The Eye of Horus (9 page)

Kate nodded. “I’ve been standing still too long. Think I’ll go find the rest room.”

“It’s time for lunch, anyway,” Phil put in. “Why don’t you girls go powder your noses while we shut down here? It’s just a few doors that way, on your right.”

Cleo shot Kate a manic-eyed grimace and mouthed an exaggerated “GIRLS?” then let her eyeballs roll up into her head. Kate got the message.

As they started down the hall, Cleo mumbled, “Too bad. He’s got fantastic buns.”

Kate pushed through the door of the “Ladies” and into a stall. “He’s also tall and has a full head of hair,” she pointed
out through the partition. “Of course that would mean you’d have to stop complaining about having to look down on some guy’s bald spot.” She hit the lever and let a rush of water end the discussion.

“So what do you think, Katie?” Cleo asked as she joined Kate at the next sink.

It was too good an opening to let pass. “What I think is that you let Dave talk you into something, and now you can’t figure a way out that won’t cost your job.”

Their eyes met in the mirror. “Okay, I’ll give him through lunch,” Cleo agreed.

Freed from the demands of his control console, Phil allowed his attraction to Cleo to blossom. Once it came out that he was divorced, the two of them engaged in a pas de deux that might have been choreographed by Balanchine, with Cleo testing his intellect as well as his tolerance for the outrageous while Phil countered every thrust with a sense of humor that seemed to surprise even Max. Through it all he sent sometimes amused, other times amazed looks at Kate, sharing his thoughts as openly as if she had been an old friend. By the time Phil laid his credit card on the check, Kate figured her old roommate had met her match.

“It’s going to take most of the afternoon to finish up,” he commented as they got up to leave, “so if you two girls are bored—”

Cleo didn’t bat an eyelash. “Bored? You must be joking! I haven’t come across anything this exciting since my last dig, in western Anatolia. The land of the Hittites. Turkey. Asia Minor.”

“Yeah? So what’d you find that was so interesting?” Phil inquired, swallowing her bait. Kate glanced at Max and knew what he was thinking—the dance isn’t over.

“A man and woman, caught in flagrante delicto, with his penis still engaged, preserved in a peat bog … for almost a thousand years. Can you imagine?” Cleo gave Phil a wide-eyed, innocent look. “She was wearing a heavy gold anklet,
primitive but absolutely gorgeous.” He started grinning. “As for later, I hate to impose when you’ve already done so much, but I’m sure questions are going to come up. Maybe we could talk occasionally, about the scans, I mean.”

“Sure, anytime,” Phil agreed. “I’m off Wednesday afternoons. How about if I come by the museum this week, let you show me around? That way I could answer any questions you think of between now and then.” He dug for his wallet again, extracted a card, turned it over, and scribbled a number on the back. “That’s my unlisted number at home, in case you need to reach me after hours.”

As they walked toward the parking lot, Phil commented, “A thousand years, huh?” He gave Cleo an appraising look. “That gold anklet must’ve really been a dilly.”

Back at the clinic, Max and Phil picked up where they left off—near the top of the male skull. For a minute utter silence pervaded the small room, as if all of them were holding their breath, waiting.

“There’s the second skull,” Max murmured, then let several images come and go before adding, “wrapped every bit as neatly as Tashat.” He turned to Kate. “I didn’t see any evidence of rewrapping on her, did you?” She shook her head, aware that he was deferring to her.

“He’s also old enough to be her father,” Phil put in. “That second suture looks fully closed, but the last one is—what do you think, Max?—halfway?”

“I’m not very keen on estimating age from skull sutures alone, but the first one is almost obliterated. That makes him past forty but shy of forty-seven.” He sent Cleo a knowing grin. “Pretty ancient.”

“He also has more than teeth in his mouth,” Phil observed. “Whatever it is, it reads like bone. Any idea what it could be?” He looked to Cleo, who shook her head.

“I’ll play with the contrast later, see what I can get,” Max said. “Browridges and mastoid processes confirm sexual determination. So do the shape of the arch and size of the
teeth. His cusps also show more wear than hers, which fits his age.”

Phil crooked a finger at Cleo, motioning her to come closer. “Want to show you something. Cartilage is opaque to X rays, so it looks like this. The growth plates are really just connective tissue, to allow the long bones to grow. When a kid stops growing it means the cartilage has formed bone, which is more porous, like this. That happens first in the hands and feet, last in the collarbone, also earlier in girls than boys. Anyway, the point is, Max is right. Everything from the metacarpal and phalangeal epiphyses in her hands to the distal ends of the humerus and tibia, the long bone here”—he touched his upper arm—“and the shinbone says she had her full growth. She had to be at least twenty.”

“Great,” Cleo mumbled, “I can hardly wait to tell Dave.”

Max glanced at his watch. “I’d like to do one more composite, so Kate can see what’s under that foot mask.”

A few seconds later another ghostly apparition materialized in the black void of the monitor.

“Her feet must be tightly bound,” Phil commented, manipulating the image to view Tashat’s feet and ankles from the front, then the back, left and right profiles, and finally from below—the soles. “Could those lines be folds in the skin, Max?”

Max mimed wrapping them with his hands, first one way, then the reverse, and shook his head. “They run almost at right angles to the creasing you’d expect with folds. Anyway, those edges appear to be cut.” A silence so profound it sounded loud descended on the small room, almost like waves crashing onto a rocky shore. A second later Kate realized it was the blood pounding in her ears.

“I’d say we just learned
why
she died,” Cleo concluded, “even if you can’t determine the medical cause of death.”

“How do you figure that?” Phil inquired.

“The head between her legs plus the slashed feet add up to an unfaithful wife. Cutting the soles of women who strayed
has been a common practice in the Middle East and the Maghreb for centuries. Even in China.”

Like a streak of lightning that comes and goes so fast it leaves only the memory of light on the retina, Kate caught a glimpse of a colorfully painted tower jutting high into the brilliant blue sky.

“No!” Anguish overwhelmed everything in its path. “It wasn’t like that at all!” Kate hardly recognized her own voice and couldn’t think how to explain what she’d just seen, not without sounding like a silly, impressionable—

She glanced at Max and caught the wide-eyed look he sent Phil Lowenstein. “I thought adulterous women were stoned to death,” Phil remarked, giving her time to recover her equilibrium. “Seems like I read about that happening to some princess in Saudi Arabia a few years back. Or was it her lover?”

“In Turkey it’s still not unheard of to slash a woman’s feet, then tie her in a gunnysack and throw her into the Bosporus,” Cleo replied, blithely unaware of Kate’s acute discomfort.

“Why bother, if they’re going to drown her anyway?” Max asked, joining in.

“So she can’t run away again, even in the Afterworld. Look, let’s assume for a minute that Tashat was a nubile young woman married to a rich man, probably a good deal older and wealthy enough to have more than one wife. Say he’s spreading himself so thin sexually that she doesn’t get enough attention to satisfy her, even if she was partially circumcised. The question is, who would her wandering eye be likely to fall on? Servants, relatives, and friends of her husband, maybe an occasional business associate, that’s who. Wives, concubines, and children all lived together in the harem, the women’s quarters, but they weren’t locked up as they were later, in Turkey. Egyptian women could own property and walk freely about town. On social occasions the men ate with men while women ate with the other women,
but in the same room.” She paused for effect. “Say her husband is cuckolded by someone he knows, an even greater betrayal. He makes sure the transgressor gets his just deserts, has his head put between her legs, and tosses the rest to the crocodiles.”

Phil shook his head. “Why not just throw him to the crocodiles, period?”

“Not the Egyptian way,” Cleo insisted. “Putting her lover where her husband found him but without the equipment to do anything about it—” she stopped and snapped her fingers. “That has to be what’s in his mouth—his genitals!—so he couldn’t lie his way into the Afterworld.”

“Talk about eternal damnation!” Phil muttered, shaking his head.

“How do you explain that judgment scene on her cartonnage, then?” Kate protested, still not ready to accept Cleo’s little scenario. Or the evidence before their eyes—Tashat’s slashed soles. “Surely a husband bent on such terrible vengeance would have insisted on the scale being tipped the other way, to let the gods and everyone else know she brought shame on his name.” A bemused smile played around Max’s lips, all the encouragement she needed. “Instead, he paid an exceptionally talented artist to paint a portrait so natural and vital that he gave her a different kind of eternity. To me that mask is the legacy of love, not betrayal and revenge.”

Max nodded, letting her know he agreed. “Didn’t the Egyptians believe that the head was the seat of reanimation, when they would come forth into the light of a new day? And in the Egyptian lexicon, wasn’t the open eye synonymous with knowing?” He looked at Cleo, waiting for her nod. “Well, maybe it’s my advanced age, but I just remembered something I forgot to mention earlier. Our anonymous friend’s eyelids were never closed. He’s traveling through eternity with his eyes wide open.”

The basket maker’s son wore a rough tunic over his loincloth, which meant he was no longer hot with fever. Even so, the skin around his swollen ankle still oozed fluid, attracting a swarm of flies. “It hurts,” he whined.

“Then you know how the
eeyore
felt when you hit him with the stick,” I told him. By the time I finished placing the leeches where the flesh was engorged with blood, he had quieted, I thought because curiosity got the better of selfpity. I was wrong. It was the sight of the girl he knew to be the lord’s daughter.

“My name is Aset,” she told him with a shy smile, “and this is Tuli.” The dog beside her wagged his tail when he heard his name. “Would you like to see him do a trick?” Ipwet’s son could barely nod, let alone speak. They both were six years old, yet Ruka was twice her size, with broad,
coarsened hands and feet. Aset touched Tuli’s muzzle, then drew three quick circles in the air. The dog flopped down on the hard dirt floor, rolled over three times, scrambled to his feet, and trotted back to nose her hand.

“How did you make him do that?” Ruka wanted to know.

“In the beginning I showed him how, and I always reward him.”

“I didn’t see you give him anything.”

She dropped a hand to Tuli’s back, pointed first to Ruka, then Ipwet, then to me, and finally to herself. “Count the people, Tuli. How many?”

Unlike most street dogs, Tuli can speak. And that is what he did, four times. Then he looked to Aset. When she nodded, he wagged his tail and sought her hand again. She hugged him and whispered in his ear.

“He understands that you promise him a bone,” Ruka decided.

“It is how I touch and speak to him that makes Tuli happy. That is the way it is between friends, and he is my dearest friend in this world … besides Tenre. Would you like to be my friend?” I understood then that she intended more than to teach him a lesson about animals, for her father denies her the company of other children, even of her own kind.

I removed the leeches, sponged Ruka’s ankle with sour wine, and covered it with goose grease laced with ground mandrake root to numb the pain. Too entranced by the girl and her dog, Ipwet hardly noticed what I did until I said I would return the next day.

“Must you go, too?” Ruka asked Aset.

“Yes, but we will come tomorrow, too, if your mother will allow it.” She glanced at Ipwet. “Couldn’t he teach me how to prepare the palm fronds for your baskets?”

“You are welcome anytime, but not to do my work.”

‘Tomorrow, then, Aset, don’t forget,” Ruka called after us.

As we set out for town, Tuli ran circles around us, lagging behind to sniff at the base of a doum palm, then running like the wind to catch up, only to be distracted again by a crumb
of bread some bird had dropped. We encountered only two worshipers carrying offerings to the temple of Re-Horakhte, and I saw that the enclosure wall had cracked, exposing its mud-brick core. Even the paint flakes from the stone pylon where Nefertiti tromps over the nine enemies of the Two Lands, wielding a scimitar while her onetime husband favors the crook and flail, symbols of peace. But if Aset recognized the figure as her lady mother, she gave no sign, perhaps because she was too excited at the prospect of visiting Khary and his monkey.

Pagosh waited at the edge of town to put a rein on Tuli’s adventures. “Does he
have
to wear a leash?” Aset protested. “He always comes when I call.”

“How do you think his belly got torn?” he asked, and attached a length of twisted hide to Tuli’s collar. “Too many of his brothers roam the streets ahead. Because they belong to no one, they must find enough to eat wherever they can.”

As we passed along one side of the market, Pagosh had to restrain Tuli from attacking the red-eared baboons used by the police to patrol for thieves. When one bared his teeth at us, Aset slipped her hand into mine. “Did we do something to make him angry?”

“He warns us away because that is what he is trained to do. We need only keep our distance.”

“My uncle’s baboon steals food from the kitchen.”

“Then perhaps it takes a thief to catch one,” I replied.

Nofret awaited us with a basket of honey cakes made fresh that morning and took Aset to the garden while I went to my workroom. It was my day for checking the accounts and signing orders for what we do not grow ourselves—myrrh gum from Nubia, red sandalwood from Kush, olive oil from Mycenae, saffron and sage from Crete, and cinnamon and ginger from beyond the Red Sea. When I finished, I wandered out to the garden, relishing the sense of contentment I always find there, perhaps because I fashioned the place to suit myself. Khary and Aset sat cross-legged in the shade of an old acacia tree, forming bread dough into little
balls, so they paid no attention when I stretched out on the grass nearby and crooked my arm over my eyes, to contemplate whether I should hire another man, perhaps to chop the raisins and dates Khary forms into medicine-laced sweets.

“How do you know which medicine the pills contain once they are baked?” Aset asked him.

“The ones for children with worms I roll in sesame seeds. These I mark with a cross, like this.” He scored the top of a tiny ball with an ivory needle. “If in doubt, I can always taste one, but—” Before he knew what she was about, Aset had popped one into her mouth. An instant later she spit it back out. “Icckkkh!” She rubbed her mouth with the back of her hand. “Is it the bitter taste that drives the sickness away?”

“You are never to put any medicine in your mouth unless Tenre says so,” Khary warned. “And those are to be swallowed rather than chewed, because of the taste. I wish it were otherwise because most little ones gum them until they soften, then do just what you did—spit it out.”

Aset stopped what she was doing and sat blinking her eyes, a sure sign that she was thinking. “I have an idea.” That was nothing new, either, and I had been up half the night with an old man, holding his hand until he passed through the reeds, so I closed my eyes, intending only to doze a few minutes.

“—and I would like to become an outline scribe,” she was saying when I came awake, “but not if I have to make the eye of an
eeyore
like that.” She pointed at the ground with the stick she had used to draw something.

“Then do as I did,” Khary suggested. “I was taught to write by an old scribe, along with several other boys who took classes in his home. The charcoal seller fed his brazier in the winter, the weaver kept him in clothes, and mine supplied him with faience amulets and
ushabti,
to serve him in the Afterlife. But I did not wish to sit cross-legged in the dust all day, counting
khars
of wheat for Pharaoh’s tax collectors, so I decided to learn everything I could, to be ready when the day came to follow where my heart led me. I did
not know it then, but that turned out to be here, with our friend.” I could feel his eyes on me and hoped he could not tell I was listening.

“But why did you have to learn to write if you wanted to be a gardener?” she asked.

“I wanted to be a healer, but my father followed Aten and believed, as did the Son of Horus who fled the Two Lands, that his god would heal all ills. I mean no disrespect, but I believe the gods—whether one or many—are too busy to care for each and every one of us. That is why I decided to learn all the old scribe could teach me, to keep faith with my
ka.
Perhaps you could do the same.”

I let a couple of minutes pass, then stretched to make a show of waking and shaded my eyes against the blinding blue sky as I slowly sat up—and saw that the rush sieve on the ground was filled with pills shaped like tiny birds and fish.

Mena’s throwing sticks are a wonder to behold, with brightly painted likenesses of crocodiles and hippos and other fierce beasts, as befits the chief physician to Pharaoh’s palace guards, while mine are the unadorned tools of a common laborer, fashioned by his own hands. But they came to me for services rendered, so I prize them as highly as Mena does his, and our friendship remains without envy because we live different lives by choice.

We drifted quietly instead of clapping our sticks together to flush the birds, preferring to pit our wits against theirs by watching and waiting. The world around us was blue, both above and below the black land from which we draw sustenance, as if Mother Sky had mated with the Netherworld, transforming that dark place into the twin of her heavenly abode. The river only mirrored the cloudless sky overhead, of course, and underneath was turgid with silt, but the daily reawakening of life always has a magical effect on me,
renewing my spirit in a way I can neither explain nor understand. As the face of Re-Horakhte kissed the tip of Hatshepsut’s silvery needle, shooting a brilliant arrow of light across the placid water, Mena imitated the call of a cormorant to his mate on the nest. I crooked my arm to be ready for the first bird to take wing, and listened for the slap of feathers. In the instant I caught sight of a duck rising from the reeds, I felt our skiff tilt beneath my feet and knew Mena had bested me. Still, I let fly a moment later, heard my stick hit, and saw the bird falter before nosing into a dive.

Mena poled us through the reeds, each of us keeping an eye on where his bird had fallen while searching for his stick at the same time. With the need for quiet past, I decided to test whether he might still be persuaded to go with his General, who prepares another campaign. “Are you not worried that this young assistant you speak of so highly may displace you in Horemheb’s affections?”

“Senmut may lack experience on the battlefield, but he has an eye that cuts to the bone. Like you. As for how he gets on with the General—” Mena shrugged and let the skiff glide. “If you think I grow bored with besting you at fowling and wish to be away from here, it is because you cannot know the joy I find in Tetisheri and Nebet.”

In the nearly three years since he returned to Waset, Mena has had the good fortune to find a wife with the wit and charm to match her beauty. He also has fathered a daughter named Nebet, who shines like gold to his eye despite her deformed hip. “Our time in this world is short,” he warned me. “and twenty-eight years of it are gone already. Do not leave it too late to get any children of your own, Tenre.”

In appearance we are as two strangers, yet in other ways we are like twins, so I am never surprised to hear him voice my own thoughts. But he does not know that I have been visiting a young widow named Amenet, who I find pleasing in both face and disposition. Nor is she coy about offering me her body as well as a meal.

“How does Nebet fare with the new splint?” I inquired,
since we have put our skills together to find some way to hold the ball of her thighbone in its socket yet still allow her to move. Now, since her second feast day, with Nebet able to take a few steps and needing more freedom, our latest device is lighter and more flexible than the one before it, to let her muscles grow strong enough to replace the brace.

“She tests herself on the steps leading to our sleeping room, so our privacy soon will come to an end.” He sent me a wry grin, since I know of his unorthodox habit of sharing his couch with his wife through the night. He reached into the water, grabbed his duck by the legs, and bound them with a cord, then tossed the bird into the bow of the boat with the others. “Anyway, the General is content for me to stay behind to look after his wife, should he leave her with child. Since the Queen lost another babe, he wants someone nearby he can trust. He believes the fault lies with her physicians, though I am not so sure.” I knew he alluded to Ankhesenamen having conceived her first child by her father, to the same end.

We paddled to where my bird should have been and in time found him thrashing about in the water, only stunned. I gave him his life and motioned for Mena to pole us into the backwash of the main channel, where we began another wait. “You know the Queen is with child again?” he asked after a minute, keeping his voice low so as not to warn off our prey. I nodded and watched the thicket of reeds ripple like ripening wheat in the cool morning breeze. “Perhaps it will go better with her this time. I hear Ramose has offered Pharaoh the services of his own physician, a man he swears can bring forth a live child if any can.”

“It is not for me to judge who Ramose chooses to—”

“He names the physician Senakhtenre. Did he not tell you?”

“Me, attend the Queen?” I stammered, not sure I understood him.

“Sheri says Ankhesenamen intended to ask for you even before the priest came forward, at the urging of her little sister.”

“Aset?” I must have sounded the village idiot, for he hooted with laughter, setting our reed skiff to rocking. It is ideal for skimming ponds and marshes, but lacks the stability provided by a keel. “The laugh will be on you if you dump our catch in the water,” I reminded him, knowing he would not want to lose his favorite meal.

“Sheri insists that you attend the banquet we plan for the General, to wish him well on his forthcoming campaign.”

Mena’s residence is near the palace, a place as foreign to me as the lands beyond the Red Sea. “I thank you, truly, but I am not at ease among people in high places, nor are they with me.”

“Then hide yourself in the crowd if you must, until the Queen and Tutankhamen grace us with their presence … unless you prefer greeting her for the first time from between her legs. Besides, you could do me a favor by speaking to my wife, who refuses to heed her father or me. She still believes Nebet’s hip, or worse, will be visited upon another child.”

“In his own house, even a wise man is green as a young shoot,” I said, then sat thinking for a minute. “All right, I will come to your fancy affair.” To make sure he did not feel too satisfied with himself, I added, “But there is little chance that Horemheb will leave Mutnodjme with child so long as she uses a pessary of ground acacia spikes.”