he would ever want to eat again. “But perhaps it’s time we got to work.”
“We’ve been working,” Nefret protested. “Think of all those bat-infested tombs we’ve explored.”
“In a rather haphazard fashion. We haven’t been on the east bank at all.”
Nefret pulled her feet up and knelt beside him. “Why should we? The tombs are all on the west bank.”
“Well, we ought to have a talk with Legrain. His storage magazines were robbed. And we could try terrorizing the antiquities dealers.”
“Not for another day or two. We still have a lot of tombs to visit.” She slid her fingers