Map of the Dead: A mystery thriller that's a page turner

by Murray Bailey

  FORTY-NINE

  Alex felt Yanhamu’s frustration at being so close to taking the life of his nemesis. And yet at the last minute he couldn’t go through with it. If he’d had the chance to kill Ellen’s murderer would he have done it? He imagined it was the guy from the Thames who had attacked them. He imagined standing over him with a gun, his finger tightening on the trigger.

  “Alex, we’re here.”

  For a moment he was disorientated. He opened his eyes. “Vanessa?”

  “We’ve arrived in Dairut. Time to get off.”

  The first-class carriage chairs reclined to a reasonable angle and the gentle rattle of the train had quickly lulled Alex into a deep sleep. He returned the seat to vertical with a jerk and put his head in his hands for a moment. He had a headache and quick movements caused a throb in his right eye.

  Vanessa held her case and stood over him, urging him to hurry. He stood gingerly, not wanting to jar his head again, collected his bag and followed her.

  “What next?” she asked as they stood on the platform and watched as the final passengers disembarked and hurried away. The train pulled off, and within a minute they were alone on the platform.

  Alex pulled out the note from Marek. “We’re to take a taxi to Deir Mawas. I don’t know if that’s a place or hotel. I guess we find a taxi and ask.”

  They left the platform and cut through the ticketing and waiting area. One man sat reading a newspaper, cigarette in mouth. He looked up as they passed and then jumped to his feet.

  “MacLure?”

  “Yes.”

  The man beamed, folded his paper under his arm and pointed to his chest. “I driver. I take you and wife.”

  “Not wife,” Alex explained, but when the man pulled an uncomprehending face, he said, “Fine. Deir Mawas?”

  The man grinned and nodded again and said something Alex assumed to be the same place. Then he led them to an old silver Nissan estate, loaded the bags in the rear and held open the doors.

  Alex wasn’t happy with the bags being loaded before the price had been agreed. “How much?”

  “No, no. No price. All paid.”

  Alex looked at Vanessa, who just shrugged and got in. They buckled up and exchanged glances, relieved to find these seat belts worked.

  The driver glanced back. “English? Where from?” he said, and they set off at speed.

  “London,” they replied in unison.

  “Yes, London. Arsenal. Chelsea. Manchester United! Lovely jubbly.”

  With the intermittent flashes from street lights and then darkness, Alex found himself nodding off again. He heard Vanessa say: “Well he seems to know where he’s going even if we don’t.” And the next thing he knew, they were bundling out, registering and staggering up to bedrooms.

  His hotel room was very basic: a single bed with a cotton sheet that smelled dusty, a tiled floor partially covered with a thin rug, and a wardrobe, the wood of which didn’t match the headboard or solitary chair or small table with a kettle and mug. Alex’s mind played through the hieroglyphs and other symbols on the Map-Stone. He pictured the majesty that would have been Akhetaten, the ancient city of Amarna, and imagined finding the clues. He was unsure of when his thoughts shifted from consciousness into dreams, but his night was filled with grand images and the gods of ancient Egypt. He was Yanhamu descending a long shaft into darkness, led by the jackal-headed Anubis. At the end he saw an orange glow of burning torches. The tunnel ended in a chamber. In the centre, lit by the torches, he saw a small gathering. Around the outside, he sensed people watching, but couldn’t quite see them. Anubis guided him to giant golden scales. Thoth, the ibis-headed god, said something and Anubis responded. Alex heard them chanting “Yanhamu. Yanhamu.” And he saw Anubis place his heart on one side of the scales and a feather on the other. He heard teeth grind and realized Ammut, the terrifying Devourer, part crocodile, part lion, part hippopotamus, sat under the scales like an expectant dog at a dinner table. If Yanhamu’s heart was found to weigh more than the feather, it would be fed to Ammut, and his soul, his ba, would not find the afterlife. There was no such thing as Hell, just oblivion. He wouldn’t see Ellen again.

  It was time to say the spells of the Book of the Dead. Yanhamu knew it. He had to pronounce his worthiness to the gods. Patiently, Anubis pointed to the far side of the chamber, and Yanhamu thought he could make out a throne lit by a green luminosity upon which a mummy sat—Osiris. As Yanhamu, he began to recite the magical words. He didn’t know how he knew them, he just did. However, when he came to the part about not committing murder, Thoth interrupted and asked him to explain. Yanhamu recounted the story of meeting Serq, the Scorpion, at the temple of Bast. How he had poisoned the milk but didn’t administer it. Thoth took notes and shook his head. “That’s not the story.”

  “He killed my sister,” Yanhamu said, and then stared in horror as his heart twitched on the scales.

  Thoth said, “And how do you explain the theft?”

  The heart twitched, moving perilously close to the edge, to the waiting jaws of the Devourer.

  “I didn’t steal anything. The Map-Stone is hidden. I didn’t steal it!” he pleaded.

  Ammut smacked her lips and Yanhamu shouted, “I haven’t done anything wrong!”

  Alex sat up in bed, covered in cold sweat.

  When they met the driver in the morning, he pointed outside. “Not good.”

  Alex and Vanessa exchanged glances. What did he mean? Their appearance? The Nissan? The weather?

  They followed him onto the road beside the Nissan estate. This time the driver pointed to the sky, a blemish-free azure.

  Alex said, “A bit windy?”

  The driver nodded and raised both hands as if weighing the air. “Not good.”

  Vanessa opened a local map she was holding. “Can you take us to Tell el-Amarna?”

  The driver pulled a concerned face but waved them into the Nissan and raced them through the town of Deir Mawas.

  Vanessa had found it on the map over breakfast and they knew Amarna was a short journey north along the Nile, before a crossing point. She’d said, “We don’t need to wait for Marek to visit the ruins, right?”

  “Not really. He seems to have done the hard part for us—organizing getting here.”

  “So what was on the block that Lord Carnarvon took—the one Ellen’s hidden?”

  “Symbols that make up a kind of map.”

  “Could you draw them for me so I can understand? So I know what we’re looking for?” When he reluctantly nodded, she pulled a pen and paper from a side pocket of her bag.

  He laughed, “Typical journalist—always comes prepared.”

  He drew a rectangle and then added sides so that it looked three dimensional. He shrugged. “I’m not very good at this. I can see it in my mind but drawing is another matter. You see, the ancient Egyptians were not only masters of disguising language and double meaning, but they would draw two-dimensional figures that folded into three.”

  She studied what he had drawn. “So what is it—a room?”

  “This is a palace or temple, I think. These symbols represent the scale but there may also be images. A flying goose, for example, may literally be a giant wall painting of a goose that confirms we have the right place.” He drew a square with concentric lines and illustrated levels. “This, I think, represents the tomb, with steps here and here”—he indicated both sides and then pointed to the middle of one—“and here is a hidden section. I think that’s what we’re looking for.”

  Vanessa frowned. “I don’t want to be rude, Alex, but that’s not much of a map. Perhaps we do need Marek to interpret.”

  It felt like a challenge, and Alex had pointed out they had no idea how long Marek would take to join them. They had nothing to lose by visiting the site and they may even get inspiration from what they found.

  He was about to respond when the Nissan jolted. They had left the main road and were now thundering along a minor one, its surface in dir
e need of repair. Between bumps, Alex said, “A rally-cum-Formula One driver!”

  From the front the driver laughed. “Formula One. Michael Schumacher. Yes, that is me!” Then, as if to prove it, he oversteered around the next bend before halting. Outside, through swirling sand, they could see that the potholed road became a hardstanding that led to a moored flatbed ferry.

  A man, with a billowing galabia and face wrapped in a scarf so that only his eyes showed, came to the window. When Schumacher wound it down, the passengers heard a rushing sound. At first Alex thought it was the Nile but realized the river was choppy rather than fast-flowing.

  “That’s the wind,” Vanessa said.

  Schumacher wound up the window after a brief animated conversation. He looked back at the passengers, weighed the air again and said, “Sand.”

  Alex pointed to the ferry. “Let’s go.”

  The driver shrugged, pulled across the hardstanding and onto the ferry.

  There were no gates at either end, just drive-on, drive-off ramps, and Alex estimated it would take eight cars, maybe four trucks. Their Nissan was the only vehicle and, as soon as they stopped, the diesel funnel belched smoke and they began to trundle across the hundred-metre gap.

  The western side of the river had been lush fields, but the town of Tell el-Amarna on the opposite bank had a narrow strip of cultivated land before desert stretched towards the eastern hills that jutted abruptly from the plain like a jagged limestone perimeter wall. The blur caused by sand in the air made the landscape look like a watercolour painting.

  In the town, Schumacher stopped and briefly scanned left and right as though looking or waiting for someone. No one appeared, and after a few seconds he continued.

  Alex leaned forward and handed a piece of paper to the driver. He pointed to a rectangle. “The Great Temple,” he said. “Please take us to this place.”

  While waiting for Vanessa at the hotel, Alex had managed to get on to the Internet and copied out the layout of the ruins that were once the great city of Akhetaten. It had been five kilometres long and housed over twenty thousand people. The modern town was just beyond the northern reaches of the old city and the taxi driver followed the road east out of town before turning south on a dusty track and following the boundary between farmland and desert. A large modern cemetery ran along their left and ended abruptly. Beyond were the ruins of a city destroyed more than three thousand years ago.

  “Here.” The driver stopped the car. “Sand,” he said, and made the gesture of something painful striking his face. Then he handed them each a scarf and demonstrated how they should wrap it around their heads.

  Alex opened the door and felt the blast of the dry hot air. They stood in the lee of the vehicle, the river to their backs. Before them were desolate, sand-covered ruins, a once great city reduced to fragments of stone, with nothing more than a few feet high. They moved forward and felt the first rush of airborne sand which stung their exposed hands.

  Alex pointed ahead and they trudged across compact dusty ground that crunched under their boots. He stopped at a wall, the only remaining external section of the temple where Akhenaten was said to act as high priest in his daily worship of the sun god, Aten. The enormity of it took Alex’s breath away. He looked at Vanessa and saw her eyes wide with wonderment.

  She placed her head close to his so he could hear. “I never imagined I could feel this way about ruins,” she shouted. “It’s both awe-inspiring and devastatingly sad.”

  He nodded. “It must have been spectacular. This temple was unlike any other. It was both vast and open.” They walked over a wall and into the first section. The second section was more open, with hundreds of stumps of what Alex had read were once offering tables.

  Vanessa pointed out the steps in the central area. “This isn’t the same as your diagram.”

  He said, “Too big, I think.” He found a little shelter and checked his sketch and took them through a side wall. “I can’t make it out, but the Royal Palace was here. Maybe part of it was the right size, but nothing distinct I can get a bearing on.”

  From there they walked through sections of wall and followed paths past stumps that were once pillars and seemed to have been removed with modern-day tools.

  Alex headed for the tallest landmark, a pinkish pillar in the shape of bundled reeds.

  “The smaller temple,” he explained as they reached it. Like the Great Temple, the walls were clearly defined. There was a central section and then the remnants of pillars at the far end.

  Alex sat on the ground, sheltered by the wall.

  Vanessa pulled two bottles of mineral water from her handbag and handed him one.

  After a long drink, he said, “I just don’t know.”

  They sat looking at the stones with sand swirling around until the Nissan pulled up close by. They jumped in, grateful for the respite.

  “Good?” the driver asked.

  “Not good,” Alex said, studying the diagram. “Is there another palace?”

  The driver beamed. “Ah!”

  He U-turned and followed the track back to the modern cemetery and then retraced their route to the town. But instead of heading for the ferry he continued north. At the end of the town there was a triangular section of desert. More ruins, but this time surrounded by agricultural land.

  Alex and Vanessa jumped out, braced themselves against the wind and walked over to the foot-high exterior wall. Alex paced it out.

  Against the wind, he said, “About the right dimensions. No sign of any flying geese.” He quickly counted the shallow stumps of identical height—pillars removed mechanically, he surmised. “Forty pillars. It was a special number for the ancient Egyptians as well as the Jews.”

  Vanessa asked, “So that was the forty you were interested in?”

  “It’s one of the numbers on the Map-Stone—four hoops symbolizing forty and a pillar. So my guess is we’re looking for forty pillars.” Alex walked around the walls ending at steps at the far side.

  Vanessa stood beside him. “OK, so if this is the first area in your map. Where’s the next? Where’s the square with the steps on either side and the hidden area?”

  Alex looked around. If this was the location, the starting point, then it was a disaster. He signalled for them to get back to the shelter of the Nissan. Once inside, he removed the scarf and grimaced. “If this is the place, then we’ve a problem. The area we’re looking for will be over there.” He waved a hand towards a field of sweetcorn. “If it is, it’s going to be damned hard to find it now.”

  FIFTY

  1322 BCE, Akhetaten (Amarna)

  Yanhamu walked through the rubble of Akhetaten and tried to imagine what it had been like. He had seen a unit of the Medjay heading to the northern quarter where they would be looting and destroying anything that remained. The mercenaries had swept through the city killing everyone they found.

  Except for the swarms of flies, feeding off decaying bodies, nothing stirred.

  Thayjem came up beside him and said, “What are you thinking?”

  “This is more terrible than war. Did these people really deserve this? They were Egyptians after all, and no man has the right to spill Egyptian blood.”

  “Well that’s debatable—not that our blood isn’t sacred, of course it is, but it is questionable whether these people were true Egyptians. Pharaoh has declared them outlaws and their kind must be eradicated throughout the land if ma’at is to be restored, the gods satisfied and the Two Lands be the great power it once was.”

  “You sound like a propaganda merchant.”

  Thayjem scoffed. “I just want to finish this stupid task and go home. What is it, twenty months since we had our victory parade in Memphis? And more than two years since Ra created the great wave that destroyed our enemies. We thought it was over then, but who could have known that we would march to Thebes?”

  Yanhamu nodded. He was studying the architecture and trying to work out where the King’s House ended and the Hall
of Records began.

  Thayjem continued: “I thought Ay would be declared the false pharaoh. I thought there would be a fight akin to the battle of Osiris and Seth.” He laughed. “Did you notice the irony since we were in the Seth Army, but on the side of the true pharaoh?” He stopped abruptly. “What are you doing?”

  Yanhamu wasn’t listening. He felt along the damaged wall. “This city was the greatest in the world and now it is going to be systematically torn down, stone by stone.” He patted Thayjem on the shoulder. “Take the men up to the royal tombs and get started. I’m just going to take a look at the records—if there are any still here. You know, for a while, not only the treasury records, but all written texts were brought here. It is said that Ra told Pharaoh Akhenaten to build a library for all the wisdom in the world.”

  Thayjem waved to the motley band of ten soldiers who squatted lazily in the shade. They reluctantly assembled themselves and led their horse and carriage back to the Royal Drive. Thayjem turned back and gripped Yanhamu’s shoulder. “Don’t be long and don’t let the Medjay mistake you for an outlaw! If you get killed here, I’m not searching through the bodies to find you.”

  “Thanks!” Yanhamu grinned. “And, if I find a Wisdom Text, I won’t share it with you.”

  He watched the unit go and then returned to studying the walls, their murals and occasional hieroglyphs. He found a short flight of descending steps where the wall was damaged and a hieroglyph appeared to have been chiselled out. At the bottom, he heaved a wooden door aside and found a passage which led to an antechamber.

  He heard a noise and was surprised to see light ahead.

  “Is someone there?”

  He walked through to a main chamber lit by lanterns and he saw desks and hundreds of earthenware pots, from jug-size to the size of a small man, the sort used to store papyri and clay tablets. The room had been disturbed, tables knocked over and most of the pots broken. He moved shards of pottery aside and picked up a scroll. It was a record of food and animals transported from the Delta during a month. He picked out another: a schedule of activities of a tax collector and the payments due. Reading through another and another, he became disappointed by their mundane nature.