The Deceit

32

It was Helen’s blood: she had been shot in the shoulder by a rebounding bullet. She fell down the steps, crying with pain. The trapdoor flapped shut above them and the bitter crackle of gunshots was muffled. Callum was buying them time, up there, in the Tomb of Ramose.

Ryan stared urgently at Helen. Her injury was energetically pulsing blood; she had to lean on him like a wounded soldier, good arm slung around his neck as they turned and made a grab at their lives: lurching along the crude stone tunnel and away from the tomb.

‘This way!’ said Hanna, using his cellphone flashlight to illuminate the unpainted, unplastered, utilitarian tunnel with its ancient chisel marks showing on the walls. ‘And here, hurry, yes, along here.’

‘But they will follow us,’ Ryan panted.

‘No,’ Hanna said. He flashed the light left, then right, in an explanatory fashion: the light exposed more tunnels, branching off into silent darkness. He was right, it was an enormous labyrinth, and now Hanna was taking them on a mazy, zigzagging route — making them unfollowable, as long as Callum bought them just a few minutes. Probably with his life.

There was no time for guilt.

‘Ryannn …’ Helen was moaning, her head lolling; she was semi-conscious with pain. Her blood dripped down Ryan’s shirt.

He hoisted her close, feeling her heartbeat through her damp shirt.

‘These tunnels were built by the workmen who constructed the tombs,’ Hanna explained as they struggled on. ‘They were also used by thieves. Only the local guides really know them well. When I worked here we’d take a hundred dollars from the very bravest tourists—’

Noises echoed, bouncing down the dark and indifferent corridors. Distant, yet menacing.

‘They’re in the tunnels,’ said Ryan. ‘They’re coming — Callum must be dead. They’re coming.’

‘They will not find us.’ Hanna calmed him with a gesture. ‘Trust me, please. I know this maze better than most. The most obvious routes go to Hatshepsut’s temple, and to Medinet Habu … we would have to be so very unlucky.’ He turned, his eyes dark in the darkness. ‘How is Helen?’

Helen was a sagging weight around Ryan’s shoulders; almost a dead weight. He could sense her strength ebbing — she was being dragged under, by death. Ryan despaired. It was as if the Tomb of Ramose had infected her with death: all these mummies, all these coffins, all this Egyptian obsession with death, it was contagious.

The Egyptians were right: life was just a factory for making souls. They were all like the cats of rancid Bubastis, bred specifically to die, so what was the point?

The point was to live just one more hour. The point was to save Helen.

Ryan Harper did this.

He fought to focus so that he could help her. Once more he hoisted Helen, her limp arm over his shoulder, following the diminishing and barely illuminated figure of Albert Hanna. The noises echoed down the tunnels again. Faraway yet ominous. If death was caged in these rocks, so were they.

‘Here, my friend, mon brave, not far now.’

The tunnel made another bewildering series of U-turns, junctions and dead ends, and then it switchbacked left and right and Helen groaned, and that was good, because it meant she was alive. But Ryan could feel the sweat from her body through his moist and bloodied shirt. A fever was rising inside her: they needed a hospital. If they escaped this labyrinth of cold stone, and bitter darkness, they’d need to get her proper medical care to have the bullet extracted. But how could they do that without alerting everyone — the authorities, the Israelis?

‘This is it.’ Hanna pointed to a wooden ladder, grey and ghostly in the dark. He climbed first, and pushed a trapdoor.

Ryan gazed up earnestly, hoping to see sky above … but there was just more musty darkness. Where were they? He glimpsed dim hieroglyphs.

Albert reached down as Ryan lifted Helen upwards; somehow they got her up and out, and Ryan quickly followed. He breathed the dank, clammy, unmistakeable air of what was surely another tomb; his life, it seemed, was now a series of tombs.

‘Where are we?’

‘The Tomb of Ay, successor to Tutankhamun,’ Hanna said. ‘Most remote of the tombs in the Western Valley. Quickly now, I know a place we can take Helen. St Tawdros. No one ever goes there.’

Ryan stared around at the stone chamber. The walls were decorated with scenes of hunting, and feasting, and the twelve baboons from the Book of Amduat. The centre of the chamber was dominated by a small, papery mummy, perfectly preserved in a glass box on a quartzite dais.

He looked again at the mummy. ‘That’s not Ay.’

Albert was already on the ramp that led out of the tomb.

‘No, it is Tiye. She was moved here some months ago because of the Akhmim connection. They are restoring her tomb in KV. Come, quick—’

But Ryan didn’t respond. Momentarily, he was transfixed. The Akhmim connection? Ay was from Akhmim. Queen Tiye was from Akhmim. And Tiye was the mother of Akhenaten, maybe the mother of Tutankhamun. All from Akhmim? This heretic family of monotheists.

He gazed at the mummy.

Even in the darkness, her vile and preserved little corpse showed the same curious, extraterrestrial head shape of Akhenaten and Tutankhamun. The elongated cranium. Yet the corpse was tiny. Like the unexpected shortness of a movie star, encountered in the flesh. What were these people?

‘Aiii.’ Helen was moaning in pain.

Ryan swore aloud at his selfishness: even as Helen was bleeding, he was trying to work out the puzzle. Hauling her dead weight, once again, he followed Albert as the Copt led them up the dark stone ramp. At last they pushed open a broken wooden door and he was breathing the fresh, dulcet air of the desert night.

The landscape was nothing but rocks and sand, lit by stars; and a beaten-up road leading down an incline. Very distant city lights must surely be Luxor.

Albert came close and lifted Helen’s face by her chin. Her eyes were shut and she was trembling with pain and fever. ‘It is very bad. But there are nuns there, they can help—’

‘We need a damn hospital, Albert.’

His shrug was eloquent. ‘You know that is not a choice. They will have seen the blood — they will be well aware one of us is wounded. Every hospital and doctor for miles will be monitored.’ He sighed, and detached himself, and walked up the hill. ‘Come, my friends, let us throw ourselves at the mercy of St Didymus the Blind. It is only one or two miles — we must be mountaineers.’

It was only one or two miles of hell. First, up the hill, out of the side-valley, an ascent of pure pain; then, down a rubbly road, carrying an almost comatose Helen, who was seeping blood all the while. Halfway there, Albert took Helen’s other arm, slung it over his neck, and together the two men helped her along, unspeaking and grim, until they reached a tiny crop of buildings, silent under the Pleiades.

‘I will speak with the abbot.’

Hanna disappeared. Ryan leaned against a rock. Helen murmured, ‘Warum … Wo ist …’ Then she fell into a feverish sleep.

They had arrived at the humblest of Coptic villages, just a tiny group of adobe houses surrounding a mud-brick monastery, lost in the starlit Theban desert. Albert was right: they were in the epicentre of nowhere. This was a good place to hide out, if Helen could survive without proper medical care.

Hushed and worried voices disturbed the stillness. A trio of nuns emerged, in black habits, accompanied by Albert, hurrying from the wooden gate of the monastery, St Tawdros. The nuns approached Ryan with compassionate smiles, then they took Helen in their arms. One of them had a flashlight, which she shone on Helen’s face, then on her bleeding wound.

This nun shook her head, and gazed at Ryan. Her Arabic was soft. ‘I fear we are too late, I am sorry.’