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Royan looked hopefully at Nicholas but he was withdrawn and silent,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?'
