The Seventh Scroll (12 page)

"Yes?" She sat forward eagerly, but he shook his head.

"We lost a man there. The only casualty on the second expedition. Rope parted and he fell a hundred feet. Landed on his back across a spur of rock."

i am sorry. But what was the other reason you remember the spot."

"There is a Coptic Christian monastery there, built into the rock face about four hundred feet above the surface of the river."

"Down the re in the depths of the gorge?" She sounded incredulous. "Why would they build a monastery there?"

"Ethiopia is one of the oldest Christian countries on earth. It has over nine thousand churches and monasteries, a great many of them in similarly remote and almost inaccessible places in the mountains. This one at the Dandera river is the reputed burial site of St. Frumentius, the saint who introduced Christianity to Ethiopia from the Byzantine Empire in Constantinople in the early third century. Legend has it that he was shipwrecked on the Red Sea shore and taken to Aksum, where he converted the Emperor Ezana."

"Did you visit the monastery?"

"Hell, no!" he laughed. "We were too busy just surviving, too eager to escape from the hell of the gorge to have any time for sightseeing. We descended the falls and kept on down river. All I remember of the monastery are the excavations in the cliff face high above the pool of the river, and the distant figures of the troglodytic monks in their white robes lining the parapet of the caves to watch impassively as we passed. Some of us waved up to them) and felt quite rebuffed when they made no response."

"How would we ever reach that spot again, without a full-scale river expedition?" she wondered aloud, staring disconsolately at the board.

"Discouraged already?" He grinned at her. "Wait until you meet some of the mosquitoes that live down there.

They pick you up and fly with you to their lairs before they eat you."

"Be serious," she entreated him. "How would we ever get down there?"

"The monks are fed by the villagers who live up on the highlands above the gorge. Apparently, there is a goat track down the wall. They told us that it takes three days to get down that track into the gut of the gorge from the rim."

"Could you find your way down?"

"No, but I have a few ideas on the subject. We will come to that later. Firstly, we must decide what we expect to find down there after four thousand years." He looked at her expectantly. "Your turn now. Convince me." He handed her the silver-headed pointer, dropped into the chair beside her and folded his arms.

"First you have to go back to the book." She exchanged the pointer for the copy of River God. "You remember the character of Tanus from the story?"

"Of course. He was the commander of the Egyptian armies under Queen Lostris, with the title of Great Lion of Egypt. He led the exodus from Egypt, when they were driven out by the Hyksos."

"He was also the Queen's secret lover and, if we are to believe Taita, the father of Prince Memnon, her eldest son," she agreed.

Tanus was killed during a punitive expedition against an Ethiopian chief named Arkoun in the high mountains, and his body was mummified and brought back to the Queen by Taita,'Nicholas expanded the story. Precisely." She nodded. This leads me on to the other clue that Duraid and I winkled out."

"From the seventh scroll?" He unfolded his arms and sat forward in his seat.

"No, not from the scrolls, but from the inscriptions in the tomb of Queen Lostris." She reached into her bag and brought out another photograph. This is an enlargement of a section of the murals from the burial chamber, that part of the wall that later fell away and was lost when the alabaster jars were revealed. Duraid and I believe that the fact that Taita placed this inscription in the place of honour, over the hiding-place of the scrolls, was significant." She passed the photograph

to him, and he picked up a magnifying glass from the table to study it. While he puzzled over the hieroglyphics Royan went on, "You will recall from the book how Taita loved riddles and word games, how he boasts so often that he is the greatest of all boa players?"

Nicholas looked up from the magnifying glass, "I remember that. I go along with the theory that bao was the forerunner of the game of chess. I have a dozen or so boards in the museum collection, some from Egypt and others from further south in Africa."

"Yes, I would also subscribe to that theory. Both games have many of the same objects and rules, but bao is a more rudimentary form of the game. It is played with coloured stones of different rank, instead of chess men. Well, I believe that Taita was not able to resist the temptation to display his riddling skills and his cleverness to posterity. I believe that he was so conceited that he deliberately left clues to the location of the Pharaoh's tomb, both in the scrolls and amongst the murals that he tells us he painted with his own hands in the tomb of his beloved Queen."

"You think that this is one of those clues?" Nicholas tapped the photograph with the glass.

"Read it," she instructed him. "It's in classical hieroglyphics - not too difficult compared to his cryptic codes."

"'The father of the prince who is not the father, the giver of the blue that killed him,"' he translated haltingly, "'guards eternally hand in hand with Hapi the stone testament of the pathway to the father of the prince who is not the father, the giver of blood and ashes."'

Nicholas shook his head, "No, it doesn't make sense," he protested, you must have made an error in the translation."

"Don't despair. You are making your first acquaintance with Taita, the champion bao, player and consummate riddler. Duraid and I puzzled over it for weeks," she reassured him. "To work it out, let's go back to the book. Tanus was not the father of Prince Memnon in name, but, as the Queen's lover, was his biological father. On his deathbed, he gave Memnon the blue sword that had inflicted his own mortal wound during the battle with the native Ethiopian chief There is a full description of the battle in the book."

"Yes, when I first read that section, I remember thinking that the blue sword was probably one of the very earliest iron weapons, and in an age of bronze would have been a marvel of the armourer's art. A gift fit for a prince," Nicholas mused, and went on, "So "the father of the prince who is not the father" is Tanus?" He sighed with resignation.

"For the moment I accept your interpretation."

"Thank you for your trust and confidence in me," she said sarcastically.

"But to proceed with Taita's riddle Pharaoh Mamose was Memnon's father in name only, but not his blood father. Again the father who was not the father. Mamose passed down to the prince the double crown of Egypt, the red and white crowns of Upper and Lower Kingdoms - the blood and the ashes.

"I am able to swallow that more easily. What about the rest of the inscription?"Nicholas was clearly intrigued.

"The expression "hand in hand" is ambiguous in ancient Egyptian. It could just as well mean very close to, or within sight of, something."

"Go on. At last you have me sitting up and taking notice,'Nicholas encouraged her.

"Hapi is the hermaphroditic god or goddess of the Nile, depending on the gender he or she adopts at any particular moment. Throughout the scrolls Taita uses Hapi as an alternative name for the river."

"So if we put the seventh scroll and the "inscription from the Queen's tomb together, what then is your full interpretation?" he insisted.

"Simply this: Tanus is buried within sight of, or very close to, the river at the second waterfall. There is a stone monument or inscription on, or in, his tomb that points the way to the tomb of Pharaoh."

He exhaled through his teeth. "I am exhausted from all this jumping to conclusions. What other clues have you ferreted out for me?"

"That's it," she said, and he looked at her with disbelief.

"That's it? Nothing else?" he demanded, and she shook her head.

"Just suppose that you are correct so far. Let us suppose that the river is recognizably the same in shape and configuration as it was nearly four thousand years ago. Let us further suppose that Taita was indeed pointing us towards the second waterfall at the Dandera river. just what do we look for when we get there? If there is a rock inscription, will it still be intact or will it be eroded away by weather and the action of the river?"

"Howard Carter had an equally slender lead to the tomb of Tutankhamen,'

she pointed out mildly. "A single piece of papyrus, of dubious authenticity."

"Howard Carter had only the area of the Valley of the Kings to search. It still took him ten years," he replied. "You have given me Ethiopia, a country twice the size of France.

How long will that take us, do you think?"

She stood up abruptly, "Excuse me, I think I should go and visit my mother in hospital. It's fairly obvious that I am wasting my time here."

"It is not yet visiting hours," he told her.

"She has a private room." Royan made for the door.

"I will drive you to the hospital," he offered.

"Don't bother. I will call a taxi," she replied in a tone that crackled with ice.

"A taxi will take an hour to get here," he warned, and she relented just enough to let him lead her to the Range Rover. They drove in silence for fifteen minutes, before he spoke.

"I am not very good at apologies. Not much practice, I am afraid, but I am sorry. I was abrupt. I didn't mean to be.

Carried away by the excitement of the moment She did not reply, and after a minute added,'You will have to talk to me, unless we are to correspond only by note. It will be a bit awkward down in the Abbay gorge."

"I had the distinct impression that you were no longer interested in going down there." She stared ahead through the windscreen.

am a brute," he agreedi and she glanced sideways at him. It was her undoing. His grin was irresistible, and she laughed.

"I Suppose I will just have to come to terms with that fact. You are a brute."

"Still partners?" he asked.

"At the moment you are the only brute I have.

suppose that I am stuck with you."

He dropped her off at the main hospital entrance. "I will pick you up here at three 'clock," he told her and drove on into the centre of York. From his university days Nicholas had kept a small flat in one of the narrow alleys behind York Minster. The entire building was registered in the name of a Cayman Island company, and the unlisted telephone there did not route through an internal switchboard. No ownership could be traced to him personally. Before he had met Rosalind the flat had played an important part in his social life. But nowadays Nicholas only used it for confidential and clandestine business. Both the Libyan and the Iraqi expeditions had been planned and organized from here.

He hadn't used the flat for months, and it was cold and musty-smelling and uninviting. He put a match to the gas fire in the grate and filled the kettle. With a mug of steaming tea in front of him he placed a call to a bank in Jersey, followed immediately by another to a bank in the Cayman Islands.

"A wise rat has more than one exit from its burrow." This was a family maxim, passed down through the generations. He was going to need funds for the expedition, and the lawyers had most of those locked up already.

He gave the passwords and account numbers to each of the bank managers, and instructed them to make certain transfers. It always amazed him how easily matters could be rranged, as long as you had money.

He checked his watch. It was still early morning in Florida, but Alison picked up the phone on the second ring. She was the blonde feminine dynamo who ran Global Safaris, a company that arranged hunting and fishing expeditions to remote areas around the world.

"Hello, Nick. We haven't heard from you in over a year. We thought you didn't love us any more."

"I have been out of it for a while," he admitted. How do you tell people that your wife and two little girls had died?

"Ethiopia?" She did not sound at all disconcerted by the request. "When did you want to go?"

"How about next week?"

"You have to be joking. We only work with one hunter there, Nassous Roussos, and he is booked two years in advance."

"Is there nobody else?" he insisted. "I have to be in and out again before the big rains."

"What trophies are you after? she hedged. "Mountain nyala? Menelik's bushbuck?"

"I am planning a collecting trip for the museum, down the Abbay river." It was as much as he was prepared to tell her.

She hedged a little longer and then told him reluctantly, This is without our recommendation, do you understand. There is only one hunter who may take You on at such short notice, but I don't even know if he has a camp on the Blue Nile. He is a Russian, and we have had mixed reports about him. Some people say he is ex-KGB an was one of Mengistu's bunch of thugs."

Mengistu was the "Black Stalin' who had deposed an then murdered the old Emperor Haile Selassie, and in sixteen years of despotic Marxist rule had driven Ethiopia to its knees. When his sponsor, the Soviet Empire, had collapsed, Mengistu had been overthrown and fled the country.

"I am desperate enough to go to bed with the devil," he told her. "I promise I won't come back to you with any complaints."

"Okay, then, no comebacks-' and she gave him a name and a telephone number in Addis Ababa.

"I love you, Alison darling Nicholas told her.

"I wish," she said, and hung up on him.

He didn't expect that it would be easy to telephone Addis, and he wasn't disappointed in his expectations. But at last he got through. A woman with a sweet lisping of Ethiopian accent answered and switched to fluent English when he asked for Boris Brusilov.

"He is out on safari at present," she told him. "I am Woizero Tessay, his wife." In Ethiopia a wife did not take on her husband's name. Nicholas remembered enough of the language to know that the name meant Lady Sun, a pretty name.

"But if it is in connection with safari business I can help you," said Lady Sun.

Nicholas picked Royan up outside the hospital entrance.