"Not only that, but look at who is attending. These goddesses are Hathor and Isis; behind them are Shu and Tefnut. Then Ma'at and Jehuti, and at the rear the 'two ladies,' Nekhbet and Wadjet."

"Your guesswork is not necessary, Miss Foret." He advanced the lm and snapped several more pictures from different perspectives.

"We'll leave the research to the graduate students, won't we?"

She fell silent for a moment, absorbing his insult and surveying the faces of the men who had been her workers for nearly half a year.

They were paid by the university and had to do what they were told, but she could see they didn't like it. Only Ahmed's young son was animated and cheerful as he crept toward the table from behind the senior scientist. Reaching his small dark arm past Vanderschmitt, he touched something on the deck of the barque.

"Get away from that, you little thief!" Vanderschmitt spun around. Seizing the boy by the shoulder of his galabaya, he yanked him backward. The child toppled back onto the stony ground with a soft "Uh!" Two of the workers helped him to his feet and signaled that he was all right.

Valerie turned back to Vanderschmitt, who had his eye to the camera again. "The boy was not stealing. And besides, you cannot strike them. Not for any reason," she said to his indifferent back. "It's * 79 *

an offense here, just as it is in Europe."

He held the camera at his chest for a moment and spoke without looking at her. "Miss Foret. These men work for me now, and you will not interfere with my management of them. You've been playing fast and loose with us this entire year. But that is over now. Have I made myself clear?" He resumed snapping pictures, stepping between her and the barque.

She stared at his back for a moment and at his wide hips, speechless with fury. She toyed momentarily with the thought of confronting him further, of even having him beaten up and ejected from the site. The men would do it for her, she knew, and it would almost have been worth it to lose her job over it. "Yes, very clear."

She hurried over to where the boy sat holding his knees to his chest. "I'm sorry, Ibrim," she said in Arabic. "I apologize for the bad manners of this man."

Ibrim looked at the ground. "I did not steal. The little toy fell from the boat, and I tried to put it back."

"The little toy?"

"I was afraid they would step on it." He opened his hand, revealing a miniature bronze snake the length and thickness of his own smallest nger. The snake's head was carved from lapis lazuli, and its tail had been hammered into a square. It hung for a second from the child's moist palm before dropping into her hand.

"Thank you, Ibrim. I promise you, I will tell your father how you did a brave thing, and the other men will tell him too."

She wandered back to the table where Vanderschmitt had reached the end of his lm roll and knelt on the ground. While he rewound the lm with a rapid, petulant wrist movement, she leaned over the barque and studied the deck, looking for the spot from where the Apophis snake might have fallen.

"I have to get more lm," he said crisply. "Keep everyone away from here. I will be back in a moment."

He marched back to his tent, and she strolled in a circle around the golden barque, holding the tiny bronze peg between thumb and fore nger. She looked along the outside, then between the god- gures, then around the periphery of the naos. Finally she saw it. A tiny square hole, scarcely a centimeter in width, had been stamped just behind the naos. She reached over and inserted the peg, pleased to feel the perfect t. "Apophis is the key," the Ka had said. She smiled at the discovery.

* 80 *

It was a lever.

She pressed it gently backward. Suddenly the entire center part of the barque, the naos and the solar orb it sheltered, lifted up on hidden hinges. She took hold of it with her other hand and tilted it gently back, like the lid of a chest. In the cavity beneath were the ruined remains of what had once been a rolled papyrus.

She dared not touch it, although it would be impossible to rescue in any case. It was already merely a pile of akes. And so she simply rotated the entire barque to catch the direct light of the sun. It was just bright enough for her to read the fragment of text that ran along the top ake. She translated the ne New Kingdom text and nearly dropped the delicate lid back in place. "'Before my burning eyes, the beasts, the winds and waters-'"

"What's that?" Derek had come up behind her and looked over her shoulder as she closed the lid over the hidden cache.

"Rekemheb's words," she said somberly. "And the death sentence to my career."

"Abdullah and I will leave at dusk tonight, after we have photographed everything." Vanderschmitt had returned, brushing dirt from his sleeves and trousers. "It should not take more than a day to le the papers with Antiquities, contact Brussels, and so forth. In the meantime, I require you to look after things." He paused, letting her appreciate that it was an assignment, not a resumption of authority.

"I will direct the men to continue looking for the burial chamber, as we discussed." She nodded, full of cooperation.

"No. There will be no more digging. I have decided to close the tomb again until I can return with proper security measures. I have got to procure an iron gate, mortar, etc. In the meantime, it is far too dangerous to leave those artifacts exposed. You must seal off and guard the entrance for the next two days. The foreman, whatever his name is, can stand guard at night. I will have made a photographic inventory, so that if anything is missing, you will of course be held responsible."

A voice spoke from behind her with courtesy and warmth. "Of course, Dr. Vanderschmitt. I will block passageway immediately. Is not a problem." Ahmed joined them and stood shoulder to shoulder with Valerie. He inclined his head in a gesture of exaggerated servitude she had never seen before.

"See to it, then." Vanderschmitt resumed photographing as Valerie and Ahmed walked back to the tent. When they were out of earshot of * 81 *

the other man, the foreman stopped.

"Doctor. How long must we now work for this camel's ass?"

Valerie shook her head. "For a long while, I'm afraid. But you can help me to...cause him a few problems."

"I will do anything you ask, and so will the men." The tone of his voice suggested that "anything" included a great deal.

"You've been bringing Mr. Vanderschmitt his tea, haven't you?

He's used to you being in his tent."

"Yes. He drinks a lot of it. Every few hours."

"Good. Try to smuggle out his camera bag the next time he's in the latrine. I need it only for a few moments, and you can carry it back when you fetch the tea glass."

"It is done, Dr. Foret."

v It took only a few minutes for Valerie to open the six black canisters and exchange their spent lm for unexposed rolls. Replacing the canisters in the same order in the bag, she handed it back to Ahmed, who slipped away again to return it.

"Won't he know what we've done when he has the lm developed and it's blank?" Derek asked.

"Probably. But it'll be too late to take new ones."

"And Rekemheb's mummy? Are you ready to save him now?

Remember, no one knows it's there. No one but us."

Valerie stared at the ground for a moment, chewing on her lower lip. Then she said quietly, "Yes."

"All right, then. Now, how do we get him out of the camp?"

"Well, Vanderschmitt will leave tonight and be gone for at least two days. We can take the mummy out of the tomb at night and let the men discover an empty sarcophagus the next day. It would be very odd, since the funerary objects are all there, but we might pull it off. The big question, however, is where do we take the mummy?"

"I've been waiting for you to ask." Derek paused theatrically, his small smile fraught with meaning. "He can stay with relatives."

* 82 *

CHAPTER XII:.

CRUSADERS.

Riding eastward with the sun on the horizon behind him, Volker Vanderschmitt buttoned his jacket against the cooling air. Four hours' sleep was not enough for a man before starting out in the desert again, and he was exhausted. It was a hardship he was willing to endure, however. In another twenty-four hours, he'd make history.

He imagined the faces of his colleagues when they got the news.

They'd congratulate him, even the ones who didn't like him. He'd be photographed, interviewed, broadcast all over the world. All those years of academic drudgery would nally be rewarded. He would be a star in the archaeological community. He could leave Brussels now for a chairmanship at one of the big universities. He could even return to Cambridge, the old denigration erased by his new glory.

He settled himself on his camel seat, drawing up one leg. Monique should see him now, the spoiled bitch. Monique, who had corrupted him and then lost interest. She had even refused to see him afterward, wouldn't return his calls. Until, recklessly, he had brazened his way into her husband's party. What was the man again, the old fool?

Antiques dealer? Vanderschmitt felt his throat tightening as he recalled the confrontation.

All he had wanted was to draw her aside, tell her that she had changed him and could not simply leave him. But she had made a public spectacle of it. Before a room full of his Cambridge colleagues, she had slapped him hard enough to cause a nosebleed. As he stood there, his own blood spotting his white linen jacket, she had whispered, "You are pathetic." Humiliated, he had not replied, but simply walked quietly from the room, seething with a rage that had not left him for thirty years.

* 83 *

He had left Cambridge at the end of the term and spent months unemployed and bitter. She became the symbol of the world that had rejected him, and of a moral and intellectual relativism that he came to despise. There was a Bohemian licentiousness, a sort of anarchy in the disciplines too, where everything was waf ing and compromise, and nothing was clear. And the women, with their "alternative"

interpretations of everything, were the worst-vessels of inconstancy.

He needed certainty, the sense of an absolute truth at his back and under his feet. A year later, after he had nearly ruined himself in sullen drinking, religion nally gave it to him. Truth had come to him one night while he was sleeping off a binge, in a dream of exquisite clarity.

He stood on the prow of a ship sailing toward a shore where wild things lived. The very landscape writhed and surged with them. Behind him, though he could not see it, was some great force, something noble and pure that sought to vanquish them. He had been chosen as its guardian and so was weaponed. Righteousness welled up through his veins and poured into his arms so that he sent a spear glittering toward the monsters. "The earth falls down before him," his dream self cried as the shaft exploded against the foe.

He had awakened, his heart still pounding, his lips mumbling a childhood memory of scripture: "I am the way, the truth, and the light."

It was the revelation that saved him, that gave him back the moral clarity of his youth and inspired him to start all over again in Brussels.

It also freed him from women, from wanting to be attractive to them. And so when his body began to soften into androgyny, it did not matter. Monique, his friends had told him, had left England after he did, though they could not say to where-to hell, he hoped.

He shook himself back to the cool, dark present and patted the camera case that hung at his side. Now heaven and hard work had rewarded him. Great things were about to happen.

v Valerie sat watching the two gures shrink and fade into obscurity on the eastern side. When they were out of sight, she turned her stool around to face the west.

Derek came up to stand beside her. "Wow. Look at all the colors.

Shades of pink not even a drag queen would wear."

* 84 *

"It's beautiful, that glow right on the horizon, but always a little depressing too. At moments like these I understand the Egyptians'

dread at seeing the Sun Barque drop into the underworld."

"Hmm. I don't see it myself, Val. But I bet Rekemheb did. It would have been scary, wouldn't it?"

"Yes. Twilight was ominous. But the sky was always full of portents."

At that moment a jet sliced across the red sky. A military plane- its speed gave it away-thundered northeastward, tearing her from her reverie.

"Enough brooding." Derek squeezed her shoulder gently. "Come on. We'd better get started."

She stood up, laying her hand on top of his, trying to dispel her misgivings. "Are all the men in the workers' tent?"

"Yes. Ahmed asked if you needed him, but I said we were going into the tomb to photograph some more and he could go to bed. So, sweetie, it's now or never."

Valerie took a nal look at the strip of orange that still smoldered in the west like a distant con agration. "May the gods be with us. The law certainly will not."

They hurried across the open space and reentered the tomb. Their single ashlight trailed along the tunnel oor as they descended to the rst chamber.

Valerie stopped in front of the sun barque that had been returned to its original place among the artifacts. Little pieces of numbered cardboard hung from all of them. She picked up one of them and read the scribbled notation. Nr. 14. Ivory chest. Vanderschmitt.

"Salop! He's put his name on everything. Well, we'll have to do something about that." She pressed with her clenched st on the Ba image on the tomb mural, and once again the Osiris door sprang toward them. With their combined effort, they dragged it fully open. The Ka was already sitting on his sarcophagus, as if he had been waiting for hours for visitors.

Valerie startled again at the sight of him.

"See, I knew he was real." Derek couldn't resist saying it.

"Rekemheb." Valerie drew the Ka's attention from his descendant, with whom he seemed obsessed. "I found Pharaoh Meremptah's papyrus. You did not tell me that it was in the Barque of the Sun."

* 85 *

"Did it answer all your questions?"

"No. It had disintegrated. But never mind. We are here for another reason. We must remove your mummy to a safer place."

"Praise to the good gods and to Hathor." The spectre raised both hands. "It has begun, then, the prophecy. I shall be carried in my descendant's arms." He evaporated cheerfully, as if to go and pack his bags.

"Well, that part was easy, at least," Derek remarked as they slid aside the lid. "He must know something we don't."

"Derek, he knows a whole world of things we don't." They lifted off the lid of the inner cof n, and she poked the gauze-covered cadaver in several places on the chest and legs. "His body's solid and well wrapped. It should hold up to being carried. Here, take him around the shoulders, and be sure to support his head."

She held the bundle around the legs while Derek raised the upper end and supported it with his shoulder. Suddenly he jerked violently, nearly dropping his end of the load. "Oh, my God! What the hell was that? Something just slid down inside my shirt. Get it out! Get it out!"

"Stay calm." She directed her ashlight at the lumpy shape in his shirt and the length of chain hanging from between his shirt buttons, then breathed a sigh of relief. "It's the amulet. I unhooked the chain, remember? Hang on to him. I'll get it." Balancing her end of the burden carefully, she pulled the wide gold plate out from inside his shirt, slipping it into her own shirt pocket and buttoning the ap.

They bore the mummy of the priest through the chambers of his tomb, setting it down only momentarily in order to close the burial chamber door. When they lifted the remains of the priest again, Valerie felt the precious object weighing in her shirt. Mixed with the other sounds-the trickling of sand from the broken doorways, their panting, and the shuf ing of their feet-she seemed to hear a faint buzzing, like the murmuring of an excited crowd on the other side of a wall.

v "Dr. Foret?" A voice called softly from behind the tent canvas.

"Ahmed!" Valerie stepped outside into the darkness and drew the tent covering closed behind her.

He stood with his hands clasped in front of him. "You work at such a late hour. Shall I send the men back to assist you?"

* 86 *