Daoimear de Dán: Inné agus Inniu

"Maybe," James said, a little smirk creeping onto his face.

"Well at least count me in on it!" Sirius exclaimed. James laughed.

"Of course."

***

Alexandria, Egypt. The Next Day.

"James, why are we in Egypt?" asked Sirius. The sun was beating down onto the ancient, dusty city of Alexandria and Sirius looked like he was about to keel over. His pale skin looked ready to burn and peel at any moment. James smiled.

"Remember Lily's birthday?" James asked. Sirius nodded. "I gave her a necklace which has a handy placement charm. She's here in Alexandria."

"You sneaky old devil! Does she know about the charm?"

"I was going to tell her, but..."

"It slipped your mind?"

"In a manner of speaking. Don't knock it, mate. It's the only lead we've got."

"So what do we do now?"

"We find Lily. She won't be pleased we're here but she'll let us tag along anyway."

"You mean we'll protect her?" Sirius asked. James smirked.

"In her head, it will be 'tag along'."

***

"I am going to kill you," Lily said quite calmly when she saw James and Sirius turn up. She did not look especially surprised to see them. They both smiled winningly at her, but she wasn't to be swayed. She sighed. "You shouldn't be here."

"Why not? We're just on a little holiday," said Sirius quickly. "I decided to give James one last week of fun before he got married. It's not my fault that you were already in Alexandria. I mean what are the chances-"

"Don't even try the Abbott and Costello routine on me, Sirius. I know you found me because of the placement charm on my necklace."

"You knew about that?" asked James in a rather disappointed voice.

"James, hello! You're speaking to Lily, the girl who came top in Charms seven years running! I meant to take the damn thing off but in the rush I forgot. More fool me."

"What's going on Lily? Why don't you want me here?" he asked in an injured voice.

"Because it's dangerous enough for me. I don't want you to get involved. This mission.... It's so important, James. I can't afford to mess it up."

Lily looked so solemn that any humour not sapped by the heat was drained from both James and Sirius.

"What are we here for?" Sirius asked her, eyes twinkling with untold mischief and curiosity although he sounded serious enough.

"We're here to hide something," she said gravely.

"What?" James' curiosity was well and truly piqued.

***

Four and a half hours later, James' curiosity was well and truly trampled down into the ground. He'd been hoping that they would catch a few rays of sun in the hot Alexandrian afternoon but instead he was following his girlfriend down a damp, millennia-old passageway by torchlight. She had a large, heavy looking rucksack with her and although he wanted to take it off her, she insisted that she was doing just fine. Behind him, the cause of most of his distress was Sirius, who was complaining noisily that he should be allowed to transform into his dog form to see better in the dark.

"If I've told you once I've told you a thousand times," Lily hissed "you cannot transform down here. It's a magical black spot, which is exactly why we're here. If you ask me one more time, I will personally rip out your brains through your nose and use them as a garnish at my next garden party."

"Hear that, James? Hear that? That's what you're marrying," Sirius growled, by now only half joking.

"Would both of you shut up?" James asked with a sigh.

"Look, if you two want to bugger off, you're more than welcome," Lily snapped.

"We're fine," James replied hurriedly. "Aren't we, Sirius?"

"Yes, terrific."

"How about we walk in silence?" Lily suggested coldly.

"Suits me," Sirius retorted. James sighed.

"Fine."

After another ten minutes or so, the dank passageway opened up into a cavern. Not large as caverns go, Sirius had to duck his head slightly lest he hit it on the ceiling. The floor glittered strangely in the light of their torches. There were several other passageways that led out of the cavern.

"Well," Lily said rather more brightly than the last time she spoke. "We must be going the right way."

"How do you know that?" Sirius asked, curiously looking at the ground.

"Well, when this place was constructed some three thousand years ago, the wizards who did so placed clues. That's gold you can see in the floor, tiny nuggets imbedded in the ground. We have to follow the path laid out by the gold to get where we're going," Lily said in the authoritative air of someone who has read many books.

"Well, where are we going?" James asked. Lily shrugged.

"Not sure. I was just told to unravel and follow the clues."

"That's great, Lil. Great," Sirius said, sarcasm firmly back in his voice. Lily ignored him and began looking. The glittering trail led into the passageway in the centre. She went to go down but suddenly stopped. She opened her bag and pulled out the lipstick she carried with her everywhere. With it she made a small mark on the wall of the passageway they'd just come in from.

"I don't want us to get lost on the way back," she explained to the two young men who looked at her quizzically. She shoved the lipstick back into her bag and headed off down the glittering path.

***

They were still walking half an hour later. The passageway seemed to be perfectly straight, so James was fairly sure they were either under the Mediterranean by now or well on their way to Sudan. Having said that, he had no direction they were headed or if they even were going in a straight line.

"Do you suppose this is where the legend of the Yellow Brick Road comes from?" Sirius asked suddenly. The Wizard of Oz stories were popular tales for magical kids that were known to have their basis in fact.

"Might well be," Lily said. James thought she sounded tired, but he didn't blame her. His legs felt like lead weights and he'd stopped feeling his feet at all about ten minutes previously.

Suddenly and without any warning, the glittering passageway opened out into a huge room. The floor was no longer just glittering with nuggets of gold but was now inlaid with gold tiles. The walls were covered in intricately painted murals and decorated with gold leaf. Statues made of granite, marble and gold stood in the room, almost perfectly preserved after centuries spent watching over the room. Three former students of Hogwarts stood in the threshold, absolutely stunned by the vision before them.

"Where are we?" Sirius asked, drinking in the sight. Lily and James just stood, mouths agape.

"I think this is it," Lily said, examining the runes carved into the archway into the room. Gingerly, she stepped into the room. She turned to look sternly at James and Sirius.

"Do not touch anything."

"OK," James said, too overawed to do anything but agree.

"We'll be good," Sirius promised. They stepped into the room and looked around while Lily searched the room.

"What are you looking for, Lil?" James asked. She sighed.

"I'm looking for some runes... Oh my God..." James' head snapped around to look over at her.

"What?" he asked, feeling panicked in this very strange place.

"Oh, it's nothing bad," she said quickly. "But you should see this!"

Walking carefully across the gold tiles, James and Sirius came over to look at whatever it was she'd reacted so strongly to.

It was a sarcophagus made of red granite- the kind found much further south in Egypt.

"Who's inside it?" James asked curiously. Lily showed him some unfamiliar runes and other writing on the granite.

"Alexander the Great," she told him.

"Really?" Sirius asked, yet more awed by this fantastical room. She nodded.

"There's a legend that the sarcophagus that held Alexander's body was never occupied by him. He was such a legend that his body was hidden away. If there was never a body, he could seem so much more like the god he wanted to be. The magical legend says that his advisor Ptolemy had a group of the greatest wizards in Babylon and here in Alexandria hide Alexander away for all eternity."

"Right. Explain to me why, about five thousand years later, we're in the same room as Alexander the Great?" James asked. Lily nodded.

"The legend went on to say that these great wizards-"

"How great are we talking?" Sirius cut in. Lily sighed. She could never just get through a story with these boys.

"Well, it's hard to say, but probably a group of twelve Dumbledores."

Sirius whistled appreciatively. "So pretty great and powerful, then?"

"Yes, Sirius. If I could continue? The wizards discovered that Alexander's beloved Alexandria was located above one of the only known magical black spots in the world. Over some years, thousands of men were secretly brought in to create the maze of tunnels, caverns and such that we've just battled through. The idea was that no wizard could use his or her magic to get to Alexander and no Muggle would know which way to go even if they did find the tunnels."

"But we're here."

"Yes. The instructions to get here have been secretly handed down over the millennia to the descendants of those great wizards. The instructions were secreted away by the original members of the Order of the Phoenix-"

"That Ruairi bloke you were going on about?" James asked. Lily glared at him, and he fell silent.

"Yes. They would be brought out again in times of trouble. Which is now. At the time, the Order decreed that any such missions should be carried out by the Heir of Maeve in her capacity as a mystical police officer of sorts."

"Which is why you're here," guessed Sirius. Lily nodded. She opened her bag up and pulled out a rusty-looking amulet hanging on a leather strip.

"This is probably the most powerful magical object in the world. For centuries it was hidden away in the place of its origin, which before you cut in again and ask is somewhere in Ireland, I don't know where. It gives the owner the power to bring people back from the dead with no strings attached. It also gives the owner power over certain ancient magic if they know how to get it. If Voldemort got his sticky mitts on this-"

"Game over," James realised. Lily nodded seriously.

"See why it was so important I came here? He has no knowledge, that I'm aware of, of this place. It's a magical black spot that's incredibly hard to get to. We can hide the amulet here."

"Why don't you just destroy it?" James asked.

"Because it was made in Ireland by an Egyptian priest using precious Greek metals and Persian gemstones on a Roman day of sacred festival. If it can be destroyed, and I'm not sure it can, it would probably cause all kinds of problems. The old gods are dormant, they're not gone."

"So we just leave it here?" Sirius asked, beginning to look around the room again.

"There's another tomb somewhere. I'm to leave it in there."

"Whose tomb is it?"

"An Egyptian wizard priest who watched over Ptolemaic Egypt. He's said to guard this place against those who would do harm," Lily said.

"What does this say?" Sirius asked, calling Lily over to another much larger sarcophagus, this time sculpted out of bright white marble.

"I told you that you should've taken Ancient Runes at school," James said.

"Divination was easier," Sirius said with a grin as Lily began translating the runes. Her mouth dropped open and she turned to them.

"Alexander isn't the only name of note to be secreted away here. Inside here are two people."

"Who?" James asked, wondering who could inspire the dumbstruck awe he saw now in his fiancée.

"Well, see this?" she asked, tracing her fingers over the first group of hieroglyph. "Queen Cleopatra... And this..." she traced the second set. "Is Mark Antony."

Two mouths dropped open. James looked around.

"Are there more here? I mean, could we be standing in the most illustrious tomb in history?"

"Maybe," Lily said. "Perhaps it became a Ptolemaic tradition to hide their famous dead away here. But we need to find the wizard. As pretty and golden as this place is, I don't really want to spend any more time here than I have to."

"We don't know what we're looking for," Sirius pointed out. Lily pulled out an old piece of parchment from her bag.

"According to the legend, he was entombed in a sarcophagus of black granite decorated with lapis lazuli. He must have been very, very powerful and well respected."

"That's the blue stuff, right?" James cut in, suspecting that they were about to get one of Lily's infamous history lectures. She nodded and the three began their search.

***

James had never felt quite like this. He was in a room made almost entirely of gold, Alexander the Great and Cleopatra were here. The tomb he'd just found might have been Julius Caesar's for all he knew. He remembered then that Caesar was cremated, so it was unlikely, but still...

It was, strangely, tucked away in a corner. Black granite and lapis lazuli.

"Lily!" he called.

"Have you found it?"

"Yes." He waited patiently for Lily and Sirius to come over.

"This is it," she agreed as she translated the engravings. She knelt down and began reading further her instructions. Pulling from her bag two candles, she lit them and placed one at the head of the sarcophagus and one at the foot.

"Stand back," she told them. "I don't think there's any booby-traps, but stand back, OK?"

James looked like he wanted to object, but said nothing and moved away. He and Sirius watched as Lily diligently worked at opening it. She continued through her instructions, doing odd things like walking around it three times. Then she pulled an peculiar shaped stone out of the bag and slid it into a corresponding hollow in the granite lid. She turned it three times to the left and three times to the right.

With a scraping sound, the great slab of granite slid open to reveal the last resting place of one of Egypt's greatest wizards. Inside, the wizard was mummified according to Egyptian ritual. Lily gently placed the amulet in the casket underneath his right hand. She then turned the stone three times to the right and three times to the left. The lid closed again. She went through the odd rituals again, this time in reverse, finally extinguishing the candles. She picked them up and threw them in her bag along with everything else. She turned to James and Sirius. She looked so tired that James wanted to scoop her up into his arms and carry her home himself.

"We should go," she said. "We've got a long walk back to the surface. We should destroy the stone once we get back. The amulet must not be found. Not by Voldemort, not by anyone."

Once back in the sunlight, the three did not linger in Alexandria. Whatever the city had to offer, after spending some time in the presence of Alexander, everything else seemed to pale in comparison. They Portkeyed straight back to London and once there paused only long enough for Lily to report to her Guardians before Apparating to Godric's Hollow.

***

The Next Morning. Godric's Hollow.

"Are you all right, love?" James asked, handing Lily a plate of toast and kissing her on the forehead. It was almost midday but she'd barely been awake ten minutes.

"Yes. I slept pretty well."

"You were exhausted."

"I know. Is Sirius here?" she asked. James shook his head.

"He went back home."

"Oh. You know...."

"What?"

"Nothing."

"What?"

"I can't get the image of that tomb out of my head."

"What do you mean?"

"Antony and Cleopatra. I mean, history says all these different things as if they're fact. Caesar Augustus paraded her dead body through Rome, all that. Yet we found them in Alexandria. Together."

"I know. It was a long time ago, though. Who knows what really happened?"

"You know what I think? I think one of her handmaidens killed herself in the same manner as the Queen and the bodies were swapped. The wizards or whoever did such things by that time, secreted her away with Antony's body."

"Maybe."

"Isn't that good to know, though?"

"What? That Cleopatra wasn't dragged through the streets of Rome?"

"No, not that. I mean, that she got to stay with Antony forever, just like she wanted to. For all eternity."

"Yeah, I saw the film as well," he said, reaching over her for another slice of toast.

"James, I'm serious! I'd... Perhaps it's silly but, wouldn't you want to remain with the one you loved forever? Even in death?"

James thought on this for a moment and nodded. The dark shadow of Lord Voldemort hung awkwardly over their heads for a long, tense moment.

"Yes, I would. But you're right here at the moment, so I'm sorted." He flashed her a bright smile which she returned.

"You're mad, Potter. Absolutely mad."

"I know. You love me anyway, right?"

"Right."

"And everything has been resolved right? Amulet safe, stone destroyed courtesy of Sirius and a sledgehammer?"

"Right," she repeated with a nod.

"So if it's OK with you, I'd like to relax and get ready for my wedding," he said. She grinned widely at him and nodded.

"Right you are."

***

To be continued...