The Seventh Scroll tes-2

by Wilbur Smith

  or sprained something.

  He was impressed with Royan's forbearance. She made no attempt to

  question him about his discoveries in the bottom of the gorge, and

  seemed genuinely more concerned with his well being than with the

  progress of their exploration.

  When she helped him to his feet and they started back towards camp, he

  moved like an old man, lame and stiff. Every muscle and sinew in his

  body ached. He knew that the lactic acid and nitrogen that had built up

  in his tissues would take some time to be reabsorbed and dispersed.

  Once they reached camp Royan led him to his hut and fussed over him as

  she settled him under the mosquito net.

  By this time he was feeling a lot better, but he neglected to inform her

  of this fact. It was pleasant to have a woman caring for him again. She

  brought him a couple of aspirin tablets and a steaming mug of tea, stiff

  with sugar. He was putting it on a little when he asked weakly for a

  second mugful.

  Sitting beside his bed, she solicitously watched him drink it. "Better?"

  she asked, when he had finished.

  "The odds are two to one that I Will survive," he told her, and she

  smiled.

  "I can see that you are better. Your cheek is showing again. You gave me

  an awful scare, you know."

  "Anything to get your attention."

  "Now that we have decided that you will live, tell me what happened.

  What sort of trouble did you run into down there in the pool?"

  "What you really want to know is what I found down there. Am I correct?"

  "That too, she admitted.

  Then he told her everything that he had discovered and how he had been

  caught in the inflow of the underwater sink-hole. She listened without

  interruption, and even when he had finished speaking she said nothing

  for a while, but frowned with concentrated thought.

  At last she looked up at him. "You mean that Taita was able to take

  those stone niches right down to the very bottom of the pool, fifty feet

  below the surface? and when he nodded, she was silent again. Then she

  said, "How on earth did he accomplish that? What are your thoughts on

  the subject?" -Tour thousand years ago the water level may have been

  lower. There may have been a drought year when the river dried up, and

  enabled him to get in there. How am I doing?"

  "Not a bad try," she admitted, "but then why go to all the trouble of

  building a scaffold? Why not just use the dry river bed as an access?

  Then again, surely the attraction of the spot for Taita was the river.

  If it was dry, then it would be just like a thousand other places in

  this gorge.

  No, I have a feeling that the fact that it was so inaccessible was the

  main, if not the only, reason he chose to wo there."

  "I suspect that you are correct," he agreed.

  "So if the river was running, even at itS lowest level as it is now, how

  on earth did he manage to carve those niches below the surface? And what

  would be the point in having scaffolding under water?"

  "Beats me. I have no idea he admitted.

  "All right, let's leave that for the moment. Now lets go over your

  description of the sink-hole that almost sucked you in. Did you form any

  estimate of the size of the opening?"

  He shook his head. "It is almost totally dark down there. I could not

  see more than two or three feet in front of me."

  "Was the entrance directly between the two tows of niches?"

  "No, not directly," he said thoughtfully. "It was slightly to one side.

  I hit the bottom of the pool with my feet, and was just about to push

  off when it grabbed me."

  "So it must be at the very bottom of the pool, and slightly downstream

  from the scaffolding. You say that the entrance seemed to have a square

  coping?"

  "I am not absolutely sure of that - remember that I could see very

  little. But that was the impression I received."

  "It may have been another man-made structure, then perhaps some type of

  adit shaft driven into the side of the pool?"

  "It's possible," he agreed reluctantly. "But on the other hand it could

  just as easily be a natural fault in the strata that the river is

  draining into."

  She stood up to leave, and he demanded, "Where are you going?"

  "I won't be long. I am going to my hut to fetch my notes, and the

  material from the stele. Back in a moment."

  When she returned she sat on the floor beside his bed, with her legs

  drawn up under her in that double-jointed feminine fashion. As she

  spread her papers around her, he pulled up the edge of the mosquito net

  and looked down at what she was doing.

  "Yesterday, while you were busy building the gantry, I was able to

  decipher most of the rest of the "spring" face of the stele." She moved

  her notebook so that he was able to overlook the pages she had opened.

  "These are my preliminary notes. You will see where I have inserted a

  number of question marks - here and here, for instance. That is where I

  am uncertain of the translation, or where Taita has used a new and

  strange symbol. I will have to give more time and consideration to those

  later."

  I follow you," he said, and she went on.

  "These sections that I have highlighted with green are quotations from

  the standard version of the Book of the Dead. Take this one here: "The

  universe is drawn in circles, the disc of the sun- god, Ra. The life of

  man is a circle that begins in the womb and ends in the tomb. The circle

  of the chariot wheel foreshadows the death of the serpent that it

  crushes beneath its rim. "Yes, I recognize the quotation," he said.

  "On the other hand, these parts of the text that I have highlighted in

  yellow are original Taita writings, or at least are not quotations from

  the Book of the Dead or any other source that I am aware of This

  paragraph here in particular is the one that I wanted to bring to your

  attention."

  She traced a section with her forefinger as she read it aloud, "'The

  daughter of the goddess has conceived. She has been impregnated by the

  one who is without seed. She has begotten her own twin sister. The fetus

  lies forever -coiled in her own womb. Her twin shall never be born. She

  will never see the light of day. She will five for ever in the darkness.

  In the womb of the sister her bridegroom claims her in eternal marriage.

  The unborn twin becomes the bride of the god, who was a man Their

  destinies are intertwined. They shall live for ever. They Sul not

  perish."'

  She looked up from the notebook. "When I first read it, I was satisfied

  that the daughter of the goddess was the Dandera river, as we had

  already agreed. I was also pretty sure that the god that was once a man

  must be Pharaoh.

  Mamose was only deified on his ascension to the throne of Egypt. Before

  that he was a man."

  Nicholas nodded. !The seedless one is obviously Taita himself. He makes

  repeated references to the fact that he was a eunuch. But now,' he

  suggested, "if you have some new ideas about the mysterious twin sister,

  let's hear them."

  The twin of
the river would most likely be a branch, or a fork of the

  stream, wouldn't it?"

  "Ah, I see what you are driving at, You are suggesting that the

  sink-hole is the twin. Down there in the gorge it will never see the

  Llight of day. Taita, the seedless one, claims paternity, So he is

  telling us that he is the architect."

  "Exactly, and he has married the twin of the river to Pharaoh Mamose for

  all eternity. Putting that all together, I have come to the conclusion

  that we will never find the location of Pharaoh Mamose's tomb until we

  explore thoroughly that sink-hole that nearly drowned you."

  "How do you suggest we do that?" he asked, and she shrugged.

  "I am not the engineer, Nicky. I leave that to you to arrange. All I

  know is that Taita devised some way of doing it - not only of getting

  there but of working down there. If our interpretation of the stele is

  correct, then he carried out extensive mining operations at the bottom

  of the pool.

  If he could do it, then there is no reason why you can't do it also."

  "Ah!" he dernurred. "Taita was a genius. He says so repeatedly. I am

  just an old plodder."

  "I have got all my bets on you, Nicky. You won't let me down, will you?"

  There was no call for intensive bushcraft to follow this spoor. His

  quarry had taken very few anti-tracking precautions. Quite openly they

  were following the main trail down the Abbay gorge, heading directly

  westwards towards the Sudanese border.

  Mek Nimmur was on his way back to his own stronghold.

  Boris estimated that he had between fifteen and twenty men with him. It

  was difficult to be certain, for the tracks on the pathway overlapped

  each other, and of course he would have scouts on the'point ahead of him

  and sweeping his flanks. There would also be a rear guard dragging the

  trail behind him.

  They were making good time, but such a large party would not be able to

  outpace a single pursuer. He was sure he was gaining on them. He

  reckoned that he had started four hours behind them, but judging by

  recent signs he was now less than two hours adrift.

  Without breaking his trot, he stooped to pick thing up from the path. As

  he ran on he examined it. It was a twig, the soft tip shoot of a

  kusagga-sagga plant that grew beside the track. One of the men ahead of

  him had brushed against it as he passed, and snapped it off the main

  branch. It gave Boris a fairly accurate gauge of how far he was behind.

  Even in the heat of the gorge, the tender shoot had barely begun to

  wilt. He was even closer than he had estimated.

  He slowed down., a little as he considered his next move. He knew this

  part of the valley fairly well. The previous year he had hunted over

  much of this terrain with an American client, who had been looking for a

  trophy Walia ibex. They had spent almost a month combing these same

  gullies and wooded ravines before they had brought down a huge old ram,

  black with age and carrying a pair of curled, back-sweeping horns that

  ranked as the tenth largest ever in the Rowland Ward record book.

  He knew that two or three miles ahead the Nile began another oxbow loop

  out to the south, and that it then doubled back upon itself. The main

  trail followed the river, because a series of sheer and formidable

  cliffs guarded the high groupd in the centre of the loop of the river.

  It was, however, possible to cut the corner. Boris had'done it before,

  while following the wounded ibex.

  The American hunter had not killed cleanly his bullet had struck the ram

  too far back, missing the heartlung cavity and piercing the gut. The

  stricken wild goat had taken to the high ground, following one of its

  secret paths up amongst the crags. Boris and the American had followed

  it up and over the mountain. Boris remembered how dangerous and

  treacherous the path had been, but when it descended the far side of the

  mountain it had cut off nearly ten miles.

  If he could find the beginning of the goat path again, there was every

  chance that he would be able to get ahead of Mek Nimmur and be lying in

  wait for him on the far side. That would give him an enormous advantage.

  The guerrilla leader would be expecting pursuit, not ambush.

  He would be covering his back trail, and it was highly unlikely that

  Boris would be able to slip past the rear guard without alerting his

  intended victims. On the other hand, once he was ahead of them he would

  be in control. Then he could choose his own killing ground.

  As the trail and the main flow of the Nile started to turn away towards

  the south, he kept watching the high ground above it, seeking a familiar

  landmark. He had not gone another half-mile before he found it. Here

  there was a break in the line of dark cliffs, a heavily forested

  reentrant, that cut into the wall of basalt.

  He stopped and mopped the sweat from his face and neck. "Too much

  vodka," he grunted, "you are getting soft." His shirt was as sodden as

  though he had plunged in the river.

  He changed the slin of the rifle to his other shoulder, lifted his

  binoculars and swept the sides of the wooded gully. They appeared sheer

  and unscalable, but then he picked out the stunted shape of a small tree

  that grew out of a narrow crack in the face. It looked like a Japanese

  bonsai, with a twisted, malformed trunk and tortured branches.

  The Walia ibex had been standing on the ledge just above that tree when

  the American had fired. In his mind's eye Boris could still see the way

  in which the wild goat had hunched its back as the bullet struck, and

  then spun around and raced away up the cliff. He panned the glasses

  upwards gently, and could just make out the inclination of the narrow

  ledge as it angled up the face.

  "Da, da. This is the spot." He was thinking in his mother tongue again.

  It was a relief after these last days of having to struggle in French

  and English.

  Before he began the climb, he left the trail and scrambled down the

  boulder-strewn slope to the river. He knelt at the edge of the Nile and

  splashed double handfuls over himself, soaking his cropped head and

  sluicing the sweat from his face and neck. He drained and refilled his

  water bottle, then drank until his belly was painfully full.

  Then he rinsed out the bottle and refilled it. There was no water on the

  mountain. Finally he dipped his bush hat in the river and placed it back

  on his head, sodden and streaming water down his neck and face.

  He climbed back to the main trail and followed it for another hundred

  paces, moving slowly and studying the "ground. At one place there was a

  rock boulder almost blocking the path. The men ahead of him had been

  forced to step over this obstruction, on to a patch of talcum-fine dust

  beyond it. They had left perfect impressions of their footprints for him

  to read.

  Most of the men were wearing Israeli-style para boots with a

  zigzag-patterned sole, and those coming up from behind had overtrodden

  the spoor of the leaders. He had to go down on one knee to examine the

  signs minutely before he could pick out the imprint o
f a much smaller

  and more delicately formed foot, a lighter, unmistakably feminine tread.

  It was partially obliterated by other larger masculine footprints, but

  the outline of the toe was clear, and the pattern was that of a smooth

  rubber-soled Bata tennis shoe. He would have recognized it from ten

  thousand others.

  He was relieved to find that Tessay was still with the group, and that

  she and her lover had not left and taken another path. Mek Nimmur was a

  sly one, and cunning.

  He had escaped from Boris's clutches once before. But not this time! The

  Russian shook his head vehemently: not this time.

  He gave his full attention to the female footprint once again. It gave

  him a pang to look at it. His anger returned in full force. He did not

  consider his feelings for the woman. Love and desire did not enter into

  the equation.

  She was his chattel, and she had been stolen from him. It was only the

  insult that had significance for him. She had rejected and humiliated

  him, and for that she was going to die.

  He felt the old thrill run through his blood at the thought of the kill.

  Killing had always been his trade and his vocation, but no matter how

  often he exercised his craft the thrill was never blunted, the pleasure

  never satiated. Perhaps it was the only true pleasure left to him, pure

  and unjaded - not even the vodka could weaken and dilute it as it had

  the physical act of copulation. He would enjoy killing her even more

  than he had once enjoyed coupling with her.

  These past few years he had hunted only the lower animals, but he had

  never forgotten what it was like to hunt down and to kill a human being,

  more especially a woman. He wanted Mek Nimmur, but he wanted the woman

  more.

  In the days of President Mengistu, when he had been the head of

  counter-intelligence, -his men had known his tastes and had picked the

  pretty ones for him. He had only one regret now, and that was that this

  time he would have to do it swiftly. There could be no question of

  drawing it i out and savouring the pleasure. Not like some of the other

  experiences, which had lasted for hours, sometimes for days.

  "Bitch," he mouthed, and kicked at the dust, stamping on the faint

  outline of her footprint, obliterating it just as he would do to her.

  "Black fomicating bitch."