Gold of the Ancients

by Graham Warren

  “I know.” He paused and swirled his red wine just as he had seen Ramses do. “This is really good wine.”

  “Glad you like it. I find the wine, when combined with being here, most relaxing. It is as if I am in a different world.”

  “It is a different world,” Alex thought. He wanted to know more, much more from David, but he also appreciated being able to sit and relax in safety, especially after recent events. He was all too aware that he had changed. He was old beyond his years, and he was more than happy to be so. If anyone had asked Alex, even as recently as two years ago, what he enjoyed doing the most, his answer would have been sitting quietly and reading about somebody else’s adventure. Now that he had found adventure, or perhaps it had found him, he liked it. In fact, after just over a year of Dr Margretti’s really boring lessons, recent events had shown him that he needed adventure in his life in order to live, just as much as he needed oxygen to breathe. With oxygen he could keep his body alive, but to feel really alive he needed … no … he craved adventure.

  Though they had been ill prepared for this adventure to date, Alex understood that right now he needed to collect as many facts as he could, however long it took. His understanding of what was going on had turned out to be wrong, so dreadfully wrong. Continuing on unprepared, with the sort of ancients they were likely to come across, was not a good recipe for their long term survival. Therefore, he had to get David back on subject and keep him on subject. “So, do you have a tent out there?”

  “Sort of. Our camp consists of a wooden hut which is built into the side of a sand dune. Once inside we cannot be seen from any direction. I built it many years ago to store my discoveries safely. Because it has never been discovered, I felt confident that we would not be discovered. I thought then that it would be impossible to get to know Kate if we never had any time to relax, if we were always looking over our shoulder.”

  Alex thought it best to interrupt before David went down the Kate route. “So, what happened out there?”

  “It was early one morning, just before dawn, when I heard voices and felt the vibrations of more than just a few camels. A whole camel train passed without any realisation that they had been within a few metres of our front door.”

  Alex thought, “A camel train in the desert, now that is unusual! Oh yes, that would have raised my curiosity to extreme levels. Come on, David, there is more to it than that!” and there was.

  “I know what you are thinking. A camel train in the desert is not unusual.” Alex tried to hide his blushes by looking into his wine. “The thing is, Alex, honest camel trains always, without exception, move between water stops. This camel train was not on any modern or ancient route. There was never any water on the route they were taking. This was a camel train of criminals. It had to be. There was no other reason for them to be where they were. They had completely avoided Amarna, deliberately avoided Amarna.”

  “But there is nothing at Amarna; it’s a ruin!”

  “There is for a camel train of ancients, for that is what this was. This is what really peaked my interest. Ancients were up to something very illegal, though they were doing it in our time. At the time of passing, it caused me to wonder what they were stealing and from where.” David scratched his forehead. “Though I soon forgot about it. I pushed it to the back of my mind as an isolated incident.” Alex looked surprised. “Don’t forget, Kate and I were then in a somewhat euphoric stage after discovering each other. I wanted to know all about her life. I wanted to connect with my daughter, to set the record straight. As far as she was concerned I had abandoned both her and her mother.” David corrected himself. “I meant, her late mother. I still cannot believe she is dead. I came here, stayed away from them, so that they would both be safe. Kate having to live with Aggie, wow, I didn’t know. Honestly, Alex, Aggie hated me from the first time she saw me. She really was something else. In all my life she was the one person I was happy to hear had died.”

  Alex knew that the removal of the warlock from the afterlife had been far more important to David, but he also knew what David meant and agreed with the sentiment.

  “At least now Aggie cannot hurt anybody else. Armed with the knowledge that Kate had had to put up with her, I was even more willing to forgive Kate her outbursts. She has been through a lot. Far too much for anybody of her age. I really thought that I would be good for her, and as you know it started well.”

  Alex had to yet again bring the subject back on track. “If it was just the one camel train, what then happened to raise your curiosity?”

  “That was just it, it was not the only camel train. Several weeks later I saw another on a slightly different route. Then in the days following I noticed several more. None took exactly the same route, but each time it was ancients.”

  Alex was well aware it would have been very easy for David to tell that they were ancients, even from quite a distance. Camel trains looked today much as they did back in ancient times, though ancients could only walk on the land as it was in their time. Sand moved with the wind, so in some places ancients would appear to be walking on nothing except air, whilst in others they would easily be up to their waists, if not deeper, in sand. Alex was thinking that they must have been the ancients who were transporting the gold from Luxor to Tanis. They had to be, because they would want to avoid Amarna in order to stop Nefertiti from taking the gold for herself. Something she could easily have done from ancients: because they would have had to enter the city as it was in her time.

  He doubted if any of his original theory was in fact correct. Somehow he could not see the almost unknown Pharaoh Psusennes being more powerful than Queen Nefertiti, the mother of Tutankhamun and wife to Akhenaton. He could also not see that a pharaoh, whom he had never heard the name of until he had read about him in a book at the Aboudi bookshop, and a pharaoh that probably most people had never heard of, would be strong enough to stop Ramses, the great Ramses II, from getting involved. Even if Psusennes was working directly with Merenptah it would fall well short of giving him the power he needed. Merenptah may well have been the thirteenth son of Ramses II, but Ramses hated him, and he and his army had been well and truly beaten in the Valley of the Bees. Alex suddenly became aware that David was talking.

  “As I was saying …”

  “What was he saying?” Alex thought, before going on to consider that it was far too easy to ignore David, even when he wanted to know what he was saying. He wondered if this aspect of David had added to Kate’s frustration, because whenever she was frustrated she dealt with it through anger. “Sorry, David, I missed that. What were you saying?”

  David looked a little surprised, and more than a little hurt upon hearing that Alex had not been listening. He went quiet.

  Alex had to get David talking and he had to force himself to listen. A lie was needed. “It’s just that this wine is so much better than that of Ramses. You chose a really exceptional bottle. Perhaps … I do think I have been enjoying it a little too much. It was really taking me off into a world of my own just then.” Alex had taken no more than a few very small sips, but he did not have time to think of anything better.

  “Yes, I know. I remember when I first started drinking this wine, it had exactly the same effect on me.” David had perked up. “I was saying that I noticed more and more camel trains. I do not know if there were actually more camel trains, or if it was because Kate and I had changed our routine. Anyway, we found ourselves spending more time looking for, and watching, the camel trains, than we did at Amarna. We were extremely curious as to what they were carrying. The camels were well and truly loaded, though with what we could not see. We could guess … gold … and lots of it, but we didn’t know for sure … an educated guess. It was around this time, not exactly sure when, that we started to hear rumours of gold workers going missing whilst we were in Amarna.”

  “You both went back into ancient Amarna?”

  “Yes, of course!”

  “Wasn’t that risky for Kate?”
/>
  “Not exceptionally so.” David thought as he emptied his glass. “I suppose, if you look at it one way, it was risky for the both of us. But once you have found out how to enter into the past it is compulsive on so many levels. Do you know what I mean?”

  Alex nodded, because he knew exactly how David felt about going into the past.

  “There were stories of the best of the gold workers being abducted from their beds in the middle of the night. Nobody saw who was doing this, and accounts were very non-specific. Some accounts were wild in the extreme. We didn’t know what to believe. As you know, ancients are extremely superstitious.

  “It was one night in particular that brought about confirmation of these stories. Unbeknown to everybody, Nefertiti had had her best soldiers lie in wait at the home of her favoured jewellery maker, possibly for several nights. On this particular night six men, ancients of course, tried to abduct him. They were all taken captive by the Queen’s soldiers, yet not one of them would disclose who they were working for. You know just how brutal Nefertiti can be.” Alex nodded. He shuddered at the thought. “They were all far more afraid of whoever had sent them than they were of Nefertiti. That in itself I found to be really worrying. They were tortured for days. Their screams were heard well outside of the Royal Palace. That, by the way, is no rumour. Kate and I heard them one day. Dreadful, absolutely dreadful. Yet, amazingly, not one of them talked. In the end their names were removed and they each left the afterlife. Of course Ramses could wield this sort of power, fear if you like, but this was not of his doing.”

  “How do you know it wasn’t him?”

  “The camel trains would be heading south, not north.”

  “That’s a good point!”

  “Well, Alex, you may consider this to be an even better point: If Ramses had wanted Nefertiti’s gold workers he would have taken them at the time he defeated her.”

  “Right, that is an exceptionally good point!” Alex put his glass down and paced around the room. He had been sitting for far too long. “Who would have the power, the ability to wield such extreme fear?” he asked of his ancient memories.

  “Something very bad was going on. We couldn’t just sit around and do nothing.”

  “So, was it at this point that you and Kate had the argument over whether to head north or south?”

  “Oh, God, yes! I suggested to Kate that we should pack and head south in order to find out where the gold was coming from. I didn’t say any more than that, and we had our own private war. Actually, the way Kate screamed at me made it anything except private.”

  “I can see your logic. Once you knew exactly where the gold was being stolen from, you would have been able to go to Ramses with the facts and let him take it from there.”

  “That’s about it!”

  “Did you tell Kate your reasoning?”

  “Never got a chance. She wanted to go north. Before I could say okay, I was on the end of one of her tirades. I would have willingly gone north, I was happy to go north, anything to keep her calm, to keep her happy.”

  “That sounds so like Kate. She wouldn’t have gone north in order to report her findings to anyone, she would have gone north looking for confrontation. Despite being ill prepared she would have ploughed in and that would have probably got you both killed.”

  “I can only repeat myself, I would have happily gone north if that is what would have made her happy.”

  “A father’s love,” Alex said to himself.

  “Sorry, Alex, I missed that.”

  “Nothing, David. I think it is time for me to tell you what has happened to Emmy, Cairo and me recently.” Alex started his story at the point where he had experienced the revelation about the silver in Luxor Souk. Anything before that he felt was irrelevant for the purposes of this conversation. He was unable to tell David of the events at the hotel in Cairo, which involved Rose, Bast and his father, because he remained blissfully unaware of those events.

  In the certain knowledge that his theory had been blown apart he, somewhat hesitantly, told David how he had linked Psusennes and Merenptah. How he had come to the erroneous conclusion that they were working together to buy ancient gold with modern silver, in order to ship it out of the country legally. He only very briefly mentioned Bast and that they had seen gold workers being forced to alter the names on the stolen gold. The changing body language of David added to Alex’s failing confidence. The more he spoke of his theory the clearer he could see that there had been holes in it from the very outset. “I know, I know, I got it so totally wrong. I feel like such a fool.”

  “Well, Alex, I can see that you have serious doubts, and rightly so.”

  Alex rather slumped back into his chair. “I do, but I haven’t been able to come up with anything better. I think … I would have thought … I don’t know what to think.” Alex struggled to find the answer he was looking for, so he went quiet.

  “Let me think for a moment.”

  Alex was more than willing to let David think, because he also needed to think.

  After no more than thirty seconds of silence David spoke, “No, Alex … do you know what, I really don’t think that you have it totally wrong. You have certainly given me food for thought, though ...” David went quiet again, though yet again for no longer than thirty seconds, “Perhaps this will help. I can tell you for a fact that Psusennes and Merenptah are often seen together in the afterlife.”

  Alex looked somewhat relieved that he had not gotten everything wrong.

  “Though they are not working together.”

  Alex’s relief faded. “So they are friends, but they are not working together. That doesn’t really make sense.”

  “I never said they were friends.”

  “No, no you didn’t. I’m just grabbing at straws. We are here in the time of Psusennes, the gold is here, so the silver must be, because Psusennes desires silver above anything else.”

  David asked to be given time to explain as he poured a few drops into Alex’s nearly full wine glass, before refilling his own. “Take a drink, Alex, I think you will need it, but before you do, tell me who you now think is behind this. I could see your mind working. Go with your gut, not the why, just the who.”

  “I think …” Alex stopped because the name he had in mind was unsupported by any facts.

  “Just say her name.”

  Upon hearing David say ‘her’ Alex had renewed confidence. “Cleopatra! I think Cleopatra is behind the stolen gold.”

  “Good! Then we think alike. I shall drink to that.” Alex sipped at his rather overfull glass. David took so much he had to immediately refill his. “I am going to ask you another question. This time I want you to think before you reply.”

  “Okay.”

  “Let’s accept, for the sake of argument, that Cleopatra is behind the stolen gold.” Alex nodded. “The stolen gold is here and is being worked on right now. You have just told me that you have seen this with your own eyes.” Alex nodded again. “So whose time are we in?”

  “Psusen …” Alex stopped himself. Everything they had seen had been Greek in design. “No … we can’t be!”

  “Why can’t we be?”

  “Are you telling me that we are sitting here, in Tanis, in the time of Cleopatra?” Alex looked visibly shocked.

  “That is exactly what I am telling you.” David may have been instantly forgettable, but right now Alex was hanging on his every word. “Then was the royal we couldn’t see today Cleopatra? She was definitely in charge.”

  “I can tell you for a fact that it was not Cleopatra as she never comes here, even though Tanis is a Greek city in the afterlife.” Alex accepted this without further comment. “Let me tell you a little about Tanis, because I found a way into here some years ago, and have been back many times since. I will keep it short, as I expect Tara will be back soon.”

  Alex was happy with this as he wanted to know about Tanis. An Egyptian city apparently run in the afterlife by Greeks!

  “Ye
s, we are here in the time of Cleopatra, but let’s think back to the time of Psusennes for the moment. As you know, Psusennes loved silver. He still does love silver by the way. Merenptah, as you also know, was – and he still is – a total waste of space, though he is a waste of space who enjoys nothing more than having a very good time. Tanis at the time of Psusennes was a very liberal city. Something akin to Pompey or Las Vegas.”

  “It was a city of sex and gambling.” There was a pause as Alex thought, “And this had to be paid for with silver!”

  “You catch on quickly, Alex. When you defeated Merenptah his fractured army scattered throughout the Theban Hills while he ran away to Tanis.”

  “How do you know that? We had no idea where he had gone.”

  “You really do need to make sure that you read the ADD every month. Really great undercover exposé last February on the playboy lifestyle of Merenptah. It looked back to how his gambling and debauchery in ancient times had been supported by his unfair taxes on the Egyptian people. How – in the afterlife, without his tax income – it had bankrupted him. He lost everything, even his sarcophagus.”

  “I didn’t know any of this.”

  “Neither did I, but it made for very interesting reading. The crux of the article, the exposé, was, that since his defeat at your hands, his gambling had once again spun out of control. Ramses did get a small mention in the article. Twice, if my memory serves me correctly. You, Kate and Cairo, and of course Rose, were mentioned in virtually every paragraph. I bet he was far from pleased about that.”