Tulip was the first to speak. ‘Cripes almighty! What Howard Carter would give to read all this!’
Never mind Howard Carter – I felt so giddy and shaken, I was glad to be sitting down.
‘Kyky’s heart can’t have survived, can it?’ I asked. It was mad to think it had. Yet hadn’t Professor Hanawati mentioned something wrapped in linen, jammed in the bottom of the jar?
‘Won’t know until you look,’ Tulip reasoned.
The very idea that a three-thousand-year-old heart was still inside the jar made me feel strange in a different way. To think that part of Kyky might be here with us – his blood, his cells.
I took a very deep breath. The jar lay between us on the bunk, the lid still off. I picked it up. Braced myself. As I slid my hand deep inside I half expected to touch something slippery and bloody – it wasn’t, of course. It was dry, and came away fairly easily so what I now had in my hand was a piece of linen, neatly folded like a handkerchief.
‘Open it!’ Tulip urged.
I hesitated. The fabric looked frail.
‘I don’t think we should,’ I said. ‘What if it falls apart?’
Oz was sitting closer than usual. ‘I’d really like to see it, Lil.’
Truth was, so would I.
‘I’ll do it slowly, then – and if it looks like it’s going to crumble or tear, I’ll stop, all right?’
The others nodded.
Ever so gently, I unfolded a corner. Then another. Amazingly, with care, the fabric stayed in one piece. As it came off, layer by tissue-thin layer, I began to feel something solid underneath. Much as I was desperate to see what, I was wary too. It felt wrong and wonderful to be poring over a dead person’s heart. And all the time that familiar prickly, chilly sensation crept down my backbone.
‘Careful!’ Tulip whispered at my shoulder as I peeled back the final layer.
My breath stopped.
There was Kyky’s heart, sitting in the palm of my hand, the size of a hen’s egg. It looked like a clod of earth – flaky and mottled-brown – or the rusty tip of a centuries-old spear. You could almost see from the way it tapered at one end that it was the shape of a heart. It was incredible.
‘Wow.’ Tulip breathed. ‘That’s got to be the most astonishing thing I’ve ever seen.’
Oz shuffled even closer. ‘I wonder, Lil, could I just—’ He put his hand out to take the heart.
‘No, Oz,’ Tulip said. ‘It’s not respectful to pass it around. Let Lil put him back now we’ve all had a look.’
Gently rewrapping the heart one fragile layer at a time, I returned it to the jar and replaced the lid. Tulip, I realised, had just called the package ‘him’. This was what it had become: Kyky was someone we felt we almost knew.
Which brought me back to Grandad. Lysandra’s descriptions of fevers and lungs and hacked-off feet were all reminders of the strange ways the curse was working. As soon as we got to Luxor, we had to find Kyky’s burial spot. And be quick about it too. With that sense of foreboding still hanging over us, who knew when – and where – the curse would strike again?
‘One treasured day each year …’ I murmured, going over Lysandra’s words. ‘If we knew what date, then we might be able to work it out from where the sun shines.’
Tulip shook her head. ‘Too complicated. Anyway, calendars were different back then.’
‘You’re missing the point entirely!’ Oz groaned, rolling his eyes. ‘We’re looking for a spot directly above where Mr Carter is digging. East-facing, high up in the rock face.’
He made it sound simple. And maybe it would be. We certainly had more details now than we’d had a few days ago.
‘You’re right, Oz,’ I said. ‘That’s where we’ll start.’ Though the thought of searching in sight of Mr Carter made me more nervous than ever. I remembered the young man on the train who’d told me to keep an eye on him. Nobody, it seemed, quite trusted Mr Carter. The last thing we wanted was him getting his hands on the jar. He might not have thought much of it twenty-odd years ago, but if he knew what we knew now, well, he’d insist on examining it, putting it in a museum – or worse, taking it for himself. We could forget it going back to Maya’s little tomb where it belonged.
Tulip tugged her bottom lip, staring thoughtfully at the jar. ‘It’s some story, isn’t it?’
I nodded. It really was. Such a different story to the one the papers were telling, which was mostly all about Mr Carter. And that, I realised grimly, was another problem. For here we were on our way to Egypt with Mrs Mendoza, a newspaper writer in search of an exclusive.
‘Tulip. Oz.’ I looked them both in the eye. ‘You’re not to tell your mum about this, got it?’
Tulip nodded so fast I thought her head might bounce off. Oz, though, sat back, frowning.
‘It’s a decent bit of news,’ he said.
It was, and I felt bad about it because I liked Mrs Mendoza very much. And it’d be a brilliant way to prove her priggish editor wrong. But we were here to return Kyky to a private, secret place, not blazon it all over the newspapers.
‘In order to break the curse, we have to return the jar,’ I reminded Oz. ‘Don’t think of it as Tutankhamun’s heart – it’s Kyky’s, who never wanted to be famous in the first place.’
‘But it’s the sort of scoop that could make Mama’s career, you know,’ Oz pointed out.
‘That’s enough, Oz,’ Tulip warned.
‘She needs to find a big story,’ he argued.
I took a long, slow breath. How could I explain I was doing this for my grandad, when all Oz wanted to do was help his mum?
‘If you mention this to anyone, I swear I’ll tell Mama—’ She hesitated.
‘Tell her what?’ Oz challenged.
‘Tell her who you thought you saw at Athens station!’ Tulip blurted out.
I turned to Oz, intrigued. ‘Who did you think you saw at Athens station, then?’ because this was the first I’d heard of it.
He looked teary and angry. ‘I’m not saying. You wouldn’t believe me if I told you.’
*
An hour and a half later we docked at Alexandria. It was quite something to be standing on Egyptian soil at last: I could’ve sworn the soles of my feet actually tingled.
From Alexandria we caught a train to Cairo. I must’ve fallen asleep eventually because when I opened my eyes, it was daylight. Oz and Tulip were still asleep. Mrs Mendoza paused in her writing to point her pencil at the window.
‘Look!’ she whispered. ‘Cairo!’
I sat up, rubbing my eyes.
We were coming into the city. The buildings near the railway line were low, sand-coloured, packed tightly together. Between them were archways leading to little courtyards, alleys, roads, all busy with people going about their lives. I saw men in white robes, veiled women carrying pots on their heads. And rising above it all every now and then, I’d spot the dome or minarets of a mosque. Though it was still early morning, the light had a soft, peachy glow to it. This, I soon realised, was mostly dust, stirred up by carts, donkeys, motorcars and people walking. It was like the sort of haze you get at the start of a very hot summer’s day.
I’d never seen anywhere so unlike the grey, wet London I’d left behind. The city was strange and beautiful. Everything I’d imagined it might be – and more. Through the little open vent at the top of the window I could smell Cairo: warm, dusty, animal dung, old apples.
I imagined Grandad all those years ago taking this same journey; he’d have been sitting here, just like me, not wanting to miss a second of it.
Before long, the train began to slow. Tulip yawned. Oz kicked out his legs and promptly woke up.
‘We’re here!’ he cried, squinting at the window.
‘Approaching Cairo station, yes,’ Mrs Mendoza informed him.
The part of the city we were now passing through had streets as wide as London’s, lined with tall, white, expensive-looking buldings. And like in London there were street sellers, newsboys, all shouting above the traffic. Then just before our train slid into the station itself, I caught sight of a horse lying in the road. It was still wearing its harness and looked rather dead.
‘How awful!’ Tulip covered her eyes.
‘It happens in our country too, you know,’ Oz remarked.
I’d never seen a dead horse in London. And the fact no one had moved this poor thing – carts, carriages, motorcars, donkeys simply carried on around it – reminded me, with a shivery thrill, how far I was from home.