H2G2 Storytime III: From Prussia with Love. Part XXVII
Created | Updated Sep 5, 2007
"There!" shouted X, pointing through small hole in the fence.
Arthur looked over his partner's shoulder to see Fort-William, illuminated at regular intervals thanks to one the Rock's resident lighthouses, running toward the sea.
Overhead there were yells from guards.
Arthur tapped his watch, 23:40. The sound of running footsteps and rifles clattering got closer. He looked up the stairs from where they were coming and tapped X's shoulder.
"Come on."
They ran after Fort-William.
Meanwhile on the other side of a continent...
"Ody?"
A young man stood in the moonlight. Though it was a cold desert night he was wearing a sleeveless shirt. In one fingerless gloved hand held an aged journal, the other hand resting on his belt.
He read parts out to himself but only in a whisper, occasionally turning the small book on its side and tracing his fingers down a map drawn in ink.
"Ody!"
Ody snapped out of his concentration and turned around to see his assistant Jamila dragging herself up the sand dune on which he stood. She sighed when she saw the book.
"You're working yourself too hard. If you lose anymore sleep you'll collapse before you find anything." Jamila grabbed his chin and pulled his head down to face her. "Get some sleep, I'll watch things here. I'll even stare at that," she said, holding out her hand, "for a few hours. Again."
Ody slapped the journal into her hand.
"You know," he said stroking his chin in pain from where her vice grip held him. "If you keep talking to me like this, people will think we're a couple."
Jamila walked around him. "They already do. Just as they assume that I'm you're assistant when you also assist me as much I do, partner."
Ody grinned. And moved toward the tent when ["I've found something!"] cried a voice in Arabic.
"Guess I'll sleep when I'm dead", Ody smirked and sped off toward the pit. His leather boots banging across wooden struts that lead the way.
Under lamps and flaming torches, a bustling group had gathered around to see what new item had been found today. Ody pushed his way through just as the discoverer finished carefully removing the piece from the ground. He passed it to Ody who gladly cradled it before holding it up in the light.
Ody laughed and patted its finder on the back; and act that led to the milling throng doing the same.
Jamila watched from the sides with her arms crossed. He had that look in his eyes again, she observed. To most people it would have looked like greed, that light made it seem all the more so but she knew her friend better.
That was the look of a man who had just gazed on something that belonged to everyone.
The noise of the party thrown to mark the discovery carried up to where Ody perched pensively at the top of the conical dome of ancient stone construction blocks, inappropriately christened 'the pyramid.' He took occasional slugs from a hip flask, and brooded.
When Jamila found him, he was staring sullenly at a small photograph. As she grunted and hauled herself onto the top of the pyramid he startled and shoved it in a pocket.
"Why so glum?" she said, concerned. "You've just uncovered the only known specimen of a Late Dynasty pharaoh's cat's tomb - it's the pinnacle of your professional career! You should be down there with the men, chewing khat and playing twister. What's the matter?"
Ody furrowed his brow. "I don't know. I think... I just feel... Have you ever felt unfulfilled in your career?"
Jamila thought back over a decade of painstakingly brushing dust off broken pots. "No, never," she replied with utter conviction.
The archaeologist rubbed his jaw. How could he explain this itching feeling of disappointment? How could he explain the nightly dreams of swinging across abysses and dodging deadly booby-traps? How could he tell her about this feeling of wasted potential, of missed opportunities? This feeling that he was not living up to some strange inheritance...
"I suppose...I suppose that maybe archaeology hasn't lived up to my dreams," he said.
Jamila looked at him kindly.
"Everyone has their family cross to bear," she said. "Parental expectations to live up to... I know my father would never have heard of me doing anything except this. But what about you? You never talk about family."
"My mother died a long time ago," said Ody quietly. He drew breath as if to speak again, and then stopped, and took another swig from the flask.
"And your father?"
Ody took the bottle way from his lips and reddened. "I don't have a father."
Jamila clucked sympathetically. "IVF?"
He broke out of his brooding and gave her a puzzled look. "What?"
"A sperm bank job. You know? In vitro..."
"No!" he objected, "I meant 'I have no father', as in 'My father and I have been estranged for my entire life and I don't even acknowledge his existence', okay?"
He snarled, raised the flask to his mouth again and then stopped, looked at the flask and hurled it as far as he could. Drops of Glenlivet sparkled as it fell in the light from fires from the party raging below.
Jamila gave him a look of mingled hurt and surprise.
"Well, you could have just said that."
The fire had burnt down to ashes when Ody finally came down from his solitude.
Jamila had already gone to bed for the night, along with the rest of the workers who were off nursing sore heads.
He walked over to where they plotted the successful dig. There was a large wooden portable table, the hinged sort you normally use to paste wallpaper. Across it was spread out a long parchment detailing the vastness of the desert and the odd pockets of wealth where treasures lay both found and waiting to be discovered.
There was the Valley of The Kings.
There was Carnac and Luxor.
On the parchment, placed directly over the site where he currently stood, there was a note. It was in Jamila's characteristic rounded script. It just said simply:
"Cairo - Tomorrow. Wire DC, register find. V.Important. J."
It was held in place by a priceless amulet, one of the other amazing finds of this morning. Ody figured it was Jamila's way of getting him to read it. He never could resist picking up priceless amulets.
He stroked his chin, which was getting rough with stubble.
"Guess that means I'm taking one of the horses then."
Later that same morning...
The whirr of the ceiling fan caused Daltmooreby to stir fitfully from his sleep. Groaning aloud at the realisation of being awake, he rolled over dragging the cotton sheet with him.
The Cairo heat was too much for this time of year.
With great reluctance and the onset of arthritis in his left knee he dragged himself out of bed and staggered into the bathroom. He drew the light on with the dial and leaned on the sink. He had deep dark rings beneath his eyes, the skin of his face here and there folding in little flaps, his wiry eyebrows grey and tatty and without his wig to cover it, the last dregs of hair atop his scalp ran in long wavy mattes around his crown.
He hadn't slept well. All the while on the plane, the thought of what lay in the desert troubled him. Afflicted now by jetlag, it was all he could do to keep such thoughts at bay. Sleep came if he was lucky, otherwise he just lay there neither truly awake or asleep, the nightmare's wracking his mind.
It was fear - he knew the feeling intimately. But not the fear of the hunted or the persecuted. No this was something risen up from deep inside. Fear of loss, again. Would he be hated or forgotten?
He couldn't decide which fate was worse.
He gargled some tepid water from the tap and spat it into the basin. He turned of the light and returned the bedroom. Daltmooreby grabbed the small travel clock off the porcelain cistern and squinted at the numbers.
2.37am.
"God!" he thought. "How I hate the night!"
The thought was unbidden and utterly unwanted. He drew his knees into his chest and hugged himself. Seated against the side of the small bathtub and illuminated by a slat of moonlight from between the blades of an extractor fan, Daltmooreby shed a tear for his dead wife.
"I am a traitor." he whispered to himself. "Yelena. Forgive me!"
In his personal solitude Daltmooreby was suddenly disturbed by a loud snore from Slepp Tonnajob distributed across the sofa like a hibernating mountain bear.
A sudden rush of energy to his limbs, Daltmooreby felt the adrenaline bring him to his feet.
"How many more betrayals do I have left in me, I wonder?" murmured Daltmooreby, and peered around the door of the bathroom. Silent as a shadow, he walked over to the unconscious form of Slepp. Another guttural snore rippled through the room.
Daltmooreby bent down and pulled out a shoelace from the assassin's shoe. He wound it tight around his thumbs in a garrote.
"There's nothing stopping me," he said quietly to himself.
He paused, the fabric taught between his hands.
"Nothing but time. I must bide my time."
He expertly rethreaded the shoelace and went back to bed.
He looked over again at the clock.
2:46am
"Patience" he said rolling over "after all, is a virtue."
