only Egypt, but Greece, Rome, Turkey, Armenia, Jerusalem-" He stopped, seeing the look in Ishaq's face. "I did not know Lovat," he finished.
"So much I see," Ishaq said dryly. "Soldiers off duty like to eat and drink, to find women, and sometimes to explore a little, look for treasures, have fun."
It sounded time-wasting if indulged to the exclusion of all else, but harmless. He had not reached the subject of broken rules, even obliquely. It looked like it was going to be a long evening, but at least Pitt was not cross-legged anymore, although the ground was hard. He had become so used to the mosquitoes that he swatted at them without thought.
"What sort of fun?" Avram asked, but with an expression of boredom, as if he was merely filling the silence.
Ishaq shrugged. "Hunting in the marshes," he replied casually. "Birds, looked for crocodiles occasionally. I think they went upriver once or twice. I arranged it for them."
"To look at the temples and ruins?" Pitt asked, trying to keep the same tone of voice as Avram.
"Think so," Ishaq agreed. "Went all the way up to Cairo once. See the pyramids at Giza, and so on." He grinned. "Got caught in a sandstorm, so they said. Mostly, though, they stayed closer."
It was not worth pursuing, but there was little else to say to keep the conversation alive. Pitt was beginning to lose hope of learning anything about Lovat that would even show his character, let alone any idea why he had been murdered. Perhaps all he would learn in Egypt was that Ayesha Zakhari was a highly educated and passionate patriot rather than a woman seeking to make use of her beauty to buy the luxuries of life.
"They usually went together, all four of them?" he asked. Perhaps he would be able to find at least one or two of these other men and learn more details of Lovat from their recollections.
"Mostly," Ishaq agreed. "Not so safe to wander around alone." He regarded Pitt closely, to see if he understood without having it spelled out to him, word for word, that the English were occupiers, an armed force in a foreign land, and as such, very naturally subjects of many emotions, some of them violent.
Pitt understood it very well. He could feel it in the air, see it in the covert glances of people when they thought themselves unobserved, both men and women. There might be gratitude for financial rescue, but no one liked to be obliged, or dependent. There would be individual affections and hatreds, like Trenchard's love for his Egyptian mistress. There would be a certain respect, possibly curiosity, and even at times a growing understanding. But always the anger was close under the surface. The memory of the bombardment of Alexandria would make it sharper now, but the same feelings would have been there then, only more deeply buried.
They sat in silence a few minutes. The sound of the oxen moving in the water was relaxing, a steady, natural noise. The night wind carried a breath of coolness, refreshing after the long, hot day.
"And of course there was the woman," Ishaq said, watching Pitt more closely than he pretended. "But if anyone were to kill him for that, they would have done it then. She was the daughter of a rich man, a learned man, but a Christian. Not as if she were a Muslim. That might have caused trouble... a lot of trouble. Very Christian, Mr. Lovat." In the darkness of the hut his face was unreadable, but Pitt heard a dozen different emotions in his voice. If Ishaq had been English, Pitt might have been able to discern them, untangle one from another, but he was in an alien land, an old and infinitely complex culture, and speaking to a man whose ancestors had created this extraordinary civilization thousands of years before Christ, let alone before a British Empire. In fact, the pharaohs had ruled an empire of their own before Moses was born, or Abraham fled the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah.
The earth under him was unyielding, the air still heavy and warm, and he could hear the beasts moving now and then outside in the starlit night, all as real as the hard ground and the whine of mosquitoes, and yet he felt an unreality of the mind as if his presence here were a dream. It was hard to remember that Saville Ryerson was actually in prison in London, and that Narraway expected