The Deceit

44

The purser of the cruiser Hypatia took one look at Ryan’s sweating face and tattered backpack and Helen’s similar state of disrepair; then shrugged and said ‘Sure.’ He looked like a man who didn’t care, whose business was dying, and so he might as well pocket the two-hundred-dollar bribe offered by Ryan and allow them on board. For another hundred dollars he would probably have let them enslave his children.

It no doubt helped, Ryan thought, that he so obviously desired Helen, giving her a sickly smile as she dragged her bag onto the deck.

The purser led them to a corridor of cabins. ‘Take your pick. There are seventy to choose from.’

They chose the very first cabin. It was small and bright with a Victorian engraving of Abu Simbel on the wall and a brass-ringed porthole. Ryan couldn’t help peering out, nervously, to see if Israeli commandos were pulling alongside in a fast black dinghy. Knives at the ready.

The purser was still watching, from the open door of the cabin. ‘You are being pursued, effendi?’

It was obviously a joke. But it stung. Ryan shook his head. ‘Ah no, just … it’s just—’

Helen interrupted. ‘We’ve been travelling by road for days, it will be a pleasure to sail on the Nile. When do we depart?’

The purser looked at his watch. ‘Any minute. The dinner is at seven, the entertainment is at nine. You do not have to book.’ He shut the door.

As became apparent, the purser was right: they certainly didn’t have to book. This was a phantom boat sailing the Nile. The Hypatia, with its crew of dozens and its handsome mahogany fittings, was designed for one hundred passengers; and it had maybe ten. There were more staff than diners at dinner. The man who carved the ice sculpture seemed to be in tears.

But all of Egypt was in tears. There was a TV in the corner of the restaurant showing the BBC news in English from Cairo: tear gas and mayhem, a fatal bombing in a business district. ‘Meanwhile, in Moqqatam, a Coptic quarter of the city, further violent clashes continued for the second day, as demonstrators burned down a clinic—’

The nation of Egypt was sickening; maybe it was dying. The Zabaleen, the Muslims, everyone. Ryan stared at the melting ice sculpture and remembered Rhiannon, in Cairo’s Christian hospital, the day she died: clutching at his arm, her heartbeat fluttering. He remembered the way the malarial fever had risen inside her, like a remorseless flood, taking the baby, then seizing Rhiannon.

The memories were, still, unbearable. Even as he’d kissed her he had known it was probably the last occasion he would kiss her. Goodbye, goodbye.

The purser switched off the TV, with its distressing news. Ryan and Helen glanced at each other, and shifted into the ballroom. They had to act like proper tourists: they couldn’t just stay in their cabin and work the code; so they sat in the big ballroom, and listened to the first few songs by the bosomy Egyptian singer in the disco room, where two old German ladies sat staring at the ceiling, and one young Russian couple danced by the tinsel-decked stage.

‘OK. Shall we go?’ She stood up.

‘No. Upstairs on the deck.’ Ryan gestured upwards. ‘You have your phone? We can get better reception there.’

‘But upstairs is dangerous? We agreed.’

‘Not at night. No one can see us, no satellite, no one. I’ve been on these boats before, they keep the light subdued so you can see the stars. Come on, I need the air.’

The desert stars were indeed beautiful. Long-armed Nut, the Goddess of Night, had littered the lovely blackness with all of the family diamonds.

‘You know, if we’re going to die,’ said Ryan, ‘this is a good place to do it. On the Nile.’ He stared at the passing scenery, barely lit by the moonlight. A few crackling woodfires glimmered in the fields. It was beautiful, even sublime. The banks rose in sandstone cliffs, then subsided to mud. The next stop was Edfu, tomorrow morning.

‘We are not going to die,’ said Helen, squeezing his hand. ‘But if we are, then I am glad I met you first.’

He kissed her, twice. They were the only people on the deck of the Hypatia. The mystery was theirs. If they could solve it.

At last, Ryan extracted his notebook. ‘Right, let’s test your theory. Finally.’

‘The quote about the Beast. We need to investigate that first.’ Helen keyed her smartphone, and read: ‘The Number of the Beast, from the Greek: Arithmon tou Thēriou, is a term in the Book of Revelation.’

‘And?’

Helen recited from the corresponding webpage: ‘“Theologians usually support the interpretation that the phrase ‘the Number of the Beast’ refers to pagan numerology, where every letter has a corresponding number.”’ She scanned the screen, and went on. ‘“For instance, 666 is the equivalent of the name and title, Nero Caesar, the Roman emperor; however, Protestant reformers have equated the Beast of the earth, of Revelation, chapter 13, with the papacy.”’

‘But what is isopsephy?’

Helen pressed her glowing phone and its light shone in the moonlit dark, like a tablet of illumination; the very stele of revealing. ‘“Isopsephy, from isos meaning ‘equal’ and psephos meaning ‘pebble’, is the Greek word for a special kind of numerology, derived from the fact the early Greeks used pebbles arranged in patterns to learn arithmetic.”’

‘But how do we know our guy would be using this … isopsephy?’

‘Because,’ Helen sounded a little triumphant, ‘the very earliest example of true isopsephy comes from Philo of Alexandria, and the form was perfected by Leonidas, also of Alexandria, in the first and second centuries.’ Her blonde hair was nearly white in the starlight as she gazed at Ryan. ‘So, you see? If we presume our man is a Hellenized Coptic scholar, who saw Alexandria as his intellectual capital—’

‘Which he did.’

‘Then this isopsephy is what he would use, if he wanted to use numerology to encode something crucial. In the Greek riddle.’

Ryan smiled. But he was suppressing his resurgent worries. What if Albert had recovered, and the Egyptian police had interviewed him? The cops would definitely want to catch Ryan and Helen. Two people had probably died at Luxor. He and Helen had stolen the papyrus even if they had since lost it. And the Egyptians would want to know all about the Israeli connection. So far they had been protected by the chaos unfurling across Egypt.

‘So. Am I right?’ Helen pressed.

He tilted the notebook into the moonlight.

AFΓO, AEΘH, AAΘ, BEZ, BHF.

‘If you’re right, the first letter alpha, A, corresponds to 1. The second letter F, digamma, means 6.’

Helen wrote down the number 1 and 6 in her own notebook. Ryan continued, ‘Then we have gamma, Γ, or 3. Followed by omicron, O, which usually means zero.’

Helen read out the number. ‘So that makes 1630.’

‘Let’s do the rest.’

The cliffs and palms of Nilotic Upper Egypt paraded past them, in the nocturnal silence.

‘So there are our numbers.’ Helen read them out: ‘1630, 1598, 119, 257, 286.’ She paused. ‘They go down then back up.’

Ryan felt the initial tingle of understanding. ‘They could be dates. Years maybe. What four- and three-digit numbers go down then back like that? I can only think of one obvious sequence: the years BC and AD. No? They’re years. They’re dates.’ He pointed to her phone, as she swatted away a mosquito. ‘Check those dates, see what happened in those years.’

Helen keyed the numbers in. ‘1630 BC — ah …’ She glanced back at Ryan. ‘The eruption of Santorini. That happened around 1630 BC, it seems.’

‘Interesting, what about 1598 BC?’

She keyed. And paused. ‘Not so much … Very vague. A Hittite king sacks Babylon. Senakhtere is Pharaoh. Maybe …’

‘OK. OK.’ Ryan was getting lost now. ‘The newer ones will be surely more accurate. 119 BC: try that.’

‘Hipparcus replaces Eumarcus as archon of Athens.’ She squinted at the phone. ‘And the Han Chinese nationalize the production of salt.’

‘Maybe it’s 119 AD?’

‘A rebellion against Rome. In Britain.’

Ryan pondered. A rebellion? Was this about rebellions? Eruptions? What? The solution dwindled even as they approached.

‘Hmm. Don’t see it. Try the next 257? 257 AD?’

‘Goths invade Turkey.’ Helen sighed.

‘OK, let’s do the last, 286 AD.’

The silence was brief, as Helen worked her phone. ‘A new emperor in Rome, Maximian. The empire is divided between him and Diocletian … And that is it. I cannot see an obvious pattern. Can you?’

Ryan stood, truly frustrated, and walked to the railing. Where he gazed at the bulrushes, and at a very distant storm, way over in the western desert. With its tiny flashes of lightning, it looked like a storm for toys. ‘Diocletian!’

‘What?’

‘Macarius was a sixth-century scholar. Are we sure he used the same calendar?’ Ryan closed his eyes and tutted. Stupid.

‘So these are not the right dates?’

‘Helen, he’s not using the damn Gregorian calendar. He’s using the Diocletian calendar, that’s what the Copts went by.’

‘The, ah …?’

‘Diocletian calendar, the Era of Martyrs: it was the Coptic calendar for many centuries. The year one is the year the Emperor Diocletian came to power, 284, the year he began to slaughter all the Christians in Egypt. For them it was the apocalypse, so it shaped everything — including the Coptic calendar.’

Helen was already tapping out the numbers, using her phone as a calculator. ‘So we add 284 to each date if it is BC, and subtract it if it is AD.’

‘Confusing, but yes. Try it.’

Helen scribbled in Ryan’s notebook. An owl hooted as the boat slipped past. A harbinger of doom and death, thought Ryan. The Copts: they would deface them if they found them in Egyptian tombs. Chisel them away.

‘So,’ Helen said, ‘when Macarius writes 1630 he really means 1346 BC; 1598 means 1314 BC. And 119 years before the Era of Martyrs, actually means, in our calendar, 165 AD …’ She paused, frowning, and wrote the last digits. ‘And 257 equals 541 AD. And 286 means 570 AD.’

Ryan was beginning to see something: he could sense the pattern or the logic. Part of him wanted to stop right here. Because what was dimly discernible was terrifying.

‘OK,’ he said, trying to hide the apprehension in his voice. ‘Macarius was writing in the late sixth century: it must have been late if he included 570 AD. So whatever happened in 541 AD and 570 AD would have been recent history. Maybe it provoked him to write what he did, to go on his journey. I think I can guess already, but make sure I am right. What major event happened in 541 AD?’

Helen pressed the keys. She said, solemnly, ‘The Great Plague of Justinian. Millions died across the Byzantine Empire … Egypt was sorely afflicted.’

‘I thought so.’ Ryan’s throat was dry. Everything was dry. He wanted to dive into the Nile. ‘Now, 165 AD. Try that.’

Her answer was sudden. ‘My God.’

‘What?’ Ryan asked, though he could make a very good guess.

‘165 AD. The Antonine Plague. Otherwise known as the Plague of Galen, brought back to the Roman Empire by soldiers returning from the Near East. Millions died.’

‘OK. Yes. 1314 BC? Start looking for plagues now.’

‘1314 BC? That is … the year before the Exodus, traditionally. The Exodus of the Jews.’

‘Therefore the year of the plagues of Moses, just before Exodus. The ten plagues of Moses, in the damn Bible.’ Ryan could see it all now: the entire appalling secret. With a sense of dread, he asked, ‘And 1346 BC?’

‘Akhenaten is in power, and …’ she did another search, ‘his reign is wracked by plagues.’

Ryan stifled his fear. ‘570 AD is the birth of the prophet Mohammed. But check it for something else, search specifically for plagues.’

Helen did as she was told. Then she spoke, very quietly. ‘570 AD. Europe and the Middle East are swept by another bubonic plague. There is a quote: “In 570 AD Greek soldiers who fought outside Mecca in 569–570 AD are said to have carried home a strange disease.”’ A silence. Helen shook her head. ‘But I do not understand, how does this prove anything? So, there were plagues, and Macarius noted them.’

Ryan raised a hand, and read from his own notebook. ‘He doesn’t just note them. Remember the passages that Macarius quotes at the beginning? It was there all along, written down, we just didn’t see it.’ He turned his notebook so that he could read by the fragile moonlight: ‘Manetho, who wrote his Egyptian history under Ptolemy II, represents Moses as a rebellious Egyptian priest who made himself the leader of a colony of lepers.’ He flicked the page. ‘And here, further down, Macarius talks about the famous Tutankhamun Stela. I know what that says off by heart, so does every Egyptologist: “Now, when His Majesty was crowned king, the temples and the estates of the gods had fallen into ruin. The world was in the chaos of disease.”’

Another flick of a page. ‘And here: Macarius quotes Chaeremon, an Egyptian scholar in Alexandria who became Nero’s tutor. Chaeremon says the goddess Isis appeared to Amenophis in a dream and advised him to cleanse Egypt by purging Egypt of lepers, so the king gathered one hundred thousand lepers and expelled them, and their leaders were Moses and Joseph.’

Ryan waited for a second, giving his thoughts time to calm, and clarify. Then he went on. ‘And again here, Macarius cites Pompeius Trogus’s Historiae Philippicae. He doesn’t give the quote but I know it: Moses is said to have quit Egypt to institute an Egyptian cult in Jerusalem, and the reason he leaves is because of an infection, an epidemic.’ Ryan stared up into the starry sky. ‘“But when the Egyptians had been exposed to an infection and had been warned by an oracle, they expelled Moses together with the sick people beyond the confines of Egypt.”’

Everything was silent. The only sound was the soft and gentle ploughing of the cruise boat in the river water, and the neighing of a donkey tethered in some little farmstead by the canefields. Hooting at their labours.

Helen was the first to speak. ‘It reminds me. Of something I learned at Gymnasium.’

‘What?’

‘The name of the flea that carried the Black Death is Xenopsilla cheopis. Named for the Pharaoh Cheops. Even the Black Death came from Egypt. Or so people believed. The pestis Aegyptica. And after the Black Death there was an outbreak of great religiosity. An upsurge in faith.’ She turned off her phone, and stared at the silent horizon of water and palms. ‘Religion is therefore … just a psychological reaction. To the terror of plague, the horror of death, on an atrocious scale.’

Ryan shook his head. ‘But maybe Macarius is being more specific than that. Perhaps monotheism is the psychological reaction. Whenever monotheism arises — Akhenaten, Moses, the first Christians during the Antonine Plague, the birth of Mohammed in 570 — we see epidemics, just before. The epidemics cause terror and great suffering, yet those that survive the epidemics become religious, monotheistic, because they have been terrified by such a powerful god that can wreak such hell. That explains what was wrong with Akhenaten, and his relatives: he had some disease, it crippled him, gave him those weird symptoms, but when he survived he felt himself blessed. Selected. Elected. Perhaps by one great god. His illness made him a monotheist.’

Helen responded: ‘So that is the story of the Exodus. There weren’t any Jews in Egypt. There were people infected, like their Pharaoh, by a horrible disease, that killed many, yet gave the survivors belief.’

‘It must be: these are the plagues of Moses, written in the Bible, the boils, the frogs, the flies and locusts.’ He gazed at the moon. ‘And this explains the slaying of the first-born, the tenth plague: they are trying to kill the disease by culling the afflicted, and stop the contagion. Create a firebreak. It must be, Helen.’ Ryan rushed on, excited and horrified. ‘But the culling doesn’t work, it doesn’t stop the plague, so in despair they expel the lepers and their great priest, Moses, and the priests and the lepers survive the disease, and start their wandering, and they finally reach Palestine, where maybe they infect the Israelis, who become monotheists in turn, after suffering the same psychological reaction to vast contagion. Because the surviving Israelites, instead of seeing this as a curse, regard this as a sign of God. It elevates them: they have been chosen. An elected people. But forever afterwards they are paranoid about further contagion, hence their dietary laws, the fear of unclean food, their detestation of impure and mentally different people, the Gentiles, the pagans …’

The stars shone down on the pagan temples of Edfu, approaching them in the night. Helen shook her head slowly. ‘Ryan … what if … we have got this the wrong way round?’

He stared at her. ‘What do you mean?’

Her eyes sought his in the darkness. ‘Perhaps the plague is monotheism.’

A fishing boat, with a solitary light, teetered in the wash of the Hypatia.

‘Sorry?’

She hurried on. ‘I have read enough Darwinists who believe religion is some kind of intellectual virus, a meme, or whatever. But, Ryan, what if religion is not an intellectual virus, what if religion or monotheism is an actual virus, which alters the mind. And it strikes like a plague?’

Ryan was silenced.

They both gazed out at the glittering river, reflecting the glory of Nut.