Ella knew it wasn’t going to be possible to go back to sleep until Rowan returned. She sat up on the camp bed, resting a hand on her belly to calm a suddenly awake and active Tater Tot.
“Settle down, baby boy,” she said, feeling a rush of warmth flood through her. Happy, she thought. That’s what this feeling is. I’m happy. She pulled the goose-feather stuffed duvet onto her lap and stretched out a growing kink in her back and heard footsteps on the gravel outside her tent. The sound of the footsteps stopped abruptly. Ella’s skin prickled uncomfortably. Was that Rowan? Why didn’t he come in?
Suddenly, the tent flap jerked back and Ra entered. Ella’s first thought was that something must have happened to Rowan for Ra to burst in on her this way. Her second thought centered on the large Bowie knife he held clutched in his hand. She covered her belly with both hands. The way the boy looked, the way he stood staring at her eliminated any thought she might have had about conversing with him or demanding why he was in her tent.
She screamed.
As if triggered by the noise, Ra charged her, his knife held in a high arc, and brought it down with force. Ella twisted away, feeling the edge of the blade slice through the bunched duvet in her hands as she fell to the floor of the tent. She could feel him regrouping for another attack and knew she would never get to her feet in time to escape. Instinctively, she turned away and tucked her head to protect her belly, presenting her exposed back to him. She waited for the blow she knew was coming. Instead, she heard a grunt and felt Ra push against her and fall onto the bed. When she wrenched around she saw him struggle to get up from the bed and slash his knife arm out at Abdullah who stood in the tent, his face flushed with anger and determination.
Ra snarled at Abdullah and launched himself at him. Ella watched the boy and the man grapple in the tent, knocking over the lantern and the camp table. Ra howled and pulled away from the fray long enough for Ella to see his arm now hung at an unnatural angle. She could also see that the front of Abdullah’s grey robe had sprouted a wide red splotch that was growing quickly. Within seconds, Abdullah dropped to his knees, his eyes dazed and slowly closing. Ella was already out of the tent and running down the path, saving her breath for her slowed, lumbering jog. As she reached the center of camp, she turned to look back at her tent and saw Ra poised in the doorway watching her before he turned and ran in the opposite direction.
Rowan! Where is Rowan? Ella fought for breath and felt the cold night air go straight through her thin cotton nightgown. It was then, as she stood in the deserted center of camp, that she realized the pounding of blood and fear in her ears had kept her from hearing what was going on around her. The sounds of screams and gunshots came roaring into her hearing as if the volume had been suddenly, rudely turned up. In front of her she saw two men on horseback running down one of the camp servants, viciously battering the man from behind with a club until the man fell. Suddenly, everywhere around her were men fighting and running. One of the servants ran past her and she thought his robes were on fire, perhaps from running through the main campfire.
Terrified, Ella ran to the first tent, Marvel’s, only to find it empty. She peered out of it and watched as two men hacked at each other with swords, one on horseback and one on the ground. The man on the ground was Spenser. She could see he was bleeding from a head wound. She watched him as he pulled a pistol from his waistband and dispatched the man on the horse who did not fall but galloped away, hugging his horse’s neck.
What was happening? Who was attacking them? Not knowing what else to do but driven by a desperate need to find Rowan, Ella bolted from the tent and ran back down the path to her tent. Her bare feet were bloody, bruised and screaming in pain.
“Rowan!” she called. Her cries were drowned out by the sounds of the battle raging all around her. She ducked off the path as a man on a pony came barreling down the pathway, his saber swinging around his head, the lower part of his face covered by his hijab. She felt the gravel give way beneath her feet as the ground sloped down from the path into the bordering ravine. Grabbing a small sapling to anchor her clumsy descent, she eased her way to the bottom of the ravine and safety. The gunshots sounded muffled and the battle cries of the Arab invaders more and more distant.
Was Ra waiting for her down here? Is he with those men? Where is Rowan? The pain from her feet was shooting all the way up her legs now as she stumbled a few steps into the bottom of the dark ravine, praying she would be safe here. She screamed and fell over a large obstacle she hadn’t seen in the dark and landed hard on her hip. She felt the rocks and the gravel on the ravine floor dig into her. Before she could scramble away from the form she knew that it was a body, probably from the fight above. It wasn’t until she was back on her feet, her breath ragged from her terror, that she could see what she had tripped over.
It was Rowan.
Emitting a horrified whimper, Ella staggered to where he lay in a crumpled heap on the ground and sank down next to him. There was blood on his shirt but none on the ground. She could see the knife embedded in his chest up to the hilt.
“Rowan,” she croaked, pulling his head and shoulders onto her lap. She held him, listening to the sounds of battle above, and not able to believe this was happening. She touched his face with trembling fingers. His face was cool from the night air. “Rowan,” she whispered again.
She watched his impassive face in desperate fear and thought this cannot be happening. Had she really gone through everything she had endured just to lose him? She flashed back to their love making of just a few hours earlier, to his sexy laugh and the way his eyes and warm strong hands worshiped her body. He was so full of life! This had to be a dream. A terrible, nightmarish dream.
She cradled Rowan’s body to her breast and felt Tater kick against the added pressure of his father’s bulk. The three of them were together now, nearly as close as they had ever been, she thought. Her fingers touched Rowan’s neck where she could feel the faintest of throbs that told her he still lived. She didn’t want to look at the knife that protruded from the middle of his chest.
The wound was a mortal one. That much she knew. The knife kept the avalanche of crimson—his very life—from gushing out of him. Maybe if he’d been stabbed in the emergency room of a topnotch trauma center in some major metropolitan city he might live—maybe. But there was no way he wasn’t dying tonight in 1922 in the middle of the Sahara desert, with his adoring, heartbroken wife wrapped around him for all she was worth. Ella reached for his pulse again, terrified she wouldn’t find it this time, but needing desperately to believe she would. That’s when the tears came.
You can’t die, my darling, she wept. You can’t leave us so soon.
As she reached for his neck, the sleeve of her robe fell back and the bright Egyptian moon shone on her arm. Before she could touch him, she saw the tattoos. For a moment she just stared at them. The words of Yeena, the Cairo seer, and Halima came back to her:
“You must find the Book of the Dead for your husband.”
“It’s the only thing that can save the three of you.”
Ella wrenched back her sleeve and stared at her arm. Without hesitating, she did the one thing Halima told her she must never do. She read aloud the first set of hieroglyphics exactly as Halima had shown her. When she spoke the words, she heard her voice, full of tears, panic and terror.
“Ana bikhayr bookra, shokran,” she read haltingly. “Hal beemkanek mosa’adati.”
As soon as the words were out of her mouth she felt her skin crawl as if a thousand ants had descended upon her but she could see nothing. A cold blast of air whistled down the ravine to settle around her shoulders.
Ella watched Rowan’s face but he showed no change. If anything, he was more still than before. She tried to remember what Halima had told her about the first incantation. Something about doing the opposite of what her instincts told her to do. She licked her lips and began to feel panic creep up her spine. That could be anything!
She watched Rowan’s chest to see if she could see it move at all and that’s when she found herself looking at the knife. She knew the only thing that was preventing him from instantly bleeding out was that knife. Only a surgeon could remove it at this point.
That was when she knew.
She had to remove it.
With trembling fingers, she wrapped her hand around the handle of the knife and, sending a prayer up to God Almighty, she yanked it out of his chest. She heard him groan when she did. The next thing she knew she was doing when she had the knife in her hand, although she had no idea why, was drawing a long shallow slit across the palm of her hand. She pressed the cut against the wound in Rowan’s chest. She didn’t know what drove her to do it but as soon as she touched him, she felt something she hadn’t felt in him before: warmth.
The baby kicked hard and Ella dropped the knife and pulled her sleeve back again. “Not yet, baby,” she said. “Not done yet.” She held her arm up to see the markings brightly illuminated in the moonlight and with one quick look at Rowan who was as silent as death, she read the second incantation.
“Ta’ala ma’ee, ta’ala ma’ee. Ada’tu tareeqi.”
Suddenly, she felt a gush of water between her legs and looked at her lap to see a widening wet spot spread across her hips.
Shit! Her water broke! Could this be right? She looked at Rowan but he lay unmoving. She heard Halima’ voice in her head: Have faith. You must have faith.
Ella put her hand on her belly and felt an immediate grinding pain as if bone were slamming up against bone without enough room to move. She gasped in pain and flexed her back sharply to avoid or rearrange the source of the agony. It followed her relentlessly. She felt it pound into her very organs and she closed her eyes and forced her shoulders to relax and to receive it without resistance.
Let it come, she thought. Give it all to me.
The pain ebbed to a whisper and then died. She took a long breath and, with a final look at Rowan, his lips now blue, the blood on his chest no longer pumping out, she read the last incantation from her arm. Again, she heard Halima reciting in her head: The sling. The lamb. The coffin. Choose wisely, Ella! There will be no more prompts. You must trust yourself.
She read out the final incantation in a strong, loud voice. “Ana ahbak. Entabeh linafsika. Ohebuka.”
It was as if she had been transformed into a magic slate that erased itself and all that was written on it in one cleansing swipe. The cold night, the rocky ravine, Rowan’s body, even her pregnancy, all vanished in the time it took for her to take a breath. She was still seated but no longer next to Rowan. She climbed to her feet to see that she was now on a cliff top. It was still night but the air was warm and carried the scent of orange blossoms on it. When she looked down at herself, she could see her stomach was flat once more. She was gripped with a sense of loss as her hand went to her abdomen to confirm what her eyes told her: she was no longer pregnant. Looking around in bewilderment, she searched for Rowan but couldn’t see him anywhere. At the same time that Ella knew all of this had to be some kind of hallucination, somehow she also knew that her actions were real.
With real consequences.
She tried to assess her situation. She was standing alone at the edge of a cliff in the Valley of the Kings. Where the camp should be, she could see only darkness. Where the piles of rubble and signs of excavation of Carter’s dig site, she could make out nothing. There was only rock and sand for miles around and below her.
She clawed into her memory to recall what Halima had told her about the third test.
There would be three choices. She would need to use her instincts. She would need to trust herself.
They would all three die if she guessed wrong.
Squinting across the valley, she could see the facing cliff was only about two hundred yards away. As she fought to see through the distance in the gloom, she could make out the ghostly form of something hanging from a large banyan tree on the verge of the facing cliff. It was a sling. Ella knew without knowing how she did that Rowan and her baby were in that sling. A terrible craving began to pull her to the edge of the cliff, toward them. She reached out her hand for the rope she knew would be there—anchored by nothing from above but her faith that it would hold her. She grasped the rope and wrapped the end around her waist and leapt off the cliff.
As soon as her feet left the ground, the chasm between the two cliffs widened, pushing the sling further and further from her. The emptiness beneath her filled up with a dark roiling movement like a thundercloud developing. As she swung out over it, an unseen hand reached up to grab her foot and when she looked down she could see that the abyss was full of the torment of many tortured souls swimming in a sea of fire and death, their arms reaching, grasping, flailing in their attempts to bring her down among them. Ella pulled her knees up and focused on the sling nearly within her reach now on the other side. Suddenly, she felt the hard rock of the facing cliff under her feet and she dropped the rope and scrambled to where the sling hung, the moving forms inside clearly that of her husband and child.
As soon as she touched the sling it dissolved in her hands. She stood on the opposite cliff and fought down her frustration and anguish, reminding herself that it was all just a hallucination. Was that the first test? Had she passed? She turned to look beyond where the sling had been and saw a simple altar set up before her. The night had morphed into morning and a beautiful beam of sunlight lit up the altar. She walked quickly to it. On the left side of the altar was a stack of three gold bars—enough to make anyone wealthy for the rest of their days. On the right was a small lamb, its left forefoot caught in a snare of hemp and metal. Ella reached for the snare to release the creature but before she could touch it, like the sling, the altar with the lamb and the gold disappeared.
She swallowed her fear and worry. Was that the second test? Were they all going to be this easy? Was there a trick coming up with the final test?
She snapped her head in the direction of the interior of the woods that led from the cliff’s edge and then froze. She had heard something she had never heard before. Something she couldn’t possibly have heard.
It was the sound of her baby’s cry.
I’m coming, Tater! I’m coming! she thought as she turned and ran in the direction of the sound. Her heart beat hard and her panic ballooned with every step, threatening to overwhelm her. Was someone hurting him? Was he hungry? Scared? She ran faster, led by the soft low wailing that she knew as well as she knew her own breath. When she came to the sarcophagus sitting in the middle of the woods, she knew she had found the final test. The sling. The lamb. The coffin. As she approached, she watched the coffin change shape, like a hologram, from a sarcophagus to a baby crib and back again.
She moved without hesitation to the coffin and grabbed the lid with both hands. It was heavy and she was forced to slide it off at an angle to see what was inside. She didn’t know if she had been consciously expecting to find Rowan’s body inside—or the baby’s—she tried to remind herself that this was all not real, no matter how important it felt. And yet when she opened the coffin and looked inside, she recoiled in horror at what she saw.
The sarcophagus was filled with hundreds of swarming, slithering serpents of every size and kind. They were biting each other and lunging up at her as she stood transfixed, watching them. There were adders and timber rattlers, cobras and mambas, all intertwining in a frenetic convulsive knot of venomous ire. Ella’s stomach bucked at the sight and her first instinct was to pull the lid shut to make sure they didn’t get out or come after her. Before she could act, she saw it. There, beneath the mass of slithering snakes, she caught a glimpse of a wooden figurine at the bottom of the coffin. It was a carved statuette of a man holding an infant in his arms.
This was it. Without pausing to think, Ella leaned over the coffin and plunged her arm into the depths of the swirling maelstrom of striking, biting evil, feeling every bite as the snakes latched onto her hand, until she touched the statue and grabbed it by the base. As soon as she did, the snakes vanished. Ella stumbled to her knees, holding the statue to her chest. When she recovered herself enough to look at the statue, she could see it was a statue of a man and a woman standing together, their arms cradling the child between them. And then the statue disappeared from her hands leaving behind not even dust or the faint scent of the cedar it had been carved from. Ella put her hands to her face to cover her eyes and tamp down the feeling of overwhelming loss that began to engulf her.
“Ella?”
She dropped her hands to see Rowan sitting up at the base of the ravine, his shirt soaked with blood, rubbing his face with one hand.
She was back.
“What happened? Where are we?” Rowan was struggling to get to his feet.
Ella began to move toward him and then awkwardly stumbled. She steadied herself and realized that she was pregnant again. She waddled over to him and put her hand on his cheek to turn his face to the light. “Rowan?” she whispered, barely daring to believe it. “You okay?”
“I feel like I’ve been rolled down a goddamn hill. Wait a minute!” His face glowered with a sudden realization. “That bastard Digby stabbed me!” He touched a tentative hand to his chest and withdrew fingers coated with gore but further probing revealed no wound. He looked at Ella in confusion.
Ella laughed and fought not to give into hysteria. She threw her arms around him and crushed him to her until they both fell over in the dirt and the bushes.
“Ouch, Ella,” Rowan said with annoyance. “I’ve got every kind of bruise and cut you can imagine.”
“Oh, Rowan,” Ella said, wiping tears from her face and laughing outright again. “I can’t even begin to explain to you what happened and I’m not sure you’d believe me if I did.”
“Okay, you’re going to have to get off me, babe,” Rowan said, patting her bottom to urge her to move off of him. “We can have this reunion dance or whatever it is some place a little less hard and wet.”
“Rowan? Rowan, is that you down there?”
Ella and Rowan lifted their heads to see Marvel carefully skidding down the ravine to where they were sitting.
“What are you doing down here?” she asked. “Oh, my God, Rowan! You’re hurt! Did they shoot you? What happened?”
Rowan got to his feet and held out a hand to help Ella up. “It’s not my blood,” he lied, glancing at Ella who had stopped laughing and was now frowning at Marvel as she descended the hill.
“There’s been a battle going on. Did you miss it?” Marvel said, dusting off dirt from her dress.
“A battle? What are you talking about?” Rowan, perhaps seeing how clean Marvel looked, began to slap dirt off Ella’s robe. He looked at her in confusion. “Why are you out here in your dressing gown?”
“Yes, we were attacked!” Marvel said. “Josh said they were desert rats. There were twenty of them! Or more! All armed and shooting. I cannot believe you didn’t know about it. Every man in the camp was shooting and fighting them off.”
“Are they gone now?” Rowan asked, looking up the ravine where the camp was.
“Yes, Josh says we ran them off. He thinks they were trying to rob the payroll.”
“How did they know where it was?” Rowan asked as he and Ella began to climb up the ravine together.
“That’s just what Mr. Carter wants to know!”
Julia stood at the base of the valley, partially hidden by a large desert shrub and watched as the last of Ammon’s men galloped away into the night. She listened to the sounds of their horses’ thundering hooves fading until all that was left was the eerie quiet of a silent Egyptian night.
She had been able to keep her eye on Ammon’s white robes for awhile during the fracas but eventually she lost sight of him. She heard the guns—so many guns! And everyone seemed to be yelling at once. It didn’t seem to have lasted very long, it felt like minutes, really, and then she was watching the men race away on their ponies, over the rise and out of the valley. When she saw them go, her heart began to pound in her ears and her throat went suddenly dry—even more than when she was watching the battle below. She found herself praying they weren’t leaving because they’d seen their leader fall. She prayed they were leaving because Ammon had told them to. She then prayed he wasn’t leading them in their flight away from the camp.
Ammon had positioned her here where she might be close enough to see the battle but not too close to be harmed. He had kissed her then—unusual for him in front of the men—and taken her pony and indicated to her that she was to wait for him.
He had taken her pony.
Julia listened to the sounds of camp as it returned to normal. She thought she could hear the deep rumble of Mr. Spenser yelling to his men and the higher pitched voices of the camp servants in response. At one point she heard a horse whinny loudly and she hoped none of them had been hurt in the battle.
What folly this had been. To attack the camp—even with the element of surprise, they had been hopelessly outnumbered. How desperate had she been to urge him to do this?
She wiped her hands on her dress. It was filthy and in virtual rags. Except for one washing in a creek polluted with camel dung, she had not cleaned it or changed it in the five months she had lived with Ammon’s people.
She pulled the branches of the bushes apart to start walking in the direction Ammon’s men had gone when suddenly, she heard a sound that made her whirl around. It was the sound of a stealthy footstep, behind her.
He had come back for her!
“Ammon?” she cried out, and then immediately cursed herself. He would want to steal away secretly, of course. Why else would he be creeping back to her so silently? It didn’t matter. None of it did. The only thing that mattered was that he had returned for her.
She emerged from the bushes. I knew you wouldn’t leave me, she thought, her heart racing with anticipation. I knew you wouldn’t.
“I hate to disappoint you, my dove.”
Julia stopped. That didn’t make sense. That voice didn’t make sense.
He tore the branches aside from the highest bush that separated them and grinned at her.
It was Edward.