Oath Bound - Book V of The Order of the Air Read online

  OATH BOUND

  Book Five of The Order of the Air

  By Melissa Scott and Jo Graham

  A Mystique Press Production

  Mystique Press is an imprint of Crossroad Press

  Digital Edition published by Crossroad Press

  Digital Edition Copyright © 2015 Melissa Scott and Jo Graham

  Cover artwork by Jack Moik

  LICENSE NOTES

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  Meet the Authors

  Melissa Scott is from Little Rock, Arkansas, and studied history at Harvard College and Brandeis University, where she earned her PhD in the Comparative History program. She is the author of more than thirty science fiction and fantasy novels, and has won Lambda Literary Awards for Trouble and Her Friends, Shadow Man, and Point of Dreams, the last written with her late partner, Lisa A. Barnett. She has also won Spectrum Awards for Shadow Man and again in 2010 for the short story “The Rocky Side of the Sky” (Periphery, Lethe Press) as well as the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer. She can be found online at mescott.livejournal.com.

  Jo Graham worked in politics for fifteen years before leaving to write full time. She is the author of the Locus Award nominated Black Ships and the Spectrum Award nominated Stealing Fire, as well as several other novels, including the Stargate Atlantis Legacy series and The General’s Mistress. She lives in North Carolina with her partner and their daughter. She can be found online at jo_graham.livejournal.com.

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  OATH BOUND

  Alexandria, Egypt

  December 25, 1935

  The Night Market was in full bloom. Lanterns hung on ropes across the narrow alleys of the Souk el-Attarine, and he stood, uncertain, in the shadows. Behind him a winding street led to the archaeological dig, now locked behind a board fence. The Metropolitan Museum of Art had an excavation in progress, and he was well acquainted with that institution. He paused. The dig, or into the bazaar?

  Even with his heavy cloak drawn up over his head, he was a striking man. Broad-shouldered and strongly built, he looked even taller than his six foot three inches, but he did not move clumsily at all, as so many big men did. He moved like a hunter, or a man who is used to being prey in a far more dangerous game. His skin was dark, his face clean shaven, his hair cut close against his scalp. Perhaps he was in his mid-forties, but there was no heaviness or complacence to his face. At least not anymore. That belonged behind, in another world.

  The dig or the bazaar? Music floated down the streets of the souk, emerging from restaurants left and right where crowds broke their fast, dining with friends and family at nearly midnight, keeping Ramadan or if they were Copts, keeping the feast of Christmas. Enticing odors wafted out too, chicken roasted with dates, couscous with pumpkin and honey… His stomach growled, but he could not be distracted, and sitting down to dinner in a conspicuous public place was a good way to ensure this meal would be his last.

  They had followed him as far as Cairo. He knew that. Two men lay dead in an alley there, and he had bandaged the long cut along his ribs, hoping that in Alexandria there would be sulfa. He hoped there were no more pursuers. Of course there were. Of course there would be. But at least he’d bought breathing room at the price of two corpses left in an alley, two mysteries for the government and the British military.

  He was running out of time. Thousands of years, and now there was no time. He carried a secret that could not wait, and there was only one man who could help him. At this time of day that man was most likely to be in the souk. He winced as the cut along his ribs pulled. A doctor, yes, but not until his mission was accomplished. For this he had killed and for this he had seen his friend die. For this he had left the battle behind, sneaking like a criminal through Egypt at his king’s command, a coward’s act were it not that he preserved something even more precious than their own blood.

  “You carry the future,” the emperor had said, “when you carry the past. Our ancient treasures define us as a people, and they must survive if we are to triumph in the end. I trust that you will succeed, Ras Iskinder.”

  He would, or die trying.

  Yes, to go into the souk would be dangerous, but there he would find Dr. Jerry Ballard.

  Alexandria, Egypt

  December 27, 1935

  “Alexandria,” Dr. Jerry Ballard said. He stood at the balustrade looking west over the harbor from its easternmost point, the perfect half circle of the corniche golden against the blue-green water of the Mediterranean. The Silsilah Peninsula jutted out, and from this point he could see the entire expanse of the Eastern Harbor, its docks busy with fishing boats that might have plied these waters for thousands of years. Most of the steamships used the Western Harbor these days because of the silting. Across on the barrier island a stubby Ottoman fort marked where the great Lighthouse had once stood, its beams visible far out to sea. The sea breeze tugged at his linen suit, cooling even through the tight weave, and Jerry lifted his face into the wind. “Alexandria,” he said. “City of dreams.”

  “City of bad traffic, you mean.” His colleague – and lover – Dr. Willi Radke said at his side. Not ten feet behind them an autobus was honking furiously as the traffic along the corniche snarled.

  “It’s always been that way,” Jerry said. “I expect they had traffic jams here in the first century BC.”

  “Camel jams?” Willi raised an eyebrow beneath his impeccable Panama hat.

  “Possibly,” Jerry said, a twist of his mouth the only sign of his amusement. “Though when the city was founded there weren’t any camels. It’s a common mistake to believe that the camel is indigenous to Egypt. In fact, when a Bactrian camel was given to Ptolemy Soter as a gift, it was regarded as a great oddity, and when it died…”

  Willi held up his hands, laughing. “Peace! Peace! I am on your ground fairly, and I shall accept all correction as to camels or camel-less-ness!”

  “Well, since you’re not a Classicist…” Though Dr. Wilhelm Radke was a noted archaeologist, his area of expertise was East Asia rather than the Mediterranean world. He would not have been on this dig at all, and certainly not in a coveted position, if
not for the merest happenstance. Dr. Justin, who had been contracted by the Metropolitan Museum of Art to oversee the photography and to handle the still crucial job of draftsman, had fallen in Mesopotamia and broken his leg, putting him out of the field for months of this season. Since Dr. Radke had been on the same steamer for Europe as Dr. Ballard — Radke returning to Berlin after delivering a series of guest lectures at Yale, and Ballard on his way to assume his job of excavation director on this dig — the search for a qualified substitute for Justin had been made considerably easier. Some might wonder why Radke would take a job so far out of his field, but perhaps he had no desire to return to a German winter when he might spend it pleasantly in warm Alexandria. And of course a job is a job. The Great Depression had not loosened its hold.

  But this was a remarkable job. After three years of angling and preparation, the Met was digging in Alexandria in search of the lost tomb of Alexander the Great, and Jerry was the dig’s excavation director. It was the culmination of a lifetime of dreams.

  Jerry looked out across the harbor again. It was so easy, with a little archaeological imagination, to see it as it had been. The fishing boats didn’t need to change much, nor the shape of the corniche. The stubby fort transformed itself in his mind into the towering shape of the Lighthouse, one of the Wonders of the World. He did not even need to close his eyes to see it — the Silsilah Peninsula longer and crowded with the palaces of the Royal Quarter, colonnades and terraces rising in gleaming white marble, laden with flowering plants and statues.

  “Just there,” Jerry said, pointing to a place among the docks of the fishing boats, “is where they found the Lochias Kouros, in eight feet of water, if you can believe that! I did some work on that statue a few years ago.” He smiled at Willi, at the miracle of such a find. “He was completely intact except for his feet and dated to the upper third century BC, an extraordinary example of Hellenistic syncretism.” He pointed to the harbor as he spoke. “The coastline has changed since the Classical period. This harbor is both wider and shallower than it was then, and Silsilah was once a larger peninsula that extended much farther, even with the tip of the barrier island. Most of what would have been the Royal Quarter and the surrounding buildings is now underwater. Which is probably why the statue was there. Perhaps it originally stood in an interior courtyard of the palace of the Ptolemies. Or it might have been one of the statues along the exterior terraces.”

  Willi frowned. “It can’t be underwater, can it?” Even here he did not name the Soma, the lost tomb. The Met’s dig was to find the Pylon of Isis rather than the tomb of Alexander, and they both knew that the Met’s permit would never have been approved if they had breathed a word about the Soma. That permit would have been reserved for others – for the British Museum or for the Egyptian Museum in Cairo itself.

  Jerry shook his head. “Its location is a matter of contention among scholars, but nobody places it along the harbor. Most likely it was back from the Royal Quarter, still within the line of the Roman walls, but inland from the palaces.” And that was what the medallion showed, the apparently ordinary Ptolemaic medallion Jerry had found three years earlier whose reverse captured a photorealistic image of Alexandria from the harbor and showed the domed roof of the Soma amid other buildings whose locations were known.

  Willi nodded, turning his head to look southward as if mentally matching the scene before him to the scene on the medallion.

  Jerry had already done that a thousand times. There in the harbor was the fort that marked the location of the lighthouse. There, just behind where Pompey’s Pillar was a modern tourist attraction, had been the majesty and grace of the Serapeum, one of the great temples of the ancient world destroyed by a Christian mob in the fourth century. Jerry felt the loss of the Serapeum like an ache in his bones, like a phantom pain in his lost leg, though of course it was that the archaeologist in him regretted its treasures. And there, somewhere in that tangle of buildings where they were preparing to dig, was the location of the Pylon of Isis. With those three points it would be possible to triangulate and find the location of the Soma.

  “There,” he said, pointing to the posh neighborhood full of British colonial houses and European consulates nestled amid walled gardens replete with orange trees. “In that area.” The Soma most likely lay beneath the modern neighborhood south of the Silsilah Peninisula. “There were gardens behind the palaces,” he said. “The tombs of the Ptolemies were in those gardens with their votive temples, beyond the first city wall. Just outside it were the oldest tombs, like the Alabaster Tomb which was found in 1907. It’s a glorious example of syncretism dating to the reign of the first Ptolemy, with many elements of Macedonian funerary architecture done in Egyptian materials. Most likely it belonged to a prominent official of Ptolemy Soter who had come to Egypt with him.”

  “And what does that tell us?” Willi asked.

  Jerry dropped his voice. “From the Roman sources who visited, it seems clear that in their era the Soma was near the other royal tombs. It may originally have been in a more central location, and indeed there was a Street of the Soma in another part of town west of here, but the body of Alexander was moved in the second century to a grander building that was part of the palace complex.” Jerry looked toward the distant trees. “It was the most beautiful building of the ancient world, lovelier even than the Serapeum. You approached it through lush gardens from the palace side, and from the other it was near the wall and the street. You came through a gate with your offerings and up a walk lined with sphinxes…”

  Willi’s eyebrows rose. “Is that documented?”

  “Deduced,” Jerry said, flushing. “With some archeological imagination.” He shrugged. “And of course we know…”

  The medallion. It was completely consistent with the medallion. Finding the Pylon of Isis would allow them to triangulate three known sites and find the fourth – the Soma itself.

  “Finding the Pylon of Isis is the key,” Willi said.

  The diggers were all Copts rather than Muslims. Unfortunately for the Met, this year Ramadan fell in November and December, at the beginning of prime digging season. Since it was impractical to hire Muslims to work all day in the sun during Ramadan, Peavey, the Met’s full time liaison in Alexandria, had suggested Jerry hire Copts instead. Since they were Christian, the only days they would expect off would be Christmas Eve and Christmas day, when Jerry closed the dig anyway. However, this was the 26th, and it was back to work.

  Thus the only Muslim Egyptian on the dig at present was a graduate student, Mohammad Hussein, who had done his undergraduate work at Oxford. He was a native of Alexandria, the son of a prominent doctor, and went home each evening to his parents’ very comfortable house. He airily proclaimed that his work was not so hard, and doing without food and water all day was a small thing and one he was accustomed to. At twenty-two he seemed very young to Jerry, a neatly trimmed mustache hovering on his upper lip as though uncertain that it belonged there.

  The dig itself was not very prepossessing, especially for Egypt. Grand digs employing hundreds of workers were the rule rather than the exception, and the Met currently had a dozen digs in progress at various places around the country, most of them at far more famous sites than a Ptolemaic pylon. Indeed, many archaeologists turned up their noses at Ptolemaic sites as hardly worthy of interest, late-come parvenus who were much less interesting than the 18th Dynasty sites everyone wanted to find. Everyone wanted the next King Tut, an unrobbed royal tomb full of priceless ancient grave goods that would make a man’s reputation. The Pylon of Isis was hardly that. Though no doubt Peavey had been informed by his superiors that Ballard’s dig was more promising than it first appeared, he had said nothing. This was a very minor site, nothing compared to the Met’s dig at Deir el-Bahari.

  There were barely twenty men employed as diggers and sievemen, which made it practical to hire only Copts. Rather than being out in barren desert or wild cliffs, it was in the courtyard of an apartment building in down
town Alexandria. The Met had rented the space from the owners, putting up a board fence to keep the neighborhood children from falling into the trenches or parenthetically walking off with anything valuable. When Jerry had arrived that had been all there was to see — a fence around an oil stained dirt parking lot where someone usually parked a truck. A ramshackle shed served as a garage and previously a stable, littered with old oil cans and cigarette packs. A makeshift soccer goal was the lot’s only other improvement, and Jerry promised himself as they dismantled goal and shed that he would get a nice new aluminum one to replace it when they were finished. A crowd of boys watched curiously over the top of the fence, one with a forlorn soccer ball in his arms.

  Now the dig was a series of trenches laid out in a neat grid, the deepest ones about seven feet deep. So far all they’d found was a lot of junk. Oil cans had given way to broken bottles and a lost sixpence which had given way in turn to a rusted cast iron pot and tin plates, a horn button that might have dated to the late eighteenth century. Below that they were finding a whole lot of nothing. The Arab city of al-Iskindariyah had been a good deal smaller than both the ancient and modern cities and mostly centered on the Western Harbor. This area had been depopulated then and used as a stone quarry for other buildings.

  Jerry sat on a stool under a makeshift awning. A long table was set up with boxes for their finds. So far the horn button held solitary court. The boys had given up watching days ago as no gold or treasures had emerged.

  Even Willi looked bored. He had camera and sketchbooks at the ready, but so far nothing remotely worthy of his attention had appeared. “Are you sure this is the correct location?” he asked quietly.

  For the fiftieth time Jerry got out the photograph of the Ptolemaic medallion he’d photographed for the Met, the one William Pelley’s goons had tried to steal before it was bought by Iskinder and supposedly taken to Ethiopia. He laid it out on the table next to the modern map of Alexandria and a sketch map of the ancient city based on the account of Strabo. “As sure as I ever was,” he said.