The Messiah Secret

‘Hang on, let me work this out,’ Bronson said. ‘That makes “TAY”. What about this chicken here?’

‘That is not a chicken. It’s a quail chick, and it stands for “W”. All those symbols are consonants, part of the Egyptian alphabet, which is almost all consonants, but the next one is a fire stick or drill, and that’s a determinative. Because the hieroglyphic language is pictorial, there can be two or more different meanings of a series of symbols.’

‘Like a rebus, you mean?’

Angela blinked. ‘I’m impressed,’ she said. ‘Though I have to confess that I don’t know exactly what a “rebus” is – apart from being the name of Ian Rankin’s detective, of course.’

‘It’s a modern type of pictorial statement,’ Bronson said. ‘Kids’ stuff really. Like a drawing of an eye, followed by a heart, followed by the letter “U”. That means “I love you”,’ he said, firmly holding Angela’s gaze as he said the words.

She blushed, and looked away. ‘OK – back to the hieroglyphics. The determinatives simply eliminated any confusion over the way the other letters – the consonants – were to be sounded and what they meant.’ She gestured towards the paper again. ‘Next is another two leaves – a “Y” – and finally a “T” with another determinative – the cross in the circle, which means a city.’

‘You said you read hieratic and demotic script from right to left, but hieroglyphics are from left to right, just like English?’ Bronson asked.

‘Not necessarily. In fact, they were usually written from right to left, but they could also be read from left to right, or downwards.’

‘Wonderful. So how did anyone know where to start?’

‘That was really easy,’ Angela said, and pointed at the drawing she’d done. ‘See the vulture and the quail chick?’ Bronson nodded. ‘There were a lot of animal symbols used in hieroglyphics – birds and snakes, and so on – and they were always drawn in profile. The two birds in this hieroglyphic word are facing to the left, so that’s the end you start reading from. If they’d been facing to the right, you’d have to read the word from right to left.’ She drained the last of her Coke and stood up. ‘Come on,’ she said. ‘I’ll tell you as we drive. We’ve still got a long way to go.’

Donovan had got steadily hotter and more irritated as the minutes passed, but kept his eyes fixed on his rear-view mirrors. Two figures were now moving slowly across the café’s dusty parking lot towards their car.

He pressed the button to open the boot, checked the mirror to ensure that it had lifted – that would make the number plate on the boot lid itself effectively unreadable – and walked around to the front of his Mercedes. He stood right beside the front number plate to shield that as well. As Bronson’s car accelerated past him, heading south, he lifted his arm to the front of the bonnet to make sure his face was invisible to the occupants of the passing car. In his white shirt and light-coloured trousers he would, he hoped, look like just any other motorist with a broken-down vehicle, wondering what the hell to do next.

When they were safely past him, he closed the bonnet and boot of his car and walked back to the driver’s side door, sitting down gratefully in the seat and switching on the engine, relishing the blast of ice-cold air that almost immediately poured out of the dashboard vents.

He waited until three other cars had passed him, then pulled back out on to the road. Bronson’s Peugeot was now at least five hundred yards in front of him, but still clearly visible.

All he had to do now was to find out where they were going.

35

The road stretched long and straight ahead of them, shimmering in the noon-day heat.

Angela adjusted one of the dashboard vents to direct cold air straight at her face. ‘El-Hiba is one of those places that not many people have heard of, under any of its names. As well as Tayu-djayet and el-Hiba, in Coptic it was called Teudjo and much later, in the Graeco–Roman Period it was called Ankyronpolis.’

Bronson settled back in his driving seat. ‘I can see that the Coptic and Egyptian words are pretty similar, but how did they come up with Ankyronpolis?’

‘It was a Greek name. Alexander the Great conquered Egypt in three hundred and thirty-two BC, and founded the city of Alexandria. When he died, his generals divided up his vast empire and one of them – a man named Ptolemy I Soter – eventually seized power in Egypt and created a dynasty that would rule the country for almost three hundred years. It was called the Ptolemaic Period – a mind-numbingly obvious name to choose because every king or pharaoh took the name Ptolemy, one after the other. The only breaks were the handful of women who ruled for short periods. They usually adopted the name Arsinoe, Berenice or Cleopatra. The last one was Cleopatra VII – the lover of Antony. When she died in thirty BC, that ended the Ptolemaic Dynasty.