The Seventh Scroll - Smith Wilbur - Страница 142

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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

of the ancient scribe by probing the labyrinth of passages and tunnels

that he had built four thousand years previously. This time they moved

into the maze with more circumspection. Nicholas had filled his pockets

with lumps of dried white river clay, and he used these like a

schoolmaster's stick of chalk to write on the stone walls at each branch

and fork of the tunnels, setting out the notations from the winter face

of the, stele and marking a signpost to enable them not only to find

their way through the maze but to relate it to the model that Royan was

drawing up in her notebook.

They found that their first assumption that the shrine of Osiris was the

north castle of the board seemed to be correct, and they happily

believed that with this as the key it would be a simple matter to follow

the moves of play to their conclusion. But these hopes were soon dashed

as they realized that Taita was not thinking in the simple two

dimensions of the conventional board. He had added the third dimension

to the equation.

The stairway leading up from the shrine of Osiris was not the only link

between the eight landings. Each of the passages leading off from it was

subtly angled either upwards or downwards. As they followed the twists

and turns of one of these tunnels they did not detect the fact that they

were changing levels. Then suddenly they reemerged on to the central

staircase, but on a landing higher than the one they had entered from.

They stood there and stared at each other in horrified disbelief.

Royan spoke first. "I didn't even have the feeling that we were

ascending," she whispered. "The whole thing is infinitely more complex

than I first assumed."

"It must be constructed like one of those nuclear models of some

complicated carbon atom,'Nicholas agreed with awe. "It interlinks on all

eight planes. Quite frankly, it's terrifying."

"Now I have some- inkling what those extraneous symbols signify," Royan

muttered. "They set out the levels.

I We are going to have to rethink the entire concept.

matic rules.

"Three'dimensional bao, played to enig What chance have we got against

him?" Nicholas shook his head ruefully. "What we really need is a

computer. Taita.

without good reason. The wasn't Puffing his own virtues old hooligan

really was a mathematical genius." He shone the lamp back down the

tunnel from which they had come.

"Even when you know it's there you cannot actually see the fall in the

floor level. He designed and built it without even a slide rule or a

spirit level in his back pocket. This maze is an extraordinary piece of

engineering."

"You can form Your fan club later," she suggested. "But right now let's

start grinding those numbers again."

I am going to move the lights and the desks up here, on to this central

landing of the staircase."Nicholas agreed, I think we should work from

the centre of the board. It may help us to visualize it. Right now he

has got me thoroughly confused."

The only sound in the room was the soft on the sobbing of the

woman who lay curled Milan floor in a puddle of her own blood and urine.

Tuma Nogo sat at the long conference table and lit a he looked

cigarette. His hands trembled slightly, and gh the sickened, He was a

soldier, and he had lived through Mengistu terror. He was a hard man and

accustomed to violence and cruelty, but he was shaken with what he had

just witnessed. He knew now why von Schiller placed such The man was

barely human.

reliance on Helm Across the room Jake Helm was washing his hands in

tediously and then dabbed the small basin. He dried them fas at the

stains on his clothing with the towel as he came back and stood over

Tessay.

"I don't think there is anything else she can tell us," he said calmly.

"I don't think she held anything back."

Nogo glanced down at the woman, and saw the livid burns that spotted her

chest and her cheeks like the running ulcerations of some dreadful

smallpox. Her eyes were closed, and her lashes were frizzled away. She

had held out well. It was only when Helm had touched her eyelids with

the burning cheroot that she had at last capitulated, and gabbled out

the answers to his questions.

Nogo felt queasy, but he was relieved that it had not been necessary to

hold her lids open, as Helm had ordered, and to watch as he quenched the

flame of the cheroot against her weeping eyeballs.

"Watch her," Helm ordered, as he rolled down his sleeves. "She is a

tough one. Don't take any chances with her."

Helm walked past him, and went to the door in the far end of the hut. He

left the door open, and Nogo could hear their voices, but they were

speaking in German so he could not understand what they were saying. He

understood now why von Schiller had chosen not to be present during the

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