She’d drifted off. Jess blinked. The moon was full and bright now, the stars sparkling, diamonds in a vast darkness, a promise of light in so much unexplained void.
During the day she’d managed to mostly re-cover the obelisk, pushing sand in with her feet, pacing herself. The desert winds would take care of the rest, as well as her shelter. She began to walk west. She had to stop several times, not only to check her direction, but to collapse, her bones quivering in the nighttime chill. Once she even slept, despite her best efforts to stay awake, but when she was roused by her own panic, it had been only a few minutes. Struggling back to her feet, she continued. Then she stopped to throw up bile and blood, and found she couldn’t regain her feet.
“No,” she rasped. Then, a harsher snarl. “No.” She kept going, on her hands and knees. Since the moon and stars were bright, she didn’t use her flashlight, but she was tempted. She might not fear meeting God alone, but darkness was an entirely different matter.
The last part of her journey took her up the back side of that tall dune. While less steep than the other side, it was still a challenge for her. Pushing back despair at her failing energy, she went, one struggling pace at a time, like a religious supplicant on a holy quest.
Seventy-five shuffling feet up, she stopped, gasping. Felt around. Sand would have shifted so much over this time, but she had to believe he’d allowed for that, figured out something. Please let it be here. Please. It was here. She knew it. She’d prayed for it, would have sacrificed her soul to find it, if the devil wouldn’t have laughed at such a pathetic, battered offering. But maybe there was someone who could still find value in it.
Exhausted, she rolled onto her back to look at the position of the stars. Stared at Persephone and struggled to remain conscious.
Farida, name your price. Anything you want, anything in my power to give, is yours. Just let me find you. Let me know there was something that makes everything that’s happened to me worth it. Dearest Jack . . .
She stretched her arms out to either side. From the sight of the heavens she hoped it was obvious she was offering herself up to whatever spirits were listening. The only fear she had left was of finding out darkness was all there was.
As she lay there for several minutes, she fought growing despair with a soft murmur, a vague lullaby of no words. She moved her twitching hands, passing them through the sand like the dip of a ladle, sifting in a soothing rhythm. She would find it. She would. In her frustration, she dug deeper, clutching the sand in a tighter fist . . . and her knuckles scraped something solid.
Struggling to her side, she found the tiny marker, no bigger than her palm. Pushed up by the movement of another stone a quarter mile away, just as she’d researched, though if she hadn’t fallen in this exact spot, she never would have found it. While the top of the obelisk had been decorative, this one was unadorned, made to look like the sand itself, blending in unless one was on hands and knees like this, going by touch alone. A day’s worth of sand had buried it a handful of inches back under the ground.
Digging down around it, she found it had a spring trigger that released easily, surprising and heartening her. She’d hidden a prybar from the men in her belongings in case, though she hadn’t known if she’d have the strength to use it properly. The marker slipped from her grasp as the door beneath it ground open, letting sand tumble down into the narrow opening.
Clicking on her flashlight, she saw a small tunnel, barely big enough for a man’s body to wriggle through on his stomach, leading into the dune at a downward incline. When she put her head inside, she inhaled, and her vitals tightened. An unmistakably fragrant smell.
Did it linger from flowers or incense left down in the tomb all those years ago, the scent trapped and waiting to give the memory to the first person to visit?
She’d found it. Hot damn, she’d found it. The adrenaline got her into the shaft, struggling over the gritty layer of sand drifting in with her. She used her elbows, her toes, her hips, whatever it took to keep going, stopping when she had to do so. When she reached about eighty feet, she guessed from the increasingly steep grade and coolness that she was past the base of the dune and going even deeper into the earth. Thank God it was all downhill. The initial walls of the tunnel had been braced wood, remarkably undamaged by rot, perhaps because of the Sahara’s lack of humidity. However, as she descended, the tunnel became rock. It widened after those first eighty feet, and she was able to lift from her belly and proceed on hands and knees again, keeping the flashlight beam in front of her until the tunnel dead-ended and emptied into a sudden hole. When she came to the edge of it, the light showed she’d found a large chamber.
She swept the beam over it slowly, for she didn’t want to minimize anything about this moment. Her heart was thumping, even as ebullience paralyzed her. Safe. God, she hadn’t felt safe in so long, and here she felt she was, at last. Even the darkness of the tunnel didn’t bother her. She’d found it.
The drop into the chamber was about five feet. She managed it, landing in a clumsy heap that set off a paroxysm of coughing and jolting pain through her chest. She fumbled out her handkerchief to make sure she didn’t spatter the chamber with blood or worse coming from her lungs. Here in the circular space, the wheezing of her breath was a harsh sound. Out in the desert, she’d been able to trick herself, lose it in the sound of the wind. It was okay, though. The end might be close, but she’d found her resting place.
When she at last struggled to her feet, she passed the flashlight over the chamber again at ground level. She started back, hitting the wall, sucking a painful gasp into her clogged throat. For long minutes she stood, staring at what was before her. Her mind whirled, denied it, tried to make sense of it. When she couldn’t, she jerked the light away and passed it over the rest of the chamber, over the myriad objects scattered on the floor, the torch sconces embedded in the wall.
Sconces with fresh, unlit torches in them.
4
HER unsteady heart pounding, she hobbled to one of them, used her lighter to set it ablaze. Avoiding what was in the center of the room, she moved to the other sconce. The resulting light created an eerie hourglass-shaped set of shadows on the floor, reminding her of her earlier thoughts about her own internal hourglass. She switched off the flashlight with cold fingers.
Air currents carried the smoke away, indicating other hidden passages, or small fissures engineered to keep the chamber vented.
Which meant her sudden cloying sense of being pressed on all sides must be coming from her mind, not the chamber.
Given the past five years of her life, she knew her mind wandered between reality and fantasy more than it should. To retune her brain fully to a reality station, she’d probably need an M&M bag full of prescription drugs. But Farida had brought fantasy together with reality, and Jessica had used all her training as a scholar to be certain, knowing she was anchoring all that she had left of herself to her belief that the story was real. Wasn’t it?
She pushed away the grim specter of logic, which was trying to fight to the forefront of her mind and make her consider what was in the middle of the room. No. Nothing was going to ruin this place, a monument to enduring love, faith. Hope.
Turning her attention back to the rest of the tomb, she saw the floor was composed of hundreds of polished stones. Different types, sizes and colors, brought out by a glaze on the smoothed top of each. In that glaze, a dried flower had been pressed and preserved.
She swallowed.
When I lie in his arms, he tells me we will travel everywhere. In every new place, he will pick the most beautiful stone, and the most beautiful flower. Each time we come home, he will add them to our bedroom floor, so that when I am an old, old woman, I will look over it and remember all the places we have been together . . .
She gripped her hands together, since there was no one else’s to reach for, to give her courage, reinforcement. Taking a breath, she began to move, one slow, disbelieving step at a time, toward the sarcophagus in the center.
The immediate circle around the stone dais was ankle deep in fresh flower petals, the source of the exotic scent she’d smelled. Jess stopped outside of that boundary and removed her boots and socks. Lifting the lace scarf of her discarded hijab back over her head, only then did she move forward, for this was as sacred a place as any church she’d ever visited.
The dew-kissed silk of the petals brushed over her bare feet, their caress thickening the emotions in her throat. “No wonder he couldn’t let you go,” she murmured. “He never let you die.” Her whisper echoed in the chamber, stirring the air, stirring spirits. But she wasn’t afraid of spirits. She was too close to becoming one of them. As swept away as she’d been by the tale, even she had underestimated how much he loved her. This wasn’t a tomb. It was an enchanted cave, holding a sleeping princess.
Farida’s sarcophagus was embellished with floral engravings and Arabic. While she wasn’t fluent, Jess caught “Beloved” and
“Woman of Honor.” Stepping onto the dais, she drew close to the open coffin, for there was no lid. She gazed down into the face of a woman dead three hundred years, who looked as if she had simply fallen asleep.
Turned on her side, with her folded hands tucked under her cheek, Farida wore a sheer white gown that bared her shoulder and showed the lines of her body. Her dark hair, spread across the pillow and down her back, was twined with ribbons. Imagining clumsy male hands weaving those ribbons brought the first tears to Jessica’s eyes. Farida had liked ribbons, and he’d wanted her to have everything she liked. Stones and dried flowers from places she’d never go, ribbons in her hair. A gown she would have chosen when she lay down with him, as eager for his touch as he was for hers.
More rose petals had been scattered over the translucent white fabric, the flowers as tender a pink as her relaxed, almost smiling mouth. According to the stories, she’d been tortured to death. Burned, bones broken, stabbed, stoned, her face cut with pieces of glass. But there wasn’t a mark on her. Her thick dark lashes fanned smooth, olive-complexioned cheeks. Slim, elegant fingers pressed together in folded prayer or repose.