The Heretic's Treasure (34 page)

Kirby’s face brightened. ‘Shit, you could be right. Again.’

‘Feel this leather,’ Ben said. ‘It’s soft. Feels like sheep nappa, but it’s thicker than cowhide. There must be half a dozen overlaid panels of it making up the seat. My guess is we’ll find something under here.’

Kirby let out a gasp when he saw the small penknife in Ben’s hand. ‘You can’t do that—’

‘Yes, I can, and I’m going to.’

‘But it’s priceless.’

‘I’ll pay for it when we find the treasure.’ Ben slashed the leather open and carefully peeled back the top layer, praying the layers weren’t stuck together.

Underneath were colourful images of Thoth and Isis, Bastet and Anubis.

‘The old gods,’ Kirby said. ‘Akhenaten definitely wouldn’t have approved of that.’

But Ben still couldn’t see anything that hinted at a clue. ‘Fuck it,’ he muttered. He slashed again. Under the painted layer was a piece of plain hide, only slightly cracked with age.

Nothing.

But then Ben noticed something sandwiched between that and the layer below. He could barely make it out, but it looked like the yellowed corner of a sheet of papyrus. ‘Look at this,’ he said, moving aside.

Kirby examined it excitedly. ‘We have to be really careful. It could just crumble away in our fingers.’

Slowly, delicately, they separated the layers of ancient leatherwork until the papyrus could be removed intact. Kirby slid it out and balanced it on his palms as though it could disintegrate into dust at any moment.

The two of them peered down at the old document. In the upper corner was the seal of Wenkaura that was becoming familiar to Ben. Below that was a faded block of delicately painted hieroglyphs that meant nothing to him. But the design in the centre of the yellowed, time-frayed page was unmistakable.

‘It’s a map,’ Kirby breathed. ‘This is it, then. We’ve found it.’

Time was ticking away dangerously. Ben snatched out his phone and took a snap of the papyrus up close. The voices below were getting louder.

‘This is just incredible,’ Kirby muttered, already deciphering the glyphs, his head bent over in concentration.

‘No time to hang around.’ Ben grabbed the papyrus map from Kirby and started folding it up to put in his pocket.

‘Don’t—’

But it was too late. The ancient document was already breaking up into dusty shards that fell through Ben’s fingers.

‘That was probably the oldest map in the history of Egypt, and you’ve just destroyed it. Nice work.’

‘The historians don’t know about it, do they?’

‘And now they never will.’

‘So what they don’t know won’t hurt them.’ Ben grabbed Kirby’s arm and yanked him to his feet. ‘Enough talk. Let’s go.’

‘Where? Security’s all over the building.’

Ben walked over to the window, yanked aside the heavy drapes and threw it open. French doors led out onto a little stone balcony. He stepped out onto it and looked down. ‘This way.’

‘No way I’m climbing down there,’ Kirby protested. ‘We’re three storeys up.’

‘Then we’ll have to go out the front door, same way we came in.’

‘We’ll be caught.’

Ben walked away from the window and up to Kirby. ‘Hold still.’

The historian looked around him in panic. ‘What now?’

‘Just don’t move. I don’t want to hurt you more than I have to.’

Kirby opened his mouth to reply when Ben socked him on the chin. It was a good punch, not hard enough to cause any real damage, but it knocked Kirby out cold. Ben caught him before he could slump to the floor, flipped him up with a grunt of effort and carried him over his shoulder to the door. He threw a last look at Wenkaura’s throne and stepped out into the corridor.

The coast was clear-for now. Ben carried Kirby’s unconscious body down the winding backstairs. He used the historian’s feet to shove open a fire door, then made his way down a corridor with offices on both sides and a door that said ‘Gentlemen’.

Up ahead the corridor curved around to the left, and Ben could hear rapid footsteps coming his way. He eased Kirby’s weight down off his shoulder and laid him down on the floor. Kicked open the toilet door, dragged him half inside and let him sprawl limply on the tiles. He quickly arranged Kirby’s arms and legs to make it look as if he’d collapsed. Then he kneeled beside him, pressed his hands flat on the historian’s chest and started pumping hard, up and down.

The footsteps in the corridor reached the door. Ben looked up. ‘In here!’ he yelled. ‘Security!’

Two Embassy security guards in black suits appeared in the doorway. They both had radio earpieces and were holding pistols. ‘What happened here?’ one of them asked. ‘The building’s been evacuated.’

‘I’m a doctor,’ Ben said. ‘This man’s had a heart attack. Get an ambulance, right now.’

Less than fifteen minutes later, Kirby was waking up in the back of the lurching, swaying ambulance as it sped towards the hospital, siren wailing. His eyes fluttered open. ‘Where the hell am I? What happened?’

‘Be quiet, you’re dying,’ Ben said.

Kirby winced, put his hand to his face. ‘You almost broke my jaw. Ouch. Jesus.’

‘I needed you to be believable in your role. And you were.’

Kirby sat up. ‘Where are the paramedics?’

‘You’re in luck. They don’t seem to have them in Egypt.’

‘You bastard. You stitched me up. They’ll put those electric shock pads on me, won’t they?’

Ben could feel the ambulance braking to a halt. Through the window he could see they were still somewhere in the city, and caught up in a gridlock of traffic. Horns were honking as the jam thickened up ahead.

‘This is our stop.’ He grabbed Kirby’s wrist and hauled him off the bed before he could say anything. Opening the back doors, they stepped out into a sea of traffic and lights. Motorists stared as the two guys in tuxedos walked calmly away from the ambulance, headed for the pavement and mingled with the crowds.

It was after ten by the time Ben and Kirby got back to Claudel’s villa. The Frenchman greeted them at the door, peering nervously out into the night as if he expected Kamal to return at any instant. ‘Did you get it?’ he whispered.

‘We got it,’ Ben replied. ‘Now let’s figure it out.’

Claudel led the way to a large comfortable study with a broad desk, three chairs and a sofa. It took Ben a few moments to transfer the image of the throne papyrus to Claudel’s laptop and set up a feed to the big TV screen on the wall. The map lit up the screen in bright high-definition detail.

‘What happened to the original?’ Claudel asked.

‘Don’t ask,’ Kirby replied quietly, shaking his head.

The three men started studying the map in detail. ‘That’s the same hieroglyph text as was inscribed on the chamber containing the first treasure,’ Claudel said, pointing to a block of symbols. ‘This part is the glyph for Amenhotep’s name.’

‘Hold on,’ Ben interrupted. ‘Amenhotep was Akhenaten’s name, before he changed it.’

Kirby shook his head. ‘That’s true, but it also means “Amun is at peace” or “Amun is content”. The phrase and the name are interchangeable, depending on context.’

‘The full meaning is “Amun is content; the Heretic of Amarna shall be denied, the treasures restored to their rightful place”,’ Claudel said. ‘Which I don’t think leaves any room for doubt. Congratulations, gentlemen.’

‘Fine,’ Ben said. ‘Now let’s figure out where this bloody treasure is.’

Over the next hour, as the two experts pored over the papyrus, scribbled notes and stopped occasionally to consult a thick dictionary of hieroglyphics, they gradually puzzled it out. Eventually, Kirby got up from the desk and sat heavily on the sofa with a sigh of relief. He wiped sweat off his brow and flapped the notebook in his hand. ‘Let me read you what I’ve got. I’m paraphrasing, but here goes. “From the home of the Kingdom of Kush, follow the path of Sah as he sails to his rest. Twelve hours of march will lead you to the horizon. Pass through the teeth of Sobek, and you will discover. The Heretic shall be denied.”’

Ben couldn’t make sense of it.

Claudel smiled. ‘It’s quite a clear set of directions. Let’s go through it. The Kingdom of Kush was an ancient civilisation dating back to 2000 BC, or even earlier, in what was then the land of Nubia, down the Nile to the south of Egypt. They lived in the shadow of the ancient Egyptians, and in many ways tried to emulate them. By Wenkaura’s time the Kingdom was all but dead, but an educated man like him would have known that its capital was a once-great city called Kerma that lay close to the third cataract of the Nile. That’s the first step.’

‘From there you follow the path of Sah as he sails to his rest,’ Kirby cut in. ‘Not as obscure as it sounds, if you know what to look for. The ancient Egyptian god, Sah, was named “the glorious soul of Osiris”. But he was also an astronomical symbol, the personification of the star constellation known today as Orion.’

‘The ancient Egyptians always envisaged the motions of celestial bodies as boat journeys, sailing across the sky,’ Claudel added. ‘Thus the place of Sah’s rest would be the point where Orion sets.’

‘In the west,’ Ben said.

‘Correct.’

‘So from the site of the ancient city of Kerma we need to head due west,’ Ben said, frowning. ‘But for how far? Twelve hours of march isn’t exactly a precise distance. It could vary hugely.’

Kirby shook his head. ‘Actually it’s a fairly specific measurement. The ancient Egyptians used the term an hour of march to signify a distance of 21,000 royal cubits. One royal cubit is about twenty inches long. It was the standard measurement used for everything from laying out street plans to building pyramids.’

Ben did some quick sums in his head. ‘Then an hour of march equals about eleven kilometres. Which means the papyrus is telling us to travel a hundred and thirty or so kilometres west from Kerma.’ He reached for a heavy volume that lay on Claudel’s desk, and flipped it open. It was a book of ancient maps. He leafed through the pages, stopped and studied it closely. Ran his finger down the path of the Nile, from Giza southwards to Thebes, and then further down past Aswan, deep into what had once been the land of Nubia. It was a long, long way downriver to the ancient city of Kerma. He ran his finger westward from that point, and imagined the kind of landscape there. Nothing much would have changed in thousands of years. It would be an arid wilderness of desert and rock, stretching over a vast area.

Claudel seemed to sense his thoughts. ‘What perplexes me is the lack of a precise physical landmark or orientation. We’re simply told “head for the horizon”. That strikes me as very vague.’

‘Show me the glyph for horizon,’ Ben said.

Claudel pointed it out on the screen. ‘Here. The word is denoted by the setting of the sun in a U-shaped cleft in the rock.’

Ben thought for a second. ‘What if it had a double meaning? What if Wenkaura was describing an actual physical location?’

Claudel considered the idea. ‘In what way?’

‘Perhaps a rock or mountain, with a cleft formed like this.’ Ben waved his hand in a U-shaped gesture. ‘Into which the sun settles as it sinks in the evening sky.’

‘It’s possible,’ Kirby said. ‘Definitely possible.’

‘Though you won’t know until you get there,’ Claudel added.

‘Which leaves the teeth of Sobek,’ Ben said. ‘Who or what is Sobek?’

‘Sobek was the Egyptian crocodile-headed god of water,’ Claudel replied. ‘As to what the reference means—’ He shrugged. ‘It’s obscure.’

‘With my luck it probably means we’ve got to navigate a croc-infested river,’ Kirby said, shuddering.

Claudel gave a grim little smile. ‘There’s only one way to find out the truth. You’re just going to have to wait and see.’

Ben returned to his book of old maps. He tapped the page with his finger. ‘Now, if I’m not mistaken, these directions are taking us smack bang into the middle of the Sudan.’

Claudel looked grave. ‘It looks that way to me, unfortunately. One of the most unstable and dangerous places in the world. You’d be travelling into the Sahara desert, towards the Darfur region. The war there may be over for now, but there are still a great many rebel groups operating across the area, clashing with Sudanese military forces and posing a major threat to travellers.’

‘Wonderful,’ Kirby said. ‘African war zone, man-eating crocodiles, certainty of death. Piece of cake.’

‘How could Wenkaura have transported the treasure that far?’ Ben asked Claudel, ignoring Kirby. ‘It seems impossible.’

‘The ancient Egyptians were able to cover huge distances,’ Claudel explained. ‘New discoveries have shown they ventured far deeper into the desert than previously thought. They were also extremely adept at river travel. It’s quite feasible that Wenkaura and his helpers could have transported a large cargo that distance. Remember that as early as 3350 BC the Egyptians had mastered the art of sail.’

‘See these two guys here?’ Kirby said, pointing out two figures on the screen. ‘These are the deities Osiris and Hapi. Wenkaura would have added them in as good luck charms to bless the journey of whoever went to reclaim the hidden treasure. Hapi was the river god, patron of the Nile. And Osiris was the god who ordained the river’s annual inundation. It seems to me he’s suggesting that the voyage be undertaken when the Nile is in flood, to allow swift navigation and the use of a vessel with a deep draught.’

‘Like a cargo ship,’ Ben said.

Claudel nodded. ‘Which is a sign that they could have been carrying a very great deal of treasure.’

‘Probably could have been done in just a few weeks, give or take,’ Kirby said.

‘We don’t have that long,’ Ben replied. ‘So I need to get moving fast.’

‘Sudan is extremely difficult,’ Claudel warned. ‘The country is a military regime, and the soldiers who patrol the border in heavily armed jeeps will tend to shoot first and ask questions later. Not to mention the risk from rebel groups running riot across northern Sudan. Westerners are major targets for robbery and kidnap. Even crossing the border legally can be a nightmare. Security’s tight. You could take the train to Aswan and from there a twenty-four-hour ferry across Lake Nasser to Wadi Halfa. But the border is seething with police and you’d need to procure all the necessary papers to get in. As well as mandatory yellow fever, typhoid and cholera inoculations.’