Wrapped (22 page)

He sighed. “That’s the trouble. General opinion holds that the Greek and demotic are literal translations, and the hieroglyphs will follow.”

“
”
I murmured, the words trickling out before I could clamp my mouth shut.

“What?” Caedmon asked.

“Nothing,” I said. “Bad habit. It’s a bit of A Lady: ‘Where an opinion is general, it is usually correct.’”

“What tongue was that?”

“Russian,” I said. “But it doesn’t matter. Please go on. You were about to tell me how you think otherwise?”

He nodded, eyes still narrowed at me. He shook his head slightly. “They don’t always square with each other. First I just figured I’d slipslopped it with my translating. But I did it over and over and they still don’t match.”

I considered this, thought of the way a word in Hebrew often had no real counterpart in another language. “Translation is always an act of negotiation rather than a science, is it not?”

“But it’s more than that,” he said, holding the candle closer. “The words and structure of language—even Greek—at the time the Stone was inscribed were different than they are now. But
these
differences are a bit more havy cavy.”

I thought of all the trouble and effort it would take to etch the words into a stone of this size. “For a civilization as advanced as the Egyptians, carelessness is suspect,” he said, seemingly reading my mind.

I ran my fingers lightly across the Stone’s surface. “Then understanding the glyphs relies on understanding how they took advantage of the differences between the other two texts on the Stone?”

He nodded eagerly. “Right as rain.”

I lifted my hand and stared at the lines of symbols. “But that would mean they anticipated someone needing to translate the text at some later date. That would mean that they would have foreseen the fact that their civilization—despite the pyramids and other evidence to the contrary—would disappear.”

He nodded solemnly, scratching the back of his neck. “A snarl, I admit. But only if you accept the supposition that all three texts were engraved at the same time.”

The thought had never occurred to me. I looked at Caedmon in admiration. “I suppose you have a reason for supposing otherwise?” I asked excitedly.

He rummaged on the table next to him and produced a magnifying glass, which he handed to me. “I wouldn’t have noticed it had I been working only with the rubbed copies, but the hieroglyphs are a bit shallower than the other markings. Look.”

He grabbed the candle and tilted it toward the demarcation between the pictures and the curves of the demotic script. I leaned in, acutely aware of his eyes on me, willing me to see what he had. As my eyes adjusted, I noticed that the rock behind the glyphs was not completely black, instead reflecting tiny pink glints back in the candlelight.

They did look a bit fresher, but it was hard to apply such a word to something as ancient as any of the markings I was looking at.

Caedmon replaced the candle in its stand. “If the hieroglyphs were added later, it’s especially curious, considering the fact that hieroglyph usage was supplanted by the rise in popularity of the other two languages.”

It was odd listening to him talk about the Stone. As if it demanded a whole new vocabulary of him. It seemed the slang that colored his speech dropped away as he slipped further into his description of his theory, as he delved into the science of his work. It gave me a new appreciation for him, for the way he could be as at home in the street as I imagined he might be with the most vaunted scientists. I looked again at the contour of the jackal glyph. “Then perhaps they added the carvings in order to hide something?”

He nodded and leaned on the Stone. “We’ve unearthed so many relics associated with the line of Ptolemy, it’s queer one of the most important could be missing.”

“Maybe grave robbers took the standard?”

He shook his head. “A bit of iron or bronze would likely have been shucked aside in favor of something that might fetch a higher premium from a collector. And if someone did know of its power, they would have used it or sold it to someone who would have used it.”

He was right. An item that could potentially render its bearer invincible and allow him to raise an army of ghost warriors would certainly have merited historical mention.

“But why would Ptolemy hide it and deprive subsequent pharaohs of this power?”

Caedmon shrugged. “These folk sealed countless treasures into tombs. He could have planned to take it with him to the next world. Or decided that it was far too dangerous to leave lying around. Might have waited until he was certain the empire faced no threat, and then tucked it away until it was needed again by him or one of his descendents.”

I nodded. “Very clever.”

“Any pharaoh who spent more than a few years on the throne had to be a bit cagey.”

“I wasn’t speaking of the pharaoh,” I said. Even in the faint light of the candle’s glow, I could see that he was not immune to my praise of his work.

“Only a theory,” he said, rubbing a spot on the Stone’s glossy black surface.

“But if you’re right, then all we have to do is compare the Greek and demotic, make an inventory of these intentional mistakes you’ve observed, and then use those and the text themselves to unlock the hieroglyphs.”

“All of which may take a mite longer than a random search of the entire holdings of the museum,” he said, his forehead sinking to the Stone.

“True. But we must try,” I said. “Show me.”

He propped himself up on his elbows, the candlelight catching the smile on only one half of his face. “You bear the bell, Agnes Wilkins,” he said. “I mean, I knew you were clever, but you absorbed all this so easily.”

I suppressed my own smile. “You explain it very well, Caedmon.”

“But you’re willing to credit it. Outside of Deacon, I’ve been too afraid to tell anyone what I’ve been working on. It’s not just that I was scared of ridicule, but that I could be right and might have my hard work stolen away.” He paused again, staring at me. “It’s nice to have a partner.”

I let the word settle between us. A partner. An equal. I knew others used it to describe marriage. To describe the relationship between husband and wife. Mother and Father certainly fit the definition. But I wondered, would I dream of applying it to Showalter and myself? Would it ever feel as natural as it did when Caedmon spoke it of us?

Finally I spoke, “Well,” I said, surprised at the catch in my voice, “what kind of partner would I be if I delayed us any longer? Shall we?”

His gaze lingered on me a moment longer before he cleared the papers from the Stone, folding and tucking the lot of them into his waistband at his back. “I started with the dates and numbers. I noticed that the Greek and demotic reference the fifth Ptolemy—the Stone itself is a decree by the priests of his royal cult. He was only thirteen at the time of the inscription. This date,” he said, pointing at a squiggle near the top of the demotic inscription, “is 332
AD
. But this one . . .” He moved his finger to the Greek characters below.

“323
AD
,” I said.

“Nine years off. It seems to me that if one were going to all the trouble of inscribing something on a stone, you’d take care to get the numbers straight.”

I nodded.

“And if you reckon that the name Ptolemy occurs as frequently in the glyphs as it does in the other two scripts, this cartouche must represent the king.”

He pointed to a squarish oval set on its side in the middle of a line of hieroglyphic characters. The oval contained a series of carvings—a couple of shapes that might have been feathers, a snake, an ankh like Rupert had found on the mummy, and other shapes and squiggles.

“This is a name?” I asked.

He nodded. “More or less.”

“The oval acts like some sort of punctuation, or calling someone Mr.?”

“Near enough,” he agreed. “But note the differences between this one”—he scanned his finger across the Stone toward the corner where I’d found the outline of the dog’s head last night—“and this one.”

“There is an extra marking here,” I said, falling under the spell that had so captivated Caedmon. I knew the joy of puzzling out a new language, but never before on a scale as grand as this.

“I reckon it’s a number,” he said.

“Nine?” I whispered.

He nodded. “And note its position?”

“Beneath the broken glyph of my jackal’s head,” I said.

“And the ninth Ptolemy is the last one reported to have used the standard in battle.”

I stood. “Then that must narrow the search somewhat, mustn’t it?”

“I—,” Caedmon began.

Footsteps approached from the south hall. Silently Caedmon snuffed the candles and licked a thumb and fore-finger to quench the ember. I was helpless now in the dark, but Caedmon grabbed my hand and led me back the way we’d come. “Quickly,” he called, his whisper calm but barely audible. I realized this wasn’t the first time he’d nearly been caught.

When we reached the corner containing the sarcophagi, the footsteps abruptly changed direction. Now they were coming at us from the hallway we’d used to enter the rooms.

I realized I was holding my breath. Realized that I was hoping desperately it was merely another late nighter like Caedmon. Because if it wasn’t, if we had been followed . . .

We had no clear line of escape. Without a word, Caedmon pulled me to the darkest corner bearing the largest of the coffins. “Inside,” he whispered.

I obeyed, stepping over the edge and into the granite box. Caedmon followed, and I vaguely thought it funny that we were now testing my earlier observation that the sarcophagus seemed built for two.

Fear and joy proved a potent combination as Caedmon settled in next to me, and we lay on our sides facing each other. Now the walls of the stone box seemed even higher, a blessing since we would have been unable to lift the bulk of the lid even if we weren’t trying to be utterly silent.

The footsteps drew nearer, and the glow of a light crept over the edge of the coffin like a slow sunrise, but did not trail down far enough to reveal us.

I forced myself to breath slowly, evenly though my nose, concentrating on the contour of Caedmon’s chin, the smell of his washing soap, the feel of his body stretched out facing mine.

It was a moment before I realized that a second light had joined the first.

Two intruders. I longed to peek up over the edge, but doing so would have meant leaving our protected shadow. The voices were unrecognizable, their speech indiscernible. They spoke only a moment before the footsteps resumed, fading away in opposite directions.

All was dark and quiet once more.

We lay still for several minutes. Finally Caedmon whispered, “I think it’s safe for us to get up now.”

I was beginning to understand why Mother and Father and everyone else was so careful not to allow young men and women near each other. Beginning to understand how quickly feelings of excitement or longing could get the better of me. Because lying there next to Caedmon was the single most alarming and wonderful thing I’d ever experienced. It was strange to be so close to him, yet so oddly familiar, as if the space between his chin and chest were contoured exactly to provide a place for my head to nestle.