“Not what it used to be,” growled Romanelli in a tone that didn’t invite further discussion. The wizard was huddled against the opposite gunwale, breathing in long wheezes. What was left of Romany was giggling quietly on the bow.
The man at the oars let the harbor’s current slant them to the left, east of the town, and on a sandy rise Doyle finally saw some people; three or four figures in Arab robes stood in the shade of a dusty palm tree, while a number of camels stood and sat around a section of ruined wall nearby. Doyle wasn’t surprised when the sailor heeled the boat about and aimed the bow toward the palm tree and Romanelli waved and yelled, “Ya Abbas sabahixler!”
One of the robed men was now walking down to the shore. He waved and called, “Saghida, ya Romanelli?”
Doyle eyed the man’s lean, sharp-chiseled face and nervously tried to imagine the fellow doing anything just domestically pleasant, like petting a cat. He couldn’t.
When the boat was still a few yards from shore the keel grated on the sandy bottom, stopping the little craft and pitching Doyle forward.
“Ow,” he mumbled, his lips brushing the thwart, which was coldly and saltily wet from the splashing of the oars. A moment later Romanelli yanked him upright.
“That hurt?” asked the wide-eyed bow-croucher with mock alarm. “Sa-a-a-ay—did that hurt, Burt?”
The sorcerer had stood up and was barking instructions in Arabic, and two more of the men from under the palm hastened down toward the water, while the first man was already splashing out toward the boat. Romanelli pointed down at Doyle. “Taghald maghaya nisilu,” he said, and lean brown arms reached over the gunwale and lifted Doyle out of the boat.
Doyle was tied onto a camel and in spite of the several rest and water stops, by the time they arrived at the little town of El Hamed by the Nile, late in the afternoon, Doyle’s legs were distant columns of numbness, only recognizable as his own when they were occasionally lanced with tooth-grinding agony, and his spine felt like a big old dried sunflower stalk that kids had used for a blowgun dart target. When the Arabs untied him and carried him aboard the dahabeeyeh, a low, single-masted boat with a little cabin in the back, he was half delirious and muttering, “Beer … beer…” Fortunately they seemed to recognize the word, and brought him a jug of what was, blessedly and unmistakably, beer. Doyle drained it in several long swallows and fell back across the deck, instantly asleep.
He awoke in darkness when the boat bumped gently against wood and rocked to a stop, and when his captors hoisted him up and sat him on the dock, facing inland, he could see lights only a few hundred yards away to his left.
A man with a lantern stepped down onto the dock. “Is salam ghalekum, ya Romanelli,” he said quietly.
“Wi ghalekum is salam,” Romanelli answered.
Doyle had been dreading another camel ride, and he sighed with relief when he noticed the silhouette of a real British carriage up on the road behind the man. “Are we in Cairo?” he asked.
“Just past it,” Romanelli said shortly. “We’re going inland, toward the Karafeh, the necropolis below the Citadel.” He barked at the Arabs and obediently they lifted Doyle by his ankles and shoulders and carried him up a set of ancient stone steps to the road and pushed him into the carriage.
A few moments later he was joined by Romanelli, the Romany thing, one of the Arabs and the man who had met them here. Reins snapped and the carriage surged into rattling motion.
Necropolis, thought Doyle unhappily. Excellent. He pressed his knees together as he sat folded up on the floor of the carriage, and was only slightly reassured by the feel of his homemade wooden dagger. He hadn’t been aware of the tropical smells of the river until they diminished and were replaced by the fainter but harsher dessicated-stone smell of the desert.
After about two miles of slow travel on a crumbled but serviceable road they stopped, and when Doyle was lifted out and propped upright beside the carriage he stared at the lightless building they’d arrived at, standing alone in the desert waste. The lantern showed an arched doorway, flanked by wide pillars, in a wall otherwise featureless except for a couple of holes that might have been meant to be windows, though they were too small even to poke one’s head through. Above, he could dimly see a large dome silhouetted against the stars.
At a nod from Romanelli the Arab who’d accompanied them from the boat pulled a mirror-bright curved dagger from under his robe and sliced through three loops of rope around Doyle’s legs. All the rope from his waist down fell to the dusty ground, and Doyle kicked it off his ankles.
“Don’t run,” said Romanelli wearily. “Abbas would certainly outrun you, and then I’d have to instruct him to sever one of your Achilles tendons.”
Doyle nodded, wondering if he’d even be able to walk.
The shrunken ka had taken off its weighted shoes and, gripping the buckles of them, was walking around on its hands, with its legs flailing upward like ribbons tied to a floor heater vent. It grinned upside down at Doyle and said, “Time to go see the moon man, Stan.”
“Shut up,” Romanelli told it. To Doyle he said, “This way. Come on.”
Doyle limped after him toward the door, accompanied by the ka, and when they’d covered half the twenty foot distance to the front door there was a hollowly echoing snap and then the door swung inward and a hooded figure with a lantern was beckoning. Romanelli impatiently waved Doyle and the ka past him into the broad stone hallway and asked a question, in a language that didn’t seem to be Arabic this time, as the hooded man closed and re-bolted the door.
The man shrugged and gave a brief answer that seemed neither to surprise nor please Romanelli.
“He’s no better,” he muttered to the ka as he led the way forward. The man with the lantern followed, and the swinging shadows made the Old Kingdom bas reliefs on the walls, and even the columns of hieroglyphics, seem to move. Doyle noticed that the hall ended a dozen yards ahead at a carefully bricked surface of masonry that was bellied and leaning sharply out toward them, so that the floor extended a good deal farther than the ceiling; as if, he thought, there’s an above ground swimming pool on the other side.
“Was you expecting to hear he’d commenced turning summer-salties?” inquired the still-inverted ka.
Romanelli ignored the creature and, turning into an open arch in the left-hand wall, started up a set of steps. Light touched the pitted stair edges from around a corner above, and the man with the lantern remained—gratefully, it seemed to Doyle—below. The three of them climbed to another hall, much shorter than the one downstairs, and this one ended at a balcony that faced the lighted interior of the dome. The trio moved forward to the balcony rail.
Doyle found himself staring out across the inside of a huge sphere, roughly seventy-five feet across, illuminated by a lamp that hung in the precise center, at the same level as the balcony, from a long chain moored to the highest point of the dome. He leaned over the rail and looked down, and was surprised to see four motionless men in a round stone-walled pen at the very bottom of the spherical chamber.
“Greetings, my little friends,” came a grinding whisper from the opposite side of the sphere, and Doyle noticed for the first time that there was a man—a very old and withered and twisted man—lying on a couch that was somehow attached to the far wall only a foot or two below the horizontal black line that seemed to be the room’s equator. The man lay on the couch, and the couch on the nearly perpendicular wall, with such a convincing appearance of gravity holding them there that Doyle automatically looked around for the edges of the mirror that had to be there… but there was no break in the dome’s inner surface; couch and man actually hung up there, like some disagreeable wall ornament. And just as Doyle had begun to speculate about how the old man stayed on the evidently nailed-up couch with such an appearance of nonchalance, and where a ladder could be footed to get him up there, there was a squealing of casters and the couch rolled upward a little.