‘Hansith!’ Nicholas called to him in a voice that was hoarse with emotion. ‘Get your men to clear this doorway.’
As the workmen moved the rocks Nicholas and Royan hovered close behind them, so that they were able to watch the shape of the doorway as it was fully revealed. It proved to be a dark rectangle, of the same dimensions as the tunnel leading up from the sink-hole, three metres wide by two high. The lintel and the door jambs were of beautifully cut and dressed stone, and when Nicholas shone his lamp into the opening he saw a flight of stone steps rising before him.
They moved the cables and the lights into the gallery and arranged them at the entrance to this new doorway, but when Nicholas set foot on the first step he found Royan at his side.
‘I am coming with you,’ she told him firmly.
‘It’s probably booby-trapped,’ he warned her. ‘Taita is lying in wait for you around the first bend.’
‘Don’t try that. It just won’t work, mister! I am coming.’
They went slowly up the steep steps, pausing on each one to survey the walls and the way ahead. Twenty steps from the bottom they reached another landing. A pair of doorways led off it, one on either side. However, the staircase continued climbing directly ahead of them.
‘Which way?’ Nicholas asked.
‘Keep going up,’ Royan urged him. ‘We can explore these side passages later.’
Cautiously, they continued climbing. After twenty more steps they came out on an identical landing, with a doorway on each side and the stairway in front of them.
‘Keep going up,’ Royan ordered, without waiting for him to ask.
Twenty more steps and there was another landing, with the familiar openings on either side and the stairway straight ahead.
‘This isn’t making sense,’ Nicholas protested, but she prodded him in the back.
‘We should keep going on upwards,’ she told him, and he did not protest further. They passed another landing and then yet another, each of them the exact image of those that they had passed lower down.
‘At last!’ Nicholas exclaimed when they came out at the top of the staircase, with the expected doorway on each side but now a blank wall in front of them. ‘This is as far as it goes.’
‘How many landings are there?’ she asked. ‘How many altogether?’
‘Eight,’ he answered.
‘Eight,’ she agreed. ‘Isn’t that a familiar number by now?’
He turned to stare down at her in the lamplight. ‘You mean—’
‘I mean the eight shrines in the long gallery, these eight landings, and the eight cups of the bao board.’
They stood silent and undecided on the top landing and looked about them.
‘Okay,’ he said at last, ‘if you are so damned clever, tell me which way to go now.’
‘Eeny-meeny-miny-moe,’ she recited. ‘Let’s try the right-hand doorway.’
They followed the right-hand passage only a short distance before they were confronted by a T-junction – a blank wall with identical twin passageways on each side.
‘Take the right one again,’ she counselled, and they followed it. But when they came to the next T-junction Nicholas stopped and faced her.
‘You know what is happening here, don’t you?’ he demanded. ‘This is another one of Taita’s tricks. He has led us into a maze. If it were not for the cable, we would be lost already.’
With a bemused expression she looked back the way they had come, and then down the unexplored passages to their right and left.
‘When he built this, Taita could not have anticipated the age of electricity. He expected any grave robber to be equipped the same way he was. Imagine being caught in here without the electric cable to follow back the way we have come,’ Nicholas said softly. ‘Imagine having only an oil lamp for light. Imagine what would happen to you when the oil burnt out and you were lost in here in the utter darkness.’
Royan shivered and gripped his arm. ‘It’s scaring!’ she whispered.
‘Taita is beginning to play rough,’ Nicholas said softly. ‘I was developing rather a soft spot for the old boy. But now I am beginning to change my mind.’
She shuddered again. ‘Let’s go back,’ she whispered, ‘We should never have rushed in here like this. We must go back and work it out carefully. We are unprepared. I have the feeling that we are in danger – I mean real danger, the same as we were in the long gallery.’
As they started back through the twists and turns, picking up the electric cable as they retreated down the stone passageways, the temptation to break into a run became stronger with each step. Royan hung tightly to Nicholas’s arm. It seemed to both of them that some intelligent and malignant presence lurked behind them in the darkness, following them, watching them and biding its time.
The army truck carrying Tessay drove back through the village of Debra Maryam, and then turned off on to the track that followed the Dandera river downstream towards the escarpment of the Abbay gorge.
‘This is not the way to army headquarters,’ Tessay told Lieutenant Hammed, and he shifted awkwardly on the seat beside her.
‘Colonel Nogo is not at his headquarters. I have orders to take you to another location.’
‘There is only one other place in this direction,’ she said. ‘The base camp of the foreign prospecting company, Pegasus.’
‘Colonel Nogo is using that as a forward base in his campaign against the shufta in the valley,’ he explained. ‘I have orders to take you to him there.’
Neither of them spoke again during the long, bumpy ride over the rough track. It was almost noon when at last they reached the edge of the escarpment and turned off on to the fork that brought them at last to the Pegasus camp. The camouflage-clad guards at the gate saluted when they recognized Hammed. The truck drove through the gates, and parked in front of one of the long Quonset huts within the compound.
‘Please wait here.’ Hammed got down and went into the hut, but was gone for only a few minutes.
‘Please come with me, Lady Sun.’ He looked awkward and embarrassed, and could not meet her eyes as he helped her down from the cab. He led her to the door of the hut, and stood aside to let her enter first.
She looked around the sparsely furnished room, and realized that it must be the company’s administration centre. A conference table ran almost the full length of the room, and there were filing cabinets and two desks set against the side walls. A map of the area and a few technical charts were the only decorations on the bare walls. Two men sat at the table, and she recognized both of them immediately.
Colonel Nogo looked up at her, and his eyes were cold behind his metal-framed spectacles. As always, his long, thin body was immaculately uniformed; but his head was bare. His maroon beret lay on the table in front of him. Jake Helm leaned back in his chair with his arms folded. At first glance, his short-cropped hair made him look like a boy. Only when she looked closer did she see how his skin was weathered, and notice the crows’ feet at the corners of his eyes. He wore an open-necked shirt and blue jeans that were bleached almost white. His belt buckle was of ornate Indian silver, the shape of a wild mustang’s head. The sleeves of his cotton shirt were rolled high around his lumpy biceps. He chewed upon the dead butt of a cheap Dutch cheroot, and the smell of the strong tobacco was rank and offensive.
‘Very well, lieutenant,’ Nogo dismissed Hammed in Amharic. ‘Wait outside. I will call you when I need you.’
Once Hammed had left the room, Tessay demanded, ‘Why have I been arrested, Colonel Nogo?’
Neither man acknowledged the question. They both regarded her expressionlessly.
‘I demand to know the reason for this high-handed treatment,’ she persisted.
‘You have been consorting with a band of notorious terrorists,’ said Nogo softly. ‘Your actions have made you one of them, a shufta.’
‘That is not true.’
‘You have trespassed in a mineral concession in the Abbay valley,’ said Helm. ‘
And you and your accomplices have begun mining operations in the area which belongs to this company.’
‘There are no mining operations,’ she protested.
‘We have other information. We have evidence that you have built a dam across the Dandera river—’
‘That is nothing to do with me.’
‘So you do not deny that there is a dam?’
‘It is nothing to do with me,’ she repeated. ‘I am not a member of any terrorist group, and I have not taken part in any mining operations.’
They were both silent again. Nogo made an entry in the notebook in front of him. Helm stood up and sauntered across to the window behind her right shoulder. The silence drew out until she could bear it no longer. Even though she knew it was part of the campaign of nerves they were waging against her, she had to break it.
‘I have travelled most of the night in an army truck,’ she said. ‘I am tired, and I need to go to a lavatory.’
‘If what you need to do is urgent you can do it where you are standing. Neither Mr Helm nor I will be offended.’ Nogo tittered in a surprisingly girlish manner, but did not look up from his book.
She looked over her shoulder at the door, but Helm crossed to it and turned the key in the lock, slipping the key into his pocket. She knew she must show no weakness in front of these two, and, though she was tired and afraid and her bladder ached, she feigned an air of confidence and assurance and crossed to the nearest chair. She pulled it from the table and sat down in it easily.
Nogo looked up at her and frowned. He had not expected her to react this way.
‘You know the shufta bandit Mek Nimmur,’ he accused abruptly.
‘No,’ she said coldly. ‘I know the patriot and democratic leader Mek Nimmur. He is no shufta.’
‘You are his concubine, his whore. Of course, you will say this.’
She looked away from him with disdain, and his voice rose shrilly. ‘Where is Mek Nimmur? How many men does he have with him?’ Her composure was beginning to rattle him.
She ignored the question, and Nogo scowled at her furiously. ‘If you do not cooperate with us, I will have to use stronger methods to make you answer my questions,’ he warned.
She turned in her chair and stared out of the window. In the long silence that followed, Jake Helm crossed the room and went to the door behind Nogo that led through to the rooms at the rear of the hut. He disappeared through it, and closed it behind him. The walls of the hut were thin, and Tessay made out the murmur of voices from the room beyond. The cadence and inflection were neither English nor Amharic. They were using a foreign language in there. She guessed that Helm was receiving instructions from a superior, who did not want her to be able to recognize him at some later date.
After a few minutes Helm re-emerged and closed the door behind him without locking it. He nodded to Nogo, who at once stood up. They both came across to stand in front of Tessay.
‘I think that it will be better for all of us if we finish this business as quickly as possible,’ said Helm softly. ‘Then you can go to the bathroom, and I can go to my breakfast.’
She raised her chin and stared at him defiantly, but did not answer him.
‘Colonel Nogo has tried to be reasonable. He is bound by certain niceties of his official position. Fortunately I do not have the same restraints. I am going to ask you the same questions that he did, but this time you will answer them.’
He took the dead cheroot from his mouth and examined the tip. Then he threw the butt into a corner of the room and took a flat tin from his hip pocket. From it he selected a fresh cheroot, long and black, and lit it carefully, holding the match to it until it was drawing evenly. Then, amid a cloud of pungent tobacco smoke, he waved the match to extinction and asked,
‘Where is Mek Nimmur?’
She shrugged and looked away, out of the side window of the hut.
Abruptly, without signalling the blow in any way, he hit her open-handed across her face. It was a savage blow, delivered with a force that snapped her head around. Then, before she could recover, he swung back again and slammed his knuckles across her jawline. Her head was thrown back violently in the opposite direction and she was knocked flying from her chair.
Nogo stooped over her and seized her arms, twisting them up behind her back. He lifted her back into the seat and stood behind her. He held her in such a surprisingly powerful grip that she could feel the skin of her upper arms bruising beneath his fingers.
‘I have no more time to waste,’ Helm said quietly, taking the burning cheroot from his lips to inspect the glowing tip. ‘Let us start again. Where is Mek Nimmur?’
Tessay’s left eardrum felt as if it had burst with the ferocity of those blows. Her hearing buzzed and sang. Her teeth had been driven halfway through the flesh of her cheek, and her mouth filled slowly with her own blood.
‘Where is Mek Nimmur?’ Helm repeated, leaning his face closer to hers. ‘What are your friends doing with the dam in the Dandera river?’
She gathered the blood and saliva in her mouth, and suddenly and explosively spat it into his face.
He recoiled violently and wiped the bloody mess from his eyes with the palm of his hand.
‘Hold her!’ he said to Nogo, and seized the front of her blouse. With one heave he ripped it open down to her waist, and Nogo giggled and leaned forward over her shoulder to look at her breasts. He giggled again as Helm took one of them in his hand and squeezed out the nipple between his finger and thumb. It was the dark purple colour of a ripe mulberry.
He held her like that, pinching her flesh with his nails until the skin tore and a droplet of blood welled up and trickled over his thumb. Then with his other hand he took the burning cheroot from his lips and blew on the top until it glowed hotly.
‘Where is Mek Nimmur?’ he asked, and lowered the cheroot towards her breast. ‘What are they doing in the Dandera river?’
She stared down in horror as he brought the burning cheroot closer, and tried to wriggle away from him. But Nogo held her firmly from behind. She screamed once, on an agonized drawn-out note, as the glowing coal touched the tip of her nipple and the delicate skin began to blister.
‘Winter,’ said Royan, spreading the enlargement of the fourth face of the stele from Tanus’s tomb under the bright glare of the floodlamp. ‘This is the side that contains Taita’s notations, which I am postulating are those of the bao board. I don’t understand all of them, but by a process of elimination I have determined that the first symbol denotes one of the four sides, or as he terms them the castles of the board.’
She showed him the pages of her notebook on which she had made her calculations.
‘See here, the seated baboon is the north castle, the bee is the south, the bird is the west and the scorpion the east.’ She pointed out to him the same symbols on the photograph of the stele. ‘Then the second and third figures are numbers – I believe that they designate the file and the cup. With these we can follow the moves of his imaginary red stones. The reds are the highest-ranking colours on the board.’
‘What about the verses between each set of notations?’ Nicholas asked. ‘Such as this one here, about the north wind and the storm?’
‘I am not sure about those. Probably merely smokescreens, if I know Taita. He is never one to make life too easy for us. Perhaps they do have significance, but we can only hope to unravel them as we work through the moves of our stones.’
Nicholas studied her figures a while, then grinned ruefully. ‘Just think how remote was the possibility that anybody would ever be able to decipher the clues he left behind. The first requirement is that the searcher must have access to both chronicles, the seventh scroll and the stele of Tanus, before he had any chance of understanding the key to the tomb.’
She laughed – a throaty, well-satisfied sound. ‘Yes, he must have believed that he was perfectly safe. Well, we will see now, Master Taita. We will see just how clever you really were.’ Then, sober and businesslike once more,
she looked up the stone staircase that led to Taita’s maze.
‘Now we have to see if my figures and theories fit into the hard stones and walls of Taita’s architecture. But where do we start?’
‘At the beginning,’ Nicholas suggested, ‘the god plays the first coup. That’s what Taita told us. If we start here in the shrine of Osiris, at the foot of the staircase, then perhaps that will give us the alignment of his imaginary bao board.’
‘I had the same idea,’ she agreed immediately. ‘Let’s postulate that this is the north castle of Taita’s board. Then we work the protocol of the four bulls from here.’
It was slow and painstaking work, trying to work their way into the mind of the ancient scribe by probing the labyrinth of passages and tunnels that he had built four thousand years previously. This time they moved into the maze with more circumspection. Nicholas had filled his pockets with lumps of dried white river clay, and he used these like a schoolmaster’s stick of chalk to write on the stone walls at each branch and fork of the tunnels, setting out the notations from the winter face of the stele and marking a signpost to enable them not only to find their way through the maze but to relate it to the model that Royan was drawing up in her notebook.
They found that their first assumption that the shrine of Osiris was the north castle of the board seemed to be correct, and they happily believed that with this as the key it would be a simple matter to follow the moves of play to their conclusion. But these hopes were soon dashed as they realized that Taita was not thinking in the simple two dimensions of the conventional board. He had added the third dimension to the equation.
The stairway leading up from the shrine of Osiris was not the only link between the eight landings. Each of the passages leading off from it was subtly angled either upwards or downwards. As they followed the twists and turns of one of these tunnels they did not detect the fact that they were changing levels. Then suddenly they re-emerged on to the central staircase, but on a landing higher than the one they had entered from.