The cloister garden was an enclosed space, gray and bare with the coming of winter, but within the yellow walls that framed it, Eleanor found a beauty even so. It reminded her somewhat of Mistral’s own private gardens, the central space surrounded by walls of arches, shuttered windows rimming the second story. Vines stretched across the brickwork, most bare while leaves clung tenaciously to others.
Mercedes led them to a bench and pointed for them to sit, whereas she was content to stand, her attention wandering the whole of the garden as they spoke. She slid the map case between them, and remained constantly in motion as though her compact body was ready to flee should the need arise, despite the profusion of skirts she wore. Eleanor had tried to assure her they meant her no harm, but Mercedes would not listen, insisting she was keeping an eye out for a wounded spirit, a man she refused to name.
“Names cease to matter,” she said, turning in a slow circle as she eyed the shuttered cloister windows. She clasped her hands together, her skin brown and folded with myriad wrinkles. “Some things need no—”
Eleanor withdrew the blue glass seal from its pouch, which silenced Mercedes in mid-sentence. In this, the old woman seemed frozen, mouth open. But her eyes were ever-sharp, anchored on the glass in Eleanor’s hands.
“Now that is a thing I never thought to see again,” she said.
Her voice grew soft, and Eleanor wondered what Mercedes saw in the glass. In Eleanor’s experience, most archaeologists saw two things when they beheld an artifact. They saw the artifact for what it was in the present day, while also imagining what it had been in its prior life. They would have a good idea of the latter, of course, but it was lovely to dream of things they could never fully know.
“Will you tell us about it?” Eleanor asked.
Mercedes’s eyes snapped to Eleanor. “It was come by legally, if that’s what you—” Her gaze dropped to the glass again and she stepped forward, pushing the last of the pouch from its rounded edge while carefully not touching the glass itself. “Broken. The lousy thieves! Who did this monstrous thing?”
“We don’t yet know,” Eleanor said. “I cannot fathom why, let alone who. The damage seems absurd, doesn’t it? Surely there is no purpose to cutting such a thing in half.”
Mercedes kneeled before Eleanor, her hands outstretched, but in the end she did not touch the seal, only held her hands above it as if she were warming them near a fire.
“Even stranger,” Eleanor added, “it was inside the Louvre when broken.”
Mercedes looked at Eleanor as though some great game were afoot. “The Louvre. This little thing?” She reached for the seal again, as if meaning to pluck it from Eleanor’s hands, but again forestalled herself. This time, her hands curled into fists. “We had permission to dig, a good many miles outside Waset, in a piece of desert where no one thought anything of interest would be found—we would not be disturbing a temple, or any grand palace, so few cared. But those in between places, that is where you find the best things sometimes, is it not?” She looked up at Eleanor, her eyes narrowed, and then gasped a little. “Oh, you are that Folley. So you know about digging in the middle of nothing.”
Eleanor’s cheeks pinked. “Indeed I do.”
“I receive news, distant as this place is.” She exhaled, eyes sliding toward an archway where a man shuffled past. He carried a canvas and easel and Mercedes gave a brief scowl. “Permission to dig. We had it.”
“We?” Mallory asked, but Mercedes went on as if she had not heard him ask.
“—and we found what I believe was Horemheb’s scribe, and the body of another man, but not her husband, for he was entombed elsewhere.”
Eleanor shifted on the cold bench, Mercedes’s careful words not escaping her attention. “Horemheb’s scribe was said to be Roy, but you are saying the scribe was actually his wife?”
Mercedes nodded. “Nebtawy, but who would hear of such a thing?” She shrugged, her thin shoulders moving in sharp points beneath the shawl that wrapped her. “For a country that elevated women to pharaoh, the notion of women being scribes was often outlandish. Maybe if these scribes had taken on the false beard they would have been more readily welcomed.”
Of course, Anubis had shown Eleanor a woman’s reflection within that polished metal mirror, not a man’s. It had been a woman’s body she occupied, no other.
“Ours is a ridiculous world, slow and backwards, and yet, look what it has brought me again,” Mercedes said, eyes once again upon the seal.
“You say she was discovered with a man not her husband,” Mallory said and to this Mercedes nodded.
“This theory is also foolish, but bear with me. Nebtawy was said to be a woman of some intelligence, and beauty too, but then the stories always say such, do they not? It was her mind she was best loved for and she enjoyed writing. She was given to storytelling, but also kept a correspondence with a man she never named, but called only Falcon.” Mercedes closed her eyes here, as if thinking backward. “I envisioned her with Horus, of course, though the marking upon that glass was never Horus’s own mark, but something more fanciful. I suppose women are given over to romantic thoughts more so than men, and old women even more foolishly so.”
“Not foolish in the least,” Mallory said.
Not foolish, but had the scribe Nebtawy maintained a correspondence with Horus? Or had her Falcon been only a man after all? Eleanor sat straight at the notion this man could have been both man and falcon, as Mallory was man and wolf, and she suspected the same idea occurred to him when he gave her a gentle nudge. Eleanor leaned into him, finding the idea marvelous.
Did it also explain why Horus had come now?
“What happened after you found bodies? The seal? Is it a seal?” Eleanor turned it over, to show Mercedes the reverse of the glass, how it appeared melted.
Now, Mercedes did touch the glass and hook her head in a silent denial. “This is new. The bottom was smooth, old and worn. Rounded but not ridged…are these impressions of fingers?” She lifted the glass from Eleanor, setting it within her own hand, and Eleanor could see how her fingers fit, but did not fill, the impressions.
“Perhaps,” Mallory said.
Mercedes set the glass upon the linen once more and stood. Eleanor heard the creak of bones and corset both. “It was not in that condition, Miss Folley. After we found the bodies, we secured them into crates, along with what little debris we found with them. We made for a return to Paris, I wanted to study the bodies in my own space, but our caravan was ransacked before we reached the city. I cannot tell you by who, for I never knew.”
It was not wholly uncommon, Eleanor knew, to have artifacts stolen once the work of unearthing them had been done.
“Now you have me suspecting workers from the Louvre itself,” Mercedes said, “given you say that glass was in their possession.”
That might also not be outside the realm, Eleanor silently admitted. What was one more theft, in a string of thefts, even if authorized? The removal of artifacts from their native soils was a thing constantly done the world over and something Eleanor struggled with.
“Or easily someone who knew they could profit from selling such items to the museum,” Eleanor said, thinking always of Howard Irving and what he excelled at. “I have, however, cause to believe your bodies never made it to the Louvre or any other museum.” Unsure how to explain that these bodies might now be in the Paris catacombs, Eleanor left that bit out.
Mercedes walked in a slow circle, her hands pressed on either side of her waist. Eleanor and Mallory let the silence hold, let the woman collect what thoughts she had. She stared at the painter all the while, and rubbed her left ear as if it troubled her.
“We mean well when we begin an outing,” Mercedes said when at last she turned to look at Mallory and Eleanor again. In the winter light, she didn’t look the least bit fragile, but Eleanor recognized the desperation and worry that crept into her voice.
“We say we mean to preserve a thing for that reason alone—pres
ervation is enough, and aren’t we saviors!” She clasped her hands together, holding herself so hard that her fingertips began to whiten. “That these marvels not be lost to the desert for all time, that the people of here and now remember what came before, that there was always and ever a people in these places that others think to overrun and claim for their own.”
Mercedes let her hands drop to her sides. “We are often less honorable than that, and need profit so that we can keep digging, keep exposing, keep knowing what came before, but then we hit a vein, a ghost, something that should have stayed buried. You know the glass falcon wasn’t simply a seal. A priceless token, a thing not meant to be used, but it sealed letters that should have never been.”
Mercedes stepped toward the bench, kneeling to open the map case she had brought. From its confines, she withdrew three small papyrus scrolls. They were no longer than the width of Eleanor’s own hands, each loose but still rolled. Eleanor jolted at the sight of them, wanting them in her hands immediately, but she sat, pressing her feet hard to the ground so as not to charge. They were yellowed with age and the seals had been dislodged, but Mercedes had these too, withdrawn from her pocket.
“Letters,” Mercedes said, “between a woman and a man she did not marry but loved as fiercely as anything she ever did love, and this ghost will not let you be, worries you at night even now, because how dare you unearth what was buried, and quiet, and unseen, how dare you?” She looked from the scrolls to Eleanor. “You mean to take this burden from me? At long last, so that I may rest?”
She offered the scrolls and seals to Eleanor with trembling hands. Eleanor carefully slid the glass seal back into its linen pouch, and into her own pocket, before she stood to take the scrolls. They weighed nothing in Eleanor’s hands, yet Mercedes breathed easier and stood straighter once she handed them over.
The papyrus scrolls were so thin, they glowed gold in what little light the cloister garden held, and the seals were of brown clay, solid despite their age. At the sight of the clean falcon marks upon them, Eleanor drew in a breath. The falcon that matched the one upon the glass.
“I could not read the scrolls—my knowledge of written Egyptian was never as sharp as it might have been, but maybe you can,” Mercedes said, “and maybe this ghost will also rest.”
Eleanor did not roll them open to see what language they might have been written in for fear they would crumble to dust, but rather held them as if she didn’t know what to do with them. Eventually and with care, she slid the clay seals into her empty pocket and the scrolls back into the leather tube.
“I will do what I can to that end,” Eleanor said.
When Mercedes had gone, no glances cast backward at them as if she had truly already put her past to its rest, Eleanor and Mallory lingered in the garden, sinking onto the bench as the painter kept at his work. The shadows in the garden grew longer, the day shorter, and Eleanor felt that somehow, they were running out of time. Anubis and Horus had been silent, but she felt the press of their demands even so.
“A body unearthed,” Eleanor said, “and old letters found.” She drew the leather case into her lap, longing to both read the letters and leave them to their privacy in the same instant.
“The scribe Nebtawy may have been an unfortunate and unplanned victim when Mercedes and her partner were robbed of their goods—mummies appearing rather commonplace when in the presence of an ancient glass artifact.”
“Easily dumped into any cemetery, if a person believed they couldn’t otherwise move them.” Eleanor shuddered at the idea, but kept on. “But that happened sixty-five years ago, Virgil. How does it connect to the damage to the glass now?”
Mallory slid his arm around Eleanor and she moved closer, welcoming his warmth as the day cooled. “Maybe now matters less than we believe,” he said. “Maybe the timing is irrelevant, beyond the idea that Anubis now has you in his box of tricks.”
Was it jealousy that colored Mallory’s words now? Eleanor could not say, for this was new to her, too. She bent her head, pressing her forehead into Mallory’s shoulder, as if in an effort to physically ally herself with him.
“Mortal constructs are of use, he said,” Eleanor murmured. She bent her head, pressing her forehead into Mallory’s shoulder. “This mortal construct believes our work here is finished, then—we spoke with Mercedes, and collected an unexpected boon in the process—but she cannot tell us what became of the bones.”
“I think we already know that much,” Mallory said, giving her a hand up from the bench. “You have only to admit that a return trip to the catacombs is in our near future.”
“How is it we find ourselves continually returning to the places we don’t want to,” Eleanor asked as they walked from the courtyard, leaving the painter to his work as they made their way back to the airship dock. Against the darkening sky, the ships looked like elongated eggs, wearing their Easter finery.
“We make a business of it, Miss Folley.”
* * *
The problem with mortal constructs is the way they often and always overthink the simplest of matters.
Eleanor sat bolt upright in her bed, Anubis’s voice lingering in her mind. Her heart was racing, the way it did when she came out of sleep unexpectedly, and she supposed it fit, the idea that she couldn’t even sneak a nap. If they had to return to a place she didn’t want to return to, why do it well-rested?
She reached for the leather case, beside her in bed, and drew a single scroll out. She was mindful as she unrolled it, and while it gave a small moan of protest, it did not crumble the way she feared. The ink upon the papyrus page was largely preserved, though fading, Hieratic rolling effortlessly across the page. Chiefly black, there was a single word written in red, and Eleanor touched her thumb to it.
“You,” Eleanor whispered and read no more.
The scroll should be spread flat, she thought; pressed safe under glass for all time, but then decided no. That wasn’t its proper place. She rolled the scroll back up and closed it into her hand. This was an aspect of archaeology that constantly pulled at her, the belief that some artifacts should remain private, even if preserved. If it was a love letter as Mercedes presumed, Eleanor felt bound to keep its words unto itself. It had not been written for her eyes, nor any eyes other than those of its recipient. A love letter was not like any tomb, created with the specific intent that its inhabitant be known to those in the afterlife.
But if she could be accused of overthinking, Eleanor could not say. She looked around the cabin and saw nothing amiss; not even when Anubis stepped out of the shadows that filled the space between bookshelf and window did anything seem strange. Eleanor exhaled and slid to the edge of her bed, trying to hold to the idea of the scrolls, the seals, the close resolution of these mysteries. When Anubis walked closer, however, she could not entirely swallow her anger. She glanced at him, as he lingered at the foot of her bed.
“Anubis,” she said and dipped her head in a nod. She didn’t know exactly how one welcomed a god, but she felt he gave her great leeway in such greetings, given she was part jackal.
His black eyes narrowed upon the scroll and he stepped back, as if in surprise at the very sight of the ancient letter. Eleanor lifted the scroll so that he might see it balanced on her hand.
Daughter. These writings—
He swallowed the rest of what he meant to say, his entire body trembling the way a frightened dog might.
“Perhaps of your scribe,” she said; and then, anger stoking her courage, “Or, was it Horus she loved and who loved her in return? Not your scribe at all. I apologize if I misspoke.”
Anubis’s great ears flicked, as if he were batting an annoying insect. He said nothing and Eleanor set the scroll carefully upon the bed as she stood. She took the seals her pocket, placing them so Anubis might see them all. A muscle jumped in his jaw as he studied each item.
“You will not tell me what I need to know, will you?” she asked.
With as much care as she had shown
the scrolls, she began to undress. As she loosened the laces and ties that held her clothing in place, Anubis took another step back.
Daughter.
“Or perhaps, it is not a need, but what I believe I need to know.” She dropped her skirts to the floor and Anubis’s mouth opened, but he said nothing.
Eleanor kicked her skirts aside with bare feet, her boots having been removed before her nap. She trembled now, the jackal within her pressing close and closer. “I will grant you, it is not often the tool understands the hand using it.” When she stood before Anubis in only her petticoats and camisole, she tried to keep the snarl out of her voice, but failed. “But I would know.”
With these words, she let her human form fall away, the jackal consuming her in a way it had not before. The pain was ever as fire, threatening to turn her to ash, bone and muscle shifting before it was entirely ready. But her mind compelled her body, and her human shape fell away much as her skirts had. Freeing her. It was so new, the ability to command her body in this way, and Eleanor felt powerful, even if she felt small before Anubis. He stepped back a third time, but if in surprise or alarm Eleanor could not say. She charged him and he turned, fleeing into the shadows where she followed.
They ran down a dark corridor, the edges of which began to bleed into a forest without name, the trees as innumerable as the stars in the night sky. The trees stretched into columns, and columns dissolved into sandy dunes, until they ran through a nighttime desert, Eleanor’s paws dipping into the sand where Anubis’s had gone before. Beneath the surface, the sand held the day’s heat, though the sun was long gone.
Eleanor hurried her pace in an effort to catch Anubis, but he remained elusive, a dark and shifting mirage ahead of her, the scent of death unspooling from where he went. Eleanor pushed herself even so, stretching her jackal body to its limits, until her breath came hard and she had to slow. She sank into the warm sand, to breathe and quell the shaking in her legs, and ahead, Anubis stilled as if he had never been running. He turned as though he had been only standing in one place, and looked down at Eleanor. He was as inscrutable as the sky beyond his black head. She might see the majesty, but could not understand what it might mean on a larger scale.
The Glass Falcon Page 6
