The Book of the Seven Delights (13 page)

Smith grabbed up his blanket and used it to beat the nearby grasses, looking for anything that might be lurking. Hidden within the grasses was a rocky ledge with a number of ominous crevices.

"Scorpions are dangerous, right?" She couldn't take her eyes off the long, dark body and curled tail with its all-too-visible stinger.

"Only if you hope to live to a ripe old age." Smith stalked back into the dim circle of light and used his feet to slide her bed of palm fronds closer to the fire. "The rule on scorpions is… a skinny tail and skinny pincers—you'll survive… fat tail and big pincers—say your final prayers."

"This one had a fat tail." She saw Haffe fling the carcass into the brush.

"Most of the ones in Morocco do," Smith added rolling his shoulders. "Might be good if one of us kept watch tonight." He sent Haffe a speaking look that the little steward acknowledged with a nod.

"You think there could be more?" She stared off into the underbrush, feeling vulnerable and unable to keep that feeling out of her voice.

Smith finally looked directly at her.

"Tell you what," he said, much too innocently, "I'll sleep beside you tonight. That way if something gets past Haffe, it'll get me before it gets you."

Abigail was caught off guard by his offer, then she recalled what was happening before Haffe interrupted and she flushed crimson.

"No thank you." She busied herself recovering her sheet and shaking it out. "I have no desire to be responsible for your death-by-scorpion-bite." She dragged her doeskin around her and sat down on her pallet.

"You don't have to worry about that. I've been bitten quite a few times." He strolled over and sat down beside her, causing her to inch closer the fire to avoid him. "Spiders, snakes, scorpions—you name it.

Used to give my old nurse an apoplexy on a regular basis."

"You had a nurse?" She looked at him with surprise.

"Until the governess came. And after that a tutor. Tutors, actually. Quite a number of them." He grinned defiantly. "It seems I was a regular beast as a child. Always bringing home some vermin or reptile that made the female help climb on chairs and scream."

"The child really is 'father to the man,'" she muttered.

"And, of course, there was my fascination with heights." He waxed a bit nostalgic as he recounted: "I was always climbing things… trees, bell towers, drainpipes, roof gables… breaking bones. By the time I reached public school I was fairly well indestructible. Which has come in rather handy in Morocco.

"The little scorpions, up north… I was bitten regularly enough to become immune. Then when we were transferred south and the scorpions got bigger, I tangled with a number of them, too. But I always recover. And the next bite generally doesn't seem quite as bad as the last."

She was staring at him in amazement, seeing clearly in his face the exasperating and yet appealing boy he had been. And she was so focused on that vision that she wasn't prepared for what came next.

"That's why I figured I could put up with you for a few weeks."

She was so dazzled by his grin that it took a moment to register. With a gasp, she started to rise, but he grabbed her arm.

"Just a joke, Boston." Then his eyes sought hers and his voice lowered. "I won't let anything happen to you. You have my word."

She looked down at his hand on her arm, realizing that she was in the grip of an appalling desire to curl up in his arms and believe him. Glaring at her own thoughts, she freed her arm and removed herself to the base of a palm tree well away from both him and the scorpion-concealing vegetation.

Wretch. She refused to look at him or to dwell on the fact that one minute she had been ready to throttle him and the next she was setting hands to him. She had been in fear for her life and wasn't thinking clearly. Thank heaven his "charm" had jolted her back to her normal desire to strangle him.

To take her mind off her unthinkable behavior, she went over and over the list of hazardous wildlife Mary Kingsley and Mabel Crawford had painstakingly described. Mosquitos, leeches, snakes, lizards, crocodiles, leopards,

"You drew water?" he said, looking pained.

"Of course. I intend to pull my weight on this expe—"

"I should have told you—the nomads are very touchy about their water. They don't like foreigners, especially infidel females, polluting their wells."

"Polluting? All I did was draw one wretched bucket of water!" she cried, causing another murmur of alarm to sweep through the clan.

Smith turned to assess the way the assembled herdsmen—including the chieftain—were watching them.

They sensed she was defying him. If he didn't do something, their hostile eyes said, then they would.

Murmurs turned to ugly shouts and a confrontation seemed inevitable, when a woman broke free from a group near the chief's tent and ran forward with something in her hands. She threw it at Smith, but it fell short. It was a minute before he realized it had been thrown to him, not at him, and he retrieved it.

He unfolded and held up a long, indigo dark garment like those worn by the women of the camp.

Bowing in the woman's direction, he came straight to Abigail and draped it over her head and shoulders, covering her from head to toe, as if she were a threadbare couch that had to be made presentable for company.

"What in blazes are you doing?" she demanded. He grabbed her hands to keep her from removing it.

"Saving your hide," he ground out in furiously compressed tones. "It's this or make you a ritual sacrifice to the 'spirit of the watering hole.'"

"Don't be ridiculous." Through her irritation, she realized that there was a marked easing in the turmoil and anxiety the nomads displayed. "Berber nomads don't practice human sacrifice. They're a deeply hospitable people who always welcome strangers."

"How would you know what they are and aren't?"

"Eliza Beaverton listed them as such in her book,
A Three Year Sojourn Through The Barbary Coast

."

"Beta, iota, beta lamda… omicron… sigma…" He pointed to a group of letters. "B… I… b… I… is that
Bible
!"

"Close.
Biblos
. It means 'book?—which is where the word 'bible' comes from." Her surprise at how close he'd come was evident. "You know Greek?"

"A few words and phrases." He shrugged. "The basics came from public school… the rest from a Greek fellow in our company who taught me a few words in exchange for some French."

"Here"—she ran her finger along a line—"the professor talks about the guardians' trip into the
erimos
, the desert. He says they built a
naos
—temple—and dedicated it to
thea Athena
… goddess and keeper of wisdom. A whole settlement. With walls and homes and chambers for the
graft
—the writings."

When she looked up from the pages, Smith was looking at her strangely.

"And where was this settlement?" he asked, dropping his gaze to the page.

"South and east of Marrakech. At least that is what T. Thaddeus calculated. He compared old navigational star charts against the few accounts of the library's location in existing texts and engravings.

And he knew the length of the journey and the location of the nearest city… Timbuktu."

"Timbuktu?" Haffe's eyes lighted with recognition. "Born Timbuktu." Then his pleasure evaporated.

"Long journey. Very hot. No water."

"Well, I doubt we'll have to go all the way there," she said. "After two fruitless trips to search for the site, the professor revised his calculations… concluding that the library and settlement were closer to Marrakech."

"So, the old boy already looked for it twice and found nothing?" Smith's amusement faded. "What makes you think you'll do better?"

"Because the professor found new evidence. A fragment of a letter that was included on a scroll describing the city administration of Alexandria."

"And no one had noticed this fragment before?"

"It was written in code." She warmed to her subject. "There had been damage to the original scroll and other translators apparently thought it was too fragmented to deal with or would turn out to be mere gibberish. But the professor glimpsed linguistic organization in the piece. After some work, he realized it was encoded and deciphered it. It proved to be a message to some of the old keepers of the library, reporting that the guardians had found a suitable place in the desert and had begun construction of a scriptorium."

She paged through the journal to the place where T. Thaddeus had painstakingly copied the manuscript fragment on which he had pinned his hopes and calculations. She pointed out the letters and identified the corresponding letters indicated by the code, growing steadily more animated.

When she finished, she looked up and found Smith staring at her with an odd look. He rose, stood for a moment, then wagged his head.

"You were one of those little girls who always got 'perfects' on her schoolroom papers, weren't you?"

When she didn't answer straightaway, he nodded for her. "Yeah. I'll bet you were a nightmare for your parents."

"My parents happen to both be classical scholars," she said defensively. "My father is a distinguished classicist at Oxford and my mother was a renowned curator and translator at a fine museum library in Boston."

"So, you're following in your father's footsteps."

"I haven't seen my father in nearly two decades." That statement and the thoughts and memories it stirred tapped a seldom acknowledged reservoir of resentment in her. "But perhaps I'll meet him, face-to-face, when I take the remnant of the Great Library of Alexandria back to the British Museum."

He stared at her for a long moment, then turned away with an "Ah."

"Ah?" She set the journal aside, watching as he collapsed on a nearby hummock of grass, stretched, and drew his hat down over his face. "Just what does that mean: '
ah
'?"

"It means"—she could hear the smugness in his voice—"I finally found the real reason you came to Morocco."

Her pursuit of the lost library had nothing to do with her father. Abigail was adamant about that as they rode through the dregs of the day's heat toward yet another stop before reaching Marrakech. She was here to make an historic discovery, to make a reputation as a scholar, and to prove the point that women were capable of the same dedication and sacrifices for the advancement of knowledge that men were.

Henry Merchant—a man who thought more of the opinion of his peers than he did of the dignity, brilliance, and spirit of his wife—had failed the test as a husband and father long ago. She had no need to prove anything to him.

Her mother, however, was a different story.

Brilliant but impetuous, Olivia Ridgeway-Merchant had fallen in love with and married a serious young scholar while touring England. When she began to work with him on a variety of groundbreaking translations, his department was scandalized and insisted he cease the collaboration and remove her name from their joint work. Devastated, Olivia found the role of faculty wife stifling, degrading, and ultimately intolerable. When Abigail was five, her mother fled Oxford for her home in Boston, intent on raising her daughter in a freer atmosphere.

But Olivia had not reckoned with the caprices of heredity. Abigail, it seemed, was very much her father's daughter; studious, obsessively orderly, and adverse to risk of any kind. When she finished college and announced she intended to become a librarian, Olivia reacted as if she'd announced she had sold her soul to the devil. She entreated Abigail to travel instead, to start a business of her own, or even to become a devotee of free love. In short, to embrace the freedom Olivia had bought for her at such a cost.

It was only at Olivia's bedside, during her last illness, that Abigail truly understood the sacrifices her mother had made on her behalf. She swore to Olivia she would do something vital and adventuresome with her life. And when her mother's modest estate was settled, she wrote a letter to Oxford and booked passage on a liner bound for England and the British Museum…

But something about Smith's taunting conclusion about her motives had struck a nerve that hours later was still tender. She reluctantly examined her motivations and had to admit that… though this expedition was for her mother… she did harbor the desire to carry back the remnant of the great library to Oxford and set it before her father's eyes.

Her gaze intensified on Smith, riding ahead of her, and she felt a rush of resentment that he had dredged up a forgotten layer of silt from the bottom of her soul. That old bit of family business seemed to add still more pressure to her already burdened quest.

But the most irritating thing was that she felt somehow disarmed by Smith's incisive assessment of her.

Exposed, somehow. Vulnerable. How could a man like him see through her—
into
her—so effortlessly?

And with only one eye?

Thee wadi Smith had promised would make a good campsite turned out to be a broad valley with a rocky, dry riverbed and a sinuous strip of green flowing along its fertile heart. There were groves of date palms all over the lower valley and plantings of olives and citrus on the slopes. After a long day of dry grass and reflective rock and sand, the lush vegetation was like a salve for the eyes.

Their party, however, was not the only one enjoying the comforts of the river's fertile plain. A band of nomadic herdsmen had claimed the grazing areas for their flocks and set up a camp near the wells at the center.

Smith led Abigail and Haffe to the only well not surrounded by sheep or tents… identified by the low stone wall that surrounded the hand-dug shaft and a bracketed pole from which hung a long bucket.

Haffe went straight to work watering the horses and setting up a camp, and Smith ordered Abigail to avoid looking directly at any of the tribesmen. Before she could demand an explanation, he went striding off toward the largest of several sprawling tents.

While Haffe replenished their canteens and filled a waterskin for cooking, Abigail paced back and forth, stretching her cramped muscles, amazed that her legs still functioned after so much riding. Her back ached, her bottom was sore, and her skin felt gritty. She was desperate for some clean water, pear soap, and cold cream. Perhaps in Marrakech, there would be time for a bath…