by Wilbur Smith
Each movement was a mighty effort and evoked fresh paroxysms of agony, but when he rolled on to his back again he realized that a gale of fresh air was being sucked through the open doorway to feed the flames. A lungful of the sweet desert air revived him and gave him just sufficient strength to lunge down the step on to the cool stones of the terrace.
His clothes and his body were still on fire. He beat feebly at his chest to try to extinguish the flames, but his hands were black burning claws.
Then he remembered the fishpond. The thought of plunging his tortured body into that cold water spurred him to one last effort, and he wriggled and wormed his way across the flags like a snake with a crushed spine.
The pungent smoke from his still cremating flesh choked him and he coughed weakly, but kept doggedly on. He left slabs of his own grilled skin on the stone coping as he rolled across it and flopped into the pond. There was a hiss of steam, and a pale cloud of it obscured his vision so that for a moment he thought he was blinded. The agony of cold water on his raw burned flesh was so intense that he slid back over the edge of consciousness.
When he came back to reality through the dark clouds he raised his dripping head and saw a figure staggering up the steps at the far end of the terrace, coming from the garden.
For a moment he thought it was a phantom of his agony, but when the light of the burning villa fell full upon her, he recognized Royan. Her wet hair hung in tangled disarray over her face, and her clothing was torn and running with lake water and stained with mud and green algae. Her right arm was wrapped in muddy rags and her blood oozed through, diluted pink by the dirty water.
She did not see him. She stopped in the centre of the terrace and stared in horror into the burning room. Was Duraid in there? She started forward, but the heat was like a solid wall and it stopped her dead. At that moment the roof collapsed, sending a roaring column of sparks and flames high into the night sky. She backed away from it, shielding her face with a raised arm.
Duraid tried to call to her, but no sound issued from his smoke-scorched throat. Royan turned away and started down the steps. He realized that she must be going to call for help. Duraid made a supreme effort and a crow-like croak came out between his black and blistered lips.
Royan spun round and stared at him, and then she screamed. His head was not human. His hair was gone, frizzled away, and his skin hung in tatters from his cheeks and chin. Patches of raw meat showed through the black crusted mask. She backed away from him as though he were some hideous monster.
‘Royan,’ he croaked, and his voice was just recognizable. He lifted one hand towards her in appeal, and she ran to the pond and seized the outstretched hand.
‘In the name of the Virgin, what have they done to you?’ she sobbed, but when she tried to pull him from the pond the skin of his hand came away in hers in a single piece, like some horrible surgical rubber glove, leaving the bleeding claw naked and raw.
Royan fell on her knees beside the coping and leaned over the pond to take him in her arms. She knew that she did not have the strength to lift him out without doing him further dreadful injury. All she could do was hold him and try to comfort him. She realized that he was dying – no man could survive such fearsome injury.
‘They will come soon to help us,’ she whispered to him in Arabic. ‘Someone must see the flames. Be brave, my husband, help will come very soon.’
He was twitching and convulsing in her arms, tortured by his mortal injuries and racked by the effort to speak.
‘The scroll?’ His voice was barely intelligible. Royan looked up at the holocaust that enveloped their home, and she shook her head.
‘It’s gone,’ she said. ‘Burned or stolen.’
‘Don’t give it up,’ he mumbled. ‘All our work—’
‘It’s gone,’ she repeated. ‘No one will believe us without—’
‘No!’ His voice was faint but fierce. ‘For me, my last—’
‘Don’t say that,’ she pleaded. ‘You will be all right.’
‘Promise,’ he demanded. ‘Promise me!’
‘We have no sponsor. I am alone. I cannot do it alone.’
‘Harper!’ he said. Royan leaned closer so that her ear touched his fire-ravaged lips. ‘Harper,’ he repeated. ‘Strong – hard – clever man—’ and she understood then. Harper, of course, was the fourth and last name on the list of sponsors that he had drawn up. Although he was the last on the list, somehow she had always known that Duraid’s order of preference was inverted. Nicholas Quenton-Harper was his first choice. He had spoken so often of this man with respect and warmth, and sometimes even with awe.
‘But what do I tell him? He does not know me. How will I convince him? The seventh scroll is gone.’
‘Trust him,’ he whispered. ‘Good man. Trust him—’ There was a terrible appeal in his ‘Promise me!’
Then she remembered the notebook in their flat at Giza in the Cairo suburbs, and the Taita material on the hard drive on her PC. Not everything was gone. ‘Yes,’ she agreed, ‘I promise you, my husband, I promise you.’
Though those mutilated features could show no human expression there was a faint echo of satisfaction in his voice as he whispered, ‘My flower!’ Then his head dropped forward, and he died in her arms.
The peasants from the village found Royan still kneeling beside the pond, holding him, whispering to him. By that time the flames were abating, and the faint light of dawn was stronger than their fading glow.
All the senior staff from the museum and the Department of Antiquities were at the funeral service in the church of the oasis. Even Atalan Abou Sin, the Minister of Culture and Tourism and Duraid’s superior, had come out from Cairo in his official black air-conditioned Mercedes.
He stood behind Royan and, though he was a Moslem, joined in the responses. Nahoot Guddabi stood beside his uncle. Nahoot’s mother was the minister’s youngest sister, which, as Duraid had sarcastically pointed out, fully made up for the nephew’s lack of qualifications and experience in archaeology and for his ineptitude as an administrator.
The day was sweltering. Outside, the temperature stood at over thirty degrees, and even in the dim cloisters of the Coptic church it was oppressive. In the thick clouds of incense smoke and the drone of the black-clad priest intoning the ancient order of service Royan felt herself suffocating. The stitches in her right arm pulled and burned, and every time she looked at the long black coffin that stood in front of the ornate and gilded altar, the dreadful vision of Duraid’s bald and scorched head rose before her eyes and she swayed in her seat and had to catch herself before she fell.
At last it was over and she could escape into the open air and the desert sunlight. Even then her duties were not at an end. As principal mourner, her place was directly behind the coffin as they walked in procession to the cemetery amongst the palm groves, where Duraid’s relatives awaited him in the family mausoleum.
Before he returned to Cairo, Atalan Abou Sin came to shake her hand and offer her a few words of condolence. ‘What a terrible business, Royan. I have personally spoken to the Minister of the Interior. They will catch the animals responsible for this outrage, believe me. Please take as long as you need before you return to the museum,’ he told her.
‘I will be in my office again on Monday,’ she replied, and he drew a pocket diary from inside the jacket of his dark double-breasted suit. He consulted it and made a note, before he looked up at her again.
‘Then come to see me at the Ministry in the afternoon. Four o’clock,’ he told her. He went to the waiting Mercedes, while Nahoot Guddabi came forward to shake hands. Though his skin was sallow and there were coffee-coloured stains beneath his dark eyes, he was tall and elegant with thick wavy hair and very white teeth. His suit was impeccably tailored and he smelt faintly of an expensive cologne. His expression was grave and sad.
‘He was a good man. I held Duraid in the highest esteem,’ he told Royan, and she nodded without replying to this blatant untruth.
There had been little affection between Duraid and his deputy. He had never allowed Nahoot to work on the Taita scrolls; in particular he had never given him access to the seventh scroll, and this had been a point of bitter antagonism between them.
‘I hope you will be applying for the post of director, Royan,’ he told her. ‘You are well qualified for the job.’
‘Thank you, Nahoot, you are very kind. I haven’t had a chance to think about the future yet, but won’t you be applying?’
‘Of course,’ he nodded. ‘But that doesn’t mean that no one else should. Perhaps you will take the job out from in front of my nose.’ His smile was complacent. She was a woman in an Arab world, and he was the nephew of the minister. Nahoot knew just how heavily the odds favoured him. ‘Friendly rivals?’ he asked.
Royan smiled sadly. ‘Friends, at least. I will need all of those I can find in the future.’
‘You know you have many friends. Everyone in the department likes you, Royan.’ That at least was true, she supposed. He went on smoothly, ‘May I offer you a lift back to Cairo? I am certain my uncle will not object.’
‘Thank you, Nahoot, but I have my own car here, and I must stay over at the oasis tonight to see to some of Duraid’s affairs.’ This was not true. Royan planned to travel back to the flat in Giza that evening but, for reasons that she was not very sure of herself, she did not want Nahoot to know of her plans.
‘Then we shall see you at the museum on Monday.’
Royan left the oasis as soon as she was able to escape from the relations and family friends and peasants, so many of whom had worked for Duraid’s family most of their lives. She felt numbed and isolated, so that all their condolences and pious exhortations were meaningless and without comfort.
Even at this late hour the tarmac road back through the desert was busy, with files of vehicles moving steadily in both directions, for tomorrow was Friday and the sabbath. She slipped her injured right arm out of the sling, and it did not hamper her driving too much. She was able to make reasonably good time. Nevertheless, it was after five in the afternoon when she made out the green line against the tawny desolation of the desert that marked the start of the narrow strip of irrigated and cultivated land along the Nile which was the great artery of Egypt.
As always the traffic became denser the nearer she came to the capital, and it was almost fully dark by the time she reached the apartment block in Giza that overlooked both the river and those great monuments of stone which stood so tall and massive against the evening sky, and which for her epitomized the heart and history of her land.
She left Duraid’s old green Renault in the underground garage of the building and rode up in the elevator to the top floor.
She let herself into the flat and then froze in the doorway. The sitting room had been ransacked – even the rugs had been pulled up and the paintings ripped from the walls. In a daze she picked her way through the litter of broken furniture and smashed ornaments. She glanced into the bedroom as she went down the passage, and saw that it had not escaped. Her clothes and those of Duraid were strewn over the floor, and the doors of the cupboards stood ajar. One of these was smashed off its hinges. The bed was overturned, and the sheets and bolsters had been flung about.
She could smell the reek of broken cosmetic and perfume bottles from the bathroom, but she could not yet bring herself to go in there. She knew what she would find. Instead she continued down the passage to the large room that they had used as a study and workshop.
In the chaos the first thing that she noticed and mourned was the antique chess set that Duraid had given her as a wedding present. The board of jet and ivory squares was broken in half and the pieces had been thrown about the room with vindictive and unnecessary violence. She stooped and picked up the white queen. Her head had been snapped off.
Holding the queen in her good hand she moved like a sleepwalker to her desk below the window. Her PC was wrecked. They had shattered the screen and hacked the mainframe with what must have been an axe. She could tell at a glance that there was no information left on the hard drive; it was beyond repair.
She glanced down at the drawer in which she kept her floppy disks. That and all the other drawers had been pulled out and thrown on the floor. They were empty, of course; along with the disks, all her notebooks and photographs were missing. Her last connections with the seventh scroll were lost. After three years of work, gone was the proof that it had ever existed.
She slumped down on the floor, feeling beaten and exhausted. Her arm started to ache again, and she was alone and vulnerable as she had never been in her life before. She had never thought that she would miss Duraid so desperately. Her shoulders began to shake and she felt the tears welling up from deep within her. She tried to hold them back, but they scalded her eyelids and she let them flow. She sat amongst the wreckage of her life and wept until there was nothing more left within her, and then she curled up on the littered carpet and fell into the sleep of exhaustion and despair.
By the Monday morning she had managed to restore some order into her life. The police had come to the flat and taken her statement, and she had tidied up most of the disarray. She had even glued the head back on her white queen. When she left the flat and climbed into the green Renault her arm was feeling easier, and, if not cheerful, she was at least a great deal more optimistic, and sure of what she had to do.
When she reached the museum she went first to Duraid’s office and was annoyed to find that Nahoot was there before her. He was supervising two of the security guards as they cleared out all Duraid’s personal effects.
‘You might have had the consideration to let me do that,’ she told him coldly, and he gave her his most winning smile.
‘I am sorry, Royan. I thought I would help.’ He was smoking one of his fat Turkish cigarettes. She loathed the heavy, musky odour.
She crossed to Duraid’s desk, and opened the top right-hand drawer. ‘My husband’s day book was in here. It’s gone now. Have you seen it?’
‘No, there was nothing in that drawer.’ Nahoot looked at the two guards for confirmation, and they shuffled their feet and shook their heads. It did not really matter, she thought. The book had not contained much of vital interest. Duraid had always relied on her to record and store all data of importance, and most of it had been on her PC.
‘Thank you, Nahoot,’ she dismissed him. ‘I will do whatever remains to be done. I don’t want to keep you from your work.’
‘Any help you need, Royan, please let me know.’ He bowed slightly as he left her.
It did not take her long to finish in Duraid’s office. She had the guards take the boxes of his possessions down the corridor to her own office and pile them against the wall. She worked through the lunch-hour tidying up all her own affairs, and when she had finished there was still an hour until her appointment with Atalan Abou Sin.
If she was to make good her promise to Duraid, then she was going to be absent for some time. Wanting to take leave of all her favourite treasures, she went down into the public section of the huge building.
Monday was a busy day, and the exhibition halls of the museum were thronged with groups of tourists. They flocked behind their guides, sheep following the shepherd. They crowded around the most famous of the displays. They listened to the guides reciting their well-rehearsed spiels in all the tongues of Babel.
Those rooms on the second floor that contained the treasures of Tutankhamen were so crowded that she spent little time there. She managed to reach the display cabinet that contained the great golden death-mask of the child pharaoh. As always, the splendour and the romance of it quickened her breathing and made her heart beat faster. Yet as she stood before it, jostled by a pair of big-busted and sweaty middle-aged female tourists, she pondered, as she had so often before, that if an insignificant weakling king could have gone to his tomb with such a miraculous creation covering his mummified features, in what state must the great Ramessids have lain in their funeral temples.
Ramesses II, the greatest of them all, had reigned sixty-seven years and had spent those decades accumulating his funerary treasure from all the vast territories that he had conquered.
Royan went next to pay her respects to the old king. After thirty centuries Ramesses II slept on with a rapt and serene expression on his gaunt features. His skin had a light, marble-like sheen to it. The sparse strands of his hair were blond and dyed with henna. His hands, dyed with the same stuff, were long and thin and elegant. However, he was clad only in a rag of linen. The grave robbers had even unwrapped his mummy to reach the amulets and scarabs beneath the linen bandages, so that his body was almost naked. When these remains had been discovered in 1881 in the cache of royal mummies in the cliff cave at Deir El Bahari, only a scrap of papyrus parchment attached to his breast had proclaimed his lineage.
There was a moral in that, she supposed, but as she stood before these pathetic remains she wondered again, as she and Duraid had done so often before, whether Taita the scribe had told the truth, whether somewhere in the far-off, savage mountains of Africa another great pharaoh slept on undisturbed with all his treasures intact about him. The very thought of it made her shiver with excitement, and goose pimples prickled her skin and raised the fine dark hair at the nape of her neck.
‘I have given you my promise, my husband,’ she whispered in Arabic. ‘This will be for you and your memory, for it was you who led the way.’
She glanced at her wrist-watch as she went down the main staircase. She had fifteen minutes before she must leave for her appointment with the minister, and she knew exactly how she would spend that time. What she was going to visit was in one of the less-frequented side halls. The tour guides very seldom led their charges this way, except as a short-cut to see the statue of Amenhotep.
Royan stopped in front of the glass-fronted display case that reached from floor to ceiling of the narrow room. It was packed with small artefacts, tools and weapons, amulets and vessels and utensils, the latest of them dating from the twentieth dynasty of the New Kingdom, 1100 BC, whilst the oldest survived from the dim ages of the Old Kingdom almost five thousand years ago. The cataloguing of this accumulation was only rudimentary. Many of the items were not described.
