Читать книгу Her Kind Of Trouble - Evelyn Vaughn - Страница 13

When the hopeful clerk repeated, “Rings for rings,” I finally understood her. I’d simply known the childhood rhyme as Circle to Circle.

But circles, rings…they were all eternal loops. It lost little in translation. And it was a recognition code.

“Never an end,” I greeted softly, purposefully giving the next piece of the Grailkeeper’s chant.

She clearly recognized it. She beamed. I even caught a pale hint of white teeth behind her veil as she reached across the counter and grasped my hand. Her grip was firm. Then her eyes closed and she drew in a long, deep breath, as if savoring…

What? Was she sensing the essence of goddessness that seemed to empower women whom I touched, of late?

It wasn’t like I expected her to rip off her veil and head scarf and demand equal pay for equal work. But when she opened her eyes, all she said was, “It is you!”

Uh-huh… “What is me?”

“You have come to reclaim the sultana’s magic,” she continued. “As in the tales.”

For a moment I had the sick feeling that there was an actual sultana out there somewhere. One more responsibility I hadn’t meant to take on. Then I realized that my word for the position would be queen.

“You mean like the fairy tale, about the queen and her nine daughters?” I asked.

“Seven,” corrected the clerk—but as surely as I’d heard different versions of the story, I’d heard different numbers. Sometimes the queen had as many as thirteen daughters, sometimes as few as three. “Seven beautiful daughters.”

Rhys, behind me, asked, “Does she mean the story where the queen gives her daughters magical cups?”

The clerk’s eyes widened. She backed away two steps, making what I assumed was a protective gesture.

“It’s all right,” I assured her. “His mother is a Grailkeeper.”

She stared at me blankly.

“A…Chalice Keeper,” I tried.

She nodded slowly and said, “A Cup Holder.”

“Um…yeah. A Cup Holder.” Now that one suffered in translation. “He knows the story.”

Pour your powers into these cups, the queen instructs. Hide them so that your energy can live on even though you be forgotten.

The veiled clerk continued to eye Rhys as if he meant to attack her. Or me. With his big, manly hands and all that…testosterone.

“Perhaps I should go look at…yes, there,” said Rhys, choosing the first thing he noticed. “One can’t have enough T-shirts, can one?”

Only after he’d backed away did the “Cup Holder’s” shoulders sink in relief. Poor, gentle Rhys.

“Let me try again,” I said. “Hello. My name is Magdalene Sanger.”

“I is Munira,” said the clerk, clearly pleased. “It is…honor…to meet champion.”

“To meet what?”

“Champion of the Holy One.” She opened her arms toward me, like a tah-dah move. “It is you, is not?”

“I’m looking for goddess cups, but I wouldn’t call myself a champion.” Certainly not the champion.

Even factoring in the number of women who’d forgotten or dismissed the legends, I suspect the number of hereditary Grailkeepers had to count in the hundreds, if not the thousands. The whole world had once worshipped goddesses, after all. We’d just kept such a low profile for so long, we’d lost track of each other.

There still had to be a handful who understood what the stories meant. Not just me.

“Blessings upon you, Champion,” said Munira.

I gave up arguing with her, in favor of better information. “Well…thank you. Would you happen to know where a goddess cup is hidden?”

Like the Isis Grail?

She stared, brow furrowed.

“Did your mother teach you a rhyme or song about where the Holy One’s cup might be waiting?” That’s how most of our knowledge had been kept. Power mongers rarely think to dissect fairy tales or nursery rhymes.

“Ah!” She nodded—and recited something singsong in Arabic.

I smiled a stupid half grin of ignorance, and Munira took pity on me, but her attempt at translating was clearly an effort.

“She…she sleeps, yes?” She mimed closing her eyes, head tipping sideways in illustration. “With no light. She is.”

“She is what?”

Munira shook her head. “She is. And much…always…will she be such.”

Then she nodded at her completely unhelpful attempt, proud of herself. To be fair, her English so far outshone my Arabic that I couldn’t do anything but thank her.

That, and make a mental note to come back with someone—a woman—who was fluent in both languages.

“May she smile upon you,” said Munira—then looked down at the wedding ring I’d set on the counter. “What is you wish for this ring, Champion? You say…trapping?”

No reason to confuse matters with the concept of a tracking device. “Is there anything unusual about this ring? Something that does not belong, embedded in it?”

I felt sick, just having to ask. Lex and I were working on trusting each other, damn it. If it turned out he’d bugged me again, the man would need more than a sword to defend himself.

Munira raised a jeweler’s loupe to her eye, a strange contrast to the veiling, and professionally examined the ring. If there was anything artificial there, she would surely see it.

“It is written,” she said. “Graven?”

“Engraved?”

Nodding, she found a pencil to trace the unfamiliar letters, right to left. They came out sloppy, like a child’s—but again, any attempt I made to write the beautiful flourishes of Arabic would have looked worse. All I needed was legibility.

That’s what I got. Virescit vulnere virtus.

Latin. Something about vulnerability and strength. I’d seen the words before—over Lex’s father’s fireplace.

It was the Stuart clan motto.

“Does this…understand…to you?” she asked, and I nodded tightly. “Is all I see. Is fine ring. Very old. Very expensive.”

So, just for giggles… “How expensive?”

She named a price—in American dollars, not Egyptian pounds—which staggered me. For just gold? No diamonds or anything?

“You have generous husband, no?” she asked.

No. What I had was a contradiction to Lex’s oh-so-casual, standard-for-women-overseas story. Was it also company policy for businesswomen to wear expensive, been-in-the-family-for-generations, complete-with-motto rings?

“We sell much fine jewelry,” offered Munira. “Very low price.” And like that the strange Grailkeeper interlude turned back to the assumed normalcy of souvenir shopping at the Khan el-Khalili.

I’d seen the Pyramids of Giza as we flew in, and caught glimpses while we were in the city, they were so close to urban Cairo. But they were the opposite direction from Alexandria.

The drive had its points of interest, for sure, like the occasional sight of fellahin, or peasant farmers, riding overpacked bicycles, donkeys or even camels down the road. Rhys pointed out the road we would take if I wanted to check out the oldest Christian monastery in existence. But contrasted against pyramids almost anything would seem anticlimactic.

Even speculating about who had attacked me with a scimitar—and what Munira had meant about me being “Champion.”

“Perhaps you’re special,” offered Rhys.

“I’m not special.”

He glanced toward me as if he wanted to contradict that but hesitated from propriety’s sake.

“I mean, I’m no more special than the next person. Certainly no more than the next Grailkeeper.”

“Perhaps you are. That is to say…perhaps you have been somehow chosen. You did find the Melusine Grail. And you did drink from it.”

“My cousin Lil drank from it, too,” I reminded him. “And my friend Sophie, and Aunt Brigitte.”

“That happened some days later, did it not?”

It did, but… “One thing I’ve liked about being a Grailkeeper, ever since I realized the concept was bigger than my grandmother’s old stories, is that there’s no hierarchy. No inner circles. No one woman—one person, I mean—is more important than another.”

“Unlike the Comitatus?” Damn, but Rhys could be insightful when he wanted.

“As far as I can see, the only difference between a secret warrior society and a pyramid scheme—the financial kind—is that nobody tries to sell you anything.”

“Instead, they try to kill you.” Rhys shared my grin, then asked, “Do you still believe that Lex was denied leadership simply because he had leukemia as a child?”

“It makes a weird sort of sense, especially if the order was established during pagan times. An ancient belief equates the health, even the virility, of the land with that of its king. Who knows? That could explain how my country has managed to prosper under presidents who were real hound dogs.”

“But surely if Lex has fully recovered…”

“Oh, he recovered all right.” But thinking about Lex and virility at the same time wasn’t going to uncomplicate anything. Besides, I was still annoyed that he’d tricked me into wearing a family heirloom—so annoyed that I’d taken it off. “I used to wonder why he was so driven to stay in shape. Now I guess I know. But no way would Phil relinquish control that easily. My best guess is that Lex will try for a peaceful coup.”

“That would be the path of a true leader, would it not?”

Depends on how you defined leadership. “He said something strange to me, Rhys. He said he needed me, needed balance, in order to do something important.”

“He needs you, and you flew to Egypt?”

“He said it a few months ago. Hasn’t mentioned it since. Besides, you needed me, too, right?”

Rhys slanted a skeptical look my direction. “I didn’t invite you here to be my bodyguard, Maggi. I do care for your safety rather more than that.”

“But if someone thinks you’re close enough to finding the Isis Grail to try killing you…”

“Then you deserve to be here for the actual discovery,” he finished. “I’ve gotten permission for you to participate. As an academic observer, that is.”

“To participate in…” Belatedly, I realized exactly what he meant. “The project? Cleopatra’s sunken palace? Really?”

He grinned. “You and she have a great deal in common, after all.”

Noting how his eyes shone at the gift he’d given me, I thought, Attracted to two men?

Or, worse, was he going to say something gushy about immortal beauty? I didn’t want Rhys admiring me that way, at least not saying so.

I was officially dating Lex, trust or no trust.

“You are both strong women,” Rhys clarified, to my relief.

That seemed the safer analogy.

Speedboats bounce. At least, they do around other boats, as in the partially enclosed harbor of Alexandria. Salt spray flew into my face, sunlight glared across the water, and I loved it. This no longer felt as foreign as Egypt. It felt more familiarly like the Mediterranean—which, just beyond the crescent of land enclosing the harbor from either side, it was.

You may have read about the discovery of Cleopatra’s Palace in Newsweek or National Geographic, or seen a special about it on cable television. I had, even before I’d started my search for the goddess grails…or learned that Cleopatra herself had claimed to be the reincarnation of the goddess Isis.

“That’s common knowledge to Egyptologists,” Rhys assured me, shouting over the engine of the motorboat we rode toward the anchored cabin cruiser where the main archeological team worked. “Pharaohs were gods on earth, or so they and their followers believed—hence that little tiff between Moses and his foster brother, before the exodus? Cleopatra VII was simply maintaining an important tradition passed down from millennia of rulers.”

“Cleopatra VII?” Had there been that many?

“She’s the one you’re thinking of,” Rhys assured me.

“Seduced Julius Caesar, then Mark Antony, heavy-on-the-eye-shadow, death-by-asp Cleopatra.”

“The very same. It’s well-known that, amid her palace complex, she had a temple to Isis. But we now assume that the same earthquake which destroyed the Pharos Lighthouse submerged the palace complex as well. It was long after that nasty death-by-asp business, though.”

I looked from the approaching cabin cruiser back toward the coastal city of Alexandria, which, from the water, vaguely resembled an especially dusty, disorganized Venice off the Grand Canal…except for the chunks of cement blocks at the water’s edge, to fight erosion. Then I turned to the medieval fortress that guarded the harbor entrance from the sea, and tried to imagine how this ancient city would have looked a thousand years before even that had been built. “And where there is a temple to Isis…”

“It stands to reason there may be a reliquary,” agreed Rhys. “And where there is a reliquary…”

“There could be relics like a goddess grail.” I shivered happily at the thought. Another font of female power, just waiting for us under the salty water. If only I could collect enough—however many that might be—then they could finally be revealed to a world in need of their balance and power.

The man we’d hired to ferry us out to the cabin cruiser steered well around what I recognized as a diver-down buoy. He cut his engine and levered the motor up out of the water for safety. Momentum carried us the rest of the way to the ship. When I saw the name of this floating headquarters—Soeur d’Aphrodite, or Aphrodite’s Sister—I felt all the more certain of the rightness of this visit.

Aphrodite, whom the Romans called Venus, isn’t just a goddess. She may well be another face of Isis.

“Several significant archeologists have been leading the effort to explore these sites since their discovery,” explained Rhys, grabbing hold of the ladder on the side of the ship as we coasted in beside it. “Whenever they can get permission. This is one of the few places in Alexandria where the scholars aren’t having to fight developers for rights to the land. There is even some talk about creating an underwater tunnel system specifically so that tourists can view the finds—once the government manages to lessen the toxicity in the local seawater. After you.”

He had my laptop case again, so all I had to do was gather up the excess of my torn cotton skirt, twist it, and tuck it into the waistband before I climbed up. If anyone had a problem with seeing my knees, they’d just have to get over it. I wasn’t about to risk falling into water Rhys had just announced was toxic. Once I swung onto the lower deck I freed my skirts, while Rhys followed me.

What came after was a pleasant jumble of introductions and welcomes from an international assortment of divers and archeologists. The director of this particular branch of the project, Pierre d’Alencon, shook my hand but seemed busy with other matters, so I backed to the edge of the deck, out of the way, to simply observe. Rhys got permission to show me the computer programs being used to map the underwater finds, so I turned in that direction—

And faced blazing green eyes.

“You,” snarled a sickeningly familiar female voice, in French.

Right before its owner pushed me over the railing.