by Jodi Picoult
I pivoted, glaring at him. “Yes it is.”
“It’s a triliteral sign,” he said. “Not a scepter.”
I hesitated. I was used to Wyatt’s transliteration being better than mine, but I was confident about this interpretation. “You’re wrong—”
“I know,” Wyatt murmured, and suddenly, quickly, he winked. “I just thought we should act like our normal selves.”
“In that case, stop being a dick,” I replied.
He laughed. I watched him walk back to another wall of the tomb, where he was working, wondering how he could keep so calm. Every time I looked at the inspector chatting with Dumphries, I broke out in a sweat.
When we broke for a snack, the gaffir served mint tea. I sat beside Wyatt, imagining what it would taste like on his lips. Dumphries regaled everyone with a story about an excavation at Hierakonpolis that revealed five-thousand-year-old animals like leopards and hippos and elephants buried with their owners.
Then Wyatt bumped my knee with his own. “Nature calls,” he said, rising to his feet, striking out behind the gaffir’s tent. Our makeshift toilet facilities were in a wadi near the necropolis that had been carefully checked for antiquities before being designated a bathroom area. Wyatt would be striking out to a different spot, one closer to the Dig House. We were both hoping that the excitement of the discovery would eliminate any questions about why he had walked that far to relieve himself in the first place.
We were also counting on the timing working in our favor—as Dumphries announced that our break was over, I walked back into the tomb with the other grad students and specialists working alongside us. I must have stared at a d-hand sign on the right wall of the outer chamber for five minutes, waiting for Wyatt to return. And then, he burst into the tomb entrance, calling out for Dumphries.
We trekked behind Wyatt to the spot he’d allegedly just found. Mostafa, our inspector, was with us. There was the rock ledge, just like the day before. I was careful not to look at Wyatt, but instead kept my eyes on Dumphries as he crouched down and picked up a sherd from a broken beer jar.
“What are we looking at, Armstrong?” he asked.
“I think it might have been a popular site during the inundation festivals,” Wyatt said.
“Because of a beer jar?” Dumphries said. “We find those in tombs, too.”
I wandered into the crevice of shade, just like we had planned. The dipinto looked different, the light striking it in a way that bleached it out. “Professor Dumphries?” I said. “I think you should take a look at this.”
Dumphries came up beside me, Wyatt flanking my other side. He began to translate the hieratic, showing off, which was completely in character. “It was a festival,” Dumphries said, excitement painting his voice. “This is like the dipinti at Hatnub.” He crouched, reading the text aloud twice. Then he stood and slapped his dusty hands against his thighs. “Sometime during the reign of Senwosret, Djehutyhotep II stopped here and slept overnight in the tomb of his ancestor Djehutynakht. We know from a graffito in Sheik Said that there was a Djehutynakht who made a point of caring for earlier tombs, but no one knew where he fit in the family tree, or where he might be buried.”
He looked at Wyatt and me, and a smile broke over his face.
“Until now, my chickens.”
Behind his back, Wyatt met my gaze. The secret was caught between us like a star, its edges sharp, its seduction blinding.
* * *
—
DUMPHRIES CELEBRATED WITH bourbon. A lot of bourbon. We sat on the roof beneath the same constellations that pharaohs had seen, and our mentor toasted us. “To Wyatt’s bladder and Dawn’s eagle eyes,” he said, “which have transported this dig season into the realm of something truly spectacular.” He declared that we would use the rest of our brief time in Deir el-Bersha to split into two teams: one that would continue the work at Djehutyhotep’s tomb, and one—led by Wyatt and me—that would copy the newly discovered dipinto and get it ready for publication. But because we had twice the work to do in the same amount of time, now our celebration ended by nine o’clock.
When I left, Wyatt was doing shots with some of the younger grad students. Dumphries and I went down the staircase, shoulder to shoulder. At the spot where we’d part ways to go to our individual rooms, he put his hands in his pockets and rocked back on his heels. His eyelids were at half-mast. “Dawn,” he told me, “I am quite glad U Chicago relinquished you to us.” Then he gave me a little bow and walked away. Drunk on bourbon and on this unexpected praise, I made my way back to my own room. The walls of the Dig House slanted, and the floor tipped beneath my feet. I closed my door and tumbled onto the bed, still fully clothed when I fell asleep.
I woke up tangled in a cocoon of darkness, with someone’s hand over my mouth. I thrashed against the sheets, my eyes going wide, and then as they adjusted to the darkness, I saw Wyatt. He was sitting on the edge of my bed, outlined in moonlight. He let go of me and put a finger to his lips. Shh.
“Come on,” he whispered.
My mother had told me that people are born leaders, or they are born followers. Be the first, Maidan, she would tell me, or all you will see is the back of someone braver than you. I had always believed that I was a trailblazer, but the truth is, I would have followed Wyatt anywhere that night. If he’d walked me to the edge of the earth, I would have stepped off right behind him.
Instead, he held up a full bottle of bourbon from Dumphries’s private collection. “Did you steal that?” I whispered, and he just grinned.
We slipped out of the Dig House, and Wyatt’s hand curled around mine. His palm was warm and a perfect fit—so necessary pressed against mine that I wondered how I hadn’t noticed, all this time, that something was missing.
The desert at night was a world of shapes and shadows—the rough, undulating tongue of a beast beneath my feet, the eye of the moon peeking out from a veil of clouds, the sky as wide as a scar. I would not have been surprised to see a basilisk rise in our path and turn its stone stare on us, to have a sphinx block our way with a riddle. We didn’t speak, as if words might break the spell.
Wyatt didn’t turn on the flashlight he carried in his other hand until we reached the wadi. Almost by instinct, we navigated to the rocky ledge that shaded the dipinto. In the dark, it was a smudge of color. He opened the bottle of bourbon and drank from its neck, then passed it to me. “To Djehutynakht,” he toasted. “We’re going to find him.”
“We?” I asked.
He nodded.
Dumphries had not mentioned searching for this lost tomb. He was already busy with his work in a different tomb, and going on a wild goose chase for Djehutynakht without actual directions or a starting point didn’t seem like a smart use of time. But just because Dumphries was too busy or too close to retirement to take on a challenge didn’t mean we had to let it fall to the wayside.
We would be a team, McDowell & Armstrong, and we would unearth the tomb of Djehutynakht. Our work on the Book of Two Ways would be seminal, thanks to a new version found at the bottom of an intact coffin we could only dream about right now. Little girls who never pictured themselves as archaeologists would know my name. We’d cochair an Egyptology department at a university—Wyatt focusing on philology, while I specialized in iconography and imagery. We would be interviewed by every foreign press about what we’d found underneath a rock ledge.
A dipinto. A tomb.
Each other.
I glanced at Wyatt from the corner of my eye. He was sitting against the rock wall, underneath the dipinto. “How?” I asked.
He understood immediately what I was talking about. “I don’t know. Of all the parts that were damaged, it had to be the numerical distances.” Without the actual directions once given in cubits in that text, it was going to be a struggle to find Djehutynakht’s final resting place. The necropolis had been excavated for
nearly two hundred years by Egyptologists; how could all of those archaeologists have missed a tomb?
“Well,” I said. “If it was easy, then someone else would have probably found it by now.”
“True. We have a lot of work to do.” Wyatt reached for the bourbon again. “But tonight, Olive…we celebrate.”
We drank, sitting in the quiet, muddled joy that was still left over from the day, much like the heat that the sand retained. I thought of how perfect it was that we were drinking, here, just like Djehutyhotep had thousands of years ago.
“What are you thinking about?” Wyatt asked.
That your long eyelashes are criminally wasted on a guy. “What it would have been like here during the Sothic rising,” I said.
He took my hand and brought it to his lips. Such a courtly gesture, and so British, and still, when his mouth touched my skin I shivered. “One unique is the sister,” he murmured. “Without her equal, more beautiful than all women. Behold her like the star, having appeared in glory at the beginning of a good year.”
Wyatt was quoting Ancient Egyptian love poetry. Festivals were social get-togethers, among the few places to meet someone outside your village and hook up. To that end, poems would be exchanged to attract someone of the opposite sex. “Shining of excellence, luminous of hue,” he said. “Beautiful of eyes when glancing, sweet her lips when speaking…for her no word is excessive.”
His voice was a river, and I was stone, and every syllable reshaped me. “Long of neck,” he said, leaning closer to kiss a spot beneath my ear. “Luminous of chest.” His teeth, on my collarbone. “True lapis is her hair.” He tugged loose the tie of my braid and unraveled it with his free hand, sliding his palm up to my shoulder. “Her arms putting on gold…her fingers like lotuses.” He finished where he’d started, kissing my hand, his tongue a quick brand between my knuckles. “Now what are you thinking about, Olive?” he whispered.
At that point, I couldn’t answer. I couldn’t form words.
Wyatt laid me down on the ground beneath the dipinto, cradling the back of my head. My hands fisted, sand spilling through them like through an hourglass.
“Maybe once, instead of admiring your brain,” Wyatt murmured, “I could admire your body?”
He hesitated, a breath away, and I realized that he was waiting for me to say yes.
Instead, I reached up and started to unbutton his shirt. His skin was hot and smooth under my palms, and muscles shuddered when I touched him, as if my fingertips were made of electricity. He didn’t seem to know what to say anymore, either, so he kissed me instead. He tasted of smoke and sugar.
I rose up, tidal, my arms holding him together. Somehow we switched places so that he was spread on the sand, his discarded shirt and pants beneath him. When I came up on my knees beside him, granules bit into my palms and rubbed me raw.
He was naked except for his socks and I was still fully clothed and I could not stop shaking. My hand slid down his stomach; he twitched in my fist. “Olive,” he groaned. “You’re killing me.”
I touched the very tip of him. He was circumcised, which was one of the ways you could culturally become Egyptian, if you were a foreigner. There was actually a stele where a captive man talked about being inducted into the Egyptian army with a hundred and twenty other men and—
Suddenly Wyatt’s hand closed around mine. “Stop picturing that stele,” he gritted out, and my eyes flew to his as he finished my sentence. “I was circumcised with 120 men. I struck no one; and no one struck me. I scratched no one; and no one scratched me,” Wyatt recited. “I know what you’re thinking.” In one fast, grating move, he flipped us over. “And frankly, if you’re still thinking, I’m not doing this very well.”
His thighs bracketed mine, but he was careful to not rest his weight on me. He unraveled me, pulling back the edges of my shirt and shucking my pants as if they were lotus petals, she loves me, she loves me not.
She loves me.
He poured bourbon on me and licked me dry, his mouth moving from one breast to the other. Sand scratched between us when he fitted his body against mine. Pain and pleasure; somehow that seemed right. We had been enemies and now I couldn’t remember the war we had been fighting.
“Dawn,” Wyatt whispered.
A name was once seen as part of the soul, and now I understood its magic. It’s why cartouches were surrounded by shen rings, for eternal protection. It’s why a king would hack out the name of his predecessor. It’s why, as long as someone held your name on their lips, you were alive.
I stared into his eyes when he sank inside me. We moved together, a chord of music I could never sing out loud, but would never stop hearing.
Somewhere in time, others drank and danced. A star flashed green on the horizon.
We were ancient.
* * *
—
HIS HANDS TANGLED in my hair.
Brushed sand off my belly.
Scrapes, cuts, teeth, elbows.
Wyatt curled around me like Mehen, the protective serpent that encircled the sun god in the Book of Two Ways, protecting him from chaos.
I lost track of the number of times we came together, or slipped apart. And even then he touched me or I touched him, until the distance between us was like the line between sea and sky, so hazy it was impossible to see where one stopped and the other started.
We fell asleep wrapped in a blanket made of night, and when it became threadbare, I knew Wyatt was just as awake as I was. “What are you thinking about?” I asked, and his arms tightened around me.
“Sakhmet,” he said.
Sakhmet was the flip side of Hathor, a sky goddess and a consort to Re. As Hathor, she represented joy and creativity and beauty and love, and she was depicted wearing a sun disk headdress between cow horns. But as Sakhmet she was a lioness goddess, a fierce hunter who protected pharaohs and led them into battle. Hathor on a rampage, with PMS, was Sakhmet. Sakhmet, pacified, was Hathor. And during the Sothic rising, Sakhmet/Hathor was Sothis, the daughter of Re.
In New Kingdom tombs, like Tutankhamun’s and Seti I’s, there was a text called the Book of the Heavenly Cow. In it, mankind rebelled against Re, who decided to retaliate by destroying them. He ordered Sakhmet to do it. But the night before the deed was to be done, Re had a change of heart. The problem was—he had already dispatched Sakhmet. How did you stop unstoppable destruction?
The answer: You made men brew beer and women grind red ocher. At the end of the night, they took the tinted beer and spread it all over the fields. When Sakhmet came to destroy humanity, she saw all the red beer and mistook it for human blood. Bloodthirsty, she lapped it all up and got so drunk she couldn’t destroy a fly, much less mankind.
At the inundation festivals, when Egyptians drank the night away, they were imitating Sakhmet—soothing her anger with beer, so that she would swallow up the overflow of the Nile when it ran red with silt from upstream, threatening to wash away settlements.
I turned slightly in Wyatt’s embrace. “You’re thinking about a drunk girl with bloodlust?”
Against the back of my neck, I could feel his smile. “I’m thinking that you’re the drunk girl with bloodlust.”
“I like you so much better when you’re not talking.”
Wyatt laughed. “Do you know the Tale of the Herdsman?”
It was a story from the Middle Kingdom, but I’d never read it. I shook my head.
“The narrator meets Sakhmet in the marshes before she’s changed back into Hathor,” he explained. “She’s a wild animal, and he’s scared shitless because he thinks she’s going to eat him. But the next day at her festival, she’s all woman and ready for the new year.”
He buried his face in the curve of my shoulder. I could smell him on my skin.
“I’m thinking that I came to the desert with a lioness,” Wyatt said softly, “and
ended up with a goddess in my arms.”
Together we watched the sun rise—my namesake, gilded in pinks and oranges; the universe being born again.
* * *
—
WE CREPT BACK to the Dig House then, to snatch a few minutes of sleep before the day officially began. But I woke up alone with the sun streaming into my room, panicking because I had slept through the morning’s work. I jumped out of bed, already wondering how much trouble I was going to be in.
The Dig House was empty because everyone was at the site. Or so I thought until I heard something crash in the magazine. I padded down the hall to find Wyatt picking up pieces of pots and setting them into a box.
A thousand thoughts cycled through my head: if he was here, and we were alone, he should have come to my room. Unless he didn’t want to. Unless there was a piece of him, like me, that believed last night didn’t happen. Or shouldn’t have.
“Tell me that was already broken,” I said evenly, and he jumped.
“Jesus, Olive!” He turned around. “You’re going to give me a heart attack.”
“That may be the kindest way to die after Dumphries figures out we slept in.”
“Relax,” Wyatt said. “I told him we were both hungover. Apparently, finding a new dipinto and a potential tomb allows us one grace period of fucking up.”
“Speaking of that.” I swallowed. “This thing. Us.”
“What about it?”
It felt like knives in my throat, but I said what had to be said. “We had a lot to drink.”
He stared at me. “Are you saying you took advantage of me?”
“I’m saying maybe we took advantage of each other.” It was the most earth-shifting moment of my life. “We were celebrating. It was…bound to happen.”
Wyatt slid his hands into his pockets. He was quiet as he walked deeper into the magazine, trailing his hand along the box where George, the mummy, rested. “You think last night was a mistake.”