Secrets of a Sun King

by Emma Carroll

  ‘It’s not like walking on your English beaches!’ he yelled at all of us. ‘You have to know the sky, know the signs. The valley is a strange and moody place. It’s dangerous for people who don’t understand it!’

  I felt a bit embarrassed.

  ‘Thanks for finding Oz. We’re really grateful,’ I said.

  Tulip, all smiles now, tried to shake the boy’s hand but he backed away. ‘You English, you come to our country with your cars and your electric cables and think you can triumph over anything! It’s not like that out here – it’s a different sort of place that requires respect and patience!’

  By now, I was starting to wonder if Mr Carter was at the root of his anger. And when Tulip asked, ever so sweetly, for directions down into the valley, that seemed to firm up the boy’s view that we English were in this together.

  He gave us directions, all right. Long, complicated ones that led us uphill and downhill until eventually we were back by the river where we’d started. The boy had sent us deliberately the wrong way. It was so exasperating. It was almost completely dark.

  ‘What do we do now?’ Tulip asked, looking pretty fed up.

  I shook the last of the sand from my hair and shifted my satchel on to the other shoulder.

  ‘We head straight for the Carter site and climb upwards,’ I said. ‘The plan hasn’t changed.’

  Tulip nodded. ‘You’re right. We’ve got to try again.’

  Oz didn’t say anything. But he was the first of us to turn on his heel and set off in the direction of the desert.

  17

  I’d never expected an Egyptian evening to be so cool. Under a clear, starry sky with mist coming off the river, it could almost have been England. Yet it wasn’t England: the hum of insects and the smell – like dust and sweat and mint all mixed together – told me exactly where I was. I felt excited again. Terrified. I sensed it in the others too: Tulip was unusually quiet; Oz, up ahead, was whistling under his breath.

  This time, as we passed Castle Carter, there was a single light on at a downstairs window. The cars that’d been there earlier had gone.

  ‘I expect he’s at the cocktail party,’ I reasoned.

  Still, we hurried past and had almost reached the main road when Tulip, who was bringing up the rear, suddenly yelped.

  ‘Arggggh! Something’s bitten me!’

  In the dark, I could just about see her holding her foot and grimacing. Very gently, I helped her sit down.

  ‘Is it bleeding?’ I crouched beside her.

  ‘Don’t think so.’ She gritted her teeth to check. ‘Arrrggh!’

  ‘Did you see what did it?’ Oz wanted to know. ‘Was it a snake, or a dog?’

  I didn’t like the idea of either.

  ‘We’d better have a look at the bite,’ I said.

  As Oz flicked on his torch Tulip, begrudgingly, pulled down her sock. You could see a bright red mark just below her ankle, though thankfully no blood.

  ‘It really flipping hurts!’ Tulip gasped.

  ‘Can you get up?’ I asked.

  ‘I think so.’

  But once she was on her feet, she couldn’t walk more than a few steps. The pain made her catch her breath. I felt suddenly close to tears.

  ‘No crying,’ Tulip said sternly. ‘I’ll be fine in a minute.’

  But it was obvious she wasn’t going to manage a two-mile trek in the dark, then climb a cliff face at the end of it. We had to take her back to the boat and fetch Mrs Mendoza – and probably a doctor too.

  ‘Oh no,’ she insisted. ‘I’m coming with you, even if I have to crawl on my hands and knees.’

  ‘But we don’t know what’s bitten you. It could be poisonous.’ All sorts of things like rattlesnakes and deadly spiders lived in desert places: if she’d been got by one of those we were in trouble.

  Tulip was stubborn. ‘I mean it, Lil. After all we’ve been through to get here, I’m not dropping out over a stupid bite.’

  ‘It looks like a sting,’ Oz pointed out.

  We didn’t know for sure, though, did we? If someone could just look at it and tell us …

  ‘We’ll have to carry her back.’ Oz interrupted my thinking.

  Tulip snorted. ‘Lil’s not a beast of burden!’

  I wasn’t, but it did give me an idea.

  *

  The boy with the camels was easy enough to find. It was his animals I saw first, dozing in the grass. On seeing me, one of them grunted. The other chewed and stared, then spat on the ground. It wasn’t much of a welcome, but after earlier, I wasn’t expecting one.

  The boy himself was crouched on the riverbank, cooking eggs over a fire.

  ‘Hello,’ I panted, out of breath from running. ‘I’m afraid I’m here to ask for your help again.’

  The boy prodded his eggs till they spat aggressively in the pan. I supposed he was still angry at us for needing rescuing earlier.

  ‘I’m sorry about the sandstorm business.’ I tried to be polite like Tulip. ‘But my friend’s been bitten by something and I hoped you might be able to help?’

  The boy stood up, taking his pan off the fire. He was still wearing his enormous scarf, which made his face look small and sharp, his eyes bright.

  ‘It is not only the sandstorm I am angry about,’ he said. ‘Earlier today when you passed on the riverbank, you were most rude.’

  Thinking he meant Tulip’s comment about the camel looking like Oz, I tried to explain. ‘My friend made a joke, that’s all. We weren’t laughing at you.’ But hearing how shoddy it sounded, I felt myself go red all the same.

  ‘Let’s do things properly this time, shall we?’ The boy wiped his hands, then offered me one. ‘I am Pepe. My camels are called Charlie and Chaplin after the famous movie star.’

  ‘I’m Lil,’ I stuttered, shaking his hand. ‘Your camels have excellent names!’

  Pepe didn’t smile. ‘We are honest and have feelings, and offer a very good service to tourists like you. If you and your friends only want to laugh at us, find yourselves an old mule too deaf to hear.’

  ‘I’m very sorry, Pepe,’ I was starting to get flustered. My apology wasn’t working and I was desperately worried about Tulip. ‘We didn’t mean to upset you, or your camels. But my friends, Oz and Tulip, are really nice people, and we’re trying to do something terribly important tonight and—’

  Pepe held up his hand to stop me. ‘No speeches, please. Show me to your friend.’

  *

  Pepe insisted on bringing the camels in case Tulip couldn’t walk.

  ‘I’m absolutely not getting up on one of those!’ she cried, when she saw Chaplin and Charlie. ‘I can manage, thank you.’

  She couldn’t, of course. And it was Pepe’s turn to laugh when Tulip had to give up after a few steps.

  ‘Please, Tulip,’ I begged. ‘Just let Pepe look at your bite.’

  Rolling her eyes like I was making a huge fuss, she pulled down her sock for him to see. The wound definitely looked worse. It was red and swollen, about the size of a hockey ball, with two marks in the middle where the skin was pierced.

  ‘How bad is the pain?’ Pepe asked.

  Tulip grimaced. ‘Like red-hot worms crawling up my leg.’

  It sounded awful.

  Pepe sat back on his heels. ‘Ah, that will be a scorpion.’

  ‘Crikey! I’ve never seen a proper scorpion sting before!’ Oz said with relish.

  Tulip looked at me, terrified. I held her hand.

  ‘No, no,’ Pepe reassured us. ‘A scorpion sting is good – at least, it’s better than a snakebite. You won’t die.’

  Tulip tried to joke: ‘Well, that’s one less thing to worry about.’

  But it wasn’t, was it?

  In a whirl of panic, I remembered Kyky’s dream: scorpions were in it, crawling over his feet. It was another bad omen, Lysandra had said. A sign of danger. Death. Poison.

  I told the others as quickly and as plainly as I could. If, as I’d been dreading, the curse was no
w stalking us, then Tulip was the next victim. None of us was immune.

  ‘Then we absolutely can’t delay any longer,’ she said, squeezing my hand tightly.

  ‘Where is it you are wanting to go?’ Pepe asked.

  When I told him, he looked at me like I was mad. ‘To the pharaoh’s tomb, tonight?’

  ‘Not the pharaoh’s tomb exactly – the cliff above it, to be precise, and quickly too, if you don’t mind.’

  He shook his head. ‘Oh no. No one goes there at night.’

  My skin prickled. The valley had a strange, eerie feel to it, all right – I’d sensed it myself – but we were well beyond being put off by it.

  Though Pepe meant something else. ‘There are special rules for visiting the valley these days.’

  I frowned. ‘Rules?’

  ‘Oh yes, thanks to your Mr Carter we can’t even walk in our own desert without a permit, an Egyptian official and plenty of this.’ Pepe rubbed his fingers to mean money.

  I wanted to point out he wasn’t my Mr Carter, but I understood.

  ‘We have to go there,’ I begged. ‘It’s for my grandfather. We’ve come all this way to do this one thing just for him.’

  Pepe breathed in through his nose, considering it.

  ‘Will Tulip be all right?’ I asked.

  ‘It’s a risky trip for everyone,’ he said. ‘But as you’ve asked politely and it’s for your family, I am willing to overlook two of these requirements.’

  *

  It was a relief to get going at last. A mere click of Pepe’s tongue and the camels lay down – all spindly legs and knobbly knees, and so awkward they looked more like folding tables than animals.

  ‘Charlie is the sensible one,’ Pepe explained.

  ‘I’ll have him,’ Oz said, and before anyone could argue, he’d scrambled on board.

  ‘And Chaplin here is the show-off,’ Pepe told us, though both camels looked the same to me.

  I was right about the saddles. They were horribly uncomfortable and scratchy against your knees. And when our camel knelt on his front legs to stand up, I was petrified we’d slide down its neck. At least with two of us – me in front, Tulip behind – it meant we were wedged in tight.

  The actual ‘riding’ part wasn’t too bad, either, like sitting in a bony armchair. The miles went by quickly. As it was late, there was no traffic on the main road. It was dark as anything, which meant it wasn’t hard to think of curses in a place like this, or of ancient magic taking its revenge. When I felt myself getting scared, I thought of Grandad and patted my satchel for reassurance. And when I wasn’t worrying about him, I kept asking Tulip if she was all right.

  ‘My leg’s going sort of tingly and numb,’ she said. ‘It feels weird, but it’s better than the pain.’

  Pepe’s way down into the valley was quicker, and steeper, than ours. It wasn’t the easiest route, he explained, but it was the most secret.

  ‘There are guards patrolling,’ he told us. ‘They’ll arrest us if we’re caught without the proper papers, I warn you now.’

  As soon as we left the road the darkness changed. It got thicker. Colder. Under Pepe’s firm orders we kept absolutely quiet.

  ‘All you must do is hold on tight,’ he instructed. ‘Trust your camel: he’ll know where he’s going.’

  I wasn’t sure how true this was, because at first Chaplin kept stumbling over every rock we came to. I felt mean not turning my torch on to help him, but Pepe laughed quietly. ‘You think camels use torches? They see by starlight.’

  I looked up when he said that – properly looked up, I mean, until my eyes got used to the night.

  ‘Oh, Tulip,’ I whispered. ‘Have you seen the sky?’

  She hugged me a little tighter round the waist. ‘Dear Lil, I’ve been looking up at it for miles.’

  In London, you only saw the faintest stars right in the middle of the sky. Here they were everywhere, right down to the far-flung corners and all along the edges. There were almost too many, if that were possible.

  What I saw now, over to our left, looked like yet another one. Except stars didn’t move from side to side.

  Oz had seen it too, and turned in his saddle. ‘Pepe, what’s that over there?’

  The light was below us on the path, and as much as I could tell, not that far away. It stood out quite clearly, bobbing a little as it moved. We all stopped to watch.

  ‘It’s coming from the tomb site,’ Pepe explained. ‘It appears to be a torch.’

  The camels began to plod forwards again, the path levelling out as we reached the valley floor. Over to our left, the torch beam kept moving. Someone else was very definitely there.

  ‘You have to have a permit to be in the valley,’ Pepe reminded me. ‘And the company of an Egyptian official. It is the law, even for Mr Carter.’

  A law we were breaking, I thought nervously: we didn’t have a permit, and surely Pepe wasn’t old enough to be an official.

  ‘Who d’you think it is, then?’ I asked.

  ‘Only the guards. Probably.’

  18

  Half a second later we were lying flat on the ground, even the camels. Something large and white loomed in front of us – a canvas tent. My heart was going like mad, and I’d a mouthful of dust, but when I heard voices I realised just how close to Carter’s site we were. In fact, we were in it, exactly as we’d wanted to be. Only it suddenly didn’t seem like such a great idea.

  ‘Pah! As I suspected – guards!’ Pepe muttered in disgust.

  Tulip groaned. ‘Just what we need.’

  Propping myself up on my elbows, I peered around the tent. The torch had gone out. The voices had stopped too. I didn’t dare move an inch more, in case the people were still there.

  Oz wriggled alongside me. ‘Torch batteries aren’t very reliable. Though it depends on the type—’

  ‘For crying out loud, shut up!’ Tulip hissed violently.

  ‘Easy, Tulip!’ I whispered.

  Oz sniffed. ‘You never listen to me. Not about torches, or the man at the station.’

  Why was he on about that again? The only man at the station I could think of was the one with the nice smile who’d told me to keep an eye on Mr Carter. What it meant to Oz I didn’t know, but he was awfully upset about it. And when I tried to touch his arm, he turned his back on me.

  ‘It’s this valley.’ Pepe shivered. ‘It casts bad spells on people. Makes them argue and fight.’

  Like Grandad and Professor Hanawati, I thought grimly, who’d come here and never been friends again.

  We fell into a tense silence. Without the torchlight flitting around it was easier to see things. Just in front of the tent was a heap of rocks, a wheelbarrow, what looked like the electric cables we’d seen earlier running past us in the sand. Beyond that, I saw hooves and swishing tails. Four donkeys were tethered, nosing through a pile of dry grass that’d been left for them.

  Beyond it, the sides of the valley rose almost straight up. My stomach fluttered. Somehow, we had to climb that rock face without being seen. Shifting my satchel to the side, I got into a crouching position: ‘I’m going to have a closer look.’

  ‘Be careful,’ Pepe warned.

  Heart in mouth, I inched around the tent. The cables seemed to all lead to one particular spot, where the dark turned deepest black. I blinked, my eyes adjusting.

  There it was.

  Set into the mountainside like a cave was the entrance to Tutankhamun’s tomb. Despite all the newspaper headlines, all the gossip and stories buzzing around the world, it looked disappointingly ordinary. Just as Lysandra had described it, in fact, a tomb that didn’t stand out or seem particularly royal.

  There was a gate fastened across it – a wooden one, padlocked, which made it look rather like a coal bunker or a garden shed. Lysandra had told us about the rushed, shabby burial, and Maya storming off in disgust. I could see why. Even though Mr Carter must’ve put this gate here, it still felt sad and strange to have a person’s grave under lock
and key.

  I moved a few steps closer. And a few more. The others were behind me in the shelter of the tent, too far away to call to. I supposed myself very alone. So when I heard voices again it caught me completely off guard.

  ‘We’re looking, remember, that’s all,’ said a woman.

  I froze.

  ‘Do you have the key, Pecky?’ asked Mr Carter, whose voice I knew instantly and who clearly wasn’t at the cocktail party at all.

  ‘Here.’ A jingle of metal. The shuffling of feet on grit, and four people came out of the shadows to stand at the top of the steps to the tomb.

  ‘Not a word of this to anyone, remember. If it gets out we’ve been here, we’ll lose our permit entirely,’ Mr Carter said.

  They weren’t officials or guards. They were Howard Carter, Lady Evelyn, a smaller, older man I recognised as Lord Carnarvon, and the person called Pecky with the key, whose silhouette was as huge and wide as a tree.

  I dropped to the ground. Not that there was anything to hide behind: I was out in the open. And if I could see Mr Carter’s group, then all it’d take would be a glance over their shoulders and they’d see me.

  Oz was right; their torch had given up. Instead, the man called Pecky lit a kerosene lamp. Four faces huddled round it, all yellow-cheeked and shadowy. Once the gate across the tomb was open, they went inside, or rather, clambered in; the passage they disappeared into was still ankle-deep in rubble. All I could see now was the flicker of the lamp against bare walls. I glanced behind me to where Tulip and the others waited. Now was my chance to get back to them without being seen. But Grandad would want to know what Howard Carter was up to – and so did I. I crept towards the tomb.

  From inside came a muffled banging noise: something fell to the ground. It sounded like a wall being knocked down. I inched even closer. What were they doing in there?

  The banging stopped.

  ‘This is where they broke in centuries before. Look, you can see where they patched up the hole,’ said a loud, jolly voice that I assumed was Pecky’s.

  ‘Robbed in antiquity, eh? Just like the rest of the tombs here.’ This was Lord Carnarvon, sounding annoyed. ‘What if we open this up tomorrow, with everyone here, and find nothing but a few old pots inside? We’ll be a laughing stock!’