“The master is dead,” Ghazi said. “I am master now.”
Daphne thought quickly.
She remembered what Noxley had said about his men: thinking is not what they do best.
“Very well,” she said in Arabic. “Congratulations. You’re welcome to be master. I’m sure you’ll make a fine one. But what has it to do with us? It was the Golden Devil who wanted me — for a bride. It was the Golden Devil who wanted my brother — to help read the ancient writing. Surely you can find your own brides? You don’t need to steal them.” She fervently hoped Noxley hadn’t told anybody how much his future spouse was worth in pounds, shillings, and pence. “But do you truly wish to devote your life to digging in the sand to find holes in the ground with painted walls? Did you want to be a leader of diggers and scavengers or a leader of — um — the most feared assassins in all the Ottoman Empire?”
While she spoke, Ghazi’s expression took on a troubled and confused expression. He glanced about him. His men were looking troubled, too. He quickly regained his composure. “This is foolish talk,” he said. “The big Ingleezi has killed the Golden Devil. You have shot one of my men. And it is not the first time. You will not go free.” With his free hand, he signaled to his men. “Take her. And the other man.”
Rupert sagged. “Oops,” he said. “Sorry.”
He folded up and sank to the ground.
“No!” Daphne cried. She ran toward him, pushing the astonished Ghazi aside, and sinking to her knees beside Rupert. “He’s no danger to you, you great bully,” she cried. “Can’t you see he’s hurt?”
“I will put him out of his misery.” Ghazi aimed the pistol at Rupert. Daphne threw herself on top of Rupert.
“As you wish,” said Ghazi. “I kill two at once.”
“Fire your weapon,” Miles called out, “and pharaoh’s treasure goes up in smoke.”
During the momentary distraction, he’d grabbed somebody’s torch. He held a papyrus close to the flame. “This is what the Golden Devil wanted,” Miles said. “This is what Duval wants. Worth a king’s ransom. Everybody play nice, or it’s ashes.”
Some of the men were muttering, “What’s he saying?” because Miles made the speech in English. But Ghazi had no trouble comprehending.
Thinking wasn’t what he did best. This, however, was simple enough to comprehend. He knew the papyrus was valuable. He knew Duval wanted it. And he knew that these old, crumbly anteekahs took fire easily.
Still, once he had the papyrus, he’d no reason to let them get away, Daphne thought.
“Let them go,” someone called from the crowd. “The Turkish soldiers are coming. Remember what they did to the one they thought had killed the big Englishman?”
Ghazi threw down his pistol and advanced toward Miles.
Miles looked at Daphne.
“Give it to him,” she said.
Miles gave Ghazi the papyrus. Ghazi unrolled it a bit, gave it a glance, then quickly tucked it into his girdle. He moved away, snatched up his pistol —
And kept on walking, away from them.
His men turned away and followed him.
All but one, the one who’d warned about the Turkish soldiers.
He came forward.
“Let me help you, mistress,” he said. In English.
She had turned away, to attend to Rupert, who was showing signs of consciousness. But the English words and something in the man’s voice made her look up again.
She gazed into a familiar face, one she hadn’t seen in more than a month.
“Akmed?” she said.
“This man saved my life,” he said. “I will help you save his.”
Chapter 21
That night, aboard the Isis, a few miles upriver
DAPHNE DID AN ADMIRABLE JOB OF PATCHING Rupert up, scolding him all the while she picked out bits of cloth from the knife wound. It was thanks to those thick layers of cloth — the Arab-style sash he’d worn and the lethal objects it contained — that Rupert was alive.
The wound was rather more than the “scratch” he’d labeled it and was rather more uncomfortable than he’d expected. Nonetheless, she seemed to think he’d live. Her main concern, she said, was infection. She did not think that leaving shreds of dirty cloth in the wound would aid his recovery.
He lay upon the divan of his cabin, occasionally peering down to see what she was doing but mainly watching her face in the lantern light. He would never grow tired of looking at her wonderful face. He was quite pleased he’d live to do so.
He’d truly thought the wound no more than a scratch, at first. It hadn’t hurt at all. But he’d probably been too furious at the time to feel anything. They’d been having a fair enough fight, fists only, he told Daphne. But then, when Noxley realized he was losing, he cheated.
“I cannot believe you so addlepated as to imagine Noxley would fight fair,” Daphne said, when Rupert waxed indignant on this point, calling it “deuced unsporting.”
“But it isn’t done,” Rupert said. “Ask your brother. Ask anybody. I did not draw my pistol. I did not draw my knife. I had never killed anybody, and I did hope it would not be necessary.”
He was a great deal more upset than he let on. He hadn’t meant to throw Noxley out the window. At least Rupert hoped he hadn’t. At such times, though, a man was not truly capable of thinking. It was all instinct. Noxley had stabbed him. Rupert had yanked out the blade and thrown it aside — and the next thing he knew, Noxley was sailing out of the window.
Having got the wound as clean as she could, Daphne quickly and neatly stitched it up and bandaged it.
“Pray do not distress yourself about Noxley,” she said, quite as though she’d spent the last few minutes reading his mind. “He would have killed you without a second thought, certainly with no qualms. He had no conscience whatsoever. A moral vacuum. He must have what he wanted. Anyone who stood in the way must be annihilated.”
She turned away to the medicine case that stood on the floor nearby. Rupert couldn’t see what she was doing. After a moment, she turned back, a small glass in hand.
“I had not realized he wanted me until his men dropped a hint,” she said.
“I told you he wanted you,” he said. “It was obvious in the way he looked at you. He might have been mad for power and fame, but he wasn’t blind.”
“Power and fame can be costly,” she said. “He was not in lust with my person alone. He doted equally upon my fortune.”
It took a moment for Rupert to fully grasp what she was saying, and these mental exertions must have shown in his face because she said, frowning, “You did know Virgil left me heaps and heaps of money, did you not? All the world knew, I thought.”
“Heaps and heaps?” he said. “Well, it was the least he could do, the lying swine. Not that I imagined you were a pauper, when you saw nothing out of the way in your brother’s spending thousands for one of those brown, rolled-up thingums.”
“Papyri,” she said crisply, almost as she’d done that first day, in the dungeon. But he heard the note of amusement.
“I know,” he said. “I knew. I was only trying to provoke you that day. I knew you had a temper. I could feel it, when you were twenty feet away. It was like standing on the edge of a storm. Very…stimulating.”
“You’ve had sufficient stimulation for the present,” she said. She came close then, raised Rupert’s head, pressed it to her delicious bosom, and held the glass to his lips. “Here, drink this.”
He’d had an unpleasant feeling the glass was for him, but the conversation had diverted his attention. The warm femininity he rested upon was an even greater distraction. “What is it?”
“A little laudanum mixed with wine.”
He carefully turned his head away from the glass without endangering his agreeable position on her soft endowments. “I don’t want any.”
“You will drink it,” she said, “or I shall summon Akmed and tell him to gather the largest men aboard. They will hold you down while I pou
r it down your throat. Will you submit gracefully, or would you rather be embarrassed in front of the boys?”
“I don’t need any laudanum,” he muttered, but he turned back and drank.
When he was done, she set down the glass and gently but firmly transferred his head from her bosom to the pillow. “The wound is sure to become a great deal more painful as the shock wears off,” she said. “This way, you will get some rest.”
“I wish you might rest with me,” he said, letting his hand slide to her thigh. She was dressed like an Arab man, but no man with working eyesight would ever mistake her for a member of his sex.
“That would not be restful,” she said. “And kindly remember that my brother is now aboard.”
Rupert sighed. The brother. Yes, of course. But the brother was not Akmed, with whom she’d threatened Rupert a moment ago. Who was Akmed?
Oh, yes, the fellow who spoke up, just as matters had promised to grow very interesting, indeed.
What had he said? He’d spoken in English first, then reverted to Arabic.