Hadji walked casually over to Sam and Roderick and patted them amiably on their shoulders. "You really have no idea how pleased I am that you good fellows showed up so quickly. I was afraid that you had some foolish notion about waiting until dark. I much preferred that you attack us than that we had to chase you down the river."
"Faz—" Sam muttered, "—he's your—your—"
"My nephew, yes," Hadji replied happily. "My sister Ayesha's boy. Such a clever little child, don't you think? We have high hopes for him. I had once hoped that I would be able to initiate him into the priesthood at some point in the future, when one of my colleagues passes away, but now that's impossible of course."
"What—what do you mean?" Sam stammered.
"Why, none of my colleagues is ever going to pass away, my dear friend! Do you still not understand what this is all about? Sekhemib and his six compatriots are the immortals chosen by Anubis, but they require servants, assistant priests, such as my friends and myself. Beginning tonight, when the rituals and sacrifices are done again as in the ancient days, they and we shall enter into the ranks of the beloved of Anubis." He feigned pensiveness as he scratched his chin. "I wonder which of your souls I shall drink tonight?"
"How did you know?" Roderick asked. His customarily impassive face was filled with fear as the true nature of his situation became clear to him. "How did you know?"
"How did we know? What, how did we know that you would be following us?" Hadji laughed. "My poor fellow, we have been watching you ever since you arrived in Egypt! Did you think that you could sneak up on the lord Sekhemib, that he could be kept in darkness as you pursued him? Foolish, foolish men! The lord Sekhemib has the wisdom and the cunning of hundreds of thousands of years! You have to die, you three and the policeman back in America, and our only problem was whether to go to the trouble and expense of having you murdered there or waiting for you to come to us. I am very, very pleased that you chose to simplify our task."
"But why?" Roderick asked desperately. "Why do we have to die? If we left right now, if we promised—"
"Don't be silly, Your Lordship, don't insult my intelligence. No promise you made right now would be worth even listening to. More importantly, you know about us, you know about the lord Sekhemib and the other immortals. Such knowledge alone condemns you to death." He smiled again. "But be of good cheer! Your lives will not have been wasted. Because of you, I or one of my associates will have our lives extended by decades! And then, of course, after living out your life spans, we shall honor some other equally cooperative people by drinking their souls as well." Hadji looked at the men who were finishing the task of securing the barge by pulling it up onto the sand. "It appears that we are ready to leave. I'm terribly sorry to ask you to accompany us on foot, but as you can see we are rather short of transport."
Hadji barked an order to one of the crew, and the crewman grabbed Roderick by the wrists and pulled him to the rear of one of the wagons. He fastened a long rope to the ropes around Roderick's wrists and then tied the ocher end of the rope to the bracing slat behind which rested the coffin of Yuya. He then walked over to Sam and, grabbing him in the same manner, repeated the process.
Sawhill was still lying senseless beside Harriet, who was moving very slightly, her bound hands slowly digging into the surface sand. Hadji issued another order, and two other crewmen dragged Sawhill by the legs over to another wagon. "Unfortunately," Hadji explained, "our friend does not seem able to walk. I'm afraid we shall have to drag him to our destination." He shrugged sadly and shook his head, as if resigned to a regrettable situation.
Sam and Roderick watched as the crewmen tied Sawhill's wrist bonds to the rear of the other wagon. "You can't do this to him!" Sam said in openmouthed astonishment. "It's inhuman!"
"Yes. Pity, isn't it?" Hadji smiled.
A few muffled laughs caught Sam's attention, and he turned to see two of the Arab crew carrying Harriet toward the wagons. They paused every few feet to squeeze and fondle her breasts and press their hands and fingers into the velvety recess between her legs. Thank God Tom can't see this, Sam thought. Poor girl. Poor, dear girl.
He turned to see Hadji standing close beside him, grinning at Sam's discomfort and sorrow. A surge of anger rose up in him, and unable to strike out at the leering smile, he spat in Hadji's face. The Arab blinked in surprise and stepped back a few feet. He wiped the saliva from his eyes and, growing red in the face, he struck Sam in the mouth with a closed fist. The older man staggered back into the side of the wagon and then slumped to his knees.
"Sam?" Roderick asked. "Are you all right?" The older man did not reply. "Sam? Sam!"
"Yes, Roderick, I'm okay, I'm okay." He shook his head in an attempt to clear it. Blood dripped from his mouth, and as he spit it out a few of his teeth followed it.
"What shall we do?" Roderick asked. "Do you have any ideas?"
Sam looked up at him. "I can't think of a goddamn thing. Can you?"
Roderick sighed. "No, unfortunately. Damn! It all seemed like such a good idea!"
Sam rose uneasily to his feet. "You can't win a game when the other fellow cheats." He shook his head. "Faz, of all people!_1 never even suspected!"
A sudden jerk took both of them unwares as the wagons began to move forward, and they were almost pulled off their feet. They ran a few steps to give themselves enough slack to get their balance, and then they walked slowly behind the slow moving wagons. Sawhill, still unconscious, was being dragged on his back along the hot sand. Ahmed Hadji led the procession atop a camel, and the rest of the caravan followed behind him in single file.
"Bloody wogs!" Roderick muttered.
The NileRiver passed from sight as the sun set gently behind the red hills of Upper Egypt, and the silence of the desert night descended upon them. Only the grunting camels and the squeaking wagon wheels broke the stillness. Somewhere off in the distance a jackal howled at the starry, moonless sky.
"Do you hear that, my friends?" Hadji called back to them. "A jackal, the symbol of the god! Anubis is welcoming you!" He laughed madly.
The three captive men moved for hours through the black desert, two on foot and one on his back. At last in the distance they saw a slight flicker of lights, and as they drew closer the soft sounds of chanting reached their ears. They could not understand the words of the long-dead tongue, but the sounds sent thrills of terror up their spines.
"Anpu, nekhemkua ma ab! 'Anpu, nekhemkua ma ab!" Anubis, deliver me from death.
CHAPTER 16
The line of freshly carved hieroglyphs was the first thing she saw as she opened her eyes and tried, at first unsuccessfully, to focus them. She almost imagined that her eyelids squeaked audibly as she forced them open, but the sound of creaking joints as she slowly and painfully moved her legs and arms was not imagination. Her body seemed to be one long wound from head to foot, battered and sore. The cold stone floor upon which she lay scraped painfully upon her soiled skin when she attempted to rise to a sitting position, and she could not suppress a small, weak moan.
Where am I? she thought, her mind confused and numb. She looked up again at the line of hieroglyphs which had been carved tall and deep upon the archway of the door which stood at one end of the long subterranean vault. She squinted her eyes, trying to bring the ideographs into clearer focus in the flickering torchlight.
"Anpu anet hrak suten neteru," she whispered as she ran her vision across the carving, "xeperu xer khat 'Anpu kheq tetta." She read it again, silently, her scholar's mind fighting its way upward through the miasma of pain and grief which radiated without explanation from her subconscious. A few moments passed, and then the meaning of the words arranged themselves in her mind, bringing with them memory of what had happened, of what was happening now.
Anubis, praise to you, king of the gods, who came into being in ancient times, Anubis, prince of eternity.
"No," she muttered weakly as the tears began to stream from her cloudy eyes. "Oh, Jesus, no." She remembered everyth
ing. She was sitting upon her folded legs, and she rested her elbows upon the junction of her inner thighs as she bent over slightly and drew her bound arms tightly to her bosom in a pathetic attempt to hide the nakedness which had been open to so many men for so many days.
"Harriet," she heard a voice say softly.
She looked up in the direction of the voice. Sam Goldhaber sat against the wall beside her, his arms and legs tied in the same fashion as hers, looking drawn and haggard, older than he had ever seemed to look before. He was wearing a torn, dirty, sweat-drenched kaftan, and his half-open eyes gazed at her sorrowfully. "Sam?" she asked, only half believing what she saw. "Sam? Is that you?"
He smiled sadly. "Who else should it be?" he muttered.
"What are you doing here?" She looked around. "And where is here?" She had not noticed before that they were seated on the stone floor of a large rectangular room whose walls were covered with freshly carved and painted inscriptions and friezes, illuminated by a series of torches which fitted at an angle into holders attached to the walls. They were not alone. People, dozens of people, male and female, sat along the sides of the chamber and in its open midst, all of them bound hand and foot. Occasional cries of anger and terror rose intermittently from the soft background noise of weeping and prayer. The other captives seemed to be local people—Arabs—from the lowest stratum of society, judging by the worn and tattered rags which most of them wore.
Tekenues, Harriet realized. All of them. All of us.
She turned back to Sam. "Why are you here, Sam? What happened?"
He sighed. "We came to try to rescue you, Tom, the Earl, and I. We didn't succeed, obviously."
"Tommy?! He's here? Where?" Sam nodded his head and pointed with his vision to the huddled pile of filthy rags beside her, and she looked down at the still unconscious form of Thomas Sawhill. His face was pale and cadaverous, and there seemed to be traces of blood on the stone floor beneath him. She could see dried flecks and spots, the red turning to brown in the dry heat. Only the slow and regular rise and fall of his chest told her that he was still alive.
"He fought them when they took us," Sam explained weakly. "They knocked him out and dragged him here across the desert, tied to the back of a wagon."
Harriet found herself weeping freely as she reached out with her bound hands and touched the cold, fishlike skin of his cheek. "Oh, honey," she whispered sadly. She half fell and half bent over to rest her face upon his chest, her body racked with sobs.
He seemed to stir slightly as her shaking body imparted its motion to his, and his eyes opened half way. "Harriet?" he muttered. "Harriet?"
"Oh, Tommy, I love you, I love you—"
"I'm sorry, honey," he said thickly. "I tried, I tried—"
"I know, sweetheart," she wept. "I love you."
"I love you," he replied, and then fell back into unconsciousness.
Harriet lay weeping upon the motionless form for a long while. Sam Goldhaber looked at her, his tired face filled with pity and defeat, too weary to be angry, too exhausted to give expression to his own fears. After a few minutes Harriet looked up at him and asked, "The Earl is here?"
"Yes, Roderick's here, right next to me. He's sleeping."
"How can he be sleeping!"
Sam smiled weakly. "He's tired. He and I walked all the way here, tied behind a wagon just like Tom."
Harriet sat up again but kept her hands on Sawhill's chest, which she stroked absently. "Where are we, Sam? What is this place?"
"I don't know how far we walked, but we're somewhere in Upper Egypt west of Aswan, out in the desert. I think we're in some sort of temple. It was hard to see too clearly in the dark outside—they just had a few torches lit when we got here—but I'm pretty sure that we're in the subchamber of an old mastaba."
"How long have we been here?"
He shook his head. "Not long. A few hours, maybe. These poor devils"—he nodded at the other people in the room— "seem to have been here longer. They were all here when we were brought down, and I've been able to catch a few bits of conversations. Some of them have been here for days."
"Tekenues," she muttered.
"What?"
"They're tekenues, all of them, just like us."
He shook his head. "This is madness. I just can't believe it."
"Believe it, Sam, believe it. I saw them kill Suzie and Gus. They just rotted away, shriveled up, while two of the mummies—" she shook her head, only partially believing it herself as she heard her own words, "while two of the mummies drank their souls."
"There must be an explanation of this," Sam said. "I can't accept all this talk about ancient gods and drinking souls."
"It doesn't matter what the explanation is," Harriet said, her voice expressionless, defeated, resigned. "Somehow or other, Sekhemib is alive. Somehow or other, he can control our minds and bodies. And they're going to kill us."
"There must be a way out of this," he whispered, more to himself than to Harriet. "There simply must be."
"There isn't, Sam," she replied. "I've tried to escape, but I couldn't. They—they punished me for trying."
His brow furrowed. "What do you mean? What did they do?"
Her voice broke. "They gave me to the crew of the ship."
Sam understood the reason for her nakedness. "Oh, Harriet. You poor thing." His lip trembled as a tear rolled down his cheek.
She shuddered and shook her head, fighting to retain what little composure she had left. "I tried to use the name of Ousha's god, but it didn't work."
"Ousha's god? What are you—oh, the scroll!"
"Yes. Ousha wrote that he could control Sekhemib by the power of Xepheraxepher, and I tried to use his name, but nothing happened." She smiled slightly, feeling a bit foolish. "I mean, of course nothing happened. I was desperate."
"I understand," Sam said soothingly. "I would have tried it myself."
Harriet looked around the room. "Maybe we should try to untie each other's bonds."
He shook his head. "Look over there, against the far wall."
She did as he suggested. Down at the end of the long room stood a large, burly man, dressed in a pure white robe. His hands rested upon the hilt of a deadly looking scimitar whose point was balanced upon the stone floor. His eyes moved continuously over the mass of huddled, weeping people.
"A little while ago, before you came to, a couple of these poor devils tried to untie each other's hands. That guard pulled them apart from each other and then chopped their hands off."
Harriet trembled, feeling her stomach grow queasy. "Madmen. These people are insane."
"Ah, but no, my dear lady," Ahmed Hadji said from the doorway beneath the hieroglyphs. "We are merely eager to receive our reward for all the years of faithful service to the god."
Sam and Harriet turned their heads in the direction of the voice and watched as Hadji walked into the room and approached them. Sam felt a surge of anger and Harriet shrank away from him against the wall. "I trust you are comfortable?" he asked politely.
"You're the perfect host," Sam muttered. "You son of a bitch."
"Tch-tch-tch," Hadji said, clicking his tongue as he wagged a finger in remonstrance. "Please attempt to maintain some dignity. You are in a house of worship, and a service is going to be conducted upstairs. Listen!"
The faint echoes of a chant drifted down into the subterranean vault. "Anet hrauthen neteru," the chorus of voice sang. Praise to you, O gods. "Anet hrauthen 'Anpu." Praise to you, Anubis.
Hadji smiled. "How do you like our choir?"
"Listen to me, Hadji," Sam said. "You can't get away with this. There are people who know we're in Egypt, who will come looking for us if we disappear."
He seemed sad in his mocking manner as he replied, "I'm terribly sorry, my friend, but I don't think so. And even if there are such people, they will present us with as little difficulty as you have. No," he sighed, "I'm afraid your fate is fixed. I’m terribly sorry."
"Do you want money?" Sam a
sked. "We can give you money, as much as you want if you'll let us go."
"Please, dear sir, don't insult me! I have more money than I know what to do with. I'm a wealthy man in my country, you know. All of us are. Why, we've been accumulating wealth for over three thousand years!" He shook his head. "No, I'm sorry. A bribe is out of the question. Unless . . ." He paused.
"Unless what?"
"Unless you can somehow arrange for me never to die. After all, that's my payment for services rendered to my companions." He paused again, as if waiting for a reply. "No? Well, then, I'm afraid we'll just have to leave things as they are." He laughed loudly and sat down beside Roderick, who was snoring. Hadji smiled at the innocent face of the young nobleman. "Ah, the English. Stiff upper lip, and all that. Remarkable people, what?"
Roderick's eyes opened slowly, his sleep disturbed by the conversation. "What—what—oh, I say!" He sat up, suddenly wide awake and frightened.
"Terribly sorry to disturb you, Your Lordship," Hadji said in a jovial, friendly manner. "We're going to begin soon, and I thought that you all might like to know what's going to happen upstairs." He shrugged apologetically. "Unfortunately, we don't have missals like the Catholics used to have, and our service is in an ancient language. I hope that doesn't detract from the beauty of the ceremony. I'm certain that scholars such as you, Dr. Goldhaber, and you, Dr. Langly, will enjoy the experience." He smiled. "For a while, at least."
"Please, Hadji," Harriet moaned, "please—"
"We begin with some ritual chanting—it has already begun, as you can hear—and then have a preliminary sacrifice. Similar to Christianity, as I understand the communion service, the crucifixion, and all that, except we aren't symbolic. We use real blood. You, my dear Dr. Goldhaber, are to be the sacrifice, or so my lord Sekhemib informs me. I'm sorry, but you are too old to be a tekenu. Your soul has too few years remaining to it for any of us to wish to drink it. I really am terribly sorry." Sam, his face deathly pale, did not respond to the goading. "Then the ceremony of the resurrection shall begin. I'm pleased to say that you, my dear lady, and our good friend the Earl of Selwyn, along with your boyfriend—oh, is he still asleep? Poor fellow. He's had an exhausting day—shall be honored by the immortals by serving as three of the six tekenues. We shall choose the other three from this motley assortment here." He waved his hand around the room.
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