by Wilbur Smith
‘You think that this is one of those clues?’ Nicholas tapped the photograph with the glass.
‘Read it,’ she instructed him. ‘It’s in classical hieroglyphics – not too difficult compared to his cryptic codes.’
‘“The father of the prince who is not the father, the giver of the blue that killed him,”’ he translated haltingly, ‘“guards eternally hand in hand with Hapi the stone testament of the pathway to the father of the prince who is not the father, the giver of blood and ashes.”’
Nicholas shook his head, ‘No, it doesn’t make sense,’ he protested, ‘I must have made an error in the translation.’
‘Don’t despair. You are making your first acquaintance with Taita, the champion bao player and consummate riddler. Duraid and I puzzled over it for weeks,’ she reassured him. ‘To work it out, let’s go back to the book. Tanus was not the father of Prince Memnon in name, but, as the Queen’s lover, was his biological father. On his deathbed, he gave Memnon the blue sword that had inflicted his own mortal wound during the battle with the native Ethiopian chief. There is a full description of the battle in the book.’
‘Yes, when I first read that section, I remember thinking that the blue sword was probably one of the very earliest iron weapons, and in an age of bronze would have been a marvel of the armourer’s art. A gift fit for a prince,’ Nicholas mused, and went on, ‘So “the father of the prince who is not the father” is Tanus?’ He sighed with resignation. ‘For the moment I accept your interpretation.’
‘Thank you for your trust and confidence in me,’ she said sarcastically. ‘But to proceed with Taita’s riddle – Pharaoh Mamose was Memnon’s father in name only, but not his blood father. Again the father who was not the father. Mamose passed down to the prince the double crown of Egypt, the red and white crowns of Upper and Lower Kingdoms – the blood and the ashes.’
‘I am able to swallow that more easily. What about the rest of the inscription?’ Nicholas was clearly intrigued.
‘The expression “hand in hand” is ambiguous in ancient Egyptian. It could just as well mean very close to, or within sight of, something.’
‘Go on. At last you have me sitting up and taking notice,’ Nicholas encouraged her.
‘Hapi is the hermaphroditic god or goddess of the Nile, depending on the gender he or she adopts at any particular moment. Throughout the scrolls Taita uses Hapi as an alternative name for the river.’
‘So if we put the seventh scroll and the inscription from the Queen’s tomb together, what then is your full interpretation?’ he insisted.
‘Simply this: Tanus is buried within sight of, or very close to, the river at the second waterfall. There is a stone monument or inscription on, or in, his tomb that points the way to the tomb of Pharaoh.’
He exhaled through his teeth. ‘I am exhausted from all this jumping to conclusions. What other clues have you ferreted out for me?’
‘That’s it,’ she said, and he looked at her with disbelief.
‘That’s it? Nothing else?’ he demanded, and she shook her head.
‘Just suppose that you are correct so far. Let us suppose that the river is recognizably the same in shape and configuration as it was nearly four thousand years ago. Let us further suppose that Taita was indeed pointing us towards the second waterfall at the Dandera river. Just what do we look for when we get there? If there is a rock inscription, will it still be intact or will it be eroded away by weather and the action of the river?’
‘Howard Carter had an equally slender lead to the tomb of Tutankhamen,’ she pointed out mildly. ‘A single piece of papyrus, of dubious authenticity.’
‘Howard Carter had only the area of the Valley of the Kings to search. It still took him ten years,’ he replied. ‘You have given me Ethiopia, a country twice the size of France. How long will that take us, do you think?’
She stood up abruptly, ‘Excuse me, I think I should go and visit my mother in hospital. It’s fairly obvious that I am wasting my time here.’
‘It is not yet visiting hours,’ he told her.
‘She has a private room.’ Royan made for the door.
‘I will drive you to the hospital,’ he offered.
‘Don’t bother. I will call a taxi,’ she replied in a tone that crackled with ice.
‘A taxi will take an hour to get here,’ he warned, and she relented just enough to let him lead her to the Range Rover. They drove in silence for fifteen minutes, before he spoke.
‘I am not very good at apologies. Not much practice, I am afraid, but I am sorry. I was abrupt. I didn’t mean to be. Carried away by the excitement of the moment.’
She did not reply, and after a minute he added, ‘You will have to talk to me, unless we are to correspond only by note. It will be a bit awkward down in the Abbay gorge.’
‘I had the distinct impression that you were no longer interested in going down there.’ She stared ahead through the windscreen.
‘I am a brute,’ he agreed, and she glanced sideways at him. It was her undoing. His grin was irresistible, and she laughed.
‘I suppose I will just have to come to terms with that fact. You are a brute.’
‘Still partners?’ he asked.
‘At the moment you are the only brute I have. I suppose that I am stuck with you.’
He dropped her off at the main hospital entrance. ‘I will pick you up here at three o’clock,’ he told her and drove on into the centre of York.
From his university days Nicholas had kept a small flat in one of the narrow alleys behind York Minster. The entire building was registered in the name of a Cayman Island company, and the unlisted telephone there did not route through an internal switchboard. No ownership could be traced to him personally. Before he had met Rosalind the flat had played an important part in his social life. But nowadays Nicholas only used it for confidential and clandestine business. Both the Libyan and the Iraqi expeditions had been planned and organized from here.
He hadn’t used the flat for months, and it was cold and musty-smelling and uninviting. He put a match to the gas fire in the grate and filled the kettle. With a mug of steaming tea in front of him he placed a call to a bank in Jersey, followed immediately by another to a bank in the Cayman Islands.
‘A wise rat has more than one exit from its burrow.’ This was a family maxim, passed down through the generations. There should always be a little something tucked away for the day the heavens opened. He was going to need funds for the expedition, and the lawyers had most of those locked up already.
He gave the passwords and account numbers to each of the bank managers and instructed them to make certain transfers. It always amazed him how easily matters could be arranged, as long as you had money.
He checked his watch. It was still early morning in Florida, but Alison picked up the phone on the second ring. She was the blonde feminine dynamo who ran Global Safaris, a company that arranged hunting and fishing expeditions to remote areas around the world.
‘Hello, Nick. We haven’t heard from you in over a year. We thought you didn’t love us any more.’
‘I have been out of it for a while,’ he admitted. How do you tell people that your wife and two little girls had died?
‘Ethiopia?’ She did not sound at all disconcerted by the request. ‘When did you want to go?’
‘How about next week?’
‘You have to be joking. We only work with one hunter there, Nassous Roussos, and he is booked two years in advance.’
‘Is there nobody else?’ he insisted. ‘I have to be in and out again before the big rains.’
‘What trophies are you after?’ she hedged. ‘Mountain nyala? Menelik’s bushbuck?’
‘I am planning a collecting trip for the museum, down the Abbay river.’ It was as much as he was prepared to tell her.
She hedged a little longer and then told him reluctantly, ‘This is without our recommendation, do you understand. There is only one hunter who may take you on at such
short notice, but I don’t even know if he has a camp on the Blue Nile. He is a Russian, and we have had mixed reports about him. Some people say he is ex-KGB and was one of Mengistu’s bunch of thugs.’
Mengistu was the ‘Black Stalin’ who had deposed and then murdered the old Emperor Haile Selassie, and in sixteen years of despotic Marxist rule had driven Ethiopia to its knees. When his sponsor, the Soviet Empire, had collapsed, Mengistu had been overthrown and fled the country.
‘I am desperate enough to go to bed with the devil,’ he told her. ‘I promise I won’t come back to you with any complaints.’
‘Okay, then, no come-backs—’ and she gave him a name and a telephone number in Addis Ababa.
‘I love you, Alison darling,’ Nicholas told her.
‘I wish,’ she said, and hung up on him.
He didn’t expect that it would be easy to telephone Addis, and he wasn’t disappointed in his expectations. But at last he got through. A woman with a sweet lisping Ethiopian accent answered and switched to fluent English when he asked for Boris Brusilov.
‘He is out on safari at present,’ she told him. ‘I am Woizero Tessay, his wife.’ In Ethiopia a wife did not take on her husband’s name. Nicholas remembered enough of the language to know that the name meant Lady Sun, a pretty name.
‘But if it is in connection with safari business I can help you,’ said Lady Sun.
Nicholas picked Royan up outside the hospital entrance.
‘How is your mother?’
‘Her leg is doing well, but she is still distraught about Magic – about her dog.’
‘You will have to get her a puppy. One of my keepers breeds first-class springers. I can arrange it.’ He paused and then asked delicately, ‘Will you be able to leave your mother? I mean, if we are going out to Africa?’
‘I spoke to her about that. There is a woman from her church group who will stay with her until she is well enough to fend for herself again.’
Royan turned fully around in her seat to examine his face. ‘You have been up to something since I last saw you,’ she accused him. ‘I can see it in your face.’
He made the Arabic sign against the evil eye, ‘Allah save me from witches!’
‘Come on!’ He could make her laugh so readily, she was not sure if that was a good thing or not. ‘Tell me what you have up your sleeve.’
‘Wait until we get back to the museum.’ He would not be moved, and she had to bridle her impatience.
As soon as they entered the building he led her through the Egyptian room to the hall of African mammals, and then stopped her in front of a diorama of mounted antelope. These were some of the smaller and medium-sized varieties – impala, Thompson’s and Grant’s gazelle, gerenuk and the like.
‘Madoqua harperii.’ He pointed to a tiny creature in one corner of the display. ‘Harper’s dik-dik, also known as the striped dik-dik.’
It was a nondescript little animal, not much bigger than a large hare. The brown pelt was striped in chocolate over the shoulders and back, and the nose was elongated into a prehensile proboscis.
‘A bit tatty,’ she gave her opinion carefully, unwilling to offend him, for he seemed inordinately proud of this specimen. ‘Is there anything special about it?’
‘Special?’ he asked with wonder in his voice. ‘The woman asks if it is special.’ He rolled his eyes heavenward and she had to laugh again at his histrionics. ‘It is the only known specimen in existence. It is one of the rarest creatures on earth. So rare that it is probably extinct by now. So rare that many zoologists believe that it is apocryphal, that it never really existed. They think that my sainted great-grandfather, after whom it is named, actually invented it. One learned reference hinted that he may have taken the skin of the striped mongoose and stretched it over the form of a common dik-dik. Can you imagine a more heinous accusation?’
‘I am truly appalled by such injustice,’ she laughed.
‘Darned right, you should be. Because we are going to Africa to hunt for another specimen of Madoqua harperii, to vindicate the honour of the family.’
‘I don’t understand.’
‘Come with me and all will be explained.’ He led her back to his study, and from the jumble on the tabletop picked out a notebook bound in red Morocco leather. The cover was faded and stained with water marks and tropical sunlight, while the corners and the spine were frayed and battered.
‘Old Sir Jonathan’s game book,’ he explained, and opened it. Pressed between the pages were faded wild flowers and leaves that must have been there for almost a century. The text was illuminated by line drawings in faded yellow ink of men and animals and wild landscapes. Nicholas read the date at the top of one page.
2nd of February 1902. In camp on the Abbay river. All day following the spoor of two large bull elephants. Unable to come up with them. Heat very intense. My men played out. Abandoned the chase and returned to camp. On the return march spied a small antelope grazing on the river-bank, which I brought down with one shot from the little Rigby rifle. On close examination it proved to be a member of the genus Madoqa. However, it was of a species that I had never seen before, larger than the common dik-dik and possessing a striped body. I believe that this specimen may be new to science.
He looked up from the diary. ‘Old great-grandpa Jonathan has given us the perfect excuse for going down into the Abbay gorge.’ He closed the book, and went on, ‘As you pointed out, to cater for our own expedition would require months of planning and organization, not to mention the expense. It would mean having to obtain approval and permission from the Ethiopian government. In Africa that can take months, if not years.’
‘I don’t imagine that the Ethiopian government would be too cooperative if they suspected our real intentions,’ she agreed.
‘On the other hand, there are a number of legitimate hunting safari companies operating throughout the country. They have all the necessary permits, governmental contacts, vehicles, camping equipment and logistic backup necessary to travel and stay in even the remotest areas. The authorities are quite accustomed to foreign hunters arriving and leaving with these companies, whereas a couple of ferengi nosing around on their own would have the local military and everybody else down on them like a herd of angry buffalo.’
‘So we are going to travel as a pair of dik-dik hunters?’
‘I have already made the booking with a safari operator in Addis Ababa, the capital. My plan is to look upon the whole of our project in three distinct and separate stages. The first stage will be this reconnaissance. If we find the lead we are hoping for, then we will go back again with our own men and equipment. That will be stage two. Stage three, of course, will be getting the booty out of Ethiopia, and that I assure you from past experience will not be the easiest part of the operation.’
‘How will you do that—’ she began, but he held up his hands.
‘Don’t ask, because at this stage I don’t have even the vaguest idea how we will do it. One stage at a time.’
‘When do we leave?’
‘Before I tell you when, let me ask you one more question. Your interpretation of the Taita riddle – did you explain that in the notes that were stolen from you at the oasis?’
‘Yes, everything was either in those notes or on the microfilm. I am sorry.’
‘So the uglies will have it all neatly laid out for them, just the way you laid it out for me.’
‘I am afraid they will, yes.’
‘Then to reply to your question as to when, the answer is tout de suite, and the tooter the sweeter! We must get into the Abbay gorge before the competition beats us to it. They have had your conclusions and suppositions for almost a month. For all we know they are on their way already.’
‘When?’ she repeated eagerly.
‘I have booked two seats on the British Airways flight to Nairobi this Saturday – that is, in two days’ time. We will connect there with an Air Kenya flight to Addis that will get us in on Monday at around midday. We
will drive down to London this evening and stay over at my digs there. Are your yellow fever and hepatitis shots up to date?’
‘Yes, but I have no equipment and hardly any clothing with me. I left Cairo in rather a hurry.’
‘We will see to that in London. Trouble with Ethiopia is it’s cold enough to emasculate a brass monkey in the highlands, and like a sauna bath down in the gorge.’
He crossed to the board and began to check off the items on his list. ‘We will both start malarial prophylactics immediately. We are going into an area of chloroquine-resistant P. falciparum mosquitoes, so I will put you on Mefloquine—’ He worked swiftly through the list.
‘Of course all your travel documents are in order, or you wouldn’t be here. We will both need visas for Ethiopia, but I have a contact who can arrange that in twenty-four hours.’
As soon as he completed the list he sent her up to her room to pack the few personal items she had brought with her from Cairo.
By the time they were ready to leave Quenton Hall it was dark outside, but still he stopped for an hour at the York Minster Hospital to allow her to say goodbye to her mother. He waited in the Red Lion pub across the road, and he smelt of Theakston’s Old Peculier when she climbed back into the Range Rover beside him. It was a pleasant, yeasty aroma, and she felt so much at ease in his company that she lay back in the seat and fell asleep.
His London house was in Knightsbridge, but despite the fashionable address it was much less grand than Quenton Hall, and she felt more at home there, even if it was only for two days. During that time she saw little of Nicholas, for he was busy with all the last-minute arrangements, which included a number of visits to government offices in Whitehall. He returned with wads of letters of introduction to high officials and British Embassies and High Commissions throughout East Africa.