by E. M. DAVEY
The year before Napoleon set sail for Egypt. Jake wanted to awake from something real, like a man told his wife has died in a car accident. Jenny shot him a look full of hunted understanding. This mummy had been discovered by Bonaparte’s savants. Unwrapped, the inscription on its bandages added to the growing corpus of the Disciplina Etrusca that Napoleon was assembling from dozens of mummies, each embalmed with the Book of Thunder as their amulet.
But why was it done?
“Do not be too surprised,” said Dr Babineaux, detecting despondency. “After all, you must know how vibrant was the market for forgeries, even in the eighteenth century. Very many were fabricated for the European collector. After two centuries the patina they have acquired can convince even the experts.”
“It’s not a forgery,” Jake uttered.
“Please, Dr Matthews.”
But Jake only stared at the screen with its array of graphs and figures; data that told him a different story. Of a discovery; a deception; of the coordination of the Grande Armée over vast distances, the forging of an empire.
“You have a photograph of the mummy, perhaps?” asked the Frenchwoman. “Maybe I can give a second opinion?”
One thing Jake had learned as a journalist was this: always take an expert opinion when it’s offered.
“My, my, my …” said Dr Babineaux as she studied the photographs. “What a mess. Grave-robbers, a terrible breed they are. But this is a real mummy! I know this casket, it’s in the Egyptian Museum, here in Cairo. And my colleagues did this? Dr Matthews, I am truly appalled.”
Jake looked at his fingernails.
“The sample must have been contaminated,” Dr Babineaux was saying. “Though how material from that era got onto the linen I cannot imagine. I cleaned it most thoroughly under the microscope. Are you also studying the Viennese mummy?”
Silence in the room.
“Viennese mummy?” repeated Jenny.
“You did not know about this? But it is a very famous mummy indeed.” Suspicion in those sparrow eyes now. “I do not understand how you cannot know about this.”
“He’s the expert,” Jenny blustered.
“Well?” Dr Babineaux said to Jake.
“I, er – I don’t know either.”
The archaeologist looked dismayed at the state of Anglo-Saxon higher education.
“There are three mummies that Egyptologists have found a connection between,” she said. “Pakhar-en-Khonsu, whose remains have been violated so unacceptably. His wife, now in Croatia, and even you must have heard of her.”
“The Zagreb Linen,” said Jake.
Dr Babineaux looked relieved. “That is correct. And the third mummy is on display at the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna.”
The disclosure reverberated through them like the news of a coming apocalypse.
She pointed to the hieroglyphs on the casket with a varnished fingernail. “You can see him mentioned here – a little boy.” A motherly look came over Dr Babineaux as she contemplated an ancient family’s tragedy. “He was their son.”
“We have to go there,” said Jenny.
This museum-breaking lark was fast becoming a spate.
45
For once Kanisha Maachii’s mysterious protégé had called in the daytime, and the linguist was ensconced in the confusing spiral of outbuildings that surround the British Museum. A facsimile of the Zagreb Linen was laid out before her – David’s suggestion.
“Zichri lu,” her student began, and although she had spent a decade studying Etruscan it sent a shiver through her to hear it pronounced so beautifully.
“Meaning?”
“Let it be written,” her pupil said with relish.
Reading right to left and with mutual passion, they translated the material. Etruscan is so obscure – and the sources so limited – that the meaning of many phrases in the linen book remains disputed. But it was like discussing the topic with a world expert, and again she sensed David’s formidable intelligence.
“Aiser-sic-seuc.”
Gods of light and darkness.
“Farthan.”
Genius, as in of the dark gods.
“Zathrumiś flerchva Nethunsl śucri therezi-c.”
Kanisha found she was nodding along with the cadence, lips slightly parted. “Very nice. And your translation?”
“In the month of Cel, offerings to Nethuns must be made and immolated.”
“Perfect,” she admitted. “Absolutely perfect. Where Cel is equivalent to our month of September, and Nethuns equated to Neptune.”
“I thought the Etruscans didn’t believe in the Roman pantheon?” said David. “Etruscan gods were invisible and omnipresent – like an ether, almost.”
Ether: from the Latin aether, meaning upper air. And so like aiser, the Etruscan word for god.
“That was the case at the beginning of Etruscan civilisation,” said Kanisha. “But by the time the Zagreb Linen was made in the second century BC, the Etruscan lands had been absorbed into Rome. It was standard practice that when Rome engulfed a new culture, their priests equated each of their gods with a Roman equivalent.”
“What sort of offerings would have been made?”
“Oh, the usual stuff. Pigs and goats, a bit of barley meal perhaps. Or a nice amphora of …”
“Vinum!” David interrupted, the exclamation startling through the voice-disguising software. “Wine. I see it written here. Why’s that word been underlined?”
“Remember, this book was originally intended for chanting,” she said. “Phrases needing emphasis were marked up, to aid the fulguriator.”
“Good to know,” David muttered.
“Time for a test,” she said. “According to the linen, what are the ‘sacred priesthood of the citadel and the community’ instructed to do?”
There was a humming as David skimmed the ancient document. “Bow to the temples of the people, to the cities and districts and hearths.”
Wow. He’s a faster reader than I am.
“That line,” said David. “It seems familiar.”
“As well it might,” she said. “It’s thought to refer to the Prophecy of Vegoia.”
“Vegoia,” David repeated.
“The prophet who warned of damnation for –”
“For kings who violate borders,” David interrupted.
“I should have known you’d be clued up on Vegoia,” Kanisha chuckled. “If only the Romans were too, maybe they’d still be with us.”
Silence down the line.
Let it be written …
46
The history lecturer from Warwick and the Yorkshire-bred Pakistani were doing a spot of sightseeing in the cultural capital of Europe.
Neither Jake nor Jenny had set foot in the continent for two years. It was May, still nippy at Vienna’s altitude, and he found the forgotten sensation of coldness pleasant. The streets looked ludicrously clean, although the first person Jake saw out of the train station was squatting on the pavement with a sign saying, Ich hab Hunger.
Vienna had survived World War Two relatively unblemished and lavish nineteenth-century apartment blocks unfurled themselves for street after street, sausage stands on every corner. What else struck Jake about Vienna? There was the smoking, for a start. The Egyptians liked a fag, but there it was a male-only pursuit. In Vienna everybody was at it, indoors too, and cafés that had not missed a day’s trade in a century were fumigation chambers. Cobbles, trams, statues everywhere: Brahms; Adam Smith; Christopher Columbus; Goethe. Plus coiffured battalions of immaculate old ladies in pearls and full make-up. It is said Vienna has a moth problem caused by the sheer weight of fur coats.
Jake’s confidence was coming back. At a shop a cashier had asked him in English if he’d like a bag.
“No thanks.” Then just for the heck of it, “Would you like a bag?”
Bemusement, hilarity. It felt good to be spontaneous and daft again, to find people responded. He had charm, damn it!
Beer.
Unexpectedly Jake felt the old urge. He could ditch Jenny and sneak off, have just one beer. It was sold on every street, supped outside cafés by those who would never suffer this imbroglio of temptations and doubts. But he would not allow himself to slither back down to weeks at a time in the drunk-hungover cycle.
*
The Kunsthistorisches Museum was a magnificent example of Baroque architecture. Children blew bubbles and men sold candy floss; pony traps clattered along, piloted by drivers in Lovat tweed greatcoats and bowler hats.
“Do you think we’re being tailed?” asked Jake.
“Do you know, I think we’ve shaken them,” Jenny replied.
“But we won’t let our guard down, right?” said Jake.
“Of course not.”
A hair detached itself from her scalp to drift away on the breeze.
There was an hour-long queue for the museum and Jake opened Sir Neil’s diaries as they waited.
“This is it!” he exclaimed.
An Asian couple glanced around, but Jake didn’t notice them. A new darkness was under his eyes and his cheeks seemed more sunken than before.
My remaining with Napoleon after the departure of the other Commissioners was in obedience to Lord Castlereagh’s instructions; there was another article of the treaty not fulfilled. It was not till this very day that Lord Castlereagh gave a qualified accession to certain portions of the Treaty of Fontainebleau. His Royal Highness the Prince Regent, having knowledge of the contents of the said treaty, accedes to the same in the name of His Majesty, as respects the stipulations relative to the possession in sovereignty of the island of Elba.
“It’s all here.” Jake’s fingers were very white as they clasped the tome. “After Napoleon was defeated in 1814, he negotiated a sweet deal with Russia and Austria – the crown of Elba and a lifelong income. The only sticking point was the Brits, Napoleon’s most implacable enemy. They wanted to send him to St Helena, at the ends of the earth and somewhere he could never return from – which is where he eventually ended up after Waterloo. So Napoleon bargained for Elba with the only thing he had left. Handing over the Disciplina Etrusca was the ‘stipulation’ for possessing Elba. That was the other ‘article of the treaty not fulfilled’.”
Before Jenny could answer Jake was racing back through the book again.
“It says it here in black and white,” he exclaimed. “This is the moment.”
He gave away manuscripts etc. to different officers present at Fontainebleau, and directed others to be transmitted to various favourites.
“Napoleon cut the deal at Fontainebleau, before he headed south to the Mediterranean. Within a couple of months, Castlereagh had satisfied himself the thing worked, so the Prince Regent assented to the treaty.”
“Maybe …”
“Not maybe,” shouted Jake. “Definitely! Look here.”
There were backward glances from another Chinese couple as he scrabbled through the work.
“On the way to Elba, Napoleon gets worried he’ll be attacked by North African pirates. But Lord Castlereagh knew it wouldn’t happen.”
Another letter from the Foreign Secretary:
I cannot foresee that any enemy can molest the French corvette, on board of which it is proposed that Napoleon should proceed to his destination.
“After that assurance, Bonaparte knows he has nothing to fear,” said Jake.
Napoleon next adverted to the threats of the Algerians, but cursorily, and did not seem apprehensive; he said that if it was intended to adhere to the treaty entered into at Fontainebleau, he would not be molested by them.
“And finally this,” said Jake.
England, Napoleon said, did now as she pleased; the other Powers were nothing in comparison. ‘No Power can make war against England and she will do as she likes.’
It was the birth of British hegemony.
“Napoleon did hand over the Disciplina,” she said. “He felt betrayed by France. He’d grown to respect his old enemy. So he played kingmaker in the game of nations.”
“Only he grew to regret the decision,” said Jake. “He got bored on Elba, set sail for France and retook the throne. But when the ‘Hundred Days’ culminated in Waterloo …”
“Napoleon got trounced by the Duke of Wellington,” Jenny finished. “He fought the worst battle of his life, strewn with all those errors that baffled Michael Beloff. Defeated once and for all, it was off to St Helena where he sickened and died.”
“But if Britain had the Book of Thunder,” said Jake, “how do you explain the slide to war in 1914? Why didn’t Chamberlain confront Hitler early in the 1930s? What about the calamity of Suez, the invasion of the Falklands, the Iraq War? Recent history hardly speaks of a Britain able to tell the future.”
“I should have thought that’s perfectly obvious,” said Jenny. “Because somehow, we lost it too.”
47
It was one of the most beautiful galleries in Europe. The murals were inspired by pharaonic tombs: lines of two-dimensional figures inching along the walls, tastefully done. Two columns from an Egyptian palace supported the ceiling, encoded in hieroglyphs like magical palm trees. There were sarcophagi with sides that were a foot of solid granite; steles were arrayed about, grave-markers of the far-off dead. A slab of temple wall bisected the room, embroidered with stars that twinkled in the stone as they must have done on a night long ago in the Middle Kingdom. And the centre of the room: the child.
He lay horizontally in a display case, peering up through the glass like a premature baby in an incubator. The face of the casket had been smashed in long ago, this instant of violence frozen in splintered wood. A golden mask remained beatific within the jagged frame. Ancient grave robbers were the purported culprits, and the label explained that this mask had replaced a missing original in the nineteenth century. An outer layer of linen enclosed the bandages, embellished with ancient spells.
Another unwrapping job.
A little door was set into the base of the cabinet – the compartment beneath the display shelf could be used for storage. Suddenly it occurred to Jake. If he was able to wriggle through the door, he’d be lying directly underneath the mummy.
“I need tools,” he said.
At a hardware shop off the Ringstrasse he acquired chisel, torch, Stanley knife and hacksaw. Jenny selected a sledgehammer.
“What’s that for?” asked Jake.
“We’re running out of money, remember?”
“You’re going to get money … with that?”
Numerous possibilities presented themselves, none of them good. But Jenny merely arched an eyebrow and would not be drawn on the topic any further. She sawed off the handle, left with the only sledgehammer’s head. As they departed the strap of her handbag was cutting into her shoulder.
*
Amid the gothic and the baroque, the art nouveau and the renaissance, the building Jenny led him to was a cube of featureless cement. It was 100 feet wide at the base and 150 feet high; circular turrets protruded over each corner, like Mickey Mouse ears eavesdropping on the rooftops.
It’s a flakturm,” explained Jenny. “A flak tower – built with slave labour by the Nazis to shoot down Lancaster bombers. During air raids forty thousand civilians could fit inside.”
“It’s hideous,” said Jake.
“Yup. But the amount of explosives it would take to blow it up would flatten every other building in sight. Like it or not, they’re stuck with it.”
“Like a reminder of their crimes.”
During the fifties the tower had been converted to an aquarium. Several school trips were booked in and the next available tickets were for two hours hence. To kill time they visited the Belvedere, a Habsburg palace and one of the finest art galleries in the world. And as they took in Monet and Schiele, Gauguin and Munch, it felt increasingly like a date.
Be funny. Be funny.
They were admiring Gustav Klimt’s unfinished painting of Adam and Eve.
“There are two types of people in the world,” said Jake. “Those who need closure.”
Five seconds passed before the penny dropped and Jenny laughed out loud.
“You’re a funny man, Jake.”
“Oh, I don’t know about that,” he said, rubbing his fringe.
“And also brave. There, I’ve said it.”
“Now you really are pulling my leg.”
“You are,” she insisted. “What you did in Jerusalem was brave. What you did in Cairo was brave too. And I know courage – please don’t take this the wrong way – courage doesn’t come naturally to you. Which makes it all the braver, if that makes any sense at all.”
She had Jake’s complete attention.
“You’re a good man,” she went on, regretful now. “And I … sometimes I think I’ve been so stupid.”
Where had this all come from? Jake felt a tightening in his chest, his life swirling about him. The majesty of Klimt, the gallery with its handsome ceilings, the view over palace gardens; all had faded into a different dimension.
“I’m telling you this because I really need you to know …”
“Know what?”
“It’s not you, it’s me.”
Jake felt a horrid prickling high up on his cheeks, had the sensation of his guts slithering out through the soles of his feet.
Beer.
“Horrific cliché, but true,” she said with a smile, as though he should be delighted by all this. “You’re a special person, Jake. You’ll make someone very happy one day.”
“Thanks,” he managed. “But I’m really not that special, am I? Or you wouldn’t be pushing me away like this.”
He saw something move behind her face, some thought he could not access.
“You don’t understand,” she said. “I’ve just got something else going on.”
“Someone else?” It came out hotter than he intended.
“No! I’m just not in the right place. Plus you’re too bloody good for me. You’re like a, I don’t know, a ray of decency, Jake, you really are. An occasionally hopeless ray, but a decent one nonetheless.”