The Anubis Gates

This did nothing to reassure the gypsy, who opened his mouth to voice another respectful objection; but Fikee had turned away and was stalking through the clearing toward the riverbank, his cloak flapping behind him in the wind like the wing-case of some gigantic insect.

The gypsy sighed and slouched away toward one of the tents, practicing a limp that would, he hoped, earn him a dispensation from actually having to help carry the dreadful crate.

Fikee slowly picked his way along the darkening riverbank toward Doctor Romany’s tent. Except for the hoarse sighing of the breeze the evening was oddly silent. The gypsies seemed to realize that something momentous was in the wind tonight, and were slinking about as silently as their dogs, and even the lizards had stopped hopping and splashing among the riverside reeds.

The tent stood in a clearing, at the focus of enough lines and rigging—slung from every nearby tree—for a good-sized ship. The angling ropes, assisted by a dozen upright poles, supported the flapping, bulging, many-layered randomness of Romany’s tent. It looked, thought Fikee, like some huge nun in a particularly cold-weather habit, crouched beside the river in obscure devotion.

Ducking under a couple of ropes, he made his way to the entrance and lifted aside the curtain, and stepped through into the central room, blinking in the brightness that the dozen lamps cast on the draped carpets which formed the walls, floor and ceiling.

Doctor Romany stood up from a table, and Fikee felt a wave of hopeless envy. Why, Fikee asked venomously, hadn’t it been Romanelli who picked that short straw in Cairo last September? Fikee pulled off his drab cloak and hat and flung them in a corner. His bald head gleamed like imperfectly polished ivory in the lamplight.

Romany crossed the room, bobbing grotesquely on his high, spring-soled shoes, and gripped him by the hand. “It’s a great thing we—you—attempt tonight,” he said in a deep muted voice. “I only wish I could be here with you in person.”

Fikee shrugged, a little impatiently. “We are both servants. My post is England, yours is Turkey. I completely understand why it is that you can be present tonight only”—he waved vaguely—”in replica.”

“Needless to say,” Romany intoned, his voice becoming deeper as though trying to wring an echo out of the surrounding carpets, “if it happens that you die tonight, rest assured you will be embalmed and entombed with all the proper ceremonies and prayers.”

“If I fail,” Fikee answered, “there won’t be anybody to pray to.”

“I didn’t say fail. It could be that you will succeed in opening the gates, but die in accomplishing it,” the unruffled Romany pointed out. “In such a case you’d want the proper actions taken.”

“Very well,” said Fikee with a weary nod. “Good,” he added.

There was a sound of shuffling feet from the entry, and then an anxious voice. “Rya? Where would you like the crate? Hurry, I think spirits are coming out of the river to see what’s in it!”

“Not at all unlikely,” muttered Doctor Romany as Fikee instructed the gypsies to carry the thing inside and set it down on the floor. This they hastily did, making their exit as quickly as respectful deportment would permit.

The two very old men stared at the crate in silence for a time, then Fikee stirred and spoke. “I’ve instructed my gypsies that in my… absence, they are to regard you as their chief.”

Romany nodded, then bent over the crate and began wrenching the top boards away. After tossing aside some handfuls of crumpled paper he carefully lifted out a little wooden box tied up with string. He set it on the table. Turning back to the crate, he knocked away the rest of the loosened boards and, grunting with effort, lifted out a paper-wrapped package which he laid on the floor. It was roughly square, three feet on each side and six inches thick.

He looked up and said, “The Book,” unnecessarily, for Amenophis Fikee knew what it was.

“If only he could do it, in Cairo,” he whispered.

“Heart of the British kingdom,” Doctor Romany reminded him. “Or maybe you imagine he could travel?”

Fikee shook his head, and, crouched beside the table, lifted from under it a glass globe with a slide-away section in its side. He set it on the table and then began undoing the knots on the small wooden box. Romany meanwhile had stripped away the package’s paper covering, exposing a black wooden box with bits of ivory inlaid to form hundreds of Old Kingdom Egyptian hieroglyphics. The latch was leather, and so brittle that it crumbled to dust when Romany tried to unfasten it. Inside was a blackened silver box with similar hieroglyphic characters in relief; and when he’d lifted away the lid of that one a gold box lay exposed to view, its finely worked surface blazing in the lamplight.

Fikee had gotten the little wooden box open, and held up a cork-stoppered glass vial that had been nested in cotton inside. The vial contained perhaps an ounce of a thick black fluid that seemed to have sediment in it.