last breath was no louder than the one before, but I felt the chill in her lips when I kissed them.
'Goodbye, my mistress,' I whispered. 'Farewell, my. heart.'
I HAVE WRITTEN THESE SCROLLS DURING the seventy days and nights of the royal embalming. They are my last tribute to my mistress.
Before the undertakers took her away from me, I made the incision in her left flank, as I had done for Tanus. I opened her womb and took from it that terrible incubus that had killed her. It was a thing of flesh and blood, but it was not human. When I cast it into the fire, I cursed it, and I cursed the foul god Seth who had placed it in her.
I have prepared ten alabaster jars to hold these scrolls. I will leave them with her. I am painting all the murals of her tomb with my own hand. They are the finest I have ever created. Each stroke of my brush is an expression of my love.
I wish that I could rest with her in this tomb, for I am sick and weary with grief. But I still have my two princesses and my king to care for. They need me.
AUTHOR'S NOTE
On 5 January 1988, Doctor Duraid ibn al Simma of the Egyptian Department of Antiquities opened and entered a tomb on the west bank of the Nile in the Valley of the Nobles. The reason why this tomb had not been previously excavated was that in the ninth century AD an Islamic mosque had been built over the site. It was only after long and delicate negotiations with the religious authorities that the excavation was permitted.
Immediately upon entering the passage that led to the burial chamber, Dr Al Simma was greeted by a marvellous display of murals which covered all the walls and the ceilings. They were the most elaborate and vivacious that he had ever encountered in a lifetime spent studying the monuments.
He told me that he knew at once that he had made a significant find, for from amongst the hieroglyphics on the walls stood out the royal cartouche of an Egyptian queen who had not been previously recorded.
His excitement and anticipation increased as he approached the burial chamber, only to be dashed as he saw that the seals upon the doorway had been damaged, and the entrance had been forced. In ancient times, the tomb had been robbed and stripped of its sarcophagus and all its treasures.
Nevertheless, Dr Al Simma was able to date the tomb with reasonable accuracy to that dark night of strife and disaster that overwhelmed Egypt in about 1780 BC. For the next century the Two Kingdoms were in a state of flux. We have little record of the events of this period, but from the chaos eventually rose a line of princes and pharaohs that finally expelled the Hyksos invader, and lifted Egypt into its period of greatest glory. It gives me pleasure to think that the blood of Lostris and Tanus and Memnon ran strongly in their veins.
It was almost a year after the tomb was first opened, while Dr Al Simma's assistants were copying and photographing the decorations of the walls, that a section of the plaster fell away to reveal a hidden niche in which stood ten sealed alabaster vases.
When Dr Al Simma asked me to assist in the transcription of the scrolls contained in the vases, I was both honoured and filled with trepidation. I was not, of course, qualified to work on the original scrolls, which were written in the hieratic script. This work was done at Cairo Museum by a team of international Egyptologists.
Dr Al Simma asked me to rewrite this original transcription in a style that would make it more accessible to the modern reader. With this end in view I have included some anachronisms in the text. For instance I have, in places, used such comparatively modern measures of distance and weight as miles and ounces. I have also indulged myself with words such as 'djinn' and 'houri' and 'hooligan' which Taita never employed, but which, I feel certain, he would have used if they had formed part of his vocabulary.
Very soon after beginning work on the texts all my reservations began to evaporate as I became totally involved in the times and character of the ancient author. Despite all his bombast and vainglory, I developed an affinity and affection for the slave Taita that reached back over the millennium.
I am left with a realization of how little the emotions and aspirations of man have changed in all that time, and a lingering excitement that to this day somewhere in the Abyssinian mountains near the source of the Blue Nile the mummy of Tanus still lies in the unviolated tomb of Pharaoh Mamose.
EXPLORE THE MYSTERIES OF THE SEVENTH SCROLL?
WILBUR SMITH'S NEXT UNFORGETTABLE
EPIC NOVEL, COMING SOON FROM
ST. MARTIN'S PRESS. AN EXCERPT FOLLOWS:
'The Seventh Scroll.' She whispered, and steeled herself to touch it. It was three thousand years old, written by a genius out of time with history, a man who had been dust for all these millennia, but who she had come to know and respect as she did her own husband. His words were eternal, and they spoke to her clearly from beyond the grave, from the fields of paradise, from the presence of the great Trinity, Osiris and Isis and Horus, in whom he had believed so devoutly. As devoutly as she believed in another more recent Trinity.
She carried the scroll to the long table at which Duraid, her husband, was already at work. He looked up as she laid it on the table-top before him and for a moment she saw the same mystical mood in his eyes that had affected her. He always wanted the scroll there on the table, even when there was no real call for it. He had the photographs and the microfilm to work with. It was as though he needed the unseen presence of the ancient author close to him as he studied the texts.
Then he threw off the mood and was the dispassionate scientist once more. 'Your eyes are better than mine, my flower,' he said. 'What do you make of this letter?'
She leaned over his shoulder and studied the hieroglyph on the photograph of the scroll that he pointed out to her. She puzzled over the character for a moment before she took the magnifying glass from Duraid's hand, and peered through it again.
'It looks as though Taita has thrown in another cryptic of his own creation just to bedevil us.' She spoke of the ancient author as though he were a dear, but sometimes exasperating, friend who still lived and breathed, and played tricks upon them.
'We'll just have to puzzle it out, then,' Duraid declared with obvious relish. He loved the ancient game. It was his life's work.
