The Deceit (35 page)

Ryan stood, truly frustrated, and walked to the railing. Where he gazed at the bulrushes, and at a very distant storm, way over in the western desert. With its tiny flashes of lightning, it looked like a storm for toys. ‘Diocletian!’

‘What?’

‘Macarius was a sixth-century scholar. Are we sure he used the same calendar?’ Ryan closed his eyes and tutted.
Stupid.

‘So these are not the right dates?’

‘Helen, he’s not using the damn Gregorian calendar. He’s using the Diocletian calendar, that’s what the Copts went by.’

‘The, ah …?’

‘Diocletian calendar, the Era of Martyrs: it was the Coptic calendar for many centuries. The year one is the year the Emperor Diocletian came to power, 284, the year he began to slaughter all the Christians in Egypt. For them it was the apocalypse, so it shaped everything – including the Coptic calendar.’

Helen was already tapping out the numbers, using her phone as a calculator. ‘So we add 284 to each date if it is
BC
, and subtract it if it is
AD
.’

‘Confusing, but yes. Try it.’

Helen scribbled in Ryan’s notebook. An owl hooted as the boat slipped past. A harbinger of doom and death, thought Ryan. The Copts: they would deface them if they found them in Egyptian tombs. Chisel them away.

‘So,’ Helen said, ‘when Macarius writes 1630 he really means 1346
BC
; 1598 means 1314
BC
. And 119 years before the Era of Martyrs, actually means, in our calendar, 165
AD
…’ She paused, frowning, and wrote the last digits. ‘And 257 equals 541
AD
. And 286 means 570
AD
.’

Ryan was beginning to see something: he could sense the pattern or the logic. Part of him wanted to stop right here. Because what was dimly discernible was terrifying.

‘OK,’ he said, trying to hide the apprehension in his voice. ‘Macarius was writing in the late sixth century: it must have been late if he included 570
AD
. So whatever happened in 541
AD
and 570
AD
would have been recent history. Maybe it provoked him to write what he did, to go on his journey. I think I can guess already, but make sure I am right. What major event happened in 541
AD
?’

Helen pressed the keys. She said, solemnly, ‘The Great Plague of Justinian. Millions died across the Byzantine Empire … Egypt was sorely afflicted.’

‘I thought so.’ Ryan’s throat was dry. Everything was dry. He wanted to dive into the Nile. ‘Now, 165
AD
. Try that.’

Her answer was sudden. ‘My God.’

‘What?’ Ryan asked, though he could make a very good guess.

‘165
AD
. The Antonine Plague. Otherwise known as the Plague of Galen, brought back to the Roman Empire by soldiers returning from the Near East. Millions died.’

‘OK. Yes. 1314
BC
? Start looking for plagues now.’

‘1314
BC
? That is … the year before the Exodus, traditionally. The Exodus of the Jews.’

‘Therefore the year of the plagues of Moses, just before Exodus. The ten plagues of Moses, in the damn Bible.’ Ryan could see it all now: the entire appalling secret. With a sense of dread, he asked, ‘And 1346
BC
?’

‘Akhenaten is in power, and …’ she did another search, ‘his reign is wracked by plagues.’

Ryan stifled his fear. ‘570
AD
is the birth of the prophet Mohammed. But check it for something else, search specifically for plagues.’

Helen did as she was told. Then she spoke, very quietly. ‘570
AD
. Europe and the Middle East are swept by another bubonic plague. There is a quote: “In 570
AD
Greek soldiers who fought outside Mecca in 569–570
AD
are said to have carried home a strange disease.”’ A silence. Helen shook her head. ‘But I do not understand, how does this prove anything? So, there were plagues, and Macarius noted them.’

Ryan raised a hand, and read from his own notebook. ‘He doesn’t just note them. Remember the passages that Macarius quotes at the beginning? It was there all along, written down, we just didn’t see it.’ He turned his notebook so that he could read by the fragile moonlight: ‘Manetho, who wrote his Egyptian history under Ptolemy II, represents Moses as a rebellious Egyptian priest
who made himself the leader of a colony of lepers.
’ He flicked the page. ‘And here, further down, Macarius talks about the famous Tutankhamun Stela. I know what that says off by heart, so does every Egyptologist: “Now, when His Majesty was crowned king, the temples and the estates of the gods had fallen into ruin. The world was in the
chaos of disease.
”’

Another flick of a page. ‘And here: Macarius quotes Chaeremon, an Egyptian scholar in Alexandria who became Nero’s tutor. Chaeremon says the goddess Isis appeared to Amenophis in a dream and advised him to cleanse Egypt by
purging Egypt of lepers
, so the king gathered one hundred thousand lepers and expelled them, and their leaders were Moses and Joseph.’

Ryan waited for a second, giving his thoughts time to calm, and clarify. Then he went on. ‘And again here, Macarius cites Pompeius Trogus’s
Historiae Philippicae
. He doesn’t give the quote but I know it: Moses is said to have quit Egypt to institute an Egyptian cult in Jerusalem, and the reason he leaves is because of
an infection, an epidemic
.’ Ryan stared up into the starry sky. ‘“But when the Egyptians had been exposed to an infection and had been warned by an oracle, they expelled Moses
together with the sick people
beyond the confines of Egypt.”’

Everything was silent. The only sound was the soft and gentle ploughing of the cruise boat in the river water, and the neighing of a donkey tethered in some little farmstead by the canefields. Hooting at their labours.

Helen was the first to speak. ‘It reminds me. Of something I learned at Gymnasium.’

‘What?’

‘The name of the flea that carried the Black Death is
Xenopsilla cheopis
. Named for the Pharaoh Cheops. Even the Black Death came from Egypt. Or so people believed. The
pestis Aegyptica.
And after the Black Death there was an outbreak of great religiosity. An upsurge in faith.’ She turned off her phone, and stared at the silent horizon of water and palms. ‘Religion is therefore … just a psychological reaction. To the terror of plague, the horror of death, on an atrocious scale.’

Ryan shook his head. ‘But maybe Macarius is being more specific than that. Perhaps
monotheism
is the psychological reaction. Whenever monotheism arises – Akhenaten, Moses, the first Christians during the Antonine Plague, the birth of Mohammed in 570 – we see epidemics, just before. The epidemics cause terror and great suffering, yet those that survive the epidemics become religious, monotheistic, because they have been terrified by such a powerful god that can wreak such hell. That explains what was wrong with Akhenaten, and his relatives: he had some disease, it crippled him, gave him those weird symptoms, but when he survived he felt himself blessed. Selected. Elected. Perhaps by one great god. His illness made him a monotheist.’

Helen responded: ‘So
that
is the story of the Exodus. There weren’t any Jews in Egypt. There were people infected, like their Pharaoh, by a horrible disease, that killed many, yet gave the survivors belief.’

‘It must be: these are the plagues of Moses, written in the Bible, the boils, the frogs, the flies and locusts.’ He gazed at the moon. ‘And this explains the slaying of the first-born, the tenth plague: they are trying to kill the disease by culling the afflicted, and stop the contagion. Create a firebreak. It
must
be, Helen.’ Ryan rushed on, excited and horrified. ‘But the culling doesn’t work, it doesn’t stop the plague, so in despair they expel the lepers and their great priest, Moses, and the priests and the lepers survive the disease, and start their wandering, and they finally reach Palestine, where maybe they infect the Israelis, who become monotheists in turn, after suffering the same psychological reaction to vast contagion. Because the surviving Israelites, instead of seeing this as a curse, regard this as a sign of God. It elevates them: they have been chosen. An elected people. But forever afterwards they are paranoid about further contagion, hence their dietary laws, the fear of unclean food, their detestation of impure and mentally different people, the Gentiles, the pagans …’

The stars shone down on the pagan temples of Edfu, approaching them in the night. Helen shook her head slowly. ‘Ryan … what if … we have got this the wrong way
round
?’

He stared at her. ‘What do you mean?’

Her eyes sought his in the darkness. ‘Perhaps the plague
is
monotheism.’

A fishing boat, with a solitary light, teetered in the wash of the
Hypatia
.

‘Sorry?’

She hurried on. ‘I have read enough Darwinists who believe religion is some kind of intellectual virus, a meme, or whatever. But, Ryan, what if religion is not an intellectual virus, what if religion or monotheism is an
actual virus
, which alters the mind.
And it strikes like a plague?
’

Ryan was silenced.

They both gazed out at the glittering river, reflecting the glory of Nut.

They passed Edfu, and Luxor. Then Dendera. Nearing his hometown of Abydos.

Ryan and Helen acted like tourists, but strange tourists who never left the boat. They read guidebooks and made love. They filmed each other in the cabin, talking over the theory. Excited, yet very anxious. Helen’s phone had run out of juice – somewhere along the way they’d lost her recharger; they couldn’t research it properly. Yet they couldn’t leave the boat. But they needed to get out of Egypt. Maybe they could get a boat to Sinai from Hurghada, and cross into Israel? The Israelis might not be expecting that.

Better still, they could take a boat back to Luxor, and charter a hot-air balloon, and fly into Sudan.
Yes.
The tourist balloons were desperate for business. It was bizarre but it might work. The Sudanese had no love for the Egyptians. There was no passport control six hundred feet above Abu Simbel.

But if this was to have a chance of working Ryan needed all the cash in his little safe, a lifetime’s humble earnings. And he also reckoned that dawn would be the best time to retrieve that cash. Abydos woke late: he could sneak in and get it. And he’d have an hour or two to sit at his desk and work alone, and work out the theory.

Helen was sleeping in their cabin, a little hot and irritable, kicking at the sheets.

Ryan seized the moment: he was going to take the gamble, and go to his apartment. He knew it was a risk, but it was necessary: he needed all of his spare cash.

Kissing Helen on her unconscious lips, he resisted the urge to say, ‘I love you’ – but the urge itself was very telling. Maybe, finally, he was leaving Rhiannon behind.

Quickly, he walked the gangplank down to the pier. Abydos temple was ten kilometres away from the Nile. He would need a taxi.

As he had expected, the Nileside township still snoozed. Horses drooped. Fuul sellers scratched on benches, and dreamed about a better day ahead. Even the pharmacists selling cheap Diazepam were shut. In the rising, blinding sun Ryan waited as patiently as he could by the riverside. Taxi drivers never slept in Egypt. They were the Waking Ones. You could always get a cab.

But no cabs came. Ryan squinted at the river. A mother was washing her naked baby in the river water, scooping water in a metal dish and dribbling it over the baby’s head. He wondered how clean that water was, with all its attendant infections and parasites. He thought of Rhiannon. Dying of perinatal malaria: the parasite
plasmodium falciparum
,
spread by the
Anopheles
mosquito, breeding in the torpid waters of the delta. The Nile had claimed her with one of its many parasites.

The words seized him. Parasites?
Plasmodium?

A taxi pulled up. Ryan snapped, in Arabic, ‘Abydos please. Fast as you can.’

The driver raced. The donkeys stared. The necropolis of kings and cats hove into view.

‘Yes, here please, drop me here.’

Creeping through the morning shadows cast by the great temple of Seti I, Ryan keyed the door by the tea-house and climbed the stairs to his dusty, deserted apartment. The furniture stared at him reproachfully. Where have you been? Why did you leave us?

His thoughts accelerating, Ryan grabbed his money, then looked to his laptop: he had just enough time to do some research. But the room was too stuffy, a haze hung in the air. So he opened a window for a freshening breeze, then sat down at his desk. The robotic muezzin was singing the call to prayer from a mosque next door. As the first lyrics echoed across the city, and the empty Temple of Seti, he opened his laptop and typed:

Can a virus or bacterium or parasite affect human behaviour?

Two words leapt out at him:
Rabies
and
Toxoplasma.
Rabies made a kind of sense – the frothing, the Zabaleen, the mad biting? But rabies needed dogs and dogs had not featured in their discoveries.

Toxoplasma was different.
Feline toxoplasmosis.

The cats. As Ryan squinted and scribbled in his notebook, the muezzin sang out his beautiful words.

God is the Greatest, I testify that there is no God except God …

The revelations came quickly now.

All the way through their odyssey they had encountered cats. There was a vast cat cemetery here at Abydos, beyond the drowned tomb of Osiris. Cats were likewise adored at Akhmim. The Egyptians venerated and even feared cats throughout their millennia of history: Egyptian cats were the origin of all domestic cats. And Ryan could, of course, never forget that grotesque hour in the catacombs of Bubastis, holding the cat mummy in his hand.

What could feline toxoplasmosis do to humans?