As You Desire (19 page)

“We shall not!”

“You’re not intending to make a habit of debauchery, are you, Diz? Because as much as I’d like to oblige you, my calendar simply cannot accommodate too many of these impromptu rescues. I do have a business to conduct.”

She raised herself up on stiff arms. The hair fell across her dusky eyes, making her look feral and dangerous. “Self-important”—her voice was no more than a growl—“narcissistic, egocentric—”

He ignored her. “Where was I? Oh, yes. The wan, feeble heroine languishing in bed as she awaits the arrival of her champion. Do try to languish a bit more, Diz. You look all tense.”

“And I suppose
you’re
my champion?”

“Well”—he smoothed his hair back, smiling modestly—“that does make twice in one week I’ve rescued you. Doesn’t that qualify me as some sort of hero?”

She gave a most unladylike snort of contempt and flopped back against her pillows. The sudden motion caused a million dust motes to take flight and dazzle briefly in the light spilling from the open doors and windows making up one wall of the tiny bedroom.

She looked disgruntled and comical and enchanting lying there amid the age-faded sheets in this shabby, dilapidated room.

He found himself by the side of the bed looking down into her upturned face before he realized he’d
even moved. Her eyes were dark, mysterious, knowing, and shatteringly innocent. He swallowed.

“I let it pass before, being a gentleman and all,” he heard himself murmur as her eyes grew nearer and his sense of being lost to time and place increased, “but I really must insist on the hero’s portion this time.”

He could hear her breathing. The memory of each velvety soft centimeter of her warm lips on his overwhelmed him with desire. He drew closer still, saw her pupils grow larger, the faintest brush of heat color her throat, surprise surface in her expression. Closer …

“You’re right.” She drew a sharp breath, pulled back from him. He straightened smoothly, wiping his face of expression. Her gaze leapt from his and she lifted her chin, turning away.

“Polish up that Anubis head, Magi,” she called loudly. “Harry here wants a trophy.”

He burst out laughing. “Really, you’re so troublesome.”

She grinned and he reached down, brushing the hair away from her eyes.

“Harry?”

Like satin, or silk …Why wasn’t there a better term for something so healthy and exquisite, something that captured the life as well as the texture—

“Harry?”

“Hm?”

“You … you won’t have to tell anyone about my little … adventure yesterday, will you?”

He let the strand of hair slip from his fingers. “Someone like Blake?”

She nodded eagerly. “I mean, I wouldn’t want your cousin to take a disgust of me, and yesterday was a unique occurrence. I wouldn’t want such an episode to unfairly color his impression of me.”

Blake. Who had everything to offer Dizzy. An ancient name. A manor and its attendant heritage. The respect of his peers.

He dredged up a mock salute. “Dear Diz, Blake shall hear nothing of your escapade from me. God forbid that he should see you as anything less than a perfect little rose of femininity.”

“Thank you.” If she realized he mocked her, she gave no indication. “I have sworn off inebriants of all forms,” she said solemnly. “And you can rest assured that you won’t have to interrupt your business meetings on my behalf again.”

“I’d be grateful.”

“Though how one can call a five-second swap of goods and money in some disreputable alleyway a business meeting is beyond me,” she muttered dryly.

“Business is where you find it. And the alleyway trade has been very good lately.”

A shadow crossed her face. He feilt himself tense. “What’s wrong, Dizzy? Lieutenant Huffy no longer hiring you to write his letters to his wife, the divine Tanya?”

“No,” she said distractedly, “I’m still assuring Tanya she’s the point upon which Lieutenant Huffy’s world turns.” She smiled crookedly. “I suppose
you’ll be leaving for Luxor soon. Picking up that Apis bull. Making ten thousand dollars.” She sounded forlorn.

“The Luxor piece is stone. Cal, so he informs me, wants metal. Hell, I think Cal wants gold, and don’t we all?” he said, watching her carefully. She brightened. “Is that what you were doing at Joseph’s, looking for an Apis bull?”

Her silence was answer enough.

“Is it so important?”

“Some people call eating important,” she said irritably. “I’m afraid I’m one of their frivolous company.”

“Ten thousand dollars is a lot of crème brulée, Diz,” he said sardonically.

“Crème brulée?” She laughed in honest amusement. “Ten thousand dollars is a lot of fruit and vegetables and bread and … Ten thousand dollars would pay the bills, the debts, buy us a house of our own, one with a roof that doesn’t leak and windows that actually shut. With ten thousand dollars I could buy the turkey farm, buy a dress, sponsor a little speaking tour for Grandfather.” She closed her eyes and smiled dreamily, luxuriating in the images her imagination created.

Harry looked at her, all rumpled and content in her raggedy room, dreaming of pleasures she shouldn’t ever have lacked. He reached down while her eyes were still closed and brushed her hair lightly.

“I’ll see you later, Diz,” he murmured, and left.

*  *  *

As the sun fell from its zenith, Harry searched districts of Cairo that Europeans did not see, did not even know existed. He questioned a bookseller, a pair of petty smugglers, looking for an Apis bull.

No one had any leads for him to follow. It didn’t deter him. He was a patient, tenacious man. He had to have been. Otherwise, he’d never have gotten as far along in his protracted education as he had.

No one knew how fiercely he’d struggled to make sense of the written word. Or how, when all the struggles had proven useless, he’d found other ways of learning. He’d badgered and bribed his sisters into reading his textbooks aloud, rhymed names, studied pictures, made up pitiful jingles to aid his memory.

Then, four years ago, suddenly, unexpectedly, he’d discovered that there was one language that, in its written form, was not completely denied him.

He’d come into possession of a section of stylus that he’d offered Simon Chesterton. Like a lover, Simon had fondled the thing, insisting that Harry, too, outline the delicate raised patterns of the hieroglyphics. Simon had murmured the name on the cartouche as Harry had traced it.

Over and over again, Harry had repeated the name to himself as his fingers played over the bas-relief. When he’d stopped, he could
feel
the form shivering beneath his fingertips and he could put a name to it.

His hands had achieved what his eyes could not.

He’d hurried from Simon’s house, the enormity of what he’d done stunning him, making him tremble
with fear and apprehension. There were times, fleeting, unpredictable, when words made sense, when the pieces of the treacherous puzzle fell together and a sentence had meaning for him. But the next day, the meaning was gone. This might be the same thing. But the next day and the next, he’d been able to recall the feel of the cartouche and trace it in the sand, been able to put a name to the pattern, until ultimately he hadn’t needed the crutch of being able to touch the cartouche in order to remember the feeling of it. And in remembering its physical shape, its visual shape became familiar. Amazing. Stunning. He’d been able to see a glyph and read it.

And so, slowly, tenaciously, he’d begun adding glyphs to his vocabulary, painstakingly pressing pictographs onto thin sheets of tin with a stylus and then fingering the raised patterns over and over again until language for him became a physical experience.

It had worked. He could read hieroglyphics. Not perfectly—not nearly as well as Desdemona—but he could actually read them.

“Harry! Psst! Harry!”

Rabi Hakim glided from the shadows near the steps of a disreputable-looking coffeehouse.

“What are you doing here, Rabi?” Harry asked.

“I am following you. I come to ask if you have brought my petition to the
Sitt
. Will she return to me the thing I lent her? Did you ask?”

“Oh, I asked, all right.”

“And?” the boy asked eagerly.

“Forget it, Rabi. You have about as much chance
of recouping whatever it was you gave her as a crocodile has of crossing the desert.”

The boy’s dark face twisted and he spat at the dirt. “Bah! Stubborn woman. I
gave
her nothing.”

“Regardless, she has it, you don’t, and I don’t see that changing in the near future. Stop harassing her, Rabi.”

Some men came up the street, apparently heading for the
kahwi
house. Instead of entering they stopped and eyed him, muttering among themselves. Foreigners did not often appear in this section of the city.

“Bah!” Rabi spat again.

“What’s so important anyway, Rabi? Nearly everything your father sells is fake or common, good tourist fodder but not worth any effort to recover.”

“It is of a personal nature,” Rabi said shortly, glancing in the direction of the men lounging against the low doorway.

Harry wasn’t buying. He tried a different tack. “Where have you been this past month? Luxor? Gurnah?” Had the Rassuls’ discovery of a royal cache in the Valley of Kings been repeated by Rabi’s family?

“No.” Rabi’s mouth clamped shut.

Harry gave up. The boy was saying nothing. “Well, Rabi, unless your father has a gold Apis bull to trade, I wouldn’t be bothering
Sitt
Carlisle again. She’ll have you arrested.”

Rabi glowered at him, flipping the edge of his
khafiya
across the lower portion of his face. “That woman is most unreasonable.”

Before Harry could agree, Rabi had left, his footfall dropping emphatically on the packed earth. Harry was smiling after the boy’s departing figure when movement near the coffeehouse caught his eye.

He turned his head, noting that the idle spectators were dividing into two pairs. They did not look quite so idle anymore. They telegraphed their intention with furtive glances. From long experience Harry knew just what that intention was. He’d been the recipient of such intentions before.

One twosome was approaching him directly while the other pair took off behind the coffeehouse, obviously intending to box him in.

They weren’t, Harry noted, very good thugs. If the presence of a skinny fifteen-year-old lad was enough to delay their assault, they shouldn’t be too much trouble to deal with. True to his assumption, the two burly men stared at him in confusion as he politely excused himself, slipped by, and headed up the street.

Behind him he heard the rapid beat of footsteps as the men suddenly gave chase. Four against one might be these blokes’ idea of fair odds, but it wasn’t his. Harry increased his pace, outdistancing them easily. He trotted onto a main thoroughfare, cursing the midafternoon vacancy of the streets.

There were no crowds to get lost in, no open shops in which to dart. It didn’t overly concern him. Although the shouts of his pursuers still resonated in the deserted streets, they were fading. He loped along, secure in the knowledge that he would soon
be far ahead of his pursuers, his thoughts racing far faster than his feet. Who had hired these men? The list wasn’t all
that
long. There was the Syrian who’d taken offense at being outbid. A Swiss deacon who’d—

“Harry!” Blake hailed him from the opposite side of the street.

Harry swore. Blake was the last thing he needed right now.

He sprinted across the road, grabbing Blake’s upper arm and spinning him around, shoving his cousin out in front of him. “Run! Hurry!”

“For God’s sakes, man!” Blake said, his face suffusing with angry color. He jerked free of Harry’s hold. “What the hell are you doing?”

“We’ve no time for this, Blake. There are some men after me. We have to run.”

“What have you done?”

He didn’t answer. The sound of his pursuers grew louder. What a moment before had been ample time to escape was no longer enough. They’d be here any second. “Damn it,” he muttered, scanning their surroundings.

They were in a small courtyard with two corridors running from it. One, Harry knew, narrowed into a mere slit before widening again and entering the road just above his house. The other corridor ended in a blank wall a few hundred yards up the hill.

“There.” He pointed at the one that gave egress. “Follow that alley. It leads to my house.”

Blake didn’t move. “What about you?”

Harry shoved Blake toward the opening.

“If you need help, I’m not running away again,” Blake said, his jaw setting with determination.

“Of course not,” Harry said, the lie coming easily. “I’ll go up the other. It’ll confuse them.”

Blake frowned, disapproval and contempt flashing across his features. “You’ll go up the other alley?”

“Yes, yes.” The four men appeared at the entrance of the courtyard. They stopped, panting and murmuring among themselves before starting forward.

“Now!” He shoved Blake into the alley. With a snarl of frustration and one last glare, Blake moved forward. Harry jumped back, out of Blake’s line of sight.

There was simply no other way. With his bulk, Blake would need every spare second Harry could give him in order to force his way through the bottleneck in that alley. And he couldn’t allow Blake to get into a fistfight with these men. Blake, with his exalted sense of fair play, wouldn’t last a minute. There were no Marquis of Queensbury rules in Cairo.

Harry had no such constraints. At least he stood some chance of fighting free.

The first man reached him. He grinned. Unpleasantly. “We have been sent to deliver a message,” he said.