by Wilbur Smith
‘More to carry,’ Royan warned him.
‘Only a pound or two, but worth it,’ he replied.
They made their way towards the point below the trail where they had last seen Tamre and Aly. But though they searched for almost an hour they found no sign of either of them. The slope above them was devastated: raw ravaged earth, great rocks shattered, bushes and trees uprooted and smashed to kindling.
Royan climbed as high as her injured leg enabled her, then cupped her hands around her mouth and shouted, ‘Tamre! Tamre! Tamre!’ The echoes took her cry and flung it from wall to valley wall.
‘I think he is done for. The poor little devil has been buried,’ Nicholas called up to her. ‘We have been at it an hour now. We cannot afford more time, if we are to get out ourselves. We will have to leave him.’
She ignored him and worked her way along the rock-slide, loose scree rolling under her feet, and he could see that the knee was giving her pain.
‘Tamre! Answer me,’ she called in Arabic. ‘Tamre! Where are you?’
‘Royan! That’s enough. You are going to damage that knee even more. You are putting both of us at risk now. Give it up!’
At that moment they both heard a soft groan from higher up the slope. Royan scrambled up towards the sound, slipping and sliding back almost as far as she climbed, but at last she gave a cry of horror. Nicholas dumped his pack and went up after her. When he reached her side, he too dropped to his knees.
Tamre was pinned down in the rubble. His face was barely recognizable. It was torn and lacerated, with half the skin ripped off. Royan had lifted his head into her lap, and was using her sleeve to wipe the filth out of his nostrils to allow him to breathe more freely. Blood was oozing from the corner of his mouth, and when he groaned again it welled up in a fresh flood. Royan dabbed at it, smearing it across his chin.
His lower body was buried, and Nicholas tried to clear the broken rock; but almost immediately he realized the futility of it. A lump of raw rock the size of a billiard table lay across him. It weighed many tons, and must certainly have crushed his spine and pelvis. No single man would be able to move that massive weight unaided. Even if it were possible, the grinding action of any movement would inevitably aggravate the terrible injuries that Tamre had already sustained.
‘Do something, Nicky,’ Royan whispered. ‘We have to do something for him.’
Nicholas looked at her and shook his head. Royan’s eyes flooded with tears, and they broke over her lower lids and scattered like raindrops into Tamre’s upturned face, diluting the blood to the pink of rosé wine.
‘We can’t just sit here and let him die,’ she protested, and at the sound of her voice Tamre opened his eyes and looked into her face.
He smiled through the blood, and that smile lit his dusty, broken face. ‘Ummee!’ he whispered. ‘You are my mother. You are so kind. I love you, my mother.’
The words were bitten off and a spasm stiffened his body. His face contorted with agony and he gave a soft, strangled cry, and then slumped. The rigidity went out of his shoulders and his head rolled to one side.
Royan sat for long time holding his head and weeping softly, but bitterly, until Nicholas touched her hand and said gently, ‘He is dead, Royan.’
She nodded. ‘I know. He held on just long enough to say goodbye to me.’
He let her mourn a little longer, and then he told her softly, ‘We must go, my dear.’
‘You are right. But it is so hard to leave him here. He never had anybody. He was so alone. He called me mother. I think he truly loved me.’
‘I know he did,’ Nicholas assured her, lifting the boy’s dead head from her lap and helping her to her feet. ‘Go down and wait for me. I will cover him the best I can.’
Nicholas crossed Tamre’s hands upon his chest, and folded his fingers around the silver crucifix that hung around his neck. Then he piled loose rock carefully over him, covering his head so that the crows and vultures could not reach him.
He slid down to where she waited in the water, and slung his pack over one shoulder.
‘We must go on,’ he told Royan.
She wiped away the tears with the back of her hand and nodded. ‘I am ready now.’
They waded upstream, pushing hard against the current. The rock-slide had blocked half the river bed and the waters squeezed through the gap that was left. When at last they reached the point on the bank above the avalanche, they climbed out of the river and picked their way up the steep bank until at last they could crawl out on to the intact section of the pathway.
They took a moment to recover and looked back. The river below the rock-slide was running red-brown with mud. Even if the monks at the monastery downstream had not heard the explosions, they would be alarmed by that flood of discoloured water and would come to investigate. They would find the bodies and take them down for decent burial. That thought comforted Royan a little as they struck out along the trail, with two days’ hard travel still ahead of them.
Royan was limping heavily now, but each time Nicholas tried to help her she brushed his hand away. ‘I am all right. It’s just a bit stiff.’ She would not allow him to inspect the knee, but kept on stubbornly along the trail ahead of him.
They marched mostly in silence for the rest of that day. Nicholas respected her grief and was grateful for her reticence. This ability to be quiet and yet not give out a sense of alienation and withdrawal to those around her was one of the qualities he admired in her. They spoke briefly late that afternoon while they paused to rest beside the path.
‘The only consolation is that now Pegasus will believe that we are safely buried under the rock-slide and they won’t bother to come looking for us again. We can push on without wasting time scouting the trail ahead,’ Nicholas told her.
They camped that night below the escarpment, just before the path began the climb up the vertical wall. Nicholas led her well off the path, into a heavily wooded gully, and built a small screened fire that could not be seen from the trail.
Here at last she relented and allowed him to examine her knee. It was bruised and swollen, and hot to the touch. ‘You shouldn’t be walking on this,’ he told her.
‘Do I have any option?’ she asked, and he had no reply. He wetted his bandana from the water bottle and bound up her leg as tightly as he dared without cutting off the circulation. Then he found a phial of Brufen in his bum-bag and made her take two of these anti-inflammatories.
‘It feels better already,’ she told him.
They shared the last bar of survival rations from his pack, sitting hunched up over the fire and talking quietly, still subdued and shaken by their experiences.
‘What will happen when we reach the top?’ Royan asked. ‘Will the trucks still be parked where we left them? Will the men that Boris left to guard them still be there? What will happen if we run into the men from Pegasus again?’
‘I can’t give you any answers. We will just have to face each problem as it comes up.’
‘One thing I am looking forward to when we reach Addis Ababa – reporting the massacre of Tamre and the others to the Ethiopian police. I want Helm and his gang to pay for what they have done.’
He was quiet for a while before he replied. ‘I don’t know if that is the wisest thing to do,’ he ventured at last.
‘What do you mean? We were witnesses to murder. We cannot let them get away with it.’
‘Just remember that we want to return to Ethiopia. If we make a huge fuss now, we will have the entire valley swarming with troops and police. It may put an end to our further attempts to solve Taita’s riddle, and to trace the tomb of Mamose.’
‘I hadn’t thought of that,’ she said thoughtfully. ‘But still, it was murder, and Tamre—’
‘I know, I know,’ he soothed her. ‘But there are more certain ways of wreaking vengeance on Pegasus than trying to turn them over to Ethiopian justice. Consider for the moment the fact that Nogo is working with Helm. We saw him in the helicopter.
If Pegasus have an army colonel in their pay, who else is working for them? The police? The head of the army? Members of the cabinet? We just don’t know at this stage.’
‘I hadn’t thought about that either,’ she admitted.
‘Let’s begin to think African from here on, and take a leaf out of Taita’s scrolls. Like him we must be devious and cunning. We don’t go rushing in shouting accusations. If we could just sneak out of the country, leaving everybody to believe that we are buried under the avalanche, that might be ideal. It would make our return to the gorge that much easier. Unfortunately I don’t think we will be able to get away with that. But from now on, we should be as cagey and careful as circumstances permit.’
She stared into the dancing flames for a long while, then sighed and asked, ‘You said there is a better vengeance to be had on Pegasus. What did you have in mind?’
‘Why, simply whisking Mamose’s treasure out from under their noses.’
She laughed for the first time that long cruel day. ‘You are right, of course. Whoever owns Pegasus wants it desperately enough to kill for it. We must hope that depriving him of it will hurt him almost as badly as he has hurt us.’
Both of them were so tired that it was already half-light when they woke the next morning. As soon as Royan tried to stand she groaned and sank back. He went to her immediately, and she made no protest when he placed her bare leg across his lap.
He unwrapped the bandana, and frowned as he saw the knee. It was nearly twice its normal girth, and the bruising was plum and ripe grape. He wet the bandana again, and rewrapped the knee. He made her take the last two Brufen from the phial, and then helped her to her feet.
‘How does it feel?’ he asked anxiously, and she hobbled a few paces and smiled at him bravely.
‘It will be all right as soon as I walk the stiffness out of it, I’m sure.’
He looked up the escarpment. So close in under the wall, the height was foreshortened, but he recalled every tortuous step of the way. It had taken them a full day to come down.
‘Of course it will.’ He smiled encouragement at her, and took her arm. ‘Lean on me. It’ll be a stroll in the park.’
They toiled upwards all that morning. The trail seemed to rise more steeply with every pace they took. She never complained, but she was ashen pale and sweating with the pain. By midday they had not yet reached the waterfall, and Nicholas made her stop to rest. They had nothing to eat, but she drank thirstily from the water bottle. He did not try to ration her, but limited himself to a single mouthful.
When she tried to rise, and go on, she gasped and staggered so violently that she might have fallen if he had not steadied her.
‘Damn! Damn! Damn!’ she swore bitterly. ‘It’s stiffened up on me.’
‘Never mind,’ he said cheerfully, and stripped his bum-bag of all but the most crucial items of equipment. He kept the dik-dik skin, however, rolling it into a tight ball and stuffing it into the bag. Then he rebuckled it around his waist, and grinned at her cheerfully. ‘Skinny little thing like you. Hop on my back.’
‘You can’t carry me up there.’ She looked up the trail, steep as a ladderway, and was aghast.
‘It’s the only train leaving from this station,’ he told her, and offered her his back. She crawled up on to it.
‘Don’t you think you should dump the dik-dik skin?’ she asked.
‘Perish the thought!’ he said, and started up.
It was slow and heavy-going. After a while he had nothing left over for talking, and he trudged upwards in dogged silence. Sweat drenched his shirt, but she found neither the wet warmth of it that permeated her blouse on to her own skin, nor the strong masculine odour of it offensive. Instead, it was comforting and reassuring.
Every half-hour he stopped and lowered her to the ground, and lay quietly with his eyes closed until his breathing became regular and even again. Then he opened his eyes and grinned at her.
‘Hi ho, Silver!’ He pushed himself to his feet, and bowed his back for her to scramble aboard.
As the day wore on, his jokes became more forced and feeble. By late afternoon the pace was down to an exhausted plod, and at the more difficult places he had to pause and gather himself before stepping up. She tried to help him by climbing down from his back, and supporting herself on his shoulder as they struggled over the more arduous pitches, but even with this respite she knew that he was burning up the very last of his strength.
Neither of them could truly credit their achievement when they reeled around another corner of the track and saw before them the waterfall, spilling down like a white lacy curtain across the trail. Nicholas staggered into the cavern behind the sheet of falling water and lowered her to the floor. Then he collapsed and lay like a dead man.
It was dark when he had at last recovered sufficiently to open his eyes and sit up. While he was resting Royan had gathered some wood from the monks’ stockpile and managed to get a small fire going.
‘Good girl,’ he told her. ‘If ever you want a job as a housekeeper—’
‘Don’t tempt me.’ She hobbled over to him, and examined the cut in his scalp. ‘Nice healthy scab,’ she told him, and then suddenly and impulsively she hugged his head to her bosom and stroked his dusty, sweat-stiff hair off his forehead.
‘Oh, Nicky! How can I ever repay you for what you did for me today?’
A flippant reply rose to his lips, but even in his weakened state he had the good sense to bite it back. He was in no state to attempt any further intimacy. So he lay in her embrace, enjoying the feel of her body against his, but not taking the risk of scaring her off with a move of his own.
At last she released him gently, and sat back. ‘I very much regret, sir, that the housekeeper cannot offer you smoked salmon and champagne for your dinner. How about a mug of mountain water, pure and nourishing?’
‘I think we can do better than that.’ He took the dry-cell torch from his bum-bag, and by its beam selected a round, fist-sized stone from the floor of the cavern. With this in his right hand he turned the light upwards, and played it over the cavern roof. Immediately there was a rustling of wings and the alarmed cooing of the rock pigeons that were roosting on the ledges. Nicholas manoeuvred into position below them, dazzling them with the torchbeam.
With his first throw he brought down a brace of them, fluttering and squawking to the cavern floor, while the rest of the flock exploded out into the night in a great clattering uproar of frantic wings. Nicholas pounced on the downed birds and with a practised flick of the wrist wrung their necks.
‘How do you fancy a juicy slice of roast pigeon?’ he asked her.
She lay propped on one elbow, and he sat cross-legged facing her, each of them plucking the vinous-maroon and grey feathers from one of the pigeon carcasses. Even when it came to drawing the bird, she was not squeamish, as many other women might have been faced with the same task. This, together with her stoical performance during the day’s struggle up the mountain, enhanced his opinion of her. She had repeatedly proved to him how game and plucky she was. His feelings towards her were strengthening and maturing every day.
Concentrating on removing the fine bristles from the puckered breast skin of the bird, she said, ‘It is beyond all doubt now that the material stolen in the raid on our camp is in Pegasus hands.’
‘I was thinking the same thing,’ Nicholas nodded, ‘and we know from the antennae at their base camp above the falls that they have satellite communications. We can place a pretty certain bet that Jake Helm has already telefaxed it through to the big man, whoever he may be.’
‘So he has all the details of the stele in Tanus’s tomb. We know that he already has the seventh scroll in his possession. If he isn’t an expert Egyptologist himself, he must have somebody in his pay who is. Wouldn’t you agree with that?’
‘I would guess that he can read hieroglyphics himself. I would think that he must be an avid collector. I know the type. It is an obsession with them.’
‘I know the type as well.’ She smiled at him. ‘There is one sitting not a thousand miles away from me at this very moment.’
‘Touché!’ he laughed, and held up his hands in surrender. ‘But I have only been lightly bitten by the bug, compared to others I could name. Those other two on Duraid’s list, for instance.’
‘Peter Walsh and Gotthold von Schiller,’ she reeled off the names.
‘Those two are homicidal collectors,’ he confirmed. ‘I am sure neither of them would hesitate to kill for the chance of having Pharaoh Mamose’s treasure to themselves.’
‘But from what I know about them, both of them are billionaires, at least in dollar terms.’
‘Money has nothing to do with it, don’t you see. If they laid hands upon it, they would never ever dream of selling a single artefact from the hoard. They would lock it all away in some deep vault, and not let another living soul lay eyes upon it. They would gloat on it in private – it’s a bizarre, masturbatory passion.’
‘What an odd word to describe it,’ she protested.
‘But accurate, I assure you. It’s a sexual thing, a compulsion, like that of a serial killer.’
‘I love all things Egyptian, but I don’t think I can even imagine a craving that intense.’
‘You must remember that these are not ordinary men whom we are considering. Their wealth allows them to pander to any appetite. All the normal, natural human appetites soon become jaded and satiated. They can have anything they want. Any man or any woman. Any thing, any perversion, whether legal or not. In the end they have to find something that no one else can ever have. It’s the only thing that can still give them the old thrill.’
‘So in whoever is behind Pegasus we are dealing with a madman?’ she asked softly.
‘Much more than that,’ he corrected her. ‘We are dealing with an enormously wealthy and powerful maniac, who in his disease will stop at nothing.’
They picked the cold carcasses of the roasted pigeons for their breakfast. Then, while the other one tactfully went to the back of the cavern and averted his or her gaze, they took turns to strip naked and bathe under the waterfall.