Touchstone (Meridian Series) (28 page)

       Robert
watched them work for a time, his excitement and curiosity keeping him at the
edge of the dig site. He could not help himself, and took hold of a rope when
the laborers had hitched it about the great carved shape of black basalt. It was
Maeve’s insistent tugging at his arm that eventually brought him back to his
senses.

       “Robert!”
she hissed in his ear, hoping no one else would hear.
“The time
… we’ve
got to get back!”

       The
retraction scheme wasn’t scheduled to kick in until tomorrow. What was she
worried about? Still, the  urgency in her voice finally penetrated the
excitement that had possessed him earlier.

       As
she pulled him away, he took one last look at it. There it was, the famous
stone that had proved a key to an entire culture and history buried in a
thousand tombs, hidden away in the barren deserts of
Egypt
.
There it was, a marvelously polished slab of black basalt, looking a bit like
finely grained granite, and carved with hundreds of Egyptian glyphs. He had
come here to determine its condition, to see if the damage he had discovered in
the
London
Museum
was something he might have caused with his
own headstrong curiosity. His every hope was to find the stone fully intact,
not broken as he had seen it in the dark, dusty cellars of the museum where it
was no more than another forgotten curiosity. Now, when he looked upon it one
last time, the full implications of what he was seeing finally began to
register in his mind.

      
Fully
intact…
The stone was
not
broken. It bore no sign of damage of any
kind, save the inevitable wear of the ages, with intermittent chinks and
abrasions marring the smooth, polished surface. It was not broken… no damage at
all, but the amazing thing was that this was not the familiar shape of the
Rosetta Stone that he had studied all his life! It was fully twice the size of
the stone he knew. The stone he was familiar with could have only been the
lower portion of this great monolith. If lifted up on its end, this stone would
tower over his head. He could hardly believe what he was seeing. This was
something altogether different.

       At
the very top, the image of a vulture’s wings were extended across the whole of
the stone. At the heart of the bird was an image of Ra as the sun, and two
cobras dangled down from either side, turning at the bottom and rearing up in a
classic pose of regal threat. These carvings arched over a gathering of lords
in two columns, facing each other, and marching in from opposite sides of the
stone.  There were seven lords facing each direction, all wearing regal head
gear and bearing scepters of authority and power. The professor recognized the
elongated ovals of cartouche symbols above their heads, naming each member of
the assemblage as they gathered.

       Directly
below this were long rows of hieroglyphics as they appeared on the upper
portion of the old stone, but they extended down the
whole face
of this
artifact, even to the base! Where was the Greek Text? Where was the Demotic
rendition of the messages carved by the glyphs?

       As
Maeve pulled on his arm with increasing urgency, he fixed his last gaze on the
writing, realizing he could still read it. His mind immediately translated what
he saw:
“Through the ages now he comes to a mystery: one death gives birth,
a great wind upon the face of the sea, in a place forever hidden where the
lions roar: ‘mine is yesterday, and I know tomorrow.”

      
Maeve prevailed at last and managed to pull
him away. LeGrand turned as the two travelers started away, but his attention
was soon drawn to the stone again, and the growing effort to recover it from
the rubble. Khalid saw them leaving as well, Nordhausen pulled along by Maeve
as they fled through a low arch in the walls, seeking a way back to the inn
where they had spent the night.

       “I
can’t believe it!” Nordhausen breathed as they went. “It’s not the stone—but
yet it
was
the stone. It has to be. Yet it was something entirely new!
There was no Greek writing on it, and not a single word of Demotic script that
I could see. The whole thing was—“

       “Later,
Robert. We have to get out of sight! I’m feeling very strange.” She paused
briefly, struggling with her skirts and looking about her to see if anyone had
noticed them. They had reached the edge of a grove of palms interspersed with a
few banana trees cultivated in the fields before a small adobe farmstead. There
was no one around, the commotion of the discovery acting like a magnet and
pulling in all the locals to the frenzied activity at the dig site.

       “How
is this supposed to work?” asked Maeve. She pulled hard on Robert’s arm when he
did not answer her, shaking him from his reverie.

       “What?”

       “How
does it work, Robert? Do we have to get back to the breaching point? Do we have
to go all that way? When will it happen? How much time do you think we have
left?”

       Robert
realized she was talking about the retraction. “How much time? The retraction
is scheduled for tomorrow morning!”

“Perhaps so…but I’m feeling…quite odd just
now. I think my integrity is slipping.”

“Really? Well its probably just the sun, and
all this excitement, and the dust. But, to answer your other question, I don’t
think we need be anywhere close to the breaching point. Paul and I wandered
very far during that first mission, and I took the train from
London
to—well, never mind that. The point is: it could happen
anywhere… at any moment, I suppose.” Now he was looking around, realizing that
it would be best to find some secluded spot where they could wait out the
remaining hours.

       “Over
there,” he pointed to a cart path that led along the fringes of the thick palm
grove. “That way looks promising.”

       As
they started toward it they heard a voice calling after them and turned about. Khalid
was rushing over the parched ground, his lavender fringed robes flowing behind
him.

       “That’s
done it,” Robert exclaimed. “Come on, we’ve got to give him the slip!” But Khalid
was fast upon them, hastening up and calling for them to wait.

       “It’s
no use,” said Maeve. “He’s seen us, and he can follow us easily from this point
if we make a run for it. Besides, the heat is appalling, and these skirts are a
nuisance.”

       “Friends,
wait!” Khalid came up, breathless, but smiling with relief. “Oh, what a day!”
He beamed at them. “Did you see it? Did you see it?” His hands trembled as he
spoke, and he seemed to gaze at the sky as he praised Allah aloud, tears
watering the corners of his eyes.

       Robert
did not know what to make of him, or his reaction, but Khalid was quick to
explain. “It is wondrous, a miracle beyond my wildest hopes! We thought to find
it broken—that is the middle way, the path of struggle and many hard years of
strife and woe. Yes, I know you had hopes here as well. You came for the
discovery, of course, for the stone. Forgive my deception earlier, but we all
walk behind a veil, do we not? Believe me now when I tell you that there is
sorrow in my heart at what you have witnessed. Forgive me—forgive us all, but
there was no other way. We worked it, day and night, and the best we could achieve
was a hundred years of enmity. But something has changed! Yes! A great transformation
has occurred. It is all made new again, even as it was on the day our sword was
first drawn in anger. Imagine my surprise! I was sent to keep watch, and now I
must go to bring this news to my people. Oh, day of days! Allah be praised. We
worked it, and now we may walk this world redeemed, with shining eyes and heads
held high
.”

      
“What in the world are you talking about?“ said Robert.

       “Of what do I speak? Of a great day… but yet, more of a
little thing that works the miracle.
A’athreh ib dafra.”

       “Look here, you have been very gracious, but we simply
must
be on our way.”

       “Forgive me,” Khalid held up a hand. “
A’athreh ib dafra.
It is a saying among Arabs. It means: with a stumble and a kick. Such is the
way of it. Small things, a stumble and a kick, but the harvest is great. Still,
I am sorry for you, I will weep for you—you must believe me. Tonight I will
pray to Allah that he will take you in the palm of his hand, and preserve your
lives. Yes, you must go now. No one will be the wiser. Take that trail and you
will find a barn behind this farm. There you may rest until the time of
recovery. And may Allah go with you through all the days that remain.”

       What was he talking about? Nordhausen kept running Khalid’s
words over and over in his mind. He seemed possessed, like a man enraptured,
but buoyant, alive, exhilarated by the discovery that so baffled the professor
now. The lines of the script still burned in his recollection. What did they
mean?

       He looked at Maeve, hoping to find support for his confused
state of mind in her unshakable logic. If anyone would know what to make of
this, it would be Maeve. She was watching Khalid go now, hastening away, back
toward the site of the discovery. Already the word had begun to spread that
something extraordinary had been unearthed at the base of the wall. The French
soldiers could be heard shouting in the distance, and Nordhausen, with the
history in mind, knew that they would be dragging the Rosetta Stone to the tent
of General Menou, where the slab would be carefully cleaned and examined before
being transported, by river barge, to
Cairo
.

       He remembered how Maeve first wagered that, if the stone
were intact, the trip from Rosetta to
Cairo
would have been the ideal time for someone to inflict the damage. But that
whole line of argument was meaningless now. The original Rosetta Stone
inscribed the same message in each of three different languages. This stone
held only one language—it was completely covered by the ancient
hieroglyphics…no Demotic… No Greek… It was completely useless as a key to
translating the glyphs… completely useless…

       His attention was shaken when Maeve suddenly swayed, as
though overcome by the heat, and fell. Robert stooped to help but, as he did
so, an unaccountable chill shook his frame. He knew at once why he was becoming
so light headed. Maeve looked at him, her features frozen with an expression of
panic. He reached for her hand as the haze of a blue frost materialized about
them, transforming into the shimmer of a multi-colored aurora. There was a
sensation of falling, and he felt Maeve’s hand tighten. The retraction scheme
was kicking in! Kelly and Paul were pulling them back through the Arch at
Lawrence Berkeley Labs. But why now? They still had a hours to wait—unless
something had moved his friends to retrieve them at once, with an untimely
urgency that added yet another chill to the moment at hand.

21

“I
just don’t see how
this
could be possible,” said Paul. “The haze in trying to alter the stone prior to
its discovery would be intense. How would they know where to look for the damn
thing?”

       It
was
four o’clock
on a gray September afternoon in
Berkeley
, and the growl of the generator turbines had finally subsided
as the system reduced power. Paul was still keeping the Arch active on standby,
with the generators running at 70% until the retraction was complete. Then he
would take them down to 50%, just enough to maintain the electromagnetic field
the Arch would create—enough to sustain the thin, protective boundaries of the
Nexus Point it welled in the flow of Time.

       The
four primary team members were assembled in the lab. Nordhausen had taken off
his wig and was still scratching the back of his head. Maeve had recovered from
the retraction shift, a bit nauseous and disoriented, but feeling better by the
minute. Kelly had a pot of hot coffee at the ready, and he was stirring a bit
of cream into Maeve’s cup, hovering over her where she sat by the history
console looking pale and tired.

       After
the elation of their safe return, and hugs all around, Robert was quick to
break the news. He began talking about the discovery of the stone, trying to
describe the new artifact that had been unearthed as best he could. He soon
found words inadequate to the task and dragged Paul over to the Touchstone RAM
bank where he retrieved an image of the stone from the data files and printed
it out. Then he began to draw, carefully sketching from the his memory of the
new find.