The Skin Map

by Stephen R. Lawhead

  “Delighted to meet you at long last, Mr. Carter. I’ve heard so much about you. Your contributions to the increase in our understanding of ancient culture are incalculable.”

  “I am glad you think so,” replied Carter in a thin, nasal voice. “However, the popular press does tend to sensationalise things overmuch, I find.”

  “Nonsense,” chimed Lady Evelyn. “You are a most erudite and canny explorer, Mr. Carter. You are far too modest for your own good.”

  Carter smiled diffidently. “I have been lucky,” he said.

  “Never luckier than at this very moment!” declared Carnarvon. “Shall we get on with it? We’ve waited years for this—the first glimpse of a royal tomb. Lay on, man! Let’s see what we’ve found!”

  Turning to the sealed doorway, Carter signalled two workmen standing by, armed with mallet and chisel. The fellows began chipping away at the mortar between the blocks, and soon the dead, still air of the chamber was filled with a fine gritty dust. As the mortar fell, the sense of anticipation in the chamber rose; the workmen murmured in Arabic; Carnarvon and his daughter whispered back and forth; Carter remained rigid, staring at the brick wall before him as if tearing it down by sheer willpower alone.

  Soon one of the central blocks had been freed. Carter raised his hand. “Kata!” He said. The workmen ceased their hammering, and he stepped forward. Carter ran his hands along seams of the block, working his fingers into the gap. He pulled, but the brick did not give. “Takkadam,” he said, stepping away again as the workers resumed hammering at the block. “We’ll have to break it to get it out,” he explained; his bookish face, betraying a sheen of eager perspiration, glistened in the lamplight.

  “Won’t take long,” Lord Carnarvon assured them. He rubbed his hands. “Any moment now.”

  With each blow of the hammers, the atmosphere grew more charged, the sense of anticipation more intense. The chink of steel on steel, and steel on stone, filled the chamber with a dull clamour; the dust grew thicker. The block fractured under the assault, and the crack was rapidly exploited.

  “Kata! ” cried Carter again.

  The hammering ceased.

  Moving to the sealed door, Howard Carter dug at the newly created crevice and pulled on the broken brick, slowly drawing the first half away. He tossed it behind him, and the second half soon followed.

  He peered in through the hole.

  “What do you see?” asked Carnarvon.

  “I see . . . ,” began Carter.

  Earl Burleigh felt Evelyn lean close in her excitement. She pressed the knuckles of her right hand to her lips. “Oh, please!” she gasped softly.

  “Nothing.” Carter stepped away from the hole in the door. “I can’t see anything until we can get a light in.” He gestured to the workmen. “Takkadam,” he said, and the hammering began again.

  The second stone fell more quickly than the first, and the third followed and the fourth and fifth in rapid succession. The dust in the anteroom chamber rose in clouds, filling the still air. All looking on covered noses and mouths with their scarves.

  “Kata!” shouted Carter. Taking a lamp from one of the men, he stepped to the void in the door and shoved the lantern through. Trembling visibly, he leaned forward, pressing his eager face to the stonework.

  “Well?” demanded Carnarvon, almost hopping with excitement. “What? Tell us! What do you see?”

  “Gold!” announced Carter. “I see gold.”

  The word sent a visceral quiver through Burleigh; he felt it in his belly.

  Carter, still at the door, motioned for Lord Carnarvon to join him at the breach. The aristocrat muscled in beside him and pressed his face into the gap. “Glorious!” he proclaimed. “Open it! Open it at once!”

  “Oh, Daddy!” cried Lady Evelyn. “Let me see!”

  “A moment more, my dear,” said her father, “and we shall all be able to see.” To the workmen he commanded, “Pull it down.”

  “Selfish beast,” muttered Evelyn.

  Burleigh patted her arm in mild commiseration, although he himself felt no such disappointment. He was supremely happy to, for once, be in at the sharp end of the discovery, to be present when the grave was opened and the objects that made his livelihood were brought back to the world of men and commerce. In fact, his cunning mind was already awash with schemes for insinuating himself into the profitable disposal of the artefacts soon to be revealed.

  Brick followed brick as whole sections of the sealed doorway tumbled. Within moments, the breach was large enough to allow entrance. “Here,” said Carter, handing around lanterns. When each member of the party had a light, he said, “May I remind each one of us not to touch anything, please, until we’ve had a chance to photograph everything in situ?” After receiving assurances all around, he smiled. “This way, please. Watch your step.”

  Turning sideways, he shrugged through the gap and disappeared into the dark interior of the tomb. Lord Carnarvon went next, with his daughter close on his heels. Burleigh fell in behind her, stepping carefully over the pile of broken brick and rubble, passing through a narrow vestibule and into a chamber that had been hollowed from the living stone.

  No one spoke. All remained silent in the grip of the mystery.

  The air inside the tomb was dry and held the metallic scent of rock dust and, oddly, spice—as if a once-pungent mingling of pine resin and frankincense had faded away over untold time to a mere ghostly wisp of its former aromatic self. It tantalized, rather than tickled, the nostrils. Burleigh rubbed his nose and moved farther into the tomb.

  Slightly larger than the interior of a train car, the room was stacked with dusty articles of furniture—a black lacquered chair, a bedstead, the painted wheels of a chariot . . . and boxes, caskets, and chests of various sizes. The black chair’s armrests were carved with the heads of lions that had been encased in gold leaf. This, Burleigh decided, was what Howard Carter had seen glinting back at him when he first looked in, for there was no other gold to be seen anywhere.

  At opposite ends of the chamber, doors gave way to other rooms. Carter instinctively moved to the door on the right and Carnarvon to the left. Carnarvon was first to break the silence. “Canopic jars,” announced the lord, his voice falling strangely dead in the close air of the tomb. “What have you got?”

  “The sarcophagus,” declared Carter. “It’s here—and intact. We’re in luck. There has been no robbery here.”

  While the others busied themselves with a cursory examination of the dead royal’s elaborate stone coffin, Burleigh made a quick mental inventory of the items he could sell, estimating what each might bring on the market. Over in one corner, he saw two very fine statues of cats carved of red granite; next to them was a small ebony owl; in amongst the wooden boxes was a large wooden hunting hound with a jewelled collar. . . .

  “Who is it? Can you see?” said Carnarvon.

  Burleigh joined the others crouched beside the sarcophagus—an oversized buff-coloured stone vault, the top of which was inscribed with hieroglyphs. “It’s here,” Carter was saying. “Yes, here it is. Here is a name. . . .”

  “Well?” demanded Carnarvon, impatience making his voice shrill. “What does it say? Who is it?”

  Anticipation, Burleigh noticed, was quickly giving way to low-level frustration. And he thought he could guess the reason why.

  “It is a male,” Carter intoned, his fingers tracing the glyphs like a blind man reading braille. “His name is Anen.” Glancing up from his examination, he said, “He is—was—a priest with the title of second prophet of Amun. Very high in the temple organization.”

  “Not royal then,” observed Lord Carnarvon, unable to keep the disappointment out of his voice. “Not a king, at least.” He paused. “Pity.”

  “No, not a king,” confirmed the archaeologist. “But still an important find nevertheless.”

  “Of course,” agreed Carnarvon, turning away. “Extremely important.”

  “Oh, Daddy,” chided Evelyn, “don�
�t pout—just because there is not a mountain of gold and jewels to be plundered. Look at all the marvellous paintings.”

  She held her lantern to the wall, and Burleigh saw what had, to that moment, failed to catch his notice: the walls of the tomb had been plastered white and covered with images. Every square inch of every surface was intensely, vibrantly, vivaciously decorated. One enormous panel showed the tomb’s occupant in a chariot beside the crowned figure of a pharaoh, spear uplifted, dogs racing ahead on the heels of a high-leaping antelope; another showed the priest in his colourful robes leading a ceremony where a number of animals were being sacrificed and that was being overseen by a huge figure of the bronze-skinned god Amun, with his tall plumed crown. A third panel showed the tomb’s occupant on his papyrus punt poling among the tall reeds surrounded by cranes and ducks and egrets, the sky above filled with birds of all kinds, the water below the boat filled with fish and even a crocodile. . . . And more, floor to ceiling—and the ceiling, too, in glowing blue and covered with tiny white stars to simulate the heavens: wonderful, intricate, detailed paintings, with colours as fresh and bright as the day the artists laid down their brushes and retreated to the daylight.

  “There’s his wealth,” Burleigh observed, moving to Lady Evelyn’s side and holding his lantern to hers. “The chap spent all his money on art.”

  CHAPTER 27

  In Which the Emperor Awaits a Mysterious Visitor

  Rudolf, King of Bohemia and Hungary, Archduke of Austria, and King of the Romans, tapped his long fingers impatiently on the arms of his favourite throne. He hated waiting. And yet, it seemed that the principal chore of the most powerful ruler of the Holy Roman Empire was not ruling, but waiting. Each day, every day, all day long, the life of an emperor amounted to little more than a series of brief conversations punctuated by lengthy intervals of loitering. He waited for audiences, waited for his edicts to be ratified and executed, waited for ministers to act on his decisions, waited for replies to his manifold messages, waited while the vast wheels of government slowly revolved to bring about a result, any result . . . and so on and—so far as he could see—forever.

  The best that could be hoped for was to organise all this waiting into more productive heaps, overlapping as many delays as possible. Rudolf liked to think it made these idle periods more productive than if strung out individually. Just now, for example, he was waiting for paint to dry, and for his first audience of the day, and for word from Vienna regarding the birth of an infant by his mistress. He was having his portrait rendered, and the artist insisted that he wait until the paint had settled before abandoning his pose, should refinements be required; he was expecting his chief alchemist to attend him with the results of the latest experiments; heavily pregnant Katharina had been sent to Vienna to bear his child, whose arrival was imminent. Later on, he could look forward to waiting for his ministers to present the state of his treasury, waiting for his friend Prince Leopold of Swabia to arrive for his annual visit and hunt, waiting for the coach to take him to the opera for his evening’s entertainment. A full and productive day of waiting stretched before him.

  “How much longer?” he asked, meaning the paint—it had become such a familiar phrase on his lips, his courtiers did not feel obliged to respond with any degree of precision.

  “Not long, Highness,” replied the artist Arcimboldo, wafting a cloth gently over the surface of the canvas. “Soon. Very soon.”

  The Holy Roman Emperor sighed and resumed drumming his fingers. The artist busied himself with mixing colours on his palette. An eternity elapsed, and the emperor was on the point of asking yet again how much longer he must wait before he could get up when a sharp rap came on the door of the chamber and his master of audiences appeared. “Forgive the intrusion, Your Highness,” he announced, “but Herr Doktor Bazalgette craves the pleasure of your attention.”

  “And we his,” replied Rudolf. “By all means, bid him enter at once.”

  The courtier bowed and stepped backward, ushering into the room Balthazar Bazalgette, the emperor’s chief alchemist: a portly man of middle years, who possessed not only the jowls of a prize swine, but lavish eyebrows the artist might have envied for portrait work. He was also a man of immense erudition, and no small pomposity. If one was prepared to overlook the latter, however, one found beneath the expansive velvet robe a man of great industry and a sincerity of purpose that many religious zealots might have done well to emulate.

  “Bazalgette!” cried Rudolf, happy at having this latest round of waiting interrupted at last. “Come here to us!”

  The Lord High Alchemist swept into the room in a rush of robes, his tall, fur-trimmed hat slightly askew in his hurry. “Good news, Highness! I bring very encouraging word. We have succeeded in producing the Elixir of the Wise. Our experiments can now continue without delay.”

  “That is good news,” Rudolf agreed. He liked anything that promised to minimize the dread delay in any of its insidious forms. “Sit you down.” He indicated the painter’s stool nearby. “Tell us all about it.”

  “Gladly, Sire,” said the alchemist, drawing the stool close to the throne. “As you will recall from our last conversation, the prime difficulty of producing red sulphur lies in the inherent instability of the constituent ingredients.”

  “Yes,” affirmed Rudolf, “we do recall the particular conversation right well.”

  “To be sure, another part of the difficulty lies in securing sufficient quantities of feculent earth needed to produce the righteous oil.”

  “Of course.” Rudolf nodded. Alchemy was a complicated business. He marvelled that anyone could maintain his wits in the face of such monumental and implacable intricacy.

  “By a most fortuitous coincidence,” continued Bazalgette with mounting excitement, “my assistant—remember young Rosenkreuz?—was at this new Kaffeehaus in the square, and he adroitly obtained a goodly quantity of a new and hitherto unknown substance—a bitter earth called ground of Kaffee.”

  “Did he indeed?” The imperial eyebrows lifted in mild surprise. “How very enterprising of him.”

  “He is a most capable assistant, Sire,” commended the chief alchemist benignly. “We have already begun experimenting with the substance, Highness, and though a complete assay will take some time, I am pleased to say that preliminary results appear extremely promising.”

  “We have heard of this Kaffee,” the emperor mused. Turning his face toward the door, he shouted, “Ruprecht!”

  The door opened momentarily and the master of audiences appeared. “Highness? You called?”

  “We have heard of this Kaffee, have we not?”

  “I believe so, Highness.”

  “But we have not imbibed it?”

  “No, Sire. Not as yet.”

  “Have some brought to us,” Rudolf commanded, then hastily added, “—today! Without delay.”

  “It will be done, Your Highness,” intoned the master of audiences.

  “If I may interrupt, Sire,” ventured the alchemist, “I have already taken the liberty of inviting the owners of this Kaffeehaus to visit me at court to discuss supplying us with the bitter earth for our experiments. Inasmuch as their cooperation is of inestimable value to our experiments, I thought we might bestow an honour upon them—the better to secure their future goodwill for the aid and advance of the Great Work.”

  Rudolf smiled. “Good thinking, Bazalgette.” To the lingering Ruprecht, the emperor commanded, “Send a coach for them at the arranged time, and make sure they bring some of this Kaffee with them. We would like to taste it.”

  “It will be done, Highness.”

  Turning once more to the alchemist, Rudolf said, “It is a momentous age we inhabit, is it not?”

  “Indeed, Sire,” agreed the alchemist, “all the more when I tell you that just this morning I received word from an acquaintance of mine who is soon in Prague and wishes to engage certain members of our enlightened brotherhood in the construction of a device to further his astral
explorations.”

  Rudolf blinked at the alchemist. “His what explorations?”

  “Astral, Sire,” answered Bazalgette. “The etheric realms, you might say. It appears that he is even now perfecting the means to travel the astral planes by means known to him and wishes our help in furthering his endeavours.”

  “Spirit travel?” wondered Rudolf. That, in itself, seemed of little promise, and less interest.

  “Oh, no, Sire,” countered the alchemist quickly. “Physical travel—moving bodily between various planes or dimensions of existence. I believe he can demonstrate this ability.”

  “That we should like to see,” said Rudolf, his interest piqued.

  “No doubt it can be arranged,” offered Bazalgette.

  “Summon him to us,” commanded the emperor. “We will grant him a place here in the palace should he so desire. We wish to see what he can do, this astral explorer. It may be that this mode of travel could prove a very boon to humanity if it could be perfected for good.”

  “I could not have said it better myself, Sire,” agreed the alchemist. “I will engage him directly when he arrives in the city.”

  “Good. Speak with Ruprecht. We would like to meet him.”

  “Of course, Highness.”

  “Excuse me, Your Majesty,” said the court painter Arcimboldo. “I would never dare to interrupt, but you asked me to tell you when the portrait was ready for viewing. I have finished for the day, so if you would like to see it, I humbly offer it for your inspection.”

  “Come, Balthazar, let us see how this portrait is developing.” The emperor rose and crossed to the artist’s easel. “Tell us what you think,” he said, casting a critical eye over the expansive canvas. “The truth, now. We will not hear flummery.”

  “Exquisite, Highness,” remarked the chief alchemist in a reverential tone. “Undoubtedly a work of genius. Just look at that melon—and those peaches!—wondrous to behold. The grapes are a revelation, if I may say it. And the asparagus is astonishing.”