The Seventh Scroll (3 page)

She stood on tiptoe with the water lapping her lips, shivering more with shock than with cold, determined to wait for the safety of the sunrise before she moved.

It was only much later when she saw the glow of the fire lighting the sky, and the flames flickering through the trunks of the palm trees, that she forgot her own safety and dragged herself back to the bank.

She knelt in the mud at the water's edge, shuddering and shaking and gasping, weak with loss of blood and shock and the reaction from fear, 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 fireravaged 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.