Doctor Who_ Set Piece - Kate Orman [56]
He stood up, put the gun away. ‘The handlers,’ said Bernice. He shook his head.
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‘Don’t leave me,’ she breathed, as the shock started to muddle her thoughts.
She tried to rise, but fell back hard against the wall, the pain making her heart skip a beat.
‘This tomb shall be yours,’ said the Setite.
‘Every storm,’ Ace said, ‘begins with something small.’
They had walked to the edge of the city, where Akhetaten faded into the desert. The rocky Red Land, Set’s land, stretched away to the north and west.
The boundary stela was cut into a limestone cliff, twelve feet high, columns of hieroglyphs dangling from an illustration of Akhenaten and his family worshipping the Aten, the disc of the sun. Two of the Setites held a ladder against the cliff as Ace climbed up it, clutching a chisel in her mouth like a pirate biting on a dagger. She had tied the mallet to a rope, strung it around her shoulders.
She climbed until she was face to face with the stone Pharaoh. ‘You know something, mate? You have an ugly mug.’
‘He insists the artists make him look like that,’ called Sesehset.
‘Can’t think why.’
‘It’s the new style. Another change.’
The ladder shook as she chipped away at the inscription. First she hacked out the sun disc, rough strokes digging into the soft limestone. Then she came down two rungs. ‘You’ll have to read it out,’ she called down to Sesehset.
The priest flicked his eyes over the columns of hieroglyphs. ‘Well, it’s a dedication, promising the Pharaoh won’t move the city from this site or extend it beyond the boundaries.’
‘No,’ she said, ‘word for word.’ She pointed with the chisel at the top of a row of hieroglyphs. The Priest peered up. ‘The Good God – that means Pharaoh – sole one of Re, whose goodness Aten has created –’
‘Stop there,’ said Ace. ‘That says Aten in the oval shape?’
‘The cartouche marks a divine or royal name,’ said the priest.
‘Right.’ Ace picked up her mallet once more, and slowly and carefully dug the Aten’s name out of the stone. Tiny chips fell to the bottom of the cliff. ‘And here as well,’ she said.,
‘Who exalts Aten, makes his name great –’ Sesehset had begun to read, but already Ace was chiselling out the cartouche.
‘Heh,’ she said. ‘I’ve rubbed him out. That’ll do for now.’
She clambered down the shaky ladder. The Setites were glancing around in the reddish dawn, nervously. Ace clapped Sesehset on the back, laughing.
‘Just one more thing before we go-go,’ she said.
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The priests watched anxiously as she scraped a series of curves and angles into the cliff, just above the height of her head. It took nearly half an hour to make a proper job of it. She was sweating in the sunlight when she’d finished.
‘Right. Now we can leave.’
‘Is it writing?’ said Sesehset. ‘I don’t recognize the language.’
‘It’s for the twentieth century,’ and Ace raised a hand to her mouth, snicker-ing like a child. ‘That ought to give them something to think about.’
The priests fled the white cliffs, running for the safety of Senef’s estate.
In letters three feet high, in a language that would not be spoken for thousands of years, the cliff shouted: ACE WAS HERE
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Chapter 9
Raiders of the Lost Akhetaten
Poets do not go mad; but chess-players do.
(G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy, 1908)
M Thierry’s house was a modest twenty-eight room affair near the Bois de Vincennes, a little outside Paris. It was separated by a wide lawn and a pond from the orchard, with its rigidly defined rows of trees stretching off into the distance.
The lawn had not been cut for months, and weeds grew thickly between the trees. There was a crater of dried earth and grass where a stray shell had come down. The pond was slick with decay. ‘I’ve eaten the fish,’ commented Thierry dryly, leading them in through the servants’ entrance.
The kitchen smelt of must and dust. ‘My servants have left me to fend for myself,’ joked the tall Frenchman. ‘There is plenty of room for visitors, as there are only the three of us.’
As if on cue, the littleboy came through the kitchen door. He was holding