The Seventh Scroll (70 page)

"Colonel Nogo, has tried to be reasonable. He is bound by certain niceties of his official position. Fortunately I do not have the same restraints. I am going to ask you the same questions that he did, but this time you will answer them."

He took the dead cheroot from his mouth and examined the tip. Then he threw the butt into a corner of the room and took a flat tin from his hip pocket. From it he selected a fresh cheroot, long and black, and lit it carefully, holding the match to it until it was drawing evenly. Then, amid a cloud of pungent tobacco smoke, he waved the match to extinction and asked, ",Ihere is Mek Nimmur?"

She shrugged and looked away, out of the side window of the hut. Abruptly, without signalling the blow in any way, he hit her open-handed across her face. It was a savage blow, delivered with a force that snapped her head around, Then, before she could recover, he swung back again and slammed his knuckles across her jawline. Her head was thrown back violently in the opposite direction and she was knocked flying from her chair.

Nogo stooped over her and seized her arms, twisting them up behind her back. He lifted her back into the seat and stood behind her. He held her in such a surprisingly powerful grip that she could feel the skin of her upper arms bruising beneath his fingers.

"I have no more time to waste," Helm said quietly, taking the burning cheroot from his lips to inspect the glowing tip. "Let us start again, Where is Mek Nimmur?" Tessay's left eardrum felt as if it had burst with the ferocity of those blows. Her hearing buzzed and sang. Her teeth had been driven halfway through the flesh of her cheek, and her mouth filled slowly with her own blood.

"Where is Mek Nimmur?" Helm repeated, leaning his face closer to hers.

"What are your friends doing with the dam in the Dandera river?" She gathered the blood and saliva in her mouth, and suddenly and explosively spat it into his face.

He recoiled violently and wiped the bloody mess from his eyes with the palm of his hand.

Hold herV he said to Nogo, and seized the front of her blouse. With one heave he ripped it open down to her waist, and Nogo giggled and leaned forward over her shoulder to look at her breasts. He giggled again as Helm took one of them in his hand and squeezed out the nipple between his finger and thumb. It was the dark purple colour of a ripe mulberry. He held her like that, pinching her flesh with his nails until the skin tore and a droplet of blood welled up and trickled over his thumb. Then with his other hand he took the burning cheroot from his lips and blew on the top until it glowed hotly.

"Where is Mek Nimmur?" he asked, and lowered the cheroot towards her breast. "WHAt are they doing in the Dandera river?

She stared down in horror as he brought the burning cheroot closer, and tried to wriggle away from him. But Nogo held her firmly from behind. She screamed once, on an agonized drawn-out note, as the glowing coal touched, the tip of her nipple and the delicate skin began to blister. inter," said Royan, spreading the enlargement of the fourth face of the stele from Tanus's tomb under the bright glare of the floodlamp. "This is the side that contains Taita's notations, which I am postulating are those of the bao board. I don't understand all of them, but by a process of elimination I have determined that the first symbol denotes one of the four sides, or as he terms them the castles of the board., She showed him the pages of her notebook on which she had made her calculations.

"See here, the seated baboon is the north castle, the bee is the south, the bird is the west and the scorpion the east." She pointed out to him the same symbols on the photograph of the stele. "Then the second and third figures are numbers - I believe that they designate the file and the cup. With these we can follow the moves of his imaginary red stones. The reds are the highest-ranking colours on the board."

"What about the verses between each set of notations?" Nicholas asked.

"Such as this one here, about the north wind and the storm?"

"I am not sure about those. Probably merely smoke, screens, if I know Taita. He is never one to make life too easy for us. Perhaps they do have significance, but we can only hope to unravel them as we work through the moves of our stones."

Nicholas studied her figures a while, then grinned ruefully. "Just think how remote was the possibility that anybody would ever be able to decipher the clues he left behind. The first requirement is that the searcher must have access to both chronicles, the seventh scroll and the stele of Tanus, before he had any chance of understanding the key to the tomb." She laughed - a throaty, well'satisfied sound. "Yes, he must have believed that he was perfectly safe. Well, we will see now, MasteTTaita. We will see just how clever you really were." Then, sober and businesslike once more, she looked up the stone staircase that led to Taita's maze.

"Now we have to see if my figures and theories fit into the hard stones and walls of Taita's architecture. But where do we start?"

"At the beginning," Nicholas suggested, "the god plays the first coup. That's what Taita told us. If we start here in the shrine of Osiris, at the foot of the staircase, then perhaps that will give us the alignment of his imaginary bao board."

"I had the same idea," she agreed immediately. "Let's postulate that this is the north castle of Taita board. Then we work the protocol of the four bulls from here."

It was slow and painstaking work, trying to work their way into the mind of the ancient scribe by probing the labyrinth of passages and tunnels that he had built four thousand years previously. This time they moved into the maze with more circumspection. Nicholas had filled his pockets with lumps of dried white river clay, and he used these like a schoolmaster's stick of chalk to write on the stone walls at each branch and fork of the tunnels, setting out the notations from the winter face of the, stele and marking a signpost to enable them not only to find their way through the maze but to relate it to the model that Royan was drawing up in her notebook. They found that their first assumption that the shrine of Osiris was the north castle of the board seemed to be correct, and they happily believed that with this as the key it would be a simple matter to follow the moves of play to their conclusion. But these hopes were soon dashed as they realized that Taita was not thinking in the simple two dimensions of the conventional board. He had added the third dimension to the equation. The stairway leading up from the shrine of Osiris was not the only link between the eight landings. Each of the passages leading off from it was subtly angled either upwards or downwards. As they followed the twists and turns of one of these tunnels they did not detect the fact that they were changing levels. Then suddenly they reemerged on to the central staircase, but on a landing higher than the one they had entered from. They stood there and stared at each other in horrified disbelief. Royan spoke first. "I didn't even have the feeling that we were ascending," she whispered. "The whole thing is infinitely more complex than I first assumed."

"It must be constructed like one of those nuclear models of some complicated carbon atom,'Nicholas agreed with awe. "It interlinks on all eight planes. Quite frankly, it's terrifying."

"Now I have some-inkling what those extraneous symbols signify," Royan muttered. "They set out the levels.

I We are going to have to rethink the entire concept.

matic rules.

"Three'dimensional bao, played to enig What chance have we got against him?" Nicholas shook his head ruefully. "What we really need is a computer. Taita.

without good reason. The wasn't Puffing his own virtues old hooligan really was a mathematical genius." He shone the lamp back down the tunnel from which they had come.

"Even when you know it's there you cannot actually see the fall in the floor level. He designed and built it without even a slide rule or a spirit level in his back pocket. This maze is an extraordinary piece of engineering."

"You can form Your fan club later," she suggested. "But right now let's start grinding those numbers again."

I am going to move the lights and the desks up here, on to this central landing of the staircase."Nicholas agreed, I think we should work from the centre of the board. It may help us to visualize it. Right now he has got me thoroughly confused."

The only sound in the room was the soft on the sobbing of the woman who lay curled Milan floor in a puddle of her own blood and urine. Tuma Nogo sat at the long conference table and lit a he looked cigarette. His hands trembled slightly, and gh the sickened, He was a soldier, and he had lived through Mengistu terror. He was a hard man and accustomed to violence and cruelty, but he was shaken with what he had just witnessed. He knew now why von Schiller placed such The man was barely human.

reliance on Helm Across the room Jake Helm was washing his hands in tediously and then dabbed the small basin. He dried them fas at the stains on his clothing with the towel as he came back and stood over Tessay.

"I don't think there is anything else she can tell us," he said calmly. "I don't think she held anything back."

Nogo glanced down at the woman, and saw the livid burns that spotted her chest and her cheeks like the running ulcerations of some dreadful smallpox. Her eyes were closed, and her lashes were frizzled away. She had held out well. It was only when Helm had touched her eyelids with the burning cheroot that she had at last capitulated, and gabbled out the answers to his questions.

Nogo felt queasy, but he was relieved that it had not been necessary to hold her lids open, as Helm had ordered, and to watch as he quenched the flame of the cheroot against her weeping eyeballs.

"Watch her," Helm ordered, as he rolled down his sleeves. "She is a tough one. Don't take any chances with her."

Helm walked past him, and went to the door in the far end of the hut. He left the door open, and Nogo could hear their voices, but they were speaking in German so he could not understand what they were saying. He understood now why von Schiller had chosen not to be present during the questioning. He obviously knew how Helm worked.

Helm came back into the room, and nodded at Nogo.

"Very well. We are finished with her. You know what to do., Nogo stood up nervously and placed his hand on the webbing holster at his side.

"Here?"he asked. "No!"

"Don't be a bloody fool," Helm snapped. "Take her away. Far away. Then get somebody in here to clean up this mess." Helm turned on his heel and went back into the rear room.

Nogo roused himself and then went to the door of the hut. He walked wide of where Tessay lay, so as not to soil his canvas paratrooper boots.

"Lieutenant Hammed!the called through the door.

t Hammed and Nogo lifted Tessay to her feet. Neither them spoke and they were subdued, almost chastened, as torn and bloodied clothing. they helped her into her yes from her naked body and the Hammed averted his ed her glossy amber skin.

burns and other injuries that marre He draped the shamnw over her shoulders, and led her towards the door, When she stumbled he caught her before her with a hand under her elbow.

she fell and supported truck, and she moved He led her down the steps to the sat in the passenger seat slowly, like a very old woman. She her cupped hands.

with her burned and swollen face in Nogo summoned Hammed with a jerk of his head, and led him aside. He spoke quietly to him, and Hammed's listened to his orders. At expression became stricken as he one point he started to protest, but Nogo snarled at him savagely and he chewed his lower lip in silence.

"Remember!" Nogo repeated. "Well away from any of the villages. Make certain that there are no witnesses.

Report back to me immediately."

Hammed straightened his shoulders and saluted before up into the seat he marched back to the truck and climbed the driver a curt order and they beside Tessay. He gav drove out of the camp, following the track back towards Debra Maryam. sed and in such pain that she had Tessay was so confu s, she lurched lost all sense of time. Only half-consciou ugh icularly ro about in the seat when the truck hit a part ead rolled loosely on her stretch of the track, and her shoulders. Her face was so swollen that it required an effort and when she did she thought to force her eyelids apart, that her vision was failing and that she was going blind.

sun, had set and darkness had Then she realized that the in the hut with fallen. She must have spent the whole day Helm.

She felt a mild lift of relief that the burns on her eyelids had not done more damage. At least she was still

form able to see. She peered out through the windscreen, and found that in the headlights the road was unfamiliar.

"Where are you taking me?" she mumbled. "This is not the way back to the village."

Lieutenant Hammed sat slumped beside her in the seat and would not answer. She relapsed into a daze of pain and exhaustion.

She was jerked awake when the truck braked abruptly and the driver switched off the ignition. Rude hands dragged her out of the cab and into the glare of the headlights. Her hands were jerked behind her back and her wrists were bound together with a raw-hide thong.

"You are hurting me," she whimpered. "You are cutting my wrists." She had used up the last of her strength and courage. She felt beaten and pathetic, with no fight left in her.

One of the soldiers yanked on her bound wrists and shoved her off the road. Two others followed, each carrying trenching tools. There was enough of a moon for her to see a grove of eucalyptus trees about a hundred metres from the side of the road, and they led her there. They pushed her down at the base of one of the trees and the man who had tied her wrists stood over her, holding his rifle casually aimed down at her and smoking a cigarette with his free hand. The others stacked their rifles and began digging.

They seemed to take no interest in her at all, but were discussing the All Africa Soccer Championships that were being held in Lusaka, and the Ethiopian team's chances of reachin the finals.

It was only after a while that it began to sink into Tessay's befuddled mind that they were digging a grave for her. The saliva in her injured mouth dried up and she looked around desperately for Lieutenant Hammed. But he had stayed with the truck.