The Eye of Horus

by Carol Thurston

  “Could it have been carried to Egypt as trade goods?” Kate asked after they sat down. “Aswan was a source of marble and a major way station for trade up the Nile.”

  “I doubt it. Three things are happening in that piece. One is the willingness to modify form for the demands of function—the need to suppress the horns to allow that oval ring to pass over the ram’s head, and the unnaturally elongated nose to hold the ring in place. That’s very un-Egyptian. Or so we thought,” Cleo admitted with a wry smile. “But it still feels Egyptian, influenced by some other sensibility. Assyrian, maybe.” She pinched off a bite of her tuna salad sandwich for Sam and set it on the edge of her plate. “I told Max what I thought it might bring at auction, and said we’d like to have first shot on an offer. Guess what he said.”

  “That it wasn’t for sale—at any price.”

  Cleo shook her head and nodded, then carried her dishes to the sink. Kate did the same, and broached the subject she’d been dreading. “Listen, Clee, if you haven’t changed your mind about going home between Christmas and New Year’s, would you mind keeping Sam for a couple of days?”

  “Sure. Where are you off to?”

  “Houston. Max wants to show me some special equipment they have at the Medical Center there.”

  Cleo gave her a knowing grin. “Okay. Bring Sam along when you come for dinner on Christmas, so he and Bastet can warm up to each other before you have to leave him.”

  Kate nodded. Sam didn’t much care for Cleo’s cat, with good reason, which made Kate feel guilty. While Cleo went to the bathroom, she let Sam in and put cottage cheese in his bowl, then added some tuna salad as a special treat.

  On the way back to the museum Kate mentioned that she was picking up the wigs later that afternoon. “Come by the workroom before you go home and I’ll show them to you.” The museum would be closed Friday, for Christmas, but she hoped to finish the head before then.

  “Okay, I’ll bring Max’s necklace, too,” Cleo replied, “so you can take it with you to Houston. Better carry it in your purse, though, or else wear it. It’s too valuable to put in your luggage.”

  Kate worked without interruption until closing time, and was getting her coat from the closet when the phone rang.

  “Did you know there’s a description of angina in the Ebers Papyrus, including the pain in the left arm?” Max asked, without bothering to say hello—tacit understanding that they each recognized the other’s voice by now. “Like you said, it’s pretty tough trying to strip away all the stuff we take for granted and imagine what it was like without even the crudest microscope, when all you had was the naked eye plus your fingers and nose. Makes you wonder, though, if they traced the source of that pain to the heart, how the hell they could think those same vessels carried everything from blood, air, and saliva to urine and feces.”

  “Hippocrates didn’t live for another thousand years, and he thought the vessels carried both air and blood,” Kate reminded him.

  “Yeah, but the Egyptians eviscerated their dead.”

  “That’s not dissection. The priests who performed that part of the ritual were outcasts and had to live away from the rest of society, but they only made an incision and groped around inside with their left hands.” It wasn’t until she heard herself say it that she realized what that could mean. “Oh, God, Max, do you think—”

  “Look, right and left has always had another meaning—right and wrong. But even if natural lefties were ostracized, her father was in a position to protect her, had to be if he managed to marry her off to a Theban nobleman.” Max paused. “See what Cleo thinks. I’ve got to run. Talk to you later.”

  Later turned out to be nearly midnight. The first ring sent Sam racing for the front door.

  “What’s with Sam?” Max asked.

  “He was asleep, really out of it. I think he mistook the phone for the door.”

  “What are you doing up so late?”

  She could hear the smile in his voice. “Duplicating Nefertiti’s blue war crown. It feels like ten people have moved into my head, and they’re all talking at once. Arguing. I thought doing something mindless with my hands might make me sleepy.”

  “Arguing about what?”

  “How much my feelings have influenced what I’ve done. Something keeps niggling at me, about Tashat’s face, but I can’t figure out what, or why, so I’m trying reverse psychology, hoping it will come to me if I don’t think about it.”

  “Okay, so tell me about this crown you’re making.”

  “Remember the straight-sided crown Nefertiti is wearing in that painted head? It looks black there, but supposedly it was covered with blue-enameled disks. She designed her own crown, probably because the traditional one wasn’t very flattering. Too bulbous. Anyway, I made one out of Bristol board, a card stock that holds whatever shape you give it. Now I’m sticking blue-paper dots all over it to get the same effect.”

  “If you say so, but you’d probably get sleepy faster by reading today’s paper.”

  “If you’re looking for evidence that they had the concept of a pump,” Kate told him, “you won’t find it in the Ebers Papyrus.”

  Silence, then, “How the hell did you know that’s what I’m looking for?”

  Because we operate on the same wavelength, she thought, and realized that had been true all along, even if she hadn’t been consciously aware of it.

  “What you said about the vessels,” she answered. “It doesn’t make sense that people who lived next to a river and watched it rise and fall, who used the shaduf to lift water from a lower level to a higher one—which means they knew the principle of the fulcrum—who built ponds to capture the water and canals to direct it, wouldn’t catch on to the idea of recirculation. Maybe it’s like evisceration and dissection. How far is one from the other—recirculation and the concept of a pump—and what does it take to get there?”

  “I knew I shouldn’t call so late.”

  Kate could tell he was teasing. “Put your brain to work on that while you sleep,” she suggested. “I’ll talk to you tomorrow.”

  It was still dark when she woke the next morning. She took Sam for a run, ate a cold breakfast, fixed herself a sandwich, and headed for the museum, which wouldn’t open to the public for another three hours. Once there she let herself in through the shipping-room door and ran through the long dark halls, to get the circulation going to her brain. In the workroom she got out all the materials and brushes she would need, filled a couple of jars with water, and waited for the sun to rise a little higher—when the light was perfect for what she needed to do.

  Like river rocks exposed to the air, acrylic paints turn dull when the sheen of wetness disappears, so one of the guesses she had to make in mixing was how much the color would change as it dried. Flesh tones were the hardest to predict. Too much white turned the paint opaque, without the translucent quality natural to living flesh. Sometimes she added gel extender to enhance transparency, but too much produced a sheen that looked equally unnatural.

  As the light changed through the day she had to count that in as well, so the sun was her clock, telling her the time by what it did to the colors she was mixing. She worked near the bank of windows to take advantage of the natural light as long as she could, even after the sun passed to the other side of the building. She took a short breather around three—two o’clock Houston time—and called the clinic, only to be told that Max was at the UT Health Sciences Center. The receptionist offered to give her his number there, but Kate demurred and went back to work. Around four, she finally had to give in and turn on the overhead fluorescent tubes, which she thought of as leeches because they paled all colors, bleeding them of vitality.

  When the museum closed she went home to feed Sam and grab a snack. After that they went for a longer run, back to the museum, where she smuggled him in through the same door. He’d been there before and settled down on the small rug she’d brought from home in an effort to soften and warm the drab, lifeless room. Lyi
ng with his paws stretched out before him, head erect, Sam appeared to be keeping guard over the dead. Like his brother Anubis, she thought, then chided herself for getting carried away. A dose of reality would fix that.

  She switched on the viewbox and stared at the X ray. Could Tashat have committed not only adultery but incest?

  Why did she find that so hard to believe? The shattered hand, that’s why, Kate realized, answering her own question. But her brain felt tired from weeks of trying to make connections where none existed. What she needed was to walk away for a while, which she was going to do.

  Three hours later she had Tashat’s face ready for the final embellishments. As she washed out her brushes, preparing to leave, she felt a growing sense of relief, at knowing she was finally bringing something to completion and could put the constant wondering to rest. Even if it didn’t answer all their questions.

  After another restless night she woke up early again but tried not to just eat and run. She scrambled a couple of eggs, one for her and one for Sam, and read the morning paper while she ate. The only thing that really registered was the date. December 24. The day Tashat would come forth to live again.

  She ran to get dressed, dropped a container of yogurt into her purse, and gave Sam a fierce hug. “Be patient one more day, sweetie. I’ll be back soon as I can, so no crazy stuff, okay?”

  It was barely light when she left the house and felt cold as the North Pole so she drove to the museum instead of walking or running. Once there she peeled off her coat and gloves, turned the revolving platform until Tashat faced the windows on the east—to greet Re-Horakhte as he emerged from the darkness of the Netherworld—and sat down on a stool to wait and watch. As the white light of dawn flooded the workroom, she kept her eyes on Tashat’s face, to catch the subtle variation in flesh tones across her cheeks and nose. Then, finally satisfied, she reached inside the head to remove the temporary plastic balls she had used to form the eyelids.

  It was time to make the final transformation, from a forensic reconstruction to an archaeological portrait. She picked up one of the eyeballs with the blue irises, slipped her hand up through the neck again, and fitted it into place. Next, keeping her gaze on the other eye socket, she inserted the second one and stepped back enough to adjust them—to get the direction of sight exactly right so the eyes would look focused.

  Kate was vaguely aware of familiar noises in the hall and knew the museum was coming awake, but homestretch jitters were causing her hands to shake. She turned and walked away from the head, to make a pot of herb tea.

  “Did you ever go home last night?” Elaine inquired from around the half-open door.

  Kate nodded. “Not that I could sleep.”

  Elaine came in for a closer a look. “She’s way beyond those heads the police come up with, but she still doesn’t look real, does she?”

  “I don’t know why you’d say that,” Kate joked, “aside from no eyebrows or eyelashes, and no hair.” She glanced to where the wigs stood waiting on their stands.

  “It’s the lack of wrinkles. I know she was young, but—”

  “I’m doing the eyes first so she won’t look quite so—so vacant.”

  “Beats me how you’d know where to put them, anyway, but I guess that’s where being an artist comes in, huh?” The thoughtless comment rubbed Kate the wrong way. Forensic reconstructions had fallen into disrepute back when the tissue depths were based on measurements taken from cadavers, but that had changed in the late eighties after a German professor named Richard Helmer used ultrasound on living subjects to establish more accurate average figures.

  “I’m planning to add laugh lines at the corners of her eyes, because of the dry air and brilliant sun,” Kate explained, partly to convince Elaine that there was a reason for everything she was doing.

  “If you say so.” The museum volunteer hefted the foilcovered pan she was carrying. “Don’t forget the staff party this afternoon, after the cafeteria closes. Bring her along, and we’ll drink a toast to both of you.”

  After Elaine left, Kate went back to outlining the eyelids, the cosmetic convention worn by everyone—men, women, and children alike—to protect their eyes from the bright sun. Women who could afford it sometimes painted their lids with a paste containing manganese oxide, giving it a slightly purple cast, or powdered malachite, which was green. But black was more common.

  While she worked, Kate kept a book open to the color photograph of Nefertiti, but when she got to the eyebrows she parted company with the Beautiful One’s sculptor, feathering the arching lines to make them look more natural, especially from a few feet away. After that she added artificial eyelashes, then stepped back to decide whether the brows needed to be heavier.

  Time passed without notice except when her stomach grumbled in protest, forcing her to stop long enough to spoon down the yogurt. It was a little past two by the time she was ready for one of the wigs. She took care positioning it, not wanting to spoil her first view of Tashat by having the bangs crooked or too high above the brows. Finally, when she had the long straight wig exactly the way it looked on Tashat’s cartonnage, she turned and walked a good fifteen feet away, took a deep breath, and closed her eyes, to wipe the slate clean before swinging around for her first real look.

  Stunned by what she saw, Kate felt a rush of tears and a gale of conflicting emotions sweep over her, even as a smile broke across the surface of her mind long before it reached her lips—emotions born of the satisfaction of knowing that Tashat no longer lay in darkness.

  Tashat’s mouth was smaller than Nefertiti’s, yet her lips struck Kate as every bit as sensuous, partly because of the way they lifted at the corners in a not-quite smile. Something about the set of her jaw suggested intransigence or strength, but what Kate found most beguiling were the contradictions that gave Tashat a persona so unlike Nefertiti’s, despite the similarity in their cranial configurations—a young woman of intelligence and irresistible charm, with her clear blue eyes reflecting light from the windows exactly as the outer curve of the living eye did.

  Kate stared, mesmerized by the echoes of something familiar, that she’d seen before, like hearing the harmonics of a pure tone. Then, driven by the vague sense of having known Tashat, or else someone who looked very much like her, she went to the mirror over the workroom sink to examine her own face. And came away shaking for another reason entirely.

  Without thinking, she moved toward the workbench and the book she’d left open to the Berlin head, where Nefertiti wore the tall, straight-sided crown of her own devising and an Amarna necklace of petal-and-leaf-shaped glass beads. Found in the sands of central Egypt, in the remains of an ancient sculptor’s workshop, it had survived with only slight damage to the ears and a missing brown iris in one eye, yet it showed enough similarity, especially through the jaw and chin, to suggest that Nefertiti and Tashat were of the same racial mix. That unexpected happenstance had led Kate to assume that Tashat’s skin was no darker and could even have been lighter, given the color of her eyes. But Nefertiti’s almond-shaped eyes were slightly hooded at the inner corners, giving her an almost melancholy expression, while Tashat’s were not only blue but rounder. The result was that Tashat had a more open, more in-your-face sort of look—the look of a woman willing to dare a great deal.

  Until that moment Kate had believed that two artifacts alone argued against the conventional wisdom that Egyptian art was conventional and individually uninspired. Now she added another—the cartonnage portrait of Tashat—which captured the sense of humor or intellect or whatever it was that was the source of Tashat’s incredible vitality. Surely whoever painted her cartonnage and coffin had been an artist of rare insight, able to portray the essence of Tashat’s spirit as well as her physical presence.

  For a moment Kate immersed herself in the glow of discovery, indulging in the satisfaction of knowing that she had done an inspired job—not that she would ever say that to anyone else. Then she got out her camera to capture Tashat in the orna
tely braided wig, from several different views. After that she switched to the short curly wig. When she finished, she glanced at the exposure counter and saw that she still had two left, so she removed the wig and set Nefertiti’s blue war crown on Tashat’s head, and took one straight on and one in profile—for Max.

  A movement at the edge of her eye caught Kate’s attention, and she glanced up to find Dave Broverman standing a few feet away. Like a car accident you can see coming but do nothing to prevent, she knew he had noticed the open book and was going to jump to the wrong conclusion.

  “Christ, McKinnon!” he exploded. “If you think I’m going to buy into your fantasies, that you can convince me this insignificant piece of dung”—he turned and pointed an accusing finger at the mummy—“is Nefertiti, you’re out of your cotton-picking mind!”

  “It’s not what you—” she began, trying to mollify him. “I do not think she is—”

  “Damn right she isn’t. I’d have to be a fool—or is that what you had in mind? You and Cleo.” He took two quick steps, swung his arm, and knocked the blue war crown off Tashat’s head. It flew across the room, hit the floor, and bounced once, then rolled back and forth in a wobbling arc.

  Stunned by the viciousness of his attack, Kate didn’t move, though she had a crazy urge to laugh at the incongruous “cotton-picking” if not his infantile tantrum. “You never listened to a goddamned thing I said, did you? Just went your own pigheaded way. Some expert that doctor friend of yours turned out to be.” Expecting him to calm down once he’d blown off some steam, Kate thought she might only make things worse by arguing with him. “Come to think of it, you’re too much the lead foot to dream this up by yourself. Don’t think I haven’t noticed you and Cleo slipping out to lunch together—”

  That did it. “I do not think Tashat is Nefertiti. If you’d let me explain—”

  “I’ve had it with you, McKinnon. Up to here.” He wedged an open hand against the bridge of his nose, eyes darting back and forth, looking anywhere but at Kate. “Come closing time today I want you out of here for good. Don’t even think about hauling off anything that doesn’t belong to you, either. I know you’ve been squirreling away supplies to use in the work you bootleg on the side.” He strode toward the door, then turned around for one last jab. “Don’t expect any more paychecks, either. You damn well better count yourself lucky I’m not inclined to be vindictive, or I’d bring suit to recover every penny we’ve paid you.” He slammed the door behind him, sending shock waves reverberating around the room.