CHAPTER 1

The Dreams Begin

The man lay on the desert sand, his body twisted and broken.

Dark shapes circled around him like jackals around a lion’s kill.

Deep voices intoned the malevolent words of a curse.

‘This man will not rise again.
This man will not go to the stars.
This man will lie forever in the desert cut off from those who loved him and those whom he loved.
His god will have no access to him.
HIS GOD IS DEAD.’

The sky deepened from the colour of fire to the colour of blood.

One broke off from the circle, crouched and wrote hieroglyphs in the sand — each one reversed.

The chanting continued.

‘May you never enter the barque that glides among the unwearying stars.
May you forget the names of those who guard the seven doors, the fourteen gates, the twenty-one mounds of the Otherworld, and may you never be vindicated in the presence of the forty-two assessors. May your heart weigh heavy against the feather of Maat in the Hall of Osiris, and Ammut, the Devourer of the Dead, feed on it. You have denied the gods of your ancestors, may they in the Everlasting deny you.’

Darkness fell and absorbed the figures of the priests who chanted these fearsome words, as though they were part of the darkness itself.

When the dawn came and the sun rose in a splendour of blue and gold, the man who lay, twisted and broken, alone at the centre of a vast and featureless desert, did not witness it.

* * * *

Eliot rang the bell in shabby Swallow Street and Emma looked around curiously. She had never visited Eliot’s friend Jack before. The place did not look promising. The door paint was peeling and scuffed, the wall grimy, and the beautiful honey-coloured stone almost unrecognisable. The whole street resembled the back of a stage set that no one had time to tidy up before the play started, while just around the corner — the front of the stage — was resplendent with reproduction Roman buildings housing a genuine ancient Roman bathing and temple complex.

At last, a disembodied voice greeted them and a buzz indicated that the door was unlocked. A steep, dark staircase confronted them, and they started to climb. The first indication Emma had that she had not entered the den of some impoverished troglodyte was the shine of leaves caught in sunlight from a skylight high above the landing. From then on the place was a delight.

A life sized Egyptian statue of worm-eaten wood that had once guarded the secret entrance to a tomb in ancient Egypt, stood beside the door to the living room. The statue held a staff that was irreverently draped with Jack’s red winter sc