Pharaoh (Jack Howard 7)

by Gibbins, David

  ‘That was when you were my adopted brother, Kahniekahake.’

  ‘And now?’

  ‘You have earned that name again today, Eagle Eye. And now you will join our ancestors. Your spirit will fly like a swift arrow towards the sun.’

  The grip tightened. His arm was pushed up further and pinned hard against Charrière’s chest, allowing him to release his right arm. Mayne heard the sound of a blade being drawn, and he felt a hard flatness against his own chest. He felt numb, too exhausted for games. ‘What are you doing?’

  ‘My job.’

  Mayne tried to struggle. ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Nobody must know. The final words Wilson spoke to me.’

  ‘That’s what he told me. And nobody will know. Especially if we leave now, before the steamers arrive.’

  ‘They are two days downstream. I didn’t see them last night. The gunfire we heard was a small Sudanese garrison in the fort of Omdurman under siege.’

  Mayne shut his eyes: this was real. He should have expected it. Wilson would arrive too late. Gordon would be dead, killed by the forces of the Mahdi. Wolseley would withdraw honourably, British prestige saved. People would for ever remember the glorious battle of Abu Klea; Gordon would become a saint.

  And nobody would ever know the truth.

  He swallowed hard. ‘And why not you? If you know, how can you live too?’

  ‘Nobody believes an Indian. Especially one living the rest of his life alone on a lake in a forest.’

  ‘Why?’ Mayne said, suddenly too tired for it all. ‘Why do it?’

  ‘General Wolseley was always good to my people. And Wilson came to me after my wife and child had died.’

  ‘Wolseley? Was he in on this?’

  ‘It was he who presented the plan to Wilson. You were the right man for the job. But even you they could not trust to talk one day.’

  Mayne shut his eyes. He realised how little he knew, and how this theatre of war was in reality a play of personalities, twisting and encircling each other like weeds in a current, using history as their stage just as the pharaohs had once used the Nile. There were a few good men: Fred Burnaby was one; General Charles Gordon was another. And there were some who once drawn in would never be allowed to leave, whose price for believing that their cause amounted to something greater was to be left forever as detritus of war.

  What he would not tell Charrière was that he had been given the same mission. It was why he had tried to persuade Wolseley to let Charrière go home with the other voyageurs. His revolver, the one he had exchanged with Gordon, was meant to be used against Charrière: it was to be at a time of his choosing, at some place on the return journey where Charrière had ceased to be of use to him. Neither of them was meant to come out of the desert alive.

  He could not see Charrière, would never see him now. But he remembered the cold dark eyes, the eyes of a hunter, like his own. He should have known it would end this way. It could only end this way.

  ‘The bowstring has been released, Charrière. The arrow that will take your spirit is already flying. Soon it will pass between us and you will see the sun.’

  He felt himself lifted bodily, felt his gorge rise, a tightness below his chest. He gasped, and then remembered something. ‘My tunic pocket,’ he said, his breathing short. ‘Gordon’s diary, his drawings. Captain John Howard, School of Military Engineering. Will you send it to him?’ He felt the feeling go from his limbs, and his voice weaken. ‘My servant, Corporal Jones … 8th Railway Company. Tell Howard to find him. He’s got something of mine. An artefact. Will you do that for me?’

  ‘I will do that for you.’

  ‘And Charrière my blood brother . . .’

  ‘What is it?’

  Mayne could barely whisper it. ‘When you get to our lake in the forest, watch out for strangers coming on the water. They will try to silence you too. Trust nobody.’

  Charrière held him tightly. He suddenly felt terribly cold. He would need to drink and to eat, to shake off the chill. He would go to the wells of Jakdul. An oasis in the desert. Nobody would find him there.

  He convulsed, and coughed blood. He saw his blood pool on sand, become the desert. Then all he could see was an enclosing constriction, a narrowing tunnel. He relaxed, knowing what it was. He was looking down the sights of his rifle, excluding all else, seeing only his target, utterly focused. It had always felt good.

  Then he saw it: a flash of light, burning like the sun, searing down the walls of the tunnel like outstretched arms, reaching out to envelop him.

  He knew what Gordon had seen.

  Then nothing.

  25

  Cornwall, England, present day

  Jack sat in his study in the old family house at the IMU campus in Cornwall and stared at the portraits of his ancestors on the walls, feeling as listless as at any time in the forty-eight hours since he and Costas had been forcibly evicted from Sudan. A few hours ago he had received more bad news, that Hiebermeyer and his team had been escorted across the border into Egypt from their site at Semna, apparently also under orders from al’Ahmed. The only consolation was that the finds from the site, including the golden sceptre, had been taken secretly by Aysha’s cousin to the Khartoum museum, where they had been placed in the vault. One day it might be possible to return to the Sudan, but for the time being it was a closed shop. Jack looked at the two old envelopes he had taken from Seaquest II, the one from Lieutenant Tanner and the other from Corporal Jones, and wondered where the contents had gone. He had taken a jolt, but he was not going to give up on this trail. He needed time, maybe a few days away. He knew he should pick up the phone and call Maria. And he knew he needed sleep.

  Rebecca knocked and came into the room, bringing him a cup of coffee. ‘You should drink this. And you need to get away for a day or two. Then you’ll see everything in perspective. As Uncle Costas says, everyone takes a few knocks down the road, and what’s a risk without bombing out from time to time. It’s all part of life’s rich tapestry. Anyway, everyone knows that working in the Sudan is a game of chance, with this kind of thing likely to happen whatever you do. And you did nothing wrong. You went to the site in good faith believing you had a permit, and you were trashed by one of the trickiest customers in the Middle East.’

  ‘I let Maurice and Aysha down. They should never have had to leave the site at Semna the way they did. It was virtually a one-hour evacuation.’

  Rebecca shook her head. ‘Maurice called me because you’re not picking up when he calls. They’d already made the decision to leave. They’d had bandits show up at night, and Aysha’s cousin, the guy acting as their guard, had become really afraid. Aysha said that as soon as she realised that, she knew she had to get out. There was no way they were going to stay there with the baby. And anyway, the Egyptians are topping up Lake Nasser again, so the whole site’s going to be inundated in a couple of months.’

  Jack picked up a small object from his desk, the greenstone scarab he had found inside the crocodile temple, and stared at the cartouche on the base. He wondered who had lost it there, and when. It had been with him since he had borrowed it from the Sudan, and now he felt he wanted to return it, not to a museum but back to the shimmering sand inside the temple where it could then spend another eternity.

  ‘You know the Muslim tribesmen of the Sudan pick up old scarabs and use them as good-luck charms,’ Rebecca said. ‘They wrap prayers around them and put them in little bags around their necks. That thing seems so close to Akhenaten, a scarab of his wife Nefertiti, but it might have been lost in there a lot more recently and have a completely different significance. It’s what you told me about artefacts that survive between different eras and cultures taking on new meanings.’

  Jack put down the scarab and stared at it. ‘I also told you I didn’t believe in good-luck charms.’

/>   ‘You said you believed in yourself.’

  Jack took a deep breath. ‘Okay. I’ll talk to Maurice. But I still feel I have to make it up to him somehow. Something big in Egypt.’

  ‘Dad, you found him a pharaoh’s golden sceptre. And not just any pharaoh, but his favourite, Akhenaten. That takes some beating.’

  ‘Maybe I can do something to help at the pyramid of Menkaure. After this I might take a rest from diving for a while. I could do some work on land.’

  ‘Dad, you didn’t say that. Get over it.’

  ‘That sounds like Costas talking. He doesn’t have to face the board of directors tomorrow.’

  ‘Actually, he does. He volunteered to go along to make sure the record was straight. Anyway, let’s face it, you run this place. You created the board of directors.’

  ‘When I created the board, I relinquished my control over IMU to them so that I would just be another employee. I’d seen too many institutions run like tinpot dictatorships.’

  ‘They’re hardly going to fire you, Dad. Come on. Anyway, I’m going back up to your great-great-grandad’s archive in the attic. One of those boxes is going to have that letter from Lieutenant Tanner, I’m sure of it. It might just give us the clue we need to whatever was in that other envelope. We don’t have to go back to Sudan to tie up that story. And get on the phone to Maurice, Dad. You’re his best friend. You owe it to him.’

  Rebecca marched out, and Jack put his feet up on the corner of his desk, staring again at the portraits on the wall: the first Jack Howard, an Elizabethan sea dog who had made his fortune as a privateer plundering Spanish treasure ships, and then fought the Armada under Drake and Raleigh; beside him Captain Matthias Howard, who had traded in tobacco from his estates in Maryland and Virginia before turning his attentions to the east, where he had put his money into an East Indiaman and doubled the family fortune, allowing him to build the present house; and on the opposite side of the door Colonel John Howard, Royal Engineers, Jack’s great-great-grandfather, who had served with distinction in India before disappearing on a quest into Afghanistan, one that Jack and Costas had finally brought to resolution almost a hundred years later. They were all there in Jack’s mind, not just those three, but the many men and women in between who had given him his sense of identity, had made him feel that he was part of the tradition of exploration and adventure and risk-taking that was in his blood.

  He knew he did not have to live up to any of them, only to the ideal he had set himself. And since Rebecca had arrived in his life it had not just been about him, but about her too, about how he could help her to feel that same urge that had always driven him forward, a relishing of the voyage of discovery as much as a yearning for the destination, for the prize that sometimes remained elusive. If there was anything he had learned from being an archaeologist, it was this: that too often the treasure at the end of the quest was an illusion, an ever-receding mirage, and the real discoveries were the ones made along the way, revelations of ancient and present lives, voyages of self-discovery and friendship.

  Perhaps chasing Akhenaten’s quest had been like that. They had made fabulous discoveries. A whole chapter of Victorian history in the desert had opened up in a way that Jack had never anticipated. And he now understood better what made men tick who had gone off by themselves in search of revelation, men like Gordon, men like himself. He had a hunch that somewhere within those months in 1884 and 1885 was a man who still could not be found, a void at the centre of the story, yet who was somehow inextricably tied up with the fate of Gordon; it was a void that Jack had found himself trying to occupy, as he struggled to imagine what had really gone on. He stared at the portrait of Colonel Howard in his uniform, wishing yet again that he had been able to talk to him, but feeling closer now to understanding what it was that had motivated the explorers and archaeologists of that generation. For Jack these were discoveries of significance. Perhaps the story of Akhenaten’s quest, of his fabled lost city of light, could now be finished, a book to be shut.

  He thought about what Rebecca had said, and about those things that had so excited him about his ancestors: exploration and adventure and risk-taking. He had taken a risk in going to the site of the Abbas, and it had not worked out. Risk-taking was all about accepting the possibility of failure. Perhaps he had been too lucky during his career, and needed to learn humility. Rebecca was about the future, and that was where he needed to put his mind now. He took a deep breath, and exhaled slowly. Sitting in the middle of his desk was the press release from Sofia about the Beatrice, waiting to be read. He might not be able to tie up all the loose ends in the Sudan, but the discovery of the Beatrice was a fantastic result and he would do everything in his power to make sure that the project put IMU in the best possible light. He pushed back his chair, put his feet down and picked up the report, feeling better already. He remembered what Sofia had called their submersible, Nina, after Columbus’ ship, and how she had wanted IMU to go to the Americas: maybe she was right. It had been almost eight years since he had taken an IMU team to Canada and then to Mexico, on the trail of crusader gold. For several years now, while there was so much going on elsewhere, he had resisted pleas from their US representative to start a new project in America. That was where he would go next. He needed a fresh start, new horizons, like Columbus. He would talk about it tomorrow morning when he had the meeting with the IMU board of directors to explain the Abbas incident, so that he could end the grilling on a positive note. And he would get Hiebermeyer to call in to outline his plans for returning the sarcophagus of Menkaure to its rightful place inside the pyramid at Giza.

  He thought of that word: pyramid. It triggered something, a very distant memory. He put down the report and picked up the brown envelope that Corporal Jones had sent to his great-great-grandfather, the envelope that he thought had contained some kind of artefact. He looked at it again, tracing his fingers over the careful handwriting of the address, and then glanced at the portrait of Colonel Howard. That was it. He remembered now. His pulse quickened, and he sat upright, thinking back forty years. It had been in this very room; he and his grandfather had been standing in front of that very portrait. His grandfather had been telling him how as a young boy he had been allowed once a week to go upstairs into the attic where his own grandfather had lived, to see his stamp collection. It had been during the few years of Colonel Howard’s retirement before his final quest into Afghanistan, and he had lived not here but in a cruck-framed half-timbered cottage in a remote village in Herefordshire, a secluded place where he could get on with his writing projects without distraction. His daughter and grandchildren had lived downstairs. But it was not the stamp collection that had so intrigued the little boy. It was an ancient artefact, a square stone with carvings all over it, sitting in a niche in the old timbers of the wall. His grandfather had remembered it so clearly all those years later because the big timbers of the cruck frame came together to form an inverted V shape in the attic, just like a pyramid. And that was what he had seen on the ancient stone: a pyramid. Colonel Howard had told the boy that he had been sent it from Egypt, and that it had once been in an ancient temple.

  Jack was suddenly coursing with excitement. Could it still be there? The cruck-framed house was still in the possession of the Howard estate, lived in by one of Jack’s elderly aunts. He pulled out his phone, scrolled through the address list and made a call. There was no reply, and he left a message. He drummed his fingers against the desk. He could make it up there today, and return in time for the meeting tomorrow morning. It would be a long drive, but he could do with it. And if there was a result, it would be something else he could throw in front of the board of directors.

  Rebecca came bounding through the door, holding a small brown parcel that looked about the same vintage as the envelope Jack had been looking at, though hers evidently still held its contents. Jack knew there would be numerous interesting items among Colonel Howard�
�s papers, and this package was too big to be Lieutenant Tanner’s letter. She was flushed with excitement, but Jack held up his hand. ‘Before we get distracted by anything, I may have made a breakthrough. I remembered something your great-grandfather told me years ago about an ancient Egyptian artefact shown to him by his grandfather, Colonel Howard. It’s just possible that it’s the artefact that was once in the envelope that Corporal Jones sent him. And I think I know where it might be. We might have to drop everything and go on a long drive.’

  ‘Hold it right there, Dad. First, this.’ She took a single sheet of old letter paper out of the package she was carrying, cleared her throat and stood upright. She sniffed, and Jack realised that she had been crying. ‘What’s wrong? Are you all right?’ he asked.

  ‘It’s just this,’ she said, holding up the letter. ‘I’ll be fine.’ She cleared her throat again. ‘This is the final page of the letter from Lieutenant Tanner at Semna to Howard. It’s very affectionate; they seem to have been great friends. Tanner was in love with Howard’s sister-in-law, and was planning to marry her when he returned from Egypt. I think the letter was written somewhere dusty, not at a desk. He’d been doing something grim, burying some comrades, and the tone of the letter is as if he’s making the best of a bad situation, taking his mind away from it.’

  Jack leaned forward, suddenly riveted. ‘That would be the sangar, and the grim business would be the burial of the two soldiers killed there by the Mahdist sniper. Incredible. This really gives the story behind Maurice and Aysha’s discoveries.’

  ‘He mentions the crocodile mummies,’ Rebecca said. ‘As an archaeology enthusiast he must have recognised them for what they were, as the soldiers were digging through them to make the graves.’

  ‘Read out the entire page, Rebecca.’

  She took a deep breath, and began: