“Okay, mighty Pharaoh, I bow to your greater authority.” She gave a deep bow.
“You can mock me now, but I shall have the last laugh. Egypt will be mine.”
“And your mother told you this?”
“She loves me.”
“Well … I suppose somebody had to!”
He feinted a lunge, pulling back as they continued to circle each other. His ploy had been so obvious that Neferkare did not break step. “When I am pharaoh, I shall be merciful with you.” His face lit up as he experienced what he thought was a clever thought. “I shall have you wash my feet … daily … with your tongue.”
Neferkare nearly threw up, and Kate for once did not think she was play acting. The thought alone had turned Kate’s stomach.
“You always were one of the world’s little charmers.”
Taking this as a compliment, he even went so far as to thank Neferkare.
“Oh boy, this guy is really thick. He could run for president!”
Alex shushed Kate.
“Whatever happened to your mother? She disappeared after all that trouble with Sekhmet. Come to think of it, you disappeared along with her.”
“See, that is where you do not appreciate just how brilliant I am.”
“You are certainly cleverer than I thought you were. Credit where credit is due.”
He looked smug, though it was a look that would not last for long.
“To be honest, I would never have thought that you would have known what the word ‘brilliant’ meant, let alone be able to pronounce it.”
He lunged at Neferkare, who would have been fine, well out of his way, if he had not tripped. Falling forward with arms outstretched, the tip of his sword left an obviously painful gash in her upper arm. Of course, being an ancient, there was no blood.
“Not so smart now, are you?”
Alex moved to go to her aid. To his surprise, Kate and Cairo grabbed an arm each as they held him back.
“I am smart enough to know that Hathor will soon have me fixed.” Neferkare was holding the wound together with her right hand, her left arm dangling lifeless by her side, pain registering upon her face. “Even Hathor cannot fix a faulty brain.” She was pushing all his buttons.
“You cannot rile me.” It was pretty obvious that she already had. “You are so unimportant. Mother made Hathor crazy once. Now she has done it again.”
“My dear half-brother, your mother could drive anybody crazy … just look at you!”
This time as he lunged for Neferkare who disarmed him, as easily as taking toys from a baby, before sending him flying to the ground. The injury to her arm being minor, she had seized the opportunity to use it as a ploy, in order to throw him off guard. It had worked to great effect.
He rolled over. His shock at now being unarmed quickly turned into fear. His eyes glistened, it was as much as he could do not to burst into tears.
“Let me get him to talk.” This time Alex was the one having to hold Cairo back.
“Getting him to talk is not the problem. Getting him to shut up, that is our real difficulty!” Neferkare appeared to be happy to have been attacked by her half-brother. Standing over him, his sword in her hand, she pressed it menacingly into his groin. “Tell me the truth, succinctly, or I will remove something that Hathor will not be able to reattach.”
The fear she installed in him worked. His words flowed so freely that she had no other option than to increase her pressure on the sword. Neferkare needed to shut him up, so that she could explain what ‘succinctly’ meant.
He proceeded to them everything he knew, without Neferkare feeling the need to challenge him on the truth at any point. He spoke in panic, due to the position of the sword, though also with the absolute certainty that she, or rather, they, would be unable to stop events already in motion. He would become pharaoh; she would be washing his feet.
“So, where is Ankhtifi’s papyrus? Have you hidden it in his tomb somewhere?” Neferkare saw her half-brother’s hand twitch. He had to stop it from touching the leather moneybag attached to his waist. Without moving the sword, she leant in, using the little dagger to relieve him of his money.
Tossing the leather bag towards Kate, Alex and Cairo, it was Cairo who caught it, opened it, and withdrew a papyrus which had been folded to be about the size of a cigar. It had to be Ankhtifi’s papyrus, it could not be anything else.
Having heard enough, Neferkare winked at Kate as she asked her to go and get water. She then asked Cairo to go with Kate, to assist her with the carrying. Alex, after suggesting that he should try and recover his mobile phone, moved close enough to open the window back to his own time, though stood to one side of it. Neferkare, whilst making sure that she retained a firm grasp on the sword and the dagger, took a few nonchalant paces away from her half-brother before calling to Kate and Cairo. She shouted for them to also bring back something to eat.
Neferkare’s half-brother saw a clear path to the window back to the present, his afterlife present. “What idiots they are. This is why we will win,” he thought, though a full minute elapsed before he made his dash for freedom.
As Alex moved over to Neferkare, the window closed and her half-brother was gone.
“You could almost hear the cogs turning.” Kate was not at all impressed with how long it had taken him to realise that he could escape. “If that is what we are up against … give me strength!”
“If only it was just him. That mother of his is a real nightmare.”
“But even with his mother’s help, he can’t become pharaoh in the time of Ramses.”
“Yes … Alex is right. Knowing about Ramses, and stepping into his time are two completely different things.” Kate, just as they all did, knew that if Neferkare’s half-brother ever turned up in Luxor he would see it as it was in his time: a thousand years before Ramses had even been born.
“Mummy would not let him down, mummy loves him … did you hear that? His mother has used him … it’s as simple that. He is so seriously deluded it is frightening.” Neferkare thought for a few seconds as she stuffed the unused clothes back in the bag before returning it to her hiding place. “We should move if we are going to get through that checkpoint today. I think we will still be in good time to meet up with the workers if we leave now.”
“What you want me to do with this?” Cairo held out the moneybag.
Looking inside, Neferkare’s frown turned into a smile. “Forget the checkpoint. There is enough in here to be able to bribe anybody. We can now head directly south, before joining the Nile much further down.”
“Does that help us get to Luxor any quicker?”
“It does! … Yes, Kate, it helps us a lot. It should save us at least a day. I will be able to return Ankhtifi’s papyrus, and you will be back with Ramses, quite a bit sooner than we could have hoped for, thanks to my half-witted half-brother.”
Chapter 20
-
The Smell of Death
They had travelled much further south than Neferkare thought they would to have to, before coming across a boat heading towards Luxor. The captain welcomed their money, as well as their supply of drinking water, far more than he welcomed them.
“Yes, yes, I know, we can’t afford to waste water, but I can’t stand this smell of death on me any longer. And I certainly cannot take it being up my nose all the way to Luxor.” Kate was using a wetted handkerchief, though failing dismally to rid herself of the stench.
“It’s certainly one smell that I will never forget, though it’s definitely not one that I ever want to experience again.”
Cairo agreed with Alex, and so did Neferkare. Kate walked off to the front of the boat, where, in the forlorn hope that the smell of death would be whisked from her upon the breeze, she stood with her arms outstretched.
It was not long before Alex came up behind her: “It looks as though you are having a Titanic moment.”
“Only there’s no iceberg and far more dead bodies here,” she said with unint
ended flippancy. Dropping her arms to her sides Kate turned to him: “Oh, Alex, it’s really dreadful. I’ve never seen so much horror. I feel so hopeless.”
Alex, quite naturally, was struggling with his own emotions. “The only positive thing I can see coming out of this, is that Ankhtifi is a good man. With his papyrus returned, he can continue to be a good man.”
“And that makes all this suffering all right … HOW?”
“I’m just as angry as you.”
“Well, you don’t sound like you are.”
“That’s not my way, Kate. You know that it isn’t.”
She did, and she regretted her outburst.
“The only way that I can cope with this, is to think that their life as ancients will be a far happier one.”
Kate took hold of Alex’s hand as they both sat. On the positive side, the breeze was wonderful, on the negative, it slowed the progress of the boat.
“I’m worried about stepping back into our time. We could well return home to a very unwelcome welcoming committee.”
Kate asked why he thought this.
Alex explained that Neferkare had told him that she would be leaving the boat in Luxor with them.
“I see why you’re worried. If Neferkare can walk on that ground, then anybody from her time could.”
“Exactly. I wondered if we could get back through another window, but she says that there are only two exits from this time: one just outside of Cairo Airport, which we cannot use, and the one in Luxor that we will be using.”
“It doesn’t take a genius to realise that if they’ve placed ancient soldiers at one, then they will also be at the other. Do you have any bright ideas?”
“Beyond splitting up and running, none at all.”
“Running where?”
“My thinking is that two of us should take wildly different routes to the Winter Palace, because we must let the family know what we know.”
“I agree, as that will cause confusion. However many there are waiting for us, they will be forced to split up. Makes perfect sense.”
“One of us must also go with Neferkare, because it is vital that the papyrus gets back to Ankhtifi.”
“You, I suppose?” Kate said with attitude.
“No … not me. I was thinking that you would be the perfect person to go with her. You would both need to travel quickly, and you run so much faster than I ever could.”
“Okay, I can do that,” Kate said, with no sign of her previous attitude.
“All four of us heading off in different directions would hopefully cause enough confusion to give us a decent head start.”
“This half-brother of Neferkare … I still don’t know what his name is.”
“Neither does she. I asked her and she had no idea … none whatsoever.”
“Kate looked at him in a disbelieving way.
“Honestly … she doesn’t! Apparently, his mother was so obsessed in her attempts to get him recognised … No, Kate … I can see what you are thinking, and it’s not like that. Her obsession wasn’t due to any sort of love for him. It was for her position, nothing more. Ankhtifi did not have a male heir, so if her son was recognised as the legitimate son of Ankhtifi, then she would have had to be recognised as his queen. The child served her purpose.”
“Hold on … Neferkare was the wife of Ankhtifi whilst this crazy woman was claiming to have had a son by him … I get it that pharaohs had favourite wives … but then surely there is no way that that idiot can be her half-brother.”
“That’s the whole point, he can’t be. The mother always introduced him as the half-brother of Neferkare as her way of getting her son accepted. Nobody ever corrected her, and nobody ever knew his name, because she never called him by name. Apparently, it became a sort of a joke throughout the royal household.”
“Okay, I accept that, but he will not be the one waiting for us in Luxor.”
“No.”
“Then who will?”
“You’ll know at exactly the same time as I do. But, my guess is that we will be too busy running in opposite directions to be able to discuss it.”
Kate playfully smacked him on the shoulder.
The sky had turned from deep blue to a glowing red, whilst they had been talking. Now, as the sun clipped the horizon, palm trees stood silhouetted against a blood orange canvas. With their backs pushed up against a stack of empty hessian bags, Alex placed an arm around Kate’s shoulder. She gripped his hand a little tighter as they watched the sky fill with birds heading off to roost. Having seen so much death, it was as much as they could do not to burst into tears. Their shared joy, the strength of their emotions, at seeing well over a hundred birds, possibly more than a thousand, which had so far found enough clean water to be able to survive, was something that they would never forget.
Sailing through Luxor as it appeared in the time of Ankhtifi – when it went by the name of Waset – was somewhat disorientating. No Karnak, no Luxor Temple, and obviously, no Winter Palace. That would all change the second Kate, Alex and Cairo stepped back into 2017. Neferkare would also step into the same year, though she would walk on the ground as it was in her time.
Their feelings of this having been the longest of long journeys, were pushed aside as adrenaline kicked in. They each knew which direction they were to take. Having had so many days to go over Alex’s plan, they were scared but prepared. The one thing they knew for sure, was that there was no turning back.
They would step from the boat as it continued on its journey, rendering any attempt to return to the past impossible, unless they wished to end up in the acidic waters of the Nile during a period of extreme drought. Memories of how Kate had suffered after taking a single gulp, generated a fear of falling into the Nile that was marginally greater than of anything they were about to face.
“Are you ready?” Nobody said no, though nobody said yes. Alex took the silence as confirmation that they were. “As soon as the window opens, don’t hesitate, run.”
“Okay, we get it!” Kate, having turned to chide Alex, only realised that the window had opened when Cairo and Neferkare jostled her as they left the boat at a pace. Instantly she turned and ran.
Alex, whilst looking down, so that he could make it safely from the boat to the shore, stepped back into 2017 with one hand raised, his other on the ingredients given to him by Gadeem. Needing to take every advantage available to him, he spoke the words of the spell. There was the usual second or so delay after being cast, before it sprang into action.
Time slowed dramatically from the moment he looked directly ahead. He saw everything, took in everything, could see what was going to happen, heard ‘no’ shouted from several different directions at the same time, as he saw Kate, Cairo and Neferkare stop in their tracks.
He felt helpless. If he could, he would have returned to the boat, only he knew that it would not be there.
The look of horror on the faces of Kate and Cairo must have mirrored that of his own. “I’m going to die!”
Chapter 21
-
Ready for Anything
All Alex could do was watch, as the magic he had just invoked hit Ramses fair and square. “I used it, but it was Gadeem who gave it to me,” he thought, wondering if he might be able to use this in mitigation, as a possible way out of the mess that he was so obviously in.
He watched the great pharaoh turn red. Gadeem, standing just to his left, also turned red – so no mitigation possible there – whilst, at the same time, watching a previously black cat run off – ensuring that the gods would now also be against him. Quite involuntarily, his mind insisted on repeating the same sentence: “I’m going to die!”
The tour coach, parked directly behind Ramses and Gadeem, turned from a dull green to a vibrant red.
“I’m not sure who looks the most surprised,” Kate said as she walked up to Alex whilst stifling a giggle. “Oh, I do, it’s you. Ramses just looks plain angry.”
“I’m going to die,” he mumbled.
“Do you know what? That tour coach, now that it is red, looks just like that ridiculous Brexit battle bus, only this one should have ‘Save Alex, only 350 million ways to die’ written along its side.” Kate lost it. She could barely stand from laughing.
The coach driver was not at all amused. Stepping into his vehicle whilst moaning, at volume, about losing his job for doing nothing more than helping a friend, he started the engine, slamming it into gear with a graunch. As the bus left, leaving a cloud of black smog behind, everyone could now see what it had been concealing. Standing to attention were a contingent of around fifty of Ramses’, now very red, elite troops. Their orders to protect Kate, Alex and Cairo, as well as Neferkare, now conflicted with their wish to tear Alex limb from limb. Elite troops did not take well to being embarrassed, not well at all.
“I really am going to die!”
Both Kate and Cairo were now on the ground, their laughter uncontrollable.
Neferkare stood as she watched, completely bemused by all that she was being witness to. Was she really looking at the greatest pharaoh in the history of Egypt?
“At least things can’t get any worse,” Alex thought, just as they did. A returning group of Asian tourists, who, from the comfort of their air-conditioned tour bus, pressed their cameras to the windows, taking photo after photo of characters dressed in ancient Egyptian costumes. The fact that they had been covered completely in red, as though they had been spray painted, only added to the tourists’ interest.
Stepping off their coach, they ignored the draw of their cruise boat. Soon, they were taking selfies with the red ancient Egyptians, without any regard to personal space. This evolved into almost theatrical poses of either whole families or groups of friends. Pictures which had to be repeated over and over again, due to individual members not liking the pose they had struck when reviewed.
Rose, having only just arrived, immediately attempted, somewhat in vein, to keep the tourists away from the ‘exhibits’, her ability to speak several languages failing her on this occasion. She had just about managed to clear space around Ramses and Gadeem when the name of the Chinese artist Ai Weiwei came to mind. Saying his name out loud had exactly the opposite effect to that which she had intended. She had thought that if they considered this to be a work of art, they would have respected it by keeping their distance. Wrong! Even those who had been heading for their cruise boat, now turned back for a further round of even more important pictures.
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