The Sheikh's Tempted Prisoner Page 13

  But, at the moment, she had a more mundane task to perform. She’d commandeered two tables in a quiet back corner of the university library conveniently close to the Egyptology section but out of the way enough that her books wouldn’t be re-shelved nor her papers moved. Amidst the towers of reference materials and notes, she settled down, back to the letter she’d been writing before she stepped away for the disappointing date.

  Dear Professor Van Rees,

  I feel I must remind you of the incredible difficulty your sabbatical presents to your being my doctoral mentor. Not only can I not simply walk to your office when I have questions, I can’t even email you due to your decision to vacation in the most remote of locations possible. Which, I’m sure had something to do with how you knew the board would react when they learned you’d left all your teaching responsibilities to your TA. Which is me. Which has also not been beneficial to my studies.

  I remind you of all of this so that you understand the magnitude of my feelings when I say thank you, from the very deepest depths of my soul, for deciding to go to Ksatta-Galan instead of Tahiti or the Bahamas or whatever other tropical paradise I’m sure was calling your name. The map you sent arrived safely this morning, and I almost immediately destroyed it by crying on it like a child.

  She glanced at the map which sat on the table near her, sealed in glass like a microscope slide to protect the outrageously delicate fibers of the ancient papyrus beneath. She sighed like an infatuated lover just thinking about it. Beneath the glass an intricate map of ancient Meroitic Nubia was painstakingly painted in Kushite script, and titled in Greek.

  It’s beautiful, Abraham, Vanessa wrote. I can’t begin to know how you managed to get your hands on an original copy, much less imagine how you shipped it here! This is going to change the course of my research entirely. You know how close I’m getting to a real translation of the Meroitic language. This map may finally make that a reality.

  I owe you the biggest, fanciest bottle of scotch when you return, and if I can really decipher this language and get the recognition I rightly should for such an achievement, I may be able to afford it!

  She wrote a little longer, catching him up on his classes and various campus gossip before signing off.

  Money really is the issue, though, she thought as she reviewed the letter.

  Translating Meroitic script might get her a grant to continue her research, but it wouldn’t keep her apartment paid for, or even make a dent in her substantial student loans. She’d kept them deferred so far as she pursued her doctorate, but the finish line was coming up fast, at which point that debt was going to hit her like a freight train.

  Vanessa had no real plan for how to deal with her debt and the thought worried her deeply. She’d started looking to line up professorships, there at Columbia or abroad, but there were distressingly few openings. Her specialty wasn’t exactly in demand.

  Sighing, she pushed the letter away and pulled the map closer, deciding to put off thinking about it for a while longer. She’d rather focus on her work.

  Vanessa had been working on a translation of Meroitic for most of her academic career. That was nearly eight years of effort. Five years of that effort had led her to that miserable spot in the desert. She’d been so certain that the tomb had been right there. But her translation had been wrong. She’d gone back to the drawing board, and here she was now.

  The map gave her the best chance she’d had in a while. It was newly discovered, of Greek origin. Until now, she’d been working with copies made decades and sometimes centuries later, much degraded and changed as the area was redrawn over and over. And those later copies had often cut out the Meroitic titles in favor of the Greek. The original had both, which gave her a direct comparison between the two languages. Bending her head to her work, she shut out the world around her, pen scratching on the paper beside her.

  Hours passed, daylight fading into evening as she worked mechanically, deconstructing the place names the map described one letter at a time. She could almost feel the key turning in the lock of her mind, the secrets of the Meroitic language about to be released.

  Then, her eye fell on a site marked in the upper right corner of the map, in a remote part of the Sahara. It was marked with a symbol she’d come to recognize as signifying a burial site. She frowned as she realized this; she’d spent enough time with the other copies of this map to know there was no such site marked on them. And she’d certainly spent enough time looking into Kushite burial sites to know there’d never been any graves discovered in that area.

  Her confusion rapidly turned to intrigue as she began translating its title. The Greek was not very descriptive, reporting something like ‘twin tomb’ or ‘double tomb’ which didn’t make a lot of sense nor convey much useful information about who was buried there. But the symbols in the Meroitic version of the name set her heart racing. She knew those symbols. There was royalty buried here. And maybe not just any royalty.

  Comparing the words to those she’d translated from the Greek elsewhere on the page, Vanessa felt her breath catch, beginning to feel lightheaded.

  ‘One-Eyed Candace’ it read. ‘Kandake and Qore.’

  One-Eyed Candace was what the Romans had called Amanirenas during their conflict. Kandake and Qore were her titles—Queen mother and ruling King. She had found it, nearly by accident. She had found the tomb of Amanirenas.

  She stood up so quickly she fell over, then scrambled back to her feet. She shoved one arm into her coat, then grabbed a pen without putting her coat the rest of the way on in order to scrawl on the bottom of her letter to the professor.

  FOUND CANDACE, she wrote. MAY ARRIVE BEFORE LETTER DOES. GETTING ON A PLANE TONIGHT.

  Chapter Two

  Vanessa crammed her letter into an envelope and took off, racing across campus to the mailboxes in Lerner Hall, her jacket still only halfway on and her expression wild. She still couldn’t quite believe it was real, but god damn if she wasn’t going to question it until she’d seen the place with her own eyes. And Abraham would want to see the map. She’d need to go back and get that.

  The awful plan came to her just as she was about to drop the letter into the outgoing mailbox.

  Meroitic royalty were buried with all their finest possessions, their mummies covered in jewelry. If she discovered the tomb on a university-approved expedition, all the relics would be, rightfully, claimed by the government. But if she went herself, unofficially, then a few pieces might go missing without notice.

  It wouldn’t take much from a tomb of that age to eliminate her student loan debt and give her a comfortable cushion until she could find work. The thought made her stomach churn, to be perfectly honest. It wouldn’t just be stealing from the dead. It would be stealing the cultural heritage of the Kush and the Nubian people. And, it would be actively hampering the continued study of that history by removing what might be crucial pieces that could reveal unknown aspects of Kushite life and burial practice.

  She shook her head, slowly withdrawing the letter from the mailbox. She’d studied this culture for almost a decade. She could tell which pieces were important. And even if she sold a few pieces into private collections, was that such an enormous price to pay for an entire tomb’s worth of royal artifacts?

  She crammed the letter into her pocket and pulled her jacket on the rest of the way, guilt gnawing at her. To keep this from Abraham, of all people, was the worst part. He’d been looking for this tomb his entire life, meeting disappointment after disappointment. Most people in the field thought Amanirenas was one of the many unidentified rulers buried at Jebel Barkal, and that she and Abraham were fools for even looking for a separate tomb. He’d endured mocking dismissal of his work for decades.

  But this would fix all of that, she told herself as she hurried back towards the library. Sure, he wouldn’t be there for the moment it was uncovered, but he’d still get credit for all the work that had gone into the discovery, not to mention validation that he’d been rig
ht all along. He would understand.

  She rushed back towards her table in the library, already mentally cataloging which books she should bring, only to pull up short in surprise as she saw someone standing near her table. The tall, thin young man was instantly recognizable.

  “Peterson,” she said, suspicious.

  Terrance Peterson turned to face her, casually sliding his phone into the pocket of his navy blue pea coat.

  “Ah, Miss Hawkins,” he said brightly. “I was just looking for you. Professor Hayek and I were about to go to a late dinner with Dean Hardwell, and I thought, since your mentor is indisposed, you might like to come along.”

  “I appreciate the gesture,” Vanessa said stiffly. “But no, thank you.”

  Peterson smiled thinly. He hadn’t expected her to agree. He was just coming to brag, yet again, about his close personal relationship with the dean and his mentor, and rub in her face the continued absence of her own.

  He already had a position at Columbia all but guaranteed. He was old money and insufferably smug about it. He was also a biblical archaeologist, which made him doubly unbearable in Vanessa’s book. In her opinion, biblical archeology had no place in a real academic setting. It was loaded with bias from square one.

  When you went into any research looking for a specific conclusion, then that conclusion was all you would see. Biblical archeologists would ignore valid avenues of research to chase fancies and twist whatever evidence they needed to in order to make it conform to their narrative. Perhaps she was unfairly generalizing the entire field. And she certainly didn’t have anything against religious people in general.

  But Terrance Peterson absolutely fit the worst possible stereotype. A self-absorbed, holier-than-thou pedant smugly passing judgment on everyone struggling for a scrap of what had been handed to him at birth, unflinchingly confident that his world view was correct, both objectively and morally. There was no person on earth that Vanessa wanted to punch quite as much as him.

  “Still trying to rediscover a tomb that’s already been found?” Peterson asked, looking down at her work.

  “Still trying to prove there are men in the sky who can turn water into wine?” she countered, elbowing past him to begin gathering up her notes. “And no, actually. Translating Meroitic just isn’t possible without more bilingual sources. I’ve moved on to something else.”

  “You, giving up on Amanirenas?” Terrance laughed, leaning casually on the table to watch her. “I doubt it.”

  “I thought having faith in the absence of empirical evidence was your specialty, Terry.”

  Peterson scowled. He hated that name.

  “Well, if you truly intend to finally give up the wild goose chase,” he said. “I have a suggestion for what you might try next. Very in line with your current areas of study.”

  “Oh really?” Vanessa rolled her eyes, carefully picking up the glass-framed map and settling it into a cushioned wooden case. “And what’s that?”

  “I’m planning an expedition to locate Cush.”

  Vanessa closed the locks of the case with a snap and looked up at him, waiting to be impressed.

  “Cush, son of Ham, son of Noah of the infamous arc,” Peterson explained. “Founder of the Kingdom of Kush.”

  “That’s a bit of a stretch,” Vanessa said with a snort, picking up her case and her valise full of notes. “And patently uninteresting to me. Why would you want me along anyway? It’s hardly a secret that you can’t stand me. I’m not an idiot.”

  “And neither am I.” Peterson planted a hand on the table near her, trying to keep her there. “You’re the foremost expert on Meroitic in the States, with a working knowledge of the hieratic and demotic scripts that preceded it. I would be a fool not to take advantage of your expertise in this.”

  “Then I will take special delight in saying no,” Vanessa said with a smile, pushing past him and walking away. “I’m not interested.”

  “Even if it would get you back into the Nubian desert?”

  She stopped abruptly, her back to him.

  “Right back to the spot you were searching for Amanirenas before,” Peterson continued, fixing her with a smug glare, convinced he’d already won. “You were forced to abandon the expedition early due to the storms, yes? Your mentor nearly bankrupted himself and the university just getting there, only to come out empty-handed. Wouldn’t you just give anything to try again, to prove you were right all along?”

  Vanessa turned slowly to look at him, her expression carefully polite.

  “I would rather walk across the Sahara alone,” she said in a calm, measured tone. “I would sell everything I own, camp out under a tarp, and excavate with nothing but my hands and a trowel before I would accept a single penny from you. In the very short, Mr. Peterson, I would not work with you if you had discovered the tomb of Sheba herself. Good night, Terry.”

  She turned sharply on her heel before he could reply and hurried out, anger a bristling knot in her chest.

  Chapter Three

  It took all her savings, but Vanessa was on a plane that night. The rest of this little informal expedition would have to be put on her credit card. She might be camping out under a tarp with a trowel after all. It would be worth it, she told herself, for even a shred of proof of Amanirenas. Not to mention the potential financial rewards…

  She left Newark at nine on Friday night, flew nearly eleven hours overnight to Lomé, Togo, where after an hour break she left for a five-and-a-half-hour flight to Addis Ababa. There, she twiddled her thumbs for two and half hours before her next flight, a two-hour puddle jump that put her in Khartoum at nearly two in the morning on Sunday. This was finally followed by an even smaller flight to a microstate sandwiched between Egypt and Sudan: Ksatta-Galan.

  The tiny, wealthy nation was on the opposite side of the Persian Gulf to Saudi Arabia, but nevertheless had strong economic and cultural ties to the Gulf States. Most importantly, its capital city was located incredibly close to the part of the Sahara she needed to explore.

  She’d already arranged lodging at a nearby hostel and after nearly twenty-four hours total of flying, she barely had the energy to leave a message for Professor Van Rees before she collapsed into her bunk.

  She woke in the afternoon, groggy and jet-lagged, as a group of other travelers sharing the hostel room crashed in noisily, laughing and talking loudly in Dutch as they dumped their belongings. The urge to roll over and go back to sleep was strong, but Vanessa dragged herself out of bed.

  Her eyes felt like the Sahara had personally moved in and made itself at home, and her tongue felt like sandpaper. She shotgunned three cups of coffee to bring herself around, and once she’d made herself look basically presentable again, she found her way to the front desk to check for messages.

  “Yes, you have something here,” the handsome Australian man behind the desk said, smiling with perfect teeth. “From a Professor Van Rees?”

  “Perfect, thank you,” Vanessa said, accepting the note he handed her and privately wondering why every hostel she’d ever been to (and she’d visited a few) was run by Australians.

  She took the note out into the sunlight before she read it, finding a café and more coffee to help with her concentration.

  Very surprised to hear of your arrival! the note read. Charity ball tonight at which I would very much appreciate your company. Formal dress code. We have much to catch up on!

  The message was followed by an address for one of the several palaces in Ksatta-Galan’s capital. Vanessa was at first shocked that Abraham had gained an invitation to such a high-class event, and then exasperated as she realized she was going to have to find a dress to wear.

  That night, she emerged from a taxi outside of a glittering palace. She’d spent the ride there awed by the beauty of the ancient city, its buildings ornate pre-Islamic Arabian architecture, all intricate arches and geometric patterns in gold and blue and orange. But nothing compared to the palace itself, its domed towers shining with gold lea
f, its towering minarets fluted and covered in intricate patterns like carousels, standing against the sunset horizon. Its silhouette was so majestic that Vanessa, in her store-bought dress, suddenly felt unworthy to even approach.

  She’d done her very best with her limited funds. The dove gray cape dress had a narrow sheath skirt rising to a lacy illusion collar from which the stately column of the cape draped dramatically. She’d thought it was quite lovely when she’d found it at the last moment off the sale rack of a dress store in town. But now, watching other guests glide past the fountains to the palace steps in their jewel-draped ball gowns and white-tie tuxedos, she felt pitifully underdressed.

  She looked ready for a daytime TV awards show, not a ball in which royalty was expected to be in attendance. Still, with what she was planning to do to Abraham, coming to meet him here was really the least she could do.

  Abraham was waiting for her on the palace steps, just as round and fatherly as she remembered, if a little older. His hair had started graying after the last disastrous expedition. It was all silver now and his face had more lines than it had just a few years ago. She’d underestimated the toll that years of fruitless searching had taken on him. But he also looked well fed and happy, and his cufflinks alone could have bought ten of Vanessa’s gown. She saw them glittering as he embraced her like a prodigal daughter.

  “It’s been too long!” he said warmly, clapping a hand on her shoulder as he held her at arm’s length. “You look wonderful, old girl!”

  “So do you, old man,” Vanessa said with a warm smile. “What have you been doing out here for a year? You could never have afforded that suit with what the university was paying you.”

  “Oh, just some private consultation work,” Abraham said, waving a hand to dismiss the matter. “Nothing interesting, I promise. Now, tell me, did the map arrive? Isn’t it glorious?”