by Wilbur Smith
When she helped him to his feet and they started back towards camp, he moved like an old man, lame and stiff. Every muscle and sinew in his body ached. He knew that the lactic acid and nitrogen that had built up in his tissues would take some time to be reabsorbed and dispersed.
Once they reached camp Royan led him to his hut and fussed over him as she settled him under the mosquito net. By this time he was feeling a lot better, but he neglected to inform her of this fact. It was pleasant to have a woman caring for him again. She brought him a couple of aspirin tablets and a steaming mug of tea, stiff with sugar. He was putting it on a little when he asked weakly for a second mugful.
Sitting beside his bed, she solicitously watched him drink it. ‘Better?’ she asked, when he had finished.
‘The odds are two to one that I will survive,’ he told her, and she smiled.
‘I can see that you are better. Your cheek is showing again. You gave me an awful scare, you know.’
‘Anything to get your attention.’
‘Now that we have decided that you will live, tell me what happened. What sort of trouble did you run into down there in the pool?’
‘What you really want to know is what I found down there. Am I correct?’
‘That too,’ she admitted.
Then he told her everything that he had discovered and how he had been caught in the inflow of the underwater sink-hole. She listened without interruption, and even when he had finished speaking she said nothing for a while, but frowned with concentrated thought.
At last she looked up at him. ‘You mean that Taita was able to take those stone niches right down to the very bottom of the pool, fifty feet below the surface?’ and when he nodded, she was silent again. Then she said, ‘How on earth did he accomplish that? What are your thoughts on the subject?’
‘Four thousand years ago the water level may have been lower. There may have been a drought year when the river dried up, and enabled him to get in there. How am I doing?’
‘Not a bad try,’ she admitted, ‘but then why go to all the trouble of building a scaffold? Why not just use the dry river bed as an access? Then again, surely the attraction of the spot for Taita was the river. If it was dry, then it would be just like a thousand other places in this gorge. No, I have a feeling that the fact that it was so inaccessible was the main, if not the only, reason he chose to work there.’
‘I suspect that you are correct,’ he agreed.
‘So if the river was running, even at its lowest level as it is now, how on earth did he manage to carve those niches below the surface? And what would be the point in having scaffolding under water?’
‘Beats me. I have no idea,’ he admitted.
‘All right, let’s leave that for the moment. Now let’s go over your description of the sink-hole that almost sucked you in. Did you form any estimate of the size of the opening?’
He shook his head. ‘It is almost totally dark down there. I could not see more than two or three feet in front of me.’
‘Was the entrance directly between the two rows of niches?’
‘No, not directly,’ he said thoughtfully. ‘It was slightly to one side. I hit the bottom of the pool with my feet, and was just about to push off when it grabbed me.’
‘So it must be at the very bottom of the pool, and slightly downstream from the scaffolding. You say that the entrance seemed to have a square coping?’
‘I am not absolutely sure of that – remember that I could see very little. But that was the impression I received.’
‘It may have been another man-made structure, then – perhaps some type of adit shaft driven into the side of the pool?’
‘It’s possible,’ he agreed reluctantly. ‘But on the other hand it could just as easily be a natural fault in the strata that the river is draining into.’
She stood up to leave, and he demanded, ‘Where are you going?’
‘I won’t be long. I am going to my hut to fetch my notes, and the material from the stele. Back in a moment.’
When she returned she sat on the floor beside his bed, with her legs drawn up under her in that double-jointed feminine fashion. As she spread her papers around her, he pulled up the edge of the mosquito net and looked down at what she was doing.
‘Yesterday, while you were busy building the gantry, I was able to decipher most of the rest of the “spring” face of the stele.’ She moved her notebook so that he was able to overlook the pages she had opened. ‘These are my preliminary notes. You will see where I have inserted a number of question marks – here and here, for instance. That is where I am uncertain of the translation, or where Taita has used a new and strange symbol. I will have to give more time and consideration to those later.’
‘I follow you,’ he said, and she went on.
‘These sections that I have highlighted with green are quotations from the standard version of the Book of the Dead. Take this one here: “The universe is drawn in circles, the disc of the sun god, Ra. The life of man is a circle that begins in the womb and ends in the tomb. The circle of the chariot wheel foreshadows the death of the serpent that it crushes beneath its rim.”’
‘Yes, I recognize the quotation,’ he said.
‘On the other hand, these parts of the text that I have highlighted in yellow are original Taita writings, or at least are not quotations from the Book of the Dead or any other source that I am aware of. This paragraph here in particular is the one that I wanted to bring to your attention.’
She traced a section with her forefinger as she read it aloud, ‘“The daughter of the goddess has conceived. She has been impregnated by the one who is without seed. She has begotten her own twin sister. The foetus lies for ever coiled in her own womb. Her twin shall never be born. She will never see the light of Ra. She will live for ever in the darkness. In the womb of the sister her bridegroom claims her in eternal marriage. The unborn twin becomes the bride of the god, who was a man. Their destinies are intertwined. They shall live for ever. They shall not perish.”’
She looked up from the notebook. ‘When I first read it, I was satisfied that the daughter of the goddess was the Dandera river, as we had already agreed. I was also pretty sure that the god that was once a man must be Pharaoh. Mamose was only deified on his ascension to the throne of Egypt. Before that he was a man.’
Nicholas nodded. ‘The seedless one is obviously Taita himself. He makes repeated references to the fact that he was a eunuch. But now,’ he suggested, ‘if you have some new ideas about the mysterious twin sister, let’s hear them.’
‘The twin of the river would most likely be a branch, or a fork of the stream, wouldn’t it?’
‘Ah, I see what you are driving at. You are suggesting that the sink-hole is the twin. Down there in the gorge it will never see the light of Ra. Taita, the seedless one, claims paternity, so he is telling us that he is the architect.’
‘Exactly, and he has married the twin of the river to Pharaoh Mamose for all eternity. Putting that all together, I have come to the conclusion that we will never find the location of Pharaoh Mamose’s tomb until we explore thoroughly that sink-hole that nearly drowned you.’
‘How do you suggest we do that?’ he asked, and she shrugged.
‘I am not the engineer, Nicky. I leave that to you to arrange. All I know is that Taita devised some way of doing it – not only of getting there but of working down there. If our interpretation of the stele is correct, then he carried out extensive mining operations at the bottom of the pool. If he could do it, then there is no reason why you can’t do it also.’
‘Ah!’ he demurred. ‘Taita was a genius. He says so repeatedly. I am just an old plodder.’
‘I have got all my bets on you, Nicky. You won’t let me down, will you?’
There was no call for intensive bushcraft to follow this spoor. His quarry had taken very few anti-tracking precautions. Quite openly they were following the main trail down the Abbay gorge, heading directly westwards towards t
he Sudanese border. Mek Nimmur was on his way back to his own stronghold.
Boris estimated that he had between fifteen and twenty men with him. It was difficult to be certain, for the tracks on the pathway overlapped each other, and of course he would have scouts on the point ahead of him and sweeping his flanks. There would also be a rearguard dragging the trail behind him.
They were making good time, but such a large party would not be able to outpace a single pursuer. He was sure he was gaining on them. He reckoned that he had started four hours behind them, but judging by recent signs he was now less than two hours adrift.
Without breaking his trot, he stooped to pick something up from the path. As he ran on he examined it. It was a twig, the soft tip shoot of a kusagga-sagga plant that grew beside the track. One of the men ahead of him had brushed against it as he passed, and snapped it off the main branch. It gave Boris a fairly accurate gauge of how far he was behind. Even in the heat of the gorge, the tender shoot had barely begun to wilt. He was even closer than he had estimated.
He slowed down a little as he considered his next move. He knew this part of the valley fairly well. The previous year he had hunted over much of this terrain with an American client, who had been looking for a trophy Walia ibex. They had spent almost a month combing these same gullies and wooded ravines before they had brought down a huge old ram, black with age and carrying a pair of curled, back-sweeping horns that ranked as the tenth largest ever in the Rowland Ward record book.
He knew that two or three miles ahead the Nile began another oxbow loop out to the south, and that it then doubled back upon itself. The main trail followed the river, because a series of sheer and formidable cliffs guarded the high ground in the centre of the loop of the river. It was, however, possible to cut the corner. Boris had done it before, while following the wounded ibex.
The American hunter had not killed cleanly – his bullet had struck the ram too far back, missing the heart-lung cavity and piercing the gut. The stricken wild goat had taken to the high ground, following one of its secret paths up amongst the crags. Boris and the American had followed it up and over the mountain. Boris remembered how dangerous and treacherous the path had been, but when it descended the far side of the mountain it had cut off nearly ten miles.
If he could find the beginning of the goat path again, there was every chance that he would be able to get ahead of Mek Nimmur and be lying in wait for him on the far side. That would give him an enormous advantage. The guerrilla leader would be expecting pursuit, not ambush. He would be covering his back trail, and it was highly unlikely that Boris would be able to slip past the rearguard without alerting his intended victims. On the other hand, once he was ahead of them he would be in control. Then he could choose his own killing ground.
As the trail and the main flow of the Nile started to turn away towards the south, he kept watching the high ground above it, seeking a familiar landmark. He had not gone another half-mile before he found it. Here there was a break in the line of dark cliffs, a heavily forested reentrant, that cut into the wall of basalt.
He stopped and mopped the sweat from his face and neck. ‘Too much vodka,’ he grunted, ‘you are getting soft.’ His shirt was as sodden as though he had plunged in the river.
He changed the sling of the rifle to his other shoulder, lifted his binoculars and swept the sides of the wooded gully. They appeared sheer and unscalable, but then he picked out the stunted shape of a small tree that grew out of a narrow crack in the face. It looked like a Japanese bonsai, with a twisted, malformed trunk and tortured branches.
The Walia ibex had been standing on the ledge just above that tree when the American had fired. In his mind’s eye Boris could still see the way in which the wild goat had hunched its back as the bullet struck, and then spun around and raced away up the cliff. He panned the glasses upwards gently, and could just make out the inclination of the narrow ledge as it angled up the face.
‘Da, da. This is the spot.’ He was thinking in his mother tongue again. It was a relief after these last days of having to struggle in French and English.
Before he began the climb, he left the trail and scrambled down the boulder-strewn slope to the river. He knelt at the edge of the Nile and splashed double handfuls over himself, soaking his cropped head and sluicing the sweat from his face and neck. He drained and refilled his water bottle, then drank until his belly was painfully full. Then he rinsed out the bottle and refilled it. There was no water on the mountain. Finally he dipped his bush hat in the river and placed it back on his head, sodden and streaming water down his neck and face.
He climbed back to the main trail and followed it for another hundred paces, moving slowly and studying the ground. At one place there was a rock boulder almost blocking the path. The men ahead of him had been forced to step over this obstruction, on to a patch of talcum-fine dust beyond it. They had left perfect impressions of their footprints for him to read.
Most of the men were wearing Israeli-style para boots with a zigzag-patterned sole, and those coming up from behind had overtrodden the spoor of the leaders. He had to go down on one knee to examine the signs minutely before he could pick out the imprint of a much smaller and more delicately formed foot, a lighter, unmistakably feminine tread. It was partially obliterated by other larger masculine footprints, but the outline of the toe was clear, and the pattern was that of a smooth rubber-soled Bata tennis shoe. He would have recognized it from ten thousand others.
He was relieved to find that Tessay was still with the group, and that she and her lover had not left and taken another path. Mek Nimmur was a sly one, and cunning. He had escaped from Boris’s clutches once before. But not this time! The Russian shook his head vehemently: not this time.
He gave his full attention to the female footprint once again. It gave him a pang to look at it. His anger returned in full force. He did not consider his feelings for the woman. Love and desire did not enter into the equation. She was his chattel, and she had been stolen from him. It was only the insult that had significance for him. She had rejected and humiliated him, and for that she was going to die.
He felt the old thrill run through his blood at the thought of the kill. Killing had always been his trade and his vocation, but no matter how often he exercised his craft the thrill was never blunted, the pleasure never satiated. Perhaps it was the only true pleasure left to him, pure and unjaded – not even the vodka could weaken and dilute it as it had the physical act of copulation. He would enjoy killing her even more than he had once enjoyed coupling with her.
These past few years he had hunted only the lower animals, but he had never forgotten what it was like to hunt down and to kill a human being, more especially a woman. He wanted Mek Nimmur, but he wanted the woman more.
In the days of President Mengistu, when he had been the head of counter-intelligence, his men had known his tastes and had picked the pretty ones for him. He had only one regret now, and that was that this time he would have to do it swiftly. There could be no question of drawing it out and savouring the pleasure. Not like some of the other experiences, which had lasted for hours, sometimes for days.
‘Bitch,’ he mouthed, and kicked at the dust, stamping on the faint outline of her footprint, obliterating it just as he would do to her. ‘Black fornicating bitch.’
He ran now with fresh strength and determination as he left the trail and climbed up towards the deformed tree and the beginning of the goat track up the cliff.
Exactly where he expected it, he found the start of the track and followed it upwards. The higher he climbed, the steeper it became. Often he had to use both hands to haul himself up a gradient, or to work his way along a narrow traverse.
The first time he had climbed this mountain he had been following the blood spoor of the wounded ibex, but now he did not have those splattered droplets to guide him, and twice he missed the path and found himself in a dead end on the cliff face. He was forced to edge back from the drop and retrace hi
s footsteps until he found the correct turning. Each time he did so he was aware that he was losing time, and that Mek Nimmur might pass before he was able to intercept him.
Once he startled a small troop of wild goats which were lying on a ledge halfway up the cliff. They went bounding away up the rock face, more like birds than animals bound by the laws of gravity. They were led by a huge male with a streaming beard and long spiral horns, which in its flight showed Boris a direct route to the top of the cliff.
He tore the skin off his fingertips dragging himself up the last steep pitch, but finally he reached the top and wormed his way over the skyline, never lifting his head. A human form silhouetted against the clear, eggshell-blue sky would be visible from miles around. He moved along behind the crest until he found a small clump of sanseveria to give him cover, and used the erect, spiny leaves to break up the outline of his head as he surveyed the valley a thousand feet below through the binoculars.
From this height the Nile was a broad, glittering serpent uncoiling into the first bend of the oxbow, its surface ruffled by rapids and rocky reefs. The high ground on either bank formed standing waves of upthrust basalt, turbulent and chopped into confusion like a storm sea in a tropical typhoon. The whole danced and shimmered in the heat and the sun beat down with the blows of an executioner’s axe, pounding this universe of red rock into heat-exhausted submission.
Though the air danced and trembled with the mirage in the lenses of his binoculars, Boris traced out the rough trail beside the river, and followed it down the valley to the point where it was hidden by the bend. It was deserted, with no sign of human presence, and he knew that his quarry had moved on out of sight. He had no way of telling how far down the trail they had travelled – he knew only that he must hurry on if he were to cut them off on the far side of the mountain.
For the first time since he had left the river, he drank sparingly from the water bottle. He realized how the heat and the exertion of the climb had dehydrated him. In these conditions a man without water might be dead in hours. It was not in the least surprising that there was so little permanent human habitation down here in the gorge.