The Eye of Horus

by Carol Thurston

  “Yeah, the clavicle is among the last to unify,” Phil added, “at its medial end, where it meets the sternum. Usually between twenty-three and twenty-five.”

  “What about race?” Cleo persisted. “Doesn’t that have to be taken into account?”

  Max shook his head. “I’d expect more difference between males and females. But we don’t have any reliable statistical difference in either case, race or gender. I suppose there might be some effect from the difference in nutrition then and now, but not nine or ten years.”

  “I don’t understand why you need so many measurements. Most physical anthropologists do discriminant function analysis with only eight.” Aware that Cleo didn’t know zip about statistical analysis, Kate almost laughed.

  “Sure, if all you’re looking for is gender and race,” Phil answered. “You could even get by with five if they’re the really crucial measurements—total facial height, sinus breadth, bigonial and bizygomatic breadth from a posterioranterior shot, plus one from a lateral.” Kate didn’t dare look at Max, afraid she would break up. “Listen, guys who work for the police, like that famous Dr. Snow,” Phil continued, as if he hadn’t just snowed Cleo with jargon, “actually get to handle the bones people dig up. Nothing like what we’re doing here.”

  Max came to her rescue. “Discriminant analysis gets sex right about ninety-five percent of the time but on race the success rate drops to eighty percent. And that’s broadly speaking—Caucasoid, Negroid, or Mongoloid—without ethnic breakdowns.”

  If Cleo was searching for some way to discredit what they found, she was fishing in the wrong pond, Kate was thinking when Max put a hand on Phil’s shoulder. “Wait up, Phil. Can you stop that before it gets away?” He motioned for Kate to come closer. “Look between the eye sockets.”

  Unaccustomed to viewing the skull in cross section, Kate tried to identify the thin, spidery lines. “It looks almost spongy.” Then it dawned on her. “Ethmoid air cells?”

  Max nodded. “The ethmoid is intact. They didn’t enter the brain vault.”

  “Sometimes they removed the brain through a hole at the base of the skull,” Cleo put in, “though not until several hundred years later … we think.”

  “We’ll watch when we hit the foramen magnum, then, where the spinal cord joins the brain.”

  The conversation continued to flow around her, but Kate concentrated on what she could see.

  “Pretty good teeth, considering,” Max commented at one point. “Very little decay found in any of the mummies, but sand in their food wore their teeth down, caused a lot of abscesses, which they treated with turpentine and ground mandrake root.” He paused. “What d’you think about those third molars, Phil?”

  “I’d say they’re in.”

  Max watched several more images come and go. “Nothing unexpected in the soft tissues around the cervical spine.” He waited a second. “Okay, let’s go to a composite of the entire head.”

  Kate turned away while the computer carried out Phil’s commands, dreading what she knew was coming—Tashat as she looked right now, under the bandages and that mask.

  “Left anterior oblique view coming up,” Phil announced.

  Knowing what to expect didn’t compare with the actuality, a ghostly white apparition, disembodied, hovering in a black void. Cadaverous, with retracted lips, sunken cheeks, prominent cheekbones, and mandible all clearly visible through the shroud of leathery skin.

  Kate stared, fascinated and repelled at the same time. It hardly looked human with all the cross sections stacked like geologic strata, giving the silhouette a stair-stepped edge. She shut her eyes, trying to hold on to the image of the vital young woman who lived in her imagination, fearing that she might never get it back—that Tashat’s death might intrude on her life. In the blackness behind her lids, she worked at erasing the macabre image that pulled her like a magnet, against her will.

  She didn’t open her eyes until she heard Max instructing Phil to take a reading every millimeter through the thoracic cavity, “to see if we can pick up any primary callus.”

  He turned to Cleo and Kate. “I’ll put together what I can as we go along, but I’m not going to catch everything on this pass-through, especially with those displaced ribs coming in at odd angles.”

  For several minutes no one said a word. “Clean break in the clavicle,” Max commented. Putting his finger on the bright spot above Tashat’s heart, he added, “This is about where that amulet showed up on the old X ray.”

  “A scarab to protect the heart, either serpentine or jasper since they were green,” Cleo supplied, then thought to add, “usually.”

  “Her arms are wrapped inside the outer bandaging,” Max continued. “Right one is folded across her chest, which we already knew from the X ray.” He glanced at Cleo. “Isn’t that a sign of royalty?”

  “Wrong arm,” Cleo answered. “Even if it wasn’t, that’s not conclusive after the middle of the Eighteenth Dynasty. Too many female mummies have turned up with their left arms folded for all of them to be royal. Some randy old pharaoh probably granted the privilege to his favorites and the practice caught on.”

  “You mean the king had an annual honors list, like Queen Elizabeth, where he named his favorite bedmates?” Phil asked, momentarily breaking the growing tension.

  Cleo didn’t think it was funny. “I was only suggesting how the practice might have gotten started.”

  Max cast a sideways glance at Kate. To accept something by inference without eliminating other possibilities didn’t sit any better with him than it did with her, especially if Max was right about Tashat’s age. That one discrepancy alone put everything else they thought they knew about her in question.

  “Tips of the fingers on the right hand are wrapped in something with a high radiodensity,” Max observed, as a different image appeared.

  “Oils and gums pretty much destroyed everything except Tutankhamen’s face, fingers, and toes,” Cleo said by way of explanation, “which were protected by gold-foil stalls and that solid gold mask.”

  “Hey, Max, what do you make of this?” Phil pointed to a faint gray line. “Watch the next one. See, there it is again. And again.”

  “Looks like something flat between the layers of bandaging. I’ll try collating the images later, but let’s get the distance in from the surface so I can focus down on it when I do the standard radiography.” He looked at Kate. “Can’t promise we’ll get anything, but we might as well try. See if there’s any writing on it.”

  “The ink would need to have an appreciably higher radio-density than what it’s written on to show up,” Phil warned.

  “Iron oxide for red, carbon for black since they used soot,” Kate told him.

  By then they were well into the rib cage, and no one said another word until Phil breathed a soft, “Uh-oh!”

  “Yeah, a couple of the ribs are impacted,” Max confirmed. Keeping his eyes on the monitor, he translated for Cleo. “That’s where one fragment of bone has been driven into anoth—wait up, Phil. Freeze it.” He paused. “Now improve the contrast if you can, then move in on this area, right here.” He put his finger to the monitor and with his other hand pulled a pair of half glasses from his shirt pocket. “Age is a factor in how fast a bone mends, but even in children it’s rare to see any callus in less than two weeks.”

  He motioned for Kate without shifting his eyes. “See here? And here? That’s primary callus. How long would you say, Phil?”

  “Three weeks max. One of those ribs could have punctured a lung or torn the liver, maybe even the spleen, but that’s not a conclusive cause of death.”

  “Just the opposite if she stayed alive long enough to form callus.” Max turned to Kate. “Don’t you agree?”

  She nodded, overwhelmed by an unutterable sadness. That meant Tashat had died a slow, painful death, probably by suffocation, or massive infection.

  “It’s still more than likely that most of the other damage occurred postmortem,” Max reminded her
before turning back to the monitor. “Okay, Phil, let’s move on.”

  The images changed again and again, keeping time to some relentless beat set by the computer, a machine with a slice of silicon for a heart. And no soul.

  “From here on we’re into Phil’s area of expertise,” Max said, inviting his colleague to take over the commentary.

  “Well, to begin, we’ve got a fracture of the posterior lip of the right hip socket, which could result in dislocation and scatter minute granules of bone into the joint, probably what caused the shadow on that old X ray.” He pointed to a yellow spot on the monitor. “This is the pubic symphysis, where the bones meet to form the pelvis. And this indentation here tells us she had at least one child. She’s also past eighteen.”

  Kate felt like a voyeur watching Tashat’s most intimate secrets revealed one millimeter at a time.

  “What the hell is that?” Phil exclaimed, thrown off stride by the sudden burst of light from the monitor.

  “Looks like the entire hand is encased in something.” Max glanced at Kate. “Could she be wearing some kind of glove?” Distracted by the images blossoming on the screen in quick succession, she didn’t answer. Neither did Cleo. A few seconds later Max let out a long sigh. “Jesus!”

  Kate didn’t have to ask why. She had seen all the fractures come and go, too fast to count, some with lateral slivers of bone that meant Tashat’s hand had been crushed. Yet the bright rings around each finger hardly changed from one axial image to the next.

  “She was alive then, too,” Kate murmured, barely aware that she spoke aloud, “because there’s not the slightest dent in that gold glove. That’s why she’s wearing it—to protect her broken left hand.”

  Phil nodded and spoke to Cleo, but Kate couldn’t make out what he said, partly because of the muted hiss of forced air, which reminded her of the subtle deafening effect of boarding a plane. When Max joined their conversation she tried to separate out what he was saying from the clacking of Cleo’s Bakelite bracelets and relentless on-off hum of the machine as it moved over Tashat’s desiccated remains. Instead, all she could hear was unintelligible gibberish. Then even that was blotted out, only to be replaced by a roaring storm of sound, fast-moving, like snow on a TV screen. The muscles in her neck tightened until her entire body felt like a vibrating string, sending a shiver of pain into her temples. The next thing she knew, Max had slipped off his sport coat and was draping it around her shoulders.

  “These machines put out a lot of heat is why the airconditioning is going full blast. You okay?” Another practiced response from the ever-solicitous caretaker?

  Kate nodded. “I’ve been standing still too long. Think I’ll go find the rest room.”

  “It’s time for lunch, anyway,” Phil put in. “Why don’t you girls go powder your noses while we shut down here? It’s just a few doors that way, on your right.”

  Cleo shot Kate a manic-eyed grimace and mouthed an exaggerated “GIRLS?” then let her eyeballs roll up into her head. Kate got the message.

  As they started down the hall, Cleo mumbled, “Too bad. He’s got fantastic buns.”

  Kate pushed through the door of the “Ladies” and into a stall. “He’s also tall and has a full head of hair,” she pointed out through the partition. “Of course that would mean you’d have to stop complaining about having to look down on some guy’s bald spot.” She hit the lever and let a rush of water end the discussion.

  “So what do you think, Katie?” Cleo asked as she joined Kate at the next sink.

  It was too good an opening to let pass. “What I think is that you let Dave talk you into something, and now you can’t figure a way out that won’t cost your job.”

  Their eyes met in the mirror. “Okay, I’ll give him through lunch,” Cleo agreed.

  Freed from the demands of his control console, Phil allowed his attraction to Cleo to blossom. Once it came out that he was divorced, the two of them engaged in a pas de deux that might have been choreographed by Balanchine, with Cleo testing his intellect as well as his tolerance for the outrageous while Phil countered every thrust with a sense of humor that seemed to surprise even Max. Through it all he sent sometimes amused, other times amazed looks at Kate, sharing his thoughts as openly as if she had been an old friend. By the time Phil laid his credit card on the check, Kate figured her old roommate had met her match.

  “It’s going to take most of the afternoon to finish up,” he commented as they got up to leave, “so if you two girls are bored—”

  Cleo didn’t bat an eyelash. “Bored? You must be joking! I haven’t come across anything this exciting since my last dig, in western Anatolia. The land of the Hittites. Turkey. Asia Minor.”

  “Yeah? So what’d you find that was so interesting?” Phil inquired, swallowing her bait. Kate glanced at Max and knew what he was thinking—the dance isn’t over.

  “A man and woman, caught in flagrante delicto, with his penis still engaged, preserved in a peat bog … for almost a thousand years. Can you imagine?” Cleo gave Phil a wide-eyed, innocent look. “She was wearing a heavy gold anklet, primitive but absolutely gorgeous.” He started grinning. “As for later, I hate to impose when you’ve already done so much, but I’m sure questions are going to come up. Maybe we could talk occasionally, about the scans, I mean.”

  “Sure, anytime,” Phil agreed. “I’m off Wednesday afternoons. How about if I come by the museum this week, let you show me around? That way I could answer any questions you think of between now and then.” He dug for his wallet again, extracted a card, turned it over, and scribbled a number on the back. “That’s my unlisted number at home, in case you need to reach me after hours.”

  As they walked toward the parking lot, Phil commented, “A thousand years, huh?” He gave Cleo an appraising look. “That gold anklet must’ve really been a dilly.”

  Back at the clinic, Max and Phil picked up where they left off—near the top of the male skull. For a minute utter silence pervaded the small room, as if all of them were holding their breath, waiting.

  “There’s the second skull,” Max murmured, then let several images come and go before adding, “wrapped every bit as neatly as Tashat.” He turned to Kate. “I didn’t see any evidence of rewrapping on her, did you?” She shook her head, aware that he was deferring to her.

  “He’s also old enough to be her father,” Phil put in. “That second suture looks fully closed, but the last one is—what do you think, Max?—halfway?”

  “I’m not very keen on estimating age from skull sutures alone, but the first one is almost obliterated. That makes him past forty but shy of forty-seven.” He sent Cleo a knowing grin. “Pretty ancient.”

  “He also has more than teeth in his mouth,” Phil observed. “Whatever it is, it reads like bone. Any idea what it could be?” He looked to Cleo, who shook her head.

  “I’ll play with the contrast later, see what I can get,” Max said. “Browridges and mastoid processes confirm sexual determination. So do the shape of the arch and size of the teeth. His cusps also show more wear than hers, which fits his age.”

  Phil crooked a finger at Cleo, motioning her to come closer. “Want to show you something. Cartilage is opaque to X rays, so it looks like this. The growth plates are really just connective tissue, to allow the long bones to grow. When a kid stops growing it means the cartilage has formed bone, which is more porous, like this. That happens first in the hands and feet, last in the collarbone, also earlier in girls than boys. Anyway, the point is, Max is right. Everything from the metacarpal and phalangeal epiphyses in her hands to the distal ends of the humerus and tibia, the long bone here”—he touched his upper arm—“and the shinbone says she had her full growth. She had to be at least twenty.”

  “Great,” Cleo mumbled, “I can hardly wait to tell Dave.”

  Max glanced at his watch. “I’d like to do one more composite, so Kate can see what’s under that foot mask.”

  A few seconds later another ghostly apparition
materialized in the black void of the monitor.

  “Her feet must be tightly bound,” Phil commented, manipulating the image to view Tashat’s feet and ankles from the front, then the back, left and right profiles, and finally from below—the soles. “Could those lines be folds in the skin, Max?”

  Max mimed wrapping them with his hands, first one way, then the reverse, and shook his head. “They run almost at right angles to the creasing you’d expect with folds. Anyway, those edges appear to be cut.” A silence so profound it sounded loud descended on the small room, almost like waves crashing onto a rocky shore. A second later Kate realized it was the blood pounding in her ears.

  “I’d say we just learned why she died,” Cleo concluded, “even if you can’t determine the medical cause of death.”

  “How do you figure that?” Phil inquired.

  “The head between her legs plus the slashed feet add up to an unfaithful wife. Cutting the soles of women who strayed has been a common practice in the Middle East and the Maghreb for centuries. Even in China.”

  Like a streak of lightning that comes and goes so fast it leaves only the memory of light on the retina, Kate caught a glimpse of a colorfully painted tower jutting high into the brilliant blue sky.

  “No!” Anguish overwhelmed everything in its path. “It wasn’t like that at all!” Kate hardly recognized her own voice and couldn’t think how to explain what she’d just seen, not without sounding like a silly, impressionable—

  She glanced at Max and caught the wide-eyed look he sent Phil Lowenstein. “I thought adulterous women were stoned to death,” Phil remarked, giving her time to recover her equilibrium. “Seems like I read about that happening to some princess in Saudi Arabia a few years back. Or was it her lover?”

  “In Turkey it’s still not unheard of to slash a woman’s feet, then tie her in a gunnysack and throw her into the Bosporus,” Cleo replied, blithely unaware of Kate’s acute discomfort.