River God

by Wilbur Smith

  'At last I saw the cobra and the vulture come together in congress. I saw them mating and entwined on a sheet of pure blue silk. There were blue banners on the city walls and banners of blue flew on the temple pylons.

  'I saw the blue pennants on the chariots that drove out across the world. I saw monuments so tall and mighty that they would stand for ten thousand years. I saw the peoples of fifty different nations bow down before them.'

  I sighed and pressed my fingers into my temples to still the throbbing in my skull, and then I said, 'That was all my vision.'

  Neither of us spoke or moved for a long while thereafter, then my mistress said quietly, 'One hundred seasons must pass before the two kingdoms are united, one hundred years of war and striving before the Hyksos are at last driven from the sacred soil of this very Egypt. It will be hard and bitter for my people to bear.'

  'But they will be united under the blue banner, and the kings of your line will conquer the world. All the nations of the world will pay homage to them,' I interpreted the rest of my vision for her.

  'With this I am content.' She sighed and fell asleep.

  I did not sleep, for I knew that she still needed me near her.

  She woke again in that hour before dawn which is the darkest of the night. She cried Out, 'The pain! Sweet Isis, the pain!'

  I mixed the Red Shepenn for her. After a while she said, 'The pain has passed, but I am cold. Hold me, Taita, warm me with your body.'

  I took her in my arms and held her while she slept.

  She awoke once more as the first timid rays of dawn crept in through the doorway from the terrace.

  'I have loved only two men in my life,' she murmured, 'and you were one of those. Perhaps in the next life, the gods will treat our love more kindly.'

  There was no reply I could give. She closed her eyes for the last time. She stole away quietly and left me. Her last breath was no louder than the one before, but I felt the chill in her lips when I kissed them.

  'Goodbye, my mistress,' I whispered. 'Farewell, my. heart.'

  I HAVE WRITTEN THESE SCROLLS DURING the seventy days and nights of the royal embalming. They are my last tribute to my mistress.

  Before the undertakers took her away from me, I made the incision in her left flank, as I had done for Tanus. I opened her womb and took from it that terrible incubus that had killed her. It was a thing of flesh and blood, but it was not human. When I cast it into the fire, I cursed it, and I cursed the foul god Seth who had placed it in her.

  I have prepared ten alabaster jars to hold these scrolls. I will leave them with her. I am painting all the murals of her tomb with my own hand. They are the finest I have ever created. Each stroke of my brush is an expression of my love.

  I wish that I could rest with her in this tomb, for I am sick and weary with grief. But I still have my two princesses and my king to care for. They need me.

  AUTHOR'S NOTE

  On 5 January 1988, Doctor Duraid ibn al Simma of the Egyptian Department of Antiquities opened and entered a tomb on the west bank of the Nile in the Valley of the Nobles. The reason why this tomb had not been previously excavated was that in the ninth century AD an Islamic mosque had been built over the site. It was only after long and delicate negotiations with the religious authorities that the excavation was permitted.

  Immediately upon entering the passage that led to the burial chamber, Dr Al Simma was greeted by a marvellous display of murals which covered all the walls and the ceilings. They were the most elaborate and vivacious that he had ever encountered in a lifetime spent studying the monuments.

  He told me that he knew at once that he had made a significant find, for from amongst the hieroglyphics on the walls stood out the royal cartouche of an Egyptian queen who had not been previously recorded.

  His excitement and anticipation increased as he approached the burial chamber, only to be dashed as he saw that the seals upon the doorway had been damaged, and the entrance had been forced. In ancient times, the tomb had been robbed and stripped of its sarcophagus and all its treasures.

  Nevertheless, Dr Al Simma was able to date the tomb with reasonable accuracy to that dark night of strife and disaster that overwhelmed Egypt in about 1780 BC. For the next century the Two Kingdoms were in a state of flux. We have little record of the events of this period, but from the chaos eventually rose a line of princes and pharaohs that finally expelled the Hyksos invader, and lifted Egypt into its period of greatest glory. It gives me pleasure to think that the blood of Lostris and Tanus and Memnon ran strongly in their veins.

  It was almost a year after the tomb was first opened, while Dr Al Simma's assistants were copying and photographing the decorations of the walls, that a section of the plaster fell away to reveal a hidden niche in which stood ten sealed alabaster vases.

  When Dr Al Simma asked me to assist in the transcription of the scrolls contained in the vases, I was both honoured and filled with trepidation. I was not, of course, qualified to work on the original scrolls, which were written in the hieratic script. This work was done at Cairo Museum by a team of international Egyptologists.

  Dr Al Simma asked me to rewrite this original transcription in a style that would make it more accessible to the modern reader. With this end in view I have included some anachronisms in the text. For instance I have, in places, used such comparatively modern measures of distance and weight as miles and ounces. I have also indulged myself with words such as 'djinn' and 'houri' and 'hooligan' which Taita never employed, but which, I feel certain, he would have used if they had formed part of his vocabulary.

  Very soon after beginning work on the texts all my reservations began to evaporate as I became totally involved in the times and character of the ancient author. Despite all his bombast and vainglory, I developed an affinity and affection for the slave Taita that reached back over the millennium.

  I am left with a realization of how little the emotions and aspirations of man have changed in all that time, and a lingering excitement that to this day somewhere in the Abyssinian mountains near the source of the Blue Nile the mummy of Tanus still lies in the unviolated tomb of Pharaoh Mamose.

  EXPLORE THE MYSTERIES OF THE SEVENTH SCROLL—

  WILBUR SMITH'S NEXT UNFORGETTABLE

  EPIC NOVEL, COMING SOON FROM

  ST. MARTIN'S PRESS. AN EXCERPT FOLLOWS:

  "The Seventh Scroll." She whispered, and steeled herself to touch it. It was three thousand years old, written by a genius out of time with history, a man who had been dust for all these millennia, but who she had come to know and respect as she did her own husband. His words were eternal, and they spoke to her clearly from beyond the grave, from the fields of paradise, from the presence of the great Trinity, Osiris and Isis and Horus, in whom he had believed so devoutly. As devoutly as she believed in another more recent Trinity.

  She carried the scroll to the long table at which Duraid, her husband, was already at work. He looked up as she laid it on the table-top before him and for a moment she saw the same mystical mood in his eyes that had affected her. He always wanted the scroll there on the table, even when there was no real call for it. He had the photographs and the microfilm to work with. It was as though he needed the unseen presence of the ancient author close to him as he studied the texts.

  Then he threw off the mood and was the dispassionate scientist once more. "Your eyes are better than mine, my flower," he said. "What do you make of this letter?"

  She leaned over his shoulder and studied the hieroglyph on the photograph of the scroll that he pointed out to her. She puzzled over the character for a moment before she took the magnifying glass from Duraid's hand, and peered through it again.

  "It looks as though Taita has thrown in another cryptic of his own creation just to bedevil us." She spoke of the ancient author as though he were a dear, but sometimes exasperating, friend who still lived and breathed, and played tricks upon them.

  "We'll just have to puzzle it out, then," Duraid declared with
obvious relish. He loved the ancient game. It was his life's work.

  The two of them laboured on into the cool of the night. This was when they did their best work. Sometimes they spoke Arabic and sometimes English; for them the two languages were as one. Less often they used French, which was their third common language. They had both received their education at universities in England and the United States, so far from this Very Egypt of theirs. Royan loved the expression "This Very Egypt" that Taita used so often in the scrolls.

  She felt a peculiar affinity with this ancient Egyptian in so many ways. After all she was his direct descendant. She was a Coptic Christian, not of the Arab line that had so recently conquered Egypt, less than two thousand years ago. The Arabs were newcomers in this Very Egypt of hers; while her own blood line ran back to the dawn of sanguine man, to the time of the pharaohs and the great pyramids.

  At ten o'clock Royan made coffee for them, heating it on the charcoal stove that Alia had left for them before she went off to her own family in the village. They drank the sweet strong brew from thin cups that were half filled with the heavy grounds. While they sipped they talked as old friends.

  For Royan that was their relationship, old friends. She had known Duraid ever since she had returned from England with her doctorate in archaeology and won her job with the Department of Antiquities, of which he was the director and professor.

  She had been his assistant when he had opened the tomb in the Valley of the Nobles; the tomb of Queen Lostris of the Ramessidian line of pharaohs, the tomb that dated from 1780 BC.

  She had shared his disappointment when they discovered that the tomb had been robbed in ancient times and all its treasures plundered. All that remained were the marvellous murals that covered the walls and the ceilings of the tomb.

  It was Royan herself who had been working at the wall behind the plinth on which the sarcophagus had once stood, photographing the murals, when a section of the plaster had fallen away to reveal in their niche the ten alabaster jars. Each of the jars had contained a papyrus scroll. Every one of them had been written and placed there by Taita, the slave of the queen.

  Since then their lives, Duraid's and her own, seemed to have revolved around those scraps of parchment. Although there was some damage and deterioration, in the main they had survived three and a half thousand years remarkably intact.

  What a fascinating story they contained of a nation attacked by a superior enemy, armed with horse and chariot that were still alien to the Egyptians of that time. Crushed by the Hyksos hordes, the people of the Nile were forced to flee. Led by their queen, Lostris of the tomb, they followed the great river southwards almost to its source amongst the brutal mountains of the Ethiopian highlands.

  Here amongst those forbidding mountains, Lostris had entombed the mummified body of her husband, the Pharaoh Mamose, who had been slain in battle against the Hyksos.

  Long afterwards Queen Lostris had led her people back northwards to this Very Egypt. Armed now with their own horses and chariots, forged into hard warriors in the African wilderness they had come storming back down the cataracts of the great river to challenge once more the Hyksos invader, and in the end to triumph over him and wrest the double crown of upper and lower Egypt from his grasp.

  It was a story that appealed to every fibre of her being, and that had fascinated her as they had unravelled each hieroglyph that the old slave had penned on the papyrus.

  It had taken them all these years, working at night here in the villa of the oasis after all their daily routine work at the museum in Cairo was done, but at last all of the ten scrolls had been deciphered, all except the seventh scroll. This was the one that was the enigma, the one which the author had cloaked in layers of esoteric shorthand and allusions so obscure that they were unfathomable at this remove of time. Some of the symbols he used they had never encountered before in all the thousands of texts that they had studied in their combined lifetimes. It was obvious to them both that Taita had not intended that the scrolls should be read and understood by any eyes other than those of his beloved queen. These were his last gift for her to take with her beyond the grave.

  It had taken all their combined skills, all their imagination and ingenuity, but at last they were approaching the conclusion of the task. There were still many gaps in the translation and many areas where they were uncertain whether or not they had captured the true meaning, but they had laid out the bones of the manuscript in such order that they were able to discern the outline of the creature it represented.

  Now Duraid sipped his coffee and shook his head as he had done so often before as he said, "It frightens me. The responsibility. What to do with this knowledge we have gleaned? If it should fall into the wrong hands." He sipped and sighed before he spoke again. "Even if we take it to the right people, will they believe this story that is three and a half thousand years old?"

  "Why must we bring in others?" Royan asked with an edge of exasperation in her voice. "Why can we not do alone what has to be done?" At times like these the differences between them were most apparent. His was the caution of age, while hers was the impetuosity of youth.

  "You do not understand," he said. It always annoyed her when he said that; when he treated her as the Arabs treated their women in a totally masculine world. She had known the other world where women demanded and received the right to be treated as equals. She was a creature caught between those worlds—the Western world and the Arab world.

  Duraid was still speaking and she had not been listening to him. She gave him her full attention once more. "I have spoken to the Minister again, but I do not think he believes in me. I think that Nahoot has convinced him that I am a little mad." He smiled sadly. Nahoot Guddabi was his ambitious and well-connected deputy. "At any rate the minister says that there are no government funds available, and that I will have to seek outside finance. So, I have been over the list of possible sponsors again, and have narrowed it down to four. There is the Getty Museum, of course—but I never like to work with a big impersonal institution. I prefer to have a single man to answer to. Decisions are always easier to reach." None of this was new to her, but she listened dutifully.

  "Then there is Herr Von Schiller. He has the money and the interest in the subject, but I do not know him well enough to trust him entirely." He paused, and Royan had listened to these musings so often before that she could anticipate him.

  "What about the American? He is a famous collector." She forestalled him.

  "Peter Walsh is a difficult man to work with. His passion to accumulate makes him unscrupulous. He frightens me a little."

  "So who does that leave?" she asked.

  He did not answer for they both knew the answer to her question. Instead he turned his attention back to the material mat littered the working table.

  "It looks so innocent, so mundane. An old papyrus scroll, a few photographs and notebooks, a computer print-out. It is difficult to believer how dangerous these might be in the wrong hands." He sighed again. "You might almost say that they are deadly dangerous."

  Then he laughed. "I am being fanciful. Perhaps it is the late hour. Shall we get back to work? We can worry about these other matters once we have worked out all the conundrums set for us by this old rogue, Taita, and completed the translation."

  He picked up the top photograph from the pile in front of him. It was an extract from the central section of the scroll. "It is the worst luck that the damaged piece of papyrus falls where it does." He picked up his reading glasses and placed them on his nose before he read aloud.

  "There are many steps to ascend on the staircase to the abode of Hapi. With much hardship and endeavour we reached the second step and proceeded no further, for it was here that the prince received a divine revelation. In a dream his father, the dead God Pharaoh visited him and commanded him, 'I have travelled far and I am grown weary. It is here that I will rest for all eternity.' "

  Duraid removed his glasses and looked across at Royan. "The s
econd step. It is a very precise description for once. Taita is not being his usual devious self."

  "Let's go back to the satellite photographs," Royan suggested, and drew the glossy sheets toward her. Duraid came around the table to stand behind her.

  "To me it seems most logical that the natural feature that would obstruct them in the gorge would be something like a set of rapids or a waterfall. If it were the second waterfall that would put them here—" Royan placed her finger on a spot on the satellite photograph where the narrow snake of the river threaded itself through the dark massifs of the mountains on either hand.

  At that moment she was distracted and she lifted her head. "Listen!" Her voice changed, sharpening with alarm.

  "What is it?" Duraid looked up also.

  "The dog." She answered.

  "That damn mongrel." He agreed. "It's always making the night hideous with its yapping. I have promised myself to get rid of it."

  At that moment the lights went out.

  They froze with surprise in the darkness. The soft thudding of the decrepit diesel generator in its shed at the back of the palm grove had ceased. It was so much a part of the oasis night that they noticed it only when it was silent.

  Their eyes adjusted to the faint starlight that came in through the terrace doors. Duraid crossed the room and took the oil lamp down from the shelf beside the door where it waited for just such a contingency. He lit it, and looked across at Royan with an expression of comical resignation.

  "I will have to go down—"

  "Duraid." She interrupted him. "The dog!"

  He listened for a moment, and his expression changed to mild concern. The dog was silent out there in the night.

  "I am sure it is nothing to be alarmed about." He went to the door, and for no good reason she suddenly called after him.