The Exodus Quest dk-2 Read online

  'Go back to the site. If anyone asks, tell them you drove around for a while but saw nothing. Understand?'

  'Yes, Reverend. And you?'

  'Don't worry about me. Just get out of here.'

  'Yes, Reverend.'

  Peterson watched him drive away. That was the trouble with kids. Their clay was too soft, not yet fired by the furnaces of righteous conflict. He'd have to handle this all by himself. He climbed down to the foot of the ditch, keeping clear of the worst of the carnage. He had a camera-phone to recover.

  THIRTEEN

  I

  Fatima allowed a few moments of silence to pass before responding to Stafford, perhaps so that he might see for himself just how ugly and excessive his vehemence had been. Then she said quietly: 'Refute it? Refute what, exactly?'

  Stafford looked confused. 'My thesis.'

  'But you promised me evidence,' replied Fatima, her voice so low that Gaille had to strain to hear her. 'How can I refute this thesis of yours until I've heard your evidence?'

  Stafford looked blankly at her. 'How do you mean? I've just given you my evidence.'

  'Really?' frowned Fatima. 'You call that evidence. All I've heard so far is speculation. Well-informed speculation, I admit. But speculation nonetheless.'

  'How can you say that?'

  'My dear Mister Stafford, let me explain something. I do not personally believe in the Bible or its God. But perhaps you do. Perhaps you believe that He created the world in seven days, and that those animals Noah took aboard his ark were the only ones to survive the flood, and that we speak different languages because God took offence at mankind's effort to reach the heavens by building the Tower of Babel? Is that what you believe?'

  'I've already said I don't take the Bible literally.'

  'Ah. Yet you still believe that we should consider it as somehow special, as having validity even when it is contradicted by the historical and archaeological record?'

  'I'm not saying that.'

  'I'm glad to hear it. For let me tell you what I think of the Bible. I think it is the folk-history of a particular Canaanite people. No more, no less. And I think its historical validity should be assessed as scrupulously as any other folk-history, not accorded special treatment just because many people still consider it sacred. You'd agree with that, wouldn't you? As a fellow historian, I mean?'

  'Yes.'

  'Good. Now if you want to test folk-history for validity, do you know what you must first do? You must discard it completely from your mind, then interrogate the independent record until you've established the truth as far as possible, and only then refer back to your folk-history to see how well it fits. Any other approach is special pleading. And do you know something?'

  'What?'

  'Do it that way and the Bible falls apart, particularly the early books. There's no evidence whatsoever to suggest its stories are true. There's no evidence that the Jews existed as a distinct people in the time of Akhenaten, or that they lived in Egypt in any great numbers, or that they left in some mass exodus.'

  A flush in Stafford's cheeks, a cocktail of alcohol and defiance. 'So where did those stories come from, then?'

  'Who can say? Many were clearly borrowed from other, older cultures. There are recognizable traces of the Mesopotamian Epic of Gilgamesh, for example. Others seem to be variations on the same story, presumably because the writers of the Bible wanted to drum home their moral message. Man makes covenant with God. Man breaks covenant. God punishes man. Again and again this same motif. Adam and Eve evicted from Eden. Cain exiled for murdering Abel. Lot's wife turned to salt. Abraham fleeing Egypt. Babel. Noah. Isaac. Jacob. The list goes on and on. Because it isn't history. It's propaganda. Specifically, it's religious propaganda, put together after the Jews had been defeated by the Babylonians to convince them that they'd brought their destruction and exile upon themselves by failing in their obligations to their God.'

  She broke off a moment, sipped water to moisten her mouth and throat, forced a smile to release some tension. 'Do you know something?' she said. 'Whenever historians have been able to test folklore against known history, they've discovered what one might expect: that it proves reasonably accurate for events within living memory, but the further back one goes, the less reliable it becomes, until it bears almost no relation to the truth. With one exception. Founding myths typically have a seed of truth in them.

  'So let's apply this to the Jewish people. Their founding myth is clearly the Exodus. The Bible is built around it. So I'm quite prepared to accept some sort of flight from Egypt. The trouble is, the only evidence of such an exodus during the second millennium BC is that of the Hyksos. But the Hyksos were a full two centuries before Amarna. So how is it that this mass flight of yours left no imprint? We're not talking about a few hundred people, remember. Not even thousands. According to the Bible, we're talking about over half the population of Egypt. Even allowing for massive exaggeration, don't you think that someone would have noticed? Do you know, Mister Stafford, there's a stele recording the flight of two slaves from Egypt to Canaan? Two! Yet you'd have us believe that tens of thousands of valuable artisans suddenly upped and left, and no one said a word. And don't you think someone would have found some trace of their forty years in Sinai? Any trace. Archaeologists have found settlements from pre-dynastic times, from dynastic times, from the Graeco-Roman and Islamic eras. But from the Exodus? Nothing. Not a coin, not a potsherd, not a grave, not a campfire. And it's not for lack of looking, believe me.'

  'Absence of evidence isn't evidence of absence,' observed Stafford.

  'Yes, it is,' countered Fatima. 'That's exactly what it is. Not proof of absence, I grant you. But evidence, certainly. If the Hebrews had spent significant time there, they'd have left traces. No traces means no Hebrews. To argue otherwise is simply perverse. And where we do find evidence, it flatly contradicts the biblical account. You mentioned Jericho, the city felled by Joshua's trumpets. If your thesis is correct, it should show evidence of destruction circa 1300 BC. But the archaeological data is conclusive. Jericho wasn't even occupied at that time. It was destroyed in the sixteenth century BC and left virtually abandoned through to the tenth.'

  'Yes, but-'

  'The early Bible is make-believe, Mister Stafford. It wasn't even written until after the Babylonian exile, circa five hundred BC; over eight hundred years after the death of Akhenaten.'

  'From records that go back much further.'

  'According to whom? Do you have any of these records? Or are you just assuming their existence? And if they did exist, how would you explain all the anachronisms? Camels in Egypt a thousand years before they were actually introduced. Cities like Ramses and Sais that weren't founded for hundreds of years after Akhenaten. A landscape of kingdoms that didn't exist in the thirteenth century BC, yet which maps almost exactly onto the seventh and sixth.'

  'What about the parallels between the religions?' asked Stafford weakly. 'You can't deny those.'

  Fatima shook her head dismissively. 'Eighteenth Dynasty Egypt was the great regional power. Its armies occupied Canaan for hundreds of years. Even after their occupation ended, they remained Canaan's key trading partner. Their practices and rituals were admired and emulated just as French and British practices are still visible in former colonies. As for their monotheism, have you considered the possibility that it might just be a coincidence? Monotheism isn't complex. It's "my god's bigger than your god" taken to its logical extreme. Long before Akhenaten proclaimed the Aten the Sole God, Egyptians had done the same for Atum.'

  'Yes, but-'

  'And let's compare the gods themselves. The Aten enjoys an exclusive relationship with Akhenaten. The God of Moses makes His covenant with every single Jew. The Aten is notional and pacific, an aesthete's God. The God of Moses is vengeful, jealous and violent. Or take their creation myths. Actually, you can't. The Aten has no creation myth; Genesis has two. The God of Moses dwelt in the enclosed Holy of Holies; the Aten was worshipped in wide-open s
paces. Read how Moses received the Ten Commandments: it couldn't be clearer that his God is a volcano God. But there are no volcanoes in Egypt or in Sinai.' She shook her head angrily. 'Let me tell you something. You claim that I have my head in the sand because I assert there's no connection between Akhenaten and Moses. But you're wrong. All I assert is that there's no evidence for such a connection. I'm an archaeologist, Mister Stafford. Bring me evidence and I'll gladly endorse your views. Until then…' And she gave a dismissive little wave of her hand.

  Stafford's jaw clenched tight as walnuts in his cheeks. 'Then it seems we'll just have to agree to disagree,' he said.

  'Yes,' agreed Fatima. 'It does.'

  II

  Peterson knelt beside Omar Tawfiq on the far bank, rough diamonds of shattered glass shining pale blue in the moonlight all around. His head was twisted back in a hideous and unnatural position, his lacerated face covered with both fresh and congealing blood. Peterson was so sure he was dead that it gave him a jolt when he opened his mouth suddenly and gasped in air.

  The Jeep was lying on its side, screeching and groaning and hissing, as if it too were in great pain. He squatted down to look through the empty frame of the windscreen. Knox was belted into the driver's seat, slumped against the driver's door, his hair slick and glistening, the bubbles of blood at the corner of his mouth expanding and shrinking as he breathed. He opened his eyes, looked at Peterson with a faint flicker of recognition. Then his gaze went distant and his eyes closed once more.

  Peterson rested his hand on the buckled bonnet, reached through the vacant windscreen, rummaged around in search of Knox's mobile phone. He patted down his right-side trouser pocket and found only a wallet, which he left. He strained to reach his left trouser pocket, felt something compact and hard inside, though he couldn't quite get hold of it. He tried to release the seat belt instead, pull Knox towards him, reach his phone that way, but the catch had jammed and wouldn't come free. He backed away, frustrated, squatted down, thinking it through.

  Severe concussion tended to destroy short-term memory, he knew. As a young man, before finding God, he'd fallen off the roof of a house he'd been breaking into, had come to his senses lying on the asphalt drive, his partner-in-crime laughing his head off. To this day, he had no memory of what had happened in the twelve hours leading up to his fall. So it was quite possible, even probable, that Knox wouldn't recall the crash or the events leading up to it. But what if he did? What if he survived and remembered everything? So the question was, was there a simple way to take care both of the camera-phone and of Knox?

  Such questions were beyond the wisdom of mortal man, but that didn't make them unanswerable. Peterson knelt at the foot of the ditch and bowed his head in prayer. The Lord always spoke to those with ears to hear. He didn't even have to wait long. The numbers twenty and thirteen began to blaze like bonfires in his mind's eye. They could surely only refer to Leviticus 20:13. If a man also lie with mankind, as he lieth with a woman, both of them have committed an abomination: they shall surely be put to death; their blood shall be upon them. So be it. When the Lord spoke with such clarity, man's only task was to obey. He went around to the exposed undercarriage. A small puddle of diesel had collected on the dried-out mud bank, dripping from a hairline fracture in the tank. His 4x4 had a cigarette lighter in its dash. He pushed it in, went hunting for a rock. He found a goodly chunk of flint, took it back down to the Jeep, hammered at the tank until the drips of diesel turned to a stream and the puddle became a pool. He went back up again, tore a strip of paper from his car-hire documentation, lit it from the orange coils of the cigarette lighter, nursed it back down the slope, dropped it into the pool of diesel, leapt back before it could take his eyebrows.

  It went up with a violent whoomp like a great orange balloon launching into the night sky. But after its first furious blaze, it burned itself out, leaving soft flames licking at the Jeep's undercarriage; and though the fabric of the ripped seats was smouldering with a rich black choking smoke, much of it was escaping through the broken windows, sucking the fresh air back in.

  Peterson scowled. Even should Knox asphyxiate, he'd still need to retrieve his phone. He knelt once more on the buckled bonnet, poked his head inside, braving the intense heat. The seat belt was still jammed. He worked furiously at the release, tugging, jiggling and pushing until finally it came free. He gave himself a momentary respite from the fierce heat and smoke, then went back in, grabbed Knox's collar, hauled him forwards while reaching for his pocket and-

  'Hey!'

  Peterson guiltily let go of Knox, jumped backwards. Two men in fluorescent yellow bibs were standing on top of the ditch, spotlighting him with their torches. The taller scrambled down, the name Shareef emblazoned in a Highways Maintenance badge upon his chest. He said something in Arabic.

  Peterson shook his head blankly. 'I'm American,' he said.

  Shareef switched to English. 'What happened?'

  'I found them like this,' said Peterson. He nodded at Knox. 'This one's still alive. I was trying to get him out before the smoke gets to him.'

  Shareef nodded. 'I help you, yes?'

  'Thank you.' They hauled Knox out through the windscreen, over to the bank, laid him gently down. The second highway maintenance man was carrying on a fraught conversation on his mobile. 'What's going on?' asked Peterson.

  'Big crash in Hannoville,' explained Shareef. 'No ambulances. The hospital ask can we bring them in ourselves.' He nodded at his own vehicle, just a cab with a crane on the back, then at Peterson's Toyota, still parked by the bridge. 'We take yours, yes?'

  Peterson nodded, trapped. Argue now, he'd only raise suspicions. 'Where's the hospital?' he asked.

  'Follow us,' said Shareef, stooping to pick Knox up once more. 'We show you.'

  FOURTEEN

  I

  The evening meal was cleared away, coffee brought in its place. Gaille clasped her hands beneath the table and wondered how quickly she could excuse herself. Perhaps Lily sensed her restlessness, for she leaned forwards into the candlelight. 'I was fascinated by the talatat Gaille showed me earlier. She hinted you might have something interesting to share with us.'

  'Yes,' agreed Fatima. She turned to Gaille. 'You don't need to be here for this, my dear. Perhaps you should update our Digging Diary.'

  Gaille felt a prick of shame. 'I can do it tomorrow,' she said.

  'Please,' said Fatima. 'It doesn't pay to fall behind.'

  Gaille nodded and stood. 'Goodnight, then,' she said, touching Fatima's shoulder in gratitude as she passed.

  'Are we all set for the morning?' asked Lily. 'Only we really need to film the sun rising over Amarna.'

  'You may not find that possible,' said Fatima, answering for Gaille. 'The ferry won't start running until dawn. You should film from the west bank anyway. That's how Akhenaten first saw it.'

  'We'll need to leave by a quarter to five,' said Gaille. 'That should give us plenty of time.' She nodded goodnight, trying not to let any resentment show as she closed the door.

  It reopened almost immediately, however, and Lily came out. 'I'm really sorry about this, Gaille,' she said.

  'Sorry about what?'

  'About manoeuvring you into coming with us tomorrow.'

  'It's okay.'

  'It's not okay. I've used your good nature against you, we all have, don't think we don't know it. And I just wanted to say sorry. I hate doing things like that to good people. If anyone tried it on me…'

  Gaille laughed. 'It's fine,' she said; and suddenly it was.

  Lily gave a rueful yet charming smile. 'This is my first overseas assignment. I don't want it to be my last.'

  'You're doing great.'

  She threw a glance at the door. 'That's not what he thinks.'

  'Don't worry about him. I've worked with his kind before. He'll think himself wonderful and everyone else awful no matter what happens. The only thing you can do is not let it get to you.'

  'I won't. And thanks again.'

/>   Gaille found herself in an unexpectedly good mood as she reached her room, humming a half-remembered tune as she turned on her laptop and connected to the Internet. Their Digging Diary did need an update, though it wasn't exactly urgent, especially considering the precious little traffic the site got. But Fatima liked keeping it fresh. Anything to spread the word. She posted a summary of recent finds, added a photograph, her mind wandering back to the dinner table, wondering what Fatima was telling Lily and Stafford about the talatat they'd found.

  Akhenaten had routinely been portrayed with breasts in sculptures and paintings. Some said it was the prevailing artistic style; others attributed it to disease. But one statue showed him completely naked, and not only did he have breasts but he had a perfectly smooth groin too, no hint of genitalia. In some cultures this might have been prudery, but Eighteenth Dynasty artists had been anything but coy. Some had argued that Akhenaten must therefore have been a woman, like Hatshepsut, who'd disguised her sex to ascend the throne. Others had even claimed Akhenaten an hermaphrodite. But then it had been pointed out that the statue had been designed to wear a kilt in antiquity, so that drawing such extravagant conclusions from it was completely unsafe. Yet their cache of talatat threatened to revive the controversy, for Gaille had assembled a plausible portrait of Akhenaten, naked, with pronounced breasts, yet without genitalia. And that was what Fatima was telling Stafford and Lily right now.

  Her update finished, Gaille yawned, eager for bed. But she checked her hotmail account just in case. Her heart gave a little jolt when she saw she had an email from Knox. She opened it up.

  Took the attached at poss Therapeutae site! Light terrible. Can you help? All speed appreciated!

  I miss you.

  Daniel. She reached out and touched the screen, fingertips tingling with static. She'd had many reasons for accepting Fatima's invitation to join her team for a month's work, but the strongest had been her growing certainty that having Knox's friendship wasn't going to be enough for her. She'd needed his respect as well.