She was here for a reason. The timestorm had brought her here for a reason.
This time she was ready for it, not just tossed into a new world. Not controlled by the world, but ready to control it. She was going to overthrow the tyrant.
She was going to bring Set back, back where he belonged. She was going to be history.
'No,' she snarled into the dirt. 'Akhenaten! You're You're history!' history!'
The Doctor woke up in shadow and thrashed, trying to get away from the thing looming over him.
101.
'Easy!' hissed Kadiatu. 'Easy! I'm not the enemy.'
She took her hand carefully away from his mouth, straining to hear what he was whispering.
'I look for butterflies that sleep among the wheat. I make them into mutton-pies, and sell them in the street.'
They were in the back of an empty hay-cart, covered by a tarpaulin, bump-ing roughly up and down. The smell of farm and animal was overwhelming.
Kadiatu sat cross-legged with the tarp just touching her cramped neck and shoulders. Random streaks of late afternoon sunshine leaked in as the tarp flapped up and down.
He had been lying on his side in the straw. Now he rolled over and sat up, plucking hay from his sleeves. ' Chez M Thierry? Chez M Thierry? ' he murmured. ' he murmured.
'We'll be there by dawn. Nicolas will get us past the guards. He's been carrying messages between Thierry and I.' The Doctor listened, counted two horses, heard the driver yawn.
'What was that thing?' said Kadiatu. 'What was it doing to you?'
'Looking for something hidden,' he said, running his fingers through his hair to get the straw out. 'You know what Ants are like. You cut off their heads, and the legs come looking for you.'
'It was trying to read your mind?'
'It wasn't having much luck.'
'Thick skull?'
'Lots of practice,' said the Doctor grimly.
'What was it looking for?'
The Doctor grinned suddenly. 'You know, I like being asked lots of questions.
Ask another.'
Kadiatu sighed. 'So that was one of the things living in the rifts.'
'It was just a servant, a domestique domestique if you like, with no mind of its own. if you like, with no mind of its own.
Employed to fetch and carry. What did you do with the pieces?'
'I put them in the cellar. The key is on a chain around my neck.'
'The padlock won't stop a shell.' His mouth was a tight little line. 'About those men you killed.'
'Don't you dare lecture me!' she hissed, almost forgetting to keep her voice down. 'Don't you lecture me. It's your fault I'm here. If they'd come into the house, the basement '
'Why did you kill them?'
'Desperate expediency,' she spat.
He closed his eyes in the greyness. 'You could have talked your way out of that situation. Bribed them, handed over the horses. You could have persuaded them. I could have persuaded them.'
Kadiatu said nothing.
102.
'You know what you are now, don't you?'
Kadiatu said nothing.
'All the years of your life it had never occurred to you there was something odd about never getting sick, or having to eat so much food. It's possible that blind spot was built into your brain '
'I don't want to talk about it.'
' if you see what I mean. It would make the indoctrination easier.'
'I'm some kind of experiment, aren't I? All those modified supersoldier genes cooked up in the one organism, and then left with retired soldiers to grow up into what?'
The Doctor was shaking his head. 'It wasn't like that.'
'They didn't even tell me. They died without telling me. Did anyone know about me? Were there others? Did I come with an instruction manual?'
'No and no and no.'
'I'll never know,' said Kadiatu. 'I never know, when I react, whether it's me or my genes.'
'You can choose. You're not a machine.'
'I was designed, programmed. I didn't kill those soldiers, the bioengineers killed them. You killed them.'
The Doctor sat back, leaning against the side of the cart, hands folded in his lap. 'I'm not selling any alibis.'
'I didn't ask to be born,' said Kadiatu. 'It's not my fault.'
The sun was low in the western sky by the time Bernice reached the tomb entrance. It was easy to spot when you knew what you were looking for; peasants had camped inside, leaving potsherds and charcoal all over the place.
Bernice smiled to herself, pushing aside a chunk of pottery with her toe. In another thousand years, this rubbish would itself become archaeology.
She made hand gestures until the handlers worked out they were supposed to stay outside. They sat down with their backs to the wall of stone, bundles at their feet. Bernice wished she could talk to them. She wished she had had the sense to throw a computer translator into her travel bag.
There were so many things that she should have done. If only it were possible to put yellow sticky labels over your life.
She slipped in through the narrow crevice and moved inside.
When she was sure the handlers wouldn't see, she took a flashlight out of her pocket, rolling the circle of light rapidly around. The entrance to the tomb proper was a little distance ahead; probably a natural cave which had been enlarged with mallet and chisel.
There was more rubbish inside the antechamber, and the ceiling and walls were stained with soot. Peasants had been sheltering here ever since the 103 tomb had been unsealed and robbed, perhaps for thousands of years. There wouldn't be any fancy artifacts or golden trinkets to please Bonaparte. Benny didn't care, as long as the wall paintings were intact.
The entrance to the tomb had a low ceiling and narrow walls. She shone her flashlight inside. The roof was irregular, but the walls were smooth, and unpainted. She would have to go further inside to find what she was looking for.
She took off the Doctor's hat and stooped under the lintel. Claustrophobia tried to take hold of her, the way it always did when she first stepped inside caves or underground chambers. She waited patiently for it to dissipate, listening to the sound of her breathing echoing off the stone.
Ahead, the passageway which had probably once been filled with funerary goods bent sharply to the right. She squeezed through and froze where was that sound coming from?
She stood perfectly still, holding her breath. After a moment she realised the torch was still on and snapped it off.
Her balance went awry in the sudden blackness. She threw out a hand to find the cold stone wall. Her ears rang, filling the empty chamber with random noise. Had the sound come from before or behind?
After a full minute she said, 'Oh, for goodness' sake,' and switched the torch back on. 'Pull up your socks, Summerfield,' she muttered, comforted by the sound of her own voice. 'This isn't The Mummy The Mummy.'
The passageway ended in a wide doorway. There were still ancient fragments of wood lying on the floor, all that was left of the doors that must have once filled the space. They had probably been used as firewood centuries ago. The stone walls had been cut before Sappho taught at Lesbos and before Hypatia taught at Alexandria, before the Exxilons visited Peru and the Celtic chieftains rode across Europe, before the Doctor had challenged Fenric to a friendly game of Ya Shah Ya Shah.
On this scale a human life was nothing more than a beat of a butterfly's wings. Benny felt the weight of time hanging heavily on her. Or was it just the musty air?
She ran the beam of her torch over the walls of the tomb. The wall paintings were not only intact, they were in remarkably good condition. She sat down, gripping the torch under one arm, and got out her diary.
She sketched rapidly, awkwardly, peering into the pool of light on the wall.
The pictures told her everything she needed to know, which was handy, because Boney wasn't going to turn up the Rosetta stone until next year.
The tomb had belonged to an official and his wife. The period was dead right: no pictures of the happy couple meeting with the gods, just with Pharaoh. The Aten symbol appeared over and over in the hieroglyphs.
104.
One picture showed the dedication of one of Akhenaten's stelae, a large carving in the cliffs near Akhetaten. And there was something more in the illustration of the cliff. There.
Surely the Amarna Graffito hadn't been present at the dedication of the stela but the artist, in true Amarna period style, had been trying to represent the area realistically. The lines representing the cliffs formed a rough map.
Using that, it would be easy to track down the Graffito.
And anything else Ace might have left behind her.
Benny stood up. She had no way of reaching back through time to her stranded friend. All she could do was try to find out how Ace had fared. Who knew, there might even be a tomb.
There was a footfall outside the chamber. Benny stood up. 'I told you to wait outs '
There was a flash and a tremendous shove against her left shoulder. Suddenly Bernice found herself sitting down with her back to the wall.
She swung the torch around. There were two men in the doorway, squinting in the unexpected brilliance of the beam.
The man with the gun crouched down. His friend was holding a flickering torch. Tall and short, both in black. 'You were at the tavern,' she said. Her voice had gone all high-pitched and wobbly. She dropped the torch, put her hand to her shoulder. It was soaking wet. Oh, cruk!
'Give me the book,' he said.
Benny didn't move. The man reached up and plucked the battered notebook out of her lap. There was a large ring on his finger, with a glittering, oval green stone.
'Why?' breathed Bernice. 'Why do you care about finding it?'
The man hesitated, spoke in halting French. 'We will find Sutekh by following . . . his footsteps? His footprints. The trail he has left for us. This is how it was written.'
'Oh, the Osiran site at Sheta-Khu'u,' murmured Bernice. 'Are you lot in for a surprise.'
The tall man ignored her. 'Our ancestors fought to sustain the religion of Sutekh. The sacred writings mention this picture.' He pointed at the wall.
The other man was holding a shovel. Now he smashed it into the wall and started levering off chunks of plaster. Benny shouted, 'No!' but in minutes the illustration was gouged out of the wall, falling in a rain of dust and shreds onto the floor.
'We do not know what we will find there,' the first man said. 'Perhaps the hidden prison of Sutekh.'
He stood up, put the gun away. 'The handlers,' said Bernice. He shook his head.
105.
'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?'