The Buried Pyramid (66 page)

Neville frowned. He honestly could not remember having lied, yet there was something in Neferankhotep’s manner that made him believe the pharaoh thought differently.

“What about the lies you told Lady Cheshire?” Neferankhotep prompted. “Certainly you cannot deny you deceived her regarding your intentions.”

“I did,” Neville agreed. “However, I did so because of the dangers I had met with in the course of my previous attempts.”

“You sought to keep her safe from these?” Neferankhotep asked mockingly.

“Not in the least,” Neville said. “However, not knowing who had been responsible for the previous attacks, and thinking that the guilty party could well have been a rival within the archeological profession, I did not dare tell Lady Cheshire anything lest the information reach the wrong ears.”

“So you did not trust her,” Neferankhotep said.

“And is there any commandment that I should?” Neville replied with more bitterness than he had intended.

“No,” Neferankhotep replied sadly. “Trust is something earned, never commanded.”

Neville saw the sorrow of centuries-past betrayal there, and felt unwilling sympathy for the pharaoh who had striven to give justice to his people, only to be rewarded with theft and violation after his death.

“Try to understand,” Neville pleaded. “As I said earlier, this game is only amusing if you’re not one of the pieces. I don’t doubt you can find instances in the past ten years I’ve been hunting for this tomb when I’ve violated the Ten Commandments. For example, I’m not sure how any living soul is supposed to manage not to covet, even if one fights the impulse to act on that desire. If I’m damned, then let me hop up on the scales and get the formalities over.”

Neferankhotep shook his head.

“There is nothing in our laws against coveting, as long as one does not act—and you are right, there is no one alive who has not sinned against maat. It is the reason that drove those actions that makes them just or unjust—and I would be verging on violation of maat myself if my questions pressed you to feel fear or anger. Answer but one more question for me.”

“What?” Neville knew he sounded belligerent, but as the alternative was trembling as no subject of the queen should do before a foreign king, he resigned himself to rudeness.

“Why have you gone to so much trouble to find this place, Sir Neville Hawthorne, even when you were repeatedly warned against doing so?”

Neville spread his hands.

“Two reasons. One is simple. I hated not succeeding all those years ago when old Alphonse and I first tried to find proof of the truth of the legend. The second is harder to explain, especially since I don’t know if your people had anything like archeology.”

Neferankhotep shrugged. “Not as a systematic science perhaps, but the monuments of our fathers and father’s fathers surrounded us. We were drawn to the past, and sought to connect ourselves to its glories.”

“Our people feel that too,” Neville said, “but it’s more complicated than that. In the time and place where we live, there is so much being discovered daily that constancy is hard to hold onto. Natural science tells us that some rocks are young when judged on the scale of creation, and that living things were not created by a beneficent God, but by the force of a Nature—as Tennyson put it so well, ‘red in tooth and claw.’ Your people thought themselves living beneath a goddess spangled with stars, that the sun was a god in a boat, the rising and falling of the waters of the Nile a constancy that proved the basic goodness of all things.”

“And archeology?” Neferankhotep asked. “How does this alter any of what your natural science has discovered?”

“It doesn’t,” Neville said, “and for some people, it probably ruins comfortable illusions—maybe for people like Mrs. Syms, who want magic, but not to think about what that magic means.”

“Leave Sarah Syms to her own judgment,” the pharaoh said. “What is it you seek?”

“The truth behind a legend,” Neville said. “The thought that somewhere, somehow there might have been a good king, that heroes might have fought on the plains of Troy, that the past is not all fairy stories and monsters. Alphonse Liebermann looked for evidence of Moses the Lawgiver. He found you. I guess I just kept looking—for you, for Moses, for some evidence that all the great grand things we’ve been told happened in the past can’t be reduced to fossils and mental aberration.”

“And if you succeeded?” Neferankhotep asked. “What would you have done?”

“I have succeeded,” Neville said. “For I am talking to you, and despite the differences that time and culture have set between us, I have seen and heard enough to know that the legend was true. On that faith in your adherence to maat—to the real truth and justice that is more potent than any code of laws—I rest my case.”

24

Condemned

Jenny tried to feel brave when the mist released her, admitting her into the glowing polychrome company of the gods. She was standing about halfway between Neferankhotep’s throne and the gleaming set of scales. Thoth stood near the pharaoh, lowering his ledger as if he had just finished showing Neferankhotep and Maat some notes. Anubis stood over by Ammit, thoughtfully scratching the monster between its round, not-quite-hippopotamus, not-quite-lion ears.

Jenny tried to guess if the monster had been recently fed, but she couldn’t tell. The grotesque features of the Forty-Two Judges gave nothing away but a certain leering pleasure in her uneasiness. She was glad for Mozelle threading herself around her ankles, and longed to pick the kitten up and hold her, but she figured that this would be less than dignified, maybe even less than respectful—and with so much on the line, not even Jenny Benet was going to flout custom lightly.

Crossing to an intricately carved table with its top painted so it could be used as a senet board, Jenny unbuckled her gun belt and laid it carefully along the edge. Then she took the derringer out of her boot top and set it there as well. She thought about doing the same with her knives, but decided against it. She’d made her point.

“Not that I think they’d do anything to you,” she said, her laugh sounding a bit more nervous than she liked, “but where I come from it’s just good manners.”

“These are weapons?” Neferankhotep asked, and though no one said anything formal, Jenny knew her trial had begun.

“That’s right,” she said. “Your people had bows and arrows, I seem to recall. Well, these are something like that. They fling a projectile, and can kill from a distance.”

“You know how to use these?”

“I do,” she said.

“You are very skilled?”

“I am,” Jenny said carefully, “a pretty fair hand.”

She knew what was coming next, had known it would be coming since Neferankhotep had so carefully explained the parts of the Negative Confessions that matched up with the Ten Commandments. The pharaoh surprised her.

“The Negative Confessions contain injunctions against both lying and slandering. Your Eighth Commandment is usually understood to be against bearing false witness. Tell me, as this was taught to you: was this understood to be restricted to those times when you might be called upon to bear witness—in a court of law, or a circumstance when you would be asked to speak to another’s character or actions?”

Jenny considered.

“No, sir. I think as it was taught me it pretty much meant you shouldn’t tell a lie, not anywhere or anytime.”

“Yet you would have lied to your uncle who has been good to you—who gave you a home when your parents were lost to you. How do you justify this action?”

Jenny wanted to pretend she didn’t remember, see if what this Neferankhotep was referring to was the same as what she was thinking, but she figured it wouldn’t make much sense acting as if these Egyptian deities didn’t have resources she couldn’t even imagine. Why, who knew what Thoth had been showing them on that ledger sheet of his? He might have a whole line of photographs set up to record every action, with captions to show what a person said or thought. She’d had a Sunday school teacher who’d said that the Last Judgment before God would be like that, and for months Jenny was shy about using the outhouse or blowing her nose, imagining God watching all that. She’d managed to banish the thought after a while, though it cropped up every so often and made her blush.

She was blushing now, and hoped that they didn’t think it was because of the question.

“Well,” she said, speaking quickly so they wouldn’t think she was hiding anything, “if what you’re talking about is how I was going to sneak along on this trip rather than stay back in Cairo, I guess you’re sorta right about my willingness to lie. I won’t even hedge that I didn’t end up having to lie after all, that Uncle Neville took me along. I would have lied if that’s what it would have taken.”

“And why would you have done this?”

Jenny thought back to her conversations with Papa Antonio.

“My uncle has a friend, Antonio Donati, who told me he was worried about what Uncle Neville was getting into with this trip. He wanted me to go along, keep Uncle careful, since Uncle wouldn’t be able to forget I was there and, frail female critter I am, would need looking after.”

No one laughed, and Jenny felt her blush deepen.

“So you were guided into willingness to lie by this friend of your uncle’s?”

Jenny shook her head.

“I can’t blame anyone else. Papa Antonio made it easier to justify what I wanted to do anyhow. I didn’t want to sit back in Cairo watching Mary Travers flirt with the soldiers and all that. I wanted to come along and be part of the adventure. I figured I could be useful, too. They didn’t have a doctor with them, and I’ve some skill. Even if we didn’t run into violence, there’s plenty of bugs and snakes out there. Stephen even nearly got killed by the sun.”

“So you would have lied in order to make possible a greater good—the benefits your added skills would grant.”

“Sounds good,” Jenny agreed. She was feeling reckless, dreading the question that just had to come. “But I’m not going to lie. I’d have done my best to go along even if Uncle Neville had himself a passel of doctors and nurses, too.”

“For the adventure.”

“That’s right.”

“And that’s all this journey meant to you?”

“Well,” Jenny said, slightly puzzled, “isn’t that enough? I don’t pretend to be a scholar like Stephen, and I don’t have Uncle Neville’s long-time interest in archeology. Mind, I think I might be catching the bug, but what really had me raring to go was remembering the letters Uncle Neville would send my mama, letters talking about his trips to foreign places and the things he did there. I’d dreamed all my life about being with him on one of those trips—like you dream about being a character in a fairy tale. I wasn’t going to give up that dream for a lack of courage.”

“Lack of courage?” Neferankhotep pursed his lips thoughtfully. “Is that how you would have seen honesty, and abiding by the ruling set down by one who—in law at least—stood as your father? As a lack of courage?”

Jenny paused long enough to think carefully about this.

“Yes, sir. I think that’s about right.”

“Yet you had doubts about the justice of this venture.”

Jenny nodded. “I did. It probably speaks badly for me, but I think I believed the reality of the stories about you more than the rest of them did. I wasn’t sure that what Uncle Neville was after was quite right, but I couldn’t stop him, and maybe he’d not find anything. I guess I figured—if I thought about it all that hard—that if we did find something, I could talk to him about how to handle the discovery then.”

“And that it wasn’t worth discussing before.”

“Oh, we did that,” Jenny said. “Those Sphinx letters made sure we talked about it at least a bit. Thing was, all I ended up was convinced that there was no talking him out of going until he’d at least given it a try.”

She hesitated.

“Sir, do you know who wrote those Sphinx letters?”

“I do.”

“And can you tell me?”

“Perhaps later,” Neferankhotep said. “This is not the time.”

Jenny couldn’t bear the waiting any longer.

“Aren’t you going to ask me about shooting at that man back at Papa Antonio’s?”

Neferankhotep looked at her, his mild eyes stern.

“Does it trouble you because you fear I shall, or for the act itself?”

“The act doesn’t bother me none—well, not much,” Jenny said. “He was going to kill me, coming into my room that way. I had to do something.”