The Gold in the Grave (6 page)

At last I felt the cool morning air on my face and blinked into the sunlight. Big Kerpes stood there, filthy from the digging but looking pleased. Antef was staring into his treasure bag, eyes alight with the morning sun.

Dalifa stretched out a hand for my treasure. I put my hand to my belt. The bag of rings had gone. It had fallen from my belt as I’d crawled along. We needed to make a few journeys. I’d find it later, I thought.

Then I looked up to the bank over the top of the entrance passage. A woman stood there. She wore a plain white gown and a rich wig. Her sweet perfume drifted down to me. She was the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen in my young life.

My mouth fell open. The others saw me staring and turned to look. Antef gave a soft moan.

There was a rattle of stones as a man in heavy sandals appeared behind the lady. He said, “Don’t you peasants kneel when you come before your Queen Ankhesenamen?”

It was Captain Khammale of the palace guard. We fell to our knees in front of Tutankhamen’s widow.

“I will have sharp wooden stakes put up by the river,” the captain said to the Queen. “I will have the thieves dropped on to the stakes to show all of Thebes what happens to grave robbers.” His eyes were bright with the thought of our deaths.

The queen spoke quietly. “No, Khammale. No more deaths. My husband died for the treasures of Egypt. These poor people need not die.”

The joy slipped from the face of Captain Khammale. “They must be punished, your Highness.”

The sad-faced queen spread her hands. “They hoped to steal a life of laziness,” she sighed. “So punish them with a life of work. Set them to work in the fields. I will take the girl to be a handmaiden in my palace.”

Dalifa smirked. It was more a reward than a punishment.

“She will scrub and sew until her fingers bleed,” Ankhesenamen promised.

Dalifa’s smirk slid from her face.

The Captain shook his head. “As you wish, your Highness.”

He drew his sword and held it at Antef’s throat. “To the river you filthy little thief.” He looked at me. “And you too, boy.”

He pointed at big Kerpes. “And as for you, you can start filling in that tunnel.”

At noon the next day the sun was high and even the crocodiles were too hot to move from the river. But we were working on the shadufs and the fields, pulling at weeds until our backs were breaking and sweat flowed like the Nile.

Just one day before, I had been dreaming of a life of ease and more riches than I could ever spend. One dreadful day later and I had only a nightmare of work and poverty.

The guards let us stop to drink a little weak beer and chew on an onion each. “We were wrong to try and rob the dead, Antef,” I moaned as I sank to the ground beside him.

He looked at me quickly. “No. We were not wrong. The only thing we did wrong was getting caught. There was nothing
wrong
with trying to make ourselves rich.”

I looked across the fields to the royal palace. “Even the Queen didn’t look happy with all her riches,” I said.

Antef snorted. “No. They say the new king is Ay, Tutankhamen’s uncle. To make the throne his own he will marry little widow-Queen Ankhesenamen.”

“He’s an old man,” I said. “Poor lady.”

Antef looked up and slapped my aching shoulders with his horny hand. “He is old! Hah! There’s a thought, Paneb!”

“So?”

“So … he will die soon. And when he does, they will bury him with all his wealth. And next time we’ll be more careful. We’ll make sure we aren’t caught!”

A guard cracked a whip and ordered us back to the baked fields.

“Next time?”

Antef grinned his broken-toothed grin. “Next time,” he chuckled. “Next time.”

Afterword

By 1900 all the kings’ tombs of ancient Egypt had been robbed. Some had been robbed soon after the king was buried, some were robbed in modern times.

Then, in 1922, the archaeologist Howard Carter came across a forgotten tomb–the tomb of a young king called Tutankhamen. It was full of the dead King’s treasure. But there was a mystery. A tunnel had been dug from the door of the tomb to the outside. In the tunnel was a bag of rings. Someone had broken in to the tomb soon after the king was buried over 3,200 years before. They must have been caught because the tunnel was filled in and the treasures saved.

How did the robbery and the arrest happen? We’ll never know.
The Gold in the Grave
is a guess. But it
could
have happened that way.

Most ancient Egyptian graves were robbed by the people who built them or people who paid the guards to let them in. The robbers worked in gangs and had ways of selling their treasure quickly.

The other mystery is how young Tutankhamen died. Modern x-rays of his mummy show he seems to have had a bang on the head. Did he fall? Or was he murdered?