Channeling Cleopatra (11 page)

Finally, feeling a little dizzy from the
lack of oxygen that came with holding her breath, Leda cautiously
exhaled. Since the same exhalation was echoed by all of the other
people in the basin, it sounded like a single strong burst of wind.
Then everyone began fanning out, checking their work areas for
damage.

Before she began inspecting the area around
her, she looked up toward the top of the dam. Her father was up
there, grinning down at her, and made a gesture of swiping his
forehead with his hand as if wiping off sweat.

"Phew, for sure, Daddy." She grinned back
and waved.

All around him, the engineering crews
swarmed over the dam like monkeys.

Duke turned away to prowl the perimeter with
such deliberation that she thought of him as a big cat with a long
clubbed tail lashing from side to side. He walked up it and on the
way back down, scanned the harbor bed.

She was still standing there, staring around
her and waiting for her heart to slow down and the blood to stop
roaring in her ears, when he hollered. She looked up again to see
him standing with his hands cupped around his mouth. He was close
to the eastern edge of the harbor, perhaps half a mile away and
seventy feet above her, so she could hear him faintly. Then he
pointed. She turned and shielded her eyes, trying to read what he
was calling to her attention. Several times she looked up and saw
him shake his head. Most of the other crew members were on their
bellies already, lying across the scaffolding and crawling
awkwardly along, examining the sea floor.

She stepped over three of them and walked
down another few yards of scaffolding before he raised his hand
three times and pointed definitely at the spot where she stood. Two
boards had been dislodged and were sticking up at about a
twenty-degree angle from the boardwalk.

She dropped to her knees, then to her belly,
and examined the boards and the area around them but couldn't see
anything. She glanced up. He was still pointing. She waved her arms
in a negative gesture. Damn. Next time she should bring the cell
phone. He turned his hand palm up and made a shoving motion. She
should look under the scaffolding.

Okay. She did. And she saw it. The old man
was amazing. He had great eyes. When she glanced back up to let him
know she'd seen it, he dropped his binoculars back to where they
hung from his shoulder on the opposite side from his pistol. Old
fart. He hadn't wanted her to see the binoculars.

Beneath the scaffolding, silt and trash had
shifted, revealing a crack between two pieces of what seemed to be
hewn stone. That wasn't unusual, as they were always finding parts
of the floor of this or that structure down here. But this time
there was something wedged between the stones, revealed by the
crack but still half buried in the muck. It was the curved belly of
a jar. Where its surface had scraped against the boards, pushing
them up as the tremor pushed it to the surface, the muck had been
stripped away, leaving a shiny white patch in the middle—the patch
that caught Duke's eye. The sheen was distinctive, though Leda had
seen very little of this substance outside of museums. It could
only be alabaster.

She felt light-headed all
of a sudden, and her hands shook as she pulled her gloves from her
pants pockets and found that putting them on was like trying to hit
two moving targets. It was so inexplicably difficult she would have
dispensed with the gloves except
no
one dared dig barehanded in the filth exposed when
the sea was pushed back. She wondered if Moses had experienced the
same problem, warning the Children of Israel to be sure to don
protective galoshes before crossing the part God had provided in
the Red Sea. Reed Sea, she corrected herself. The Bible story had
been retranslated, and now they knew it was a sea of reeds, but the
original version was more poetic, as well as more
intriguing.

Her hands protected, she
studied the exposed surface of the jar. It could be part of a
statue, a vase, or some other item, but somehow she just
knew
it wasn't. She was
being unscientific, silly, gullible to think what she was thinking,
but in her gut she knew what its true purpose was. And finding it
was a miracle, a genuine, certifiable miracle.

From another pocket in her pants, she took a
small camera and a tape measure. Laying the tape measure atop the
jar, she snapped three shots, two bracketing the first. She looked
around like a criminal casing a likely house, but nobody was paying
her any attention so far. She turned the tape measure sideways and
snapped three more photos, then replaced camera and tape in her
pocket.

Just for a moment, suspicion crossed her
mind. Had it maybe been salted here for her to find? Were the
others playing a trick on the newbie? Or maybe it had been put here
to impress Rasmussen so it could be "found" and the project
therefore made more worthwhile in the board member's eyes. But
nobody else was looking up or paying any attention, and she was
sure either she or Duke would catch onto the joke if that was what
it was.

Maybe Duke was the one playing a joke on
her. If so, he'd have had to con someone else into planting the jar
for him. He almost never came down into the harbor bed. He said it
gave him the creeps. After the tremor, she knew just what he meant.
But he was pretty tight with most of the Egyptian guards and
workers. They liked macho old guys like him: friendly, amiable,
good storytellers, dangerous if crossed.

Nah. He wouldn't play that mean a joke on
her. He knew what this meant to her. Besides, he knew he would find
sugar in the tank of his bike and both tires slashed the next time
he tried to ride it if he did such a dastardly deed to his baby. He
wasn't the only one who was dangerous if crossed, and he knew it.
She glanced back up at the dam again thoughtfully, just for a
moment. Pete now, he might do it, for malice, to run her off. But
he had become friends with the old man, and surely he was a shrewd
enough judge of character to figure out that a trick of such
proportions played on her would not endear him to her daddy.

The hell with it. Her gut was jumping around
as if she'd swallowed a flea circus. If she was cool about this and
called the others over, then she would lose out altogether. Better
to extricate the jar and have faith in her knowledge that she would
be able to tell whether or not it was genuine.

But, as she pawed the dirt and muck away
from the jar's surface with her gloved hands, a little brush, and a
very gently applied pocket knife to loosen the soil around the
vessel, she felt as if an elevator inside herself was going all the
way to the penthouse.

More of the jar's curve emerged from her
patient digging. She kept expecting to find a jagged edge where the
vessel had been broken but encountered only the deliberate
indentations of its carving on an otherwise smooth and un-marred
surface. She was panting and sweating as she worked, trying to keep
herself calm and her pace steady. Most of all, she was trying not
to hope that this would be what she thought it was. If it was,
surely it would be empty after all it had been through. But from
the feel of the outside of it, somehow she couldn't believe that.
Her hand worked downward and inward, toward the mouth of the jar.
Her fingers encountered, instead of space, another shape.

She had her toes hooked over the far edge of
the scaffolding, and now she unhooked them and scrabbled forward,
so that from the waist down, she was bending over the scaffolding
until the topknot of her long brown hair brushed the sea floor.
Removing a pen flashlight from another pocket in her cargo pants,
she stuck it between her teeth and kept working, though the sweat
ran into her eyes and plastered her T-shirt to her.

Alternately brushing and working the object
free, she finally made out the shape of the carved lid. It was in
the shape of a dog, Duamutef, one of the guardians of the dead, as
she had deduced from groping its shape. That made it exactly what
she thought it would be, hoped it would be. A canopic jar. Still
apparently sealed. Still apparently a very useful as well as a very
important find, being the first evidence of human remains in this
area, especially human remains mummified in the ancient Egyptian
fashion, which was by no means the preferred funeral style
throughout the latter part of Alexandria's history. A jar of
alabaster, of this quality, could only belong to someone of
nobility, even royalty.

She had been working with such concentration
she hadn't noticed the crowd gathering around her until she pulled
the jar free. She would be paying for this heroic straining of her
back for years to come with visits to her chiropractor. She hauled
the jar up to the scaffolding and had to swat sandals and tennis
shoes aside to put it down while she twisted around to a sitting
position again.

The excited babble of voices was drowned out
by the ringing in her ears.

Dr. Yussuf, the scientist in charge of this
particular section of the harbor, leaned forward with hands
outstretched for the jar, but she swatted at him with the rubber
glove she'd just removed. She had been pleased that he had
condescended to allow her to do grunt work on his section of the
dig, but now was the time to pull rank, with all of the privileges
thereof.

"Ah ah ah," she said. "Off limits! Nucore,
meaning me in this instance, gets first crack at any possible human
remains and this," she said, patting her find in a proprietary way
her father referred to as "putting one paw on it and growling."
"This is definitely a canopic jar, and as such it would definitely
hold human remains."

"Perhaps," Yussuf said, kneeling to inspect
what was visible of the inscription on the jar but keeping out of
range of her glove. "But you have not the experience to judge,
Leda. It is most likely a false canopic jar, though of very fine
workmanship. It is very close to the surface to be from the more
ancient times when such jars were used in the way you're thinking
of them. In later periods, the viscera were wrapped and returned to
the body cavity and the jars, such as this one may be, were merely
carved to resemble those which once held viscera. They were used
strictly for ceremonial purposes."

"Ceremonial purposes, for sure. I never
thought otherwise. But most of the funerals of the well-to-do were
highly ceremonial. And there were always cults of holdout
traditionalist priests who liked to do things the old-fashioned
way. Maybe some of those guys did the mummification of this
person."

"Yes, and maybe it fell off a British ship
when our esteemed British colleagues were looting Egypt," said
Habib, an Egyptian grad student who thought he was a full tenured
professor already. He eyed the jar's rounded middle critically.
"That shape was not in use during the reigns of the Ptolemys.
Rectangular boxes were more often used."

"It might be one of the finds Goddio made at
the end of the twentieth century and returned to the ocean,"
Solange Cousteau, a descendant of one of Goddio's divers, opined.
"Perhaps something collected from upper Egypt and brought
here."

"Don't wake Leda from her dream world," Yves
Dulac said. "She thinks she has in her canopic jar the womb of
Cleopatra."

Leda regarded him with her best imitation of
the sphinx. "Could be. If I was dreaming, I would have picked
someone from an earlier dynasty than the Ptolemys to make my
discovery. But this isn't exactly the Pick your Favorite Pharoah of
the Month Club, is it? If you'll all get out of my way now, I'm
going to examine my find."

"You don't just pluck something from a site
and carry it off with you! Its location must be documented, it must
be photographed and measured, it must—"

"I took its picture with a tape measure,"
Leda said patiently. "I will measure it better when I get it back
to the lab. Meanwhile, there is the hole. Document its location all
you want. Knock yourselves out. But remember, these things usually
come in sets, and even if you find one, I have dibs on being the
first kid on this dig to collect all four."

"There is no need for such haste."

"Actually, there sort of is. Haven't you
ever heard of aftershocks? This probably isn't the only tremor
we're going to have, and 1 think this thing was coughed up by a new
fissure in a stone floor. If you want any more goodies before
another little quake closes it back up again or breaks things, you
might want to get right on it."

"We scientists do things in
an orderly and methodical fashion. We must examine this artifact
and
I
must read the
inscription," Yussuf said. "That is what I am here for, after
all."

She smiled up at Yussuf, which he must have
enjoyed for once. He was about five four, and she was five ten. He
was also in his early thirties and she was forty-five. What
happened to all of the white-haired old dignified guys she thought
all senior archaeologists were? Maybe she just assumed they were
mostly old because what they studied was. "I'll be sure to call you
if I need any help, but I was reading hieroglyphics while you were
still in grade school."

He shrugged. "Your interest does you credit,
of course, madame, but you are an armchair archaeologist. That does
not make you a reliable field Egyptologist."

"I am a fully qualified forensic
anthropologist, actually. Furthermore, I have spent considerable
time training in techniques to preserve and restore such finds as
this so that they will yield more information than they ever have
previously about the lives of their owners. Your conventional
methods would ruin what I need to implement my own." She was only
lying a little bit, evading one truth by making a sharp left before
she got to its core, and exaggerating the dangers of letting the
sample out of her control. What would ruin it for her purposes was
that she was pretty sure she'd never get it back if she let Yussuf
and Namid have it.