Tutankhamun Uncovered (72 page)

Winlock could see the change in mood and smiled once more. “Howard, guess what?”

Such teasing was extremely vexing. The matter at hand was far too important for this kind of frivolous behaviour. “Spit it out, man! The concession is to be restored?”

Carter’s rhetorical question temporarily stopped Winlock in his tracks. In the euphoria of the news he was bearing, he had forgotten the most important item on his colleague’s agenda. He felt a sudden surge of remorse, but quickly put it aside. After all, what he had to convey to his colleague was a true honour.

“No, Howard. No. At least, not yet. But I am sure that affair will be resolved in due course. The tone of Lacau’s last telegram was most conciliatory. And, as I hear it, Hanna is gone!” he chuckled. “No. But the news that I bear is, in its own way, almost as great.”

Carter’s expression withdrew once more to one of melancholy.

Winlock was himself too excited to notice. He announced with some formality, “In recognition of your achievements in Egypt and in enriching the historical knowledge of the Western world, you are to be bestowed a great honour. Yale University, our premier academic institution, is to confer an honorary doctorate upon you: Doctor of Science.”

He raised his tumbler and clinked it against the glass which hung casually from its fragile purchase between Carter’s forefinger and thumb.

For a moment the Egyptologist looked directly at Winlock without expression.

Winlock clinked glasses again. “Dr Carter, I presume?”

Carter’s impassive face finally softened into a grin and the two swiftly broke into uninhibited laughter.

The nouveaux riche languishing about at various tables within the lounge turned their heads to look. Lita Chaplin pulled her dark glasses down her nose and looked over the top of them. She thought she recognised the less well dressed of the two men. ‘In the newspapers, wasn’t it?’ But the name escaped her. She pushed her glasses back up her nose once more and returned to the attentions of her husband.

Carter, quite wrapped up in himself, did not look at, let alone recognise, anyone else in the bar.

Howard Carter returned to New York in the middle of July. It was asphyxiatingly hot. Good old east coast humidity had set in with a vengeance and, back in his Waldorf hotel suite, he found himself stripping down to his underwear. He dragged a chair up to the open window, sat down and looked out at the traffic and the people milling about below. He dwelt on memories of Swaffham, of Didlington Hall, and of Dorothy Dalgliesh. Two of these were lost. If he could find Dorothy again, what would she think of him now? Disgraced in Egypt. Garlanded with the accolades of capacity American audiences. The degree they were about to bestow on him. It was an incongruous mix.

When he raised his glass to take another draught of his gin, the ice had melted and the tepid cocktail, now diluted with water, tasted weak and decidedly unrefreshing. He looked reflectively at the bottom of the tumbler.

‘Dr Carter’. Would people, colleagues, and friends call him that? If he were truthful with himself he wouldn’t want them to anyway. The fact that he had attained the title was inward satisfaction for him and quite enough in itself. He would have it always. No one would be able to take it away from him. Recognition at the highest academic levels in the United States was enormously satisfying. (However, on the two volumes of ‘The Tomb of Tutankhamen’ that were yet to come, he would make sure he had the right letters after his name for all to see. See Carter, 1927; 1932).

As he sweated restlessly in bed that night, unable to watch the setting sun for the buildings all about him, he felt a hot blast of wind from the open window. Sand grains brushed against his face. Behind the cold steel gate stood a small teenager in a golden mask, a regally dressed girl at his side. The two had their arms defiantly folded before them.

There was the challenge and there he must return.

The royal pair were beside themselves with frustration. Despite the well publicised reports in the press and the buzz of rumour in Luxor and amongst the onlookers in The Valley, they had barely ever heard it discussed between the members of the excavation team, and then only in the most disparaging of terms. They could not conceive why. The deaths were factual. The victims’ associations with the tomb were real. The story of ‘the curse’ was well known and consistently reported. Why had the team not made the clear connection?

Tutankhamun had concluded that it was because they were blinded by their tenacious desire to seek out and clear every corner of his sepulchre. Clearly avarice, expectation and anticipation were far more powerful emotions than fear. To stop them now, it seemed, they had little choice but to attempt the systematic extinction of the team itself.

Tutankhamun looked at Ankhesenamun. Ankhesenamun looked at Meneg. Meneg looked at Ugele. Ugele couldn’t find anyone to look at.

“I... I believe I know what you are thinking, lord. But it has been my feeling all along that killing is too radical a means to achieve your ends. In any case, it is difficult and with uncertain outcome. The consequences, also, are hard to read. Your ark now being exposed, there will always be others who will gladly follow, no matter what the risk. See how these men ignore it. For them the prize is far too great a temptation.

“It is my firm belief that we should continue to aggravate the already strained political relationships between Egypt and the foreigners who seek to control it. If we can cause unrest sufficient to delay any agreement to continue the excavation and if we can do this for long enough until a great storm comes to bury the tomb once more your Majesty may once again rest in peace.”

“You are a good and peaceful man, Ugele,” said the king. “And we admire your respect for human life. You may try your way. Should you fail, however, I fear that we shall have to resort to more physical means. Even this, as you say, may fail. Then the outcome for ourselves will be inevitable.”

Ugele bowed. He turned to contemplate The Valley below.

First he must slow Carter down. He knew that Carter retained a fondness for the Dalgliesh girl. But so far as emotional attachment and the tomb were concerned, the man had long since made his choice. The Nubian could see that the girl still felt her unrequited affection for Howard was, well, unrequited. She, too, had come to terms with the realisation that this Egyptologist with his life’s ambition before him and within his grasp, felt a huge responsibility for the care and preservation of all that he discovered. She was very much in second place not even a close second at that. There could be no balance between these two realities.

He had watched her with some vigour purposefully expose herself to a considerable number of social occasions involving the opposite sex ever since the last encounter with the Egyptologist. Neither the pilot nor any of the others had managed to capture her attentions for any length of time. But she was not discouraged and keenly continued an active social life.

Somehow he had to get them back together again, and not just to meet but in such circumstances that would ignite some deeply passionate chemistry between them. Ugele would have to create a far greater passion if he was to cause Carter voluntarily to give up any notion of returning to the tomb.

The Nubian had one great advantage. Lovemaking was a particular skill with his kind and he felt supremely confident of his persuasive abilities. He decided to begin by working on the prize.

He found her at home, sitting by the fire in her living room, reading a letter. It was from Carter. It had been posted in the United States.

Good timing, thought Ugele. She will be receptive. But when he got within her mind and read the letter for himself, he realised that the task before him was a heavy one. The words clinically recounted Carter’s adventures. First the mundane the stumbled lectures, the better ones, the applause, the press (there were several cuttings accompanying the letter), the quality of the hotels, their food, their service, their guests, their rooms, his itinerary, the trips, the long nights on the trains, the cabs, the cab drivers, being late, getting to bed late, sleeping late, the American breakfasts, the coffee shops, the cars, the people in the streets, and the museums. Then the high notes the private lecture session with the President, the White House, his questions and comments, the honour bestowed at Yale and, finally...

...However, the best news I can relate to you, Dot, is that the government has once again changed this time to our advantage and I have received from my colleague in Cairo news that Prof. Lacau has accepted my explanation for the overlooked bust of T. and I am once more held in good favour by the authorities. There is, therefore, a strong chance I will be able to return shortly to continue my work!

You can imagine my current state of excitement. Hopefully, by the time I see you next a date for my return will have been confirmed and I shall be able to prepare for resumption of the work. In the time I have had to think on it I am now convinced that to do a proper job will take my team at least another five years. I dearly hope and pray nothing has been hurt in this unfortunate interim.

Until Southampton. My love, Howard.

Dorothy threw the letter and the unopened cuttings on the fire. She watched the pages briefly glow, curl, char and crumble to soot. Bad news indeed. There would be no turning this worm. Ugele’s timing had been impeccably bad.

In the foggy cosmos of the afterlife, in those dense and swirling mists of time, there were two other spirits, other energies abroad. Invisible and unknown to each other, they acted independently, each one pursuing its desperate charge, each one intent on its own goal, each able to control aspects of the present, each capable of influencing the future, each able to touch the lives of mortals.

There was no way that these forces could meet. They existed on separate, individual planes, each a perfect representation of their own world as they had known it from birth to death. They looked down on the modern world. They saw all that happened there. But they could not see each other. They were both there at the same time and neither ever knew of the other’s existence.

One of these forces was doing its utmost to preserve the sanctity of its wordly tomb. The other was intent on assuring its total violation. Because of the separation of their planes, the boy king himself had no sense of any other conspiracy. Likewise, neither was Horemheb aware of the activities of Tutankhamun.

Horemheb, for his sins, was almost alone. But for a few ephemeral servants, no one in his previous life had accompanied him to his personal plane in the afterlife. Most had perished.

Sitting in a street side cafe in the sukh in Cairo, his body wrapped in a dirty white robe and his fat head in a black and white burnous, the scheming, oblate spirit’s ragged posture looked every part the infidel. He had had little success in his attempts to get the rabble to support some local insurrection, so he decided to take on the job himself. He was, after all, eternal now and he could afford to take risks.

It was early evening and the Commander in Chief of the protecting British forces was shortly to ride by on the way to his residence. Horemheb had drunk several cups of coffee while he waited. He was becoming impatient to get the job over with so that he could return to his own little piece of paradise, be it ever so lonely.

Following twenty or so outriders in several regimented lines, mounted on a finely dressed, white Arab stallion, the brilliantly white, erect and imperial figure of Sir Lee Stack finally appeared from a side street.

Horemheb got up from his table and walked briskly into the road. It was over in a moment. Closing within a yard or two of the great man, he drew a gun from under his robe, aimed it at the man’s head and fired. Stack fell to the ground stone dead. The gun lay in the dust. The man who had fired it was gone.

The police quickly wrestled an unfortunate suspect to the ground. That, but for the mechanical formalities of lawful process, was an end to the matter.

What this single act of assassination had achieved, however, was a grave turn for the worse for the designs of the boy king. Within weeks, the scandal had forced the old government to stand down. The new government was far less unsympathetic to the British. It would demonstrate a willingness to be receptive to the Carnarvon Estate’s wishes to return Carter to his job of clearance. This being the case, completion of the excavation and ultimate violation of the mummy became a virtual certainty.

Horemheb had much cause for self-congratulation. With a complacent smile on his face, he lay back on his couch and reached for the goblet of wine offered by a servant girl. He winked at her lustfully. She leant closer, the bulging top of her bosom blossoming from her tight dress. He pulled at the neckline with one finger. The sensuous image slowly dissolved before his eyes.

“To Seth with this afterlife!” he swore. “Is nothing real? Am I condemned to a life of eternal frustration?”

He was right about one thing.

They could not believe their misfortune. Everything had been going so well. What forces of evil were at work against them? Could it really have been the singular act of a madman, or was there some more sinister foe out there amongst the ordinary people in the streets? The royal couple had discussed the possibility with their followers and dismissed it both Ay and Horemheb had been irrevocably eliminated; there was no way their spirits could have survived to the time they now inhabited. Akhenaten, then, or Smenhkhare, because Tutankhamun had been moved to return the religious order to the old ways? No, it was unthinkable they could have turned against their own blood.

“There is one way to be sure, my lord,” said Ugele. “One way we might know the true nature of this evil force or whether this is just a most unfortunate coincidence.”

They all looked at him.

“We can lay a trap.”

“A trap?”

“A trap, yes. If there is someone, something out there conspiring against the king’s spirit, it surely would be attracted to assisting in the execution of a plan that, if successfully completed, would seal the fate of our king’s mortal remains. The infidel, if he in fact exists at all, would be exposed.”