A Trail Through Time (The Chronicles of St Mary's) by Jodi Taylor Page B

Lower Egypt. He made another offering.
    The crowd remained respectfully silent.
    He turned from the altar and made his way down the steps to the courtyard. At the bottom, he stood quite still, arms outstretched, while attendants moved forwards to remove his robe and crown.
    This was it. I was about to see … How deformed was Akhenaten?
    Then, suddenly, I sensed a disturbance in the force.
    It could be anything. This was not a happy time. Egyptians don’t like change. It might simply be an unhappy, edgy, restless crowd. I tried, unobtrusively, to look around.
    Leon grasped my arm. ‘Something’s happening. Either there’s about to be a riot, or our friends have turned up. Either way – time to go.’
    I opened my mouth to protest. To beg for another five minutes. Just until he disrobed completely. I couldn’t go until I’d seen …
    His grip tightened. ‘Now.’
    I dropped back off my toes and nodded.
    Hoping it wasn’t disrespectful to leave such a solemn occasion before it was finished, we began to ease backwards out of the crowd. We took our time, moving slowly, pausing every now and then to listen for sounds of pursuit. From anyone.
    If the Time Police were around then they were being remarkably discreet. On the other hand, there were vast numbers of soldiers stationed around the area. These were the Medjay, the elite police force, and they didn’t mess about at all. The punishment for pretty well everything is ‘giving on top of the stake’. Impalement. There’s a whole raft of historian kebab jokes that suddenly weren’t that funny.
    Then, quite clearly, in the silence, a man shouted, ‘Hey, lady, you dropped something.’
    The crowd gasped at such sacrilege. Around the walls, the Medjay began to move, shouldering their way through the people who shrank away from them.
    The instinctive thing is to turn towards the person addressing you, especially when they speak to you in your own language. Under cover of pointing out something interesting to me, Leon gripped my arm, pointed to the ceremony, and whispered, ‘There’s going to be trouble. Let’s get out of here before it starts.’
    I nodded, eased my weight to my left foot, and craned my neck, as if straining for a better view. People moved around me, adjusting themselves to my new position. Little ripples spreading outwards. I eased again. And again. I wanted to run. I wanted to barge my way through the crowd and somehow gain the shelter of Thebes itself, with its narrow streets and many hiding places. But you don’t do that. You slide, insinuate yourself, smile at your neighbours, ease yourself along, and watch the ceremony and you don’t ever, ever do anything hasty that could attract attention, because that could be fatal.
    ‘They’re behind us,’ whispered Leon. ‘With luck, these Egyptian soldiers will give them something else to think about.’
    I nodded. Shouting hadn’t worked for them. In fact, it had made things worse and now the hunters had become the hunted. At least, so I hoped.
    We found ourselves on the fringes of the assembly, where the groups of people were thinner and smaller. Now was the really dangerous time. We had an open area to traverse and at least two sets of policemen to avoid.
    And then we had bit of luck. About bloody time. A harassed-looking woman, heavily pregnant, with a screaming child and two other infants clinging to her skirts, emerged from the edge of the crowd. She was desperately trying to hush the toddler whose cries were bouncing off the buildings. She looked hot and embarrassed, turning her head from side to side, looking for something or someone. It didn’t matter. She was struggling with the kicking kid and falling over the other two under her feet. I waved as if I knew her, and before she had a chance to ask who the hell I thought I was, I’d taken the kids’ hands and smiled again. Relieved of part of her burden, she nodded towards an alleyway and heaved the infant higher on her hip. We set off,