Lucas looked confused. Unable to think of anything better to show his equality, he raised a hand to strike the Bishop. He suddenly realised what he was doing. The Bishop hadn’t flinched. Several of the diggers were looking surly. His own bodyguard was looking on in horror. He turned and padded after Siroes.
‘Nice try, Alaric,’ Priscus said with another look at the lead container. ‘But it does look as if you’ll need to work a great deal harder to please Siroes.’ He looked up at the sun. ‘You still have a whole day. I heard Martin praying as I came over. Shall I get him to pray harder – and this time in Greek? That is, after all, the language in which the Faith was revealed to the world.’
The Bishop looked happy enough with his relic. He was holding it up while every digger in sight grovelled in the sand. I’ll not say I felt much affection from the gathering. But I was for the first time feeling a certain lack of hostility. It was all worthless. I fought to control the tears.
‘What do you think it is, My Lord Alaric?’
Siroes passed the length of glassy cord to me. Priscus had tossed it back with a contemptuous sniff. Lucas had made up some nonsense about jewellery manufacture for export in the days of the native kings. I hadn’t supposed that a serious answer was required. But Siroes wasn’t giving up on his question. I reached across the table and took the offered eighteen-inch length of glass strands within a glass sheathing.
These weren’t jolly meals the four of us were taking together. It was uncooked food from a common plate, and water from cups allotted by casting dice. I might have insisted on proper food for myself – after all, I was the one person there who had nothing to fear for the moment. But it struck me as a better idea to keep up some pretence of equality. So it was dull food for me as well. Apart from this, there were long silences and funny looks every time the flow of bright chatter dried up between Priscus and Siroes. One friendly meal had been easy to ensure. This was our fourth dinner together, not to mention other meals. The pretence hadn’t broken down, and wouldn’t be allowed to break down during the time it had to be maintained. But the strain was getting to us all. Discussion of what had been found was something not yet seriously tried.
‘I don’t think jewellery manufacture explains this stuff,’ I said.
Lucas sat up, outrage on his face. No one paid attention. If I was there as a prisoner masquerading as an equal, his own equality was highly notional. Never much in the first place, his royal act was wearing thin. All he had to offer was some diminishing ability to control the diggers – and a continuing monopoly, it had to be said, of armed force.
I twisted the glassy cord, again noting how it moved in my hands as if it had contained bunches of silk rather than of glass. I forced the dull glow of misery to the back of my mind and tried to pretend I was here in more scholarly circumstances. I dipped my cup into the water bowl and drank awhile in the silence.
‘So far as I can tell,’ I went on, ‘Soteropolis exists on three levels. There is the modern city, dating back to the beginning of the Greek settlement. There are the remains of an Egyptian city. These two mostly run into each other, and it may be better to describe them as different periods of the same place. Deep underneath, though, there is something much older and much bigger. This stuff is buried in the foundations of that earlier city. It’s now in short lengths. But it seems once to have run in long stretches between the buildings.
‘Most likely, it served some religious function – though what it is and how it was made are beyond me.’ That wasn’t much of an explanation. But it gave me the excuse to ask a few questions of my own. ‘More useful to know, Siroes,’ I said, ‘is what you think is under those sands. It’s plain you aren’t interested in Christian relics. Indeed, all that seems to connect what the three of you are after is that it’s in Soteropolis, and I’m the one to find it.’
‘If my sources tell right,’ came the reply, ‘you will know what I seek when you find it. Beyond that, I am unable to comment. I hope for your sake, though, that my sources are right about who will do the finding. I am told it must be a man of light complexion from the West, who has much learning and great power over the Egyptians. Yes, let us all hope that describes you.’
We fell silent again. A gust of wind moved the leather flaps of the tent where we had our meals, and brought a little shower of sand through the woven papyrus of the roof. I wondered if this would cause problems again. From the wrong direction, a stiff wind could undo the work of half a day.
‘Shall I have musicians brought in again?’ Lucas asked with an attempt at bright hospitality. ‘They’ve had all day to cut new flutes.’
Siroes pulled a face. Priscus appeared not to have heard. I thought of making an excuse and creeping off again to where Martin was tethered. Doubtless, Macarius would notice and tag along. Certainly, I’d done everything I could, and it had failed. But we could sit together through the night. I’d try to think of some deal – even now – that I could strike with Priscus or anyone else. I might also find time to sit alone in the cold night air. I’d had little time for reflecting on things since leaving the oasis. There was much new material to fit into the hypothesis that was still only half formed in my mind.
‘What’s that bloody noise?’ Priscus asked, slamming his cup down heavily. His now rather bedraggled cat left off pawing at a dung beetle that had been deprived of a few of its legs. ‘Can’t you give us a single night when the fucking natives aren’t restless?’
Looking alarmed, Lucas got up and went to the leather flaps. Given luck, I thought, the diggers had grown sick of being driven day and night like pyramid builders, and had come to string up their latest Pharaoh. That being so, the Bishop would surely intervene for me and Martin. Lucas paused at the entrance to the tent, then went out. I heard his voice raised in some threatening snarls. The wailing started over again, almost blotting out the shouted jabberings to Lucas.
‘There has been another accident,’ he said as he came back in. He flopped down and looked at his cup. He thought better of daring to drink from it again, and instead stared at the ring of lamps.
‘My dear boy,’ Priscus sighed, ‘we are not so bored we need to be told about another dead wog. What is it this time? Scorpion bite? Falling masonry? Broken back at the bottom of a well shaft?’ He took up his fly whisk and flicked around without enthusiasm or success – not that he needed either. The flies were making a proper meal of me. They weren’t desperate enough to bite into Priscus.
‘This one is different,’ Lucas said, gathering himself back into a semblance of leadership. ‘I think you should all come.’
Chapter 60
We made our way through a forest of torches to the larger of the two craters I’d had dug as the light faded. We were outside the foundations of the city wall, and I’d waved at this spot earlier as the likely site of a graveyard. There ought to be bodies here that had been buried with their household goods. Some of these might not have been looted, and I might find something here that wouldn’t be rejected out of hand by Siroes. This crater was about forty feet across at the top, though the sand was rather loose, and it sloped gently down to a spot that was only six feet across at its widest.
‘Get a light down here,’ I said curtly. The moon was waxing strong now in the cloudless sky. But I wanted as much light as I could get. I pointed at the two diggers closest to the edge. Torches in hand, they peered uncertainly at me. If they didn’t understand what I was saying, they could guess what I wanted. ‘I want those men down here directly,’ I said.
Lucas had given up protesting when I used him as an interpreter. He nodded and shouted at the men. They shrank back. There was a general murmur of fear and anger from the crowd. But Lucas shouted again, and snapped his fingers in a gesture that usually brought a couple of his guards forward. The men stepped reluctantly over the edge. They held their torches upright as they slid down the twenty feet of loose sand.
During the day, I thought we’d found a funerary temple, or the tomb of some local person
of quality. Soteropolis had been abandoned long before the establishment of the Faith. Graveyards would be in the full ancient style. I was wrong. Now the digging had uncovered more of those ancient foundations, it was plain that they continued outside the walls of the more recent city. I stood at the bottom of the crater on a surface of huge but perfectly cut blocks of granite. The now sobbing wretch who’d made all the noise was still grovelling face down on this platform.
‘What is it?’ I said, hoping the peremptory tone would save the need of interpreting.
He looked up and pointed waveringly at a stone at the edge of the crater, still half buried in sand, which seemed to rest on the granite floor. I went over and scooped some of the sand away. The stone was about the size and shape of a millstone, but I could now see it was topped in the centre with a granite cone that rose up about a yard. Covered in Egyptian picture writing, its very top was in the shape of what I knew to be the Goddess Sekhmet.
‘They say it resembles the creatures seen at night on the fringes of the camp,’ Lucas called down, reluctance to explain anything clear in his voice. ‘They say that whoever looks first on a demon’s image found at night must die before morning.’
One of the torchbearers beside me pointed at the depressions cut into the round stone at regular intervals round its outer edge. As I bent to examine them, the digger who’d found all this went into a renewed screaming fit. He flopped over and jerked about. His eyes mad and staring, he screamed a single phrase over and again. Above us, beyond the edge of the crater, the other diggers took up the phrase. They mixed it in with religious imprecations I could more or less understand.
‘I want that Bishop on site now,’ I shouted up at Lucas. ‘Failing that, get a priest. Go on – we’ll have a night riot on our hands if you don’t move quickly.’
As quickly as it had started, though, the fit came to an end. One moment, the crater was filled with despairing wails. The next, all was silent and still. There was no point giving instructions for the two men down there with me. I bent down myself and got hold of the now lifeless body. I pulled it into a semblance of normality and flipped the eyes shut. They opened again in an instant, reflecting still the light of the torches. There was another wail of terror overhead. Lucas had to scream what sounded the most horrifying threats to keep the crowd from stampeding. I hoped religious help wouldn’t be too long in coming.
‘Not a pretty sight,’ Priscus said. He stood beside me, looking down at the twisted features. ‘You’d think he’d seen straight into the pit of Hell before he died.’
I was glad he spoke quietly, and that almost no one else could understand him. It was a ghastly sight. I swallowed and looked at the jaw still open and locked into that long final scream of horror.
‘There’s no doubt in my mind, by the way,’ he added, ‘that the bugger did die of fright. I’ve seen that look any number of times on the faces of men tied to the rack and who’ve pegged out before a single click of the wheel.’ He smacked his lips appreciatively and looked up at Lucas.
‘Do get those torchbearers closer,’ he called. ‘You did say it was the first to see the wog goddess who was to die. Well, that being so, the curse is surely spent.’
But Lucas was busy keeping order and paid no attention. With a dissatisfied grunt, Priscus reached down for the now extinguished torch the dead man had been carrying. He went over to relight it from the torches of the diggers, who were cowering as far away as they could get without clambering back up the slope.
‘Do you suppose those are leverage holes?’ I asked, pointing at the depressions around the edge of the stone. ‘If so, this may be some kind of opening to a cellar.’
Priscus bent down further to see where I was pointing. He straightened and looked at me. ‘I do think they might be,’ he said, now cheerful. ‘It does look, dear boy, as if you really are lucky this time. Even Siroes would have trouble accusing you of fabricating this.’
‘I want six strong men,’ I called to Lucas. ‘Get them down here with crowbars to use as levers.’ Once that was relayed, I had the satisfaction of hearing real terror in the crowd. Lucas had to scream himself hoarse, and set his overseers loose with whips before I got what I wanted. Even with some very strong men to do my bidding, though, it took much of the night before we managed anything at all. Long before the stone began to grate within its granite housing, Lucas had managed to send off most of the onlookers to bed or about their digging elsewhere on the site.
‘May the relic of Our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ preserve us from harm,’ the Bishop, now beside me, interpreted himself into Greek. Taking care not to remove it from the linen bag that shielded mere humans from its raw holiness, he waved the lead container I’d earlier arranged to be ‘found’, and the men sweating over the circular stone looked a little less troubled.
It was nice, I thought, that someone had believed in my relic. If only that bastard Siroes hadn’t stuck his nose into the matter, we could already have broken out the wine. I looked up at him. He was standing overhead just beyond the edge of the crater, muttering away in Persian.
The stone grated again. This time, it turned free. Round and round, the men pulled and pushed it with their crowbars. At last, they set their crowbars beneath it and flipped it over on to the granite floor. It fell with a heavy thud that dislodged a rush of sand from the crater wall. The upper cone of the thing crunched as it turned on the loose grains of sand. Priscus and I stood looking down at it in the silence that followed. Several of the torches had been dropped and extinguished in the shock of the noise, and the men who’d been holding them looked stupidly down. One of the men we’d brought to supply heavy muscle fainted clean away. Another turned to bolt back up the sandy slope. He was only stopped by Priscus, who set about him with the little cosh he carried in his clothing.
It was a big piece of stone – about a yard and a half across and eighteen inches deep. On its underside was a threaded projection about a yard across. It was this that had fixed it into the opening that it covered. The stone must have weighed several tons. There was a soft and sinister murmuring from the few onlookers who remained. It was one of those sounds that could easily presage real trouble. But the Bishop was praying loudly again in Egyptian and waving the relic. It really was going down a treat with everyone who didn’t matter.
Then it was back to business. We got the torches relit. Lucas had the men threatened back to the job of extending the crater properly so the opening was in its centre, and then of sweeping sand away from the opening. The Bishop now helped no end, with his continual prayers and waving. He even came down and stood beside us. His repeated mentions of Jesus Christ had a perceptibly steadying effect on the men. At last, the work was done. I looked into the round blackness. I’d expected foul or at least stale air from a place sealed for so many thousands of years. Apart from the slight smell that reminded me of dry wood left out in the sun, the air wasn’t bad in the least. I coughed and listened for the echo. I took up a pebble and dropped it in. I hadn’t counted to one before I heard it fall. I threw another in at an angle. I heard it skip sharply along a flat surface. So far as I could tell, we’d broken into an underground chamber. From the drop and echo of the pebble, it must be a very large chamber, or the entrance to something large. This might be the only entrance If so, this was the sort of find tomb raiders in Egypt had been talking about for ever. Very likely, it was the tomb of someone really important. Leontius would have died for this. Then again, he probably had.
‘You are the luckiest man alive, young Alaric,’ Siroes called down with another of his laughs. ‘I no sooner tell you that you will know what we seek than you find it.’
‘God be praised!’ Lucas cried, not to be outdone by some Persian. Perhaps mindful of the look on the Bishop’s face, he’d lapsed back into Christianity for the moment. ‘The twenty-third of Mechir shall be remembered for ever in Egypt as the first day of its liberation. We will rename our capital – in Egyptian, of course – as City of the Twenty-Third Me
chir.’ He looked at Siroes, who seemed baffled. ‘Among the Greeks,’ he explained, ‘this day is known as the 11th September.’
‘I don’t think we need lectures on comparative chronology,’ Priscus sneered up at him. ‘And don’t you think we should wait and see what’s down there before we start celebrating?’ He turned to me. ‘But you really are the luckiest,’ he repeated softly. ‘It doesn’t matter how deep the shit you fall into – you still come out smelling of roses. I’ll give you until the third hour of the day to get yourself rested. It goes without saying that Martin is under conditional reprieve.’ He looked at my face.
‘Don’t play stupid, my dear fellow,’ he said, now laughing. ‘Someone has to go down that hole. And you can be perfectly sure it won’t be me.’
In broad daylight, the stone was still more curious than it had appeared in the night. Its top, where it had faced outward, was as weathered as if it had been on show for a thousand years in Rome. Its underside, though, and along its thread – which was, by the way, as perfect a spiral as I’d ever seen – it was polished to a high gleam. The hole it had until just now filled was still a yard width of blackness. While men around me chattered and moaned away, and the Bishop raised his voice beside me in prayer, I gripped the edges of the hole in both hands and cautiously dipped my head inside. I shut my eyes and waited for them to grow used to the darkness. When I opened them, I saw the dull roughness, about ten feet below, of granite. Otherwise, I could see nothing at all.
‘I’ll need lamps and two men to carry them and give general assistance,’ I said to Lucas.
He looked round. Macarius was an obvious choice. I’d have asked for him anyway. I didn’t see how there could be anything actively nasty down there in a place that had been sealed for thousands of years. But he might have his uses in overcoming more passive difficulties. Who else, though? Martin was out of the question. Even if everyone could be sure the place had only one point of entry, we’d never be allowed together out of sight. But I wanted someone else who knew Greek.
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