The Exodus Quest (25 page)

FORTY-SIX

I

Streams were still pouring down the walls, the rate not slackening at all. If anything, it was getting worse, leaving Lily marooned with Stafford on the small island they’d created, thigh-deep in water that would soon be up to her waist and then her throat unless something changed and went their way. She gave a full-body shudder of dread and cold, teeth chattering wildly. It took all her strength not to let the hysteria take hold. She was so young, and felt the desperate unfairness of her predicament, but also reproach for herself. It was one thing to have one’s life ahead, all those infinite possibilities, another to look back and see how little she’d made of what she’d had so far.

Gaille surfaced, heaving for air after her latest shift attacking the
talatat
wall. ‘Any luck?’ asked Lily.

‘We need to keep working.’

‘It’s getting us nowhere,’ snapped Stafford. ‘Haven’t you realized yet?’

‘Then what do you suggest?’

‘We conserve our strength,’ said Stafford. ‘That’s what I’m going to do. Maybe we can swim out of here.’

‘Swim out!’ mocked Lily.

‘If this rain keeps coming down like this.’

‘We’ll drown before then,’ cried Lily. ‘We’ll all drown.’ Her indignation was too much for mere words. She slapped at the sound of his voice. To her surprise, she struck his bare chest. He’d taken off his shirt. ‘What are you doing?’ she asked.

‘Nothing.’

She reached a hand across, felt something bob in the water. A water bottle, its cap screwed on. He grabbed it back from her; she heard the sound of wet cloth, felt out the knotted sleeve of his shirt, bulging with Popeye muscles. ‘You’re making yourself a life-jacket,’ she said.

‘We’ll all be able to use it.’

‘He’s making himself a life-jacket,’ Lily told Gaille. ‘He’s using all the water bottles.’

‘It’s a good idea,’ said Gaille.

‘They’re
our
water bottles. Not
his
.’

‘This is for all of us,’ said Stafford unconvincingly. ‘I just didn’t want to get your hopes up before I knew it would work. Anyway, isn’t it your turn to dig out this bloody wall of yours?’

It was. Lily paddled across the shaft, took several deep breaths, dragged herself down to the
talatat
hole, ears and sinuses aching from the pressure as she scratched furiously at it, a crust of plaster beneath her nails, progress pitifully slow, especially as the rising water was making the task harder and harder and soon it would be impossible even to—

Her world crashed in suddenly, the water a ferment; something striking her shoulder, spinning her around. She kicked instinctively upwards, half aware already of what must have happened, the planks and sheets and blankets and the rocks pinning them over the shaft mouth had all been brought crashing down by the accumulated weight of water. She surfaced, spluttered, flapped around in the darkness.

‘Gaille!’ she cried. ‘Charlie!’ No reply. She reached out, touched something warm, a torso, a man’s shirtless torso: Stafford. She felt his neck, his head, a great indentation in the cranium, soft hot pulp smashed like a dropped fruit. She shrieked and pushed him away. ‘Gaille!’ she cried, searching the darkness with outstretched fingers, the flotsam of sheets and blankets and a wooden plank. She touched a forearm, felt the shirt, knew it was Gaille, dragged her up the mound and lifted her head from the water, allowing her to cough out liquid from her airways, but giving little other sign of life. All the same, Lily hugged her against herself, weeping copiously with grief, terror and loneliness in the dark.

II

‘I’m getting you a lawyer,’ Augustin yelled out to Claire, hobbling up the steps after her. ‘Not a word until he arrives. Understand?’ She nodded as she was bundled into the back of the police car, her complexion alarmingly pale. ‘I’ll be right behind you,’ he promised. ‘I won’t let you out of my sight.’ But as the door slammed closed and they began pulling away, he remembered too late that he’d crashed his bike.

Mansoor came to join him. ‘Don’t worry. It’ll sort itself out.’

‘What’s that supposed to mean?’ snarled Augustin. ‘You know what it’s like here once people get caught up in the system.’

‘What are you so worked up about her for? She’s one of them, isn’t she?’

‘No, she’s not. She’s one of us. She made her choice and she chose us.’

‘Yes, but—’

‘You have to drive me back to Alexandria. I need to get her out.’

‘I can’t,’ grunted Mansoor. ‘This place comes first. You must see that.’

‘Bullshit. We already have security. Get on the phone, arrange more if you want. Everything else can wait till morning. It’s already waited two thousand years, after all.’

‘I’m sorry, my friend.’

‘I gave her my word,’ protested Augustin. ‘I promised I’d stay with her.’

‘Yes, but—’

‘Please, Mansoor. I’ve done a lot for Egypt, haven’t I?’

‘Of course.’

‘And for you too.’ Mansoor’s son was studying medicine at a prestigious university in Paris, thanks in large part to strings pulled by Augustin.

‘Yes.’

‘And I’ve never asked you for anything in return before.’

‘What are you talking about? You’re always asking for things. How about my GPS, that remote-controlled aircraft? Where is that, by the way?’

Augustin waved his quibble aside. ‘I’m serious, Mansoor. Claire’s not at fault. She’s really not. She’s behaved well in difficult circumstances. She’s risked her whole future to put things right. You saw Farooq. He wants a scapegoat. Someone to interrogate, to bully, to take his anger out on. If he can’t find Peterson or Knox, he’ll make do with her.’

Mansoor sighed. ‘What can I do?’

‘Tell him that Claire was a whistleblower, the one who originally contacted the SCA with concerns about Peterson and this dig. Tell him she was the reason Omar and Knox came out here in the first place.’

‘He’ll never believe me.’

‘He doesn’t have to. Just as long as he can’t prove anything.’

Mansoor grimaced unhappily. ‘You really think it’ll work?’

‘There’s only one way to find out.’

‘You’ll owe me big for this.’

‘Yes,’ acknowledged Augustin. ‘I will.’

III

Knox was blasting warm air into his shoes when the mobile finally rang. ‘It’s me,’ said Augustin. ‘Sorry I missed your call. Troubles of my own. Where are you?’

‘Hermopolis. Long story. Listen, was that you flying that plane over Peterson’s site?’

‘You saw that? Yes. And we’ve found the site, too; we’ve found everything, the mosaic too.’

‘You fucking beauty.’

‘I haven’t had a chance to study it yet, but I can send you a photo. This number, yes?’

‘Please.’

‘Any news of Gaille?’

‘Not yet.’

‘You’ll find her,’ said Augustin. ‘I know you will.’ He paused, searching for the right thing to say. ‘I don’t believe in much, but I believe in you two.’

‘Thanks, mate,’ said Knox, unexpectedly touched.

The photograph came through shortly after, but the mobile’s screen was too small for him to make it all out, so he turned on the Toyota’s interior light, fetched a pen and notepad from the box of supplies in the back, sketched out the figure inside the seven-pointed star, then added the clusters of Greek letters. But hard though he stared at it, it made no sense. He punched the dashboard in frustration. He’d imagined that everything would fall into place if only he could find the mosaic. He’d been wrong.

The notepad was too small to make it easy on his eyes. He went back to the box for some sticky-tape and a cheap pair of scissors, then drew the figure and each of the seven clusters of letters on separate sheets and stuck them to the Toyota’s windscreen in the rough pattern of the seven-pointed star. Such heptagrams had been favoured symbols of the alchemists, who’d believed it had taken seven stages to convert the leaden soul into the golden sun. He dredged up what little else he knew about them. They’d been a talisman against evil, a symbol of God, of the divine form.
The divine form
. Wasn’t that what Augustin had called hermaphrodites? When everything came from one thing, that one thing must by definition be both male and female. Atum masturbating into his hand. The Androgyni. Adam Kadmon. His thoughts drifted uselessly to a halt.

He began switching the clusters of letters around on the windscreen, looking for patterns, anagrams. But then he heard an engine rumbling nearby and hurriedly switched off his interior light. A truck prowled into view, turning this way and that, using its beams like twin searchlights to illuminate great swathes of the sugar cane. They swept past where he was hiding, throwing thin bars of yellow light over the pages, settling for a moment on two of the clusters,
Θε
and
ΔΙ
, before moving on once more. If he hadn’t had divine forms on his mind, no way would he have spotted it, but
ΘεΔΙ
transliterated into English as
thedi
; and
theoeides
was Greek for the divine form. A third possible link to a single concept all within one diagram. Could it really be coincidence?

The headlights vanished as the truck drove on. He gave them twenty seconds or so before his impatience grew too much for him and he turned his interior light back on. His spirits dipped as he saw that the two clusters
Θε
and
ΔΙ
weren’t adjacent, but then he realized they were connected by the unbroken line that made up the seven-pointed star. He jotted down the cluster at which the central figure was pointing, then followed the line all the way around.

KεΝ XAΓ HN Θε ΔΙ ΤP ΣΚ

He stared down at these letters, trying to impel his mind to the solution, until suddenly the answer burst like sunlight in his mind. But he had no time to celebrate. The truck’s headlights sprang on at that moment, full beam and directly at him, dazzling him through his windscreen.

FORTY-SEVEN

I

Knox switched on his own lights, stamped down his foot, surged out of the sugar cane, the Toyota throwing up great sprays of water; startled faces in the truck, the driver wrenching his steering wheel, his passenger calling in back-up. He sped alongside the field until he spotted a track, swung down it, driving by feel, stalks drumming against his flanks.

Headlights in front, a car speeding past on a road, he spilled too fast out onto it, charging into the tilled field opposite before swinging around, accelerating away. He rounded a tight bend, saw two police cars blocking the lane ahead, slammed on his brakes, muddy tyres struggling for grip on the saturated surface. He put it into reverse, but another police car was coming up fast behind. He steered off the road, down a short embankment into a quagmire field, changed to four-wheel, gained traction, the pursuing police car bogging down behind. He reached an abandoned railway spur, turned left, jolting along the sleepers, checking his mirrors, hoping he’d got away. But then a pair of headlights appeared in his rear-view, shuddering over the tracks, and then a second pair. He looked left and right, but the track was bracketed by waterlogged ditches that even the Toyota would struggle to get out of.

A freight train clanked slowly into view ahead, a monster with dozens of carriages. He tried to beat it to the junction but it got there first: there was no way past it, wouldn’t be for another couple of minutes at the rate it was going. The police were catching up fast, their sirens sounding, lights flashing. There was nothing for it. Knox stuffed his pockets with the phone, wallet, scissors, pen, anything of potential use, jumped out, ran to the train, grabbed hold of a ladder, climbed up onto the roof. The train had appeared from his left and therefore was heading south, maybe even as far as Assiut, where the search was on for Gaille. But Knox had no interest in Assiut any more. He’d figured out the mosaic, why Gaille had tried to bring his attention to it; and the solution beckoned him not south but east.

He found a ladder on the other side of the roof, climbed down, jumped from the moving train, winding himself on landing. The Nile was a good couple of kilometres away. He tore through a thicket, out into a field, his feet splashing up gouts of water as he ran, the secret of the mosaic ablaze in his mind.

KεΝXAΓ HN ΘεΔΙ ΤPΣΚ

Akhenaten, Theoeides, Threskia
.

Akhenaten, Divine of Form, Servant of God.

II

Reception on Naguib’s police radio drifted in and out. He smacked it in exasperation with the heel of his hand. The crackle of static gave way to a burst of speech. ‘He’s getting out. He’s getting out.’

‘Seen him.’

‘He’s going for the train. Stop him.’

‘He’s boarded! He’s boarded!’

‘Follow him.’

‘Stop the train. Stop that damned train.’ A burst of static. ‘What the hell do you mean, you don’t know how? Follow it, idiot. Get ahead of it. Wave to the driver. I don’t know.’

Naguib released his Lada’s handbrake, coasted down a slight incline to park in the shelter of trees as close to the Nile’s edge as was prudent in this dreadful weather. If his bearings were correct, this was all happening a kilometre or so upstream. He turned his headlights on full, the camber aiming them down so that they painted brilliant yellow ellipses on the Nile’s foaming surface, the reflected light illuminating a million raindrops from beneath.

He felt, for an exquisite moment, that delicious moment of stillness when you don’t have the answer quite yet, but you know for sure it’s coming. And then it arrived.

Light coming from beneath
.

Yes!

How blind he’d been! How blind they’d all been!

III

The local fishermen had hauled their rowing boats high up the Nile bank in anticipation of the storm, turned them turtle. It took Knox a couple of minutes to find one with a pair of sturdy long slats for oars. He righted it, dragged it down to the water, glanced back. No sign of chase. With luck the police still believed him on the train.

He pushed out into the fast-running current, jumped aboard, began to row, his mind whirring with the implications of the mosaic. Was it truly possible they referred to Akhenaten? Or was his imagination running away with him? He’d never given much credence to Amarna-Exodus theories. For all their superficial plausibility, there was precious little physical evidence to support them. He was an archaeologist; he liked physical evidence. But the mosaic changed everything.

Akhenaten, Theoeides, Threskia
.

It wasn’t just
theoeides
that linked to Akhenaten.
Threskia
did too. The Greeks hadn’t had a word for religion.
Threskia
was as close as they’d got. It had denoted anything done in the service of the gods, and the people who did it too, which was why it was sometimes translated as ‘servants of the gods’. Scholars still debated fiercely the etymology of the word ‘Essene’, but it quite possibly meant something very similar, as the word ‘Therapeutae’ almost certainly did. And then there was the name Akhenaten, the one the heretic pharaoh had chosen for himself. For it literally meant ‘One who is useful to the Aten’; or, more simply, ‘Servant of God’.

The current was fierce, storm-water swelling the Nile as it raced downstream towards the Delta and the Mediterranean. And maybe that was significant too. After all, why should a mosaic of Akhenaten be found on an ancient site outside Alexandria? If the story of the Exodus were even faintly true, and if the Atenists had indeed become the Jews, he could see an explanation.

Plague had ravaged Egypt during the Amarna era. Perhaps it had started during the reign of Akhenaten’s father, for he’d famously commissioned hundreds of statues of Sekhmet, goddess of disease. And it had certainly persisted throughout Akhenaten’s reign, as made clear by independent Hittite texts as well as the human remains recently found in Amarna’s cemeteries, which showed stark evidence of malnutrition, shortness of stature, anaemia, low life-expectancy; all the classic indicators of epidemic. That fitted neatly with the Exodus account. After all, God had warned Pharaoh to let his people go by inflicting a series of plagues on Egypt. Historians and scientists had long sought to explain these plagues with natural phenomena. One theory argued that they’d actually all been triggered by a volcanic eruption, specifically the eruption of Thera in Santorini sometime during the mid-second millennium
BC
. It had been a blast of extraordinary magnitude, six times more powerful than Krakatau, the equivalent of thousands of nuclear warheads flinging one hundred cubic kilometres of rock into the atmosphere, debris crashing to earth for hundreds of miles around, just like the hail of fire described in the Bible. And, in the ensuing days and weeks, a great cloud of ash and smoke would have blacked out the sun, turning the world to darkness, just as described in a second plague.

The rain was still bucketing down, slopping around in the foot of his boat. Knox rested his oars for a while to bale it out with his cupped hands.

Volcanic ash was strongly acidic. Excessive contact not only caused sickness and boils, it could kill cattle too. Its high iron-oxide content would turn rivers red, suffocating fish. But other species would thrive, particularly egg-layers whose predators had died out. All their eggs would hatch for once, triggering mass infestations of lice, flies, locusts and frogs. So a volcanic eruption could legitimately explain all the biblical plagues except the slaughter of the first-born, and Knox had even heard ingenious explanations for that.

But it didn’t stop there. From a distance, an eruption looked like a pillar of fire by night, a pillar of smoke by day – just like the one followed by the Jews as they’d fled. And if they’d truly started from Amarna, their obvious route would have been north along the Nile, taking them in the direction of Thera. In fact, by Knox’s reckoning, a line drawn between Amarna and Thera would pass almost directly through the Therapeutae settlement.

A glow ahead. In the deluge it was hard to make out. But then he realized it was a pair of headlights, pointing directly out over the Nile. Maybe they were out looking for him. He stopped rowing at once, lay down in the boat, let the current drift him through the beams, hoping he was far enough out to remain unseen. The darkness swallowed him again. He picked up the oars once more, rowed towards the bank, his mind back on ancient riddles.

The Chosen People. That’s what the Jews considered themselves. If any one episode proved the truth of their special covenant it was surely the moment when God parted the Red Sea to help them escape, then brought the waters back to destroy Pharaoh and his army. But actually, according to the Bible, God hadn’t parted the Red Sea at all. That was a mistranslation. He’d parted something called the ‘Sea of Reeds’ instead.

Scholars debated vigorously where this sea was, many placing it in the ancient marshlands of the eastern Nile Delta. But it would certainly have been an appropriate name for Lake Mariut too, surrounded as it had been by reeds, and directly abutting the Mediterranean in places. Tsunamis were well documented along that stretch of coast, triggered by underwater earthquakes or volcanic eruptions. The first sign of a tsunami was the sea being sucked away in a massive ebb tide, creating acres of new dry land. It could stay that way for hours too, plenty of time to enable an escape, before a huge tidal wave swept in, destroying everything in its path.

The Nile’s eastern bank came into view ahead.

Knox stopped paddling and let momentum drift him in.

The Therapeutae had sung antiphonal chants celebrating the Exodus and the parting of the Sea of Reeds. And so he asked himself a startling question: was it possible that they’d chosen that particular site not out of fear of pogroms, or a wish to be left alone? That, in fact, the Therapeutae weren’t some small offshoot of the Essenes, but that their Borg el-Arab site actually commemorated the great miracle of Exodus itself?

The boat’s keel scraped earth. He jumped out, hauled it up the bank out of the river’s reach and stowed the oars. He was about to head on up the slope when he heard a distinctive noise behind him. A handgun had just been cocked. He stopped dead, slowly raised his hands and turned around.