Shadows on the Nile (33 page)

You come to see me in hospital. I am alone in a private room that is all white which I like, but I am only a breath from death. You come to my bedside and you cry. You bring me an ancient bronze
ankh
, the looped cross that is the Egyptian hieroglyph for
life
. You tie it to my bed-head.

‘It is awesome.’ Monty
was studying the exhibits. Before him stood the magnificent throne, gleaming with sheet gold and richly adorned with lions’ heads, winged serpents and the king’s cartouches. ‘Truly awesome. There is no other word.’

Jessie stared fixedly at the great solid gold death mask of Tutankhamen that was decorated with lapis blue. It weighed twenty-four pounds. No wonder it was heavy in her dream. It possessed a pharaoh’s long ceremonial false beard and black eyes of obsidian and quartz that gazed back at her with cold indifference.

Speak to me. Make me hear.

Around her a throng of tourists, eager to see the boy king’s glorious funerary equipment, jostled against her but she didn’t move. She had already examined the delicate Hathor couch with its golden horns and sun-disk, and admired the beauty of the statuettes and rings, especially the elaborate scarab pectoral necklace. But nothing prepared her for the canopic shrine which stood almost as tall as a man and was fashioned from solid gold. The ornate decorations and carvings of gods and goddesses on it touched a nerve inside her, that someone could care so much for the dead that they created a work of art so sublime. One that would beguile the gods themselves.

But it was in the canopic
jars sitting in their alabaster canopic chest that the objects of unparalleled importance lay: the viscera of the king. Carved images of the sons of Horus watched over each jar – Imesti guarded the royal liver, Qebehsenuef protected the intestines, Duamutef the stomach, and the all-important lungs were kept safe by Hapi, with his ape’s head. Breathtaking works of art. Fit for a king.

His guardians.

Jessie had felt the power of them. As fresh and strong as when they left their maker’s hands. They pulled her in, obliterating her thoughts. Instead of the chatter of the voices in the museum, she heard the sigh of sand whipped over the tomb by the wind, the howl of the desert jackals at night, the cry of the red-tailed kite high in the blinding blue sky watching over the hidden entrance. She closed her eyes and the murmurs grew louder in her head, spiralling inside her skull, spinning in ever tighter twists and turns. She felt dizzy … put out a hand … Warm firm flesh grasped it.

‘Jessie, are you all right?’ It was Monty’s voice. Close and concerned.

She’d forced open her eyes. The room felt dim and oppressive. She could smell something, some strange unfamiliar incense that teased her nostrils …

‘I’m fine.’

But she waited for her heart to slow its drumbeat. Gently he led her away from the display of objects destined for the pharaoh’s use in the afterlife, and the strange smell faded, the noises in her head fluttered and died.

‘I think you are too anxious,’ he’d murmured, ‘for your brother. And for those hurt in the explosion last night. You need to sit down and rest a moment.’

‘No, but thank you.’ He still held her arm. ‘I need to examine the mask.’

So she was now standing in front of King Tutankhamen, and Monty was studying the golden throne fit for a god.

‘It is awesome,’ she agreed. ‘There is no other word.’

Speak to me. Make me hear.

When she heard the hiss, her
heart slammed into her throat. A king cobra rose out of the darkness with its hood flared, ready to strike with a speed beyond mortal eye. It swayed its head, numbing her mind, and though she wanted to run, to shout a warning to Monty, she couldn’t move. Couldn’t speak. Couldn’t breathe.

‘You’ve had enough,’ Monty said casually at her side. ‘If you can see nothing out of the ordinary,’ he slid an arm around her waist, ‘I think we should move on, don’t you?’

Jessie blinked and let her hand touch his. The hissing slid into silence and the cobra became once again the symbol of royalty standing proud on the front of the golden mask. The
uraeus
. The protector.

Timothy told me that you are his
uraeus. That’s what Anippe Kalim had told her in the British Museum.

His protector.

So why wasn’t she protecting him?

They moved quickly through the rest of the halls. Jessie was unwilling to linger.

‘It’s an astonishing collection,’ Monty commented as they passed a slab of ancient hieroglyphics. ‘Very impressive. Who set it up, do you know?’

‘It was the Egyptian Antiquities Service. The collection was started by Auguste Mariette, the French archaeologist. Ismail Pasha was determined to stop the looting of his country’s priceless artefacts, and quite right too. So he retained Mariette to create a home for them and introduced laws to punish thieves of antiquities.’

‘So this place was built specially for the collection, I assume.’ They were heading back downstairs towards the entrance to meet with Maisie once more. ‘They made a good job of it.’

‘Yes.’ She had herself back under control now and had organised a smile on her face. ‘Though it’s a bit of a maze, isn’t it?’

There were so many gigantic statues, carefully transported and preserved from the ruins of temples and fortresses in the Nile Valley that it was like walking through a gloomy forest of stone. The scale of everything was so vast, yet the detail of workmanship was immensely skilled and imaginative. Jessie stopped for a moment to inspect more closely a relief of the head of Amun-Ra, depicted with his tall feathered crown cut deep into the stone and a mystifying array of hieroglyphs behind him.

Out of the corner of her
eye she saw a flicker of movement. Not the general slow milling around of the tourist crowd, nor the rhythmic whisk of the feather-dusters wielded by the cleaning women shrouded head to toe in black, but a quick flash of bright blue. There one moment, then gone. Quick as a kingfisher. A bright blue and gold headscarf. The last time she had seen a blue and gold scarf was in the British Museum, around the neck of Anippe Kalim.

Jessie darted quickly off to the side where the movement had come from, dodging between exhibits. Squeezing between visitors and checking around corners. The halls flowed confusingly one into another and it was when she was finally standing cursing herself for being too slow, too blind, too plain crazy to believe she would bump into Tim’s girlfriend in a museum in Cairo, that Jessie caught another sighting of the elusive blue.

But this time it paused. It was over in a far corner, about to vanish through a half-open door. This time the scarf turned, as if its owner could not resist one final look behind her. Their eyes met. It
was
Anippe Kalim. The same proud face and dark round eyes, but this time the face was marred by a deep scowl.

‘Anippe!’ Jessie shouted. ‘Wait, I need to …’

The headscarf vanished. The door slammed. Anippe Kalim was gone.

Jessie ran. Like a dog runs. A bloodhound on a trail. Without thought, without distraction. Blind, deaf and dumb to all else except the scent. She burst through the door marked PRIVATE. STAFF ONLY, behind which Anippe had disappeared, and into a warren of corridors. She didn’t even see the people who accosted her or hear the members of staff who questioned her right to be there. She just ran.

The blue scarf bobbed and
wove, disappearing and reappearing, coming closer, moving further away. It changed direction. Struck out first one way, then another. Jessie gained ground.

It vanished.

For no more than half a second did Jessie feel disgust at her failure before she smelt the warm gust of air from outside with its scent of ripe fruit and animal dung. A back door hung open. She threw herself through it, blinded for a moment by the fierce glare of the sun, and she squinted. At the far end of the street Anippe was running, hampered by her long brown gown and her innate courtesy to others on the pavement. Jessie had no such compunction.

She raced after her. But Anippe knew these streets. Just when Jessie was gaining ground, Anippe would dodge down a scarcely visible side-alley and Jessie would overshoot, forced to backtrack to find the entrance. Time and again she lost Anippe completely. But at one point she drew so close that she saw the look of shock on the Egyptian woman’s face when she glanced over her shoulder. Jessie had no idea how far she ran. Or how long. But slowly she became conscious of the streets growing narrower, of the buildings becoming short, squat, and flat-roofed, the roads turning to dust-paths under her feet. White faces vanished. Instead women in black dress, carrying water jugs on their heads and children on their hips, stopped to stare at her from suspicious eyes as she shot past.

‘Anippe!’ she called out, gasping for breath.

This time the young woman paused at a corner. She glanced back at her pursuer and slowly shook her head from side to side. In rebuke or in astonishment, Jessie had no idea, but she could see Anippe’s chest heaving with effort and knew neither could keep this up much longer. So she stopped running. She stood where she was and beckoned to Anippe, thirty yards away. Why she thought the woman would come towards her when she had just spent the last age running away from her, Jessie had no idea. But it suddenly seemed a good alternative, like tempting a nervous young horse to you instead of flailing around after it.

‘Anippe,’ she called
again, along the length of the small street, ‘is Tim in Cairo?’

Did she hear? Was her shake of her head a refusal to answer? Or was it the answer itself?

Jessie realised she would never know, because Anippe ducked around the corner and by the time Jessie reached it, she had vanished from the face of the earth. Only then did Jessie sag exhausted against a wall, dragging woodsmoke into her lungs, and come to her senses.

She was lost. Somewhere deep in the old part of Cairo. Her hat had gone and her hair was plastered to her neck with sweat, attracting the fat glossy flies that pestered unbearably. Blood dripped from her palm onto her shoe and she had a recollection of tearing it while squeezing past a fruit stall during the chase. Her mouth was parched as desert sand and her throat felt raw.

She thought of Monty and knew he would be frantic.
Monty, I’m sorry. But
…

But what? How to explain what she’d done? She felt a cold rush of shame. What had possessed her? She ran her undamaged hand over her forehead and felt the burning heat of it. It was as though she had gone mad in there, the exhibits in the museum taking over, invading her mind with their war-chariots and their scarab beetles, driving all reason out before them.

She was lost.

Like Tim.

She closed her eyes and it was as though out here in the heat and the dust, with the normal props of her life removed, everything was unravelling. Everything was changing. She steadied herself with a hand on the warm mud bricks of the wall behind her and let out a deep breath. If everything was changing then it was time to change with them. She breathed in, breathed out, and looked around her. The street was narrow and therefore shady. That was something. Scruffy two-storey houses that opened straight onto the dirt road, shutters keeping the heat from the rooms. Front doors propped open, interiors dark. Further along, two women in black robes were squatting like dark stains in a doorway shelling peas.

Jessie thought
of enquiring about Anippe Kalim, but knew it would be a dead end. She was a foreigner, an infidel, who didn’t speak their language. Even if Anippe was sitting breathing hard behind one of the nearby shutters, why would anyone betray one of their own to Jessie?

She emptied the grit from her shoes, straightened her dress and ran her fingers through her hair before moving off down the street. The two women watched her without pausing in their work, but it was as though word had spread. In the next street, even meaner, she sensed eyes behind the shutters and heard voices calling from one upstairs room to another across the bruised patch of shade between them. She could smell onions frying somewhere and woodsmoke lingered lazily in the air. Corn husks lay dried and shrivelled in a pile that she carefully skirted, but she tried not to hurry, not to intrude or unbalance the slow pace of life here. She was desperate for a drink of water, but she didn’t stop to request one, just kept heading quietly in one direction, hoping it would lead eventually to a main thoroughfare where she could pick up a horse-drawn gharry.

It was the children who alerted her. Grubby little urchins in ragged tunics and bare feet who followed behind like a string of ducklings, chuckling and squawking, rolling their big round eyes at her and flashing their small white teeth. She threw them a handful of piastres which they pounced on with squeals, pecking and pushing each other, but instead of drawing nearer to her, so that she could ask for directions, they turned and fled. Only then did she see the group of four swarthy young men ahead of her.

She didn’t fuss. Just nodded politely to them and kept walking.
Don’t run. Please, don’t do anything stupid, Jessie.
It was when she drew alongside them that their stares turned unwelcoming and she was acutely aware of being a foreign woman, an intruder in their street, with head uncovered and a skirt reaching no further than her knees.

Keep walking.

But then she saw it. Tucked
between the voluminous folds of the men’s
galabayas,
a small dark head and the frightened eyes of a child. A boy with dirty cheeks and big wide mouth; a smear of blood oozed from his nose.

Jessie stopped.

The men said something to her, harsh and hostile. She didn’t understand their words but she had no trouble interpreting their meaning:
Go away. You are not wanted here.
The street seemed to grow suddenly smaller.

‘Good morning,’ she said courteously to the men who had closed tight around the boy. She smiled. ‘Is there a problem?’

‘No.’ The one who replied had a deep voice and a thick beard though he could not be more than twenty. ‘You go.’ He flapped a hand at her as though shooing away a mangy dog.