Seven Ancient Wonders (52 page)

‘And so, ladies and gentlemen, our mission is accomplished,’ Wizard concluded. ‘This issue need not be addressed for another 4,500 years. At which time, I am pleased to say, it shall fall to someone else to handle.’

The delegates at the meeting rose from their chairs and applauded.

Then, buzzing with excitement, they started congratulating each other and calling home, to relay the excellent news.

Only one of them remained seated.

Sheik Abbas.

‘Wizard!’ he called above the din. ‘You neglected to tell us one thing. Where is the Capstone now?’

All fell silent.

Wizard faced Abbas, eyed him evenly. ‘The disposition of the Capstone was one of the loose ends Captain West had to attend to.’

‘Where does he intend to hide it?’

Wizard cocked his head to one side. ‘Surely, Anzar, the fewer who know the resting place of the Capstone, the better. You have trusted us this far, now trust us one more time.

‘But let me assure you of one thing: Captain West has now retired from national service. He does not intend to be found. If you can find him, you can find the Capstone, but I pity the man who is tasked with that hunt.’

This seemed to satisfy Abbas, and the congratulations continued.

The sounds of celebration would echo from the farmhouse deep into the night.

The next morning, Wizard and Lily left Ireland.

As they boarded a private plane at Cork International Airport, Lily said, ‘Wizard, where did Daddy go?’

‘As I said, to tie up some loose ends.’

‘What about after that? When he’s done, where will he go?’

Wizard eyed her sideways. ‘I actually don’t know, Lily. Only you know. For all our safety, Jack wouldn’t reveal his final destination. But he did tell me that he once gave
you
a riddle which, when solved, would reveal the location of his new home. So now it’s all up to you, little one. If you want to find him, you must solve the riddle.’

GREAT SANDY DESERT NORTH-WESTERN AUSTRALIA 25 APRIL, 2006, 1130 HOURS

The Toyota four-wheel drive zoomed along the empty desert highway.

In the passenger seat, Lily gazed out at the most inhospitable landscape she had ever seen. Wizard drove, with Zoe in the back. Lily shook her head. If there was any place on Earth further from civilisation, she didn’t know it.

Dry barren hills stretched away in every direction. Sand crept out onto the desert highway, as if eventually it would consume it.

But it was an odd kind of sand, orange-red in colour, just like the soil that had been in West’s jar.

They hadn’t seen another car in hours. In fact, the last living thing they’d seen was a big saltwater crocodile basking on a virtually dry riverbank under a bridge they’d crossed a couple of hours ago.

A sign on the bridge had revealed the river to be named, somewhat appropriately, the River Styx, after the river in Hell. A three-way junction a few miles after it offered three options. To the left: Simpson’s Crossing, 50 miles; straight: Death Valley, 75 miles; while going right would ultimately take them to a place called Franklin Downs.

‘Go straight,’ Lily had said. ‘Death Valley.’

Now, two hours later, she said, ‘It has to be here somewhere. . . ’

She checked her riddle:

My new home is home to both tigers and crocodiles.
To find it, pay the boatman, take your chances with the dog and
journey
Into the jaws of Death,
Into the mouth of Hell.
There you will find me, protected by a great villain
.

Lily said, ‘“Pay the boatman, take your chances with the dog.” In Greek mythology, when you entered the underworld, you first had to cross the River Styx. To do that, you paid the boatman and then took your chances against Cerberus, the dog guarding Hades. We’ve found the River Styx.’

Wizard and Zoe exchanged looks.

‘And Death Valley?’ Zoe asked. ‘What makes you think that?’

‘The next two lines in the riddle, “Into the jaws of Death/Into the mouth of Hell”, they’re from a poem that Wizard taught me, “The Charge of the Light Brigade”. In the poem, the 600 members of the Light Brigade charge into “the Valley of Death”. Death Valley.’

Minutes later, a series of low buildings rose out of the heat haze.

The town of Death Valley.

A weatherworn sign at the entry to the town read:

WELCOME TO
DEATH VALLEY
HOME OF THE MIGHTY
DEATH VALLEY TIGERS FOOTBALL TEAM!

‘Home to both tigers and crocodiles,’ Lily said.

Death Valley turned out to be a ghost town—just a cluster of old wooden shacks and farms with crumbling dirt driveways, long-abandoned.

They drove round for a while.

Lily gazed out the window, her eyes searching for a clue. ‘Now we need to find a “great villain” . . . a great villain . . . 
There
! Wizard! Stop the car!’

They stopped at the end of an ultralong dirt driveway. It was so long, the farmhouse to which it belonged lay over the horizon.

At the point where the driveway met the road, however, a rusty old mailbox sat on a post. Like many such mailboxes in rural Australia, this one was a home-made work of art.

Constructed of old tractor parts and a rusted oil barrel, it was fashioned in the shape of a mouse . . . complete with ears and whiskers. Only this mouse wore, of all things, a crown.

‘A Mouse King. . . ’ she breathed. ‘
The
Mouse King. This is it.’

‘How do you know?’ Zoe asked.

Lily smiled at the in-joke. ‘The Mouse King is a great villain. He’s the villain in
The Nutcracker Suite
.’

Their car bounced up the dusty dirt driveway. At the very end of the long drive, far from the main road, they found a quiet little farmhouse nestled beneath a low hill, its windmill turning slowly.

A man stood on the front porch, dressed in jeans and a T-shirt, his metal left arm glinting in the sunshine, watching the approaching four-wheel drive.

Jack West Jr.

Lily bounded out of the car and leapt into West’s arms.

‘You found me,’ he said. ‘Took you long enough.’

‘Where have you been?’ Lily asked. ‘What were these loose ends you had to tie up for a whole month?’

West grinned. ‘Why don’t you come and see.’

He led them behind the farmhouse, into an old abandoned mine hidden in the base of the low sandy hill back there.

‘Later today, like Imhotep III did at the Hanging Gardens, I’m going to trigger a landslide to cover the entrance to this mine,’ he said as they walked, ‘so that no-one will ever know that there’s a mine here, or what it contains.’

A hundred metres inside the mine, they came to a wide chamber and in the centre of the chamber stood. . . 

. . . the Golden Capstone.

Nine feet tall, glittering and golden, and absolutely magnificent.

‘Pooh Bear and Stretch helped me get it to Australia. Oh, and Sky Monster, too,’ West said. ‘But I left them all at the dock in Fremantle. A little later I got them to help me pick up a few other things that we encountered on our adventures. Wizard, I thought you might like to keep one or two.’

Standing in a semi-circle on the far side of the Capstone were several other ancient items.

The Mirror from the Lighthouse at Alexandria.

The Pillar from the Mausoleum at Halicarnassus.

Both last seen in Tunisia, inside Hamilcar’s Refuge.

‘You didn’t get the head of the Colossus of Rhodes?’ Wizard asked jokingly.

‘I was thinking of going after it in a few months, if you wanted to join me,’ West said. ‘I could use the help. Oh, and Zoe. . . ’

‘Yes, Jack. . . ’

‘I thought you might like a flower, as a token of thanks for your efforts these last ten years.’ With a flourish, he whipped something from behind his back and held it out to her.

It was a rose, a white rose of some kind, but one of unusual beauty.

Zoe’s eyes widened. ‘Where did you find this—?’

‘Some gardens I saw once,’ West said. ‘Alas, they’re no longer there. But this variety of rose is really rather resilient, and it’s taking in my front garden very well. I expect to develop quite a rosebush. Come on, it’s hot, let’s head inside and I’ll get some drinks.’

And so they left the abandoned mine and went back to the farmhouse, their shoes and boots caked in the unusual orange-red soil.

It was indeed a unique kind of soil, soil rich in iron and nickel, soil that was unique to this area: the north-western corner of what was now the most powerful nation on Earth . . . if only it knew it.

Australia.

First and foremost, I am indebted to a wonderful non-fiction book called
Secret Chamber
by the Egyptologist Robert Bauval. He’s the guy who deduced that the pyramids at Giza are laid out in imitation of the constellation Orion’s Belt.

It was from reading
Secret Chamber
that I discovered a Golden Capstone did indeed once sit atop the Great Pyramid at Giza. As an author, it’s wonderful when you discover something so big and so cool that it can be the ultimate goal of your story, and when I read about the Golden Capstone, I just leapt up and started dancing around my living room, because I’d found exactly that.

I am often asked ‘Where do you get your ideas from?’ And this is the answer: I read a lot of non-fiction books, and if you read enough, you find gems like this. As a work on the darker side of ancient Egypt, with interesting sections on the Word of Thoth and the Sphinx, I would thoroughly recommend this book to anyone keen on the subject of ancient Egypt.

On the home front, as always, my wife Natalie was a model of support and encouragement—reading draft after draft, letting me off doing chores around the house, and most of all, happily allowing our honeymoon in Egypt to morph into a quasi-research trip!

Honestly, in Egypt I became one of those tourists who is the first off the bus and the last one back to it, and who pesters the tour guide with all kinds of weird questions. For example, at the Valley of the Kings, I asked, ‘Is there a hieroglyph that says “Death to
grave robbers?”’ (Sure enough, there is, and the image of it in this book is it!). And neither of us will ever forget exploring—on our own—the haunting chambers beneath the ‘Red’ Pyramid south of Giza by the light of a perilously fading flashlight!

Once again, thanks to everyone at Pan Macmillan for another stellar effort. I’ve been so fortunate to work with a group of people who can package my work so well (I really love the jacket of this book).

Kudos also to my agents at the William Morris Agency, Suzanne Gluck and Eugenie Furniss—they look after me so well! And they’re just from the literary section. That’s not even mentioning the cool people in LA (notably Alicia Gordon and Danny Greenberg) doing film things on my behalf.

I’d also like to thank Mr David Epper, who generously supported my favourite charity, the Bullant Charity Challenge, by ‘buying’ the name of a character in this book at Bullant’s annual auction dinner. Thus, his son, Max Epper, is in the book as Professor Max Epper, aka Wizard. Thanks, Dave.

And lastly, to family and friends, once again I pledge my eternal thanks for their support and tolerance. My mum and dad; my brother, Stephen; friends like Bec Wilson, Nik and Simon Kozlina; and, of course, my first ‘official’ reader, my good friend John Schrooten, who still reads my stuff in the stands at the cricket after all these years. If he starts ignoring the cricket because he’s absorbed in the book, then it’s a good sign!

Believe me, it’s all about encouragement. As I’ve said in my previous books:
to anyone who knows a writer, never underestimate the power of your encouragement.

M.R.
Sydney, Australia
October 2005

AN INTERVIEW WITH MATTHEW REILLY

THE WRITING OF
SEVEN ANCIENT WONDERS

How was the writing of
Seven Ancient Wonders
different from the writing of your other books?

It’s funny, but for some reason the writing of this book was a more solitary experience than the others—if anything, it felt a lot like the writing of
Contest
. Perhaps that’s because the subject matter of the book, the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World, is
so
ancient,
so
distant,
so
alien to us, that I was creating most of the story from pure imagination (rather than from actual sources—some of the stuff on the Wonders is pretty flimsy). As I did when I created the aliens in
Contest
, I just had to create these mystical places, like the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, for example, from scratch.

What did you try to do differently with this book?

For me, the key difference between
Seven Ancient Wonders
and my previous books is the theme of ‘family’ in it. The team of international soldiers guarding Lily ultimately becomes a family—complete with grandparents (Doris and Max Epper), squabbling brothers and sisters (Pooh Bear, Stretch, Big Ears, Zoe), and the father-like figure of Jack West.