Chapter 25
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Captured!
Alex wobbled on his camel as he followed directly behind P1. Upon meeting, Alex had asked his name. ‘Use not my real name’ P1 had replied as if he were in some Dickensian play, though with an accent which was most definitely not English. His eyes were an unusual mix of pale green and blue. Alex had seen eyes like that before. P1 was Greek. Alex had decided to call him Pi – π – the sixteenth letter of the Greek alphabet, and when asked, P1 had been happy with this.
They had come across Kate, Emmy and Cairo very quickly. Their line of ten camels, seven of which were fully loaded, had been dreadfully easy to spot. They painted a black line across an otherwise white desert. Alex and Pi had kept their distance because between them and Kate’s camel train were a pack of ancients. Alex thought of them as a pack because they were moving around his friends as he had seen wolves move, in television natural history programs, before they brought their much larger pray to the ground.
Alex was also keeping his camel lined up directly behind that of Pi’s. That way if anybody looked back, friend or foe, they would appear as nothing more than a thin grey line. A line that would disappear all too easily in the haze of the desert.
“How are they able to move so fast yet keep so low?” Alex asked.
“They must be ancients.”
“Can ancients run that fast?” Pi turned to Alex and gave him an old fashioned look. “Well, can they?” Pi looked back without saying a word. The penny dropped. Of course they could if they were ancients riding camels or horses: hidden from view because they were on ancient ground. Neither of them said anything for several minutes as they watched the pack become more organised and also grow in number. “They must be on horses; they are turning too quickly to be on camels.”
“That is right. Now I must go.”
“What!” Alex uttered much louder than he had meant to.
“I cannot be seen with you, because if I am I will be of no future use to Ramses.”
Alex understood. If Pi was caught with Alex he would be treated as a traitor and removed from the afterlife, along with his family. He had no option except to flee if he and his family were to live on. “Can you take a message to Ramses?”
“Of course.”
“I have nothing to write it on,” Alex said as he felt through his pockets.
Pi had already turned his camel and was now alongside Alex. “Make it quick and simple and I will remember.”
“Please tell him … tell him … oh, just tell him that I love him.” Alex had barely got the words out of his mouth before Pi was speeding off into the distance. Pi may not have been running away scared, but he gave a really great impression of running away scared. This somewhat unnerved Alex. There were now fifteen to twenty ancients working themselves into an arc behind his friends. He counted and he counted again. There were exactly twenty ancients. They were closing in and all Alex could do was sit on his camel and watch.
The heavy wooden door in front of Quentin opened, slammed against the cell wall, and woke him. An oversized guard stepped in. He ushered a bleary eyed Quentin into the far corner before placing a tray of food on the floor. At any other time, the sight of a goliath wearing a white wrap around mini-skirt, white flip-flops laced up to the knee, and a ten centimetre strip of white linen tied tightly around his chest, his ample chest – all edged in thick gold thread – would have been something that would have raised a smile. Not today. The solid gold bands which cut their way into massive biceps were each clearly marked. This guard, just as the soldiers Quentin had encountered on his journey here, belonged to Cleopatra.
The guard grunted, the door slammed, and Quentin was alone again. He failed on so many levels to understand what he was doing here. He had been abducted, that he knew for sure, and though he suffered from several bruises as well as a split lip, these had only occurred because he had tried to make a run for it. Not for one moment had he considered that such large men would have been able to move so quickly, but they had. Nobody had interrogated him; nobody had been really nasty to him.
He had at first been reluctant to try the food, which always arrived on a platter of gold along with a generous goblet of red wine. After his first taste his reluctance subsided as it proved to be a gastronomic feast of the highest quality. He was, however, very tired. His cell was just that, a cell. A square box with nothing in it. No bed, no chair, and no toilet. He had to bang on the door whenever he needed to relieve himself. The guards never made him wait. They immediately opened the door, and the toilet they took him to offered luxury beyond belief. Everything was either white marble or gold, though for some inexplicable reason he was never allowed to wash, not even his hands!
The one thing which really unnerved Quentin about his cell was that it had no ceiling. There was no chance of escape with the plain cell walls being well over five metres tall. The lack of a roof over his head alone would not have unnerved him. It was looking up, as he was now, and seeing fish swim overhead, even an occasional shark passed by, without there being any obvious glass ceiling. That was what he found unnerving. The water apparently held itself in place and sent ripples of blue-white light around the cell walls as it did. Even at night silver-grey moonlight shone down from above, silhouetting all manner of sea creatures.
Quentin’s thoughts were interrupted by a moan. He had been so intently looking up – he was presently watching an octopus moving above him, sending out panicked squirts of black ink as a large eel of some kind was trying to turn him into lunch – that he had failed to realise he was no longer alone.
“Rose, oh Rose, what have they done to you?” he said as he rolled her over and gently, very gently, attempted to sit her up against the wall. She looked to be in far worse condition than when he last saw her, if that was indeed possible.
“Please,” Rose said as she pushed him away. It was clear to Quentin that sitting up was not an option. She lay on her back with her arms wrapped tightly around herself.
“What have they done to you?” Quentin asked as a reflex to what he was seeing.
“Please,” she said again. After quite a pause she added, “Just let me be … I need to be still.”
By the way she was gasping for breath as she spoke, and the way she held her arms around her torso, Quentin was pretty sure that Rose was at least suffering from a few bruised or, much more likely, broken ribs.
Just a few seconds later Quentin was looking down at a sleeping Rose, more likely a passed out Rose. He got off of his knees and went over and banged on the cell door. It was immediately opened and he asked for a mattress, a bed of some kind for Rose. The door closed. He banged on the cell door again. The guard, as large as he was, showed signs of sympathy rather than anger. “Please, if nothing else, would you let me have some water and a cloth so that I can wash some of the blood off,” Quentin asked this as he stepped back and gestured to the body on the floor. Every conceivable shade of blood appeared to cover Rose’s body, from black dried blood to bright red new blood and all the shades in between. The door closed without the guard saying a word. Quentin felt useless.
Alex was feeling much the same as his father … useless! All he could do was watch from a safe distance as, unbeknown to Kate, Emmy and Cairo, ancients surrounded them. He had even worked out that the ancients would most likely attack as his friends reached a point where the land they were travelling on converged with ancient land, and that would be pretty soon, within the next one to two kilometres.
His reasoning was simple. All twenty of the ancients were now riding much higher in the desert than just a few minutes before. Alex was able to make out the heads of a few of the horses, but all the time more and more was being revealed. Each ancient was dressed in white, their horses were white, and the desert was white. They followed in an arc which allowed them to be invisible. Ahead was the delta, a green lush area. No longer would the ancients have the invisibility that the desert afforded them, quite the opposite.
It all happened in the blink of an eye. Alex watched, yet he did not believe what he saw. The ancients rode their horses as if they had jumped up onto a plateau. They took his three friends hostage and disappeared back into the desert as quickly as they had risen from it. He looked along the black line in the desert which was the ten camels. They headed on as if nothing had happened, yet now they headed on without Kate, Emmy and Cairo.
Alex raised himself as high as he dared on his camel without falling off, but there was no sign of anyone. He was alone in the desert with nothing more than a camel and a small amount of water. This was not good. He had hoped, expected to be able to follow the ancients. He needed to know where his friends were being taken. How could he even think of trying to rescue them if he did not know where they were? There was no way he could have warned them because there was no way that the four of them could have taken on and won against twenty ancients, twenty very well trained ancients with swords and daggers. To have maintained the discipline, to have held their positions and then attacked as one, as they did, without any verbal orders, took training, lots of training. They were not robbers, or for that matter ordinary soldiers, they were elite soldiers … they had to be!
When Alex was only slightly younger he would have mentally beaten himself up. He would have felt a failure, but, despite still having reservations, he felt that he had done the right thing. Had the ancients wished to kill, that would have been easy at any time. They had followed and taken his friends in the way they had because they wanted them alive. He had time to work out where they were being taken. Something inside his head kept saying ‘follow the gold’ and he knew the gold was going to Alexandria.
He headed towards lush green of the delta ahead, in order to let his camel drink, refill his own water bottle, and hopefully find them both something to eat. All things considered, he felt amazingly in control, though he could not, for one moment, fathom why.
Chapter 26
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Suicide and Magic
Alex was amazed at how the barren white unrelenting hell of the desert could give way, in a matter of a just few metres, to a lush green environment. Upon feeling the gentle breeze, he raised his arms. He was feeling confident on the camel, though only because it was now stationary, and he needed to dry out. Every pore of his body oozed sweat. An unfortunate natural occurrence from leaving the heat of the dry desert for the relative cool of the humid delta.
He wondered why his camel had not immediately gone to drink from the fast flowing river in front of him, a river that was generating a most welcome breeze. His ancient memories brought forth an answer. The camel instinctively knew that it needed to cool down before drinking or the shock could kill it. Patting his camel, Alex issued forth with words of reassurance as he leaned back, brought both legs over to one side, and slid off. Had he not stumbled forward upon landing and ended up on his knees it would have been the perfect dismount, or, at least, that was what Alex thought to himself. As always he was glad to be on his own so that he was the only person to witness his mistakes.
The river before him was just one of many fingers of the River Nile as it splayed out in the delta on its way to the Mediterranean. Along its edges, in the fast flowing though shallow water, stood mature papyrus plants waving gently. The sound they made was mesmerising as their umbrella like heads rustled against each other. A picturesque scene, though one which was a problem for Alex. With date palms overhead, various tall grasses and the two-metre-high papyrus all moving in the breeze, it would be difficult, if not impossible, to hear the approach of anyone, and even more difficult to see them until it was too late. His senses were heightened.
Having spent ten, possibly fifteen minutes scouring the area, he returned to his now drinking camel feeling much more relaxed – he was alone.
He thought over all that had happened recently as he subconsciously unrolled the triangular stem of a broken papyrus plant, laying out the pieces as he sat in the shade as if he were making a sheet of paper. He looked down, chuckled, and said softly, “Ancient memories.”
There was a whoosh just behind him, more than plant noise. Alex managed to half stand before he was body tackled at great speed. Both he and his flying attacker disappeared through the papyrus, with Alex ending up in the Nile. Alex’s body craved oxygen. Having been severely winded by the attack his inbuilt awareness of not attempting to breathe whilst underwater proved ineffective. In this case his body’s needs proved to be greater than anything his brain could control.
He brought his head up, spluttering and coughing from the intake of water, before sinking again. He rolled in the speeding water. He rolled and he rolled, not knowing which way was up. Taking in as much water as air he was in real danger of drowning. Green, he saw a flash of green. He knew that his only chance was to head for the green. Flapping his arms and kicking his legs he continued to roll, though now for a fraction of a second on every roll he saw more green, ever more green.
He kicked harder, flapped his arms harder. This was no recognised swimming stroke, though it proved to be effective as he was becoming ever closer to the green, which he knew must be papyrus and that only grew in shallow water. His right hand hit and then grabbed at the stems of the papyrus. His left hand soon followed. His legs were now hitting mud. In the shallow though fast flowing water the strength of the Nile had abated. Pulling himself up onto his knees he continued to cough and splutter.
His urgency to defend himself from further attack subsided upon hearing laughter in the distance, very recognisable laughter.
“I thought for a moment there that I was going to have to come in and rescue you,” he heard Kate shout from roughly where he had entered the water. She was sitting on the riverbank and laughing like a drain. Alex was furious, more furious than he had ever been. Kate could do that to people, it was an unfortunate knack of hers. Still struggling to fill his body with the oxygen it needed, he was unable to reply, which was probably for the best.
The door to Quentin’s cell opened. The goliath of a guard handed him a large solid gold tray with one hand, that he could barely hold using both hands. Even more to Quentin’s surprise the goliath spoke for the first time, quietly, though his voice still boomed.
“Don’t damage anything, or I will be in trouble.”
Quentin looked at all the items on the tray.
Seeing the way Quentin looked at the tray, the goliath clarified his statement. “Do what you want with the fabric and towels, just do not damage any of the items, because if you do, I will have to damage you!”
The cell door shut, and for the first time Quentin saw a possible way out. The guard had issued his threat with no real malice in his voice. He had not left Quentin shaking in his boots. This guard was only loyal to his employer because he was afraid of his employer. There was no loyalty, only fear. This might be a weakness which he could exploit, though as his employer was Cleopatra, this would be a far from easy task.
Under the towels there was fabric, intended for use as bandages, everything else was covered in gem encrusted gold. The marking on each piece, from the largest hair brush to the smallest nail brush, showed that this had obviously come from Cleopatra’s personal collection. She probably had so many collections, gifts from people and countries wishing to be in her favour, that this would never be missed, yet the guard was right to be worried. Cleopatra had a swift way of dealing with even a minor infraction. Beauty and brutality went hand in glove with her. Of course, apart from seeing her briefly from quite a distance at Karnak Temple – during Ramses’ celebrations for the defeat of the warlock – Quentin’s knowledge of Cleopatra was only historical.
An hour or so later, cleaned up as best as he could and with her ribs bandaged tightly, Rose was sitting up with her back to the wall. Though extensively bruised, all things considered she did not now look too bad. The white galabeya Quentin had found wrapped within the towel was certainly a great improvement on her bloodied and torn clothing. Quentin looked at directly Rose as he listened t
o her. He, like everybody of a certain age, thought that she not only looked like, but also spoke like, Ingrid Bergman. Inside he was angry that anybody could treat a lady, any lady, in such an appalling way.
As she finished speaking, Quentin had a much clearer idea of what was going on and why he, Rose and Bast had been taken hostage. Obviously nobody could take Bast hostage, but her captors had been very persuasive. If Bast left, then either Quentin or Rose would die, possibly both of them would be put to a very painful and protracted death. They were not ancients. They could be put to death all too easily.
In a moment of rashness Quentin suggested that if they took their own lives then Bast would be free to tell Ramses and Nakhtifi what was going on. His suggestion was interrupted by the serving of yet more food. Breakfast, lunch or dinner, neither of them were sure. Quentin thanked the guard, they both did, as he handed back the tray with all of its contents in perfect condition.
Having had the time to weigh up his anger at how Kate had flung herself at him, attacked him with a flying leap, Alex had calmed down. His anger at the unwarranted attack juxtaposed with his feeling of joy that she was here with him and not captured – though his concern for Emmy and Cairo remained all too real. His first words were exactly as expected from the normally calm person that he was, “How did you manage to escape?”
“Sorry, Alex, that was really mean of me to attack you like that.” Kate sat hugging her knees and spoke with her head bowed. “Sometimes I do not know what is wrong with me.” She stuttered a little as she said this. Alex was far too shocked to say anything. “I did it without thinking. I thought it would be a laugh. I never expected you to …” Kate sounded as though she was crying. She never wanted boys to see her cry. For that matter she never wanted anybody to ever see what she considered to be her weaker, more vulnerable side.
Gold of the Ancients Page 21
