The Deceit (27 page)

The man strapped to the iron frame was groaning. He probably needed more Diazepam. Forty milligrams should do it. Rothley crossed the dark room and lifted the man’s head. ‘Do you want to say something? You want to say something important?’

But the man just sobbed. Twisting his hands in his restraints, twisting his mind against the drugs.

Rothley tutted. ‘I thought we were friends.’

Reaching for his syringe, Rothley carefully injected his older prisoner with more Diazepam. Then he glanced at the clock. Seven a.m. He really needed to be careful about time: the ritual was so fastidious about procedures and protocol: turn north, turn south, write the SATOR square, wear only white, then complete.

Rothley turned and walked back to the child. She was still crying, and yet, through the endless, fizzing tears, she also gazed at him with that trusting look: wanting to believe that an adult knew what he was doing, that he wasn’t going to
hurt
her again.

‘I’m sorry,’ said Rothley. ‘It’s not me, sweetheart, it’s the Egyptians. And the Jews. Here.’ He reached in his pocket and pulled out a plastic bag containing three vivisected rat hearts, smeared and bloody. Fingering the little bag, he extracted one heart, still warm, and offered it to her. ‘Eat this.’

She shook her head. Defiant.

‘You have to eat.’

She shook her head.
Mm-mnm
. Like a toddler.
Not eating.

Rothley grabbed her and forced open her mouth and shoved the rat’s heart in her mouth and clamped shut her jaw. ‘Fucking eat it.’

The girl whimpered. But she refused to chew.

‘Eat it or we’ll do it again. Another turn around the block.’

Then he slapped her hard, having to reach down to do it. The slapping felt odd, because she was stuck in her box, just her head protruding. But it worked. She bowed her head, swallowing the rat’s heart, and she cried.

Lucas Rothley exhaled in exasperation. ‘OK.’

He had to stay in control. The Abra-Melin ritual was adamant about that: stay serene and pure, wear white, pray to the north. Now he had to say the words.

He opened the book.

‘May the lady of fire shrivel your soul.’ Rothley lifted the page to the dim wintry light. ‘I beseech thee Lampsuer, Sumarta, Baribas, Iorlex. O Lord send Anuth, Anuth, Salbana, Lazaral, now now, quickly quickly. Come on the morrow night, and take this girl and this man, take them, shrivel up their souls, lady of darkness. Take them for your bitter food, chew them, and consume them.’

Rothley walked across the room. In the corner was a sack that writhed with vile energy. He slipped on his leather gauntlet, and untied it. The many rats inside surged, eager to escape, but he lifted the sack so that they fell back, seething, then he leaned in and grabbed just one by the throat. He knocked its head against the wall, rendering it semi-conscious, giving him a chance to retie the sack. Then he carried the lolling rat across the room, to the wooden box containing the girl.

Lifting the stunned rat over her head, Rothley extracted a pin from his pocket and jabbed it in the rat’s eye. There was a faint popping sound. Liquid dribbled down on her.

‘By a fire kindled with eyes, take her, Abraxas, Jesus, Adonai, take her. And feed her soul with offal.’

The little girl was whimpering, as ever. Rothley dropped the blinded rat onto the floor, where it writhed. Then he checked his watch.

The trap was closing.

Ryan sat by Helen’s bedside, in the bare monastic cell, holding her clammy hand. She sweated and moaned in her fever, and plucked in her dreams at her bandages. The afternoon sun was fierce and dying outside.

It was fitting, he thought, bitterly, that they should be where they were. These mud-brick church buildings, in this archaic mud-brick town, were situated where the ochre desert met the Nile valley: this was the very frontier where death met life. If he stood and looked out of the austerely small monastic window he could see the distant swaying palms of green Upper Egypt: life was that close.

But they were actually in death: in the desert, not far from the western hills, the place where all good Egyptians went to die. Where his wife and child had already gone.

Ryan held her hand.

‘Anna, oh …
ja
.
Vater?
’ Her murmurs were in German, incoherent to him, just shreds of unmeaning. Ryan wondered if the Macarius papyrus was the same: the ramblings of a man in the dream. Maybe he was chasing a dream.

AFΓO, AEΘH, AAΘ, BEZ, BHF.

Maybe that phrase meant nothing at all.

‘
Wie ich im Geiste. Brannte.
’

The day of her fever turned into the evening of her fever. Ryan scratched a match and lit an oil lamp, casting its warm and fragile glow across the room. He thought of Rhiannon and death and wanted to drink whisky. He had no whisky.

A nun entered the cell with a metal bucket of cold fresh water. She used a clean rag to dab at Helen’s hot and suffering face, muttering words in Coptic as she did so.

‘
Shere ne Maria, to etchrompi
.’ It was a prayer to the Virgin. The nun pressed the rag to Helen’s forehead, who seemed to respond in her unconsciousness, half-smiling, half-frowning.

Ryan had already given Helen all the antibiotics he had in his possession, in a desperate bid to ward off further infection. A furtive local doctor had come in to stitch the wound; luckily the bullet had gone straight through the flesh and the bone was intact. The Coptic doctor had departed with a frown, and words of encouragement. So Ryan had hoped the nuns would provide whatever further medicine was needed.

But no. This was all the nursing offered by the nuns of St Tawdros, this was all their medication: cold water and prayer. Let God do the rest.

And yet the nuns’ compassion was clear. They had the most worryless eyes Ryan had ever seen: genuinely sinless, completely pure, entirely emptied. Their souls were vessels filled with the oil of love, and they poured it over Helen’s face, anointing her with mercy.

Ryan left the nun to her primitive nursing. Outside, the desert night greeted him, and as he breathed deeply a jackal called out there, somewhere: a voice in the wilderness. Where was that line from? Ryan stood transfixed for a moment.

It was from the King James Bible of course. Isaiah 40:3.
The voice of him that crieth in the wilderness.

Ryan groped for the meaning here, as he stood in the moonlit courtyard. There must be a meaning. He stared up at the high and endless sky, swirled with gleaming stars, the looted jewellery of a Czarina.

He needed to concentrate on the papyrus, to break the mystery open. What were the two direct quotes from the Bible in the Macarius text?

And the LORD brought us forth out of Egypt with a mighty hand.

Out of Egypt, out of the desert, out of the wilderness. And the other one?

Let him that hath understanding count the number of the beast: for it is the number of a man; and his number is Six hundred threescore and six.

They must be significant. Add them together and what did they produce?

The jackal howled again. A breeze blew across the monastic yard. And then the answer seemed to finally crumble in Ryan’s hands, like a papyrus too old to be saved. Flakes of nothingness, flickers of light, then dark.

Enough. Needing to exercise his limbs and to shake off some of the sadness, Ryan strode from the nocturnal courtyard. A few short minutes brought him to a low hill. He gazed back. The village twinkled behind him, half a mile away, but in the other direction the light was stunning. What was that? Ryan stared, amazed. It was like an aurora borealis of the earth, great purples and greens; huge cyan and crimson lights were dancing across the mighty rocks and cliffsides of the Theban Necropolis. What
was
it?

‘It is
son et lumière
.’

He turned, startled: and saw the dapper, slightly paunchy profile of Albert Hanna. The Copt waved his elegantly wristwatched arm. ‘The lights come on every night, for the tourists: colours and music and pictures of Pharaohs. The lights are projected onto the rocks: you can see them for many miles.’ He paused. In the stillness, Ryan could hear distant music now, that sadly danced with the lights. Albert continued, ‘And yet, of course, there are no tourists, no one is watching. The cinema is shut, but the film plays on. It is poignant,
n’est ce pas
?’

‘Yes.’

Ryan stared at the vivid scenes projected onto the mile-high cliffs. It was like the Macarius papyrus itself: for centuries the secret had been sitting there in its rocky cave, in the western cliffs, a great work seen by no one, like an unvisited masterpiece in a shuttered museum. But now someone had come: to see and understand.

‘It’s … beautiful,’ he said, to himself as much as Albert Hanna.

Huge translucent faces were now visible, projected onto the cliffs: Ryan could see the great golden death mask of Tutankhamun, the eerie elongated head of his father Akhenaten, then the Aryan cheekbones of Nefertiti, Akhenaten’s wife.

‘She was so beautiful, Nefertiti,’ Albert mused. ‘So very beautiful. You know, I sometimes believe that female beauty, in its highest form, like Nefertiti, offers a glimpse of the Divine.’ Hanna’s voice was pensive in the dark. ‘Maybe this is why Muslims are so threatened by it? By the female face. So that they deface it, with the burqa and the niqab. And the early Copts were no better, always defacing the goddess …’ He exhaled, long, and longingly. ‘And yet human beauty, the face, is where God resides, no. Is it not so?’

‘Albert, I must go back.’

‘How is she?’

Ryan shrugged. ‘The same. Every time I think she is getting better she relapses. The nuns are there this evening.’

‘Well, my friend, if prayers have any efficacy she will be cured by the morning. Their piety is astonishing.’

Albert joined Ryan as they retraced their steps. ‘You know, of course, this is one of the oldest monasteries?’

‘In the world?’

‘Yes. Fourth century. It is said that it was founded by Helena, the mother of the Emperor Constantine, when she was touring Egypt looking for places where the Holy Family sheltered. At this point I would traditionally make a cynical joke at the expense of faith, but somehow it does not seem right, not here.’ He stared up at the little moonlit cross, on top of the gate of the monastery. ‘This place has true spirituality. Such a thing rather unsettles me. As you may have noticed.’ He pressed a firm hand on Ryan’s shoulder. ‘Good night, Ryan, I will see you in the morning. I sleep in the abbot’s house.’

Albert Hanna turned and walked into the gloom; Ryan turned and entered the monastery. As he took his seat beside Helen, the nun stood, crossed herself and lifted her eyes to the ceiling as if to say: It is in the hands of God.

Helen mumbled. ‘
Wir wissen
…’

Ryan sat in his chair, and eventually slept too, his head resting on Helen’s bed, beside her clutching hands.

The next twenty-four hours were the same, blurring into a fever of their own. Helen’s bandages were replaced, the wound was uninfected, but the fever refused to quit.

On the fourth day, or maybe it was the fifth, Ryan could bear the attenuation of his grief and anxiety no longer, and he left her side for the entire afternoon. He trekked for half a mile across the melting tarmac roads and the bare and sunburned sands, towards the Nile. Albert Hanna had told him that Tawdros was close to one of the great concealed sites of Upper Egypt: the ruins of Malkata Palace. Albert was correct: just six minutes of walking in the punishing sun brought Ryan to a series of muddy heaps and a pathetic line of walls, almost entirely rotted away. A solitary telegraph pole with no wire stood at an angle in the sand-blown centre of the site, as if marking the spot.

This was all that was left of the great palace of Amenhotep III: once one of the biggest palaces in Egypt, maybe the world. The higher spoil heaps at the side were the by-products of a great artificial lake, Birket Habu, built to Amenhotep’s order in about 1360
BC
. The dumps of spoil looked like modern rubbish heaps.

With his Egyptologist’s gaze, Ryan surveyed the wider scene. The Nile was close here: the first fields of hibiscus and Moses-grass were just a quarter of a mile beyond. He could even see the silver glint of the great river itself, between the rustling date palms: it would have been easy to divert the river into this lake.

He stared down at his boots and the salty rocks beneath. This was the lakebed, or what was left of it. This was where the boy kings Akhenaten and then Tutankhamun played and swam and set toy boats to sail; here the young demigods grew to manhood, watched over by their Nubian slaves, tended by the parasolled concubines of the harem.

But now it was entirely dust. Ryan kicked a rock along. Three thousand years of desert sun had dried out the lake to a bitter, faintly saline basin of dryness; three thousand years of desert wind and summer cloudbursts had eroded the splendid and mud-walled palace, virtually erasing it from the earth. Like the cartouches of Akhenaten, chiselled away by his angry son.

Ryan sat on one low course of adobe bricks, and mused. Amenhotep III seemed crucial to their puzzle. This Pharaoh of the Eighteenth Dynasty, in the fourteenth century
BC
, had built the rooms at the Luxor temple where Ryan had found the frieze; and what did they show, those friezes?

Ryan pulled out his notebook, and read his own notes:

The frieze shows, first, the goddess Hathor, in the middle, embracing the queen on the left, with the father god Amun on the right.

Second relief. Now Amun is on the right, with another figure on the left. Who is this? The god Thoth? King Thothmes IV?

In the next scene the god Amun is holding an ankh to the queen’s nostril. Giving life?

7. Thoth announces to the queen that she is pregnant.

Scene 9. The queen is sitting on a couch surrounded by five figures on the left and four on the right, one in a group of three holding the baby …