The Seventh Scroll

by Wilbur Smith

  ‘Some of those chests will contain the royal cosmetics,’ Royan murmured, ‘and some of them will be Pharaoh’s wardrobes of clothing. There will be costumes in them for every occasion in his after-life. I long to be able to unpack and examine them.’

  The next set of wall panels showed the marriage of the king to the young virgin, Taita’s mistress. The face of Queen Lostris was rendered with loving detail. The artist gloated on her beauty and exaggerated it, his brush strokes caressing her naked breasts and lingering on all her virtues until they epitomized feminine perfection.

  ‘How much Taita loved her,’ Royan murmured, and there was envy in her voice. ‘You can see it in every line he drew.’

  Nicholas smiled softly and put his arms around her shoulders.

  There were hundreds more wooden chests stacked in the next alcoves. Painted on the lids were miniatures of the king decked in all his jewellery: his fingers and toes were thick with rings and his chest was covered with pectoral medallions, while bangles of gold adorned his arms and bracelets his wrists. In one portrait he wore the double crown of the two kingdoms of Egypt united, the red crown and the white with the heads of the vulture and the cobra on his brow. In another he wore the blue war crown, and on a third the Nemes crown with gold and lapis wings that covered his ears.

  ‘If each of those chests contains the treasures depicted on its lid—’ Nicholas broke off, unable to continue the thought. The possibility of such riches was daunting, and the imagination balked at the magnitude of it.

  ‘Do you remember what Taita wrote in the scrolls? “I cannot believe that such a treasure was ever before accumulated in one place at one time”?’ Royan asked him. ‘It seems that it is all still here, every single gem and grain of gold. The treasure of Mamose is intact.’

  Beyond the treasury there was another alcove lined with shelves on which stood the ushabti figures: dolls made of green glazed porcelain or carved from cedarwood. They were an army of tiny figures, men and women from all the trades and professions. There were priests and scribes and lawyers and physicians, gardeners and farmers, bakers and brewers, handmaidens and dancing girls, seamstresses and laundrymaids, soldiers and barbers, and common labourers. Each of them carried the tools and accoutrements of his or her trade. They would accompany the king to the after-world and there would work for Pharaoh, and would go forward in his place if he were ever called upon to perform a service for the other gods.

  At last Nicholas and Royan came to the end of this fabulous arcade, and found their way closed off by a series of tall, free-standing screens, tabernacles that had been once fine white linen mesh but were now decayed and rotted into ribbons and streamers, dirty and shabby as old cobwebs. And yet the stars and rosettes of shining gold that decorated these curtains were still hanging in the mesh like fish in a fisherman’s net. Through this ethereal web of silken wisps and golden stars they could make out the shape of another gateway beyond.

  ‘That must be the entrance to the actual tomb,’ Royan whispered. ‘There is only a thin veil between us and the king now.’

  They hesitated at the threshold, gripped by a strange reluctance to take the final step.

  As an old warrior, Mek Nimmur had seen and treated most of the injuries that a man might sustain on the battlefield. His little guerrilla group did not have a doctor, or even a medical orderly. Mek himself treated most of his casualties, and he always had a medical kit close at hand.

  He had the men carry Tessay to one of the huts near the quarry, where, screened by the grass walls, he stripped her of her tattered clothing and treated her injuries. He cleaned her burns and abrasions with disinfectant, and covered the worst of them with clean field dressings. Then he rolled her gently on to her stomach and snapped the glass phial off the needle of the disposable syringe which was preloaded with a broad-spectrum antibiotic.

  She winced at the sting of the needle, and he said, ‘I am not a very good doctor.’

  ‘I would have no other. Oh, Mek! I thought I would never see you again. I did not fear death as much as I feared that.’

  He helped her dress in the spare clothing from his pack, a sweatshirt and fatigues that were many sizes too large for her. He rolled up the cuffs for her, and his touch was gentle. His hands were those of a lover, not a soldier.

  ‘I must look so ugly,’ she whispered through her swollen, black-scabbed lips.

  ‘You are beautiful,’ he denied it. ‘To me you will always be beautiful.’ He touched her cheek carefully, so as not to harm the raw burns that covered it.

  At that moment they heard the gunfire. It was still faint with distance, borne down from the north on the rain winds.

  Mek stood up immediately. ‘It has begun. Nogo is attacking at last.’

  ‘It’s all my fault. I told him—’

  ‘No,’ he told her firmly. ‘It is not your fault. You did what you had to do. If you had not, they would have hurt you even worse than this. They would have attacked us, even if you had told them nothing.’

  He picked up his webbing belt and strapped it around his waist. From far off they heard the crumping detonation of exploding mortar shells.

  ‘I have to go now,’ he told her.

  ‘I know. Do not worry about me.’

  ‘I will always worry about you. These men will carry you down to the monastery. That is the assembly point. Wait for me there. I cannot hope to hold Nogo for long. He is too strong. I will come to you soon.’

  ‘I love you,’ she whispered. ‘I will wait for you for ever.’

  ‘You are my woman,’ he told her in his deep, soft voice, and then he ducked through the doorway of the hut and was gone.

  When Nicholas touched the frame of the screen, fragments of the mesh veil tore free with even that tiny movement and fell to the tiles of the floor. The golden rosettes trapped in their folds tinkled on the stones. Now there was an opening in the curtain large enough for them to step through. They found themselves before the inner doorway. It was guarded on one side by a massive statue of the great god Osiris with his hands crossed over his chest, clutching the crook and the flail. Opposite stood his wife Isis, with the lunar crown and horns on her head. Their blank eyes stared out into eternity, and their expressions were serene. Nicholas and Royan passed between these twelve-foot-high statues and found themselves at last in the veritable tomb of Mamose.

  The roof was vaulted, and the quality of the murals that covered it and the walls was different – formal and classical. The colours were of a deeper, more sombre hue, and the patterns more intricate. The chamber was smaller than they had anticipated; just large enough to accommodate the huge granite sarcophagus of the divine Pharaoh Mamose.

  The sarcophagus stood chest-high. Its side panels were engraved in bas-relief with scenes of Pharaoh and the other gods. The stone lid was in the shape of a full-length effigy of the supine figure of the king. They saw at once that it was still in its original position, and that the clay seals of the priests of Osiris which secured the lid were intact. The tomb had never been violated. The mummy had lain within it undisturbed through the millennia.

  But this was not what amazed them. There were two extraneous items within the otherwise classically correct tomb. On the lid of the sarcophagus lay a magnificent war bow. Almost as long as Nicholas was tall, the entire length of its stock was bound with coils of shining electrum wire, that alloy of gold and silver whose formula has been lost in antiquity.

  The other item that should never have been placed in a royal tomb stood at the foot of the sarcophagus. It was a small human figure, one of the ushabti dolls. A glance confirmed the superior quality of the carving of this effigy, and both of them recognized the features instantly. Only minutes before, they had seen that face painted upon the walls of the arcade, outside the tomb.

  The words of Taita, from the scrolls, seemed to reverberate within the confines of the tomb, and hang like fireflies in the air above the sarcophagus:

  When I stood for the very last time beside the
royal sarcophagus, I sent all the workmen away. I would be the very last to leave the tomb, and after me the entrance would be sealed. When I was alone I opened the bundle I carried. From it I took the long bow, Lanata. Tanus had named it after my mistress, for Lanata had been her baby name. I had made the bow for him. It was the last gift from the two of us. I placed it upon the sealed stone lid of his coffin.

  There was one other item in my bundle. It was the wooden ushabti figure that I had carved. I placed it at the foot of the sarcophagus. While I carved it, I had set up three copper mirrors so that I could study my own features from every angle and reproduce them faithfully. The doll was a miniature Taita.

  Upon the base I had inscribed the words—

  Royan knelt at the foot of the coffin and pick up the ushabti figure. Reverently she turned it in her hands and studied the hieroglyphics carved into the base of the figure.

  Nicholas knelt beside her. ‘Read it to me,’ he said.

  Softly she obeyed. ‘“My name is Taita. I am a physician and a poet. I am an architect and a philosopher. I am your friend. I will answer for you.”’

  ‘So it’s all true,’ Nicholas whispered.

  Royan replaced the ushabti exactly as she had found it and, still on her knees, turned her face to his.

  ‘I have never known another moment like this,’ she whispered. ‘I want it never to end.’

  ‘It will never end, my darling,’ he answered her. ‘You and I are only just beginning.’

  Mek Nimmur watched them coming, skirting the bottom slope of the hill. It took the trained eye of a bush-fighter to pick them out as they moved through the thick scrub and thorn. As he evaluated them he felt a twinge of dismay. These were crack troops, seasoned during long years of war. He had once fought with them against the Mengistu tyranny, and he had probably trained many of those men down there. Now they were coming against him. Such was the cycle of war and violence in this racked continent, where the endless struggles were fuelled and nurtured by the age-old tribal enmities and the greed and corruption of the new-age politicians and their outmoded ideologies.

  But this was not the moment for dialectics, he thought bitterly, and focused his mind on the tactics of the battlefield beneath him. Yes! These men were good. He could see it in the way they advanced, like wraiths through the scrub. For every one of them he picked out, he knew there were a dozen others that remained unseen.

  ‘Company strength,’ he thought, and glanced around at his own small force. Fourteen men amongst the rocks, they could only hope to hit their adversary hard while they still had the advantage of surprise, and then pull back before Nogo ranged his mortars in on the hilltop where they lay.

  He looked up at the sky and wondered whether Nogo would call in an air strike. Thirty-five minutes’ flying time for a stick of those Soviet-built Tupolevs from the air base at Addis, and he could almost smell the sweet stench of napalm on the humid wind, and see the rolling cloud of flame sweeping towards them. That was the only thing his men really feared. But there would be no air strike – not this time, he decided. Nogo and his paymaster, the German von Schiller, wanted the spoils from the tomb that Nicholas Quenton-Harper had discovered in the gorge. They did not want to share any of it with those political fat cats in Addis. They would not want to draw any government attention to themselves and this little private campaign of theirs in the Abbay gorge.

  He looked back down the slope. The enemy was moving in nicely, swinging around the hillside to intersect the trail along the Dandera river. Soon they must send a patrol up here to secure their flank before they could sweep on. Yes, there they were. Eight, no, ten men detaching from the main advance, and moving cautiously up the slope beneath him.

  ‘I will let them get in close,’ he decided. ‘I would like to get them all, but that is too much to hope for. I would settle for four or five of them, and it would be good to leave a few squealers in the scrub.’ He grinned cruelly. ‘Nothing like a man screaming with a belly wound to take the fire out of his comrades, and make them keep their heads down.’

  He looked across the rock-strewn slope, and saw that his RPD light machine gun was perfectly sited to enfilade their advance up the slope. Salim, his machine gunner, was an artist with that weapon. Perhaps, after all, he could hope to put down more than five of them.

  ‘We will see,’ thought Mek, ‘but I must time it right.’

  He saw that there was a gap in the ridge of rock just below him.

  ‘They will not want to expose themselves by crossing the open ridge,’ he judged. ‘They will tend to bunch up and sneak through the gap. That will be the moment.’

  He looked back at the RPD. Salim was watching him, waiting for his signal. Mek looked back down the slope.

  ‘Yes,’ he thought. ‘Their line is bunching. The big one on the left is already out of position. Those two inside him are angling across towards the gap.’

  Nogo’s men’s camouflage blended perfectly with the scrub, and the barrels of their weapons were wrapped with rags and scraps of camouflage netting so that they threw no sunlight reflections. They were almost invisible in the bush; it was only their movements and the skin tones that betrayed them. They were so close now that Mek caught the occasional gleam of one of their eyeballs but he still could not pick out their machine gunner.

  He must silence the gun with his first burst. ‘Ah, yes,’ he thought with relief. ‘There he is. On the right flank. I nearly missed him.’

  The man was short and thick-set, with heavy shoulders and long arms, simian, carrying the gun easily on his hip. It was a Soviet-made 7.62mm RPD. The wink of brass from the cartridges in the ammunition belts festooned over those great shoulders had given him away.

  Mek eased himself down and inched around the base of the rock that covered him. He slipped the rate-of-fire selector on his AKM to rapid, and laid his cheek on the wooden butt. It was his personal weapon. A gunsmith in Addis had trued the action and lapped the barrel for him, as well as glass-bedding the barrel into the stock. All this had been done to improve the accuracy of this notoriously inaccurate assault rifle. It was still no sniper’s weapon, but with these modifications he could expect to place all his shots within a two-inch circle at a hundred metres.

  The man carrying the RPD up the slope was now only fifty metres below where he lay. Mek glanced to his right to make sure that the three others were moving into the gap where Salim could take them out with a single burst; then he settled the pip of his foresight in the centre of the RPD machine gunner’s belly, using his belt buckle as an aiming mark, and fired a tap of three.

  The AKM rode up viciously and the triple detonation stung his eardrums, but Mek saw his bullets strike, stitching a row up the man’s torso. One hit low in the belly, the second in the diaphragm and the third at the base of his throat. He spun around, his arms flinging out and jerking, and then crashed over backwards, out of sight in the underbrush.

  All around Mek his men were firing. He wondered how many of them Salim had taken with that first burst, but there was no longer anything to see. The enemy were all down in cover. A faint haze of gunsmoke blued the air as they returned fire, and the scrub trembled and shook to the recoil and the muzzle blast of their weapons.

  Then, in the uproar of fire, in the whine and wail of ricochets off the rocks, one of them began to scream.

  ‘I am hit. In Allah’s name, help me.’ His cries rang eerily across the hillside, and the enemy fire slackened perceptibly. Mek clipped a fresh magazine on to the AKM.

  ‘Sing, little bird. Sing!’ he muttered grimly.

  It required the combined strength of Nicholas, Hansith and eight other men to lift the lid off the stone sarcophagus. Staggering under its weight, they laid it carefully against the wall of the tomb. Then Royan and Nicholas stood on the plinth of the sarcophagus to look down into the interior.

  Fitted neatly into the stone receptacle was an enormous wooden coffin. Its lid too was in the form of the reclining Pharaoh. He was in the posture of d
eath with his hands crossed at his breast, clutching the flail and the crook. The coffin was gilded and encrusted with semiprecious stones. The expression on the face of the king’s effigy was serene.

  They lifted the coffin out of the sarcophagus, and its weight was less than that of the stone lid. Carefully Nicholas split the golden seals and the layer of hard dried resin that held the lid of the coffin in place. Within it they found another coffin, fitted perfectly, and when they opened that yet another coffin was revealed. It was like a nest of Russian dolls, one within the other, becoming smaller with each revelation.

  In the end there were seven coffins, each of them progressively more ornate and richly decorated than the previous one. The seventh coffin was only slightly larger than a man, and it was made of gold. The polished metal caught the light of the lamps like a thousand mirrors and threw bright arrows and darts into every recess of the tomb.

  When at last they opened the golden inner coffin they found that it was filled with flowers. The blooms had dried and faded, so their colour was sepia. Their scent had long ago evaporated, so that only the musky aroma of great age wafted up from the coffin. The petals were so dry and papery that they crumbled at the first touch. Beneath the faded blooms was a layer of the finest linen; once it must have been snowy white, but now it was brown with age and the stain of the juices from the flowers. Through the soft folds they saw once again the gleam of gold.

  Standing on either side of the coffin, Nicholas and Royan peeled back the linen mesh. It crackled softly and tore like tissue paper under their fingers, but as it came away they both involuntarily gasped with wonder as the death-mask of Pharaoh was revealed. It was only fractionally larger than the head of a man, but it was a perfect image in every detail. Pharaoh’s features had been preserved for all eternity in this extraordinary work of art. They stared in silent wonder into the obsidian and rock crystal eyes of Pharaoh, and Pharaoh gazed back at them sadly, almost accusingly.