The Seventh Scroll (74 page)

cartouche of Mamose significant vehicle were war bows Piled beside this of electrum and bronze whose stocks were bound with wir ays of daggers with ivory handles and gold. There were arr and swords with blades of glistening bronze. There were racks of spears and pikes. There were shields of bronze, the targets decorated with scenes of war and the name of the se. There were helmets and breastplates made divine Mamo from the skin of the crocodile, and the uniforms and regalia of the famous regiments of Egypt dressed the life-sized the wooden statues of the king that stood in rows against walls of the alcoves.

a They walked on down the isle, between more paint, death of the icting the life and the ings and murals dep ters and danking. They saw him playing with his daugh nt son. They saw him fishing and hunting and dling his infa isn'omarches, hawking, in council with his ministers and dallying with his wives and concubines, and feasting with the priests of the temple. What a chronicle of life in ancient times," Royan breathed with awe.

"There has never been a discovery remotely like this before." Each of the persons in the panels had obviously been drawn from life. They were real breathing living men and women, every face and every expression different, captured with the keen eye, the humour and he great humanity of the artist.

"That must be Taita himself." Royan pointed out the self-portrait of the eunuch in one of the central panels. "I wonder if he took poetic licence, or was he truly so noble and beautiful?"

They paused to admire the face of Taita, their adversary, and looked into his searching, intelligent eyes. Such was the skill of the artist that he watched them as keenly as they studied him. A small, enigmatic smile played on Taita's lips. The painting had been varnished, so that it was perfectly preserved, as if it had been painted the day before. Taita's lips seemed moist and his eyes gleamed softly with life.

"His complexion is fair and his eyes are blue!" Royan exclaimed.

"Although that red hair is almost certainly dyed with henna."

"It is weird to think that, although he lived so long ago, he almost succeeded in killing us,'Nicholas said softly.

"In what land was he born? He never tells us that in the scrolls. Was it Greeceor Italy? Was he from one of the Germanic tribes, or was he of Viking stock? We will never know, for he himself probably did not know his own origins."

"There he, is again in the next panel." Nicholas pointed down the arcade to where the unmistakable face of the eunuch appeared in the throng that knelt in homage before the throne on which sat Pharaoh and his queen.

"Like Hitchcock, he seems to like to appear in his own creations." They went on past the treasure stalls in which were stored plates and goblets and bowls of alabaster and bronze chased with silver and gold, polished bronze mirrors and rolls of precious silk and linen and woollen cloth that had long ago rotted to shaggy black amorphous heaps. On the walls that divided these from the next set of stalls they saw reenacted the battle with the Hyksos in which Pharaoh had been struck down, the arrow shot by the Hyksos king lodged in his breast. Then in the next panel Taita, the surgeon, bent Over him with the surgical instruments in his ed barb from deep in his hands, removing the blood-smear flesh.

Now they came to alcoves in which were stacked hundreds of cedarwood chests. The boxes were painted with the royal cartouche of Mamose, and with scenes of the king at his toilet: lining his eyes with kohl, painting his face with white antimony and scarlet rouge, being shaved by his barbers and dressed by his valets.

"Some of those chests will contain the royal cosmetics," Royan murmured,

'and some of them will be Pharaoh's wardrobes of clothing. There will be costumes in them for ack every occasion in his after-life. I long to be able to unp and examine them."

all panels showed the mart iage of the The next set of king to the young virgin, Taita's mistress. The face of Queen LostTis was tendered with loving detail. The artist gloated on her beauty and exaggerated it, his brush strokes caressing her naked breasts and lingering on all her virtues until they epitomized feminine perfection.

"How much Taita loved her," Royan murmured, and there was envy in her voice. "You can see it in every line he drew."

Nicholas smiled softly and put his arms around her shoulders. There were hundreds more wooden chests stacked in the next alcoves. Painted on the lids were miniatures of the king decked in all his jewellery: his fingers and toes were thick with rings and his chest was covered with pectoral medallions, while bangles of gold adorned his arms and bracelets his wrists. In one portrait he wore the double crown of the two kingdoms of Egypt united, the red crown and the white with the heads of the vulture and the cobra on his brow. In another he wore the blue war crown, and on a third the Nemes crown with gold and lapis wings that covered his ears.

"If each of those chests contains the treasures depicted on its lid-'

Nicholas broke off, unable to continue the thought. The possibility of such riches was daunting, and the imagination balked at the magnitude of it.

"Do you remember what Taita wrote in the scrolls? "I cannot believe that such a treasure was ever before accumulated in one place at one times'T

Royan asked him. "It seeffLs that it is all still here, every single gem and grain of gold. The treasure of Mamose is intact."

Beyond the treasury there was another alcove lined with shelves on which stood the ushabti figures: dolls made of green glazed porcelain or carved from cedarwood. They were an army of tiny figures, men and women from all the trades and professions. There were priests and scribes and lawyers and physicians, gardeners and farmers, bakers and brewers,

handmaidens and dancing girls, seamstresses and laundrymaids, soldiers and barbers, and common labourers.

Each of them carried the tools and accoutrements of his or her trade. They would accompany the king to the after world and there would work for Pharaoh, and would go forward in his place if he were ever called upon to perform a service for the other gods.

At last Nicholas and Royan came to the end of this fabulous arcade, and found their way closed off by a series of tall, free-standing screens, tabernacles that had been once fine white linen mesh but were now decayed and rotted into ribbons and streamers, dirty and shabby as old cobwebs, And yet the stars and rosettes of shining gold Now, still hanging in the that decorated these curtains were mesh like fish in a fisherman's net. Through this ethereal web of silken wisps and golden stars they could make out the shape of another gateway beyond.

actual tomb," Royan

"That must be the entrance to the thin veil between us and the whispered.

"There is only a king now.

tated at the threshold, gripped by a strange They hesi the final step reluctance, to take an old warrior, Mek Nimmur had seen and treated most of the injuries that a man might sus in on the battlefield. His little guerrilla group did not have a doctor, or even a medical orderly.

Mek himself treated most of his casualties, and he always had a medical kit close at hand.

He had the men carry Tessay to one of the huts near the quarry, where, screened by the grass walls, he stripped her of her tattered clothing and treated her injuries. He abrasions with disinfectant, and cleaned her burns and clean field dressings-Then covered the worst of them with he rolled her gently on to her stomach and snapped the which glass phial off the needle'of the disposable syringe wh was preloaded with a broad'spectrum antibiotic. -and he said, "I She winced at the sting of the needle, am not a very good doctor."

other. Oh, Mek! I thought I would would have no ared never see you again. I did not fear death as much as I fe that."

He helped her dress in the spare clothing from his pack, a sweatshirt and fatigues that were many sizes too large for her. He rolled up the cuffs for her, and his touch soldier.

was gentle. His hands were those of a lover, not a she whispered through her must look so ugly," swollen, black-scabbed lips.

"You are beautiful he denied it-"To me you will always be beautiful." He touched her cheek carefully, so as not to harm the raw burns that covered it.

At that moment they heard the gunfire. It was still faint with distance, borne down from the north on the rain winds.

Mek stood up immediately. "It has begun. Nogo is attacking at last it's all my fault. I told him-'

"No," he told her firmly. "It is not your fault. You did what you had to do. If you had not, they would have hurt you even worse than this. They would have attacked us, even if you had told them nothing."

He picked up his webbing belt and strapped it around his waist. From far off they heard the crumping detonation of exploding mortar shells.

"I have to go now," he told her.

"I know. Do not worry about me."

"I will always worry about you. These men will carry you down to the monastery. That is the assembly point.

Wait for me there. I cannot hope to hold Nogo for long.

He is too strong. I will come to you soon."

"I love you," she whispered. "I will wait for you for ever."

"You are my woman," he told her in his deep, soft voice, and then he ducked through the doorway of the hut and was gone.

hen Nicholas touched the frame of the screen, fragments of the mesh veil tore free with even that tiny movement and fell to the tiles of the floor. The golden rosettes trapped in their folds tinkled on the stones. Now there was an opening in the curtain large enough for them to step through, They found themselves before the inner doorway. It was -guarded eat god Osiris on one side by a massive statue of the gr with his hands crossed over his chest, clutching the crook and the flail. Opposite stood his wife Isis, with the lunar crown and horns on her head. Their blank eyes stared out into eternity, and their expressions were serene. Nicholas and Royan passed between these twelve-foot-high statues and found themselves at last in the veritable tomb of Mamose.

The roof was vaulted, and the quality of the murals that covered it and the walls was different - formal and classical. The colours were of a deeper, more sombre hue, and the patterns more intricate. The chamber was smaller han they had anticipated; just large enough to accommodate the huge granite sarcophagus of the divine Pharaoh Mamose.

The sarcophagus stood chest-high. Its side panels were engraved in hasrelief with scenes of Pharaoh and the other gods. The stone lid was in the shape of a full'length effigy of the supine figure of the king. They saw at once that it was still in its original position, and that the clay seals of the priests of Osiris which secured the lid were intact. The tomb had never been violated. The mummy had lain within it undisturbed through the millennia.

But this was not what amazed them. There were two extraneous items within the otherwise classically correct tomb. On the lid of the sarcophagus lay a magnificent war bow. Almost as long as Nicholas was tall, the entire length of its stock was bound with coils of shining electrum wire, that alloy of gold and silver whose formula has been lost in antiquity. The other item that should never have been placed in a royal tomb stood at the foot of the sarcophagus. It was a small human figure, one of the ushabti dolls. A glance of this effigy, confirmed the superior quality of the carving and both of them recognized the features instantly. Only minutes before, they had seen that face painted upon the walls of the arcade, outside the tomb.

The words of Taita, from the scrolls, seemed to reverberate within the confines of the tomb, and hang like fireflies in the air above the sarcophagus:

When I stood for the very last time beside the royal sarcophagus, I sent all the workmen away.

I would be the very last to leave the tomb, and after me the entrance would be sealed.

When I was alone I opened the bundle I carried. From it I took the long bow, Lanata.

Tanus had named it after my mistress, for Lanata had been her baby name. I had made the bow for him. It was the last gift from the two of us. I placed it upon the sealed stone lid of his coffin.

There was one other item in my bundle. It was the wooden ushabti figure that I had carved.

I placed it at the foot of the sarcophagus. While I carved it, I had set up three copper mirrors so that I could study my own features from every angle and reproduce them faithfully. The doll was a miniature Taita. Upon the base I had inscribed the words Royan knelt at the foot of the coffin and pick up the ushabd figure. Reverently she turned it in her hands and studied the hieroglyphics carved into the base of the figure. Nicholas knelt beside her. "Read it to me," he said. Softly she obeyed. "'My natne is Taita. I am a physician and a poet. I am an architect and a philosopher. I am your friend. I will answer for you - "'

so it's all true,'Nicholas whispered, Royan replaced the ushabti exactly as she had found it and, still on her knees, turned her face to his. this," she

"I have never known another moment like whispered. "I want it never to end."

"It will never end, my darling," he answered her. "You and I are only just beginning."

ek Nimmur watched them coming, skirtin 9 the bottom slope of the hill, It took the trained eye of a bush-fighter to pick them ut as they moved through the thick scrub and thorn. As 0 he evaluated them he felt a twinge of dismay. These were crack troopsi seasoned during long years of war. He had once fought with them against the Mengistu. tyranny, an he had probably trained many of those men down there.

Now they were coming against him. Such was the cycle of violence in this racked continent, where the war and endless struggles were fuelled and nurtured by the age-old tribal enmities and the greed and corruption of the newage politicians and their outmoded ideologies.

But this was not the moment for dialectics, he thought bitterly, and focused his mind on the tactics Of the battlefield beneath him. Yes! These men were good. He could see it in the way they advanced, like wraiths through the scrub. For every one of them he picked out, he knew there were a dozen others that remained unseen.