The Golden One - Elizabeth Peters [53]
“I don’t know yet.” Nefret shrugged helplessly. “But I’ll have to find out, won’t I? Bring it along, Ramses.”
As I might have expected, Sennia was the first one down next morning. Gargery was trying to get her to eat her porridge—never an easy task—when we entered the dining room. She bounced up from her chair and ran to me. “How is the kitty? When can I see it?”
“I don’t know, Sennia. Ramses and Nefret have not come yet. Sit down and eat your breakfast. Where is Horus?”
“Under her chair,” said Gargery grimly. “As usual. Madam, what is all this about another cat? We don’t need one. We don’t need that one,” he added, with a baleful look at Horus.
“It is only a little cat,” said Sennia. “It is sick, but Aunt Nefret is going to make it well.”
Her bright, confident face made my heart sink. What she expected, in her innocent fashion, might be impossible, even for Nefret. Emerson cleared his throat. “Er—Sennia, the cat was—er—very sick. It may not . . .”
“There they are!” Sennia was out of her chair again, running to them. She threw her arms round Nefret’s waist. “Why didn’t you bring the kitty, Aunt Nefret?”
“It needs to rest,” Nefret said, after the obligatory grunt of expelled breath. “But it is better. Much better.”
Emerson’s face displayed his relief. He is such a sentimentalist about children, he could not bear to see Sennia disappointed. He did not even object when the entire conversation centered on the cat, for Sennia would talk of nothing else. She demanded a detailed diagnosis.
“Malnutrition and dehydration,” Nefret said. “With the attendant infections. The little creature has quite a will to live, though. The first thing it did was stagger to the food we put out for it and gulp it down. Then it tried to climb up Ramses’s leg.”
Sennia laughed. “Did it scratch, Ramses?”
“Not really. Its claws aren’t any longer than your eyelashes.”
“It thinks Ramses is its mother,” Nefret said. Sennia chortled, and Nefret added, “He sat up most of the night holding it.”
“It needed to be kept warm,” Ramses mumbled, looking embarrassed. “And it wouldn’t stay in its basket.”
“I am going to see it now,” Sennia announced. “You want to see it, too, don’t you, Gargery?”
Gargery tried to think of something that would express his feelings to the rest of us without betraying them to Sennia. He failed. “Yes,” he said resignedly.
The kitten served one useful purpose. I did not want to take Sennia with us on our first day at the dig, and she would have insisted on coming but for the distraction. Nefret offered to give her her first lesson in bones after the patient had been inspected, and Sennia promised to leave it alone the rest of the day. A convalescent does not fare well with an enthusiastic child poking at it, however good the child’s motives, and I took it for granted that the creature was not housebroken.
Naturally Ramses stayed with them, and Sennia kindly agreed to let Jumana join her biology lesson. They were to bring the horses and meet us later at Deir el Medina, where Selim and Daoud were waiting for us with the men they had hired.
Few tourists visit the site, which is tucked into a little valley in the hills of the West Bank. The only attraction for them is the Ptolemaic temple at the north end of the valley. It is a nice enough temple in its way, but it is too late in date to interest us. The people who do go there follow the route that includes more popular tourist attractions, from Deir el Bahri to Medinet Habu.
There is another path, however, that ascends one of the hills enclosing the settlement and continues at a considerable elevation, passing above the temples of Deir el Bahri on its way to the Place of Truth, as the Valley of the Kings was called in ancient times. We had often followed part of this route, climbing the slope behind the temple and going on to the Valley—or, as we had done two days earlier, striking off on that hair-raising climb over the plateau.
It was not the easiest way of getting to Deir el Medina, but Emerson proposed we follow it that first morning.