Journey to the Lost Tomb (Rowan and Ella Book 2) (20 page)

           
“Come
on, girl,” Ella said. “You’re plucky, remember? You’re tougher than this. It’s
cold but it’s not the arctic. It’s a
desert
.
Come on, sweetie.”

           
Julia’s
only answer was the rather loud clattering of her teeth.

           
“Let’s
think of warm things, okay?” Ella said. “I’ll start. Hot chocolate so hot it
burns your lips. Cancun at high noon when all you can feel is the sweat and the
sunscreen dripping down your ribs and the sun beating down your face. How about
any moment we just lived through today, right? Plodding along endless sands
with the sun burning down your neck? Remember, sweetie? Remember it was so hot
we felt like our skin was crisping up? Julia?”

           
Suddenly,
Ella heard a noise that hadn’t come from her or Julia or one of the horses. She
stopped talking and held her breath. The only sound in the quiet night was Julia’s
chattering teeth.
 

           
“Julia,”
Ella said, shaking her friend. “Julia, shut up a second.”

           
Ella’s
stomach clenched with excitement.
She
heard voices! Voices coming across the sands toward them!
           

           
They
were rescued!

           
“Julia!
We’ve been found!” she said. “They’ve found us! We’re saved!”

           
Ella
jumped up and ran to their hobbled horses. She was horrified to see her horse
was lying down and not moving.

           
“Hello?”
she called into the night. “We’re over here! Help!”

           
She
heard the voices stop when she called and it occurred to her that
that
was not a good sign. She tried to
see in the darkness but could make out nothing. She took a tentative step back to
where she had left Julia and realized at some instinctual level that she was now
attempting to be secretive.

           
Why
would the voices stop when she called to them?

           
She
turned to run back to Julia but halted in horror after two steps.

           
Four
men stood over Julia. They were dressed in rags, their faces covered by beards.
As Ella watched, two of them turned toward her. One pulled a long scimitar from
a loop in his belt as he advanced toward her.

Chapter Fourteen

           
Rowan
stood holding the punctured water bag and stared at the wet puddle that had
soaked into the desert floor hours before. They had a smaller bag but it wasn’t
going to last long.

           
“How
could this happen?” Rowan said, his voice shaking with anger as he held the bag
in his hands. He wanted very badly to punch something.

           
“Son
of a bitch!” Spenser strode across the few yards that separated them and snatched
the bag out of Rowan’s hands. He stared at the darkening stain on the ground.
“It’s been cut with a knife!”

           
“I
say, chaps,” Digby said. “I fear I am the unwitting and totally unfortunate perpetrator
of this terrible—”

           
He
didn’t finish his sentence before Spenser socked him in the jaw, knocking him
flat.

           
“Are
you trying to kill us, you idiot?” Spenser shouted. “Slashing our water in the
desert?”

           
“It…it
was an accident!” Digby said, spitting blood into his hand. “I was using my
knife to get to the beef jerky I keep in my saddle bag and in the dark I failed
to…I had difficulty distinguishing between the—”

           
“Shut
up!” Spenser said, throwing the water bag at Digby on the ground. “Just. Shut.
Up.” In an attempt to get his anger under control, Spenser stomped over to the
campfire and scooped up his own water bag. He looked bleakly at Rowan.

           
“There’s
not enough water to go forward,” Rowan said, interpreting Spenser’s look.

           
“There’s
barely enough to make it back,” Spenser growled.

           
Rowan
remembered Abdullah slinking off into the night.

           
“I
say, chaps,” Digby said, picking himself up off the ground. “I am frightfully
sorry. Nobody more so. Am I to deduce that this means we will have to return to
camp?”

           
“Something
like that,” Spenser said with disgust as he began to kick the fire out.

           
“I’m
going on,” Rowan said.

           
“You
can’t,” Spenser said with exasperation. “Even if you
did
find them, you’d have no water to give them and none for
yourself. How would any of you get back? You would only find them in time to
die with them.”

           
“Every
hour they’re out there weakens their chances of surviving,” Rowan said.

           
“That’s
true,” Spenser said, more calmly now, “if they
are
out here. They might be in a village. They may well have
doubled back to the camp by now. They could be sitting in a chair at camp drinking
lemonade and waiting for us. And if they are, gentlemen, I’m warning you now I’ll
likely take a switch to them myself.”

           
“That’s
true,” Digby said, still rubbing his jaw. “They’re probably back at camp.”

           
Rowan
looked out at the forbidding desert. Unless the women found shelter or help
soon, they would die. That was clear. His only hope now was that they never
made it this far.

           
“Okay,”
he said with resignation. “We head back.”

Somewhere in the Egyptian
Desert

           
The
leader of the Bedouins rode stiff and rigid on his Arabian mare at the head of
his miscreant gaggle of thugs. Ella sat in front of him, her legs to one side
as he cradled her between his arms as he held the reins. At one point, she twisted
around to try to see Julia. Julia’s billowing skirts flounced obscenely against
the front of her captor’s saddle as she leaned against his chest. There were
five men in total, each more malodorant and filthy than the other. Each rode
their mounts aggressively, punishingly.

           
Whether
Julia had fainted or just succumbed to general discomfort when the men found
them, she revived quickly enough when the first man began ripping her clothes
off. Ella watched in horror, herself held in the iron-vise grip of one of the
men, as they attempted to find an opening into Julia’s tangle of textiles. Ella
realized she must have been screaming because when the man holding her slapped
her, she slid to her knees in the sand and the volume of the night reduced to
just the crude laughter and talk of the men.

           
Before
the men were able to gain entry into Julia’s fortress of clothing, a tall man
wrapped in flowing robes and wearing a dark
hijab
around his head and neck, came from out of the darkness. He spoke a quiet word
and they dropped Julia in the sand like a broken doll. Ella jerked away from
her captor and ran to her. Before reaching her, the tall man grabbed Ella
around the middle and swung her over his shoulder. Ella didn’t struggle. It
would have been futile. The man held her as if she were no more an armful than
a squirming kitten. He spoke to his men who grabbed Julia and dragged her to
the horses that Ella could see stood just a few yards away. The leader dropped
Ella on the ground and swung up into his saddle. Before she could react, he
pulled her up and set her in front of him.
 

           
One
thing was becoming quickly clear: fighting these men would do no good. Ella had
no idea if there was a code of conduct in these wild bands that would relate to
the treatment of women. She didn’t have a good feeling about that. She assumed
rape was a given at some point. She prayed murder wasn’t also.

Howard Carter’s Camp in the
Valley of the Kings

           
Digby
stood at the front of his tent smoking a large cigar. He watched Pierce come
and go from Miss Steven’s tent all morning. The man was a nuisance. Constantly barging
into people’s conversations, demanding answers, insisting on fresh provisions
to mount another expedition.

           
The
women had
not
come back to the camp.

           
He
watched Pierce as he carried a saddle to the front of his wife’s tent and began
tying a series of empty goat skin water bags to it. His boy, a thief from the Cairo
streets from the look of him, complete with lupine hungry eyes, was ever at his
side to fetch, carry, and run his master’s errands.

           
While
Digby had to admit that an actual body would have made him feel much better
about proceeding with his plans, it was a fortuitous and tidy turn of events to
have dear Julia expire in the desert all on her own. Actually, once he got past
the part where he didn’t have any actual proof of her death, it was a jolly
nice story to tell at all the house parties whose lists of preferred and
esteemed guests he had no doubt he would now belong to. It was all very well to
be widowed so soon—especially with a large fortune from the dead wife to
help assuage his grief—but to do it hand in glove with a story as tragic
and colorful as
lost in the desert while
excavating with Howard Carter
? Digby smiled.
Yes, if it only weren’t for the blasted no-body situation—and
really, it was no more than a gnat’s sting, that—it was clear that providence
had smiled upon Viscount Edward Digsby.

           
He
turned his thoughts back to Pierce, who
was dragging more provisions into his tent.
Clearly,
another tedious venture into the desert was in the offing
. Digby, of all
people, saw the sense in that. The desert dried everything with the inevitable
result that the bodies, when found, would be mummified, well-preserved husks.
And a husk was as good as flesh and bone for proving death, especially one that
could not possibly be laid at his feet. But what was
not
as good was the chance—even the infinitesimally small
one—that the passionate search of two desperate husbands, for of course,
he would be required to go—might actually
rescue
the women.

           
And
that would not do at all. Not at all.

           
He
glanced over at Abdullah who sat in the full beating sun, watching Digby,
waiting for his master’s orders. Finding this creature in Cairo had been the
one stroke of luck that had helped make much of the rest of it possible. He’d
been told by school chums who’d done it before him that
baksheesh
would open any door if there was enough of it. He’d been
warned not to try to save money by underbidding for the types of
specialty
services he needed. These
people had no loyalties—or qualms—save what enough money would dissolve.
Although it had sickened him to do it, his generosity had been worth the cost. Abdullah
was his to command. Without any effort beyond tapping the ash off his cigar, Digby
signaled to the man to join him in his tent.

           
It
was time for him to earn his money.

           
Rowan
knew it was a long shot. But short of returning to Cairo, there was nothing
else he could think to do. His mind ran over the unanswered questions.
Why did Ella leave?
Where would she be heading? Did she really just go the wrong way or was
she heading to someplace specific?

           
He
looked around her tent and wondered if it was too much to hope that she might
have left him a note or a clue of some kind.

           
Shouldn’t she have assumed he’d come after
her? Did she think he’d let her fly off to Cairo and just not come back?
While he knew she hadn’t deliberately traveled to 1922 as he had, once she was
here and knew it was possible, surely she’d realize Rowan would follow her
trail and come after her?

           
Did
she not want to be found?

           
Pushing
the worry from his mind, he made a quick survey of the provisions he’d need for
going back into the desert. His plan was to leave Ra at Carter’s camp in case Ella
found her way back. Josh Spenser had agreed to send three men with Rowan. He
gave orders for Rowan to be given whatever supplies he needed.

           
Rowan
was glad to leave Spenser behind. He wasn’t needed and he had already abandoned
his job here at Carter’s camp for long enough. If Rowan had his way, he’d leave
Digby behind, too. He had every reason to believe that Digby had intentionally sabotaged
the water supply in order to force their early return to camp. When he had suggested
to Digby that he stay back in camp, Digby had been downright aggressive in his
insistence that he go too.

           
“
Effendi! Effendi
!” Ra called to him from
outside the tent.

           
Rowan
took a step out to see that Ra was pointing in the direction of Howard Carter’s
tent.

           
“The
chief has returned to his tent,” Ra said, his eyebrows shooting up under his
dark shaggy mop of hair. Rowan had put him on the lookout for Carter on the off
chance Rowan would be able to speak with him before he left.

           
Rowan
threw down the bandages he had been packing inside his bedroll and strode to
the center of camp where several village men were milling about, their long
robes dusting the ground as they fidgeted.

           
“Where,
Ra?” he asked as he squinted into the distant crowd of men.

           
Ra
indicated that Rowan was to follow him. “He is coming up the trail from the dig
site,” he said, pointing toward the trailhead on the other side of the Egyptian
men. “They said he was coming back to camp for lunch today.”

           
“
Who
said?” Rowan strode down the camp
pathway toward Carter’s tent.

           
Ra
looked up at him, his eyes wide and then looked back toward the empty
trailhead. He shrugged. “One of the other boys,” he said. “He works with
Effendi
Carter in the tombs. He has a
very important job!”

           
“Okay,
Ra. Never mind.” Rowan placed a hand on the boy’s shoulder. “I’ll see the great
man when I return. I need to get going. You remember what I told you?”

           
“I
will wait in camp for
Madaam
Pierce
to return.”

           
“Good
boy.” Rowan turned impatiently toward where the horses were tethered.

           
Every
minute they delayed could mean the difference between the women surviving and
not.

           
“Pierce!”

           
Rowan
turned at the sound of Spenser’s voice. The foreman was coming from the
direction of Rowan’s tent.