Sunbird (46 page)

^{'Give me your knife.' Louren said.}

^{'Lo, we can't,' I began.}

^{'Give it to me, damn you.' His voice was shaking, thick with a peculiar lust and passion. 'You know what this is? It's the treasury, the gold vaults of Opet!'}

^{'Wait, let's do it properly, Lo,' I pleaded, but he took the seal in his bare hands and ripped it from the gate.}

^{'Don't do it, Lo,' I protested, but he pulled the bolts open, and flung his weight against the gate. It was rusted closed, but he attacked it with all his weight. It gave, swinging back far enough for Louren to squeeze through. He ran forward, and I ran after him. The tunnel turned again at right angles and led directly into a large chamber.}

^{'God!' shouted Louren 'Oh God! Look at it, Ben. Just look at it.'}

^{The treasury of Opet lay before us with all its fabulous wealth untouched. Later we could count and weigh and measure it, but now we stood and stared.}

^{The chamber was 186 feet long and twenty-one wide. The ivory was stacked along most of one wall. There were 1,016 large elephant tusks. The ivory was rotten and crumbly as chalk, but in itself must have been a vast treasure 2,000 years ago.}

^{There were over 900 large amphorae, sealed with wax. The contents of precious oils had long since evaporated into a congealed black mass. There were bolts of imported linen and silk, rotted now so that they crumbled
to
dust at the touch.}

^{The metals were stacked along the opposite wall of the vault - 190 tons of native copper cast into ingots shaped like the cross of St Andrew; three tons of tin, cast into the same shape; sixteen tons of silver; ninety-six of lead; two of antimony.}

^{We walked down the aisle along the centre of the vault, staring about us at this incredible display of wealth.}

^{'The gold,' Louren muttered. 'Where is the gold?'}

^{There was a stack of wooden chests, carved from ebony, the lids decorated with ivory and mother-of-pearl inlay. These were the only objects of an artistic nature in the vault, and even they were crudely executed battle scenes or hunting scenes.}

^{'No, don't do it, Lo,' I cried another protest as Louren began ripping open the lids.}

^{They were filled with semi-precious stones, amethyst, beryl, tigers' eyes, jade and malachite. Some of these were crudely cut and incorporated in gold jewellery, thick clumsy pieces, collars, brooches, necklaces and rings.}

^{Louren hurried on down the aisle, and then stopped abruptly. In another recess that led off the main chamber, behind another iron gate, the gold was stacked in neat piles. Cast in the usual 'finger' moulds. The piles of precious metal were insignificant in bulk, but when, months later, it was all weighed the total was over sixty tons.}

^{Its value was in excess of PS60,000,000 sterling. In the same recess as the gold were two small wooden chests. These yielded 26,000 carats of uncut and rough-cut diamonds of every conceivable colour and shape. Not one of these was smaller than one and a half carats, and the largest was a big sulky yellow monster of thirty-eight carats, and this added a further PS2,000,000 to the intrinsic value of the treasure.}

^{Here was the wealth of forty-seven kings of Opet, accumulated painstakingly over the course of 400 years. No other treasure of antiquity could compare with this profusion.}

^{'We'll have to be bloody careful, Ben. No word of this must leak out. You understand what might happen if it did?' He stood with a finger of solid gold in each hand, looking down on the piles of treasure. 'This is enough to kill for, to start a war!'}

^{'What do you want me to do, Lo? I must have help in here. Ral or Sally even.'}

^{'No!' He turned on me ferociously. 'No one else will be allowed in here. I will leave orders with the guards, no one but you and I.'}

^{'I need help, Lo. I can't do it myself, there is too much here.'}

^{'I'll help you,' Louren said.}

^{'It will take weeks.'}

^{'I'll help you,' he repeated. 'No one else. Not a word to anyone else.'}

^{Until six o'clock that evening Louren and I explored the treasure vault.}

^{'Let's find out where the other branch of the tunnel leads to,' I suggested.}

^{'No,' Louren stopped me. 'I want to keep normal hours here. I don't want the others to guess that we are up to something. We will go down to the camp now. Tomorrow we will have a look at the other fork of the tunnel. It can't be anything like this anyway.'}

^{We closed the stone door behind us, sealing off the secret passage, and at the guard post Louren made his orders clear, repeating them and writing them on the guard's instruction sheet. Ral's and Sally's names were removed from the list of those allowed into the tunnel. And later he mentioned it to them at dinner. He explained it away as an experiment that he and I were attempting. It was a difficult evening for me. I was overwrought by the day's excitement, and now that I had shaken off my mood of apathy I was over-reacting to the normal stimuli of living. I found myself laughing too loudly, drinking too much, and the agony of my jealousy returned more intensely than ever.}

^{When Louren and Sally looked at each other like that, I wanted to shout at them, 'I know. I know about it, and damn you, I hate you for it.'}

^{But then I knew it was not true. I did not hate them. I loved them both and this made it all the harder to bear.}

^{There was no chance of sleep for me that night. When I get myself into a certain state of nervous tension, then I can go for two or three nights without being able to still the racing of my overheated brain. I did not mean to spy on her. It was a mere coincidence that I was standing at the window of my hut staring cut from my darkened room at the moonlit night when Sally left her own hut.}

^{She wore a long pale-coloured dressing-gown and her hair was let down in a dark cloud around her shoulders. She paused in the doorway of her own hut and looked around carefully, making sure that the camp was asleep. Then guiltily, quickly, she hurried across the open moonlit yard to the hut in which Louren was living. She opened the door and went in without hesitating and for me a long harrowing vigil had begun.}

^{I stood by my window for two hours, watching the moon shadows change shape, watching the patterns of the stars swing and turn across the heavens, stars as fat and bright as they are only in the sweet clean air of the wilderness. The beauty of it was wasted on me this night. I was watching Louren's hut, imagining each whispered word, each touch, each movement, and hating myself and them. I thought of Hilary and the children, wondering what madness it is that makes a man gamble his all on a few hours of transient pleasure. In that darkened hut how many confidences were those two betraying, how many people's happiness were they risking.}

^{Then suddenly I realized that I was assuming that this affair was merely play on Louren's part, and I faced the possibility that he was serious. That he would desert Hilary and go to Sally. I found this thought intolerable. I could no longer watch and wait, I must have some distraction and I dressed quickly and hurried across to the repository.}

^{The night-watchman greeted me sleepily, and I unlocked the door and went to the vault in which the golden books were kept, I took out the fourth book of Huy. I carried it across to my own office, and before I settled down to read I went to fetch a bottle of Glen Grant. My two opiates, words and whisky.}

^{I opened the scroll at random and re-read Huy's ode to his battle-axe, the gleaming wing of the bird of the sun. When I had finished I was taken by an impulse and I lifted the great axe down from its place of honour. I caressed the shimmering length of it, studying it with new attention. I was convinced that this was the weapon of the poem. Could there be another answering the description so accurately? I held it in my lap, wishing that I could draw from it the story of the last days of Opet. I was sure it was involved intimately in the final tragedy. Why had it been left abandoned, a thing so well beloved and yet thrown carelessly aside to lie uncared for and discarded for nearly 2,000 years? What had happened to the Axeman Huy, and his king and his city?}

^{I read and dreamed, disturbed less frequently by thoughts of Sally and Louren. However, at every pause in my readings they came to me with a sick little slide of jealousy and despair in my guts. I was torn between the present and the distant past.}

^{I read on, sampling those portions of the scroll which were still unknown territory while the level in the whisky bottle sank slowly and the long night passed.}

^{Then when midnight had flown and the new day was being born, I came upon a small piece of writing which touched a new depth of response in me. Huy makes a sudden heart-felt cry from the depths of his being. It is as though some long-suppressed emotion will no longer be contained and must come out in this appeal to have his physical form discounted when his value is assessed. From base earth flowers the purest gold, Huy cries, in his own poor distorted clay there were treasures concealed.}

^{I re-read the passage half a dozen times, making sure of my translation before I could accept that Huy Ben-Amon was like me.
A cripple.}

^{Dawn's first promise was tracing the silhouette of the cliff tops with a pale rose colour when I laid the golden book away in its vault and walked slowly back towards my hut.}

^{Sally stepped out of Louren's doorway and came towards me in the darkness. Her gown was ghostly pale and she seemed to float above the ground. I stood still, hoping she would not see me. There was a chance, for I stood in the deeper shadow of her hut and I turned my face away, standing quietly.}

^{I heard the rustle of her skirts, the whisper of her feet in the dust very close in the dark, then her startled gasp as she saw me. I looked at her then. She had seen but not recognized me. Her face was a pale moon of fear and her hands were at her mouth.}

^{'All right, Sally,' I said. 'It's only me.'}

^{I could smell her now. On the clean night air of the desert it was a perfumed smell like crushed rose petals, and mingled with it the warm smell of perspiration and lovet. My heart slid in my chest.}

^{'Ben?' she said, and we were both silent, staring at each other.}

^{'How long have you been here?'}

^{'Long enough,' I answered, and again the silence.}

^{'You know, then?' It was said in a small voice, shy and sad.}

^{'I didn't mean to spy,' I said, and another silence.}

^{'I believe you.' She began to move away. Then she turned back. 'Ben, I want to explain.'}

^{'You don't have to do that,' I said.}

^{'Yes, I do. I want to.'}

^{'It doesn't matter, Sal.'}

^{'It does matter.' And we faced each other. 'It does matter,' she repeated. 'I don't want you to think that I, well, that I am so terrible.'}

^{'Forget it, Sally.' I said.}

^{'I tried not to, Ben. I swear to you.''}

^{'It's all right, Sally.'}

^{'I couldn't help it, truly. I tried so hard to fight it. I didn't want it to happen.' She was crying now, silently, her shoulders shaking as she sobbed.}

^{'It doesn't matter,' I said, and went to her. I took her gently to her room and put her on the bed. In the light I saw how her lips were swollen and kiss-inflamed.}

^{'Oh, Ben, I would have given anything for it to be different.'}

^{'I know, Sally.'}

^{'I tried so hard, but it was too much for me. He had me in some kind of spell, from the very first moment I saw him.'}

^{'That evening at the airport?' I could not help but ask the question, remembering how she had watched Louren that first time she met him and how later she had ranted against him.}

^{'That's why - later, with me - that's why we--' I did not want to hear her answer, and yet I must know if she had first come to me inflamed with thoughts of another man.}

^{'No, Ben.' She tried to deny it, but she saw my eyes, and turned her face away. 'Oh, Ben, I'm sorry. I didn't want to hurt you.'}

^{'Yes,' I nodded.}

^{'I truly didn't want to hurt you. You are so good, so gentle, so different from him.' There were dark shadows of sleeplessness beneath her eyes, and the peach-coloured velvet of her cheeks was rubbed pink by Louren's unshaven skin.}

^{'Yes,' I said with my heart breaking.}

^{'Oh, Ben, what shall I do?' she cried in distress. 'I am caught in this thing. I cannot escape.'}

^{'Does Lo - has he said what he is going to do? Has he, told you he, well, that he will leave Hilary, and marry you?'}

^{'No.' She shook her head.}

^{'Has he given you reason--'}

^{'No! No!' She caught my hand. 'Oh, Ben. It's just fun for him. It's just a little adventure.'}

^{I said nothing, watching her lovely tortured face, glad at least that she knew about Louren. Realized that he was a hunter and she the quarry. There had been many Sallys in Louren's life, and there would be many more. The lion must kill regularly.}

^{'Is there anything I can do, Sally?' I asked at last.}

^{'No, Ben. I don't think so.'}

^{'If there is, tell me,' I said and moved towards the door.}

^{'Ben,' she stopped me, and sat up, 'Ben, do you still love me?'}

^{I nodded without hesitation. 'Yes,
I
still love you.'}