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“Tell him that is a very kind offer, and we shall certainly return to take him up on it, but right now your mother is expecting you for lunch,” Constance neatly rattled off.
“My mother?” Neil echoed. “But my mother’s in—”
“Just tell him!”
Neil looked queasy as he delivered the message, but the farmer accepted it with a shrug. A great deal of handshaking followed before Neil was freed to follow her to the boat.
Constance stepped inside. The weathered deck wobbled under her boot. It was not a very large boat, but there was no sign that it was actively leaking—which meant it would do.
“I’m so glad that’s over!” Neil burst out.
“Can you sail?” Constance demanded.
Neil stiffened a bit. “I can, as it happens.”
“Good. Then I needn’t do it all myself,” Constance concluded. “Free the lines, would you?”
Neil loosed them from the dock and then hurriedly leapt into the boat before the current could tug it free. The felucca tilted precariously, forcing him to spin his arms to maintain his balance.
“This is a terrible idea!” he exclaimed.
“Hoist the sail,” Constance replied, taking hold of the tiller. “We have villains to catch.”
??
Thirty
With its largesail and light hull, the felucca turned out to be reasonably river-worthy as it skimmed across the water, carried by a steady breeze from the south. There were only a handful of moments when Neil was convinced they were going to drown.
They sailed through the length of the day, stopping only once for food. As the sun declined in the west, turning the deserted landscape a deeper gold, Constance asked Neil about the contents of the cuneiform tablet.
Twenty minutes later, he was still talking.
“And so you see, Genesis is full of references to other gods,” he explained as the Nile breeze tousled his hair. “Which begs the question—whatcausedthe shift from monolatry to monotheism among the proto-Hebrews? There are strong indications that the Hebrews themselves attributed the change to the time of Moses, who by all accounts was raised as an Egyptian. And then we have the roughly contemporaneous cult of Akhenaten—a clear early case of monotheism, whatever Flinders Petrie might have to say about it…”
“Come about to starboard,” Constance ordered with a vague wave of her hand.
It was the only comment she had made since Neil had begun giving her a detailed summary of his theories on the relationship between the Exodus story and the history of the Eighteenth Dynasty. Neil did not let that bother him overmuch, continuing his lecture as he adjusted the rigging.
“The only thing we have been missing is an explicit link between the Hebrews and the Atenists. But if hard evidence exists that Moses was an official in Akhenaten’s court—”
“Are you an atheist, then?” Constance asked abruptly.
“I… What?” Neil squirmed in the face of her renewed attention.
“It is only that you keep talking about the Egyptians inventing God—which is a very clever theory, of course,” she allowed in conciliatory tones. “Only it does make one wonder whether you actually believe in God after all. Not that I would be bothered about it one way or another. My Aai has a shrine to Durga in her suite that is hardly a secret to anybody. I have not ruled out becoming a Hindu myself.”
“Can you just… do that?” Neil asked, bewildered.
“Whyever not? Being a Hindu sounds altogether more interesting than attending services at St. Matthew’s Bayswater. Reverend Spencer gives the most abominably dull sermons.”
She flashed him a considering look, and Neil realized that she was still waiting for an answer to her question.
“I don’t know that the Egyptians invented God, as such,” Neil replied carefully, feeling as though he were stepping out onto ground as fragile as porcelain. “One might just as easily suppose that Akhenaten came to acknowledge something that was already there.”
“Oh! Like a prophet, you mean,” Constance concluded easily.
Neil tried not to choke. “I am not sure that most people would find that equivalence… er, entirely inoffensive.”
