"It's older than the Sphinx," said Amenhotep. "That's all we know. That, and that nobody's opened it."
They were standing in the pit below the great stone paws at an hour before dawn, by torchlight, with forty diggers from the Ptah estates waiting up on the sand with baskets and the Sphinx's broken face looking out over their heads towards a sky just starting to go grey. Cleopatra was in a plain brown riding dress with her hair tied in a scarf. John was in the mask, because there were forty diggers.
"How do you know it's there, if nobody's opened it?"
"Because it's in the inventory." Amenhotep was young for a high priest, thin, quick, with the shaved head and the long fingers of a man who'd spent his life with papyrus, and he had a way of saying outrageous things in the voice of a clerk. "The temple of Ptah keeps an inventory of every holy thing in Egypt. We've kept it since before there were kings. It's on stone at Memphis, on a wall in a room nobody goes in. And one line of it says beneath the paws of the Watcher, the door of the first men, not to be opened until the Bronze Face comes." He looked at John, very steadily. "I copied that line when I was fifteen. I've been thinking about it every day since Carthage."
John didn't answer. He'd stopped answering things like that.
"Dig," said Cleopatra.
* * *
They dug for six hours.
The sand ran back into the hole as fast as they cleared it, and the diggers muttered about the Watcher and about the queen and her foreign god disturbing the dead, and twice a man threw down his basket and walked off into the desert and didn't come back. Cleopatra didn't stop them. She sat on a folding stool at the lip of the pit with a waterskin and watched, and every hour she went down and spoke to the ones who stayed, by name, and doubled their pay.
At the sixth hour a mattock hit stone that rang.
It was a lintel. Then a doorway, under it, two men high, cut into the bedrock of the plateau itself, under the paws. The stone was a different colour from the Sphinx. Older, darker, the edges worn round as river pebbles. And the door was carved from top to bottom with signs.
Not hieroglyphs. Amenhotep knew hieroglyphs the way John knew English, and he stood in front of that door with his long fingers on the stone and his face slack, and said, "No."
They were rows of marks. Dots and short lines and circles, some of the circles divided, some with tails, in long ordered columns, like a ledger. Between the columns, pictures: wavy lines that might be water, a disc with rays, the shape of the Sphinx itself, lying down.
John went close. He put his hand flat on the stone. He'd meant to look at it the way he'd looked at the clod of earth from the Byrsa, for its Branches. He got nothing. Not fog, as with Cleopatra. Nothing at all, as if the stone were so old it had no future left in it, only past.
So he looked at it with his eyes.
He was a lab assistant, and before that he'd been a wireless sapper, and before that a boy at St Olave's who liked sums. He stood in front of the door with the mask pushed up on his forehead and the diggers staring, and looked at the columns of dots and lines for an hour, and Cleopatra didn't let anyone speak to him.
"It's numbers," he said at last.
Amenhotep looked at him.
"The dots are ones. The lines are fives. A circle's... twenty, I think, they count in twenties." He pointed. "This column goes up by the same amount every row. This one's doubling. And these, with the disc, that's a calendar. Days. Three hundred and sixty-five, and then a mark, and then a quarter." He felt cold, and it wasn't the Hold. "They knew the length of the year to a quarter of a day. Before the Sphinx."
"Can you open it?" said Cleopatra.
* * *
They opened it with levers and ropes and the forty diggers on the ropes, and the door didn't swing, it slid, sideways, grinding, into a slot in the rock, and a breath of air came out of the dark behind it that was cold and dry and smelled of nothing at all.
John went first, with a torch. Then Cleopatra, then Amenhotep. She told the diggers to wait. None of them argued.
A passage, sloping down. Forty paces. Then a room.
It was round, and bigger than the whole of Leonardo's Sala del Papa, and the roof was a dome cut out of the living rock, and every inch of it, walls and dome, had been painted.
The paint was almost gone.
That was the first thing. He held up the torch and saw shapes on the walls, colours, ochre and black and a faded blue, and the shapes had worn away to ghosts. Smudges where figures had stood. Lines that went nowhere. Ten thousand years of dry air and darkness had not been kind to them. Down at the foot of the walls, on stone benches, stood objects under a blanket of dust, and a row of clay jars with their lids sealed.
"Oh," said Amenhotep, very softly, and sat down on the floor.
Cleopatra turned in a slow circle with her hand over her mouth. Then she looked at John.
"Can you?" she said.
He knew what she meant. Paint wasn't alive. Stone wasn't alive. The Turn would go backwards into them, if he pushed, and bring the colours back up the way he'd brought back Leonardo's clay horse. He'd never tried anything so big. A horse the size of a cat had turned his hands blue to the wrist.
"Not all of it," he said.
"A piece."
He gave the torch to Amenhotep. He took off the mask and put it on the bench, and took off his gloves, and went to the wall opposite the door, and put both palms flat on the faded plaster.
He pushed backwards.
* * *
He didn't know how long it took. Amenhotep said afterwards it was as long as it takes to say the morning prayer to Ptah twice, which was about a quarter of an hour.
He felt it go. Not wet to dry, this time. Dry to bright. The plaster under his hands warmed and smoothed and the paint came back up into it, he could feel it coming, like blood coming back into a numb leg, and the heat went out of him into the wall at a terrible rate, out of his hands, his arms, his chest. He felt his heart slowing. He felt his teeth start to knock together. He kept pushing. Behind him Cleopatra said something sharp and he didn't hear what.
When he took his hands away a piece of the wall was new.
It was about the size of a door. In the middle of the old smudged ghosts, an oblong of fresh colour, as bright as if it had been painted that morning: blue, very deep, with stars on it in gold leaf, and under the stars a great curving coastline, green and brown, with a river running into it. A river with a delta. The Nile, seen from very high above, from higher than any bird. Exactly as he'd seen it once in a photograph in the Illustrated London News, taken from a balloon.
No. Higher than that. From so high that you could see the curve of the earth at the edge.
He fell over.
* * *
He came round on the floor of the passage with his head in Cleopatra's lap and Amenhotep holding his hands inside his own robe against his chest, the way Leonardo had once, and both of them talking to him at once.
"Don't you ever," Cleopatra was saying. "Don't you ever. You went grey. Your lips went blue. You stopped breathing. I thought..."
"Show me," said John.
They helped him back in. He stood in front of the new piece of wall with a blanket round him, shaking, and looked at it again by the torch.
The coastline. The stars. And now he saw what he hadn't had time to see before he fell: beside the coastline, at the edge of the oblong, where the old paint ended and the new began, a figure. A man. Painted in the flat old style, sideways on, one arm raised, in black. Pointing up at the stars.
He wore a mask over the top half of his face. Bronze. The hammer marks had been painted on it, scale by scale.
And on the man's raised left arm, above the elbow, a thin pale line had been painted across the black. A scar, done with a single careful stroke of white.
John looked down at his own left arm, at the scar from the village under the three pines, eight months old.
He didn't say anything. Behind him Amenhotep was saying something, softly, over and over, a prayer. Cleopatra was looking from the figure on the wall to him and back. He felt her hand find his under the blanket.
* * *
They spent four days in the chamber, by lamplight, with a dozen scholars Cleopatra sent for from the Library, sworn to silence on pain of death.
The jars held rolls. Not papyrus: a kind of thin pale leather, folded, covered with the same dots and lines as the door, and pictures. The scholars worked through them in teams with John and Amenhotep, and what came out of them, slowly, over those four days, made the oldest of them, a mathematician from Cyrene called Theon, sit down on a bench and weep. Tables of numbers that worked out the paths of the planets. A way of writing numbers by their place, with a mark for nothing, that made multiplication a child's game. Drawings of the inside of a body, and of plants, and of things too small to see, round and rod-shaped, with notes beside them that Amenhotep, slowly, sounding out the dots like a child, read as these make the fever.
The objects on the benches were mostly ruined: metal so corroded it fell apart at a touch, glass gone milky. John didn't Turn any of them. He couldn't have. He could barely lift a cup.
He didn't look at the wall again.
* * *
On the fifth day, Cleopatra stood at the foot of the Sphinx in the full regalia with the double crown and the cobra, in front of the priests of Ptah and the scholars of the Library and two thousand people who'd walked out from Memphis to see, and John stood one pace behind her left shoulder in the mask, and she spoke.
"The Watcher has given us back our past," she said, in Egyptian and then in Greek, in a voice that carried to the back of the crowd without seeming to be raised. "Before the kings. Before the gods had names. Men stood here who counted the stars and knew the length of the year, and their knowledge was buried under the sand to wait for us. It has waited long enough." She lifted the crook. "From this day, Egypt remembers. Let every scholar in the land come to Alexandria. Let the old knowledge go out into every temple and every village. This is the first year of a new age."
The crowd went down on its faces. The sound was like rain.
That night, when everyone had gone, she found him sitting alone on the sand between the Sphinx's paws, with his back against the stone and the mask in his lap, looking at the stars.
She sat down beside him.
"You knew," she said softly. "Didn't you? Somehow. You knew it was here."
"I had my suspicions," said John.
It was a lie. He'd had none. He sat in the cold and looked up at the stars over the desert and thought about a painted man on a wall ten thousand years old, with his own mask and his own scar, pointing up at them, and a woman in a gully in Japan saying I'll be there.
Somebody had been here first. Somebody had known he'd come.
Or he'd been here himself, and hadn't done it yet.
"John," said Cleopatra.
"Yes."
"Your hands are still cold." She took them and held them in her lap. "Tell me one day. Not tonight. One day, when you know." She was quiet for a while. "And John. The rider came this afternoon, from Elephantine. The governor of the south. The Kushites have crossed the border at the first cataract with an army. The queen of Meroe herself, he says, is with them. They've burned Philae."