He came out on a roof, in the heat, in armour, and the first thing he heard was a car horn.
He stood very still. The fever was coming. He could feel it in his knees. But he stood on the gravel of a flat roof among humming metal boxes, in Musashi's black lacquer and the bronze mask, with the sun hammering down, and listened to it. A car horn. Then another. Then a sound under them, enormous, everywhere, that he'd last heard in 1920 on the Strand: a city full of engines.
He went to the edge of the roof and looked down.
Alexandria. He knew it by the harbour, the curve of it, the two moles. He knew it by the island at the end of the eastern mole, where the Pharos had stood, and still stood. The Pharos. Patched and buttressed, sheathed in something pale, with a lamp on top behind a great ring of glass. Beside it on the island, a second tower, a needle of steel and glass three times its height, with a light that turned.
And the rest of it was towers.
Glass and steel, like the ones he'd seen in his glimpse in the basement. Thirty storeys, forty, more, crowding along the harbour front, blazing in the sun. Between them, wide straight avenues, the Canopic Way still running dead straight to the sea, solid with cars, red buses, a tram. People on the pavements. Thousands. Women in bright dresses and men in short sleeves. On the side of the tower across the avenue, forty feet high, a picture of a young man in a white shirt holding a little black slab to his ear and laughing, and under it, in Greek letters and Egyptian script and a third alphabet he didn't know, words he could half read.
Call anyone. Anywhere. From the palm of your hand.
He sat down on the gravel with his back to a humming box.
On the side of the box was a sticker. A small printed notice in Greek, of a sort he'd seen on electrical cabinets all over London. Danger. High voltage. Alexandria Power Authority. Inspected 14/3/2008.
Two thousand and eight, he thought. Not two. He'd reached for the far end of the accident and missed by six years. Of course he had. He'd fogged the whole river.
Then the fever came, and he stopped thinking about it.
* * *
The cleaner who found him on the roof three hours later was a woman in a blue overall with a mop and a bucket, and when she saw the mask she dropped both, and went down on her knees on the gravel, and began, in a high cracked voice, to pray.
He didn't understand the prayer. It was in Egyptian, a modern Egyptian, quick and soft and full of words he didn't know. He understood one word in it, because she said it over and over.
Montu.
* * *
By the time he could stand, there were forty people on the roof.
Police, in pale blue, with guns on their hips. Men in dark suits with little coiled wires running into their ears. A doctor. And a thin grey-haired man in spectacles and a linen jacket, out of breath from the stairs, who pushed through all of them and stopped two yards from John and stared at him for a long time with his mouth open.
"I'm sorry," the man said at last, in Greek. Modern Greek, but clear, the way a scholar spoke it. "Forgive me. My name is Samir Haddad. I am the keeper of antiquities at the Library." He swallowed. "I have spent thirty years of my life looking at your statue. I would know the mask anywhere. Every hammer mark." His voice shook. "And the armour. We have the drawings. The blue cords. Is it... are you..."
"Yes," said John. His voice came out of the mask very hoarse. "I'm sorry. I think I'm going to be sick again."
He was. On Dr Haddad's shoes.
* * *
They took him to the palace in a car.
He watched the city go by through the dark windows, first through the slits, then with his own eyes.
The people. That was what he noticed. They were tall. They were straight. They walked fast and laughed in the street. Children everywhere, fat-cheeked, in school uniforms. Old people, a great many very old people, on benches in the squares in the shade. He thought of the net shed at the root of the causeway, and bread at four times the price.
The car went past the Library.
It was still there. The old one, the colonnaded one, and the stone one he'd built beside it. Both of them dwarfed now by the glass towers round them, but there, in their garden, with people going in and out. On the wall by the gate, as they slowed for the traffic, he saw a bronze plaque, and Haddad, beside him, saw him looking.
"In the third year of the Bronze Face," Haddad read, quietly, "the fire of the Roman ships came to this wall and was stopped. Here the people of the Delta quarter saved the books." He looked at John. "Every child in Egypt learns it. The fire that nearly took the Library. We have the four thousand rolls that burned listed by title, from the catalogue. Every year on the anniversary the scholars read the list aloud." He paused. "It takes a day and a half."
John didn't say anything. He looked at the plaque until the car moved on.
* * *
The palace was on the point of Lochias, where it had always been, but it was glass now, glass and white stone, rising out of the old palace's foundations in a long sweep of terraces down to the harbour. There were soldiers at the gate in dark green with rifles, and when the car stopped and John got out in his armour they came to attention so hard he heard their heels.
"Great One," said their officer, saluting, in Greek. He was a young man with a moustache and he was trembling. "The Queen. Queen Nefertiti. She is waiting for you in the Royal Chamber."
They walked him through it.
Corridors of white marble and glass. Cool air, coming from somewhere, from grilles in the ceiling, cold as an autumn morning. Glass cases with things in them that he knew: the telescope's bronze cradle, a water lift, the Isis's first engine, rusted, on a plinth. On the walls between the cases, flat black panels that were pictures, moving pictures, in colour: a newsreader at a desk, a map of the world with Egypt marked in gold, a graph going up.
And portraits.
Painted, at first. Then photographs. A long row of them, down the whole length of a gallery, the kings and queens of Egypt.
He stopped at the first one.
A young man, tall, in the double crown, painted in the old encaustic style, wax on wood, the way they'd painted faces for mummies. A big nose. Dark eyes. And at his left temple, a white streak in his hair, a finger wide, like a stripe of paint.
Under it, a brass label. Ptolemy Iohannes, called Johnhotep. Son of Cleopatra the Great and of the Bronze Face.
John stood in front of it for a long time. He didn't know how long. Haddad didn't speak. The soldiers didn't move.
She never told me, he thought. She couldn't have known. Not then. Not that morning. And then: Or she did. And she let me go anyway, because I'd said I had to.
He walked down the gallery. He couldn't stop himself. Johnhotep's daughter, with the streak. Her son. A queen with the streak and the nose, holding a steam-whistle, in the hundredth year. On and on. Eighty-one portraits. Every one of them with the white streak at the left temple. Some with his chin. Most with her nose.
The last one was a photograph. A woman of about thirty in a white suit, with the double crown. Nefertiti II. Crowned 2002. He'd seen the face before. Three storeys tall, on a billboard, in a glimpse in a basement in London in 1920.
He went on to the end of the gallery, and through the door.
* * *
She was standing by the window when he came in, in a dark suit cut like a man's, with a high collar that somehow made it look like the robes on a temple wall. Thirty-four, perhaps. Tall. The nose. The white streak, very fine, almost lost in her black hair. Her face was calm and her hands were shaking.
"My lord," she said, and held out her hand.
He took it. It was the modern greeting. He'd almost forgotten it.
"For eighty generations," said Queen Nefertiti, in Greek, "my family has waited for you. Every child of the house says the prayer. Will the Father come back? I said it every night until I was twelve, and then I stopped, because I thought it was a story." She was holding his hand very tightly. "Look at what you made."
She turned him to the window.
The city. The towers, the harbour, the steel needle on the Pharos island. And on the screen on the wall beside the window, a map of the world, with numbers. Egypt in gold, from the sea to Meroe and beyond. A hundred and ninety million people. First in the world for universities, third for wealth. Satellites. A war, in its south, on the border with somewhere he didn't know the name of, that had been going on for nine years. A drought in the Delta. A riot, last month, in a city called Ptolemais, over the price of bread.
"Not all of it is good," said Nefertiti, watching him read it. "I know. You'll want to know that. You were always..." She stopped, and smiled, a little. "I was going to say honest. As if I knew you. I only know the stories."
"You've done wonders," he said. He meant it. He could barely speak. "All of you. With what we started."
"With what you started." She let go of his hand. She stood very straight. "My lord. The line of the house has run thin. My father had one child. I've had none. The doctors say I may, still, but it will be the last time. And when I go, the throne goes to a cousin in Thebes who's never had the streak, and the House of the Bronze Face ends." She took a breath. "So I'm going to ask you something, and I want you to know before I ask it that I've thought about it for six years, since my coronation, every night, and that I know exactly what it is I'm asking and exactly what it would mean, and that you can say no."
He knew what she was going to say before she said it.
"I would be honoured," said Nefertiti, "if you would consider me worthy of continuing your line."
* * *
He didn't answer for a long time.
For him it had been this morning. Cleopatra on the balcony with one tear running through the kohl. Five years of her. The scroll on the table. He could still feel her fingers tying the cord of the mask.
And she'd been dead for two thousand years, and had a son he'd never known about, and eighty generations had come down from that son to this woman standing in front of him with her hands shaking.
He thought of Moira in the gully. In thirty branches you go to Egypt and make it into something it never was.
Here it was. The thing it had become. Universities and riots, satellites and a nine-year war. And a woman of his own blood, two thousand years down, asking him to leave one more mark on it.
It was tempting. He'd have been lying to himself if he'd said it wasn't. To put one more stone in the water, knowing for once where the rings would go.
"You understand what you're asking," he said.
"Yes."
"I won't stay. I can't. I'll be gone in the morning."
"I know that too," said Nefertiti. "It's in all the stories. You always go in the morning."
He looked at her. Then he looked out of the window at the city, for a long time.
"Very well," he said.
* * *
The royal chambers were at the top of the palace, high over the harbour, and they were a strange mix of the old and the new: a painted ceiling of blue lotuses, copied, he saw, from Cleopatra's, and under it the cold air from the grilles and a bed with sheets as white as paper. Nefertiti dismissed her people at the door. She turned to him in the half-light from the city.
"No other man could compare to you," she said softly. "That's what they say. In the stories."
"The stories are wrong about a great many things," said John. "Including my chin."
She laughed, startled, and came to him.
The door closed.
* * *
He woke before dawn and lay for a while listening to her breathe and to the city, which never went quiet, even now. Then he got up and dressed in the dark. The armour. The sword.
On the desk by the window there was paper, thick and cream-coloured, with the crest of the house at the top: a falcon and a mask. He wrote on it with her pen.
Our child will be extraordinary. They always are, I'm told. Guide them with wisdom, and then let them forge their own path. Don't let them wait for me. The future of Egypt is in your hands. It always was. J.
He left it by the bed.
There was one more thing. He'd asked Haddad for it the evening before, in the corridor, quietly, and the curator had gone white and then nodded and said he'd send it up. It lay on the desk now in a small velvet box, delivered in the night: an anchor. A silver denarius from the Library's coin room, struck in Rome in the year of the battle off Pharos, with a head of Venus on one side and a war galley on the other. Haddad had chosen it himself. From the Roman mint, the note said, in his small scholar's hand. The nearest thing to Rome we have.
Rome, thought John. He'd felt it, lying awake. Columns and legions. Senators. The great animal Caesar had told him about on the harbour wall. It doesn't hate what it doesn't understand. It simply eats it. The city that would, in a hundred years, start talking about the Egyptian disgrace.
He wanted to see it. Before it saw them.
He picked up the coin.
He didn't look at it. He was tired, and the room was dark, and the velvet box was the one Haddad's runner had brought. He didn't see that the runner had been a tall woman of about forty in a museum overall, with short grey hair. He didn't see that the thing in his palm was not a coin at all, but a small bronze disc, very old, rough, cast rather than struck, with a crude octopus on its face.
He closed his hand on it, and went.
* * *
Nefertiti woke at sunrise to an empty bed and a sheet of cream paper.
She read it twice. Then she sat up against the pillows with the paper in her lap, and put her other hand on her stomach, and left it there, and looked out of the window at the city for a long time.
By noon it was on every news channel in Egypt. Shaky footage from a tourist's phone of a man in black armour on a roof above the Canopic Way. A weeping cleaner on her doorstep. Dr Haddad, declining to comment. In the cafés of Alexandria people watched it on their phones, over and over, and argued, and posted, and argued again, and by evening the word was everywhere, on every screen and every wall, in every alphabet.
He came back.