Kate and Cairo, having managed to regain some composure, sat and watched from the shade of a group date palms.
“Why haven’t they moved?”
Without taking his eyes off Ramses, Alex replied to Kate: “Gadeem told me that he had tried something new with this spell. It’s not that they don’t want to move, they can’t move. Brilliant idea of Gadeem’s,” he added sarcastically.
“It would be even more brilliant, if it had been used on the bad guys!”
Whilst Alex could not disagree, he failed to be impressed by her comment. He really wanted to run, even more so since he had realised that Ramses was frozen to the spot, but that was also what was stopping him. Had there not been danger, then Ramses would not be here. If he ran, he was very concerned that he could meet that danger head on, alone, without any backup. With a choice of being stuck between a rock and a hard place, he, being the hero that he was, would stay and take what was coming to him. Yes, standing behind Rose was his safest bet!
He had become somewhat frustrated as Lady in Red was deliberately blasted out from the cruise boat disco: because he could not see Ramses seeing the funny side of it. Now, as Red, Red, Wine, the original Neil Diamond version, filled the air, he shared a smile with Kate: because this Ramses would appreciate.
“Alex’s knees were knocking so loud that you could have heard them in Aswan.”
“No, they weren’t, Kate.” Relaxing in the comfortable chairs of their living room, after just having had the remains of a meal, which had been more like a banquet, cleared away, Alex wanted to get down to discussing the problem at hand. “Don’t listen to her,” he said quite firmly in the direction of Ramses.
“Okay, Alex is probably right. I could be wrong.” Kate said at volume, whilst having a look on her face which said that said she had not yet finished with him.
Alex turned to her, shaking his head slowly as he did. He knew that was far too easy, and he was right.
The room went quiet. Rose and Neferkare were looking at something on a small table at the far side of the room, though Kate held the attention of Ramses, Nakhtifi, Gadeem and Alex, and there was no way that she was going to let that drift away.
“Thinking about it, it couldn’t have been his knees, not with his legs having turned to jelly.” Kate laughed … nobody else did.
Ramses stood, he felt that he had allowed Kate, allowed everybody over dinner, to have enough light-hearted banter with regard to the events of earlier. He had even joined in. Much to Alex’s surprise, Ramses had seen the funny side of the events. “I think that we can all agree that, young Alex here, did the right thing by deploying magic. I know that you, Gadeem, having now experienced it in use, are particularly pleased with your reworking of this old spell.”
“I am, yes, I really am. It was far more effective than I could have ever hoped.”
“So, Alex, you have nothing to fear from us, though … I’m not so sure about my elite troops. They tend not to be as forgiving as I am.” He picked up his red wine, held the glass aloft, then toasted the young adventurers for successfully bringing back Ankhtifi’s papyrus.
Alex worried about exactly what Ramses’ elite troops might do to him. He expressed his concern.
“Forget it, my boy. Yes, they were angry today, and, if they could have moved then things might have been quite different.” He turned to Gadeem: “Good job you did not give him your ordinary spell, or this might have been a wake rather than a celebration.”
“Tell me, Ramses, where you are concerned, is there any difference?”
“Rose, you have hurt my feelings. Thoth, more wine. I need it to deaden the pain!”
“Your glass is still full, my Pharaoh.”
“It cannot be. I must have picked up somebody else’s by mistake. Anyway, it is empty now.”
Thoth R filled Ramses’ glass before stepping back to join Nakhtifi’s Thoth.
“I’m still waiting to find out how, to you, a wake would be different?”
“Well, and I really would have thought that you would have worked this out for yourself, Rose, if this was Alex’s wake, he would not be here drinking my red wine; now would he?”
“He’s not drinking your red wine, he’s drinking the Winter Palace coffee.”
“Well … that is alright then. Let the boy stay. Perhaps we should have a wake for Nakhtifi, because he is certainly getting through far too much of my red wine this evening.”
“I thought you were going to be serious. We are in serious trouble.” Nakhtifi was worried, very worried, though he often was.
“There you go, son, always looking for the negative rather than focussing on the positive.”
“Son?” Neferkare whispered her question to Alex.
“Nakhtifi looks older than his father because he was at his most powerful late on in life.”
“Of course. I should have realised.” And she should have, because, having died at a greater age, she returned in the afterlife just as she looked on the day that she wedded Ankhtifi.
“What are you two whispering about over there? Young love, is it?”
“Oh, no, great Pharaoh, I am the proud wife of Ankhtifi.”
“Oh, yes … I knew that.” Unusually for Ramses, he failed to come back with a witty retort. “My mind is on other things, please forgive me.”
“Nothing to forgive … I thank you all for your hospitality, your fine dining, and your friendship, but it is now well past the time that I should have left. I really need to return this papyrus.” She patted the little leather moneybag attached to her waist. “Ankhtifi will be so worried until it is safely back where it should be.”
Rose gestured for Ramses to sit down, enjoy his wine, and leave this for her to explain. “I’m sorry, Neferkare, but it will not be possible for you to leave here tonight. I have readied an ancient bed in the library for you. Kate has volunteered to sleep on the sofa in there with you.”
“I have?” An elbow in the ribs from Alex and her question turned into a statement: “I have!”
“Why can I not leave tonight?” Neferkare asked calmly, whilst looking worried. Actually, Kate and Alex were also starting to show signs of concern.
“There are possibly events taking place out there that would make it extremely unwise for you to leave the safety that we are able to enjoy here.”
“Safety?”
“Yes, think of us as all being in the royal tent.” Whenever an ancient army made camp, the king’s tent was always at its centre.
“Then we are surrounded by an army?”
“Yes. Ramses has put on a massive show of force. We will be safe here until Cairo and Bast return. I discussed with them what we needed to know. I am sure they will be back with news soon.”
Kate and Alex were no longer starting to look concerned, they now looked extremely worried.
“You sent Cairo and Bast off earlier? I wasn’t worried before, but I am now.”
“To clarify, Kate, I cannot send Bast anywhere, and I most certainly would not send Cairo anywhere.”
“You know what I mean.” Kate needed an answer.
“Let me just say, that until they return we will not know what we are up against.”
“Up against?” Kate noticed the worry lines on Nakhtifi deepen.
“As I said, we are totally safe here.”
“With respect, Rose, we need to know a little more than that.” Alex’s voice had a worried tremble to it.
“Well done, Rose, you handled that so much better than I could have,” Ramses said ironically.
“Yes, actually, I think I did!” She gave the great man an exaggerated smile, in acknowledgement that this had not been her finest hour.
“Perhaps we should get serious for a moment.”
“Oh, Ramses, I do wish that you would. This is all such a worry to me, to the family.”
“Do not worry, Nakhtifi. Earlier Gadeem and I were nothing more than red, now we are red-ee for anything.”
Chapter 22
-<
br />
Optimistic or Delusionary?
Kate could not believe how relaxed Ramses was when there was a potential crisis going on outside.
Alex was wondering where Cairo had gone. He was worried for his friend’s safety. He was also curious of Rose’s decision to send Cairo and Bast ... And also, where had she sent them?”
Rose had only just left the room, taking Neferkare with her into the tunnel which linked the lounge to the Winter Palace. They obviously needed to talk without having the worry of being interrupted.
“You know what Neferkare said, about somebody from another ancient family being unable to enter Ankhtifi’s tunnels without him knowing.” Alex was in a thoughtful mood, as he spoke quietly to Kate.
“Yes, I was just thinking about that,” and Kate genuinely had. As it turned out, she was in the same frame of mind.
“I think that some of Ankhtifi’s people have swopped sides, moved away from him. It would have taken no more than a handful to break into that Sekhmet tomb. They would have been able to work in the tunnels without any worry.”
“The overlapping circles?”
“Yes, exactly! They have been talked, more than likely bribed, into throwing their support behind whoever was in that tomb.”
“Wasn’t that the sarcophagus of that crazy half-brother’s mother?” Kate thought for a second: “I think that I meant the thick half-brother that isn’t really Neferkare’s half-brother, who has the crazy mother … or, at least, I think that is what I meant!”
Alex could not have put it better. “I thought so at first, but now we know that she was never a queen it can’t be.”
“Of course not, because it has a name within a cartouche carved into it.”
“I took photos … but …” He shrugged his shoulders whilst gesturing with palms uppermost.
Kate thought for a while. “And you can’t picture it in your mind?”
Alex shook his head. He could only picture his phone in a million pieces.
“But one of those girls,” Kate said as she wondered if it was Celina or Leonie, “or perhaps both of them, has a direct link to that Sekhmet tomb.” She paused as she thought. Alex did likewise. Both aware that there must be something they were missing. They tried to fathom what it was.
Ramses drew their attention to their refreshed drinks: Kate’s tamar-hindi, Alex’s pot of steaming coffee.
His thoughts interrupted, Alex took the opportunity to ask Gadeem what he thought was going on. Ramses was overly happy, Nakhtifi overly miserable, so Gadeem was the best bet for a reasonable answer.
Always wary of being too honest with his comments in front of Ramses, Gadeem was rather more circumspect than either Alex or Kate would have wished for. He explained what they already knew: that only ancients and those who had ‘seen’ could step through windows into the past. He went on to explain, in greater depth than either of them needed, that Ramses was the Ramses of today. The same with Ankhtifi, as well as any other ancient that they met without stepping back in time.
Kate had to interrupt: “So, what you are saying is, that if it doesn’t affect you now, here in 2017, then you are not concerned about it. That’s how you can sit here drinking and joking whilst millions are dying.”
“Enough …” Ramses was angry. “Of course, it is the here and now that we are concerned with. It is the family, our family, Kate, that I am concerned with. I am a pharaoh, I have my own gods, it would be war if I stepped into the domain of another pharaoh without being invited.”
“Then get Ankhtifi to invite you!” Kate shouted with anger.
Alex had expected Ramses to bellow back at Kate, but he said quite calmly: “He cannot invite me, as it would show him to be weak, and if he could, those whom you saw dying are well and truly dead, thousands of years dead. You were in a past that has already happened, the outcome of which is in the history books.”
Kate said almost as calmly as Ramses, whilst holding back tears: “But he can invite you; you could do something.” It then dawned on her that if Ramses were to go to El Moalla he would only be able to see it as it was in his time – a thousand years after the tombs had been sealed, more than a thousand years after all those people had died. “If you had seen what we saw, then you would want to change history,” Kate said as justification, possibly as an apology, for her outburst.
Ramses stood, straightened his royal regalia, then spoke: “We have seen far, far worse.” Nakhtifi and Gadeem confirmed that they had. “We have lived through unimaginable horrors year upon year. That is why we are determined, more determined than you could ever know, to never let the horrors of the past be repeated.”
He raised his glass, asking everyone to raise their glasses with him. They all did, Alex and Kate taking hold of the glasses which Thoth had placed before them. “We, as ancients, have an obligation to learn from history, to ensure that the suffering of the past will never be repeated. May our family live in peace.”
Rose and Neferkare returned to the lounge. They had only just taken their seats as Kate said: “All this complexity is to cover something very simple … it has to be.” Before anybody could challenge her to justify her comment, Kate added: “I’ve been really thinking about this. I don’t see anybody wanting to disrupt the afterlife of Ankhtifi. If they did, then why were we able to find his papyrus?”
“We have not been able to return it to Ankhtifi yet. Rose was just explaining that our journey to El Moalla could be quite dangerous. It could be taken from us before we ever get there,” Neferkare said.
“I don’t think so.” Kate realised that ‘think’ did not project the certainty which she felt. “Put it like this, if I wanted to mess up Ankhtifi’s position in the afterlife, I would have destroyed that papyrus. It would have been no more than a pile of ashes by now.”
Nobody could argue with this except Neferkare. Though after some discussion about just how stupid her ‘half-brother’ was, they agreed that he was being used.
Nakhtifi took a large gulp of wine, to embolden himself, before saying: “It is that tomb. That tomb was opened for a reason. That is what scares me.”
Ramses gestured to Thoth. Less than five seconds later one of Ramses’ elite guards was on the floor with an arm missing. “See,” Ramses said as the soldier left after being attended to by Hathor, “we have nothing to worry about.”
“But she does.” Nakhtifi pointed to the arm of Neferkare. It was true that her wound, though relatively minor, had not been healed. “If Ankhtifi’s Hathor is missing, then yours or mine could be next, and we know what that would mean for our armies and their morale.”
“I am confident that neither you nor I will be having any problems with our own Hathor.”
“Confident, are you? Is it that confidence which made you have her priestesses, in every single one of your temples, perform additional daily rituals to placate Sekhmet’s anger?”
“Nothing more than a precaution. It was the wise thing to do after Rose made us aware of Alex’s text. If you had any temples, then I would expect that you would be doing the same.”
“Your confidence is so high that you waited, in broad daylight, for several days, for,” he gestured towards Kate, Alex and Neferkare, “them to return.”
It was most unusual to see Nakhtifi so animated. A black cat came running into the dining room, from the tunnel entrance, morphing into a beautiful lady as she collapsed onto a sofa.
Breathing heavily, she struggled to tell them that Cairo had saved her, though in the course of doing so he had been injured. She did not know how badly, though, from her tone, both Kate and Alex understood that she believed he was suffering from an injury with, in all probability, life threatening consequences.
“Where is he? Tell me where he is, because I must go to him.” Alex was in panic mode. He had a pretty good idea where Cairo was, he just needed Bast’s confirmation, which he received.
“I’m coming with you. Don’t you dare go without me Alex Cumberpatch, or you will have far more to fear fr
om me than any ancient.”
Alex believed Kate, though he never thought, not for a moment, that he wouldn’t be going without her. Cairo was their friend, and friends stood united.
“You did hear what Bast just told you, that Cairo had been dragged, severely injured, screaming at the top of his voice, into that Sekhmet tomb.”
Alex confirmed that he had: “Yes, Ramses, but I also heard Bast tell us that if he had not bitten into Sekhmet’s tail, then clung on for dear life as he kept biting, then she would not be here today, tomorrow or ever!”
In a battle between ancient gods Bast, a black cat, was no match for Sekhmet, a lioness, and a very big lioness at that.
“I have the Volvo just outside,” Rose said. “I’m taking you both there. It will be the quickest way.”
“I must go with you.” Bast could hardly stand, her dark skin masking the beating that she had taken.
“Ramses, keep her here. She is your god, so keep her here.”
“She is only half my god, Rose.”
“Don’t you dare pick a time like this to argue semantics with me. KEEP HER HERE.”
“He will; we will,” Nakhtifi confirmed.
“Whilst you are about it, keep Neferkare here as well.”
Neferkare protested: “I am not staying here. I am going with you.”
“Not tonight you’re not. Though I will ask you to hand over the papyrus.”
Kate, desperate to tip the obelisk so that they could be on their way, suddenly felt extremely proud. Neferkare had deliberately stepped past both Alex and Rose to hand the papyrus to her, before she had stormed off into the tunnel.
“Let her go,” Rose said. “Helios will make sure she doesn’t go too far.”
Ankhtifi's Papyrus Page 18
