The rules of the game seemed to be that he was not allowed to use his hands to get it into his own mouth, neither should he dribble down the front of his robe, nor splutter gravy over those seated near to him. His contortions, together with his gulping and choking and gasping for air, were the source of uncontrollable hilarity. When at last he succeeded in getting it down, a brass bowl of katikala was held to his lips as a reward. He was expected to send the contents in the same direction as the parcel of injera.
Jali Hora, by now warmed with tej and katikala, lurched to his feet. In his right hand he held aloft a streaming parcel of injera. As he began an unsteady progress across the chamber, with his shiny crown awry, they did not at first realize his intentions. The entire company watched him with interest.
Then suddenly Royan stiffened and whispered with horror, ‘No! Please, no. Save me, Nicky. Don’t let this happen to me.’
‘This is the price you pay for being the leading lady,’ he told her. Jali Hora was making his rather erratic way towards where she sat. The gravy from the morsel he carried for her was trickling down his forearm and dripping from his elbow.
The band standing along the side wall struck up a lively air. As the abbot came to a halt in front of Royan, rocking on his suspension like an ancient carriage, they fiddled and fifed and the drummers broke out in a frenzy.
The abbot presented his gift, and with one last despairing glance at Nicholas Royan faced the inevitable. She closed her eyes and opened her mouth.
To roars of encouragement and the urgings of fife and drum, she struggled and chewed. Her face turned rosy and her eyes watered. At one point Nicholas thought she would have to admit defeat and spit it out on to the reed-covered floor. But slowly and courageously, a bit at a time, she forced it down and then fell back exhausted.
Her audience, clapping and hooting, loved every moment of it. The abbot sank stiffly to his knees in front of her and embraced her, almost losing his crown in the process. Then without relinquishing his embrace, he made himself a place beside her.
‘It looks as though you have made another conquest,’ Nicholas told her dryly. ‘I think he will be on your lap at any moment, if you don’t duck and run.’
Royan reacted swiftly. She reached across and grabbed a bottle of katikala, and a bowl which she filled to the brim.
‘Drink it up, Pops!’ she told him, and held the bowl to his lips. Jali Hora accepted the challenge, but he had to release her to drink from her hand.
Suddenly Royan started so violently that she spilled what was left in the bowl down the old man’s robe. The blood drained from her face and she began to tremble as though in a high fever as she stared at Jali Hora’s crown, which had slipped forward over his eyes.
‘What is it?’ Nicholas demanded quietly but urgently, and he reached across to steady her with a hand on her arm. Nobody else in the chamber had noticed her distress, but he was fully attuned to her moods by now.
Still staring ashen-faced at the crown, she dropped the bowl and reached down and grasped his wrist. He was startled by her strength. Her grip was painful, and he saw that she had driven her nails into his flesh so hard that she had broken the skin.
‘Look at his crown! The jewel! The blue jewel!’ she gasped.
He saw it then, amongst the gaudy shards of glass and pebbles of semi-precious garnets and rock crystal. The size of a silver dollar, it was a seal of blue ceramic, perfectly round, and baked to a hard, impervious finish. In the centre of the disc was an etching of an Egyptian war chariot, and above it the distinctive and unmistakable outline of the hawk with the broken wing. Around the circumference was a legend engraved in hieroglyphics. It took him only a few moments to read it to himself:
I COMMAND TEN THOUSAND CHARIOTS.
I AM TAITA, MASTER OF THE ROYAL HORSE.
Royan desperately wanted to escape from the oppressive atmosphere of the cavern. The parcel of wat that the abbot had forced upon her had mixed heavily with the few mouthfuls of tej she had swallowed, and this feeling in turn was aggravated by the smell of the dirty food bowls thick with congealing grease and the fumes of raw katikala. Already some of the monks were puking drunk, and the smell of vomit added to the cloying miasma of incense smoke within the chamber.
However, she was still the centre of the abbot’s attention. He sat beside her stroking her bare arm and reciting garbled extracts from the Amharic scriptures; Tessay had long ago given up translating for her. Royan looked hopefully at Nicholas but he was withdrawn and silent, seeming oblivious of his surroundings. She knew that he was thinking about the ceramic seal in the abbot’s crown, for his eyes kept returning thoughtfully to it.
She wanted to be alone with him to discuss this extraordinary discovery. Her excitement outweighed the distress of her overloaded stomach. She felt her cheeks flushed with it. Every time she looked up at the old man’s crown her heart fluttered, and she had to make an effort to stop herself reaching up, seizing the shiny blue seal and ripping it from its setting to examine it more closely.
She knew how unwise it was to draw attention to the scrap of ceramic, but when she glanced across the circle she saw that Boris was far past noticing anything other than the bowl of katikala in his hand. In the end it was Boris who gave her the excuse for which she had been seeking. He tried to get to his feet, but his legs collapsed under him. He sagged forward quite gracefully, and his face dropped into the bowl of grease-sodden injera bread. He lay there snoring noisily, and Tessay appealed to Nicholas.
‘Alto Nicholas, what am I to do?’
Nicholas considered the unlovely spectacle of the prostrate hunter. There were scraps of bread and beef stew sticking like confetti in his cropped ginger hair.
‘I rather suspect Prince Charming has had enough for one night,’ he murmured.
He stood up, stooped over Boris and gripped one wrist. With a sudden jerk he lifted him into a sitting position, and then heaved him upright and over his shoulder in a fireman’s lift.
‘Good night, all!’ he told the assembled monks, very few of whom were in any condition to respond. Then he carried Boris away, draped over his shoulders with head and feet dangling. The two women had to hurry to keep up with Nicholas as he strode down the terrace and then up the stone stairway without a pause.
‘I did not realize Alto Nicholas was so strong,’ Tessay panted, for the stairs were steep and the pace was hard.
‘I didn’t either,’ Royan admitted. She experienced a ridiculous proprietary pride in his feat, and smiled at herself in the darkness as they approached the camp.
‘Don’t be silly,’ she admonished herself. ‘He isn’t yours to boast about.’
Nicholas threw his burden down on Boris’s own bed in the thatched hut and stood back panting heavily, the sweat trickling down his cheeks.
‘That’s a pretty good recipe for a heart attack,’ he gasped.
Boris groaned, rolled over and vomited copiously over his pillows and bedlinen.
‘On that pleasant note I will bid you all goodnight and sweet dreams,’ Nicholas told Tessay, stepping out of the hut into the warm African night.
He breathed in the smell of the forest and the river with relief, and then turned to Royan as she gripped his arm.
‘Did you see—’ she burst out excitedly, but he laid his fingers on her lips to silence her, and with a cautionary frown in the direction of Boris’s hut led her away to her own hut.
‘Did you see it?’ she demanded, unable to contain herself longer. ‘Could you read it?’
‘“I command ten thousand chariots,”’ he recited.
‘“I am Taita, master of the royal horse,”’ she completed it for him. ‘He was here. Oh, Nicky! He was here. Taita was here. That’s the proof we wanted. Now we know that we are not wasting our time.’
She flopped down on her camp bed and hugged herself ecstatically. ‘Do you think the abbot will let us examine the seal?’
He shook his head, ‘My guess is no. The crown is one of the monast
ery treasures. Even for you, his favourite lady, I don’t think he would do it. Anyway, it would not be wise to show any great interest in it. Jali Hora obviously does not have any idea of its significance. Apart from that, we don’t want to alert Boris.’
‘I suppose you are right.’ She moved over on the bed to make room for him. ‘Sit down.’
He sat down beside her, and she asked, ‘Where do you suppose the seal came from? Who found it? Where, and when?’
‘Steady on, dear girl. That’s four questions in one, and I don’t have an answer to any of them.’
‘Guess!’ she invited him. ‘Speculate! Throw some ideas around!’
‘Very well,’ he agreed. ‘The seal was manufactured in Hong Kong. There is a little factory there that turns them out by the thousands. Jali Hora bought it from a souvenir store in Luxor when he was on holiday in Egypt last month.’
She punched his arm, hard. ‘Be serious,’ she ordered.
‘Let’s hear if you can do better,’ he invited her, rubbing his arm.
‘Okay, here I go. Taita dropped the seal here in the gorge while he was working on the construction of Pharaoh’s tomb. Three thousand years later an old monk, one of the very first to live here at the monastery, picked it up. Of course, he could not read the hieroglyphics. He took it to the abbot, who declared it to be a relic of St Frumentius, and had it set in the crown.’
‘And they all lived happily ever after,’ Nicholas agreed. ‘Not a bad shot.’
‘Can you find any holes?’ she demanded, and he shook his head. ‘Then you agree that this proves that Taita really was here, and that it proves our theories are correct?’
‘“Proves” is too strong a word. Let’s just say that it points in that direction,’ he demurred.
She wriggled around on the bed to face him squarely. ‘Oh, Nicky, I am so excited. I swear I will not be able to sleep a wink tonight. I just can’t wait for tomorrow, to get out there and start searching again.’
Her eyes were bright, and her cheeks flushed a warm rosy brown. Her lips were parted, and he could see the pink tip of her tongue between them. This time he could not stop himself. He leaned very slowly towards her, treating her gently, giving her every opportunity to pull away if she wished to avoid him. She did not move, but her shining expression turned slowly to one of apprehension. She stared into his eyes, as if seeking something, some reassurance. When their lips were an inch apart, Nicholas stopped, and it was she who made the last movement. She brought their mouths together.
At first it was soft, just a light mingling of their breath, and then it became harsher, more urgent. For a long, heart-stopping moment they devoured each other, and her mouth tasted soft and sweet as ripe fruit. Then suddenly she whimpered, and with a huge effort of will tore herself out of his arms. They stared at each other, both of them shaken and confused.
‘No,’ she whispered. ‘Please, Nicky, not yet. I am not ready yet.’
He picked up her hand and turned it between his palms. Then lightly he kissed the tips of her fingers, savouring the smell and the taste of her skin.
‘I’ll see you in the morning.’ He dropped her hand and stood up. ‘Early. Be ready!’ he said, and stooped out through the doorway of the hut.
As he was dressing the next morning he heard her moving around in her hut, and when he whistled softly at her door she stepped out to meet him, dressed and eager to start.
‘Boris is not awake yet,’ Tessay told them as she served their breakfast.
‘Now that is a great surprise to me,’ Nicholas said, without looking up from his plate. He and Royan were still slightly awkward in each other’s presence, remembering the circumstances in which they had parted the previous evening. However, as Nicholas slung the rifle and the pack over his shoulder and they set off up the valley, their mood changed to one of anticipation.
They had been going for an hour when Nicholas glanced over his shoulder and then cautioned her with a frown. ‘We are being followed.’
Taking her wrist, he drew her behind a slab of sandstone. He flattened himself against the rock and gestured at her to do the same. Then he poised himself, and suddenly leaped forward to seize the lanky figure in a dirty white shamma who was sneaking up the valley behind them. With a howl the creature fell to his knees, and began gibbering with terror.
Nicholas hauled him to his feet. ‘Tamre! What are you doing following us? Who sent you?’ he demanded in Arabic.
The boy rolled his eyes towards Royan. ‘No, please, effendi, do not hurt me. I meant no harm.’
‘Leave the child, Nicky. You will precipitate another fit,’ Royan intervened. Tamre scurried behind her and clung to her hand for protection, peering out around her shoulder at Nicholas as though his life were in danger.
‘Peace, Tamre,’ Nicholas soothed him. ‘I will not hurt you, unless you lie to me. If you do, then I will thrash you until there is no skin on your back. Who sent you to follow us?’
‘I came alone. Nobody sent me,’ blubbered the boy. ‘I came to show you where I saw the holy animal with the fingermarks of the Baptist on his skin.’
Nicholas stared at him for a moment, before he began to laugh softly. ‘I’ll be damned if the boy doesn’t really believe he saw great-grandfather’s dik-dik.’ Then he scowled ferociously. ‘Remember what will happen to you, if you are lying.’
‘It is true, effendi,’ Tamre sobbed, and Royan came to his defence.
‘Don’t badger him. He is harmless. Leave the poor child.’
‘All right, Tamre. I will give you a chance. Take us to where you saw the holy animal.’
Tamre would not relinquish his grip on Royan’s hand. He clung to it as he danced beside her, leading her along, and within a hundred yards his terror had faded and he was smiling and giggling at her shyly.
For an hour he led them away from the Dandera river and up over the high ground above the valley, into an area of thick scrub and up-thrust ridges of weathered limestone. The thorny branches of the bush were densely intertwined, and grew so close to the ground that there seemed to be no way through them. However, Tamre led them on to a narrow twisting path, just wide enough for them to avoid the red-tipped hook thorns on each side of them. Then abruptly he stopped and pulled Royan to a halt beside him. He pointed down, almost at his own toes.
‘The river!’ he announced importantly. Nicholas came up beside them and whistled softly with surprise. Tamre had led them around in a wide circle to the west, and then brought them back to the Dandera river at a point where it still ran in the bed of the deep ravine.
Now they stood on the very edge of the chasm. He saw at once that, although the top of the rocky ravine was less than a hundred feet wide, the chasm opened out below the rim. From the surface of the water far below, the rock wall belled out in the shape of one of the pottery tej flasks. It narrowed again as it neared the top where they stood.
‘I saw the holy thing over there.’ Tamre pointed to the far side of the chasm where a small feeder spring meandered out of the thorny bush. Streamers of bright green moss, nourished by the spring, hung from the lip of the concave rock wall, and the water trickled down them and dripped from the tips into the river two hundred feet below.
‘If you saw it there, why did you bring us to this side of the river?’ Nicholas demanded.
Tamre looked as though he were on the point of tears. ‘This side is easier. There is no path through the bush on the other side. The thorns would hurt Woizero Royan.’
‘Don’t be a bully,’ Royan told him, and put her arm around the boy’s shoulder.
Nicholas shrugged, ‘It looks like the two of you are ganging up on me. Well, seeing that we are here, we might as well sit a while and see if great-grandpa’s dik-dik puts in an appearance.’
He picked out a spot in the shade of one of the stunted trees that hung on the lip of the chasm, and with his hat swept the ground clear of fallen thorns until there was a place for them to sit. He placed his back against the trunk of the thorn t
ree and laid the Rigby rifle across his lap.
By this time it was past noon, and the heat was stifling. He passed the water bottle to Royan and, while she drank, glanced at Tamre and suggested to her in English, ‘This might be a good time to find out what, if anything, the lad knows about the Taita ceramic in the crown. He is besotted with you. He will tell you anything you want to know. Question him.’
She began gently, chatting softly to the boy. Occasionally she stroked his head and petted him as though he were a puppy. She spoke to him of the previous night’s banquet, the beauty of the underground church, and the antiquity of the murals and the tapestries, and then at last mentioned the abbot’s crown.
‘Yes. Yes. That is the stone of the saint,’ he agreed readily. ‘The blue stone of St Frumentius.’
‘Where did it come from?’ she asked. ‘Do you know?’
The boy looked embarrassed, ‘I do not know. It is very old, perhaps as old as Christ the Saviour. That is what the priests say.’
‘You do not know where it was found?’
He shook his head, but then, eager to please her, he suggested, ‘Perhaps it fell from heaven.’
‘Perhaps.’ Royan glanced at Nicholas, who rolled his eyes upwards and then pushed his hat forward to cover his face.
‘Perhaps St Frumentius gave it to the first abbot when he died.’ Tamre warmed to the subject. ‘Or perhaps it was in his coffin with him when he was placed in his tomb.’
‘All these things are possible, Tamre,’ Royan agreed. ‘Have you seen the tomb of St Frumentius?’
He looked around him guiltily. ‘Only the ordained priests are allowed into the maqdas, the Holy of Holies,’ he hung his head and whispered.