by Knox, Tom
What options did they have? He was going to shoot them anyway. Ryan reached into his rucksack and pulled out the file containing the precious Macarius papyrus.
‘Why?’ said Helen, as Ryan sorted the fragile sheets. ‘Why do you want them?’
‘Because. You. Insult God.’
‘What?’
Albert coughed his answers, his eyes swivelling, left and right, leery and panicking. ‘You insult God. I am. Copt. A Copt. Copt. You insult, insult my faith. Give it.’
‘No,’ said Ryan.
The bullet streaked past Ryan’s face. He actually saw its burning course, or the flash of sun on the metal.
The gunshot agitated the vultures feasting on the corpse of the buffalo. They clapped and flustered, flapping into the air; dirty airborne rags with talons.
‘Give me now.’
Ryan yielded. He took the documents and handed them in their folder to Albert. Who reached for it. And missed. Albert’s hand clutched at air, at nothing; then he reached again, and this time grabbed the file successfully and took it from Ryan.
He couldn’t see it properly. Ryan realized that Albert was ill in some way, mentally or physically ill, in a fashion that affected his speech and blurred his sight. That was why he’d been staring at the sky above Ryan’s head.
Slowly and quietly, Ryan stepped sideways, then moved forward to take the document back, but Albert shot again. This time the shot missed by ten metres at least. He had shot at the last place he’d heard Ryan speak: he really was going blind, but he still had the gun.
‘Ryan?’
It was Helen. Albert twisted violently and shot at the sound of her voice, the bullet missing her by mere inches. Now people were gathering: a boy on a moped had stopped to watch; a taxi was slowing down, the taxi driver gawping, quite terrified, at the scene.
The facts dawned on Ryan. They didn’t need the papyrus. What were they doing, waiting to get shot? They had the movie in the camera. They had the solution in their hands. They couldn’t get to the car – Albert was in the way – but they could get to that wooden boat.
‘Come on!’ Ryan dragged Helen by the hand towards the riverbank.
Clutching their bags, they scrambled down to the Nile. Swiftly, desperately, Ryan unloosed the tether of the little motorboat and they jumped in. Up on the riverbank Albert sent two more shots into the air, but he was on his knees now, his hands shaking. The bullets went everywhere and nowhere.
Albert had dropped the papyrus. Three or four cars had pulled over.
Ryan yanked the starter rope of the decrepit outboard motor. One tug, then two: it coughed into life. Helen kicked the boat vigorously away from the muddy riverbank and they were away, fleeing downstream.
Peering through the river-haze Ryan could see the fallen figure of Albert surrounded by cars and people. Was that a policeman, trying to handcuff him?
They were too far away to tell. For ten minutes neither he nor Helen spoke; they motored north in horrified quietness, trailing silvery plaits of brown river water, meandering around the vast corners of the riverine shore.
Peasant fishermen gazed, mildly confused, then uninterested. Two tourists on a boat on the Nile? Probably lost. Life was too difficult to worry about such a thing. Back to work.
At last Helen said, ‘We have to get off this boat. The police will interview Albert.’
‘If he can speak.’
‘The police will talk to him,’ she said. ‘That kid on the little moto, he will have seen us: they will be looking for two Westerners in a little boat like this, we will not be hard to find.’
She was exactly right. Ryan scanned the next curve. The growing traffic on the riverside road showed they were near a town. It must be Kom Ombo – the City of Gold – with its great temple to Sobek, the crocodile god. There would be tourists here, if there were tourists anywhere between Luxor and Aswan. Maybe some backpackers, maybe some Russians undeterred by riots. And there would be cruise boats.
Yes. That was surely the answer. Going by train or plane was impossible: the airports and stations would be under surveillance. Travelling by road was equally risky: army checkpoints became ever more frequent the nearer you got to Luxor.
But a tourist cruise boat? That would be entirely anonymous. The few still operating would be desperate for business; and the cruise boats never got stopped. As long as they stayed on the boat, they could expect to reach Qena unmolested, and from there maybe they could hire a private vessel.
Ryan tillered the boat up to a small jetty. Rope tied, bags hauled, they climbed the steep riverside stairs, up the sandstone banks, and emerged onto the road.
As they watched for a taxi, Helen said, ‘This is not the answer. We do not have the answer.’
‘What?’
‘We have not solved it. I do not believe our solution. Something very important is still missing. Think about Sassoon. Would he really have killed himself because of a revelation like this? Really? The discovery is not entirely new. We have more facts, more proof – but it is not revolutionary. And what has happened to Albert?’ She shook her head. Angrily. ‘Has he been poisoned?’
A cab pulled over. The driver was a headscarved woman – extremely unusual. She looked their way as Ryan leaned towards her window, asking in Arabic, ‘Can you take us to the centre of town, to the main pier? We need a cruise boat.’
The woman nodded and they climbed in. The car joined the dinged and rusty traffic heading for the town centre. Donkey carts and Toyotas, bareboned horses and the odd gleaming limo. The car stalled at a clot of traffic. A man, squatting on the roadside, in a filthy turban and an even filthier djellaba, leered at Helen and her blonde hair.
Helen was oblivious. She spoke, staring straight ahead. ‘Let him who hath understanding reckon the number of the Beast.’
‘What?’
‘Reckon the number. That is it, Ryan. That is what he is telling us. About the Greek words. It’s isopsephy. Numerology.’
‘I don’t get it.’
Helen turned. ‘Numerology. It is a code. The Greek words are not a curse or a chant or a spell: the letters mean numbers. That is why Macarius left that clue on the line directly before. He was telling us straight out. Reckon the number of the Beast. We have to reckon the number.’
Ryan felt the flush of excitement. Helen was quite possibly right. And if she was right, what did that mean? What revelation could be worse, for a Jewish scholar, than what they already knew? That Judaism and Christianity were fake?
‘Kom Ombo,’ said the taxi driver, gesturing. ‘You can take the boat.’
44
The Nile
The purser of the cruiser Hypatia took one look at Ryan’s sweating face and tattered backpack and Helen’s similar state of disrepair; then shrugged and said ‘Sure.’ He looked like a man who didn’t care, whose business was dying, and so he might as well pocket the two-hundred-dollar bribe offered by Ryan and allow them on board. For another hundred dollars he would probably have let them enslave his children.
It no doubt helped, Ryan thought, that he so obviously desired Helen, giving her a sickly smile as she dragged her bag onto the deck.
The purser led them to a corridor of cabins. ‘Take your pick. There are seventy to choose from.’
They chose the very first cabin. It was small and bright with a Victorian engraving of Abu Simbel on the wall and a brass-ringed porthole. Ryan couldn’t help peering out, nervously, to see if Israeli commandos were pulling alongside in a fast black dinghy. Knives at the ready.
The purser was still watching, from the open door of the cabin. ‘You are being pursued, effendi?’
It was obviously a joke. But it stung. Ryan shook his head. ‘Ah no, just … it’s just—’
Helen interrupted. ‘We’ve been travelling by road for days, it will be a pleasure to sail on the Nile. When do we depart?’
The purser looked at his watch. ‘Any minute. The dinner is at seven, the entertainment is at nine. You do not have to book.’
He shut the door.
As became apparent, the purser was right: they certainly didn’t have to book. This was a phantom boat sailing the Nile. The Hypatia, with its crew of dozens and its handsome mahogany fittings, was designed for one hundred passengers; and it had maybe ten. There were more staff than diners at dinner. The man who carved the ice sculpture seemed to be in tears.
But all of Egypt was in tears. There was a TV in the corner of the restaurant showing the BBC news in English from Cairo: tear gas and mayhem, a fatal bombing in a business district. ‘Meanwhile, in Moqqatam, a Coptic quarter of the city, further violent clashes continued for the second day, as demonstrators burned down a clinic—’
The nation of Egypt was sickening; maybe it was dying. The Zabaleen, the Muslims, everyone. Ryan stared at the melting ice sculpture and remembered Rhiannon, in Cairo’s Christian hospital, the day she died: clutching at his arm, her heartbeat fluttering. He remembered the way the malarial fever had risen inside her, like a remorseless flood, taking the baby, then seizing Rhiannon.
The memories were, still, unbearable. Even as he’d kissed her he had known it was probably the last occasion he would kiss her. Goodbye, goodbye.
The purser switched off the TV, with its distressing news. Ryan and Helen glanced at each other, and shifted into the ballroom. They had to act like proper tourists: they couldn’t just stay in their cabin and work the code; so they sat in the big ballroom, and listened to the first few songs by the bosomy Egyptian singer in the disco room, where two old German ladies sat staring at the ceiling, and one young Russian couple danced by the tinsel-decked stage.
‘OK. Shall we go?’ She stood up.
‘No. Upstairs on the deck.’ Ryan gestured upwards. ‘You have your phone? We can get better reception there.’
‘But upstairs is dangerous? We agreed.’
‘Not at night. No one can see us, no satellite, no one. I’ve been on these boats before, they keep the light subdued so you can see the stars. Come on, I need the air.’
The desert stars were indeed beautiful. Long-armed Nut, the Goddess of Night, had littered the lovely blackness with all of the family diamonds.
‘You know, if we’re going to die,’ said Ryan, ‘this is a good place to do it. On the Nile.’ He stared at the passing scenery, barely lit by the moonlight. A few crackling woodfires glimmered in the fields. It was beautiful, even sublime. The banks rose in sandstone cliffs, then subsided to mud. The next stop was Edfu, tomorrow morning.
‘We are not going to die,’ said Helen, squeezing his hand. ‘But if we are, then I am glad I met you first.’
He kissed her, twice. They were the only people on the deck of the Hypatia. The mystery was theirs. If they could solve it.
At last, Ryan extracted his notebook. ‘Right, let’s test your theory. Finally.’
‘The quote about the Beast. We need to investigate that first.’ Helen keyed her smartphone, and read: ‘The Number of the Beast, from the Greek: Arithmon tou Thēriou, is a term in the Book of Revelation.’
‘And?’
Helen recited from the corresponding webpage: ‘“Theologians usually support the interpretation that the phrase ‘the Number of the Beast’ refers to pagan numerology, where every letter has a corresponding number.”’ She scanned the screen, and went on. ‘“For instance, 666 is the equivalent of the name and title, Nero Caesar, the Roman emperor; however, Protestant reformers have equated the Beast of the earth, of Revelation, chapter 13, with the papacy.”’
‘But what is isopsephy?’
Helen pressed her glowing phone and its light shone in the moonlit dark, like a tablet of illumination; the very stele of revealing. ‘“Isopsephy, from isos meaning ‘equal’ and psephos meaning ‘pebble’, is the Greek word for a special kind of numerology, derived from the fact the early Greeks used pebbles arranged in patterns to learn arithmetic.”’
‘But how do we know our guy would be using this … isopsephy?’
‘Because,’ Helen sounded a little triumphant, ‘the very earliest example of true isopsephy comes from Philo of Alexandria, and the form was perfected by Leonidas, also of Alexandria, in the first and second centuries.’ Her blonde hair was nearly white in the starlight as she gazed at Ryan. ‘So, you see? If we presume our man is a Hellenized Coptic scholar, who saw Alexandria as his intellectual capital—’
‘Which he did.’
‘Then this isopsephy is what he would use, if he wanted to use numerology to encode something crucial. In the Greek riddle.’
Ryan smiled. But he was suppressing his resurgent worries. What if Albert had recovered, and the Egyptian police had interviewed him? The cops would definitely want to catch Ryan and Helen. Two people had probably died at Luxor. He and Helen had stolen the papyrus even if they had since lost it. And the Egyptians would want to know all about the Israeli connection. So far they had been protected by the chaos unfurling across Egypt.
‘So. Am I right?’ Helen pressed.
He tilted the notebook into the moonlight.
AFΓO, AEΘH, AAΘ, BEZ, BHF.
‘If you’re right, the first letter alpha, A, corresponds to 1. The second letter F, digamma, means 6.’
Helen wrote down the number 1 and 6 in her own notebook. Ryan continued, ‘Then we have gamma, Γ, or 3. Followed by omicron, O, which usually means zero.’
Helen read out the number. ‘So that makes 1630.’
‘Let’s do the rest.’
The cliffs and palms of Nilotic Upper Egypt paraded past them, in the nocturnal silence.
‘So there are our numbers.’ Helen read them out: ‘1630, 1598, 119, 257, 286.’ She paused. ‘They go down then back up.’
Ryan felt the initial tingle of understanding. ‘They could be dates. Years maybe. What four- and three-digit numbers go down then back like that? I can only think of one obvious sequence: the years BC and AD. No? They’re years. They’re dates.’ He pointed to her phone, as she swatted away a mosquito. ‘Check those dates, see what happened in those years.’
Helen keyed the numbers in. ‘1630 BC – ah …’ She glanced back at Ryan. ‘The eruption of Santorini. That happened around 1630 BC, it seems.’
‘Interesting, what about 1598 BC?’
She keyed. And paused. ‘Not so much … Very vague. A Hittite king sacks Babylon. Senakhtere is Pharaoh. Maybe …’
‘OK. OK.’ Ryan was getting lost now. ‘The newer ones will be surely more accurate. 119 BC: try that.’
‘Hipparcus replaces Eumarcus as archon of Athens.’ She squinted at the phone. ‘And the Han Chinese nationalize the production of salt.’
‘Maybe it’s 119 AD?’
‘A rebellion against Rome. In Britain.’
Ryan pondered. A rebellion? Was this about rebellions? Eruptions? What? The solution dwindled even as they approached.
‘Hmm. Don’t see it. Try the next 257? 257 AD?’
‘Goths invade Turkey.’ Helen sighed.
‘OK, let’s do the last, 286 AD.’
The silence was brief, as Helen worked her phone. ‘A new emperor in Rome, Maximian. The empire is divided between him and Diocletian … And that is it. I cannot see an obvious pattern. Can you?’
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 Egy
pt. 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?’