Excerpt from
by
Sarah A. Hoyt
The Wedding Night
The Royal Were- Hunters
Cairo From Above
cd “What is wrong?” Emily asked.
She sat, naked, on her bridal bed, the waves of her dark hair falling like a dusky veil over her golden shoulders and small breasts. Over it, wrapped around her, she clutched a multi-colored flowered shawl, a legacy from her Indian grandmother.
Nigel, her husband of ten hours, stood at the foot of the bed, trying to arrange his blue dressing gown with shaking hands and only managing to twist it, so it hung askew and displayed a portion of his pale, muscular chest.
He had turned away from her, but she could see his face reflected in the full length mirror. It showed a complexion splotched by sudden high color, pale blond hair on end where sweaty fingers had run through it again and again, and grey-blue eyes animated with an odd passion and rimmed by red as if Nigel – Nigel! – were near tears.
Emily pulled her long legs up till her knees came right up to her pointed chin, and clutched her arms around her legs as she took a deep breath. It wasn’t possible that Nigel would cry. Proper gentlemen didn’t cry, and Nigel was as cool and collected as a gentleman could be.
“Have I done something?” Emily asked. Her voice wavered and trembled, sounding too childish in this sumptuous suite, all red velvet and heavy mahogany furniture. “Failed to do something?”
Nigel’s back remained turned. He didn’t seem to hear her. He was tying and untying his dressing gown as if it were the most important task in the world.
Emily wished to shout, to scream, to ask him what had happened and why. But proper young ladies didn’t rail at their husbands. Instead, insecurity trembled in her voice as she said, “How did I fail you?”
“Fail?” Nigel’s head jerked back at the word. He looked at her, startled, then quickly away.
“Mr. Oldhall,” Emily said, making her voice as formal as she dared.
The family name, which she hadn’t used since they’d become engaged made him give her a look of undisguised horror. Emily felt blood rush to her cheeks, though she knew the blush would show only the color of sunset against her golden skin. “Nigel...”
Nigel pulled a packet of tobacco from a dressing gown pocket and a pipe from the other. “Yes?”
“No one ever told me what should happen on our marriage night.” She paused. “My step-mother did tell me it was all worth it for the children, but...” Her voice floundered and she shook her head. “I have seen...” A deep breath to gather courage. “I was raised in my father’s country house, Nigel. We had dogs and horses and...” desperately, trying to avoid being explicit, she said, “Geese. And it seems to me the interaction between men and women cannot be all that different from what happens between... animals. Even horses and cats... and...” Deep breath. “Geese.”
She glanced up to see Nigel staring at her, his mouth half open, his face an odd mix of shock and amusement. Slowly, he turned and drew a long breath that echoed noisy in the room. Turning his back on her, he fumbled. She smelled tobacco and saw him, in the mirror, pushing shreds of it into the bowl of his pipe. He struck the flint to light the wick of his lighter, then lit his pipe and inhaled deeply. The lighter clicked closed and Nigel exhaled, a breath like a tremulous sigh forming a grey, aromatic cloud in the air in front of him. He put the lighter back in his pocket.
“I... I understand your disappointment,” he said at last. He pulled a heavy draft from his pipe and expelled it in increasingly neater rings. “Emily, I do understand how in your innocence, you might believe something untoward has happened, or...” He cleared his throat, and a slight flush tinged his pale cheeks. “Or failed to happen, but... Emily, now that you are a wife, you should understand that marriage... isn’t always perfect.” He cleared his throat again. “There are moments when the body will not... obey the mind.”
He smiled suddenly, but his smile vanished just as quickly, and it was only after another puff on the pipe that he managed to shape his mouth to his normal, aloof smile. “Don’t let it disturb you, my dear. We’re just both tired. The day started devilishly early with the wedding breakfast and... with the parties... You’ve been trotting too hard, my dear, and no mistake. Let’s have a good night and then we’ll... we’ll both feel better in the morning.”
He reached over to pat her arm, then strode towards the closed door between their two rooms. He’d no more than set his hand on the polished brass doorknob than the whole room shook.
Emily stopped, holding her breath. It had felt as thought, three floors beneath them, the magic carpet that supported the luxury carpetship, cruising above the clouds towards Cairo, had fluttered unsteadily on some air current.
“It’s just the magic field we’re crossing,” Nigel said. “Or the weather. I’m sure the flight magicians...”
But the curtains danced again and a rattle echoed through the ship – composed of stem wear and crystal mage-light chandeliers colliding in liquid notes, crockery clashing down in the kitchen and the groaning of wood in framing and floors and furniture. Emily clutched at the bed covers. She remembered this noise. It bought back memories of her first trip to England. Every little current, every jolt had terrified Emily then. The ship had been all strange and scary. And her mama had been in her room, very ill, leaving no one but a cool English nurse to tell Emily not to be a goose.
But that trip had ended well. The carpet ship had not fallen. Yes, Emily’s mother had died six months after arriving in England, leaving Emily stranded, in the midst of her father’s family. But the carpetship had landed safely. She closed her eyes and willed the ship to keep flying.
The carpetship trembled again, harder. Every window frame rattled. Every bed bucked. The support beams mounted on the carpet and holding up kitchens, ballrooms, parlors and passenger rooms, twisted and groaned like a dying beast.
Emily opened her eyes and caught a moment of panic in Nigel’s expression. He grabbed for the bed to steady himself. The ship rattled again, and started a ponderous half-roll, throwing Nigel against a green-velvet sofa. Emily barely managed to hold on to the bed, whispering prayers to a divinity in which she very much wished to believe.
With a groan of stressed lumber, the carpetship started rolling the other way. Nigel held onto the sofa, his panic no longer hidden. His lips were moving, and she supposed he must be saying words, but no sound reached her over the creaks and groans and the sharp sounds of breaking glass and pottery.
Horns sounded, magically amplified, alerting everyone in the ship to the danger. This meant they should seek the lifeboats outside, on the deck. It meant the carpetship was falling. Falling through the dark night sky to the cold ocean far below them.
Nigel’s hand was on her arm and Emily opened her eyes, without realizing she had ever closed them. Nigel was very pale, holding onto the headboard of the bed with one hand and onto her with the other. His lips moved, but only a word here and there emerged above the shrilling distress of the alarms. “Madam,” and “Sensible,” and, she would swear to it, “decent.”
Emily was sensible of her need to be decent; sensible of the fact that she was naked, and clutching only a flowered shawl. Her panicked mind told her she would die naked. Her shamelessly nude body would wash ashore, on some foreign land.
And then she realized Nigel was dressing her. He had somehow got hold of her white dressing gown embroidered with green sprigs, and was attempting to pull her hand up from the bed.
Clinging, frightened, one hand clawing at his shoulder, Emily forced her other hand to let go of the bedcovers and to allow Nigel to put it into a sleeve. He was murmuring at her, but she could get no more than a general feel of comfort and an attempt to calm her. She clutched at him, and allowed him to slide her other arm into another sleeve. And then he was tying her belt, firmly, and pulling her up, still talking.
“Must,” she heard him say before the words submerged in other sounds. And then “Safety.”
She rolled from the bed, with Nigel gripping her. Safety meant the lifeboats – mounted on smaller flying rugs tethered to the side of the ship. Each of them would take ten travelers apiece and lead them, unerringly, to the nearest patch of terra firma.
Fumbling, she and Nigel scrambled, holding each other, towards the French doors that opened from Emily’s room onto the deck. They held onto furniture in passing, and Emily had a moment of gratitude that every piece was firmly bolted to the floor.
Nigel struggled to open the door, kicked it open and yelled, “Go, go, go,” propelling her through the open door to the deck outside.
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cd Emily stepped out the door and onto the polished mahogany of the deck. “The boats,” Nigel yelled above the din. “No one has pulled in the lifeboats.”
Emily looked across the deck where bedlam had been unleashed in the form of half dressed – or hardly dressed at all – men and women of all ages. Emily’s dressing gown was positively proper compared to so many of the people who were rushing about in their underthings, or one young, disheveled woman, clutching a sheet to her otherwise naked body and shrieking in fear. Not that the men were any better. One of the gentlemen nearby was wearing his hat, his gloves and his underwear and seemed perfectly composed, until one realized he was strolling about pointing with his cane and giving orders to no one.
On the other side of the deck, past the frightened throng, a glass partition six feet tall and composed of small glass panes protected passengers and crew from otherwise deadly flight-breezes and the frigid air at this altitude. And against that partition, on the other side, lifeboats knocked against the frame with a noise like the damned attempting to storm the halls of heaven.
To allow people to board the boats, they would need to be tethered right up close to the frame, not allowed to blow away from it on the currents. And doors in the glass partition would need to be opened by the crew.
None of this had been done.
Nigel stopped a passing man – an amazingly groomed and properly attired employee in the blue serge uniform and cap of the carpetship line. “Good man.” Nigel yelled to be heard above the confused din of voices around them. “Good man, why haven’t the lifeboats been pulled in and made accessible? My wife must be taken to Terra Firma at once.”
The man tried to pull away from Nigel, but Nigel held his arm and wouldn’t let go. “The magicians are trying to save the carpetship, milord,” the man said, also yelling above the babble of voices, but with every appearance of eager obsequiousness. “They think they can save it, milord. That it will pass.”
“Pass how?” Nigel yelled back. “When a carpetship’s magic fails– ” He stopped as the ship trembled, more violently than before. “What?”
The ship shuddered again, in great spasms like a dying beast. It should have caused a blind panic on deck, but instead everyone fell silent. Nigel looked as startled as Emily felt. And then Emily saw something in the unrelieved black, outside the glass partition. Something shimmered there, not quite as bright as the stars. It was more like a bit of shining dust in the wind, like glimmers of flame.
Without knowing quite why, Emily pushed through the crowd, towards the glass barrier. Pressing against its cool smoothness, Emily heard something – a sound like another wind beating within the wind, like the murmur of a heart composed of the hissing flames, like...
She looked toward the sound – perceived more with her mage sense and her mind than with her ear. And there, by the side of the carpetship, something deep blue green seemed to glitter and churn the air beside the ship. Slowly, it sailed closer; becoming clearer; revealing itself for a large reptilian-looking creature.
Moonlight flickered on a long sinuous neck, on bright, sparkling eyes, on an elongated body, on a curling tail. Moonlight struck upon wings that looked as unreal as an artist’s dream, as if their armature had been carved in the finest ivory, then covered over with transparent fabric, upon which myriad fireflies had been caught.
The carpetship trembled like a frightened beast, but it groaned to altitude again.
So it was a dragon’s magical field that disrupted the flying spells. A dragon! Her breath caught at the word.
She’d read about dragons in history books and stories, but Emily had never seen one. They were were-creatures, whose other form looked wholly human but who – in the period of their change – craved the hunt, the chase, and tore their prey alive beneath their impatient fangs.
Watching the dragon, Emily breathed in little puffs that fogged the window. She wiped impatiently at the glass with cold, sweaty hands, and peered through the stripes left by her fingers, not wanting to miss a single second of the wondrous sight.
If she’d ever imagined dragons, she’d thought them sinister and frightening. And yet this creature was gossamer and moonlight, living flame and whispering wind. She wished she could engrave this scene upon her memory and relive it later, whenever she needed to refresh her vision from mundane sights.
None of the histories that spoke of the evils of dragons said that the pinpoints upon their wings shone like multicolored fairy lights rivaling the stars. None had mentioned that they transmitted an impression of power and joy. Nor had they admitted that dragons flew so effortlessly – gracefully – like dancing on air.
The only good thing they were ready to admit at all about dragons was that the eye of a dragon was the most powerful scrying instrument on Earth, allowing people to far-see and see the future in it.
Looking at the dragon she couldn’t fully understand how that could be. Its eyes were just eyes.
From behind Emily came the sound of running feet, and two employees of the company came rushing to turn cranks on the side of the glass partition that separated the passengers from the dragon.
“Letting us at the lifeboats, then?” Nigel said, in a confused tone.
“No, sir,” one of the men said. “Just opening the partition so the Royal Were-Hunters can have at the beast. Miss. You’ll have to get out of the way.”
Emily turned and saw a whole regiment of Royal Were-Hunters – Gold Coats – wearing gold uniforms with golden braid, about fifteen of them, in a line, each pointing a powerstick at the dragon. The powerstick, Emily knew, would be full of were-killing magic.
Like other such creatures who might feast on humans as well as animals -- European werewolves and the were-tigers that sailors had brought with them, unawares, from the first voyages to India -- dragons were outlawed within the reach and influence of the British sovereign. The Royal Were-hunters were a regiment specially empowered by the Queen to hunt down and exterminate these terrifying beasts.
Emily knew they did good work. Without them, weres would overrun normal mankind and destroy civilization. And yet, she could not move aside and allow them to shoot at the dragon.
“Madame,” Nigel corrected, yelling at the Royal Were-Hunters. “She’s my wife. Mrs. Nigel Oldhall.”
The Were-Hunters in turn were yelling at Nigel, but their screams had nothing to do with Emily’s marital status. Instead, they were screaming at her to move, to get out of the way, so they could shoot. Nigel pulled at Emily frantically too, fingers scrabbling at her dressing gown sleeve. She heard him as if from a great distance. She could not move. The men in the green jackets with the powersticks were increasingly frantic, now aiming at her, now away, and begging her to move.
“Please, Miss– Madam.” And, “We must do our duty.” And, “It is a dangerous beast.”
The dragon probably was a dangerous beast, and more. What she’d heard of dragons said they couldn’t control themselves. They ate people. They–
Behind her there was a sound and she turned, just in time to see a jet of flame singe along the edge of the carpetship. People screamed and ran, and Nigel grabbed at her arm and tugged at her.
When she managed to look up, there was no fire at all and the dragon had gone. The Royal Were-Hunter captain was standing nearby. “You should have let us shoot it, ma’am. You never know what those creatures are about. We have all sorts, in the isles,” he said, offering Nigel his hand to help him rise. “From wolves to foxes. Some of them are harmless enough, and we wink at it. But them dragons, they’re desperate creatures that can neither be controlled nor brought down easily.” He pulled Nigel up and Nigel pulled Emily up along with himself. “We had a perfect shot.”
“She was too scared to move,” Nigel said.
And Emily supposed that could be true, but deep inside she didn’t think it was. Not scared. More... fascinated, intrigued. She couldn’t help turning her head a little towards where the dragon had been, feeling a lurch of dismay that the sparkling, magical being was gone.
She couldn’t quite understand why that would leave her feeling empty – as though a yawning abyss of dark, grey nothingness had opened where the wondrous should reside.
Nigel didn’t seem to notice. Or if he did, he attributed it to her presumed fright. He said nothing until she was back in her cabin, sitting on her bed in her dressing gown, wrapped in her mother’s shawl. And then what he said was, “Dragons are natural only to China. It is said their noblemen suffer this hereditary curse and are venerated and given virgins for fodder in the days of their madness. There are many weres in England, but surely no true Englishman can be a were-dragon?”
He didn’t seem to either expect an answer from Emily, nor to want it. Instead he went through the connecting door and into his room.
Emily sat on the bed, hugging her knees. Before her eyes was the image of the powerful, elemental beast. Where had it come from? Where was it going? And why had she saved its life?
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>cd Nigel’s heart tightened as he watched from the deck of the carpet ship descending towards Cairo.
The mission proper was starting. Today he would meet his contact and learn where he was to go and how to complete the mission the Queen had given him.
“It’s very bright, isn’t it?” Emily asked, leaning against him, her open parasol, held behind them, more decorative than practical.
Nigel nodded, looking at the landscape beneath them. It was indeed bright and completely different from the sheep-dotted green fields, the stately country houses, the landscape of Nigel’s proper English childhood. It didn’t even resemble bustling London, where Nigel had spent the last year. From this far up, all of Egypt looked like a narrow strip of land, squeezed between golden sparkling desert and shining emerald sea, along the green ribbon of the Nile. Where the Nile met the sea, a green shape formed, resembling a lady’s fan. There, the arm of the Nile branched into multiple fingers and along those fingers vegetation grew and white habitations nestled, looking -- from this far up -- like a toy village.
In the desert, away from the city, the fabled pyramids of ancient Egypt rose, golden and eternal, dwarfing the impermanent mortals with their majesty.
Nigel wished with all his heart that he was just coming to Egypt on his honeymoon, to see the beauties of antiquity and savor the exoticism. That was what Emily believed and it made him wish – madly – that he hadn’t lied to her. That he’d never heard of Wildfield or of the Queen’s secret mission to Africa.
The mission that had caused his older brother Carew vanish. Carew who had been the competent older son, forever confident and full of certainty, while Nigel... Nigel was only the Oldhall’s delicate younger boy, kept at home and only allowed to attend school because Carew had attended it also. And only allowed to go to Cambridge on Carew’s say so as well.
Nigel was not half what Carew had been. The only reason he’d been chosen at all was his blood. Carew’s brother, they’d said, must complete Carew’s mission. Might be the only man who could do it. They never explained why that was – though they made disjointed comments on it, that seemed to have to do with Nigel’s being descended via both his parents from the first man who’d used the compass stone.
Now Nigel could see the squarish houses, without proper roofs but with terraces. And, here and there, the protruding, rounded tops of what he presumed were cisterns. It looked like an illustration in a book of Bible stories he’d owned when he was very little. He remembered looking at that picture for hours, fascinated by the dark, starry sky above, the alien-looking houses.
He’d wondered what it would be like to be one of the shepherd boys in the picture, away from English society and rules. Now that alien landscape beneath him looked and felt as fantastic as it had when he was little. An exotic land, an imaginary haven -- a way to escape his own, limited life.
“Did you know it would be this beautiful?” Emily asked. “Is that why you chose it?”
Her warm breath caressed his cheek, more tantalizing and erotic than those experienced and trained ladies of the night to whose boudoirs Carew had introduced Nigel, at Cambridge. And yet, he couldn’t have Emily as he had enjoyed those beauties. And he wondered why. Except... except that she depended wholly on him, and she was so innocent. She’d been so badly treated, so neglected in her life, a waif without a mother and devilishly neglected by her father and his new wife. If he did what he longed to do, it would feel like a betrayal.
And then there was the undeniable fact that he had betrayed her. He had brought her here under a lie. She was still deluded. How would she react to finding out he’d lied?
He shook his head. “All I knew of Cairo was my teacher of Arabic,” he said. “A frightful little man who smelled too much of garlic and always dressed in white suits with a red carnation in his pocket.”
He thought he heard Emily giggle, amid the noise of the people around them. The deck was crowded with the portion of England that traveled with them — the better bred portion — pressing about them all around, wearing the best dresses, the best suits, the most exquisite and fashionable attire. And yet he felt as if he were alone with Emily. Alone with the woman he loved, with the woman to whom he was obliged to lie.
Beneath him, the carpetship jolted.
They were close enough now to hear the shouts of workmen and carpetdock workers, a mingling of Arabic and English, both clearly intelligible to Nigel, but in a mixture he’d never before heard nor imagined. Even those who spoke English spoke it with a lilting exotic accent that was fennel and garlic to the ear, evoking hot spices not part of the English cuisine.
When Nigel looked back, Emily was looking at her feet, a faint smile playing on her lips.
He leaned against the glass windbreaker thinking how bright the houses were, how pale the morning-fired sky, how deep blue the ocean beneath them. He'd craved such liveliness through his days in the sick room, listening to Carew and his friends playing outside.
The ship was descending, slowly, toward the bright metropolis of Cairo, with its glimmering buildings, its brightly-lit feluccas with multicolored sails.
In the carpetport beneath, carpetships clustered. Some were built upon brilliant carpets that showed around the edge of the buildings upon them, and whose fringe -- a mix of brilliant gold and red and sky-blue -- blew softly in the wind. Other carpetships were smaller, and showed wear and age in tatters and holes around the edges. All of them were woven by descendants of a single Persian family, whose hereditary ability this was.
The flags of Spain and France were the most prominent, but at a glance Nigel saw a couple of Union Jacks, and a Portuguese flag, two German ones, and others where his geographical knowledge faltered.
At the edges of the carpet strong navvies threw down thick ropes, which were caught by natives stripped to their waists and tanned deep brown by sun above. The men’s corded muscles strained, and they chanted in Arabic as they pulled the ship down, for the final tethering to the strong pillars of the dock.
A scent rose from the city, together with the increasingly loud babble of voices — a scent a smell of spices and hot cooking oil and heated sand.
Many buildings surrounded the carpetport up close, too close -- as though the city pressed, like a child peering through the window of a sweet shop. Up close, the walls looked not white but golden, as if they’d acquired the color and texture of the surrounding desert. Amid the buildings, bright clusters of multicolored tents shone.
Bazaars, Nigel assumed. He had heard much of souqs and dim, ancient markets filled with mysterious goods. His teacher of Arabic had spoken of them. Huddled in the cold of a Cambridge garret, making his living bestowing his knowledge of Arabic language and culture on people such as Nigel — and never quite saving enough money to buy his passage back to the warm sands of his native land — the little man had spoken of bazaars filled with the exotic goods of the East, with the wild spoils of Africa. And of dazzling women who hid their features beneath veils and let only the eyes peer out to tantalize male kind. Women of gold and spice.
Women, Nigel imagined, like his Emily. Emily’s hand snaked around Nigel’s wrist, and Nigel jumped, drawn back from his dreams. “Does it look like India?” Nigel asked.
She gave him a startled look, her eyes opening wide, like sapphires on a dusky cushion. Then she blushed, and turned away. “I don’t know,” she said. “I was so small. Six. I don’t remember.”
Nigel nodded, but in his mind this land and India were the same, all part of the Empire his mission would save. And yet if Carew could not have accomplished the mission and returned triumphant to the Queen of England, the Empress of India, how could Nigel do it? What could Nigel add with his poor efforts to Carew's failed, heroic attempt?
Yet, something in Nigel seemed to trust itself. Heretically, against all revealed knowledge, something in Nigel believed he could rescue Carew and return to England in triumph. And then, maybe his parents–
But he flinched away from the thought.
He’d take this mission step by step, as he’d taken his exercises at school. Nigel had been given precise instructions on how to search for the magic jewel, how to bring it back for the queen. He had to remember he was not in this alone.
First, he would meet the secret emissary of the Queen's government in Cairo. This man would give Nigel more exact instructions, including how to activate the compass stone that would show the way to the temple in which the jewel lay hidden.
Nigel leaned forward and scanned the crowd assembled on the disembarking quay.
Lord Widefield, the Queen’s friend and the overseer of her most secret enterprises, had told Nigel that there would be a tall Englishman waiting – a Cairo expatriate. He would wear a white linen suit and a panama hat. And he would tell Nigel all the specifics of the mission, the particulars that Lord Widefield had been afraid to reveal in London, where — Lord Widefield had been sure — someone had watched and listened to them. He would tell Nigel where to go, how to proceed with finding the ruby of power that Lord Widefield had called Heart Of Light. The ruby that would give the Queen firm magical control over Europe and end, once and for all, the blood-soaked republican uprisings.
Maybe the man could even tell Nigel how Carew had come to fail at the mission and where Carew might be. Or Carew’s remains.
But Nigel flinched away from that thought. He couldn’t bear the idea of taking news of Carew’s death to his mother.
Yet, no matter how hard he tried to discern his contact, no Englishman stood amid the dark faces on the quay no straw hat was visible amid varieties of turbans and head cloths.
The ship touched down with a jar, and gentlemen and ladies called shrilly to their servants, ordered them to retrieve their luggage, then screamed out goodbyes to travel-met friends. Nigel had not brought servants, telling Emily that it was their honeymoon and that, surely, the hotel would have personnel who could assist them with the dressing, the undressing and such necessities. But truth was that Nigel had neither wanted to endanger an old servitor of the family, nor risk treason if that same servitor had been somehow coerced or seduced onto the enemy side. Perhaps that had been the mistake Carew had made. So they personally needed to trust the ship’s personnel to unload the luggage. Or rather Emily was supposed to have seen to it. He turned to Emily, a questioning look in his eyes.
“The trunks?” he said.
Emily, whose father had been so strict that Emily might well think she was supposed to guess Nigel’s wishes, nodded, without waiting for his question.
“The trunks,” she muttered. “I’ll see to it.”
With those words and without even a look of recrimination or rebellion, she turned and headed downstairs, doubtless to roust the personnel of the carpetship and get them to carry their trunks out. Nigel waited only long enough to see her white hat, her graceful swaying figure, disappear amid the crowd filling the deck, then he thundered down the spiral metal staircase to the bottom deck — struggling against tumultuous traffic of white-aproned maids and dark-attired men servants, against trunk-carrying footmen and shrilling nannies.
They gave him an odd look. The spiral staircase was the sole domain of servants and ship’s personnel. But Nigel didn’t allow them time to question him — had they dared — as he ran out of the carpetship and down the lower gangway, squeezing past tumultuous groups of debarking Englishmen.
Nigel would find his contact and come back up the plank before Emily ever knew he was missing.
All of Nigel's traveling -- beyond his few months in London -- had taken place in his mind. Thus he had formed a clear picture of himself emerging onto the crowded quay and going about unmolested, as he would have in the best London neighborhoods. He’d thought of himself slipping between groups of people, looking for a man wearing a Panama hat and a white linen suit and with a bright yellow flower adorning his lapel. He knew he would not be touched by the lower orders in England. And the upper class would certainly not do anything so rude as to grab at him or attempt to detain him.
But there was more strangeness to Cairo than the white houses with no proper roofs. As soon as Nigel stepped down from the gangway, people surrounded him. Men whose skin was a panoply of brown -- from caramel to deeply burnished, chestnut -- babbled at him in Arabic, broken English and doubtful French. So many voices resounded so close together that he could hardly tell what they were saying or what merchandise they were trying to hawk.
Sentences surfaced occasionally from the babble, shameless pitches for diverse merchandise:
“Elephant hair bracelets, effendi.”
“Powerful, ancient statue the likes--”
“Ground mummy. Will make your virile parts--”
“Unicorn horn.”
“Perfumes from India--”
“Opium to spice--”
Nigel stopped, surrounded by natives intent on selling him the merchandise of the whole world and took in a deep breath, fearing that someone — an enemy, a secret conspirator, had known of his arrival and had sent this mob to intercept him. But looking at the anxious eyes around him, he realized that these people only wanted money. To them, Nigel was just an Englishman, and Englishmen came to Cairo disposed to buy. How many times had Nigel heard stories, in his mother’s drawing room, of people who’d gone to Africa, or India, or even China, and got this so cheap, my dear, you wouldn’t believe it.
Nigel, though a disbeliever by nature, could believe it, once he’d seen the purported treasure: statuettes claimed to be from some ancient tomb but looking no older than yesterday. Or perhaps silver, so adulterated with nickel that it would break at the slightest pressure. He pushed through the crowd of vendors. Some of them tried to grab at his sleeves, others waved goods before his eyes.
“A fly swat made from an elephant’s tail. Very efficacious, Effendi.”
“A stuffed crocodile.” This while something scarcely larger than a lizard its tiny jaws pathetically open in mock ferociousness, was waved in front of his eyes. “You could tell your lady you shot it yourself.”
“The god Toth of the baboon head. From ancient pharaoh tomb. Robbed at great risk. Sell cheap.” Nigel waved away the crude fakeries and looked through the crowd for his contact – for a friendly face, a pale complexion, pale hair, blue eyes, anything that bespoke England in this sweltering climate. He saw no one — no one he could call a fellow expatriate.
The same peddlers or their near cousins had followed him, surrounding him again. “Effendi,” they said. “Buy my universal ointment.” A greasy clay jar waved back and forth across his field of vision.
The air itself felt alien, filled with spices for which Nigel lacked a name.
“Buy this formula for the philosopher's stone.” A greasy paper appeared beside the jar.
The crowd added its own smell to the mixture, the smell of hot human bodies, unwashed hair and heated cotton garments that billowed around dark, wiry bodies.
“Buy this true map to lost Pharaohs’s treasure.”
White and gold and sudden, startlingly blue bead necklaces wiggled in front of Nigel’s face. Ivory implements, and brass vases and violently colored, beautiful fabrics danced before his eyes.
“I see you are a discerning man. You’ll buy this.” An obscene wooden statuette, showing a man with an impossibly large, improbably erect penis.
The breeze that blew from the west brought no relief at all to the stultifying heat. Instead, it felt like the breath from a just-opened baker’s oven, hot and dry and stifling.
Nigel looked and found no one. A little throng of vendors surrounded him at all times, fresh ones rushing in to replace those who’d left to pester new arrivals. In the middle of the crowd, like a man surrounded by a swarm of flies, Nigel pushed and shoved and stood on his tiptoes. His contact wasn’t here. He was going to fail in this mission in an abominable way. He was going to fail before he started. Foiled in Cairo, for lack of a contact, for lack of the information his contact was likely to give him.
Was this a test? Had they withheld the information because they thought Nigel incapable of keeping his mouth shut while still in England? Had they been afraid that he would tell all to his mother, or the mistress he didn’t have? Were they afraid he would reveal all to Emily’s attentive sapphire-blue eyes?
If not that, then what had happened? Had his contact been betrayed?
A fine dewing of sweat covered Nigel’s skin and glued his shirt to his back. He thought of Emily on the ship. He should go back to her, get her out of here. Something had gone terribly wrong.
A newspaper seller stood at the edge of the crowd, hawking his Arab-language newspapers, printed in brownish sepia tones upon nasty-looking yellow paper. He stood away from the other sellers, displaying his wares to the locals, with melodious cries of, “Buy the news.”
But Nigel read the elegant, twirling characters as easily was he would have read English and breath arrested on seeing the headline on the first page. “Lord Widefield Dead. British Aristocrat Killed By Anarchists.”
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