The Eye of Horus

by Carol Thurston

  Max nodded, slowly, thinking while he continued to watch her. Then, as if he’d arrived at some conclusion, he picked up his glass and drained it, reached into his back pocket for his wallet, and put a bill on the check. When he glanced up his eyes were sparkling with eagerness. “Okay, so where do we go from here? Should I talk to your director? What’s his name again?”

  “Dave Broverman. But I’d like to bring Cleo in, ask her to arrange something for tomorrow if that works for you.” Worried that Maxwell Cavanaugh might still slip through their fingers, Kate stopped short of spelling it out for him—that she was low man on the museum totem pole.

  “Okay, but I need to contact my radiologist friend in Littleton before I talk with whoever has to give us the go-ahead, and see how the scheduling looks there so I can be more specific about when. How about if I call you in the morning?”

  “Sure.” She pulled a paper napkin from the holder, took the pen he handed her, and wrote down her number at the museum. “I should know something by ten.” Maybe even sooner, she thought, since it was Thursday, the night Dave’s wife played bridge.

  3

  Dave had agreed to a magnanimous fifteen minutes for Max at three o’clock. Kate considered the way he’d worded his response as borderline insulting, but it didn’t seem to bother Max. He had called from the clinic in Littleton, and said he would come early “so you can clue me in on what he’ll probably want to know.”

  By noon she was feeling too jumpy to eat, but forced herself to go to the museum café, where she nibbled on the crackers that came with her salad. Then, worried that she might miss him, she gulped down some hot tea and hurried back to the workroom. She needed to get a grip and the only way to do that was to draw. First she tried sketching the street scene with Tashat and her little white dog, but it had already begun to fade, like a dream that disappears from memory upon waking. She ended up doodling, letting her hand wander without purpose until an image slowly began to form in her mind’s eye.

  Flipping to a clean page, she drew with quick strokes, hoping to catch the essence of Maxwell Cavanaugh before he, too, could slip away. A few minutes later she knew she had him. Not his face but the attitude of his body, which spoke louder than words. He moved with a kind of controlled deliberateness, yet his stance was relaxed, which suggested he was at peace with himself—without the simmering insecurity that made Dave Broverman such a control freak. She pictured Max’s broad square hands, the flash of excitement in his eyes, and realized they were of a piece—that the one out-of-tune note was the mustache and beard. What was that? Some kind of midlife rebellion against a wife or job that had gone stale?

  “Am I interrupting?” She turned to find him peering around the half-open door. She shook her head, aware that he looked different. It wasn’t until he came on in that she caught the full impact of his mouse-colored suit, and wondered if he planned to overwhelm the lion with meekness.

  “The clinic in Littleton has one of the new high-resolution machines,” he told her right off, “so we can slice her down to one millimeter if we need to. It’ll have to be at night or a Sunday, though, and the sooner the better. Come December, Phil Lowenstein spends every weekend on the slopes.”

  “Your friend wants to be there, too?”

  “Either him or a technician, and I’d rather have him.” He looked all around while he spoke, as if seeing the workroom for the first time. “I’m not licensed in Colorado.”

  “You can’t even x-ray a mummy without a license?”

  He shrugged, then moved to the workbench where she’d spread some watercolors to dry. “Can I look or would that be a breach of protocol?”

  “They’re just studies for a larger illustration, but help yourself.”

  He examined them one at a time, taking so long that Kate decided he wasn’t going to say anything. Not that she was looking for compliments. But they were perfectly ordinary anatomical renderings, without any abnormalities that might send him into his silent mode.

  “Jesus, Kate,” he said finally. “These are really exceptional.” He laid one down and picked up another. “You caught every muscle and tendon exactly right. Arrested, yes, but not for long. I get the feeling it could even be a trick of my imagination, that you stop-framed this one so I could see how the muscles elongate but it’s just on the verge of reversing itself, of contracting. They’re just so—so exquisitely right!” He glanced at her. “Do you know those anatomical studies by da Vinci, the ones he did with this same red pencil?”

  “Conté crayon.”

  “Whatever. That’s what I mean about the way you’ve captured the fluidity of the human body in motion.” Like Re-Horakhte rising on the eastern horizon, a smile started somewhere behind her eyes, bathing the whole room in its brilliant white light. Max didn’t seem to notice. He was holding up the portrait she’d done with transparent washes.

  “Do you think her eyes actually were blue? Weren’t the Egyptians a dark-eyed people, like Middle Easterners today?”

  Kate had wrestled a long time with the color of Tashat’s eyes and still worried that she had let herself be influenced by personal experience, because her own eyes were yellow with brown flecks—unlike anyone else in her family, which her father never let her forget.

  “It may be politically correct to describe them as a mosaic instead of a melting pot, but there had to be a lot of intermixing in an empire that extended north to the Euphrates and south up the Nile to Khartoum. They traded all over the Mediterranean and brought prisoners of war home as slaves, so blue eyes may not have been common but there must’ve been some.”

  “In that case why give her curly hair when it’s straight on that mask?”

  “That’s probably a wig. I’m guessing she would choose something different from her natural hair.” Kate shrugged, felt a strand of curly hair fall across her cheek, and reached up to push it behind her ear. “I know I would.”

  She caught the smile in his eyes before he glanced at his watch. “So fill me in on your director. Anything I should try to make a point of, or avoid?”

  This was not the time to tell him that Dave Broverman feared new information the way the Egyptians feared the plague, in case it should topple the house of cards on which he’d built his reputation. Now, with feelers out to several universities, Dave would be especially wary of anything that sounded risky. But she was counting on Cleo to remind him that the “gift” Maxwell Cavanaugh was offering actually could tip the scales the other way. The Antiquities Museum operated in the shadow of Denver’s pride and joy, the Museum of Natural History, where a newly installed Egyptian exhibit included not only a mummy but films from a CT scan carried out at a local hospital. That scan had revealed very little they didn’t already know, which Dave knew, but just by doing it the Antiquities Museum would rise to its level. Finding something new, not to mention sensational, could put Dave’s operation on the map.

  “You might want to reassure him about this procedure, that it carries no risk of damage to the mummy,” Kate suggested. “Also, if he asks how the scanner works, try not to make it too complicated. Cleo’s the same way. Anything very technical turns them off.”

  “Okay. Anything else?”

  She pulled the X-Ray Atlas of the Royal Mummies from the shelf where she kept the books she’d borrowed from the Denver Museum of Natural History library, something else Dave’s budget couldn’t support. “You might want to glance at some of the shots taken by the University of Michigan team.” She handed it to him and reached for another book, this one entitled Evidence Embalmed. “This, too, in case Cleo brings up the Manchester study.”

  “Your friend’s going to be there?” Kate nodded. “Anybody else?”

  “Me.”

  “Good. Why Manchester?”

  “The museum there got together a group of people from different fields to conduct autopsies on a couple of their undesirables—mummies in plain brown wrappers so they’re not prized for display. Anyway, they did a pretty thorough job. Blood groupi
ng, histology, carbon dating, and even developed a way to rehydrate tissue so they could lift fingerprints from the dermis rather than the epidermis.”

  “Okay.” He sat down at her drawing table and started on the atlas.

  Twenty minutes later Dave was doing his predictable best to downplay the whole idea. “I’m not sure she’s worth all the trouble, Dr. Cavanaugh, but I’d be interested in hearing what you think we could learn that we don’t already know.”

  “We’d eliminate the guesswork about what she looks like right now, under the bandaging.”

  “An image composed of multiple cross sections?” Dave glanced at Kate. “Do you think that’s aesthetically wise?”

  Max answered for her. “We can produce some pretty impressive composites, too, of any part or the entire body, from any angle.”

  “But still a computerized image,” Dave insisted, fingering the knot of his tie. Satisfied that it was straight, he checked his cuff links next, making sure they were aligned with the buttons of his coat sleeves. “What about cause of death?”

  “That depends on what it was. But we’d establish an age range for that second skull, and learn whether it was wrapped before it was placed between her legs.”

  Dave flicked a glance at Kate, as if to let her know that he knew where that came from. “I assure you that is the result of rewrapping, or else an embalmer’s mistake.”

  “Then we could confirm that she was rewrapped,” Max persisted.

  Cleo arrived at that moment, mumbling apologies for being late, and Max rose from his chair to greet her. ‘This is Cleo Harris,” Kate began, hoping to get the introductions over with quickly. “Cleo, meet Dr. Maxwell Cavanaugh.”

  Max beamed as Cleo offered her hand. “That wouldn’t be short for Cleopatra, would it?” To Kate it sounded like something he would say to put a new patient at ease.

  “A self-fulfilling prophecy,” Cleo replied with an assessing glance, then took the chair beside him, “but don’t let me interrupt.” She had on a velvet tunic and long bias-cut skirt, mixing vintages in different shades of green that made her copper-colored hair look even more so, with platform shoes she didn’t need.

  “I was just telling Dr. Broverman that scanning Tashat would resolve a number of questions about that male skull,” Max explained for her benefit. “What he has in his mouth, for instance. Or do you already know?”

  A stunned silence greeted his little bombshell.

  Kate kept her eyes straight ahead, wondering why he hadn’t mentioned that the day before. Was it just his brand of insurance, as Cleo was hers?

  “Oil-soaked pads, most likely,” Dave supplied, eyes darting sideways between Maxwell Cavanaugh and Kate.

  “I thought MRI was the preferred imaging technology these days,” Cleo put in.

  “For resolving soft tissues, yes,” Max agreed, “especially the brain. But magnetic resonance depends on aligning the hydrogen molecules in water. If there’s no water left in the body, the results could be unreliable. X-ray tomography, on the other hand, is better for resolving the cranial sutures, the seams where the plates of the skull come together. Those and the growth plates in the long bones are what we need to see to clear up the confusion about her age.”

  “But we already know how old she was,” Cleo pointed out, leaning around him to peer at Kate. “Didn’t you tell him?”

  “She told me,” Max replied. “I can’t be absolutely sure from that old X-ray, but the third molars appear to be partially in. If so, that would make her at least twenty. If they’re all the way in, she’s even older, not fifteen. Maybe her coffin was intended for someone else. That happened sometimes, didn’t it? Seems like I read about one where the original face had been scraped off and repainted. Akhenaten, wasn’t it, the pharaoh they call the Heretic?”

  The back of Dave’s executive chair snapped to attention. “If you mean KV Fifty-five—that’s Valley of the Kings tomb number fifty-five, Dr. Cavanaugh, in case you’re not familiar with our notation system—yes, that coffin does appear to have been intended for someone else. But the body was Smenkhkare, not Akhenaten. A lot of amateurs, even graduate students, confuse the controversy over who the coffin belonged to with the identity of the body it contained.”

  “The inscription had been changed, too, from female to male,” Cleo added. “So that coffin probably belonged to Meritaten, Smenkhkare’s wife and Akhenaten’s daughter, which would explain why his name was on some of the grave goods.”

  “I stand corrected then,” Max murmured. Without missing a beat, he asked, “How did they establish the identity of the mummy?”

  “An autopsy and radiological examination carried out by three very reputable scholars working as a team,” Dave replied, “who verified it was a male no younger than eighteen and no older than twenty-three.”

  “I understand those remains were in pretty bad shape even a hundred years ago, when the tomb was found. Do you happen to know which—”

  “Both age and gender were determined not only by the pelvis,” Dave said, anticipating him, “but the state of development of the sacrum. Akhenaten had to be at least thirty by the end of his reign. Even more compelling is that this body was of the same blood group as Tutankhamen, which means the elusive Smenkhkare was Tut’s brother. Some of us believe Smenkhare was not only Akhenaten’s coregent but his lover.” That little kicker didn’t even faze Max.

  “Blood grouping indicates kinship,” Max agreed, “but not whether two men are brothers, father and son, or even cousins twice removed. Didn’t Akhenaten have an older brother who died?”

  “You’re an Egyptologist as well, Dr. Cavanaugh?” Dave inquired, making a point of his own.

  “No, of course not. I only—”

  “You’re Probably too much the rational scientist to appre- ciate the ancient Egyptian mind,” Dave continued, an insult masquerading as a compliment. “But to preserve a man’s ren—his name—was to allow his spirit to live on after death. To blot it from memory was to destroy him forever, a powerful form of an ancient curse.”

  For Kate the words were flying back and forth so fast they began to pile up in her head, like cars on a superhighway that suddenly narrows, forcing them into one bumper-to-bumper lane. A sensation she recognized. Next would come the static. She closed her eyes to shut everything out so she could concentrate on stopping the rush of words before they collided and burst into unintelligible noise, and tried to bring up an image of Tashat. Instead, another face appeared in her mind’s eye, one more familiar than her own. Sam.

  “That is why,” Dave said, “when Horemheb and the priests of Amen set out to rid the Two Lands of the Aten heresy, they tried to eliminate all evidence that the Amarna kings ever existed—not only Akhenaten but Smenkhkare, Tutankhamen, and Ay.”

  Kate suspected he was warming up to say no. She opened her eyes and turned to Max. “Computerized tomography could give us a true-to-life dimensional map of Tashat’s skull, isn’t that right?” He nodded, then waited to see where she was going. Kate looked at Dave. “That means I wouldn’t have to extrapolate or just plain guess in some places to recreate Tashat’s skull.”

  “That’s right,” Max agreed, following her lead. “The data from the scanner can even be fed to a computer-controlled milling machine, to carve an exact replica of the skull out of styrene or some other rigid plastic. Then there’s laser sintering, where a computer-guided laser beam duplicates whatever shape it’s told to by polymerizing a powdered plastic. A surgeon I know in Houston uses that technique for the parts he needs in reconstructive surgery.” He glanced at Kate. “No offense intended, but you’d get a more accurate armature for building that head, and much faster.”

  Kate looked around him to Cleo. “Not only the skull. Think of it, Clee—Tashat dressed and adorned as she might have been thirty-three centuries ago, walking the streets of ancient Waset—Thebes to the Greeks—with her little white dog. A blue lotus blossom tucked behind one ear, to match her eyes. All with exquisite accuracy.” The
little smile plucking at one corner of Max’s mouth told her he remembered using that very word.

  For a moment Cleo just sat there, letting her imagination take up where Kate left off. Then, unable to sit still, she jumped up and began pacing back and forth across the end of Dave’s big desk, skirt swirling around her ankles.

  “Picture it, Dave. An entire room”—she used both arms to draw a huge square—“or rooms, devoted to life as a young Theban woman lived it during the Golden Age of Egypt! We could open with a series of X rays and cross sections from the scan, intermixing them with poster-size images of what Tashat looks like now—the composites Max mentioned. Follow that with drawings or photographs of each step in the reconstruction process. Next would be Kate’s sketches and colored portraits of Tashat, adorned with different wigs and jewelry, all building to the grand climax—a fully realized figure from life in her natural setting. All done with unassailable accuracy!”

  She stopped pacing, braced her hands on the desk, and spoke directly to Dave. “What the Egyptians really looked like remains controversial because the ethnic mix is speculative at best. We still don’t know how literally to take their reliefs and paintings, or Akhenaten’s physical abnormalities—the pear-shaped torso and elongated face. How much of that was real versus symbolic? Or was it just artistic convention?” She pushed free of the desk and went back to pacing. “With Tashat as the cornerstone, plus a few important loans, I’ll bet we could get a corporate grant to underwrite the whole thing.”

  Dave began to nod, slowly, eyes focused inward on his own fantasies—a cushy professorship at Chicago, if not Harvard or Yale.

  “Yes,” he murmured finally, smoothing a hand over his dark, razor-cut hair, “it does present some very interesting possibilities.”