Брайан Ламли - Khai of Khem

“But what of you? Will you take a Queen, Manek?”

“A Queen?” Manek looked surprised, then showed his teeth in a grin. “That I will! She lives in the village of Thon Emahl, in Kush. She’s Thon’s widow, though I knew her before he did. I gave her up for … for the throne of Kush!”

“Well,” Khai answered, nodding, “now you shall have both.” He clasped the other’s arm. “Now we shall both have our hearts’ desires. Isn’t it enough, Manek?”

“More than enough!” Manek laughed. “Well, come on. What are we waiting for? If we make good time, we can be home in three days!”

“Two!” Khai answered, and he also laughed. And in his mind, he pictured Ashtarta’s marquee and a certain chamber within it where the walls were of purple linen. But what use to dwell on memories when the real thing waited for him at the end of a chariot ride?

The two men climbed aboard their vehicle’s platform and Khai took the reins. He wheeled his horses round and aimed them westward, then shook the reins and laughed again as he gave the animals their head….

Wilfred Sommers watched the Egypt-Air jet take off and climb into the sun. He watched it until it was little more than a silver sliver in the sky, then turned and made his way from the airport lounge, through the crowded foyer and out to the car park. As he drove back to the museum, he managed to get his thoughts sorted out a little, so that by the time he climbed the museum’s stairs to the second floor he believed he finally understood something of what had happened. More than that he could not, dared not admit to believing. But the whole thing had impressed him deeply and it was not something he would soon forget.

For the tenth time, he pictured the meeting between Paul Arnott and Omar Dassam as he had seen it less than a week ago. They had met; Dassam had given Arnott a ring which he had slipped onto his finger; then—

Sommers shook his head as he made his way along aisles of relics toward his father’s private rooms. The transformation had been amazing, frightening. There had been recognition in the eyes of the two men, real recognition, and something else. That other something had seemed to span untold centuries of time, had reached out from the past to bind both men in an unbreakable spell. Sommers and his father had felt nothing physical, nothing really ... tangible. And yet there had been—yes, something.

Arnott had finally broken the spell, when in an instant he changed from a civilized man into—into what? Whatever, his totally unexpected attack on Dassam had been like greased lightning. The other man had not known what hit him, and yet at the same time, he seemed somehow to expect it. Arnott struck two blows, so that his victim was already unconscious and falling when he was snatched up and hurled headlong through the old hardwood paneling of the study into the next room. And still not satisfied, Arnott had been after him with a bound—doubtless to finish the job—when his hang-gliding injury caught up with him. Then he had collapsed against the wall, crumpling in a moment, and all of that primal power had seemed to drain out of him. Just as well, for Sommers and his father had known that he was intent upon killing the other man, the stranger from Egypt.

And what of that exchange between them, before Arnott’s attack? There had been recognition in that, too. They had spoken, nothing in the English tongue, words in a language dead and gone for thousands of years. That was Sir George’s guess, at any rate, and it was that chiefly which had determined the elder Sommers perspective of the thing, his explanation of what he thought had happened. His son had more or less come to agree with his theory, though when first he heard it, he could not help but compare it to Paul Arnott’s own wild fancies. And yet how else could any of it be explained?

But for all the Sommers’s talk of race-memory—of Arnott’s instinctive fear of Egypt, despite his fascination with the subject; of his being a throwback to some forgotten race of men whose homeland had been in or near the Nile Valley—still their concept could only remain one of purest conjecture. Never in a million years could they have guessed how close they were to the truth of things.

Dassam had not been seriously injured by Arnott’s attack and had recovered a few minutes later when Wilfred Sommers applied smelling salts. Arnott, on the other hand, had been taken back into hospital. He, too, as it worked out, was lucky. He had done himself no permanent damage; indeed something seemed to have clicked back into place, so that within a few days, he was out of hospital permanently and free at last of his “concrete breastplate.”

Moreover, there had been ... changes.

Changes in both men, inexplicable alterations in memory, character and mood. The one, Dassam, seemed to have lost something: the element of instinctive drive visible in him before was no longer there. He was no longer searching. He could not explain his coming to England, his purpose in approaching the elder Sommers with his find, that prehistoric funerary mask from the foothills of the Gilf Kebir. Indeed, he seemed horrified that he had dared smuggle the thing out of his country and into England in the first place, and he couldn’t wait to take it back and hand it over to the rightful authorities.

Sir George could only agree with Dassam’s sentiments in this matter, and he further agreed to say nothing of the affair, but simply pretend that it had never happened.

As for Paul Arnott: paradoxically, he seemed to have both lost and found something. He was much less restless, had lost all of his old moodiness, was no longer continually bothered by dim dreams of far, fabulous places and half-remembered occurrences in a world which existed in an age when saber-tooths still prowled England and the last mammoths still wandered the Siberian plains. On the other hand, he now seemed to know where he was going and what he was doing. He had … direction.

He had been shocked when he was reminded of his attack upon Dassam, for apparently he could not recall it, knew nothing at all of it, would not accept that it had ever happened—until Wilfred Sommers visited him in the hospital and brought the Egyptian with him, and he saw Dassam’s face: the badly bruised jaw and blackened eye. And even then he had difficulty accepting the fact that he was to blame.

Finally, there was the matter of the two rings which Dassam had found with the golden mask. When Sir George had asked the Egyptian if he intended to hand them over also, he had declared that that was not his intention. One of the rings belonged to him—the other belonged to “Khai.” Afterwards he had not known why he had called Arnott by that name, and he never used it again....

Now Sommers had reached the door to his father’s study and he knocked before entering. Sir George was pacing the floor, deep in thought. After a while, he stopped his pacing and looked up. The two faced each other and each knew what the other was thinking. Then Sir George smiled and his son joined him.

“Did everything go all right?” the elder Sommers asked.

“Oh, yes, the plane got off OK,” Wilfred answered.

“And Omar is sure he can smuggle the mask back in again?”

“He thinks so, yes.”

For a moment, the older man was silent, then he said: “It has all been very strange, but now it’s over.”

“Is it?” His son seemed doubtful.

“You think there’s something else?”

“I don’t think we’ve seen the last of Paul, no,”

“Ah!” his father thought he understood. “You think he’ll make some great discovery up there in the Gilf Kebir, do you? You believe that he and Omar will have a successful dig, is that it?”