Текст книги "The Seventh Scroll"

Автор книги: Wilbur Smith

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and peered at the flames through the veil of her wet hair -and the lake

water that streamed into her eyes.

"The villa! she whispered. "Duraid! Oh please God, no! No!

She pushed herself to her feet and began to stagger towards her burning

home.

acheet switched off both the headlights and the engine of the Fiat

before they reached the turning into the driveway of the villa and let

the car coast down and stop below the terrace.

All three of them left the Fiat and climbed the stone steps to the

flagged terrace. Duraid's body still lay where Bacheet had left it

beside the fishpond. They passed him without a glance and went into the

dark study.

Bacheet placed the cheap nylon tote bag he carried on the tabletop.

"We have wasted too much time already. We must work quickly now."

"It is Yusuf's fault," protested the driver of the Fiat. "He let the

woman escape."

"You had a chance on the road," Yusuf snarled at him, "and you did no

better."

"Enough!" Bacheet told them both. "If you want to get paid, then there

had better be no more mistakes."

With the torch beam Bacheet picked out the scroll that still lay on the

tabletop. "That is the one." He was certain, for he had been shown a

photograph of it so that there would be no mistake. "They want

everything – the maps and photographs. Also the books and papers,

everything on the table that they were using in their work.

Leave nothing."

Quickly they bundled everything into the tote bag and Bacheet zipped it

closed.

"Now the Doktari. Bring him in here."

The other two went out on to the terrace and stooped over the body. Each

of them seized an ankle and dragged Duraid back across the terrace and

into the study. The back of Duraid's head bounced loosely on the stone

step at the threshold and his blood painted a long wet skid mark across

the tiles that glistened in the torchlight.

"Get the lamp!" Bacheet ordered, and Yusuf went back to the terrace and

fetched the oil lamp from where Duraid had dropped it. The flame was

extinguished. Bacheet held the lamp to his ear and shook it.

"Full," he said with satisfaction, and unscrewed the filler cap. "All

right," he told the other two, take the bag out to the car."

As they hurried out Bacheet sprinkled paraffin from the lamp over

Duraid's shirt and trousers, and then he went to the shelves and

splashed the remainder of the fuel over the books and manuscripts that

crowded them.

He dropped the empty lamp and reached under the skirts of his dishdasha

for a box of matches. He struck one of them and held it to the wet run

of paraffin oil down the bookcase. It caught immediately, and flames

spread upwards and curled and blackened the edges of the manuscripts. He

turned away and went back to where Duraid lay. He struck another match

and dropped it on to his blood– and paraffindrenched shirt.

A mantle of blue flames danced over Duraid's chest.

The flames changed colour as they burned into the cotton material and

the flesh beneath it. They turned orange, and sooty smoke spiralled up

from their flickering crests.

Bacheet ran to the door, across the terrace and down the steps. As he

clambered into the rear seat of the Fiat, the driver gunned the engine

and pulled away down the driveway.

Durid drifted. He groaned. The first thing he was aware of as he

regained consciousness was the smell of his own flesh burning, and then

the agony struck him with full force. A violent tremor shook his whole

body and he opened his eyes and looked down at himself.

His clothing was blackening and smouldering, and the pain was as nothing

he had ever experienced in his entire life. He realized in a vague way

that the room was on fire all around him. Smoke and waves of heat washed

over him so that he could barely make out the shape of the doorway

through them.

The pain was so terrible that he wanted it to end. He wanted to die then

and not to have to endure it further.

Then he remembered Royan. He tried to say her name through his scorched

and blackened lips, but no sound came. Only the thought of her gave him

the strength to move. He rolled over once, and the heat attacked his

back that up until that moment had been shielded. He groaned aloud and

rolled again, just a little nearer to the doorway.

Each movement was a mighty effort and evoked fresh paroxysms of agony,

but when he rolled on to his back again he realized that a gale of fresh

air was being sucked through the open doorway to feed the flames. A

lungful Of the sweet desert air revived him and gave him just sufficient

strength to lunge down the step on to the cool stones of the terrace.

His clothes and his body were still on fire. He beat feebly at his chest

to try to extinguish the flames, but his hands were black burning claws.

Then he remembered the fishpond. The thought of plunging his tortured

body into that cold water spurred him he pain roused Duraid. It had to

be that intense to bring him back from that far place on the very edge

of life to which he had to one last effort, and he wriggled and wormed

his way across the flags like a snake with a crushed spine.

The pungent smoke from his still cremating flesh choked him and he

coughed weakly, but kept doggedly on.

He left slabs of his own grilled skin on the stone coping as he rolled

across it and flopped into the pond. There was a hiss of steam, and a

pale cloud of it obscured his vision so that for a moment he thought he

was blinded. The agony of cold water on his raw burned flesh was so

intense that he slid back over the edge of consciousness.

When he came back to reality through the dark clouds he raised his

dripping head and saw a figure staggering up the steps at the far end of

the terrace, coming from the garden.

For a moment he thought it was a phantom of his agony, but when the

light of the burning villa fell full upon her, he recognized Royan. Her

wet hair hung in tangled disarray over her face, and her clothing was

torn and running with lake water and stained with mud and green algae.

Her right arm was wrapped in muddy rags and her blood oozed through,

diluted pink by the dirty water.

She did not see him. She stopped in the centre of the terrace and stared

in horror into the burning room. Was Duraid in there? She started

forward, but the heat was like a solid wall and it stopped her dead. At

that moment the roof collapsed, sending a roaring column of sparks and

flames high into the night sky. She backed away from it, shielding her

face with a raised arm.

Duraid tried to call to her, but no sound issued from his smoke-scorched

throat. Royan turned away and started down the steps. He realized that

she must be going to call for help. Duraid made a supreme effort and a

crow-like croak came out between his black and blistered lips.

Royan spun round and stared at him, and then she screamed. His head was

not human. His hair was gone, frizzled away, and his skin hung in

tatters from his cheeks and chin. Patches of raw meat showed through the

black crusted mask. She backed away from him as though he were some

hideous monster.

"Royan," he croaked, and his voice was just recognizable. He lifted one

hand towards her in appeal, and she ran to the pond and seized the

outstretched hand.

"In the name of the Virgin, what have they done to you?" she sobbed, but

when she tried to pull him from the pond the skin of his hand came away

in hers in a single piece, like some horrible surgical rubber glove,

leaving the bleeding claw naked and raw.

Royan fell on her knees beside the coping and leaned over the pond to

take him in her arms. She knew that she did not have the strength to

lift him out without doing him further dreadful injury. All she could do

was hold him and try to comfort him. She realized that he was dying no

man could survive such fearsome injury.

"They will come soon to help us," she whispered to him in Arabic.

"Someone must see the flames. Be brave, my husband, help will come very

soon."

He was twitching and convulsing in her arms, tortured by his mortal

injuries and racked by the effort to speak.

"The scroll?" His voice was barely intelligible. Royan looked up at the

holocaust that enveloped their home, and she shook her head.

"It's gone," she said. "Burned or stolen."

"Don't give it up," he mumbled. "All our work-'

"It's gone," she repeated. "No one will believe us without-'

"No!" His voice was faint but fierce. "For me, my last–2 "Don't say

that," she pleaded. "You will be all right."

"Promise," he demanded. "Promise me!"

"We have no sponsor. I am alone. I cannot do it alone."

"Harper!" he said. Royan leaned closer so that her ear touched his

fire-ravaged lips. "Harper," he repeated. "Strong hard – clever man-'

and she understood then. Harper, Of course, was the fourth and last name

on the list of sponsors that he had drawn up. Although he was the last

on the list, somehow she had always known that Duraid's order of

preference was inverted. Nicholas Quenton Harper was his first choice.

He had spoken so often of this man with respect and warmth, and

sometimes even with awe.

"But what do I tell him? He does not know me. How will I convince him?

The seventh scroll is gone."

"Trust him," he whispered. "Good man. Trust him-' There was a terrible

appeal in his "Promise me!'

Then she remembered the notebook in their flat at Giza in the Cairo

suburbs, and the Taita material on the hard drive on her PC. Not

everything was gone. "Yes," she agreed, "I promise you, my husband, I

promise you."

Though those mutilated features could show no human expression there was

a faint echo of satisfaction in his voice as he whispered, "My flower!"

Then his head dropped forward, and he died in her arms.

The peasants from the village found Royan still kneeling beside the

pond, holding him, whispering to him. By that time the flames were

abating, and the faint light of dawn was stronger than their fading

glow.

The staff from the museum and the Antiquities were at the funeral the

church of the oasis. Even Atalan Abou Sin, the Minister of Culture and

Tourism and Duraid's superior, had come out from Cairo in his official

black air-conditioned Mercedes.

He stood behind Royan and, though he was a Moslem, joined in the

responses. Nahoot Guddabi stood beside his uncle. Nahoot's mother was

the minister's youngest sister, which, as Duraid had sarcastically

pointed out, fully made up for the nephew's lack of qualifications and

experience in archaeology anj for his ineptitude as an administrator.

The day was sweltering. Outside, the temperature stood at over thirty

degrees, and even in the dim cloisters of the Coptic church it was

oppressive. In the thick clouds of incense smoke and the drone of the

black-clad priest intoning the ancient order of service Royan felt

herself suffocating. The stitches in her right arm pulled and burned,

and every time she looked at the long black coffin that stood in front

of the ornate and gilded altar, the dreadful vision of Duraid's bald and

scorched head rose before her eyes and she swayed'in her seat and had to

catch herself before she fell.

At last it was over and she could escape into the open air and the

desert sunlight. Even then her duties were not at an end. As principal

mourner, her place was directly behind the coffin as they walked in

procession to the cemetery amongst the palm groves, where Duraid's

relatives awaited him in the family mausoleum.

Before he returned to Cairo, Atalan Abou Sin came to shake her hand and

offer her a few words of condolence.

"What a terrible business, Royan. I have personally spoken to the

Minister of the Interior. They will catch the animals responsible for

this outrage, believe me. Please take as long as you need before you

return to the museum," he told her.

"I will be in my office again on Monday," she replied, and he drew a

pocket diary from inside the jacket of his dark double-breasted suit. He

consulted it and made a note, before he looked up at her again.

"Then come to see me at the Ministry in the afternoon.

Four 'clock," he told her. He went to the waiting Mercedes, while Nahoot

Guddabi came forward to shake hands. Though his skin was sallow and

there were coffeecoloured stains beneath his dark eyes, he was tall and

elegant with thick wavy hair and very white teeth. His suit was

impeccably tailored and he smelt faintly of an expensive cologne. His

expression was grave and sad.

"He was a good man. I held Duraid in the highest esteem," he told Royan,

and she nodded without replying to this blatant untruth. There had been

little affection between Duraid and his deputy. He had never allowed

Nahoot to work on the Taita scrolls; in particular he had never given

him access to the seventh scroll, and this had been a point of bitter

antagonism between them.

"I hope you will be applying for the post of director, Royan," he told

her. "You are well qualified for the job."

"Thank you, Nahoot, you are very kind. I haven't had a chance to think

about the future yet, but won't you be applying?"

"Of course," he nodded. "But that doesn't mean that no one else should.

Perhaps you will take the job out from in front of my nose." His smile

was complacent. She was a woman in an Arab world, and he was the nephew

of the minister. Nahoot knew just how heavily the odds favoured him.

"Friendly rivals?"he asked.

Royan smiled sadly. "Friends, at least. I will need all of those I can

find in the future."

"You know you have many friends. Everyone in the department likes you,

Royan." That at least was true, she supposed. He went on smoothly, "May

I offer you a lift back to Cairo? I am certain my uncle will not

object."

"Thank you, Nahoot, but I have my own car here, and I must stay over at

the oasis tonight to see to some of Duraid's affairs."This was not true.

Royan planned to travel back to the flat in Giza that evening but, for

reasons that she was not very sure of herself, she did not want Nahoot

to know of her plans.

"Then we shall see you at the museum on Monday." Royan left the oasis as

soon as she was able to escape from the relations and family friends and

peasants, so many of whom had worked for Duraid's family most of their

lives.

She felt numbed and isolated, so that all their condolences and

exhortations were meaningless and Without comfort.

Even at this late hour the tarmac road back through the desert was busy,

with files of vehicles moving steadily in both directions, for tomorrow

was Friday and the sabbath. She slipped her injured right arm out of the

sling, and it did not hamper her driving too much. She was able to make

reasonably good time. Nevertheless, it was after five in the afternoon

when she made out the green line against the tawny desolation of the

desert that marked the start of the narrow strip of irrigated and

cultivated land along the Nile which was the great artery of Egypt.

As always the traffic became denser the nearer she came to the capital,

and it was almost fully dark by the time she reached the apartment block

in Giza that overlooked both the river and those great monuments of

stone which stood so tall and massive against the evening sky, and which

for her epitomized the heart and history of her land.

She left Duraid's old green Renault in the underground garage of the

building and rode up in the elevator to the top floor.

She let herself into the flat and then froze in the doorway. The sitting

room had been ransacked – even the rugs had been pulled up and the

paintings ripped from the walls. In a daze she picked her way through

the litter of broken furniture and smashed ornaments. She glanced into

the bedroom as she went down the passage, and saw that it had not

escaped. Her clothes and those of Duraid were strewn over the floor, and

the doors of the cupboards stood ajar. One of these was smashed off its

hinges. The bed was overturned, and the sheets and bolsters had been

flung about.

She could smell the reek of broken cosmetic and perfume bottles from the

bathroom, but she could not yet bring herself to go in there. She knew

what she would find.

Instead she continued down the passage to the large room that they had

used as a study and workshop.

In the chaos the first thing that she noticed and mourried was the

antique chess set that Duraid had given her as a wedding present. The

board of jet and ivory squares was broken in half and the pieces had

been thrown about the room with vindictive and unnecessary violence. She

stooped and picked up the white queen. Her head had been snapped off.

Holding the queen in her good hand she moved like a sleepwalker to her

desk below the window. Her PC was wrecked. They had shattered the screen

and hacked the mainframe with what must have been an axe. She could tell

at a glance that there was no information left on the hard drive; it was

beyond repair.

She glanced down at the drawer in which she kept her floppy disks. That

and all the other drawers had been pulled out and thrown on the floor.

They were empty, of course; along with the disks, all her notebooks and

photographs were missing. Her last connections with the seventh scroll

were lost. After three years of work, gone was  the proof that it had

ever existed.

She stumped down on the floor, feeling beaten and exhausted. Her arm

started to ache again, and she was alone and vulnerable as she had never

been in her life before. She had never thought that she would miss

Duraid so desperately. Her shoulders began to shake and she felt the

tears welling up from deep within her. She tried to hold them back, but

they scalded her eyelids and she let them flow. She sat amongst the

wreckage of her life and wept until there was nothing more left within

her, and then she curled up on the littered carpet and fell, into the

sleep of exhaustion and despair.

 the Monday morning she had managed to restore some order into her life.

The police had come to the flat and taken her statement, and she had

tidied up most of the disarray. She had even glued the head back on her

white queen. When she left the flat and climbed into the green Renault

her arm was feeling easier, and, if not cheerful, she was at least a

great deal more optimistic, and sure of what she had to do.

When she reached the museum she went first to Duraid's office and was

annoyed to find that Nahoot was there before her. He was supervising two

of the security guards as they cleared out all Duraid's personal

effects.

"You might have had the consideration to let me do that," she told him

coldly, and he gave her his most winning smile.

"I am sorry, Royan. I thought I would help." He was smoking one of his

fat Turkish cigarettes. She loathed the heavy, musky odour.

She crossed to Duraid's desk, and opened the top right hand drawer. "My

husband's day book was in here. It's gone now. Have you seen it?"

"No, there was nothing in that drawer."Nahoot looked at the two guards

for confirmation, and they shuffled their feet and shook their heads. It

did not really matter, she thought. The book had not contained much of

vital interest. Duraid had always relied on her to record and store all

data of importance, and most of it had been on her PC.

"Thank you, Nahoot," she dismissed him. "I will do whatever remains to

be done. I don't want to keep you from your work."

"Any help you need, Royan, please let me know." He bowed slightly as he

left her.

It did not take her long to finish in Duraid's office. She had the

guards take the boxes of his possessions down the corridor to her own

office and pile them against the wall.

She worked through the lunch-hour tidying up all her own affairs, and

when she had finished there was still an hour until her appointment with

Atalan Abou Sin.

If she was to make good her promise to Duraid, then she was going to be

absent for some time. Wanting to take leave of all her favoUrite

treasures, she went down into the public section of the huge building.

Monday was a busy day, and the exhibition halls of the museum were

thronged with groups of tourists. They flocked behind their guides,

sheep following the shepherd.

They crowded around the most famous of the displays.

They listened to the guides reciting their well-rehearsed spiels in all

the tongues of Babel.

Those rooms on the second floor that contained the treasures of

Tutankhamen were so crowded that she spent little time there. She

managed to reach the display cabinet that contained the great golden

death'mask of the child pharaoh. As always, the splendour and the

romance of it quickened her breathing and made her heart beat faster.

Yet as she stood before it, jostled by a pair of big-busted and sweaty

middle-aged female tourists, she pondered, as she had so often before,

that if an insignificant weakling king could have gone to his tomb with

such a miraculous creation covering his mummified features, in what

state must the great Ramessids have lain in their funeral temples.

Ramesses II, the greatest of them all, had reigned sixty-seven years and

had spent those decades accumulating his funerary treasure from all the

vast territories that he had conquered.

Royan went next to pay her respects to the old king.

After thirty centuries Ramesses II slept on with a rapt and serene

expression on his gaunt features. His skin had a light, marble-like

sheen to it. The sparse strands of his hair were blond and dyed with

henna. His hands, dyed with the same stuff, were long and thin and

elegant. However, he was clad only in a rag of linen. The grave robbers

had even unwrapped his mummy to reach the amulets and scarabs beneath

the linen bandages, so that his body was almost naked. When these

remains had been discovered in 1881 in the cache of royal mummies in the

cliff cave at Deir El Bahari, only a scrap of papyrus parchment attached

to his breast had proclaimed his lineage.

There was a moral in that, she supposed, but as she stood before these

pathetic remains she wondered again, as she and Duraid had done so often

before, whether Taita the scribe had told the truth, whether somewhere

in the far-off, savage mountains of Africa another great pharaoh slept

on undisturbed with all his treasures intact about him.

The very thought of it made her shiver with excitement, and goose

pimples prickled her skin and raised the fine dark hair at the nape of

her neck.

"I have given you my promise, my husband," she whispered in Arabic.

"This will be for you and your memory, for it was you who led the way."

She glanced at her "Wrist-watch as she went down the main staircase. She

had fifteen minutes before she must leave for her appointment with the

minister, and she knew, exactly how she would spend that time. What she

was going to visit was in one of the less-frequented side halls.

The tour guides very seldom led their charges this way, except as a

short-cut to see the statue of Amenhotep.

Royan stopped in front of the glass-fronted display case that reached

from floor to ceiling of the narrow room. It was packed with small

artefacts, tools and weapons, amulets and vessels and utensils, the

latest of them dating from the twentieth dynasty of the New Kingdom,

1100 BC, whilst the oldest survived from the dim ages of the Old Kingdom

almost five thousand years ago. The cataloguing of this accumulation was

only rudimentary. Many of the items were not described.

At the furthest end, on the bottom shelf, was a display of jewellery and

finger rings and seals. Beside each of the seals was a wax impression

made from it.

Royan went down on her knees to examine one of these artefacts more

closely. The tiny blue seal of lapis lazuli in the centre of the display

was beautifully carved.

Lapis was a rare and precious material for the ancients, as it had not

occurred naturally in the Egyptian Empire. The wax imprint cut from it

depicted a hawk with a broken wing, and the simple legend beneath it was

clear for Royan to read: "TAITA, THE SCRIBE OF THE GREAT QUEEN'.

She knew it was the same man, for he had used the maimed hawk as his

autograph in the scrolls. She wondered who had found this trifle and

where. Perhaps some peasant had plundered it from the lost tomb of the

old slave and scribe, but she would never know.

"Are you teasing me, Taita? Is it all some elaborate hoax? Are you

laughing at me even now from your tomb, wherever it may be?" She leaned

even closer, until her forehead touched the cool glass. "Are you my

friend, Taita, or are you my implacable adversary?" She stood up and

dusted off the front of her skirt. "We shall see. I will-play the game

with you, and we shall see who outwits whom," she promised.

The minister kept her waiting only a few minutes before his male

secretary ushered her into his presence. Atalan Abou Sin wore a dark,

shiny silk suit and sat at his desk, although Royan knew that he

preferred a more comfortable robe and a cushion on the rugs of the

floor. He noticed her glance and smiled deprecatingly. "I have a meeting

with some Americans this afternoon." .. She liked him. He had always

been kind to her, and she owed him her job at the museum. Most other men

in his position would have refused. Duraid's request for a female

assistant, especially his own wife.

He asked after her health and she showed him her bandaged arm. "The

stitches will come out in ten days."

They chatted for a while in a polite manner. Only Westerners would have

the gaucherie to come -directly to the main business to be discussed.

However, to save him embarrassment Royan took the first opportunity he

gave her to tell him, "I feel that I need some time to myself. I need to

recover from my loss and to decide what I am to do with the rest of my

life, now that I am a widow. I would be grateful if you would consider

my request for at least six months' unpaid leave of absence. I want to

go to stay with my mother in England."

Atalan showed real concern and urged her, "Please do not leave us for

too long. The work you have done has been invaluable. We need you to

help carry on from where Duraid left off." But he could not entirely

conceal his relief She knew that he had expected her to put before him

her application for the directorship. He must have discussed it with his

nephew. However, he was too kind a man to relish having to tell her that

she would not be selected for the job. Things in Egypt were changing,

women were emerging from their traditional roles, but not that much or

that swiftly. They both knew that the directorship must go to Nahoot

Ouddabi.

Atalan walked with her to the door of his office and shook her hand in

parting, and as she rode down in the lift she felt a sense of release

and freedom.

She had left the Renault standing in the sun in the Ministry car park.

When she opened the door the interior was hot enough to bake bread. She

opened all the windows and fanned the driver's door to force out the

heated air, but still the surface of the driver's seat burned the backs

of her thighs when she slid in behind the wheel.

As soon as she drove through the gates she was engulfed in the swarm of

Cairo traffic. She crawled along behind an overloaded bus that belched a

steady blue cloud of diesel fumes over the Renault. The traffic problem

was one that seemed to have no solution. There was so little parking

available that vehicles lined the verge of the road three and four

deep," choking the flow in the centre to a trickle.

As the bus in front of her braked and forced her to a halt, Royan smiled

as she recalled the old joke that some drivers who had parked at the

kerb had to abandon their cars there, for they were never able to

extricate them from the tangle. Perhaps there was a little truth in

this, for some of those vehicles she could see had not been moved for

weeks. Their windscreens were completely obscured with dust and many of

them had flat tyres.

She glanced in the rear-view mirror. There was a taxi stopped only

inches from her back bumper, and behind that the traffic was backed up

solidly. Only the motorcyclists had freedom of movement. As she watched

in the mirror, one of these came weaving through the congestion with

suicidal abandon. It was a battered red 200 cc Honda so covered with

dust that the colour was hardly recognizable. There was a passenger

perched on the pillion, and both he and the driver had covered the lower

half of their faces with the corners of their white headcloths as

protection against the exhaust fumes and dust.

Passing on the wrong side, the Honda skimmed through the narrow gap

between the taxi and the cars parked at the kerb with nothing to spare

on either side.

The taxi-driver made an obscene gesture with thumb and forefinger, and

called on Allah to witness that the driver was both mad and stupid.

The Honda slowed slightly as it drew level with Royan's Renault, and

the' pillion passenger leaned out and dropped something through the open

window on to the passenger seat beside her, Immediately the driver

accelerated so abruptly that for a moment the front wheel was lifted off

the ground. He put the motorcycle over into a tight turn and sped away

down the narrow alleyway that opened off the main thoroughfare, narrowly

avoiding hitting an old woman in his path.

As the pillion passenger looked back at her the wind blew the fold of ck

she recognized the man she had last seen in the headlights of the Fiat

on the road beside the oasis.

"Yusuf!" As the Honda disappeared she looked down at the object that he

had dropped on to the seat beside her.

It was egg-shaped and the segmented metallic surface was painted

military green. She had seen the same thing so often on old TV war

movies that she recognized it instantly as a fragmentation grenade, and

at the same moment she realized that the priming handle had flown off

and the weapon was set to explode within seconds.

Without thinking, she grabbed the door handle beside her and flung all

her weight against the door. It burst open and she tumbled out in the

road. Her foot slipped off the clutch and the Renault bounded forward

and crashed into the back of the stationary bus.

As Royan sprawled in the road under the wheels of the following taxi,

the grenade exploded. Through the open driver's door blew a sheet of