The Eleventh Plague (12 page)

D
ECIDING THAT HE
would make better headway on foot, Cornelius Quaint discarded his mule and walked the rest of the way to Bara Mephista. He reached into his waistcoat pocket and pulled out his recently reacquired fob watch. It was late afternoon, day one in Egypt. At the rate he was going, he would be lucky to get to the Clan Scarab settlement by sundown, and if there was one thing that he knew would be suicidal, it was wandering around that camp after dark.

It was dangerous enough doing it in daylight.

Several stone buildings were peppered about in two split semicircles around a central, rectangular building. Bleached sugar-white by the wind-whipped sandblasting over the years, it was remarkable that it was still standing. There were no ‘locals’ as such to Bara Mephista. If the remote location this far out in the desert failed to put people off, then rumours that it was Scarab territory almost certainly would.

Arriving at the main building, Quaint noticed a row of horses, donkeys, and even a young camel, tied to a long wooden post outside. This was the place, he assumed – an assumption given weight by the hubbub of cheers, jeers and catcalls that filled the air.

By the time he reached the door of the building, the noise from inside was loud and raucous; an atmosphere that would no doubt be shattered the moment he entered the place. If Bara Mephista was to be likened to an uncivilised town on the frontiers of the Wild West of America, then Cornelius Quaint was about to set foot in the equivalent of a saloon bar at high noon.

He pulled the rope handle and opened the door to the smoke-filled building, sending streams of stilted daylight into the place. Momentarily blinded, his eyes were unable to adapt to the contrasting light, and he stood exposed.

One by one, the occupants inside the place quietened their row as every one of them stopped and gawped at the stranger in their midst. As Quaint entered the tavern, the only noise that he could hear was his boots striding across the uneven, creaking wooden floor like the ominous ticking of a grandfather clock. This place obviously served as the Scarabs’ resident drinking establishment, with rows of benches and tables scattered about against the walls, each one populated by hunched, shadowed figures scowling in his direction. Feeling many sets of eyes follow his approach, Quaint walked confidently towards the long, wooden bar.

‘Good afternoon, my good man!’ he said in fluent Arabic, smiling broadly.

‘What do you want?’ asked the bartender in his native tongue.

‘Wine, please. Red, if you have any. I don’t know about you, but I simply can’t stomach white wine. It’s far too watery for my tastes. Give me a nice, earthy red any day of the week,’ Quaint rambled.

The bartender glared back at him. ‘You misunderstand me, stranger – I meant what do you want
in here
?’ he sneered, his greasy brow glinting with sweat.

Removing his hat, Quaint placed it upon the bar next to him and scanned the dusty array of label-less bottles lined up on the shelves, searching for a clue as to their contents. ‘No wine, eh? Goes without saying, I suppose. What do you recommend?’ Quaint asked, ignoring the distemper in the bartender’s eyes.

‘I recommend that you turn around and get out whilst you still can,’ said the bartender.

‘Hmm. One before I go then?’ said a disgruntled Quaint.

‘Forget the drink,’ shouted a voice from behind him. ‘
This
is what you will get!’

The blade of a large knife thudded into the solid wood of the bar just shy of Quaint’s hand, spearing the brim of his hat. He turned slowly, searching for the knife’s owner.

It did not take long to find him.

A mean-looking one-eyed Scarab sat at a table in the corner, his one good eye staring fixedly at the conjuror.

‘You have a good aim, sir,’ complimented Quaint.

‘Hardly…I was aiming for your back!’ sneered the one-eyed man.

‘Well, in that case I suppose that I’m rather fortunate you seem to be deficient in the ocular department by fifty per cent,’ Quaint chirped.

Ignoring the attention that he had gained from the one-eyed man, Quaint reached into his waistcoat pocket and pulled out his fob watch. Time was ticking on. He had not expected to win the big prize on his first day in Egypt, but he was at least hopeful that he would pick up on a nugget of information regarding the Hades Consortium. It was surely not too much to ask. His only hope was that these desert scavengers held the key that would set him on the right road. That, and surviving long enough to make good use of the information.

Angered at being ignored, the one-eyed man slammed a bottle of murky liquid onto his table and sidled up to the bar. He spied the watch in the conjuror’s hand and washed his tongue across what few remaining teeth he possessed. He prodded his finger into Quaint’s shoulder.

‘I want that,’ he sneered.

Quaint popped the watch back into his pocket, and turned his head to look at the one-eyed man. ‘Just coming up to a quarter to four.’

‘Not the time, fool – I want the watch!’ growled the one-eyed man. ‘Give it to me.’

Quaint laughed. ‘I’d rather not, if it’s all the same.’

‘It was not a request.’

‘Even so…my answer remains,’ said Quaint.

The portly bartender swiftly removed all the glasses and bottles from the bar and waved his hands to gather attention. ‘Now, Sebul – I do not want any trouble, not whilst the Aksak is gone! Take a fresh bottle and sit down!’

But Sebul had no intention of doing either.

Again, he prodded Quaint’s shoulder with his grubby finger.

‘In Bara Mephista, we have a tradition…if a Scarab wants something, a Scarab
takes
it.’ The one-eyed man grabbed hold of his knife, still embedded in the bar, and wrenched it from the wood. Looking Quaint up and down, he brandished the blade inches from the conjuror’s face. To his credit, Quaint did not even flinch. ‘So I will ask only one more time, stranger…give me that watch or I will gut you where you stand and
take
it from you! Understand?’

‘Perfectly,’ said Quaint. ‘But you see I have a little tradition of my own.’ Beckoning the Scarab towards him, he grabbed the back of Sebul’s head and slammed it into the bar, breaking his
nose. He reeled as Quaint followed with a powerful open-handed punch to his jaw. For good measure, the conjuror kicked his legs out from underneath him and slammed his elbow onto the back of the Scarab’s neck.

Sebul slumped onto the sawdust-covered floor – very bloodied and quite extremely unconscious.

A low growl from many throats sounded behind him, and Quaint was conscious of being surrounded by Scarabs. He turned to face the mob, all armed with threatening glares – as well as hooks, metal spikes and daggers. Dirty and dishevelled, and stinking like a pack of wild dogs, the men closed upon him.

A mental checklist of his options blazed across Quaint’s mind – fleetingly, for he had none to consider. He measured the crowd gathering around him as an uneasy silence quickly settled. The air held the scent of violence and he was fully aware that it was at his expense.

‘Don’t tell me you all want the time,’ he said. ‘Don’t any of you have a watch?’

There came no reply.

Staring down the crowd, Quaint held his ground, continuing his charade of confidence as best as his spent nerves could manage.

Eventually, the Clan Scarabs’ anger subsided. They could not quite measure the stranger in their midst, and none of them were too eager to get a helping of what Sebul had just had. They soon returned to their business as if nothing had happened.

‘You enjoy chancing your luck, stranger,’ noted the bartender.

‘Every day,’ Quaint smirked.

‘Well, I would not push it…luck does not last long in Bara Mephista.’

‘I’ll bear that in mind,’ said Quaint. ‘So…I presume you are the proprietor of this establishment?’

The bartender’s double chin wobbled as he nodded. ‘And I must say, you speak Arabic very well for an Englishman.’

‘How do you know I’m English?’ asked Quaint.

The bartender measured the conjuror from top to toe. ‘Just a wild guess.’

The tavern full of Scarabs was still in shock after seeing Sebul so deftly quashed, and they listened intently to the unfolding conversation as the bartender slid a stained glass across the bar.

‘The last of our red wine. Drink it and go,’ he said. ‘You are not welcome here.’

Quaint grinned shamelessly. ‘Clearly. But I’m not here for trouble. I only want to see your leader.’

‘Aksak!’ snapped a Scarab behind him.

‘Yes, that’s the chap,’ said Quaint, with misplaced cheer. ‘Mr Aksak.’

‘We call our leader Aksak!’ yelled another.

‘Aksak Faroud!’ said yet another, with a defiant stomp of his foot on the floor – causing his friends to mirror him.

‘That’s what I said,’ Quaint answered. ‘We’re old pals, you see. I was in the neighbourhood and just thought I’d pop in and see him. Good old Aksak Faroud…what a champ!’

‘Friend of the Aksak’s?’ mumbled a chorus of Scarabs.

‘How would someone like
you
know the Aksak, stranger?’ asked a pockmarked, scab-infested man as he spat upon the floor – causing his friends to mirror
him.

‘Why…from our old robbing days in Cairo, of course,’ answered Quaint, lies trickling from his tongue – a talent he held in great esteem. ‘I’ll bet he’s not changed a bit. Still a grumpy old sourpuss, is he? The look of the Devil about him and rarely a smile unless a woman is in the room?’

The pack of Scarabs went silent. Strangely, this description of
their leader seemed perfectly acceptable, and they required no further validation of Quaint’s identity.

Cornelius Quaint was not one of the most beguiling conjurors in Europe for nothing. His bravado had talked him out of (and into) a lot of trouble over the years, and if there was one thing that he was supremely gifted at, it was being able to fool an audience. And bloody spectacular at it he was too.

‘Aksak Faroud is not here,’ the bartender said. ‘He is away on urgent Scarab business in Umkaza.’

‘I’ll wait,’ said Quaint, throwing a dried date into his mouth from a bowl at the bar. Finally he would have someone to ask questions of. This man, Aksak Faroud, surely he was a reasonable sort of chap. Quaint pulled out his deck of cards. ‘Why don’t we pass the time with a little illusion I like to call the Equivoque Principle?’

P
ROFESSOR
P
OLLYANNA
N
ORTH
was an educated woman.

In her late thirties, she had already made a name for herself as one of only a handful of female archaeologists working in service to Queen Victoria, and this fact alone made her the object of much attention. ‘A rare gem of a woman’ and ‘One of the Empire’s finest exported treasures’ were just two of the niceties that her peers had bestowed upon her. Polly was under a great deal of pressure not to come back to England empty handed on this dig, especially as the Queen herself had seen fit to honour her at a forthcoming gala dinner. That would normally have sent tingles of excitement up and down the woman’s spine, but she currently had nothing of worth to present.

The abandoned district of Umkaza was some miles away from Bara Mephista on the outskirts of the low-lying flatlands to the west of the River Nile. Abandoned years before, it had become home to a small group of archaeologists and historians. Polly’s benefactor was convinced that Umkaza held a glorious treasure and he had invested a great deal of money in this venture to discover it. Polly was desperate not to let him down, but after digging with her small crew for some time yet finding little of
value, she was rapidly running out of both hope and luck – in equal measure. Rebuilding, reconstructing and retracing History’s footsteps were not tasks for the impatient, but even Polly’s vaunted endurance was sorely waning of late.

The Professor was up to her armpits in sand and dust when she became distracted by several of her young crew running up to her, gathering her up in their excited swarm as they led her to one of the many deep pits dug at the far end of the marked site. She placed her hands on her hips and scowled at the two excited men in the pit, their filthy faces smudged with dust and dirt.

‘What on earth is all the fuss about, Mal? Have you found something?’ she asked.

‘Yes, ma’am!’ said the smaller of the two Egyptians. ‘Something quite odd.’

‘I’m sufficiently intrigued, Mal,’ said Polly. A small crowd gathered around her, all eager to hear her assessment. She squatted down onto her knees and leaned into the pit, as Mal handed her what he had discovered in it. It was unmistakably a bone. Removing a magnifying glass from the top pocket of her blouse, Polly lifted the bone closer to her eyes and blew the remaining dust from it. ‘Approximate length eighteen inches…width: just less than an inch.’

‘There are lots of them down here, ma’am. The deeper we dig, the more we find. Perhaps as many as fifteen, maybe more,’ said Mal. ‘What animal do you think it might be? Horse? Camel?’

Polly North clenched her jaw. ‘Human.’ The word was like a crash of thunder to those crewmembers within earshot. ‘It’s a femur – a thigh bone, to those unfamiliar with anatomy. How many of these things did you say were down there?’

‘At least fifteen, ma’am,’ replied Mal. ‘But there are lots of
other bones too of all shapes and sized, piled one of top of the other. We will have to dig a little deeper to know how many for certain.’

‘Don’t,’ said Polly. ‘Leave them where they are, Mal. Fifteen bodies in a pit, piled on top of each other can only mean one thing. This is a mass grave, and it’s never good news to go excavating a mass grave, trust me.’

‘Why not, Professor? These bones…might they not be ancient Nubian in origin? There are so many in one place; if this is a sacrificial site…perhaps they might be a clue. Perhaps they might eventually help us find “The Pharaoh’s Cradle?”’

‘That’s highly unlikely, Mal, especially if my instincts are spot on.’ Professor North held her magnifying glass an inch from the bone, inspecting its length carefully. ‘It can’t be much older than twenty or thirty years at the most. Sorry to say, Mal, there is no place for them in the Cairo Museum of Antiquities…and no way could the Pharaoh’s Cradle be buried here. We’ll just have to keep on searching, chaps.’

The crowd chorused a disappointed sigh. But rising above it, Polly was distracted by a tumultuous noise echoing all around her.

Screams littered the air.

Aksak Faroud and a band of twelve Scarabs tore into the encampment astride horses. Wearing a dark red hood, the Scarab leader held his sword high in the air. Professor North’s crew were caught between an intense desire to flee and the inability to do anything about it, their fear freezing them to the spot.

‘Who are these men?’ asked Polly of Mal, clutching at the younger man’s clothes as he crawled from the trench.

‘Clan Scarabs!’ he gasped.

‘Clan Scarabs?’ cried Polly. ‘What are they doing so far from their territory?’

‘I am sorry, Professor…but I do not plan on waiting to find out.’ With that, he climbed from the pit and ran at top speed across the dig site, his arms flailing in the air as if he were being pursued by a swarm of wasps.

Pretty soon many other workers followed his lead. Polly looked around at the ensuing chaos. Her excavation crew were running scared in all directions, the merest mention of the words ‘Clan Scarabs’ igniting a fire underneath their feet. Polly was dumbfounded, unable to move. What could she do? Where could she go? Polly had never heard of them attacking an archaeological site before.

It made no sense.

Aksak Faroud’s quarry was an easy target to spot. The only pale-skinned female around – actually, one of the few people around full stop, for most of the others had fled. Polly gulped down her fear. The bestial pack headed towards her determinedly.

‘But this is insane!’ she said to herself. ‘We have nothing worth taking!’

Apart from Professor Pollyanna North herself, it seemed…