Author's Note:
Well then, here it is - the end of the story, all in a long chapter. Thank you so much for staying with itthose who have read there most likely won't be any sequel and I hope Sketch of Distrust hasn't been a disappointment and a let down - given that it's way darker than my previous story and way more angsty too.
Deb2: Glad to hear that you've loved this surprise - where Jonathan gets to do something other than hanker after the fairer sex! Well, this is the last chapter - will probably upload an Epilogue I guess, along with a timeline very soon since it has already been written. (Needs just a bit more revision or addition, depending on the mood of the day)
Aathiya Lia - *LOL* it really isn't my intention to leave cliffhangers - it's simply because I don't know how to continue after a chapter! ;-) Well, aren't you glad that this is done? I.e., gives me the excuse to write more POTO fics I suppose - but still, the honest truth remains: I always wonder what can I write that countless of others have not attempted before (And doing a good job of it as well!), especially for something so 'closed' and 'narrow' as POTO, so that's the great difficulty there. (Or maybe it's just me - too unoriginal to think of good plots, always drawing a blank when it comes to POTO)
Sheri - Many thanks for your encouraging email. I like Jon too - guess what? You'll see this story end with him. (in the Epilogue upload, promise)
Chapter 16: The Sins of the Fathers
In those days
When civilization kicked us in the face
When holy water slapped our cringing brows
The vultures build in the shadow of their talons
The bloodstained monument of tutelage
-David Diop, Vultures
Brigaki djilia tut araklam tume
You will sing sorrow songs; it will find you.
The Gypsy soothsayer muttered loudly, pottering around the brick kitchen as though greatly agitated, stirring trembling pots, cleaving several condiments; Evelyn Carnahan understood no Romanian, but the very presence of Lyanka had served to remind her with devastating clarity the early words of warning that she had casually dismissed, its initial vagueness and ambiguity dissolving into a guilt that could not be assuaged.
Lyanka had been Ardeth's - and her - only hope, whose unsurpassable, eccentric wizardries had made others fear - they feared all they did not understand anyway - but not herand for her curiosity and fearlessness in the past she had been rewarded with this woman's tacit offer of friendship, the strange, unlikely start of an unflagging alliance.
They would only be safe for a short period, Evy thought, in a starkly abhorred dwelling, in a place that people shun by giving its perimeter a wide berth. Jon was wise to have chosen such a place, she finally decided, even if it only granted temporary reprieve.
"Lyanka - are these brews ready? May I take them in now?" She asked anxiously, driven by the need to alleviate pain.
The ageless one cackled, and nodded, unable to refuse her anything, not since the time Evy pulled her off the streets when a seething, misguided horde had tried to stone her.
"Go, go," The gypsy motioned with a flabby movement.
Ardeth Bay's wounds were chillingly deep, and she had loathed touching him for the fear of causing him further pain, yet he needed to be cleaned and fed; Lyanka's mysterious medicines had nonetheless worked wonders on his back.
"Evelyn." His ragged murmur signalled that the worst of the infection had been passed; it was for her, the beginning trickles of joyous, iridescent hope that brought the mighty burst of arduous strain of the past days.
Immediately she was at his side, pressing her face closely to his, moving her palm over his forehead.
"The fever is broken," She breathed easier, relieved. "How do you feel?"
"More alive with each passing day," he acknowledged briefly, closing his eyes again. "My body heals well" he hesitated, frowning, "I am not able to remember with ease. There are empty patches."
She snapped her head around at the opening of the door, feeling relieving drain of tension when Jonathan strode in quickly replaced by another bout of suspicion, when Rick O' Connell followed at his heels.
"Severige has naturally sent a search party for us, but I don't believe he yet knows that you are here with Ardeth," Jon drawled. "After all, you have been missing for over a week, your luggage still lying in a stuffy corner of that room," he mused. "Pity really, it was quite nicely furnished."
"Jon," She said sharply. "There is always a chance that we will now be found - we must move somewhere- anywhere! And Ardeth..."She glanced at the frail Medjai warrior, "I don't know how to move him in this condition -"
"That is why I'm here," Rick cut in coolly, looking at her appraisingly. "Evelyn Carnahan. It was a pleasure to meet you last time - I can't quite say the same now though. But right now, Ardeth is our priority. His men are awaiting him outside. They will move him, as quietly as possible."
"Where to?" She frowned.
"I think you've forfeited the right to ask such questions." He placed on her an enforced meditation on internal ugliness that was the most corrosive of traits, an unspeakable implication that she carried an abundance of that, and more.
Rick grabbed her upper arm roughly, willing her to turn, to face the disbelief and rage at her deep betrayal.
"Do you know who your father is, Evy?" His unexpected fierceness stirred a reactive rebellion in her, but she remained obstinately silent. The need to cover her ears became overwhelming - it took all the control that she possessed not to do so, unwilling to face the sins of the fathers, for the insinuated that she too, carried tainted blood through her veins was too much to admit freely.
"How could you do this! Well yes - I am referring to your betrayal that landed Ardeth in a dungeon, for God's sake," He chastised severely. "Do you really want to know who he was, Evy?" Rick repeated softly, but steadily, releasing his tight grip, mincing no words. "A man so slippery that no one trusted him! You want the truth? I'll say in a few sentences what the Wafd took a month to tell you - Rohan Carnahan - the man whom you call your father - was -"
A sudden shove against his chest by her irate brother cut him off mid-sentence.
"Don't worry, old mum," Jonathan Carnahan scowled, his eyes narrowed, suddenly standing between them. "Rick is being unreasonable. He has obviously not heard the full account of your dashing rescue and the -"
"Dashing rescue!"
"Rick." The voice from the pallet warned quietly. "Do not continue. She did not know that Yasser Mahadeva had set a rat trap."
And yet how could he not? Rick O'Connell, former legionnaire and appropriately self-proclaimed daredevil, fought now, for the Medjai and his beloved chief as if they were his own - they were his own, he forcefully corrected himself, ever since the day the Medjai warrior Taqiyyah Hasnan had bought his blood when she recognised him as an innocent, burning victim caught in the fray of the Medjai and Wafd scuffles - the same day he had sent Evelyn Carnahan off, back to England at the docks, the same day he lost and regained his soul.
That sketch of distrust, that stereotype of the barbaric, unprincipled of the Medjai had then, all but split - Evelyn Carnahan's, however, wove itself into a web of political deceit that even the most talented of individuals could not extricate themselves from.
"Is this your definition of 'protection', Ardeth?" Rick argued. "Are you going to let her believe the wrong thing -"
Ardeth held up a hand.
"I too, have known the death of a father," He reflected gravely. "It is enough bearing that burden without needing to know that the loved one had done unforgivable deeds. We must leave this as it is."
There was no dishonesty in Rick O'Connell; Evy knew without any doubts that he told merely brutal truth because of their shared history- it was his strongest, brashest trait that had landed him in jail in that fateful search for Hamunaptra those years ago. He was her greatest chance now, the only one who would willingly rupture the verbal dam if she demanded it. It was, ironically, his righteous fight for the sake of Ardeth and his unshakable loyalty to the Medjai that she observed - a far cry from the same reckless gambler who albeit threw in his dice most unwillingly with them when Imhotep was resurrected. It was from him that she needed to hear the confession of truth which would now shred the wool that had been pulled low over her eyes -
"Tell me, Rick," Evy interrupted, thwarting Ardeth Bay's efforts. "Tell me now, tell me all that no one has told me, the unbroken truth, say everything that Ardeth is unwilling to let on, even the things that my own brother have kept from me."
She had earned assessing stares from the party in the small room, knowing that the moment of reckoning had finally arrived.
"Your father was a double agent, not the martyr that the Wafd made him out to be," he announced flatly. "As an officer in the political office, he had access to British arm records, which he handed to the Wafd - because your mother was affiliated with it. He sold valuable, military information to the Wafd - information that dealt with British plans to sell the Suez Canal to the Americans, locations of British strongholds in Alexandria and Cairo. And as part of the Wafd by marriage, he also knew, from your mother, the activities of the Wafd. What better time to stick his feet in both places?"
The oppressive silence made it difficult for her to breathe - she needed to gulp air - but Rick was relentless in the pursuit of truth in the same fashion she had been before she nearly fell to the depths of treachery, running this collision course to its finish line; she instinctively knew it was to be a spectacularly ugly culmination of all that she wanted to know.
And as if fate mocked - it was hard - or rather, near impossible - to have pure truth hammered into her.
"And to the British, he sold them information about the Wafd - the number of the troops, he monitored their supply of arms, the financers behind themhave you heard enough, Evy? Do you know now how much you have done to Ardeth?" He stated bitterly, an arm flung in the direction where the Medjai lay, not seeing the unexpected lunge that shoved him backwards into the wall.
"Yes," she said in a small voice, lost in the helpless tide of heartbreak. "I believe I have."
"I think you've said more than enough, Rick," Jon snapped, pushing him harder into the wall. "Don't you see what this is doing to Evy? If you derive satisfaction from stripping dignity to all whose last names are Carnahans, I suggest you -"
"Let me finish, Jonathan! The Medjai did not toy with Rohan Carnahan - in fact, I think it was quite the other way aroundand that is not all. The Wafd didn't lie about one thing though. Your father was killed by Ishaq Bay," Rick O'Connell pushed Jonathan away, glancing at Ardeth.
The Medjai chief nodded wearily. "Let me speak, Rick. Egypt is all that you see, its monuments, its great past, and its people now. It is what makes Egypt rich. I fiercely fight for this Egypt, Evelyn. And this is where the love for your own people comes above the hate, but I will not fight, not when the hate for others come above the love for your own. In these days, the Medjai fear the dilemma that has come upon us. My father had stood strongly for the Wafd. I do not. We find ourselves now concerned with the risk of losing our standing with Muslims whose causes for confrontation are just and honourable. We risk also losing the peace we have with the tribes of the Medjai that had remained united for long. Do you not see?"
They sat in silence, moved deeply by the plainness of his rhetoric; it held no gilded edges, set apart from Severige's fiery brand of persuasion by its sheer simplicity.
"My father discovered Rohan Carnahan's activities," Ardeth continued simply. "He killed him in the rampage of 1918, just before he was about to board a ship bound for England. Your mother, died in the burning of Alexandria, four years later" he shook his head, "This is so hard for me to sayif you wish for vengeance" he paused, his voice finally breaking as he lapsed into Arabic, "I think enough has been taken - we are equalled if you wish to see it this way - my father died, along with my wife and unborn child, with your mother, on that same day."
The tale of duplicity undid her, humiliated her as strongly just as waves crashed against the tall cliffs of Dover, although she was, in hindsight, a directionless pawn in a great game whose odds she simply could not crest over without hurting and being hurt. There was a savage guilt that tore at her gut, its accusation stark in her mind, calling her unscrupulous for her degradation of Ardeth Bay into a being more animal than man, but in the torture that he had endured all she saw, hopefully and gratefully, was that his strength had only burned brighter, laced with a fortitude that was quite possibly deficient previously. She saw then, the self-devotion that had enticed Severige and Mejdan Bay so subtly in their cause when they gorged on the irresistibility of supremacy and power, where expediency had offered men their ambitions on a silver platter in exchange for their charity.
It was a lesson well learned, that the apathetic violence employed in the name of achieving control and power benefited no one -
The distinct ring of gunshots and a feeble scream shook her out of her self-imposed stretch of castigation.
"The Wafd attacks! They bring their leader, Yasser Mahadeva!"
The intruder burst through the door, drawing the last line of defence.
Taqiyyah Hasnan O'Connell.
"They followed you - you were not careful enough!"
"We must go now," She urged, casting calm, assessing eyes to the occupants, speaking this time in English. "Lift the pallet with me."
"Let me come with him." It was a humble request. "Just this once, until you leave for wherever you are bound for."
Taqiyyah O'Connell stared at her, trying to see with an effort, past the traitor she had prematurely branded Evelyn Carnahan to be, the murderess and the lone skewed weakness of their Chief, sternly battling the instinct to push her away.
In resignation, she nodded.
Together, they lifted him, moving swiftly through the side of the house, past the gunned body of Lyanka, the ever-increasing collateral damaged sustained by the Wafd, gently manoeuvring him into the backseat of a vehicle.
"Go, bring him to safety," Evy instructed, knowing that her presence was now unwanted, irrelevant to their plans. Whatever it was, it could not possibly include anyone who was remotely associated with the Mahadevas or the Carnahans.
"No," The other woman articulated succinctly, her luminous eyes speaking volumes. "I know he would want you to stay with him. Come back quickly."
In an instant, she turned, running back to the brick-house, dodging scattered gun-fire that echoed across the adjacent dirt paths, through the open doorway, to Ardeth's previous resting room - the house was empty- she rushed, to the three remaining occupants of the room, staring in sudden shock, at the bloodbath that had taken mere seconds to accomplish.
Rick O' Connell still held smoking gun in his hand, standing stock still over the motionless body of Severige. Evy turned away, not wanting to look into his green eyes, once full of charm and snake-like diplomacy, now lifeless.
A slurred moan drew her attention downwards.
"I'll be alright ol' mum," She helped her brother to sit up, careful to apply pressure on the wound on his shoulder. "That bastard there," he groaned and looked gratefully in the direction of Rick O' Connell, "He had foresight enough to bring the his elite team of fighters with him to visit their chief. And yea. His gun saved me - nah, merely a graze, Evy. 'Tis nothing. You know something old mum? If you want to know what I've gleaned from this" Jon rolled his eyes, "Nationalism is infantile enough to make men fight, especially when their own interests overtake their original vision. I'll be fine, Evylook, I can even stand."
He wobbled a bit; she tried to laugh at his silly antics.
"Ardeth needs you. Go to him."
He said no more, and a silent look between them told her that things would be taken care of; they would settle down themselves in the days to come, but now she took off again, stomping up puffs of dust, casting away the sorrow songs, lithely running past the dwindling gunshots and the slowly receding nightmare of the past months, back to the one to whom she thought owed much.
It was penance that Evy sought; it seemed the easiest to seek it in presence of the Medjai chief who had suffered so because of her - if it meant a lifetime of atonement for both the atrocities of Rohan Carnahan and the lesser mistakes of hers, it was a punishment that she would willingly carry.
Evy climbed into the vehicle and Taqiyyah jerked it to life immediately; she placed his head on her lap in a tender motion knowing that he was still weak, but awake and quite lucid, begging his forgiveness with grief-stricken speechlessness, wanting to tell him that she would wash the blood that was on himthat she could see his shame and she would wash it toothat she would apply the salve of peace onto his wounds of misery and loss.
"Forgive me Ardeth, I know so little."
Short, clipped words, conveyed with the most vehement of regret she had ever known.
"I was foolish as well, Evy," He murmured, curling her hands into his own, "to withhold the information of your father from you - I thought you have not believed meI assumed that it would hurt you, that it would turn you against the Medjai...and indeed it had...you asked for my forgiveness, and now I must ask for yours. Forgive me, for esteeming you so little."
She placed her hands carefully on his shoulders marvelling at the solidarity between them, smiling at the burden that lifted, maddened by this cathartic, wormwood passion that surfaced, haunted by a sweet and impossible hope that he might have still found secret moments for thoughts of her own comfort while disregarding his own.
"You are going home, Ardeth."
He smiled then, a hallowed entity so rare from him that she felt fresh tears welling anew.
She did not seem to mind that he was filthy, sweating and ill, smelling of the pungent herbs that Lyanka had administered - and still in his worst form possible - he wiped the tears from her face hesitantly, not knowing that his own had started to roll down his cheeks.