Nimmur. He is no shufta."
"You are his concubine, his whore. Of course, you will say this."
She looked away from him with disdain, and his voice rose shrilly.
"Where is Mek Nimmur? How many men does he have with him?" Her composure
was beginning to rattle him."
She ignored the question, and Nogo scowled at her furiously. "If you do
not cooperate with us, I will have to use stronger methods to make you
answer my questions," he warned.
She turned in her chair and stared out of the window.
In the long silence that followed, Jake Helm crossed the room and went
to the door behind Nogo that led through to the rooms at the rebir of
the hut. He disappeared through it, and closed it behind him. The walls
of the hut were thin, and Tessay made out the murmur of voices from the
room beyond. The cadence and inflection were neither English nor
Amharic. They were using a foreign language in there. She guessed that
Helmw'as receiving instructions from a superior, who did not want her to
be able to recognize him at some later date.
After a few minutes Helm re-emerged and closed the door behind him
without locking it. He nodded to Nogo, who at once stood up. They both
came across to stand in front of Tessay.
I think that it will be better for all of us if we finish this business
as quickly as possible," said Helm softly. "Then you can go to the
bathroom, and I can go to my breakfast." She raised her chin and stared
at him defiantly, but did not answer him.
"Colonel Nogo, has tried to be reasonable. He is bound by certain
niceties of his official position. Fortunately I do not have the same
restraints. I am going to ask you the same questions that he did, but
this time you will answer them."
He took the dead cheroot from his mouth and examined the tip. Then he
threw the butt into a corner of the room and took a flat tin from his
hip pocket. From it he selected a fresh cheroot, long and black, and lit
it carefully, holding the match to it until it was drawing evenly. Then,
amid a cloud of pungent tobacco smoke, he waved the match to extinction
and asked, ",Ihere is Mek Nimmur?"
She shrugged and looked away, out of the side window of the hut.
Abruptly, without signalling the blow in any way, he hit her open-handed
across her face. It was a savage blow, delivered with a force that
snapped her head around, Then, before she could recover, he swung back
again and slammed his knuckles across her jawline. Her head was thrown
back violently in the opposite direction and she was knocked flying from
her chair.
Nogo stooped over her and seized her arms, twisting them up behind her
back. He lifted her back into the seat and stood behind her. He held her
in such a surprisingly powerful grip that she could feel the skin of her
upper arms bruising beneath his fingers.
"I have no more time to waste," Helm said quietly, taking the burning
cheroot from his lips to inspect the glowing tip. "Let us start again,
Where is Mek Nimmur?" Tessay's left eardrum felt as if it had burst with
the ferocity of those blows. Her hearing buzzed and sang. Her teeth had
been driven halfway through the flesh of her cheek, and her mouth filled
slowly with her own blood.
"Where is Mek Nimmur?" Helm repeated, leaning his face closer to hers.
"What are your friends doing with the dam in the Dandera river?"
She gathered the blood and saliva in her mouth, and suddenly and
explosively spat it into his face.
He recoiled violently and wiped the bloody mess from his eyes with the
palm of his hand.
Hold herV he said to Nogo, and seized the front of her blouse. With one
heave he ripped it open down to her waist, and Nogo giggled and leaned
forward over her shoulder to look at her breasts. He giggled again as
Helm took one of them in his hand and squeezed out the nipple between
his finger and thumb. It was the dark purple colour of a ripe mulberry.
He held her like that, pinching her flesh with his nails until the skin
tore and a droplet of blood welled up and trickled over his thumb. Then
with his other hand he took the burning cheroot from his lips and blew
on the top until it glowed hotly.
"Where is Mek Nimmur?" he asked, and lowered the cheroot towards her
breast. "WHAt are they doing in the Dandera river?
She stared down in horror as he brought the burning cheroot closer, and
tried to wriggle away from him. But Nogo held her firmly from behind.
She screamed once, on an agonized drawn-out note, as the glowing coal
touched, the tip of her nipple and the delicate skin began to blister.
inter," said Royan, spreading the enlargement of the fourth face of the
stele from Tanus's tomb under the bright glare of the floodlamp. "This
is the side that contains Taita's notations, which I am postulating are
those of the bao board. I don't understand all of them, but by a process
of elimination I have determined that the first symbol denotes one of
the four sides, or as he terms them the castles of the board., She
showed him the pages of her notebook on which she had made her
calculations.
"See here, the seated baboon is the north castle, the bee is the south,
the bird is the west and the scorpion the east." She pointed out to him
the same symbols on the photograph of the stele. "Then the second and
third figures are numbers - I believe that they designate the file and
the cup. With these we can follow the moves of his imaginary red stones.
The reds are the highest-ranking colours on the board."
"What about the verses between each set of notations?" Nicholas asked.
"Such as this one here, about the north wind and the storm?"
"I am not sure about those. Probably merely smoke, screens, if I know
Taita. He is never one to make life too easy for us. Perhaps they do
have significance, but we can only hope to unravel them as we work
through the moves of our stones."
Nicholas studied her figures a while, then grinned ruefully. "Just think
how remote was the possibility that anybody would ever be able to
decipher the clues he left behind. The first requirement is that the
searcher must have access to both chronicles, the seventh scroll and the
stele of Tanus, before he had any chance of understanding the key to the
tomb."
She laughed - a throaty, well'satisfied sound. "Yes, he must have
believed that he was perfectly safe. Well, we will see now, MasteTTaita.
We will see just how clever you really were." Then, sober and
businesslike once more, she looked up the stone staircase that led to
Taita's maze.
"Now we have to see if my figures and theories fit into the hard stones
and walls of Taita's architecture. But where do we start?"
"At the beginning," Nicholas suggested, "the god plays the first coup.
That's what Taita told us. If we start here in the shrine of Osiris, at
the foot of the staircase, then perhaps that will give us the alignment
of his imaginary bao board."
"I had the same idea," she agreed immediately. "Let's postulate that
this is the north castle of Taita board. Then we work the protocol of
the four bulls from here."
It was slow and painstaking work, trying to work their way into the mind