“Of course you’d have to write the monograph to go with it,” Cleo reminded him, adding fuel to the fire she’d lit under Dave’s ego. “From what Dr. Cavanaugh says, we might even discover something about the extra head that points to a death ritual nobody’s ever seen before.”
Kate watched Max watch Cleo stack the deck in their favor. “The scanner is available this Sunday, day after tomorrow,” he put in, “if that works for whoever you’d get to transport her from the museum.”
Dave stood up suddenly, signaling that he’d come to a decision. “Cleo is right. This could be an invaluable tool for educating the public. And that, after all, is our primary reason for being.” All smiles now, he came around his desk to seal the deal by shaking Max’s hand.
As they all began moving toward the door, Cleo flashed Kate a self-satisfied grin, as if to say “See, I told you not to worry.” Dave almost caught her when he turned and dropped a proprietary hand on her shoulder. “I know you’ll want to be there, Cleo, so I’ll leave all the arrangements to you.”
Kate had heard enough. Craving quiet, she started back to the workroom, and was halfway down the hall when Cleo caught up with her.
“I know you want this, Katie, but be careful. From what I heard in there, I’d say this one is cut off the same bolt of cloth as those clinchpoops you ran into back in med school.” Cleo favored vintage terms of endearment, too. “Besides, he’s too old for you.”
“I don’t care if he’s forty or four hundred, Clee. I’m not interested. Not the way you mean, anyway.”
“Well, he’s interested in you.”
Kate just shook her head and veered off into the workroom, leaving Cleo heading for the stairs to the second floor.
By the time Max showed up it was finally beginning to sink in—Dave had actually said yes. She was going to see Tashat as she really was. What excited her most, though, was the realization that she would be able to re-create Tashat as she once actually looked, without all the guesswork that had clouded her vision for the past two months. Not one of those vacant-eyed mannequins either, she told herself, thinking of the forensic heads she’d seen, some so impersonal their own mothers wouldn’t recognize them.
“Boy, am I glad your friend is on our side!” was Max’s first comment.
“Me too.” Kate had to smile despite a new worry that had occurred to her—that they might learn something she didn’t want to know. Something that would put the lie to Tashat’s cartonnage portrait and destroy the young woman who had begun to come alive in Kate’s head. A kind of second death.
“Was it my imagination, or is something going on between those two?”
“You might call it that.”
He shrugged. “Thought that was a wedding ring he had on.”
“So what else is new?” Kate responded, hoping he would drop the subject.
He did. For a minute Max pretended a consuming interest in the little wooden lion she kept on the corner of her drawing table because she liked being able to reach out and physically touch a time long past. Now he pulled the knotted string, making the lion’s jaws open and close, until the silence began to feel uncomfortable.
When she caught Max glancing at his watch, she blurted out, “When are—” just as he said, “Would you—”
“Sorry,” he apologized. “I was going to ask if you’d like to have dinner with me.” She wondered if Cleo might be right, until he explained why. “I’ve got a few questions, thought I might try to get a better handle on what we’re likely to run into Sunday. I brought my laptop with me and plan to plug into Medline before then, see what I can find in the literature. If you’re busy that’s okay. It’s not important.”
It was to Kate. “No, I’d like to. But I need to go home first—” She stopped, remembering how much he seemed to enjoy tossing that little bombshell back in Dave’s office. “To fix Sam’s supper. He gets upset when I’m late too many nights in a row.”
Max looked confused, then apologetic. “That’s okay, we can let it go.”
“Why don’t you come with me? It’s only a few blocks from here. So close I even walk to work most of the time, or else jog. But not today. That way we wouldn’t have to take both cars.” She could tell by the way he hunched his shoulders that he was backing away. Closing a door. “Besides, meeting you would be a real treat for Sam. You two have a lot in common.”
“Sure,” he agreed. “Be glad for him to come along if he’d like.”
Kate shook her head. “He’d only be bored. Besides, he needs to learn that throwing a temper tantrum won’t get me to stay home.”
Kate drove into the driveway of her rented brick bungalow, then waited on the front porch while Max parked at the curb. It was ominously quiet inside, too quiet, making her wonder what Sam was doing. As Max came up the steps, she pushed the door open and called, “Sam? Where are you?”
The dog came shooting out of the bedroom hallway, made a beeline straight for Kate, and slid to a stop against her ankles. Then, wagging his tail with pure delight, he put his forepaws on her knees and leaned his head into her hands.
“I brought a friend home to meet you.” She patted his chest, a signal for him to get down. “Max, meet Samson. Sam for short.”
“You’re a breed unto yourself, aren’t you, boy?” Max muttered to the dog as he squatted down to pet him. “Just like her.”
Sam had the thick, sturdy body and short legs of a Welsh corgi, the pointed ears and nose of a fox, and velvety brown eyes that had been Kate’s undoing. Black-and-brown fur waved down his back, ending in a long, silky tail that was sweeping the floor.
“No telling what he was up to in my bedroom,” she said. “Last night he tore his bag of dry snacks and scattered crunch all over the kitchen floor.” Max started to stand, but Sam put out a paw, pleading for more. “He likes you,” Kate observed.
The living room was empty because it faced north and was always dark, besides which she didn’t have much furniture. Now she saw it through Max’s eyes and realized how it must look to him—not only bare but temporary. “Want something to drink while I fix his supper?” she asked, an excuse to move to another part of the house. “I’ve got wine in a box and beer.”
“A beer would taste good.”
Sam led the way to the kitchen and sat beside his bowl while Kate took a plastic container and can of Olympia from the refrigerator, then handed the beer to Max.
“Did you name him Samson because he’s strong or just strong-willed?” he asked, watching Kate scoop some beef stew into Sam’s bowl.
“I didn’t know that at the time. I found him at the city shelter right after I got here.”
“How long ago was that?”
“Two months.” Kate had never had a dog, yet the idea came to her shortly after she started work at the museum. At first she assumed it was empathy, a subconscious attempt to understand the significance of what puzzled her most—the little white dog on Tashat’s cartonnage. Now Sam was just one more reason, besides Tashat, to believe that coming to Denver was simply meant to be—that Cleo had served as handmaiden to something more powerful than friendship.
“One look at those big brown eyes,” she added, smiling at Sam, “and I could no more walk away than—”
“—than you can walk away from Tashat without trying to find out what happened to her?” Max finished.
“Tashat grows on you with time. With Sam it was love at first sight. His name comes from the Hebrew Shimson, which means ‘like the sun.’ I thought it fit.”
“Is that one of the things we have in common?” Max inquired, dipping his head to where Sam was sitting up on his haunches, front paws folded in supplication. She realized then, if she hadn’t before, that Max felt the supplicant in his bid to scan Tashat.
“It just seemed—” she began, embarrassed, then decided to spit it out. “The Egyptians thought too much hair, on man or dog, was the mark of a barbarian.”
Max burst out laughing but gave her shoulders a friendly squeeze
to let her know he wasn’t offended. “Feel free to look around if you want,” she suggested, “while I put Sam’s supper in the microwave to take off the chill. The glassed-in porch through that doorway is where I work and watch TV and read and just about everything else.”
He wandered out onto the enclosed porch that ran all across the back of the house, but soon returned holding a sheet of watercolor paper. “Tell me about this.”
“It’s the Egyptian Judgment Day. That one is from Tashat’s coffin, but it’s fairly typical. The heart of the deceased—the double-handled jug on one side of the scale is the hieroglyph for heart—is being weighed against the feather of truth, the symbol of Maat, goddess of order and justice. We’d say what’s moral or right.” She pointed to the dog-headed man. “That’s Anubis, watching to see that the heart doesn’t use any trickery, and the man with the head of an ibis is Thoth, the god of wisdom, who invented writing. He records the judges’ decision, while Horus, the son of Isis and Osiris, waits to escort her to Osiris, who will read her the verdict—whether she’ll be allowed into eternity. Heaven. The part-lion,-hippo,-crocodile crouching near the center post of the scale is Ammit. If your heart is too heavy with all the sinful things you’ve done, Ammit will devour it, and that’s the end of you.”
“Guess Tashat passed then, since her heart is lighter than the feather.”
“Usually the scale is evenly balanced, probably because the gods are supposed to pass judgment, not mere mortals. Dave thinks it’s just sloppy workmanship.”
“Dave Broverman is full of it!”
A laugh caught in her throat at the unexpected outburst. “I hope you realize you were treading on hallowed ground this afternoon.”
He grinned, an admission in itself. “Not at first, but yeah.”
She set Sam’s stew on the floor. “Well, next time you ride into battle over that particular mummy, if there is a next time and you really want to live dangerously, try dropping Nefertiti’s name—Akhenaten’s Queen, the famous one in that beautiful painted head?”
Max nodded. “Why?”
“Some very respected Egyptologists think she was Smenkhkare.”
“Jesus, I wish I’d known that this afternoon!” Motioning for her to follow him, Max went back out onto the porch, to the walnut table she used as a desk.
“What did you mean by plus or minus twenty-five years? Doesn’t the inscription on her coffin say when she died, or at least when she was born?”
“Yes and no. The Egyptians wrote dates as Year One or Year Five, or whatever, of a particular pharaoh’s reign, but there are three different dates on her coffin. Two of them are suspect, but still—”
“Suspect how?”
“Most Egyptologists think Akhenaten ruled seventeen years, yet—here, I’ll show you.” She pulled a piece of paper toward her and wrote three names, adding the length of each pharaoh’s reign in parentheses. Then, following each one, she wrote the date from Tashat’s coffin.
Akhenaten (17) Year 18
Smenkhkare (3?) Year 4
Ramses (2) Year 1
Max caught on right away. “So there shouldn’t be a Year Eighteen for Akhenaten, or a Year Four for Smenkhkare?”
Kate nodded. “It’s not just a list of kings, either, because three pharaohs are missing—Tutankhamen, Ay, and Horemheb, in that order—between Smenkhkare and Ramses. Horemheb is considered the last pharaoh of the Eighteenth Dynasty because he married into the royal family. There are twenty-four years, at least, between Smenkhkare—whoever he or she was—and Ramses.”
“So the first Ramses begins a new royal line, the Nineteenth Dynasty?”
Kate nodded again. “Another military man, like Horemheb.”
“If Ramses wasn’t in line to inherit, then whoever wrote those dates had to be alive to know that he ever sat on the throne. That means the Ramses Year One is the most telling date.”
She was beginning to appreciate that Max Cavanaugh was no mean practitioner of the diagnostician’s art. “I agree, but that still doesn’t explain why there are three dates instead of
one.”
“And the question mark after Smenkhkare?”
“No one knows for sure whether he followed Akhenaten or was only his coregent. If it was the latter, Smenkhkare’s reign was simultaneous with the final years of Akhenaten. Nefertiti did disappear from public view during the last three years of her husband’s reign, but nobody knows where they started counting with a coregent, either. That’s one reason there are different chronologies of the pharaohs.”
‘Too damn many pieces of the puzzle are missing,” he muttered, threading his fingers through his hair. “Too much we may never know.” Worried that he was beginning to feel overwhelmed, Kate tried to think of something she could give him to hold on to, that wasn’t in doubt.
“I’ll admit to some wishful thinking, but I can’t accept the reasoning of someone like Dave Broverman any more than you can. Not yet. Because there’s another verse on her cartonnage.” Kate paused, then began to recite it for him.
“At first a voice cried out against the darkness, and the voice grew loud enough to stir black waters.
“It was Temu rising up, his head the thousand-petaled lotus. He uttered the word and one petal drifted from him, taking form on the water.
“He was the will to live. Out of nothing he created himself, the light. The hand that parted the waters, uplifted the sun and stirred the air.
“He was the first, the beginning. Then all else followed, like petals drifting into the pool.
“And I can tell you that story.”
I wake in the dark to the stirring of birds, a murmur in the trees, a flutter of wings. It is the morning of my birth, the first of many. Lions roar in the temple and the earth trembles. But it is only tomorrow keeping watch over today.
—Normandi Ellis, Awakening Osiris
4
Year Five in the Reign of Tutankhamen
(1356 B.C.)
DAY 12, SECOND MONTH OF HARVEST
The priest’s servant came for me again, but while Aten sailed high in the sky. This time we went around the priest’s main residence, to a smaller house connected to it by a covered walkway, where he led me to a large room guarded by life-size statues of the ram-headed god—Amen in his ancient form. The sleeping couch in the center of the room was shaped like a kitten with its tail arrested in midswing while its head turned to watch over the little girl on its back.
“How long since you first noticed something was amiss?” I asked the girl’s nurse-mother, who I recognized at once for she had changed little in the nearly four years since I saw her last, except for the deep shadows beneath her eyes.
‘Three days. First she fussed about a piece lost from one of her games, or when Tuli did not come the instant she called, which is not her way.”
“She also would not eat,” Pagosh put in, “and stopped talking. That is not her way, either.” I could feel the heat from the girl’s body even before I put my fingers to her neck, so it did not surprise me that her heart spoke too fast.
“She felt too warm to my hand,” Merit continued, “but who does not when Re takes so long to cross the sky?”
“Are any of the other children sick?”
“There are no other children in the house of Ramose. Only this one”—Merit’s voice faltered as tears flooded her eyes—“small girl.”
“Bring a lamp so I can see into her mouth. And you—Pagosh—see that a brazier is lit, but outside. Then uncover the windows and have someone bring a fan, since there is no breeze for the wind-catcher on the roof to capture.”
Holding the lamp in one hand, I squeezed the girl’s cheeks, and saw that her throat was swollen and inflamed. But it was the white spots on the back wall of flesh that concerned me most. “Let her lie on the ropes and continue bathing her with water,” I instructed Merit, “while I prepare a draught for her throat. Wet her face, neck, and chest, even her legs, then turn her over and do the same again.”
; Pagosh brought a servant girl with an ostrich-feather fan, then led me to the terrace where he had lit the brazier. I handed him a bronze ewer containing dried sage and bark of willow, instructed him to fill it with clean water, and set it over the flame. “Your lord cannot spare another serving-woman to help her nurse-mother care for his daughter, even when she is sick?” I inquired.
“Merit does not trust anyone else with Aset. Only me, so say what you need.”
I scooped two spoons of pulverized soil from an old cattle pen into my mortar, along with a few pieces of rotten bread. “A pitcher of beer will do for now.”
“Later, sunu, after you tend to the girl.”
The stiff-necked lout thought I meant to drink the beer myself! “You really expect me to believe that Merit trusts the girl with you?”
He gave me a hard look, yet he spoke in a softened voice. “Merit is not only my wife and the mother of my son, may his ka live in eternity, but the beloved of my heart. She knows I would protect Aset as if she were the child of my own loins, for she was a gift from the goddess after Osiris took our son.”
Understanding hit me like the gust of a hamseen blowing in from the Western Desert—Merit’s dead babe had been this man’s son. “Merit also trusts me, does she not?” I asked. He nodded. “Then we have little choice but to trust each other.” The least I could do was put him at ease about what I intended, I thought, and why. “We must replace the fluid burned away by the fever. That is why she will need more than the few sips of beer she gets with this decoction for her throat. Perhaps you could ask one of the kitchen servants to press the juice from a pomegranate.”
He nodded and hurried away to get the beer. When he returned I poured some into my bronze cup and added three measures of the powder from my mortar. “I must give her this first, while you take the willow tea from the brazier. When it has cooled bring it to me.”
He lifted the hot pot with his bare hand, set it on the tiled table, and covered it with a cloth. “I will return for it when you say.”
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