Ankhtifi's Papyrus

by Graham Warren

  Alex faked a coughing attack, a very vocal coughing attack. It covered the sound of Kate running around behind the sarcophagus.

  “Look what I’ve found,” she said as she appeared with something; a bird of sorts, Alex thought.

  “Don’t hurt me, don’t hurt me, please don’t hurt me. I was never going to hurt you, I can’t hurt you; why would I want to hurt you?”

  “Okay, okay, enough,” said Alex. “Let him go, Kate.”

  “Can’t I torture him, waterboard him?” she said in a very poor American accent.

  “No, you can’t.”

  “Just a little?”

  “No, Kate, and I don’t know where you got this bad cop good cop idea from, but it won’t work.”

  Kate issued an expletive before letting the metre-tall bird go. “Bugger,” she then said as she tried to kick of a white and green mess from her shoe.

  “Okay, perhaps it worked, just not in the way you intended!” Alex struggled to stifle a laugh. Composing himself, as Kate took her shoe off to wipe it in the sand, he asked, “Who are you?”

  “T … T … Thoth,” the bird stuttered as his far from insignificant knees knocked together.” He turned to Kate. “I am so sorry, I am so embarrassed, it is just that you really are scary.”

  “If you think she is scary now, just wait, you haven’t seen anything yet.” Apart from that thought, Alex was lost for words. There, before him, was a short stocky bird that obviously did not come from the real world, though neither did he look like a Thoth. Feet of a swan, short fat legs, body of an overfed white goose, a head that looked more duck than ibis which was attached to his body by a thin, feather-free, pink neck. Certainly, he was nervous enough to be a Thoth, though only pharaohs had Thoths, and their Thoths looked nothing like this. Not believing for a moment that he was what he purported to be, Alex asked where his quill and papyrus were.

  “He dropped them around there,” Kate said as she put her shoe back on. “I’ll get them.”

  “I hope I got all the details correct?” asked the bird, as Alex and Kate used the light on his phone to read a very accurate description of their time in the tomb.

  Neither replied to his question, as both were having similar thoughts. Only pharaohs had Thoths, and Ankhtifi was no pharaoh, so who had brought them here and for what reason? Their confidence sank to a level only slightly higher than Thoth, because as strange as he looked, they were now convinced that he was indeed a Thoth.

  Kate and Alex looked at each other, their looks of concern enhanced by the highlights and shadows created by Alex’s phone light.

  “You?” Kate said.

  “Me?”

  “Yes, you, ask him something.”

  “Like what?” Alex was really struggling to pull all of his thoughts together. When he had told Gadeem of his plan to walk straight into Ankhtifi’s tomb, speak directly to the warlord, agree to help him with whatever it was that he wanted help with, then walk out with the abducted tourists, Gadeem had been taken aback by Alex’s bravery, though he could see where Alex was coming from. Looking at the downside, all the things that could possibly go wrong, had resulted in Gadeem giving Alex the two spells, as well as a crash course on how to cast them. They were his insurance, his get-out-of-jail-free card, only he did not have them, he had left them in the gaffirs hut.

  “Well, are you going to ask him something?”

  “Like what, Kate, like who is his pharaoh?”

  “Exactly!” She turned to Thoth. “Who is your pharaoh?” It came out incredibly aggressively.

  Thoth froze, he appeared to be unable to speak from fear.

  Alex shook his head, not due to the way Kate had spoken, even though he felt it was rather too harsh, but at how, at times, the obvious, the most obvious question of all failed to come to him. Shining his light at the feet of Thoth, he asked the same question as Kate had done, though in a far more pleasant tone.

  “My pharaoh, well you know who he is,” stuttered Thoth, “he is–”

  Kate jumped in before the ‘he is’ registered, “If we did, why would we be asking?”

  “I think he was just going to tell us, Kate!”

  “Yes, yes, sorry, I jumped in too quickly.”

  At any other time Alex would have savoured this moment. Contrition from Kate did not happen often. “Carry on, Thoth.”

  “Ankhtifi, of course. I am in his tomb, you are in his tomb–”

  “But he doesn’t appear to be in his tomb?” Kate was unable, perhaps unwilling, to give Thoth the time he needed to speak. He was far too hesitant for her liking.

  “You arrived sooner than expected.”

  “When were we expected, exactly?” Kate asked.

  “Sunday, Monday, after your friends had returned.”

  “How …?” Kate started, but then was unsure of the question she wanted to ask as so many flooded her mind.

  Alex was also taken aback by this comment. “You know of our friends?”

  “Oh, yes, of course. You are all famous. Don’t you read The Add? If you haven’t, I can let you have my copies–”

  “We have,” Kate started with a very firm ‘we’, though realising she was admitting to reading it, the ‘have’ was inaudible to anybody who could not lipread.

  Alex said nothing, whilst making sure that his phone light was pointing in a direction where she could not see the smirk upon his face.

  Thoth was becoming more relaxed as he wrote everything down, they all were. He did not have hands, his feathers turned into some sort of fingers. “It is important to know what is going on, so every pharaoh has his people, his contacts–”

  “His spies,” Kate interjected.

  “Yes, if you wish to call them that, though no pharaoh would wish to hear them be called spies. Every pharaoh must know what is going on, so every pharaoh must have his information gathering network.”

  “Only Ankhtifi’s broke down,” said Alex, still trying to work out how a warlord had a Thoth who thought he was the Thoth of a pharaoh.

  “Yes.” He paused, stopped writing, then looked directly at Alex: “How did you know that?”

  “Why else would we be needed here?

  “Yes, yes, I see. You will help, won’t you? It is very serious.”

  “As Ankhtifi was this mad crazed warlord,” Kate said in her usual not-to-be-messed-with attitude, “why on earth do you keep calling him pharaoh?”

  “He is a benevolent warlord–”

  It was obvious that Thoth was going to say more, though yet again Kate was unable to keep a still tongue: “That sounds like an oxymoron to me.”

  “Who are you calling a moron?” A deep powerful voice emanated from the shadows.

  Alex immediately shone his light in that direction, though could see no one with the massive sarcophagus blocking so much of the burial chamber.

  “I asked you,” bellowed a now very angry deep voice, “who you are calling a moron?”

  “No, no, no, it’s not like that, it’s a … help, Alex!”

  “Please believe me, she wasn’t calling you a moron. It’s a word used when two normally contradictory words are put together in the same sentence. Oxymoron is a single word. It has nothing to do with the offensive word ‘moron’.”

  “See, you were not being called a moron, you moron!”

  She had been doing so well. “No, Kate,” Alex heard himself say as he tensed. There was a period of silence before both of them jumped, then spun around, at the sound of a booming voice.

  “The ‘moron’ you speak of is behind you and could have easily killed you both, by now, a hundred times over.”

  Kate and Alex looked to where an average face would be, they looked a little higher to where a tall person’s face would be, then they looked even higher, so much so that they peered up the flared nostrils of Ankhtifi. Too close to see his features, all they knew for certain was that he was a goliath of biblical proportions, and yes, if he had wanted to, he could have crushed them with his bare hands.
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br />   “I’m sorry, really, really sorry,” Kate said.

  “Thoth?”

  “Yes, my pharaoh.”

  “You told me that this girl had spunk, had a backbone, put fear into ancients” – “Not just ancients,” thought Alex – “and most definitely never said sorry to anyone.”

  “That is what I have been informed. She is feared, she does not tolerate fools and she never says sorry.”

  “Well she is saying sorry here, and she is saying it far too often.”

  “I am here, you know,” Kate said in a return to her usual attitude.

  “Are you?” Ankhtifi said as he looked down at her.

  “Yes, so address your questions about me, to me!”

  “Okay, then. Why are you saying sorry when it is a word I have been told you do not use?”

  “It’s a friend, Rose–”

  Ankhtifi’s face softened. “Rose, how is she? She has not been to see me for such a long time.”

  “You could go and see her,” Kate snapped back.

  “I am afraid I cannot, as the area of Waset she frequents, was not there in my time.” Luxor was known as Waset in the time of Ankhtifi,

  “Oh!” was all Kate could reply.

  “I have a small meal prepared. Shall we talk as we eat?” He looked over to Thoth. “It is ready, is it not?”

  “Oh, yes, my pharaoh, ready and waiting.”

  “Is the tamar-hindi cold?”

  “Yes, yes, very cold, my pharaoh.”

  “Good, good, come then, let us eat.” Ankhtifi walked past them with a slight stoop. Whilst he could stand upright in his tomb, the bounce in his step would have caused his head to collide with the ceiling.

  “He is not really angry,” Thoth said. “He is very nice when you get to know him. Please do follow me.”

  Kate and Alex looked at each other blankly, shrugged their shoulders, then followed Thoth.

  “What is it with ancient Egyptians and white marble rooms?” Kate asked nobody in particular as they entered a high ceilinged and expansive room, set deeper in the hill.

  “Light, nothing more than light, as danger lurks in the shadows,” Ankhtifi said. “Please sit.” It was true that the flaming torches lit every area of the plain white room. There was nowhere that anyone could hide.

  Thoth showed Kate and Alex to their places. This was appreciated, as there were easily fifty chairs around a massive rectangular table, each one with a full place setting in front of it. Whilst Ankhtifi obviously needed the largest of the chairs, it would have been impossible for Kate or Alex to deduce where to sit as there were many extremely large chairs, several of which were in pairs.

  As Alex sat he wondered why, when Ramses and Nakhtifi needed their guards to always be close, Ankhtifi appeared to only have a Thoth for company. He then thought that he had answered his own question. ‘Appeared’ was the salient word. There were guards, just not right here. He was trying to work out the warlord, pharaoh connection, wishing he had read more about the time Ankhtifi lived in, when Kate jolted him back to the here and now.

  “Don’t we!” he heard her say as he felt pain in his arm.

  “Y … yes,” he said less than convincingly. Seeing the look on Kate’s face and her raising arm, “YES” sprang forth both loud and convincingly.

  “You were correct, Thoth, she is a force to be reckoned with.” Ankhtifi gave a booming laugh which continued as serving girls brought in an interesting collection of food upon red-clay plates.

  Fear had left Kate and Alex, though confusion remained. Ankhtifi let his Thoth do most of the talking whilst he ate heartily. Food lay untouched on the young adventurers’ plates.

  Thoth confirmed that Ankhtifi had indeed supplied the article they had read in The ADD as his way of getting them to come to his tomb. It had obviously worked! The girls, far from being abducted, had gone on a multi-day shopping trip to Cairo, then on to Alexandria. They had been happy to go as they had been made to believe that Celina’s parents had arranged it as an early birthday present. She had even been presented with a card which said this, signed by her father: a signature that was copied from his signing of the registration form, at the hotel, upon arrival.

  “What about their phones?” Kate asked.

  “A masterstroke of planning,” Thoth said. He went on to explain that the plan had been very fluid. Their phones had been ‘borrowed’ whilst at a rest stop on their way to Cairo, before being brought back to their room.

  After a rather prolonged conversation about the difficulties of living a thousand years before Ramses, the Ramses that Kate and Alex had got to know well, Alex felt confident enough to ask Ankhtifi if he was a warlord or a pharaoh. He wanted to refer to what he had read in his book, which he said was in his backpack.

  At Ankhtifi’s request the backpacks were brought down.

  Alex opened his, grateful that the exploding water bottle had been strapped to the outside. He removed a white cotton scarf, then the Sekhmet shabti, which he had forgotten he had shoved in there after Kate had produced it in the bar of the Winter Palace. Relieved that it was undamaged, he placed it on the table.

  Ankhtifi literally recoiled at the sight. “Get that thing out of here,” he bellowed, and it was a bellow. Ancient soldiers instantly appeared and the shabti was gone.

  “Sorry,” Alex said as an automatic response, though not knowing why he was sorry as he had just lost his favourite piece for the second time.

  “Why did you bring that here?” Ankhtifi asked with a tremble in his voice. He was frightened.

  “It’s a long story, but, honestly, it was in my rucksack by mistake.”

  “Don’t you know how dangerous Hathor can be, and especially a shabti as rare as that?”

  Kate reacted, she had to be silenced by Alex. “I would imagine Ankhtifi knows the difference between Hathor and Sekhmet,” he said to her through gritted teeth before turning back to Ankhtifi, then placing his book on the table.

  “Well, he doesn’t appear to.”

  Ankhtifi could not fail to hear their comments in the otherwise silent room. “What difference? There is none, they are one and the same. Surely you know that?”

  “They are, they are,” added Thoth. “Oh, it was the most dreadful time.”

  “What was?” asked an exasperated Kate. Alex was just plain confused. A condition that had occurred to him far too often today.

  “I gather by your reactions that neither of you have ever read anything about Sekhmet.” They shook their heads in confirmation. “But you have read about Hathor?” They both nodded to confirm that they had. “Never read of any connection between Hathor and Sekhmet?” They had not. There were several more questions which were answered with either shakes or nods of heads. A picture developed where modern books, for the most part, kept the ancient goddess Hathor tied to the nurturing, love, fertility, mothering side of her nature, whilst Sekhmet was the goddess of fire and war, and whose breath was so hot that it formed the desert. Invariably they were never connected, yet Ankhtifi was insistent that Sekhmet was Hathor’s alter ego, and that the lion headed goddess had almost destroyed Egypt in his time as ruler.

  Though they both wanted to know more about the Hathor Sekhmet link, there now appeared to be an urgency with Ankhtifi to get back to the matter at hand. Anyway, this was all proving a little too much for the young adventurers to take in, even more so, when Ankhtifi suggested that if they wanted to know more then they only had to ask Bast, as she was a daughter of Sekhmet. You could have knocked them over with a feather

  Alex cleared his head to focus on why they had been manipulated to be where they were.

  Kate was wondering why they had not read up more on the ancient gods, thinking that she would do so at the earliest opportunity.

  With the serving of a multitude of deserts, Kate did finally eat something. She could not resist a honey and lemon cake, even returning for a second slice whilst Ankhtifi spoke.

  “A papyrus has gone missing, not just any papyrus,
but one created by my magician. The loss of this threatens to destabilise my period of rule, as well as having ripples throughout history.”

  Alex, his book open in front of him, asked Ankhtifi to clarify his period of history because what he was reading appeared to be very vague.

  “It was a dreadful time.” He leaned forward, placing his elbows on the table. “Egypt was in danger of breaking up; my Egypt; my country. Yes, I was a warlord, though that term, at that point in time, made me nothing more than a modern-day mayor. Perhaps I had a little more power than a mayor.”

  “Like being able to kill people,” Kate added through a mouthful of cake.”

  Ankhtifi ignored her comment. “Egypt was becoming rapidly fragmented. I tried to pull the people together, but each region had its own beliefs, its own culture, if you will. It was impossible to get the uneducated people who had seized power, in the many small regions, to work together. They had tasted power, without the intelligence to understand how to use that power for the good of the people. All they looked to was helping themselves, their family, their wealth. None would take any advice, as each one had a massive, massive ego.”

  “Where have we heard that before?”

  “Enough, Kate,” Alex said.

  “Just saying,” she replied, as she wondered if she was really going to leave the last piece of honey and lemon cake sitting alone on the serving plate.

  “Each region needed a unifying figure, though each needed a different unifying figure, one that would listen and act on the needs of that particular group of people. Thanks to my magician, I became what they needed; that is how I became pharaoh.”

  Alex looked a little bemused, Kate was too busy diving in for her third piece of cake. It had been a long time since breakfast.

  Ankhtifi took the time to explain that his magician had come up with a spell that worked through the papyrus to make him appear as a different person to different groups of people, even different to people within a single group. It showed him as the type of person they would wish to be led by. That was why history was so unclear about the tenth dynasty, because records of who was in charge talked about many different people, a fragmented society, when in fact there was only one ruler of Egypt and that ruler was Ankhtifi.