The Seventh Scroll - Smith Wilbur - Страница 42

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of kadkala, and a bowl which she filled to the brim.

"Drink it up, Pops!" she told him, and held the bowl to his lips. Jab

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 Jab

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.

if 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Royan looked hopefully at Nicholas but he was withdrawn and silent,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 kadkala in his hand. In the end

it was who gave her the excuse for which she had been Boris 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 rate hunter. There

were scraps of bread and beef stew prost sticking like confetti in his

cropped ginger hair.

"I rather suspect Prince Charming has had enough for one night the

murmured.

stood up, stooped over Boris and gripped one wrist.

He With a sudden jerk he lifted him into a sitting position, nd then

heaved him upright and over his shoulder in a 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.

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 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 sealT

He shook his head, "My guess is no. The crown is one of the monastery

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."

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.

 can do better," he invited her, rubbing

"Let's hear if yo 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

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