Sphinx

by T. S. Learner

  ‘Surrender,’ she said, and the shape of the word descended on me like the moth powder coating my tongue, the inside of my nostrils, my burning eyelids.

  We sat there in the strangest of embraces, Amelia behind me, her legs wrapped around my hips, her arms holding my arms, the astrarium between us, while the felucca moved through the frenetic mass of dazed insects flying in chaotic circles as if they themselves were bewildered by their own predicament.

  As I made out the shape of the approaching shore, the wings of the insects surrounding us transformed into a harder, brilliant cascade of hues that glittered in the lantern light. I focused my gaze on the creatures hovering just before my nose, their heavy bodies clumsily defying gravity like bumblebees, their translucent wings a whirl of air, and, with a shock, I recognised them - scarab beetles, the sacred manifestation of Ra, signifying rebirth.

  The cloud thinned into a column that spiralled and curved in a path to the shoreline. The boat followed and soon its wooden bottom was scraping along the shallow bank of salt crystal.

  Before us lay a lunarscape of sand dunes with the distant outline of a mountain squatting on the horizon like a giant in repose. Time stretched like taut wire in the darkness until Amelia’s voice cut the silence like a bell.

  ‘We are now entering the sandy world of Sokar.’

  I couldn’t believe that time had passed so quickly - the distortion of the drugs, I guessed. Just then the sound of an approaching speedboat echoed across the water

  ‘Quick!’ Amelia said. Grabbing my arm, she helped me out of the boat.

  My feet hit a beach made uneven by the drying rock salt and tangled vegetation. The only illumination came from the moonlight and the glistening wings of the scarab beetles as they flew in a zigzagging black-purple snake into the hushed, expectant desert.

  Amelia pulled me down behind the cover of some bushes and we watched the dark outline of the approaching boat as it cut across the lake. As we crouched there it was as if the sound of that boat’s engine was my own fear curdling at the base of my spine, threatening to burst at any minute into sheer blank terror.

  The boat drew up to the bank and I could just make out the faces of the two men sitting by the motor. One looked Arabic, the other European. Were they Wollington and Mosry? I couldn’t quite make out their features.

  ‘Wait here!’ Amelia whispered.

  Keeping low, still holding the lantern, she ran from bush to bush towards the boat. The sound of a twig breaking made one of the men look over. My stomach tightened in fear. Amelia cupped her hands to her mouth and made the call of a marsh bird - a perfect imitation. I could see the guerrilla fighter emerging from the role of the middle-aged woman that she’d played and I realised the years of experience she’d had fighting in this terrain. The man dropped his gaze and got out of the boat to pull it up onto the crusty salt bank.

  I could make out Amelia across the way; she was holding a lighter to the wick of the lantern. In a second it was alight. Silently and accurately, she hurled it into the speedboat. It smashed against the wood and the spilled oil burst into flames, which spread quickly across the hull. In that flash of light, I recognised Hugh Wollington.

  Shouting, both men leaped into the lake. Amelia bolted back to me. The boat’s diesel tank exploded and shattered wood rained down around us.

  ‘Run!’ she ordered.

  47

  We sprinted up the beach and into a thicket of thorny shrubs that tore at our skin, Amelia propelling me forward while bullets flew over our heads. It felt like several minutes of battling the dense foliage before a path opened before us. Amelia pointed upwards: etched against the night sky was the column of glistening scarabs. Following them, we climbed higher and higher, pressing our bodies against the rocks to remain out of sight until finally we reached a moon-drenched plateau surrounded by majestic boulders that looked like chess pieces abandoned by a reckless colossus. Above us, the scarab beetles hovered for a moment, then disappeared into the night sky.

  In the centre of this clearing stood a huge antelope, its twisting horns piercing the low moon. A falcon perched on its back.

  ‘Seth in his antelope form and Horus,’ Amelia whispered reverently.

  Her voice seemed distorted and when I turned towards her she was unrecognisable. She had grown to over six feet in height, her skin had turned to copper, and her grey hair was now thick, black and reached down beyond her shoulders. She wore a headdress of cow horns between which hung a golden disc. I stumbled back, terrified. She had become the goddess Isis. A moment later she switched back to the form I was familiar with, then she was the goddess again. In my hallucinatory state I saw her flickering between the two. She caught my arm just before I fell, dizzy and disorientated.

  ‘Oliver, stay with me. Stay in the moment.’

  We heard our pursuers crashing through the shrubs behind us. Bending its head, the antelope pawed the ground, then turned and cantered up the mountain slope in front of us. The falcon flew ahead.

  ‘Come on!’ Amelia was instantly after the antelope, clambering up the rocky incline.

  I climbed blindly after her, hauling myself higher and higher, tearing the palms of my hands on the jagged stone. Each new plateau accelerated the sense of infinity stretching above and behind me - the huge open cosmos - and I crouched closer and closer to the ground as I climbed, terrified of falling into that void.

  As I pulled myself up onto yet another ledge, my foot slipped, dislodging an avalanche of sand. I froze in terror, both hands desperately gripping the rock above me, hanging in mid-air.

  ‘Haul yourself up - you have to!’ Amelia’s face came over the ledge, one arm extended.

  Exhaustion made me panic. I tried to hoist myself up but couldn’t. Hanging there, suspended in the void, I made the mistake of looking over my shoulder. Far below, at the foot of the mountain, the moonlight reflected off the tiled roofs and mud-brick walls of Shali Ghali and I realised we’d climbed far higher than I had imagined. The rush of vertigo almost made me let go. I shut my eyes and prayed, still frozen in the same precarious position.

  ‘There is no reversal of fortune. You have to get yourself up here!’ Amelia insisted.

  With a supreme effort, I pushed down on my right foot and hauled myself up, scrambling and clawing to pull all my body onto the ledge. I lay there panting in the darkness, my heart banging wildly against my chest. I could just make out openings cut into the mountain - burial tunnels. We were climbing Gebel al-Mawta - the Mountain of the Dead - and we were near the top.

  In the ensuing silence, punctuated by my short breaths, I could hear the sound of steps, rocks falling. The two men were scrambling up the rock face below us. My limbs felt as if they were moving through treacle, a thousand repetitions of a thousand muscles exploding in effort. My fear had almost transmuted into something else - an ecstasy? Yet part of me was still aware that I was in great danger. I gazed transfixed into the vast cosmos. Could I die now? In some ways it felt as if I had already.

  In that second, a bullet whistled past my ear. Amelia pulled me roughly behind a boulder. Lying on her stomach, she returned fire; bullets ricocheted against the flintlike rock, thudding down into the sand. There was a scream as one of the men was hit.

  ‘Move!’ Amelia grabbed my arm and pushed me towards one of the burial tunnels before following me inside. I crouched against the stone as two more bullets struck near the entrance.

  ‘Help me!’ Amelia called. ‘We haven’t got long - they’ll be here in seconds!’

  She indicated a pile of rocks that looked as if they’d been deliberately stacked on a length of wood beneath them. Together we levered the wood until the rocks fell across the entrance, completely blocking access. Exhausted, I leaned against the cool rock; it smelled faintly of lime. The astrarium was a lead weight across my shoulders.

  ‘How do we get out?’ I asked.

  ‘We don’t need to.’

  ‘But we’ll die in here!’

  ‘Trust me.�
�� Amelia dusted off her hands. ‘Come on, we have to keep moving. It’s now hour five - the timing is precise. ’

  She pulled out a small torch and switched it on. The walls and ceiling of the tunnel were covered in brightly coloured murals that, in my drugged state, appeared to be moving. Hieroglyphs and drawings telling of the life of Osiris: here, his marriage to Isis; there, Seth murdering him. On the opposite wall was the story of Isis magically piecing together the fourteen parts of her husband’s dismembered body.

  Amelia walked in front of me, shining the torch ahead. As I followed her, I could feel the blue lotus pounding through my veins, rippling through my perception. Light glinted off the burnished disc of her headdress and blossoms - poppies, lotuses, lilies - sprang from her feet as she led me deeper into the mountain. Fascinated, I glanced down at my own arms and wondered if I too had metamorphosed. I held my hand up and my fingers danced before me, five, ten, a hundred of them, all moving slowly, as if the air itself had become gelatinous.

  We arrived at a thick wooden door carved with a relief of monstrous animals. In front of it sat an old man, his back to us, huddled over.

  ‘The gatekeeper,’ Amelia murmured, unable to keep the fascination out of her voice.

  The old man turned around. To my horror, it was my father, naked, his thin, aged body bent, the wrinkled pouch of his sex hanging from his sagging flesh.

  Amelia pressed her gun into my hand. ‘You must kill him.’

  ‘I can’t,’ I said, terrified.

  ‘He is not what he appears to be.’

  My father whimpered when he saw the gun in my hand. I couldn’t drag my stare away from him. Memories ran through me: the first time we flew a kite together on the Fens, my father showing me how to unreel the string and let the kite catch the wind, his pride as I managed to haul it up high into the air; my astonishment and joy at my graduation when I caught sight of my father’s figure from the podium after he’d sworn he’d sooner see Carlisle United lose than walk into any university; the last time I’d seen him, only weeks ago, standing at his front door, shrunken and vulnerable, wearing my mother’s pink cardigan over his undershirt. I knew that the image before me now was an illusion, but it felt utterly real as I lifted the gun.

  The old man cowered, petrified, the whites of his eyes peering out of his dust-covered face. Pleading, he began to claw at my legs, but the sounds that came from his mouth were not human, rather they were the grunts of an animal.

  Still I couldn’t bring myself to squeeze the trigger.

  ‘Shoot!’ Amelia ordered me.

  Instead, my arm shaking, I lowered the gun. The creature lunged at me, his hands now reptilian claws, the skin on his wrists darkening and congealing into scales. I smashed the gun against his head, knocking him to the ground, then reeled around, expecting another attack from behind.

  Nothing came; just the sound of Amelia chanting what I assumed was a spell from the Book of the Dead. The creature’s legs began to shrivel and his distorted face flattened into the snout of a hippopotamus as he convulsed and writhed on the ground. Then his jaw stretched wide, cavernous and red, and a sparrowhawk burst out of his mouth and began to fly wildly around my head.

  ‘It’s Isabella’s Ba,’ Amelia whispered. ‘You will carry her to the end - you must help her spirit reach the afterlife.’

  Awed, I reached out to the bird. The fluttering of its wings formed a thousand after-images that enveloped me in Isabella’s scent, in the soft whispering of her voice. Finally it landed on my shoulder.

  Amelia took the gun from me and tucked it back into her belt. As she did, we heard an explosion in the distance - the tunnel’s entrance being unblocked.

  We ran along the narrow passage for what, to my tired limbs, seemed like hours. When I was sure I could go no further, dragging myself along, mustering every last ounce of strength, we emerged into a massive underground limestone cavern deep within the mountain - a vast temple with multifaceted crystal stalactites glistening like hundreds of diamonds.

  ‘This is where you will meet your Ka, your spiritual twin,’ Amelia said.

  In the middle of the huge stone floor flickered a large lake of flames that illuminated the ceiling that arched over us like the sweep of a cathedral roof.

  ‘Walk towards the fire,’ Amelia told me, and pushed me forward.

  Tentatively I moved towards the blazing lake. Curiously, the nearer I got, the less heat I felt on my skin. Encouraged that the flames too were an illusion, I moved quickly closer and stopped about a foot from the edge.

  The flames became iridescent and reflective at the same time, winding around themselves to fuse into the smooth surface of a mirror. Reflected in it was an image of myself. I stared at the tousled, bearded man with scratches covering his forehead and cheeks, barely recognising the dirt-stained face, the bewildered blue eyes staring through the red dust. I lifted my hand and he lifted his too. Then, to my amazement, he extended his hand towards me, the flesh becoming real as it reached out of the swirling reflective surface.

  I stumbled back and my double stepped out and steadied me. His touch burned, and as his fingers closed around my arm he began to merge into my body. I blacked out.

  When I regained consciousness, I seemed to be hovering high above, next to the glistening limestone ceiling. I looked down. Amelia stood below me - an aerial perspective, her figure foreshortened against the stone floor. Shocked, I plummeted downward for a second, then regained my balance. As I did, feathered tips came into my peripheral vision. I had wings. I had transformed into my own Ba. Sensing a presence behind me, I turned my head and saw a sparrowhawk swooping towards me. Isabella.

  We flew together, twisting around each other like acrobats, swerving and swooping and narrowly missing the rock walls of the cave. I chased her, revelling in the power of flight, wanting to catch up with her, wanting to feel her spirit engulf me as if we were one being. Memories of our marriage streamed through me: our first night together; her first visit to an oilfield and her amazed expression as she watched me reading the ground; the way we laughed together at an unspoken joke; how we fell asleep in each other’s arms. And I knew then that despite all I’d learned since her death, all that Hermes had told me about our marriage being arranged by others, our union had been true, her love for me had been genuine. Isabella might have married me to fulfil the prophecy, but she had loved me above and beyond that - I was certain of it now. All these certainties seemed to tumble with us as we plummeted down to climb again in blind joy. Then, in the grip of my epiphany, I crashed into the cave wall.

  I opened my eyes to find myself lying on the sandy ground. The sparrowhawk, perched on my outstretched arm, cocked its head quizzically at me. I tried to sit up. My whole body ached. It felt as if the hallucinogen pumping through my blood was receding.

  The sparrowhawk hopped down onto the sand and pushed against my leg with its beak, as if to make me stand. All around me the sand started to undulate.

  ‘Oliver!’ Amelia shouted. ‘The mehen serpent!’

  Two glistening eyes emerged, then a reptilian snout blowing grains of sand. The mottled head of a huge rock python followed, its smooth scaly body now stretched in a huge circle around me. The sparrowhawk dived at the snake with claws outstretched and the snake hissed and lunged back.

  I struggled to my feet. The serpent reared up, sand cascading either side of its patterned skin. It stared at me with indifference, as if I were little more than a fly. I held my ground, determined not to show fear. Then, almost as suddenly as it had appeared, the serpent collapsed into dust and I realised that I was standing on a vast mosaic, its design a serpent holding its tail in its mouth.

  The last of the blue lotus left my body and I became aware of the cold dampness of the stone tiles, the straps of the rucksack cutting into my shoulders, the sharp throbbing of the scratches on my arms and legs. Uncontrollable shivering gripped my limbs. I looked at Amelia. Her solid figure was also dusty and scratched and very definitely human.
/>   Above us, the sparrowhawk screeched.

  There was a whoosh of air as a bullet flew past me, narrowly missing my left shoulder. I ducked, the crack of gunfire horribly real. We bolted to the far side of the cavern as Hugh Wollington, dressed in army fatigues, ran into the huge space, gun raised. Blood stained his left sleeve; Amelia’s shot on the hillside had only wounded him slightly.

  Amelia had her pistol in her hand and squeezed off two quick shots, forcing Wollington to take cover.

  ‘Over there, Oliver - behind that stalactite lies the entrance to the final chamber of the tomb. The doors will open as you reach them.’

  ‘What about you?’

  ‘This is my fate. Who am I to question it?’ she answered, smiling.

  Wollington fired again and the bullet caught her in the left shoulder, flinging her body back with the impact. She grunted, but turned back to me.

  ‘Go! Go now!’ she told me. ‘I’ll cover you!’

  Blood was seeping through Amelia’s jacket. I reached out to help her, but she urged me on. Lying on her side, she kept firing as I darted from one rock to another. As I reached the low archway, barely visible in the shadows, I suddenly felt a searing pain. A bullet had hit me in the foot. Falling to the ground, I cried out in shock and pain.