The Falcon at the Portal - Elizabeth Peters [172]
“Do you think Horus looks pretty when he is watered?” Ramses asked. The cat gave him a sour look.
But as he responded to the child’s chatter, part of his mind wandered back to the sound that had wakened him. If it wasn’t Fatima who had looked in to see if he wanted food or drink, who was it? Or had he imagined that sly soft little sound?
When Fatima came back with tea and food and milk for Sennia, he said casually, “I suppose the others are still at the dig.”
“All but Geoffrey Effendi. He said he did not feel well, and went to his room to rest. I hope it is not a bad sickness. He is not a strong man.”
“He’s stronger than he looks,” Ramses said. “No, little bird, cats do not like jam. And don’t eat it from the same spoon you put in Horus’s mouth.”
She was a distraction and a delight, the innocent cause of his misery and one of the few things that allowed him to forget it for a while. No doubt his mother could compose a pithy aphorism on the irony of that.
After Sennia had been carried off for a bath and a change of clothing he was too restless to sit still, so he went to the stable. With no particular goal in mind he headed up into the desert; the emptiness of sand and sky always helped him to think more clearly. This time he could have wished he wasn’t thinking straight, that he was misled by anger and jealousy; but the evidence was mounting, and all of it pointed to the same man. He hoped he was wrong. Of all the solutions to his personal problems, this would be the worst.
He let Risha set his own pace, paying little attention to his surroundings until a cool wind lifted the hair on his forehead and a sudden twilight turned the air gray. Looking up, he saw the approaching storm; it was still some distance away, but it looked like a bad one. Undirected, Risha had headed for the same place they had been so often; they were less than a mile from Zawaiet el ’Aryan. He decided he might as well go on and lend a hand if they were still there. Knowing his father, he thought they probably were.
He was within sight of the little group when the first shot whistled past, so close he could have sworn he heard the wind of its passage. His hands tightened on the reins, but Risha, who had better sense than he, stretched out and broke into his long, smooth gallop. By the time his agitated family had done arguing and interrogating him and inspecting him for bullet holes, there was no sense in searching for the rifleman.
He and David took the horses to the stable and helped rub them down. He learned there what he had expected to learn. It still wasn’t proof positive, he told himself. Apparently none of the others shared his suspicions; his father would have gone straight after Reynolds if his mother had not prevented him. Obeying her orders, he and David went to his room to change their wet clothing.
“It must have been Jack Reynolds,” David said, while Ramses rummaged through the wardrobe looking for dry garments.
“The rumors mention an Englishman.”
“That means little or nothing. Wardani used the words sahib and effendi and Inglizi interchangeably; they indicate a social class rather than a particular nationality.”
“I seem to be out of clean shirts,” Ramses muttered.
“A lot of your things are at the Amelia” David left his wet clothes lying on the floor and went to assist in the search. He pulled out a dresser drawer and reached in. “What’s this?”
He had found the little statue of Horus. “Maude gave it to me,” Ramses said. “It was a Christmas gift. She bought it in the suk, I suppose.”
“Charming Western naiveté,” David said.
“What do you mean?”
“Isn’t that what Europeans say of Egyptian work? Primitive, naive? All that means is that they don’t understand, or care to understand, that particular artistic tradition. No Egyptian made this.”
Ramses tossed the galabeeyah he had removed from the wardrobe across a chair and went to David.
“How do you know?”
“Hard to put in words. The workmanship is rather