Cries from the Lost Island

by Kathleen O'Neal Gear

  Samael cocked his head again, and his toothless mouth hung half-open while he listened. “In my dreams, they are alive. You know? They come to me weeping, pleading for help. This one . . .” He aimed a hand at the skeleton. “He says his name is Philopator Philometor Caesar. He—”

  “What?” I instantly fell to my knees beside Samael to stare down at the skeleton. “It can’t be.”

  Roberto said, “Who is he?”

  “Well . . .” I sucked in a stunned breath. “Could be the son of Julius Caesar and Cleopatra, better known as Caesarian. Born in June of 47 BC, he was murdered on August twelfth, 30 BC, right after his mother committed suicide. She’d ordered him to run away and hide, but messages reached him from Gaius Julius, telling Caesarian that he need not be afraid. Gaius Julius told him to come back to Alexandria, that Egypt needed a ruler. Of course, when Caesarian returned, Octavian had him murdered.”

  “Was he buried here? In Pelusium?”

  I shook my head. “No one knows where he was buried. Gaius Julius wanted him to disappear from history, just as he wanted to obliterate all traces of Marcus Antonius and Cleopatra.”

  I tried to convince myself that Caesarian had been carried here and placed in an ignominious grave, but it didn’t seem likely. Gaius Julius could have dumped him in an ignominious grave in Alexandria just as easily. On the other hand, hauling him out of the city and far away would have lessened the chances that someone loyal to Caesarian might have been watching. And, after all, there had been an enormous Roman camp here. As the only blood heir to both Julius Caesar and Cleopatra, Caesarian was the legitimate ruler of both Rome and Egypt. And he was the greatest threat to Gaius Julius, who was only an adopted son of Julius Caesar. A known grave would have provided a rallying point for a rebellion. Of course, the graves of Cleopatra and Marcus Antonius might have done so, as well. Which was probably why they, too, had been dumped in ignominious graves. Gaius Julius was nothing if not thorough.

  Roberto looked up from the grave with his blue eyes squinted. “Don’t get too excited, Hal. He’s probably going to turn out to be some poor shabti schmuck who survived on an ancient version of teff ramen and canned cat food.”

  “Why would you think that?”

  “Don’t you remember that naked ninety-year-old in The Springs that the Meals on Wheels lady found moldering in front of his TV surrounded by empty cans of dog food?” He held out a hand to the skeleton. “Same thing. Ptolemaic variety.”

  It amazed me that Roberto had absorbed who the Ptolemies were. That was true progress on his part. “Poor old guy. That was a tragedy.”

  “People get lost in the shuffle, bro.”

  We both turned to Samael, and I knew Roberto was thinking the same thing I was: Just like Samael, living isolated and alone, forgotten by everyone.

  “Has the Ka said anything else?” I asked.

  Samael used his walking stick to brace himself while he wobbled to stand up. “He says I must pay the shabti for the services he renders the dead.”

  Samael reached into his pocket and handed Roberto the extraordinary ancient medallion that Cleo’s father had given her. Quietly, he said, “Do not forget the task you’ve been given. And tell no one you have her medallion. Both people and demons will kill you for it.”

  Roberto looked dumbstruck. His mouth was hanging open. “Wow. Sure. Whatever.”

  Samael turned to me. “You understand now.”

  “What? No, I don’t. I don’t understand anything,” I protested. “Ask Caesarian if he knows where his mother is buried?”

  Samael gazed at me with those strange milky eyes. “Please? Before you go, cover him?”

  He turned and meandered off, sort of heading toward where Moriarity was working at the end of the fortress wall. The old man kept walking in small circles, then listening, as though for the sound of voices, then walking again. Or maybe his dementia had set in with a vengeance, and he had no idea where he was or where he was going. I’d take care of him in a few minutes.

  When he was far enough away that he couldn’t hear me, I quietly said, “He’s blind. How could he find this grave? It’s out here in the middle of the flats, far away from the ruins.”

  Roberto stuffed the fabulous medallion in his pocket and stood up. “Did you know he was going to give me the medallion?”

  “’Course not. How could I? I’m not a shabti.”

  “Yeah? How do you know?”

  “Oh.” That was a disturbing possibility. “Right. Point taken.”

  He shook his head and the four pentagrams dangling from his left ear flashed with sunlight. “Look at the dirt pile, Hal. It’s fresh.”

  “You mean someone dug up the body this morning?”

  “Or last night.” Roberto reached down and grabbed a handful of the dirt to rub it between his fingers. “See how the dirt is a darker color? It was just turned over not long ago.”

  My gaze was drawn back to the skeleton that lay in the grave. Ancient Egyptians buried their dead with great care. This young man had been buried with nothing. Even if it were Caesarian, there was no way to identify him. Just as his enemy had intended.

  Grief tightened my chest. Cleo had always spoken of her first son with such love in her voice. “Help me cover him up, then we’ll go help Samael get to Moriarity.”

  “Why does he want the skeleton covered again? Isn’t the whole point out here to dig stuff up?”

  “I don’t think he wants anyone to know he dug this up. If he’s the person who dug it. The excavation wasn’t done scientifically. See how the hole is kind of oval? Archaeologists dig square holes. This was a haphazard act done by somebody who just wanted to get the dirt out fast.”

  “Maybe the old guy already knew it was here? Maybe he found it years ago?”

  “And came back to look at it?”

  Roberto rubbed his jaw. His sparse brown beard was improving. “If this burial was his personal secret, why would he tell us? We’re nobodies. Less than nobodies. We’re not even archaeologists.”

  “Maybe that’s why.”

  As I started scooping dirt back into the hole, I looked down at the man below me. Caesarian had been seventeen when he’d died. His parents were dead. His younger half brothers and half sisters were about to be hauled off as prizes of war and given to Octavia, the sister of Gaius Julius, who was also Marcus Antonius’ former wife. She would raise them as the royalty they were, but Rome would never let them forget that their parents were traitors.

  I had often tried to imagine what it must have been like for them. Almost a year after their parents’ deaths, the ten-year-old twins and six-year-old Ptolemy Philadephus were forced to march down the streets of Rome in chains as part of Gaius Julius’ glorious anniversary celebration of his victory over their mother. A painted figure of their mother lying on her deathbed with an asp was followed by Gaius Julius in a magnificent purple cloak. Oddly absent at the anniversary gala was any reference to Antonius. It was already as though he had not existed at all. Over and over again for the rest of their lives, the three children would be bombarded with Roman propaganda, forced to see plays portraying their parents as despicable deviants, plays reenacting their parents’ suicides. By the time they were twenty or thirty, did they actually believe their parents had been evil people?

  When we’d finished covering up the skeleton, I bent down and lightly rested my hand atop the dirt pile. In my mind, I told Caesarian the other side of the story, told him that I mourned him, and thousands before me had mourned him. Maybe, after all, that was a historian’s prime directive? Learn the truth and tell the dead, so they could rest easier.

  Roberto watched me with a curious expression. He’d gotten sunburned on our hike to and from Samael’s remote cave, and his freckles seemed larger and darker. “Is that, like, a Vulcan mind-meld?”

  A smile came to my face. “Yeah. Pretty much. Come on, I’m s
ure Moriarity is waiting. And Samael is never going to get there without our help.”

  We dusted our hands off on our jeans and headed for the blind old man wandering aimlessly across the desert.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  With Samael holding onto my arm, I led him at a slow walk toward where Moriarity stood looking down at two students kneeling in the bottom of the shallow excavation. The other eight students had gone to a nearby pit to start digging. Both of the men with Moriarity appeared to be in their mid-twenties. One had short sandy-colored hair. The other was a dyed platinum blond with black roots.

  Moriarity didn’t even glance at us until we stopped two paces away, then he turned and asked, “Did you find something out there?”

  “Just murex shells,” I lied.

  Samael’s fingers dug into my arm, as though to thank me for lying.

  Moriarity scanned my face with shining black eyes, looked out in the direction of the covered-up grave, then back at me. “Are you sure?”

  “Yeah, why?”

  After studying Roberto and Samael, Moriarity gestured to the students in the pit. “Jonathan Jones and Mike Bates, this is Hal Stevens and Robert Dally. These are the kids I told you about from Colorado. Jonathan and Mike are graduate students. Their job today is to teach you boys the fundamentals of excavation.”

  “Sure,” Mike said, but looked a little annoyed at being saddled with that task when there were far more interesting things to do. “Why don’t you both climb down here, grab a trowel, and we’ll get started.”

  Moriarity nodded. “Samael and I need to find an old excavation unit. Let me know if you have any problems. Otherwise, I’ll see you at the cook tent for lunch, and you can update me on the boys’ progress.”

  “Will do, boss man,” Bates replied.

  Moriarity grabbed Samael’s arm and dragged the elder away, speaking to him in a hushed voice.

  “What was that about?” I asked.

  Mike Bates shook his head. He was tall and wiry. Sandy hair flew around his oversize ears. “I don’t know, but he was not happy that Samael took you two out there. Was that really all you found? Murex shells?”

  “Yeah,” Roberto said. “They’re everywhere. You must have been out there a hundred times. Didn’t you see them?”

  Bates had been working hard this morning, because sweat drenched his bulbous nose. “No, that part of the site is absolutely off-limits to everyone. Moriarity is saving it to be excavated years from now, when archaeological tools and techniques are better. He wants it left undisturbed.”

  Jones climbed out of the pit and stared me down with hard brown eyes. He had a physique like Arnold Schwarzenegger, made more impressive by the stretched-to-the-max synthetic blue shorts and muscle shirt he wore. I actually flinched and took a step backward. “And yet you two were out there, and with Samael, no less.”

  “What do you mean, ‘with Samael no less’?”

  In an almost theatrical manner, Jones shook dyed platinum hair out of his eyes, before answering, “That old man is as famous as you can get in this part of the world. In archaeological circles he’s called the Oracle of Egypt. He has a supernatural ability to find sites. He’s a legend.”

  “More like a prophet,” Bates corrected. “I’d give anything if he’d take me by the arm and lead me out across a site. Like he did you two.”

  Mystified by their hostility, I threw up my hands in surrender. “Hey, it wasn’t our fault. We didn’t know it was off-limits, and Samael asked us to follow him out there. What were we supposed to do, say no? Would you have?”

  Bates’ fierce expression tightened. “I—”

  “So,” Roberto interrupted. “Do you have a PhD?”

  “I’m a graduate student working on my PhD, brainless. Right now I just have a master’s degree.”

  “Oh. Okay. So I guess that means we can’t call you Doctor Bates. We just have to call Master Bates, right?”

  “You little . . .”

  When Bates took a threatening step toward Roberto, Jones grabbed his shoulder and pulled him back. “Listen, kids. Mike is trying to save you a lot of grief. If Moriarity finds you out there by yourselves, he’ll throw you off the excavation.”

  “No joke?” Roberto asked. “He’d actually kick us off the excavation for going out there by ourselves?”

  “No doubt about it. Two years ago a woman from the University of Chicago sneaked out there in the middle of the night. It was more of a prank than anything, but she ran straight into Dr. Moriarity who was excavating by himself in the moonlight. The next morning, he put her in a Jeep and drove straight to Port Said, where he dumped her at the airport without so much as a word of goodbye. Carla still hates his guts.”

  “Well, that’s not surprising,” Roberto commented. “Dr. Who is kind of a psycho.”

  “Hey!” Jones half shouted. “The guy chairs my dissertation committee, okay? I don’t want to hear your trash talk, fairy boy.” He flicked his left ear to demonstrate that he was referring to Roberto’s earring.

  “Yeah, whatever.”

  As usual, I was seeing their story play out in my mind, watching Moriarity bent over in the darkness, pulling dirt back with his trowel when something gleamed silver. “Can you excavate in moonlight? It seems like you’d miss a lot.”

  Bates and Jones exchanged a knowing look—as though the answer was obvious—but neither wanted to be quoted later.

  After a few seconds of silence, I asked, “So, I’ve been wondering about the location of the Great Horus Road. Is it close to here?”

  Jones rolled his eyes. “Christ, you are buffoons, just like Moriarity said. Look down. You’re standing right in the middle of it. It ran in front of the fortress wall. That’s why there’s a gatehouse over there.” He flung an arm to point at the massive brick structure we’d seen earlier. “That’s how military forces entered Pelusium. They came up the road and turned in at the gate. Get it?”

  “Thanks. I should have thought of that.”

  Jones shook his head as though really upset with my stupidity. “Now come here, boys.” He reached down, picked up two trowels and shoved them at us. “Climb in here. Let’s get started. Once Mike and I have taught you the basics, we can return to our own excavation unit where there is actually something important going on.”

  Roberto jumped down first and looked around. The unit stretched about ten feet across and ten wide. “What are we excavating? I don’t see any artifacts.”

  “That’s right, bright boy,” Jones said. “This three-by-three-meter unit is a sterile pit. There’s nothing in it. You don’t think Moriarity would actually let you two dunces excavate archaeology on your first day, do you?”

  Bristling over the way he kept stressing the word boy, I clenched my jaw to keep from saying something I’d regret. These guys really resented having to spend the morning with us. Had Moriarity actually told them we were buffoons?

  Of course, when it came to archaeology, we were. But I still didn’t like being described that way.

  Roberto seemed oblivious to the general hostility. He was preoccupied examining Jones’ shorts, which were made of the kind of shiny material that would survive a thousand years of sun and dust storms and still reveal that he had no dick.

  In a genuinely concerned voice, Roberto said, “Dang, bro, if I were you, I’d seriously think about strapping on a tampo—”

  “Not now,” I interrupted.

  Roberto reluctantly closed his mouth and pretended to be squinting out at the field crews scattered across the ancient site. Metallic clangs sounded as tools were laid out for the day’s work.

  “What was he going to say?” Jones asked in a hostile voice. His face had gone bright red, which contrasted sharply with his dyed hair. He was clenching and unclenching his fists, as though he had a pretty good idea what Roberto was about to say. Probably because Roberto wa
s not the first person to notice his “shortcomings.”

  “Nothing,” I replied. “We didn’t have a chance to grab our own dig kit this morning. Do you have brushes and dental picks we can borrow?”

  “The only thing you’ll need today is trowels.” Jones flung an arm out to point to the three-by-three-meter unit. “Now get in the pit.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  By the time the lunch bell clanged, Roberto and I had excavated a ten-centimeter-deep level in the designated three-by-three-meter unit, which means we’d carefully used our trowels to scrape out a roughly ten-foot-square hole, four inches deep, with absolutely nothing in it. But we’d kept the pit walls straight and square, and learned to use our trowels like an artist rather than a bricklayer. Just before Jones and Bates left us alone to move to their own unit, they had not so politely explained that we were no longer to use terms like inches and feet to describe measurements, because it meant we were “stupid pricks.”

  Wiping my forehead on my sleeve, I gazed out across the site. As a couple hundred people started moving slowly toward the cook tent, dust puffed beneath their feet and drifted across the majestic ruins of the ancient city. We’d been hearing snippets of conversation all day, but now it picked up, punctuated by laughter.

  “I’m hungry. This is hard work,” Roberto said.

  Standing up, he stretched his tired back muscles. As his thin brown beard grew out to meet his chin-length hair, it covered his biggest freckles, leaving his blue eyes as the centerpiece of his triangular face. Though it was wispy, the beard made him look older, maybe eighteen or nineteen. His sweat-soaked white T-shirt, like my blue T-shirt, was covered with windblown dust and stuck to his chest.