Sphinx by T. S. Learner Read Free Book Online Page A

could. It was the exhilarating rush of finding the next potential new oil reservoir and not the money that kept me running. From what, I never really knew, not back then - I just knew there was some part of myself I had been denying for as long as I could remember. I was thirty-three, a dangerous age for a man, a craggy lump of graceless Anglo-Saxon masculinity drooped over his bar stool.
    I’d grown up in Cumbria, between the Lake District and the Irish Sea. Out there your body forms an island, a wind-battered automaton of pounding legs and flaying arms. Hot breath warming icy cheeks in the folds of a scarf as you tear jagged through the antediluvian landscape. This self-sufficiency, the dogged struggle against the elements, starts to define you and before you know it, you have become a curmudgeon - bristling, impenetrable and ready to deal with a hostile world. Not the most attractive proposition and I knew it. But none of these characteristics had deterred Isabella.
    She’d introduced herself by dropping a necklace of amber beads into my Bloody Mary. I looked up and was startled by the vivid energy that seemed to dance around her face - the ferocious intelligence that sharpened her features. I pulled out the amber beads, sucked the vodka off them and, after holding them up to the light, guessed that the amber came from Yantarny, Russia. To my surprise she seemed to find the fact that I was a geophysicist intriguing and, determined to engage me in conversation, she’d sat down next to me and demanded that I buy her a drink. I remember noticing how she seemed a little wild and reckless, almost as if she were determined to shake off some recent trauma. But back then India was full of lost souls.
    Three whiskies later Isabella was telling me about her visit to Ahmos Khafre. My seduction plans were momentarily derailed. I had a strong aversion to mysticism and disliked the dispossessed Westerners I often came across floating aimlessly, with their long hair and loose mock-native clothes, through the same geography as myself. However, I found myself suspending disbelief when Isabella went on to tell me about the topic of her doctorate.
    ‘It’s a kind of portable astrarium - a mechanised model of the universe that doesn’t just tell mean time and sidereal time but also incorporates a calendar for movable feasts, and has dials illustrating the movements of the sun, moon and the five planets known to the ancients. Leonardo da Vinci saw one that was built during the Renaissance - he described it as “a work of divine speculation, a work unattainable by human genius . . . axles within axles.” Another was found in 1901 - the Antikythera Mechanism. My hypothesis is that an earlier prototype existed.’
    ‘And your mystic?’
    ‘Ahmos Khafre - you should meet him. He’s a really serious archaeologist as well as a world-famous astrologer.’
    ‘Before you go on, I’d better warn you I’m a complete sceptic.’
    ‘I don’t believe you.’ Isabella hiccupped and I guessed she might be drunker than she realised. ‘A sceptic does not use sorcery to tell me the exact place my amber came from.’
    ‘That wasn’t sorcery, that was just training, extremely good detective work and a tiny bit of guesswork. Plus . . .’ I held the beads up again. ‘I recognise the fossilised insect in this piece as the rare Slavic wasp.’ It was a ruse I often applied to cover guesswork - the trickster covering his tracks with a pseudo-fact.
    She stared at me, her huge black eyes widening.
    ‘I think, Oliver, that you are a man who is not entirely integrated with both his intellect and intuition. But that’s okay: we will be good for each other - I can make you whole and you can protect me.’
    Isabella’s quaint use of English and her Italian accent had me hooked, but her uncanny observation made me uncomfortable. I decided that if I was to bed her it would be sensible to steer her away from any further analysis of my personality.
    ‘So