just his robes, a small sack of provisions, a few coins in his purse. But he hadn’t walked ten minutes before he saw a glow over the ridge ahead. It meant nothing to him at first, too lost in private thoughts. But then he realized. Torches. Approaching from the harbour. The direction of the breeze changed and then he heard them. Men and women shouting, singing, jubilant in the anticipation of another lynching.
He hurried back the way he’d come, his heart pounding. Their settlement was on a gentle hill overlooking the lake. He reached the crown and saw the glow on every side, like a pyre just lit, flames licking up the tinder. A cry to his right. A rooftop began to blaze. A second and then a third. Their homes! Their lives! The clamour grew louder, closer. That hateful baying! How these people loved their work. He turned this way and that, seeking a path out, but everywhere he went, torches forced him back, penning him into an ever-smaller space.
The cry went up at last. He’d been seen. He turned and fled, but his old legs weren’t up to it, even though he knew the penalty of capture. And then they were all around him, their faces enflamed with bloodlust, and there was nothing more he could do save go with dignity and courage, try to shame them into compassion. Or, failing that, perhaps when they woke in the morning, they’d look back on their work this night with such horror and revulsion that others might be spared.
That would be something.
He fell to his knees on the rocky ground, his whole body trembling uncontrollably. Tears streamed down his cheeks. He began to pray.
ONE
I
Bab Sedra Street, Alexandria
Daniel Knox was walking north along Sharia Bab Sedra when he saw the earthenware bowl on the street-trader’s flapped-out tablecloth. It was filled with matchbooks and packets of white napkins, and it was propping up one end of a line of battered Arabic schoolbooks. His heart gave a little flutter; he suffered a moment’s déjà vu. He’d seen one like it before, he was sure of it. Somewhere interesting, too. For a few seconds he almost had the answer, but then it eluded him, and the feeling slowly faded, leaving him merely uneasy, unsure whether his mind was playing tricks.
He paused, crouched, picked up a garish plastic vase with wilting artificial yellow flowers, then a ragged geography textbook with all its pages falling out, so that out-of-date maps of Egypt’s topography and demographics fanned out over the tablecloth like a deck of cards swept by a magician’s hand.
‘Salaam alekum,’ nodded the trader. He couldn’t have been more than fifteen years old, made to look even younger by hand-me-down clothes at least two sizes too big.
‘Wa alekum es salaam,’ replied Knox.
‘You like this book, mister? You want to buy?’
Knox shrugged and put it back, then glanced around as though uninterested in anything he saw. But the young hawker only gave a crooked-toothed smile. He wasn’t a fool. Knox grinned self-deprecatingly and touched the earthenware bowl with his finger. ‘What’s this?’ he asked.
‘Sir has a fine eye,’ he said. ‘A wonderful antique from Alexandria’s rich history. The fruit bowl of Alexander the Great himself! Yes! Alexander the Great! No word of a lie.’
‘Alexander the Great?’ said Knox. ‘Surely not?’
‘No word of a lie,’ insisted the young man. ‘They find his body, you know. They find this in his tomb! Yes! The man who find Alexander, he is a man called Daniel Knox, he is my very good friend, he give this to me himself!’
Knox laughed. Since that particular adventure, he’d been everyone’s very good friend. ‘And you’re selling it out here on the street?’ he teased. ‘Surely if it belonged to Alexander, it’s worthy of the Cairo Museum itself!’ He picked it up, again felt that reprise of déjà vu, a curious tingling in his chest, a dryness at the back of his mouth, a slight pressure at the base of his cranium.
He turned the bowl around in his hands, enjoying the sensation of touch. He was no expert on ceramics, but all field archaeologists had a certain knowledge, not least because about nine out of every ten artefacts on any given site were some kind of pottery, a fragment from a plate, cup or jar, a shard from an oil lamp or perfume flask, perhaps even an ostracon, if it was your lucky day.
But this wasn’t broken. It was some seven inches in diameter and