In the moonlight, Karoy saw Tiy turn her eyes anxiously and Hefti's glum face looking back. What chances did the two left behind have of surviving until the boat returned?
The army slowed near the water's edge. They did not have to hurry now. The wooden spearmen were trapped.
"I see a chance," said Karoy. "Look over there."
An object had washed to the edge of the stream where it bobbed and twisted slowly among dried leaves in an eddy, a piece of driftwood with a flat area where they could stand.
"Our raft. Come on."
Karoy made a running leap onto its surface. The raft rocked and then again as Weji landed. They shoved off away with their spears.
"Row. Use the end of your spear!"
They dug their spears into the water and hauled on the handles, their metal blades flashing below their raft like panicked fish.
They edged out into the stream. Were they free?
Not yet...
"Look!"
Three soldier termites jumped onto a floating leaf with such speed that it skidded over the water to the side of their raft. "Boarders!"
Karoy and Weji slashed and jabbed with their blades, but now more termites were following their comrade’s lead and jumping onto leaves.
Weji used his spear to drive one attacker into the water. Another termite soldier clambered onto the raft with his front legs, trying to haul himself on board.
"No you don't!"
Karoy used his spear like a crowbar to prise off one leg and then another. The termite tumbled back onto the leaf, upsetting it and sent two soldiers into the water.
"Row hard!"
Two more leaves were drifting towards them, packed with soldiers like a marine landing craft, their enlarged jaws snapping the air eagerly to lay hold on them.
Karoy and Weji started to pull away. Without oars, the termite pirates found themselves spinning in the current.
They drifted helplessly away, their agitated limbs squeaking together in frustration.
It was still dark, the sun just beginning to reach inside the museum building.
They had spent the night under bushes in the park and sneaked in behind the cleaners in the morning, carrying Tiy into the building on their shoulders as she reclined on the fisherman’s boat.
The obstacles that had littered the floor and hindered them on the night before were gone.
Only one thing remained.
“Don’t forget the shield we tossed on the floor,” he told Weji who paused to scoop it up before tossing it on the deck beside Tiy.
Tiy was returning.
Karoy looked back at her. She seemed to be afloat, the swept up papyrus boat supporting her safely like a cupped hand. Safe at last, he thought, after the struggle against so many perils. His heart floated too as he looked at her.
Yes, the adventure had damaged her, but in the end it might only shorten her survival by another five hundred or a thousand years.
That left time enough.
The child’s affectionate but careless handling of Tiy, as well as the exposure to air, had stolen some of her beauty, no doubt, and yet the gap in her loveliness was something that he filled himself and the imagining made her even more a part of him.
Karoy had suffered too. He could feel it in his glued and pinned joints. His painted skin had grown new cracks and lines of stress, but she had suffered more. Why? Was it because her body had been fashioned in sycamore wood that was bare and unpainted?
They had made a different kind of journey tonight. Time travellers both, they had also crossed a gulf of great danger together.
They ran past the shadow of the elevator.
The shadow of the basement stairwell loomed.
The museum’s underworld.
Even in the creeping light of dawn, the void sucked at him like a dizzying drop.
He changed course away from the void when the figure of Heka appeared from nowhere, stopping the tiny convoy in its tracks.
Heka, raised to her full height, snake wands held out in her hands, did not speak but glared at the sight of Tiy and then pointed the snake heads at the boat.
At this, a stream gushed up the stairs from the darkness of the basement. It knocked Hefti and the boatmen aside before sweeping the boat and Tiy away carrying her away on a bobbing, squeaking current of grey-brown fur.
Rats... their gnawing teeth were as dangerous to Tiy as the jaws of any soldier termites.
They swept Tiy to the stairs, while another horde attacked the spearmen and boatmen.
Heka laughed.
"Your broken queen will be swept into the underworld from whence none ever returns...”
The papyrus boat raced away on the backs of the furry wave, a squeaking river of rats. Tiy crouched, shrinking to the deck in horror. The furry denizens were streaming back to where they belonged - their basement underworld.
Was it the magic of Heka's spell or exhaustion after fighting so hard that glued Karoy's feet to the floor? How could spearmen and a few boatmen stop a legion of rats?
Here came the wave. They will sweep over us just as the termites had swept over Planki.
Planki.
A memory flashed into his mind of the spearman raising his spear and giving one last defiant shake. We too must rise to one last battle.
"Down the stairs. Fall back to the doorway of the underworld. We must try to hold them off there!"
The acacia men fell back, along with the wide-eyed boatmen. One of them picked up a fallen oar from the boat and he gripped it in his hands like a wooden spear. They reached the stairs and slid down, step after step. The river of rats washed down the stairs after them.
Daylight sent spears of light down the stairs and revealed the entranceway - the basement door - open! Heka must have opened the gates of hell with her magic, he guessed.
The mouth of the underworld. Even a glimpse within struck him cold. He had a glimpse of a dim hall lined with shelves of broken ugly heads, wrapped mummies’ feet and hands, - a smashed face of a goddess, a smashed mummy case on the floor with its face gaping in a broken scream.
Karoy and his band turned to face the enemy. The rats' eyes were like angry red coals. Their backward sloping teeth were bared.
"Defensive positions - link shields! Boatmen, take cover behind us."
"Not I," said the one with an oar. "They have taken our boat and I will paddle a few heads first!"
The first wave of rats struck, hitting their linked shields. They staggered, but held the line. Now they jabbed around their shields with their spears, while the boatman pounded heads with his oar.
The rats fell back.
The second wave came. He could see Tiy on the boat being swept towards their doorway.
"Link shields!"
Karoy felt the blackness of the underworld sucking at his back, the void threatening to draw him down. He had a blurred impression of beady eyes, whiskers and teeth like long ivory daggers before they hit. Weji went over. Hefti and the boatmen closed ranks. They kicked and jabbed at the rodents.
"Take that you dirty rat!" said Hefti.
The boatman added a whack with his oar. Rats squeaked in rage and shrank back.
'One more wave will drown us,' thought Karoy. It was a hopeless stand, while at their backs the hungry black mouth of the underworld yawned.
But hold, why were the rats falling back, further, scattering? A current of panic had spread through them.
"Look - at the top of the stairs!" Hefti yelled, giving a cheer.
Thirty-six Egyptian wooden spearmen came running, yelling, shields raised, tackling the rear with their spears. Made bolder by daylight they had left their case to come in search for their comrades, only to find them under attack.
"Our troop. They have come to our rescue!"
The rats were trapped - like rats.
Cowardly creatures, they dropped the boat and left it rocking on a step, Tiy clinging to its deck. Spearmen fought their way down.
Rats fled, scattering in al
l directions and scuttling through the entrance hall.
Karoy and his band of defenders ran to Tiy’s side.
Where was Heka?
No time to worry about her now. They must get back into their case and hoist the lady Tiy up on the rope.
Hefti found his spear still stuck in the leg of the display case, but the mummy cat and its ribbon of cloth had gone.
Heka shrieked inside the display case when she saw the lady Tiy returning, carried on Karoy’s broad houlders, her arms flung around his neck.
"What magic did you use to defeat me?"
"A magic you would not understand," said Karoy.
"Do you know what you have done?"
He could guess.
The metal snake-wands in Heka's hands hung limp and lifeless as two cords.
"Yes. I have brought Tiy back from the four pillars of the sky."
"Not that. You have defeated my curse and you know what happens when a curse fails. It turns back on the sender with twice the force!"
Thousands of years now attacked Heka like a horde of hungry insects. She gave a choked, dusty scream. Heka was collapsing slowly in stages like a tower block falling into itself. Now her legs and knees were gone, now her body, her waist, her shoulders. Finally only an insect-eaten head fell crumpled on the pile, throwing up a puff of sawdust.
Heka had dreamed of seeing Tiy old, cracked and crumbling, but now that fate had come to her instead.
Tiy could no longer stand so they rested her, gently propped against the side of the glass case in almost the same spot as before.
"Why did you do this for me, Karoy?"
"I have admired you for three thousand years, Tiy, and I want you to be mine.”
There. He had said it.
He had not only rescued Tiy, but found his tongue at last.
He had crossed a gulf to do it. But it proved to him that there was no time to lose in matters of the heart. 'We do not have an eternity to speak our hearts,' he thought. 'We just risk missing out for eternity if we do not.'
"You took three thousand years to tell me?"
"I did not want to rush things."
The smile that came to her lips froze as the sound of footsteps reached their ears.
The cleaners were coming.
"Back into your positions men - but this time one of you from the middle must take Planki's position in the front rank. Space yourself to cover for his absence. With luck nobody will ever know."
But we will know, Karoy thought.
A week later, the little girl Mish was walking through the Egyptian gallery with her father when she stole a glance at the spearman's case.
Her father, the museum keeper, saw her looking in that direction and he smiled a little sadly.
"I know you've always had a soft spot for the little lady in the case. It's the strangest thing. I found her crumbled off her base and propped against the glass. But you'll be pleased to hear I've patched her up a bit and put her back on a new stand."
The girl stopped suddenly. She gaped at the case and then up at her father in amazement.
"She's - back here?"
"Yes, a bit broken and worn, but still a pretty young lady in my book."
"But -"
Mish ran to the case. She flattened her nose against the glass. She stared in wonderment at the Lady Tiy, then, as if hoping that they might provide some explanation for the mystery, she turned to the troop of wooden spearmen. They looked back at her, smartly erect in their ranks. Her eyes tracked along the front, examining Hefti, Weji and then settling on Karoy. If only they could speak...
Her stare, filled with awe, went down from Karoy's face to his feet. In a crack between Karoy's toes she noticed a tiny strand of fibre, a blue-green colour like that of turquoise jewels mined in Egypt's Western desert - and the colour of her bedcover at home.
Then a smile of overwhelming amazement revealed itself in Mish's face, along with the steely glint of her dental braces.
"I'll tell you something else that's strange," her father went on. "There was a magical doll in there and I found her collapsed in a heap. Her magic must have finally let her down. Her body had crumbled into powder and only the head was left, eaten away as if by insects. I've put her below in the basement, or what's left of her. Ugly doll. Always thought so."
Did the child catch a hint of a smile on the face of the acacia spearman? "I think he wants to be with her forever," Mish said.
"Who?"
"This wooden spearman and the pretty lady."
"All eternity? Well, they've made a good start," said the keeper.
Karoy lost no time.
He and Tiy made vows for eternity and the community of the display cases all celebrated.
They threw a wedding feast.
The bakery made cakes and fourteen kinds of bread, the butchery provided succulent portions of roasted meat and the fishermen provided a fresh catch grilled over hot coals. The two spearmen were the guests of honour and the ladies from the weavers' workshop put lotus blossoms in their hair and danced to the music of musicians playing harps.
A rich nobleman by the name of Meketre, who owned a great estate and many cattle, made a gift to the happy pair of some fat, spotted cattle.
Meketre also made another special wedding gift, but he left this one to Karoy to reveal as a surprise for his new bride.
After the feast, Karoy took Tiy by the hand to show her the gift.
"Oh Karoy, it's perfect!"
It was a charming little estate with its own villa.
The model house had a verandah outside with gaily painted pillars, trees in its own walled garden and an ornamental pond stocked with water lilies and fish where the couple could sit together on warm summer evenings and enjoy the cool Northern breeze.
"Welcome, Lady of the House," Karoy said.
"And you, Lord of the Manor," she smiled. "I think it will not be too long before we hear the tap, tap tap of tiny wooden feet." 'A child?' Karoy thought. A little chip off the old block. That would be just perfect.
Chapter 29
THE ANCIENT HORIZONS organization spared no expense on this tour.
Before they joined the dahabiyya at Aswan, they took a flight south across the Aswan Dam and over an inland sea to the Temple of Abu Simbel… just to catch the sun and a rare solar event that occurred twice a year at daybreak. They would spend a night at a hotel in the town of Abu Simbel so that they could be sure of arriving at the temple before dawn.
Neith sat beside him on the short thirty-minute flight. As the EgyptAir jet banked, they caught a glimpse of the blue inland sea splashing in the afternoon light.
Lake Nasser. Luxury cruise boats stopped along the way at clusters of temples that had been rescued and rebuilt on new ground at the time of the construction of the new Aswan High Dam. The temples now sat like sublime flotsam and jetsam washed up high on the shores of the lake.
Kalabsha, Kiosk of Qertassi, Beit al-Wali, Wadi es Sebua, Dakka, Maharraqa, Qasr Ibrim, Amada, Derr...
“You wonder what lies down there,” he said to Neith. “Beneath the lake lies what have been called a chain of the mightiest fortifications ever erected in the ancient world, among them the Middle Kingdom riverbank stronghold of Buhen. It was a fortification complex with defensive technology that rivaled anything the Medieval age could offer three thousand years later, including battlements, buttresses, bastions, loopholes for arrows, moats and crenellations. The five metre thick walls stood four storeys tall. The Egyptians built Buhen to hold and protect a population of several thousand and to repel waves of enemy attacks from Nubians and Bedouin, but the mud brick walls were powerless against waves of the watery kind. Archaeologists excavated the fortresses before the waters of the dam rose, but the structures were considered unsalvageable and so they were abandoned to the waves. Yet according to reports the mud brick battlements are still holding up bravely like ghostly defences in the depths of the African water, decades after their drowning.”
“That’s a sa
d thought,” she said.
Did the fiery disc of Ra also lie below, stashed in a hiding place and now swallowed forever by the waters of a lake, built up behind Egypt’s Aswan Dam, an inland sea that stretched for five-hundred-and-fifty kilometres and was thirty-five kilometres at its widest point?
How many lost temples, cemeteries and ruins of settlements lay beneath the lake, gone forever?
“I always feel I’m heading deep into Egypt’s roots in Africa when I come this far South,” she said.
“Aswan certainly was the gateway between Egypt and the rest of Africa. The ancient Egyptians mounted trading expeditions from here since the times of the earliest pharaohs, coming back with gold, ivory, incense, exotic animals such as giraffes, leopards, apes, and also on one recorded occasion, a dancing pygmy dwarf. Just across the river, hollowed in the cliffs, are the tombs of the nomarchs, the ancient governors of this region," he told her. “You go on an exhausting climb up sand strewn steps to reach them in the cliffs. There you can see the tomb of Harkhuf, an official who told the story of bringing a dancing pygmy dwarf back to Egypt. News of his acquisition apparently travelled ahead and reached the child king Pepi II, who sent an urgent message to the expedition: Come northward to the court immediately… bring this dwarf with you, alive, prosperous, to gladden the heart of the king of Upper and Lower Egypt… When he goes down with you into the vessel, appoint excellent people, who shall be beside him on each side of the vessel; take care lest he fall into the water. My majesty desires to see this dwarf more than all the gifts of Sinai and of Punt!”
“Cute story.”
Their flight took them over the same route taken by the fleeing Nectanebo II on his way to exile in Nubia, the last pharaoh of indigenous origin and a magician celebrated by chroniclers in medieval times when Nectanebo was Egypt’s most famous pharaoh and a name on everyone’s lips. There’s a legend about Nectanebo that gained particular currency in Medieval times. It told that Nectanebo did not end his days in Nubia, but fled to the Macedonian court, taking refuge with the enemies of Persia. The Greeks welcomed him there with open arms as a great and beguiling magician, and a scurrilous twist told that Olympias, wife of the Macedonian king Phillip II, also welcomed Nectanebo with open arms into her bed, where Nectanebo and not Phillip, actually fathered Alexander. Was it possible? Tempting to believe of the sly snake Nectanebo, but Anson doubted. It was probably just an invention designed to legitimise Alexander as an heir to the pharaohs and as the incarnation of Egyptian divinity.
THE HATHOR HOLOCAUST Page 19
