King Solomon''s Curse

  By the time she and Eddie hacked their way to the summit, the documentary team had caught up. Lydia carried the boom microphone, her sound equipment hanging from her neck. The New Zealander had an aggrieved expression, but it was from more than the strain of the climb. ‘This is weird,’ she said, adjusting dials. ‘There’s some sort of interference on the audio, but I can’t figure out what it is.’

  Rivero glanced at his camera’s mic. ‘I’m not getting anything.’

  She pushed one of her headphone cups more firmly against her ear. ‘It’s really low-frequency, but . . . there’s definitely something. Kind of a background hum.’

  Eddie stopped to listen. ‘I can’t hear anything either, but I know what you mean. Like when you go past an electricity substation and there’s that buzz you can feel.’

  ‘There’s something else I can’t hear,’ said Nina. ‘Anything. No birds, no insects. Listen.’ Everyone halted, silence falling unnervingly around them. ‘Maybe this place really is a dead zone. The only living things here are plants, and even they don’t look too healthy.’

  ‘Yeah, they’re definitely Tim Burton-y,’ Eddie noted, regarding a spindly and twisted tree. He whispered to Nina: ‘If there’s another source of eitr here, remember that we gave away most of the cure . . .’

  ‘I don’t think that’s what it is,’ she replied. ‘Eitr would have killed everything, including the vegetation. But it’s more like the animals and insects have been driven off. Maybe that hum Lydia’s picked up is scaring them away, like an ultrasonic repeller.’ She pressed onwards. ‘But we don’t scare that easily. Right?’

  ‘You get that?’ Fisher asked Rivero below. The cameraman nodded.

  The ground levelled out. Eddie swept a machete through obstructing branches, then held them aside so Nina could pass through. She pushed clear – and stopped in amazement. ‘Okay, guys?’ she called. ‘You’ll definitely want to have the cameras rolling.’

  ‘What’ve you found?’ asked Fisher as the others reached the summit.

  Nina looked into Rivero’s lens. ‘Welcome,’ she announced, ‘to Zhakana . . . City of the Damned.’

  They had emerged on to a field of ruins.

  There were dozens of structures, hundreds, disappearing into the shadows beneath the overhanging trees. The buildings were ancient, but even in a state of collapse there was something almost triumphal about them, a sense that they had been built to celebrate their civilisation. Even after being eroded by rain and cracked by creepers for multiple millennia, traces of elaborate carvings were still discernible on the walls.

  Ziff gasped. ‘Magnificent! Oh, this is glorious.’

  ‘You’re not kidding,’ said Nina. ‘And I bet that if we compared each building to the model in the map room, they’d match perfectly.’

  ‘So Solomon was a model train nerd like my dad?’ Eddie chipped in. He held the bushes aside so Howie, Paris and finally Wemba could reach the top of the hill, the other Congolese having remained below to unload the boats. It occurred to him that Wemba should have helped them, but he forgot about the porter’s lax attitude when he glanced back at the top of the promontory – and saw something new. ‘Er, Nina?’

  His wife was examining the carvings on one of the ruins. ‘Hold on, I just want to see this.’

  ‘I think you’d rather see this.’

  His tone prompted her to look around – and her eyes went wide. ‘Yeah, you’re right!’

  A building sat upon the jutting clifftop. Unlike the others, this was almost completely intact. It was a stout rectangular block, the sheer outer walls some thirty feet high and capped with ranks of square towers. Its bricks had the same precise, almost laser-cut appearance as those inside the First Temple in Jerusalem. The canopy of trees provided almost total cover, explaining how it had remained hidden from aerial observation – but these were the most sickly specimens yet, their deformed trunks seeming barely able to support their own weight.

  Nina was not interested in the flora, though. She hurried towards the building. ‘No doors or windows,’ she said. ‘It really is the Palace Without Entrance!’

  Ziff broke into a jog to catch up. ‘So the legend of Solomon is true! And according to the story, the way in is buried in sand on the west side.’

  Nina glanced in the direction of the setting sun as she cleared the ruins. ‘We’re by the north wall, so . . . around that corner.’ She pointed.

  ‘Hey, can you wait for us?’ said Rivero, breathing heavily as he and the others caught up. ‘People running away from the camera only makes good TV on Cops.’

  ‘Sorry, sorry,’ she said. ‘But according to the legends of King Solomon, the way in to the Palace Without Entrance should be over there.’

  ‘Wouldn’t that make it the Palace With Entrance?’ joked Eddie.

  ‘It’s hidden. In the legend, Solomon had to follow a trail of eagles to find one that told him where to find it. But the story already gave us the location.’ She approached the corner. ‘Around here.’

  ‘According to the legend, they had to dig in the sand,’ said Ziff. ‘Should we get a shovel from the boats?’

  ‘Let’s see what’s here first,’ Nina replied with rising excitement. ‘Which is . . .’ She stopped as she cleared the corner. ‘Oh.’

  Rivero was right behind her. ‘Hey, cool,’ he said, with no little sarcasm. ‘Trees!’

  Warped vegetation formed a dense wall along the palace’s western side. There was no sand on the ground, no convenient pits to be excavated. ‘Maybe the legend’s wrong,’ said Eddie.

  With the camera fixed upon her, Nina tried not to let her frustration show. ‘But it corresponds to what we discovered in the First Temple. This is Zhakana, this is the Palace Without Entrance, it has to be. The legend is a clue telling us how to get in, so there must be a way!’

  ‘Nina, it will still be here in the morning,’ said Ziff gently. ‘We should make camp and start work again at first light.’

  ‘I know, I know. But it’s so annoying! We found the city exactly where the map room said, the palace is right here . . . but we can’t get in.’

  ‘Yet,’ the older archaeologist added. He smiled. ‘For someone who has found so many ancient wonders, you are very impatient to find more!’

  ‘Tell me about it,’ Eddie said, smirking. ‘Now I know where our little girl gets it from. It’s not enough that she’s got a great Christmas present waiting for her – she’s got to open it now, now, now!’

  ‘Thanks for sharing that with the world, Eddie,’ Nina told him huffily, seeing the film crew smile at what she was sure would be a quotable line.

  ‘Dr Ziff’s right, though,’ said Fisher. ‘We won’t get anything else done before dark, so we should set up camp.’

  ‘I will tell the others to bring your gear,’ said Wemba. He started back towards the river path.

  ‘Yeah, come on,’ said Eddie. ‘We’ll get the tents, sort out some nosh, then kick off first thing tomorrow.’

  ‘Okay, okay,’ Nina sighed. She gave the palace a last look, then reluctantly turned away.

  It was long past nightfall by the time everything had been brought to the hilltop. Luckily, the film crew’s array of portable lamps made it easier for everyone to see what they were doing as they set up camp.

  It also made the strange absence of wildlife more obvious. ‘We’d normally have every bug within five miles coming to look at those lights,’ Eddie noted as he ate. Insects were flitting around the bulbs, but only a fraction of the number he would have expected.

  ‘Yeah, it’s weird,’ Nina agreed absently. Something else was dominating her thoughts. They had set up their tents amongst the ruins near the top of the slope. The Palace Without Entrance loomed like a huge spectre over the encampment, its pale stone walls soaking up the spill from the lights. ‘What’s inside?’ she said, almost to herself. ‘What did Solomon consid
er so dangerous that he built that to hide it?’

  Ziff nodded. ‘And hide in such a way that only he could get back in. Or someone as wise as him. I hope we are up to the task.’

  ‘I’m sure we’ll get in one way or another,’ said Fisher. ‘We’ve got a three-thousand-year technological advantage.’

  ‘At the risk of sounding like Yoda,’ Nina replied, putting on a growly voice, ‘technology not make one wise.’

  Eddie looked askance at her. ‘Was that meant to be Yoda? Sounded more like Jar Jar Binks!’

  ‘Says the man who can’t do an accent to save his life! Go on, do your American voice. Give us all a laugh.’

  He adopted a mock-offended look. ‘Ah’m show-ah ah dowan knur what yer-wah tarkin’ abart.’

  Fisher chuckled. ‘It’s as if John Wayne himself was here.’ Laughter from the crew – with one exception. ‘Of course, a Kiwi wouldn’t know the difference.’

  ‘Uh-huh,’ said Lydia, engrossed by the playback in her headphones.

  ‘What’re you doing, Lydia?’ Rivero asked. ‘I thought Howie’d backed everything up already.’

  ‘I did,’ Howie insisted. While the others made camp, the young man had spent half an hour copying files from the team’s various devices.

  ‘I’m just checking something,’ Lydia said, tapping at her own laptop. ‘That humming noise? I’ve been trying to isolate it – and I found it.’ She turned the computer towards the others. Its screen displayed an audio waveform, a stuttering green line showing various sound frequencies. ‘This is a composite of twenty seconds of ambient noise.’ She pointed out several peaks. ‘It’s got the wind in the trees, the river, the odd bug or bird – all natural stuff.’

  ‘But you filtered that all out and found . . .?’ Nina prompted.

  ‘Nothing – at first. But that’s because the defaults on the software clip out anything beyond the range of human hearing. If you aren’t going to use it, no point having it – it just wastes processing power and bandwidth. But,’ she continued triumphantly, ‘the raw recordings are made at the full spectrum. So I went back to them and filtered out the higher-frequency stuff. And here’s what I found.’

  She clicked the trackpad to bring up a new waveform. This was flat – except for a sharp spike at the extreme left-hand end. ‘This is the hum,’ Lydia went on. ‘The frequency’s well below anything we can hear.’

  ‘But we can still feel it,’ said Eddie.

  ‘Absolutely. It’s not loud, but it’s definitely there.’

  ‘So where is it coming from?’ asked Nina. ‘And what’s causing it?’

  ‘The second, I don’t know, but the first?’ She pointed at the Palace Without Entrance. ‘It’s coming from in there. Or more likely, under there. I think the source is underground.’

  Ziff and Nina exchanged looks. ‘The Mother of the Shamir?’ said the Israeli.

  ‘It could be,’ she agreed. ‘And now I want to get in there to find out more than ever.’

  11

  Dawn broke over the thick jungle of the Congo basin, but Nina was already up.

  ‘Thought I’d find you here,’ said Eddie, pushing through twisted undergrowth along the palace’s west wall to find her kneeling at its base. ‘You shouldn’t wander off without letting anyone know, mind.’

  ‘I told Paris where I was going,’ she replied, not looking up.

  ‘He says you just went “hi” as you walked past and went into the trees with a torch. Not quite the same thing.’

  ‘I’m okay, aren’t I? Anyway, I wanted to see if I could find any sand that might hide an entrance.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘Nope.’ She retrieved a small shovel and straightened. ‘It’s either topsoil or rock all the way along. So maybe you were right about the legend last night. The Palace Without Entrance exists, but the part about how to get in could be as much a fantasy as the talking eagles.’

  ‘You mean they weren’t a pretty obvious clue?’ he said, smiling.

  ‘I know, I know. But it wouldn’t be the first time an ancient story that sounds impossible on the surface turned out to have a truth beneath it.’

  ‘Not this one, though. So how are you going to get inside?’

  They started back towards the camp. ‘I know what I said to Steven last night, but three thousand years of technological progress can be useful. We can use the drone to check the roof for entrances. For all we know, it collapsed centuries ago and the whole thing’s open to the sky.’

  ‘If it is, climbing up there’ll be a pain in the arse,’ he said. ‘We’ve got those folding ladders, but we’ll probably need ropes too.’

  ‘We’ll worry about that if we have to.’ They saw activity through the trees and ruins. ‘Looks like everyone else is awake.’

  ‘Don’t think people got much sleep. That weird hum’s not exactly relaxing. I know I wasn’t the only one who kept waking up. Heard Lydia whingeing at about three o’clock.’

  ‘Good morning, Eddie!’ boomed Fortune as the couple approached. ‘You have made an early start, I see.’

  ‘Yeah,’ the Yorkshireman replied. ‘If there’s archaeological stuff to be had, she’ll drag me up before dawn’s even had a chance to crack.’

  ‘Where’s Howie?’ Nina asked. ‘I want to use the drone to check the palace roof.’

  ‘Way ahead of you,’ said Rivero, yawning. ‘He’s been getting some aerial shots.’

  ‘Sunrise over a lost city in the jungle,’ added Fisher. ‘It should look spectacular.’ The director picked up a walkie-talkie. ‘Howie, how’s it going?’

  ‘Looking good,’ came the crackling reply. ‘I’m flying orbits of the cliff so the drone can see under the treetops. Real nice shots.’

  Nina gestured for Fisher to hand her the radio; he did so, with territorial reluctance. ‘Howie, it’s Nina. How much charge does the drone have left?’

  ‘Five minutes, maybe.’

  ‘I know Steven wants his beauty shots, but it would be a huge help archaeologically if you could get a closer look at the palace’s roof for any potential ways inside.’

  ‘I can do it, sure,’ said Howie. ‘Boss, do you want me to?’

  Fisher gestured impatiently for Nina to return the walkie-talkie. ‘Yeah, go ahead,’ he said. ‘Once you’ve got your current shot.’

  ‘No problemo.’

  ‘Where is he?’ Eddie asked.

  ‘Over by the cliff,’ said Lydia, pointing. ‘He wanted clear space for the drone to take off.’

  Nina started in that direction. ‘Let’s see what he’s got, then.’

  Eddie and the documentary crew followed, Ziff joining them. Fortune and Paris stayed with the porters at the camp. ‘You not coming?’ Eddie called back to them.

  ‘Sure we’ll know soon enough if you find anything interesting,’ said Paris, stretching out on Fisher’s newly vacated chair.

  Fortune gave the Englishman a shrug of exaggerated apology. ‘He is good at his job when it counts, I assure you!’ Paris threw a plastic fork at him, the smartly dressed man easily catching it.

  Eddie smiled. ‘So what do you think of Paris?’ Nina asked him. ‘Is he good at his job?’

  ‘Fortune wouldn’t let him piss about like that if he wasn’t,’ he replied, nodding. ‘He trusts him, so . . . I trust him, yeah.’

  ‘Fortune’s a tough boss? He seems so laid back.’

  ‘Remember how he scared those militia arseholes? He doesn’t need to make a scene to stay on top of a situation.’

  They rounded a ruin to find Howie perched cross-legged on a fallen stone block, controlling the quadcopter from his laptop. ‘Hey, there you are,’ he said, glancing around. ‘I’m bringing the drone through the trees now. We’ll see the roof in a sec.’

  ‘I’ll let you concentrate, then,’ said Nina. ‘I don’t want you to crash!’
br />   ‘Won’t happen, I’m a good pilot. Although,’ he admitted, ‘I did have a hairy moment when the drone went around the palace’s far side. Started to get a load of interference from something.’

  ‘What would cause that?’ asked Fisher. ‘If it gets broken, we’ve got no way to fix it out here.’

  ‘Dunno. It was like the signal was being blocked. She dipped a little low, and boom! Huge dropout, and I almost lost control. Good thing is that if there’s a major glitch, the drone’s programmed to retrace its route until it gets a solid signal again. Only took a few seconds, so after that I kept her higher.’ Howie nodded at the screen. ‘Anyway, here we go.’

  The view from the drone showed it descending beneath the tree cover over the palace’s southern end. Nina saw that the roof was not flat. Between the ranks of towers on each side it was vaulted, curving up to a line of keystones running the building’s length. ‘Solomon knew how to build ’em,’ she said, impressed. ‘It’s survived this long, and I don’t see any signs of damage.’

  Ziff nodded. ‘A roof like that would be self-supporting as long as the lower walls remained intact. How large are the individual blocks?’

  ‘Probably a couple of feet long . . .’ She frowned, leaning closer. ‘What’s that? Howie, hold position.’

  The production assistant set the drone to hover. ‘There’s something on that block,’ said Ziff, pointing out a detail. ‘A carving?’

  ‘Hard to tell with all the crap on the stonework.’ The palace’s upper aspect was covered in detritus that had fallen from the overhanging trees. ‘Howie, can you get closer?’

  ‘Sure can.’ The young man’s fingers played over the keyboard. The drone descended. Features upon the block became clearer.

  ‘It is a carving,’ Ziff said, entranced. ‘I can’t tell what it is, though.’

  ‘You know what it looks like to me?’ said Eddie, tilting his head. ‘A bird.’