Luxor Lost and Found

by Graham Warren

  “Well, my Pharaoh, there is no definitive law which defines this action,” said Thoth with a stutter. Mrs Inky was screaming. Sobek started snapping his jaw, so now Inky was also screaming. Ramses, however, was laughing.

  Kate saw this and fumed. “Oh, do grow up, Ramses,” she shouted above the din. Then, to the amazement of all, she slapped him around the face with all of her might. She put so much force into it that upon contact not only did Ramses’ face spin, but it caused Kate to fall back into Alex’s arms. The ensuing silence could be cut with a knife. Kate’s hand stung more than she ever believed was possible.

  Alex and Cairo moved around in front of her, to protect her from the wrath of Ramses. They were not looking forward to what was to come. The last time they had tried to protect Kate from his wrath, they were on the roof of Gadeem and Rose’s villa. Then they were tossed aside as if they were rag dolls, and both had bruises to show for it. Alex already had enough bruises, he really did not want anymore and wished Kate could get that temper of hers under control. They locked arms as they stared Ramses straight in the eye. They were going to protect Kate, or at least do their very best to try and protect her, against someone who not only had superior strength, but who also had an army and many ancient gods at his disposal. There was a tense standoff.

  “Morning all, sorry I’m late. Bast is on her way, she sends her apologies.” Rose came in with a smile as always, which was not only on her face, but also in her voice. “Now, do sit down, Ramses, you are making this tomb look untidy.” She turned to Mrs Inky, who was still on her knees. “Would you please get Ramses your nicest cushion?” Rose called after her as she left, “You had better make it your best two cushions. He is the greatest pharaoh of all time after all!”

  She then placed a calming hand on each boy’s shoulders, gently separating them before applying downward pressure in order to get them to sit. “Sobek!” she said as assertively as she could whilst retaining the smile in her voice, “do put Inky down. You know all too well he would disagree with you, and in such a small tomb as this none of us could cope with your indigestion.”

  “I will second that,” said Bast with the usual purr in her voice as she stepped into Inky’s tomb, which was looking smaller and more crowded by the second. She did, however, stretch up onto her toes so that she could give Sobek a peck on the cheek.

  “We were just talking about the chosen spell and the five ingredients we cannot get hold of,” said Gadeem, as he seized the opportunity to prolong the calm. “I searched for centuries, though with no luck at all. So eventually I gave up looking. If I had found just one, I would have thought that there might have been a chance of finding the others.”

  Prompted to do so by Rose, Kate again read out loud the five items they must obtain if the magic was going to work. The five items which Gadeem was positive they would not be able to locate.

  Dried Bullsblood

  Pure Red Cinnamon

  A ring from the nose of the Apis bull, freely given

  The six sacred scuta from a single Nile crocodile

  Ten grains of sand of the Sun

  Gadeem started to give them the specifics of each item, each ingredient. Bullsblood, as it turned out, had nothing to do with either bulls or blood. Well, not directly, as it was a plant. He explained about its flowers, which were of an intensely deep red. They were the colour of fresh blood. When these were fully open, they resembled bulls’ heads, hence their name. They did, however, smell awful, as they were carnivorous plants which fed on flies as well as other insects which were drawn to the smell of rotting flesh. After describing what they looked like in great detail, he explained it was their smell, rather than their beauty, which was their downfall. Anyone who had a Bullsblood flowering within fifty metres of their home would have had no option except to go and chop it down, as the smell was truly awful.

  “Just how big are these Bullsblood plants?” asked Kate. When Gadeem used the word chop rather than pick, a picture from the storybook Jack and the Beanstalk, which her mother used to read to her as a child, had popped into her mind.

  “Were,” replied Gadeem, “just how big were these plants, is what you should have asked.”

  “Whatever!” was her reply.

  “Apparently, they stood somewhere between one and a half and two metres high. Perhaps some were even a little taller. They had to be chopped down because they had a woody stem, rather like bamboo.”

  “So, they should be easy to see,” Kate said rather too optimistically.

  “Easier to smell, though nobody has either seen or smelled one since long before I was born.”

  “Then, if you have never seen one, how can you describe them so well?” The question would have sounded quite reasonable from anyone else, though the abrupt way Kate asked when combined with her sitting up on her knees and placing her hands on her hips, left nobody in any doubt she was on a short, a very short fuse.

  “I was shown several as a child,” answered Gadeem without any outside sign of annoyance. He then paused, looked quizzical and smiled. “No … after all these years it cannot be this easy. They were shown to me pressed between large papyrus sheets. They belonged to my grandma, and I still have the books. Well, I think I still have the books. I have not thought about them at all.”

  “I think it could be this easy,” added Alex, “as we only need Dried Bullsblood, we do not need a fresh plant.”

  Rose left for their villa whilst Mrs Inky and Bast prepared breakfast.

  They had hardly finished when Rose arrived back with two very large, and also very dusty, books of pressed flowers. Gadeem took hold of the first volume, placing it on the floor in front of him before frantically flipping through the pages. The three adventurers and Inky, after shuffling out of the way, looked on. There were two, three, sometimes there appeared to be twenty or more pressed flowers to a page. Rose moved the other book closer to her nose. “I think this is the one you need!”

  Gadeem pulled the book from her hands, it crashed to the floor on top of the other. He was already on his hands and knees, but now he was leaning forward and sniffing at it. “Yes, this is the one!” He looked up at Kate. “Several thousands of years old and it still retains its smell. Only some of its smell, mind you, but can you imagine just how odorous it must have been?”

  They actually could not, though once Gadeem opened the pages it had been pressed between, they did not have to imagine.

  “It is the oil,” he explained. “The flower is quite dry. It is the oil from the flower which has soaked into the papyrus that we can all smell. All the years I have spent looking for this plant and it was under my nose all the time.”

  “Do you think that you could shut the book as I have had enough of it being under my nose?” Everybody agreed with Rose.

  “Sorry, yes, of course.” He shut the book, placed the other one on top of it and sat back next to Ramses. “Perhaps we do have a chance of finding the other ingredients after all. I must admit that I have changed my mind. With the three of you on the case, new eyes so to speak, I really do think we have a chance.”

  “What would the spell actually do to the warlock?” asked Alex.

  “Well, I am sorry to say there will be no fireworks and no clash of thunder. Also, there will not even be any pain, not with this spell. Oh, and it will not remove his magic powers.”

  “Then what good is it?” asked Kate in an attitude which was much more like the Kate of a few weeks before.

  “What good is it!” repeated Gadeem with more than slight annoyance now showing in his voice.

  “Look out for her right hand, my friend, as it packs quite a punch.” This was the first thing Ramses had said since the incident.

  Gadeem calmed as he said, “It is good because it would deflect any spell he tried to cast back on himself. He would then not be a threat to any of us anymore. Then we would even be able to remove him from the afterlife if we wished to do so.”

  “We wish,” came back at Gadeem from all those asse
mbled. The instant and heartfelt reply resulted in a round of laughter.

  Chapter 14

  -

  Pure Red Cinnamon

  “Well, according to Gadeem, none of the different types of cinnamon I located, as I went around Luxor with your mother, was Pure Red Cinnamon.”

  “If it was that easy to find, Kate, I’m pretty sure he would have found it by now.”

  “So, now what do we do, clever clogs?”

  “What do clogs have to do with cinnamon?” asked Cairo, who added as an afterthought, “Is it from Holland?”

  “It has nothing to do with clogs or Holland,” answered Alex quite softly. He gave Cairo a look which said ‘Just forget it or Kate will go off on one again’. His look worked, so the boys looked vacant and said nothing, as Kate mentally went through all Gadeem had told them of the other missing ingredients.

  “I think we should look for something else first,” she said after a while.

  “I think we are correct to look for the cinnamon,” Alex responded quite automatically.

  “Pure Red Cinnamon!” Kate said as if he was a child who had not paid attention.

  “Well, I still think we are correct to look for this first as it sounds to be the least difficult of those remaining.”

  “How does something sound to be difficult or not when it is just an item, an ingredient?” Kate was truly back to her old self. She was unable to work out what they should do, so the way she dealt with her frustration was to be angry with anyone within earshot.

  Alex was about to insist that in his opinion a ring from the nose of the Apis bull, freely given or the six sacred scuta from a single Nile crocodile sounded ever so slightly more difficult than locating cinnamon. However, he decided silence was his best option, as he could see that Kate was not in the mood for anyone’s opinion, least of all his.

  Kate, Alex and Cairo, having left the ancients, were sitting in a farmer’s hideaway within a field of maize. This was a small circular area which the farmer left intentionally fallow. The rock hard raised soil and deep furrows from the ploughing of the field made for quite comfortable seating. The picnic blanket they were sitting on, which Kate had produced from her backpack, made sitting even more comfortable.

  When it was time for the farmer to stop for lunch he would come to this area and set a small fire, into which he would place and old tin can containing the water he needed to heat for his tea. He would enjoy this without milk, though with lots of sugar, whilst smoking a harsh, unfiltered Egyptian cigarette. Visitors to Luxor were often surprised at how green it was along the banks of the River Nile, when just a kilometre away from its life-giving water the desert took hold with a vengeance.

  Each lush green plant reached over two metres above them and swayed constantly in the light breeze. The heavy cobs with their swollen kernels of corn pushed through the green outer sheaf to reveal their pale-yellow colour. Their weight magnified the movement of these top-heavy plants, which any day now would need to be harvested. They had left Inky’s tomb some while ago and had picked what was, in their opinion at the time, a place where nobody would think of looking for them … they were going to be proved wrong.

  Cairo asked what cinnamon was, as he had failed to understand Gadeem’s explanation. Alex explained both slowly and simply that cinnamon was a spice which came from the inner bark of special trees, Cinnamomum trees. This was where the name cinnamon came from. Alex was not totally sure of his facts as Gadeem had told them so much about the ingredients they needed to collect in such rapid succession, he had become a little confused. As he did not have a notepad to hand at the time, he only had his memory to rely on.

  “What does Alexander have to do with Cinnamon?”

  “Not Alexander, Cairo, Gadeem said Alexandria. In his time, in the time of Ramses II, cinnamon came up from what we now call Ethiopia, as well as across from Arabia. This was a different tasting cinnamon to the ones we are familiar with today. I did not know any of this, but apparently during Greek rule in Egypt, a time when many more varieties of spice came into the country, they all came in through Alexandria, the city at the end of the Silk Route.” Alex went on to explain about the Silk Route, which he did know something about, and how it was the major trading route from the Far East. Cairo was interested and Alex was enjoying telling him about it, or at least he was until Kate spoke with extreme attitude.

  “What on earth does any of this have to do with Pure Red Cinnamon? Come on, get a grip, you two. Gadeem told you both it was not for eating. Do either of you remember what it was used for? I don’t suppose you listened at all!” Alex and Cairo had actually listened and both knew what its main use was. Somehow Kate’s overly stroppy rebuke was not having the desired effect.

  Alex was so sick of her rants today, especially as he had thought she was maturing and on her way to becoming a calmer person, now that she no longer suffered from the stress of having to live with her recently deceased grandmother, Aggie. He wondered if she had calmed at all, so he thought he would find out by giving a deliberately wrong answer. Not just a wrong answer, but a deliberately ridiculous answer. “It was used as bait for catching fish,” he said with extreme confidence.

  Cairo looked at him, horrified to think of the forthcoming rebuke his friend would receive from Kate, but to his surprise, Alex winked at him. Cairo fell in straight away, and as Kate reached a boiling point which was well above boiling, he also felt empowered, so he said, “Alex is wrong.”

  Kate calmed a fraction, “Thank you, Cairo, I’m glad at least one of you was paying attention. So, do tell me what it was used for?”

  “It was used by ancients to keep craptors away.” He smiled an almost angelic smile, before both he and Alex burst into fits of laughter.

  The barrage of corn on the cob which hit them and kept hitting them as they ran from Kate certainly took their smile away, though only for a short time. Once safely away from her, they sat amongst the maize and laughed.

  “So, what is Pure Red Cinnamon used for?” Henuttawy asked as she stepped out from the maize and sat down between the boys. Alex was really pleased to see her and so was Cairo.

  “How long have you been listening?” asked Alex.

  “I followed you into the maize, though I was reluctant to join you, as Kate rather frightens me. I have never seen such anger … well of course I have, but when it comes from my father it is quite different to when it comes from a young girl. She is seriously scary!”

  “Yes, Ramses can be angry all right, but you don’t know the half of it with Kate.” Alex gave an over the top really frightened look.

  “You make me laugh and I need a laugh.” Henuttawy gave the impression of someone who lived looking over her shoulder. She appeared to live on her nerves, though she did not have the anger of Kate, no anger whatsoever.

  Ramses, for all his fame, was not in a powerful enough position to tell the truth about Henuttawy, especially with the warlock using every trick in the book to gain followers. His fear was one which he had gained from experience. If he was seen to have lied about his favourite daughter, to have treated her so unjustly, his soldiers, his supporters and his friends would turn to support the warlock. Not all of them of course, but more than enough to make the warlock far too powerful to ever be defeated.

  The picnic blanket they had previously been sitting on appeared from nowhere, covering Henuttawy. The force of Kate pushed her to the ground then crashed on top of her. “Quiet,” Kate said rather too loud. “Stay still and we will get you out of this,” she said to the blanket, under which Henuttawy now lay motionless in a furrow. “Quickly, come here and kiss me … Not you, Cairo. Come on, Alex, quickly!”

  Cairo looked dejected, Alex looked bemused, then they heard a noise in front of them, behind them, beside them, all around them. Soldiers, by the sound of it.

  “They don’t want us, now come down here and kiss me you fool. Cairo, pretend to be asleep … NOW!”

  Soldiers appeared, ancient soldiers, the soldiers of Ra
mses II, and the youngsters were indeed surrounded. Kate and Alex were sort of entwined on the picnic blanket whilst at the same time they were apart just enough to obscure the shape of Henuttawy. Cairo was curled up into a ball and snoring a snore which had all the reality of someone who was really asleep, and had been for some while.

  Alex might have been slow to cotton on, but he was well up to speed now. “What are you voyeurs?” he said rather indignantly. “Has Ramses sent you on behalf of my mum and dad, because if he has, I will tell him what I think in no uncertain terms? I have had enough of him spying on me, and I will go and tell him so right now.”

  “No, no, Mr Alex, we thought–” started the lead soldier only to be cut off in mid-sentence.

  “I don’t care what you thought, but I do care what Ramses thinks in order to send his soldiers after me.”

  “No, no, it is not like that …”

  “Well, what is it like? No, don’t tell me, I will tell Ramses.”

  “This has been a mistake, we thought it was Hen–”

  “You tell me this has been a mistake. Do you know how long I have been trying to get Kate on my own? We had to wait for Cairo to fall asleep, and now you ruin everything.”

  Kate started to cry crocodile tears. The lead soldier signalled, immediately the soldiers moved quickly to line up in two columns behind him. He signalled again, they turned as one before heading out of the maize in four columns. He apologised profusely and hoped Ramses did not have to hear of his mistake.

  Alex assured him Ramses would know nothing of these events, just as long as he was not disturbed again. The soldier wanted Alex to stand, so they could embrace each other as Egyptian soldiers did, but there was no way he could move without giving Henuttawy away. He gave a rolling wave of his hand, then turned to hug the now silent Kate as if the soldier was no longer there.