Tomb of the Sun King, page 38
part #2 of Raiders of the Arcana Series
“I… can’t rule that out,” Neil admitted uneasily. “He’s not entirely ignorant of Egyptology. Just excessively sure of himself.”
“That’s one way of putting it,” Adam added dryly.
Zeinab looked down at her sandals as her mind worked furiously. When she raised her head again, her eyes spoke of a decision. “I would like to know whether there is anything at the true location for him to find.”
“Right.” Adam sighed resignedly. “Hell. Fairfax, grab the back of my shirt.”
“Your shirt?” Neil hurried after Adam as he moved across the ridge. “Why?”
“In case I pass out,” Adam replied, stepping up to the edge of the cliff.
Zeinab joined him there, moving like a wisp of shadow.
Adam studied the opposite wall of the canyon. “Hundred and ninety feet’s gonna take you right… about… there.”
He pointed across the gap to a spot that looked like a bowl scooped out of the face of the ridge. The geological feature was framed on three sides by a crown of ragged stone and blocked from Julian’s dig site by a narrow outcrop.
“How can you be sure that is the spot?” Zeinab demanded
Adam met her gaze evenly. “I’m a surveyor. This is what I do.” His expression shifted, his mouth tightening greenly. “And now I’m gonna lie down for a second.”
He staggered back from the drop and collapsed onto the ground.
Zeinab shot Ellie a questioning look.
“He’s… not overfond of heights,” Ellie explained.
Zeinab studied the spot Adam had indicated. Her brow wrinkled with concentration. “It is possible we might examine the area without being seen—if we are very careful and very quiet.”
Ellie felt a thrill of danger at the idea. Things would quickly go bad if they were discovered… but if any truth lay behind the text on the tablet, then an exploration of that ledge might reveal the true location of Neferneferuaten’s tomb—and perhaps solve the mystery of the lost pharaoh’s connection to the man the world knew as Moses.
“We’ll need to cross about a quarter mile down and then backtrack,” Adam commented from behind them, where he continued to lie flat on his back on the stones. “That’s the only way to make sure those sentries don’t spot us.”
“Is there no chance that extremely attractive Bedouin and his cousin might join us?” Constance asked hopefully.
Ellie wasn’t sure whether she was more eager for the assistance—or the view.
“No,” Zeinab replied flatly.
She trudged off toward the hollow behind their perch, where Ellie could hear the occasional grunt and bray from the herd.
Ellie gave her brother a more thorough examination. Neil’s waistcoat was missing a button, and his soft brown hair was in a state of disarray. “How are you, really?”
Neil hesitated before he replied. “Your Mr. Jacobs is terrifying.”
“Yes.” Ellie’s skin chilled with the memory of her past encounters with the man.
“That professor, Dawson… he claimed that Jacobs always knows when someone is lying.” Neil met Ellie’s gaze with a wide-eyed trepidation. “And I… I think I actually believe him. Is that mad?”
Ellie found herself washed over with memories—of Jacob’s icy confidence in the hotel in Belize Town. His tired, resigned certainty in the wilderness of the Cayo. The uncanny, impossible feeling that he simply knew.
Ellie forced the answer out. “No. I don’t think you are.”
“How is that possible?” Neil demanded. “To always know? I mean, I can see where a fellow might have a particular sense for the thing, which when looked at from a certain angle—”
“But it’s more than that,” Ellie cut in quietly.
Neil shook his head. “I don’t understand any of this.”
“Don’t have to.” Adam hauled himself back to his feet.
“Then what am I supposed to do?” Neil pushed back helplessly.
Adam clamped a hand on his shoulder, giving it a squeeze. “Stop the bad guys. Stay alive.”
Zeinab returned in a swirl of black cloth, the ropes, lantern, and crowbar slung over her shoulder.
“If you are here to be useful,” she declared authoritatively, “then come.”
Without waiting for answers, she set out across the cliffs, a scrap of fluttering shadow slipping through the darkness.
Sayyid stared after her, his face drawn with worry. He glanced back at the rest of them, his eyes drifting from Constance and Adam to Ellie.
They stopped at Neil, and for a moment his gaze hardened, flashing with something that Ellie was startled to realize she recognized.
It looked like hurt.
He stalked after his wife without another word.
Neil hadn’t noticed, lost in his own uneasy thoughts. “Is it possible to be both excited and abjectly terrified at the same time?”
“We might very well be on the verge of discovering the final resting place of one of the most important women in Egyptian history,” Ellie replied. “And we are doing it under the noses of your villainous ex-employer, a batch of mercenaries, and an unflinchingly ruthless killer who can detect lies.”
“So pretty much just your average day,” Adam concluded.
“What are you all waiting for? Christmas?” Constance hissed as she hurried past them.
Neil cast a forlorn look up at the stars. “I miss books,” he moaned and trudged after her.
Jemmahor hopped over the rocks like a long-legged gazelle. Umm Waseem swung her ubiquitous satchel over her shoulder and trundled after her.
Adam lingered at Ellie’s side. The two of them stood alone together under a cobalt sky sparkling with a thousand stars. The wind that danced over her skin smelled of dust and time.
“I won’t try to talk you out of coming along,” Adam commented quietly. “I’m aware that would go over about as well as a sack of bricks. Even though there’s a good chance this whole business could end with all of us being shot.” Heat mingled with worry in his gaze. “But I’d appreciate it if you’d do whatever you could to stay alive for the rest of the night.”
“I will if you will,” Ellie replied softly.
The shadow of a smile tugged at his lip. It fell away as he glanced out across the canyon. “You really think the Staff of Moses is over there?”
“I think if there is even a chance,” she replied deliberately, “then it is worth any cost to protect it.”
Adam’s calloused thumb smoothed gently over the curve of her cheek. “Suppose we’d better be getting on, then.”
Ellie gazed up at him, memorizing the familiar lines of his face in the slender moonlight. “I supposed we had.”
They set out across the ridge.
𓇶
Thirty-Two
Neil followed the black-cloaked form of Sayyid’s wife down the mountain, hoping he wasn’t about to plummet to his doom. The path Zeinab picked along the steep face of stone would barely have accommodated a cat. It followed the line of an ancient washout rife with loose stones and slender ledges that fell straight down to the hard floor of the wadi.
The light from Julian’s lanterns washed over the walls perhaps two hundred yards ahead, which still felt far too close. Voices echoed from the excavation site, laughing heartily or calling out orders before another spill of spoil was tipped over the ledge to rattle down into the gorge.
Neil’s calves ached. His boots found every loose stone with an uncanny accuracy. He lost track of the number of times someone glared back at him in a silent imprecation to keep quiet.
He was keeping quiet. The cliff was making all the noise.
When they finally reached the ground, Neil breathed out a sigh of relief—one that cut short when he looked up at the wall of sheer, ragged stone that they now needed to climb on the opposite side.
Sayyid’s wife led them up another precarious route of steep runnels and narrow perches that wound them back in the direction of Julian’s excavation. The sounds of the dig grew louder as they neared it. Neil flinched at the bark of a rough cough and the crack of the pickaxes.
They rounded another turn, and Neil faced a moonlight-washed depression that looked as though it had been scooped out of the top of the ridge by the hand of a giant. The ledge was framed on three sides by steep, high walls of stone. On the fourth, the land fell away precipitously to the canyon floor.
The rest of the group tucked themselves into hiding places behind the boulders as they surveyed the terrain. Only Neil lingered—until Adam’s hand clamped onto his shoulder and yanked him behind the cover of a ragged crust of limestone.
“Where does your hundred and ninety feet take us, exactly?” Zeinab demanded of Adam in a low murmur.
Adam crept forward to join her, keeping to the shadows with the grace of a jaguar. “Right there.” He pointed a little beyond the center of the hollow curve of the rock, near to where Julian’s lights spilled up from beyond a slight rise in the landscape.
Neil regarded the spot as his heart leapt, thudding powerfully at the base of his throat. Was it really possible that somewhere among those scattered boulders and pools of wind-blown sand lay the final resting place of one of the most mysterious and important pharaohs in Egyptian history?
The answers to so many puzzles must lie in Neferneferuaten’s tomb—not the least of which was the true identity of the pharaoh herself. If Akhenaten’s queen, Nefertiti, had indeed risen to rule in her own right after the death of her husband, her origin story remained rife with mysteries. No one knew who her parents had been. She had arrived in Egyptian royal life seemingly out of nowhere, rising from obscurity to claim first the love of a king, then the most powerful position in the empire.
Zeinab frowned with wary displeasure as she regarded the place Adam pointed out. “What are we looking for?”
“If there is a tomb here, the entrance would most likely have been dug into the cliff and then covered in rubble,” Sayyid replied from where he hid a little further back under the shadow of the looming cliff.
Ellie crept forward to peer down into the barren, silent hollow. “I don’t see much rubble.”
“The Egyptians were very clever about disguising their tomb entrances,” Sayyid returned. “We might have to look from exactly the right angle to see it.”
“Then we will spread out and search,” Zeinab declared.
Nobody questioned her order. The others—even the gangly young apprentice and the stout old fishwife—slipped down the rest of the steep, awkward distance to the floor of the depression.
As they reached the bottom, Constance set her hands on her hips and studied the curved wall of stone that framed their perch. The crown of the ridge rose perhaps forty feet overhead. “Someone really ought to scale the cliffs. There’s no reason the Egyptians couldn’t have dug their tomb a little further up.”
“I’m good,” Adam demurred flatly.
Constance’s gaze shifted deliberately to Neil.
“I… uh…” Neil started uncomfortably.
“I will do it,” Jemmahor cut in, adjusting the strap of the rifle that hung over her back before striding away. Neil watched the young woman find a grip on the stones and haul herself up.
“I’ll take the side by the bad guys.” Adam glanced over at Ellie as she let out a soft huff of irritation. “What?”
“Of course you are. And I’m going with you,” she replied, and the pair set off.
Zeinab moved along the base of the cliffs like a flicker of black shadow. Constance started off toward another section, then stopped to glance back. “Aren’t you coming?”
“I…” Neil turned his head to realize that Sayyid had wandered away from them, lingering at the place where the ground fell away into the canyon. “I’ll join you in a moment.”
Neil crossed over to his foreman—or was that his former foreman? The thought carried a healthy burst of guilt along with it. He looked down over the drop into the wadi. Even though the ledge stood only a little over halfway up the height of the ridge, the floor of the canyon still looked very far away.
It should have been easy to break the silence that lingered as he and Sayyid stood beside each other, but Neil found himself struggling to open a conversation. Everything that came into his mind sounded painfully awkward. The truth was, he hadn’t the foggiest notion of what he should say to Sayyid. Should he apologize for the way his sister had come barreling in to overturn the man’s life? Or for that wretched note he had sent to Julian Forster-Mowbray?
He wanted to tell Sayyid how much he wished he could go back to those months in Saqqara where they had worked side-by-side together in such comfort… but sensed the declaration wouldn’t be entirely welcome.
“The bottom of the wadi looks oddly flat, doesn’t it?” Neil offered instead.
Sayyid frowned down at the pale surface of the canyon floor. “I suppose,” he distantly agreed.
They both kept their voices low. Neil was still painfully conscious of the lamplight spilling into the canyon from Julian’s dig, which was just around the bend from where they stood.
“It almost looks like a road,” Neil mused.
Sayyid opened his mouth to respond, and the furrow in his brow cleared, his eyes widening. “It is a road,” he observed wonderingly.
Neil felt a spark of scholarly inspiration. “And that slight rise in the grade over there? I mean, it could just be a natural declination—but one might almost imagine it to be a ramp of some sort.”
“But why build a ramp in the middle of a canyon?” Sayyid returned carefully. “This hardly seems the place for chariot races.”
“Maybe they were dragging something along,” Neil replied a little absently.
Something about the notion felt right.
Sayyid finally turned to look at him, his eyes narrowing with interest. “And what might they have been dragging?”
Ellie popped into place between them, leaning out over the ledge. “Goodness! Doesn’t that look rather like the road at the quarry of Hatnub?”
Neil blinked at her in surprise while Sayyid raised his eyebrows.
“That ramp there would have been for dragging larger cuts of stone. Look—you can see the stairs cut to either side of it,” Ellie elaborated.
She pointed, and Neil realized that he could see them. The steps were pale lines of light and shadow marking out a narrow space to either side of the softly graded ribbon of packed earth.
“But what do they need steps for?” Neil had to work to keep his voice down.
“For pushing along large slabs by pole and sledge, of course,” Ellie returned. “Didn’t you read Griffith and Newberry’s report on the tombs at El Bersheh?”
“Of course I did,” Neil retorted. “But I don’t remember anything about poles and sledges.”
“Well, it was more of a passing mention,” Ellie said dismissively. “Only it does suggest the most intriguing theory about how the Egyptians might have used similar technology to raise blocks high enough to build the pyramids.”
Only Ellie would manage to file a passing mention in an obscure excavation report away in her brain like a neatly coded library card, ready to pull out at the slightest peripheral reference. She had always had a prodigious knack for recalling anything that she had read.
That skill would have made her a formidable archaeologist in the field… had such a position ever been open to her.
She planted her hands on her hips, turning around to survey the cliff-ringed bowl with a frown. “We have been all the way around the walls, and there are no substantial piles of rubble to speak of—only boulders and sand. I cannot see anywhere that someone might have concealed a royal tomb.”
Neil wondered if he ought to feel disappointed.
He was not immune to dreams of finding the lost tomb of an important pharaoh. What Egyptologist didn’t hope to make the sort of discovery that would revolutionize the entire field? But Neil had always imagined himself doing it the proper way—in the broad light of day with an official concession from the government granting him permission to excavate.
First, there would be weeks of careful survey. When he finally uncovered the entrance to the tomb, he would be surrounded by government officials and newspaper reporters—along with his sponsors, of course. He could envision the speech he would have given.
I am honored to recover this lost evidence of Egypt’s noble history, and I look forward to the wisdom and enlightenment that its careful study can grant to the scholars of the world.
Instead, he was creeping through the dark with a band of lady revolutionaries.
“I might have been wrong about the cubits,” Sayyid admitted with a frown.
“I honestly don’t think you were,” Ellie insisted, then twitched the fabric of her skirt. “Oh! I seem to have acquired a passenger.”
She shifted the folds of gray poplin, exposing the shining black carapace of a very large beetle clinging to her hem.
“Aeerrggh!” Sayyid exclaimed, taking an instinctive, panicked step back—which put him very near to tumbling off the edge of the cliff.
Neil caught him by the sleeve of his coat.
“It’s just a scarab,” Ellie protested.
The insect was the length of Neil’s index finger, fat and glossy in the moonlight. Even he had to admit that it was larger than the usual type.
“But are there any more of them?” Sayyid pressed urgently. “Are any of them trying to climb my trousers?”
“I don’t see any on your trousers.” Ellie gave the fabric of her skirt a neat shake. In response, the scarab spread its wings and buzzed loose.
Sayyid ducked. “Where did it go?”
“It’s all right,” Ellie assured him. “It flew off that way.”
She pointed across the depression in the vague direction of the continuing rattle and clanging of Julian’s dig.
“Alhamdulillah,” Sayyid noted with a fervent sigh of relief.
Neil was only half listening to him. He was still staring in the direction where the scarab had flown as something tickled at the back of his brain. The uncomfortable itch reminded him of the feeling he’d had when he first stood on the plain at Saqqara and looked at the place Sayyid had flagged out for their dig.
