Lord of the Silent - Elizabeth Peters [78]
“You are looking for the Mudir? He is not here. He left me to stand guard.”
Over what? Ramses wondered. The workmen’s huts had yielded no treasures, only a few objects the former occupants had left, and the tombs were those of the workers themselves—relatively humble sepulchres, most of them robbed in antiquity. There had been one spectacular exception, that of the tomb of a royal architect, which an Italian expedition had discovered in 1906 with its grave goods intact, but another such find was highly unlikely.
“Have thieves been at work here?” he asked. He remembered the man now; he had once worked for them at Drah Abu’l Naga. Like so many of the locals, who could not afford medical or dental care, he had aged rapidly, his face wrinkled, his beard graying.
“No. But if they come, I will be ready for them!” He flexed stringy arms and bared decaying teeth in a threatening grimace.
He had ignored Jumana, but when she began scribbling in her omnipresent notebook, he gave her an uneasy glance. “What is she writing?” he demanded.
“I don’t know,” Ramses said truthfully. “Tell the Mudir we were here and will come again.”
“Do I ask questions now?” Jumana demanded. “I have much to say.”
“I’m sure you do,” Ramses said. “Nefret, are you ready for a rest?”
Her hand shielding her eyes, she was scanning the slopes of the hills. “Perhaps it was one of the workmen’s tombs the thief was clearing.”
“Lansing said it was behind the temple, but he may have been mistaken. Shall we have a look?”
Jamil, who was carrying the water bottles, shifted the bag to his left shoulder. “It is a hard climb, and there is nothing to see,” he announced. “The tombs are empty.”
“You’ve been in them, have you?” Ramses’s tone was not accusatory. Jamil grinned and stroked his beloved mustache.
“I and many others, Brother of Demons.”
“ ‘ ’Tis true ’tis pity, and pity ’tis, ’tis true,’ ” Ramses said. He didn’t bother to translate; Shakespeare would be wasted on Jamil. He went on, addressing Nefret, “Weigall finally got round to installing gates over the most interesting of the tombs, but not before the reliefs had been damaged.”
The climb was not precipitous, but it was steep and long, involving a scramble up the loose stones at the base of the cliff, and by the time they reached the crumbled remains of a small mud-brick pyramid Ramses had had second thoughts. “This is wasted effort. I haven’t seen any signs of recent disturbance, and we may not be in the right place.”
“Let’s rest a bit before we go back.” Nefret dropped gracefully into a sitting position, legs crossed, and beckoned to Jamil. “It’s not a very thrilling site. All those poor little battered pyramids! Not even Mother would get excited about them. Where are the tombs of the Saite princesses?”
“The what? Oh, those.” Ramses handed Jumana one of the water bottles. “They weren’t the ladies’ original tombs.”
“Where were they buried, then?”
“Medinet Habu. You can still see their chapels, or parts of them. The tombs themselves are empty. Two of the sarcophagi were dragged all the way over here and up the hill, by people who wanted to use them for their own burials.”
Seeing that Jumana was watching his mouth as if pearls of wisdom were about to fall from it, he sighed and prepared to do his pedagogical duty. “The princesses were the high priestesses of Amon at Thebes during the last dynasties. They had the titles of God’s Wife of Amon and Adorers of the God—”
“Adoratrixes,” said Nefret, through a mouthful of bread.
“Far be it from me to deny a lady her feminine ending,” said Ramses, “but I find that title frightfully clumsy. Anyhow, the ladies were daughters or sisters of the pharaoh, sworn to celibacy—er—sworn to remain unmarried, for they were the brides of the god. Each of them adopted a successor, who was also a royal princess.”
“So they were very powerful and very veeery rich,” murmured Jumana. “If they were not in their tombs at Medinet Habu or in their sarcophagi, where are they?”
“A good question,” Ramses admitted. “Three