Eric collapsed on the lawn. He was either tired of cutting grass all morning, or he sensed another complication.
“I’m sure we could do that,” Rachel said. She sat down beside me and stretched her legs out in front of her. “We can take a rock, smooth a layer of clay onto it, and then carve the message.”
“That would also make our plaque more solid,” I added. “Because who knows how hard the clay alone will be.”
Eric sighed and said, “Yeah, but all the rocks around here are pure granite. And they’re almost always round—like boulders. We could search for months and not find a thin piece of granite.”
“You know what would be cool?” I said. “If we had some kind of rock that couldn’t even be found in Manitoba—or at least not around here—and wrote our message on that.”
Rachel wiped her forehead. “Yeah, that would really give the experts something to ponder. Archaeologists and Egyptologists would have to assume that our explorers picked up the rocks on their travels through North America.”
Eric jumped up without warning. “You guys stay right here. I think I have just the thing.”
Rachel and I didn’t even have a chance to respond before Eric disappeared inside the house. Five minutes later he reappeared and handed me a grey piece of cardboard. Only it wasn’t cardboard. It was a rock—a rock the size of a licence plate, and not much thicker.
“Where did this come from?” I asked, turning the thin slab over and over.
“It’s slate,” Eric said, grinning.
“Slate?” I echoed.
“Yeah. A roofing slate. They used them in the old days instead of wooden shingles, so that if sparks came out of the chimneys—”
“—the houses wouldn’t burn down. I get that,” I said. “But where did you get it?”
“Our uncle Oliver brought some back as souvenirs from someplace down in the United States—maybe New Orleans. They’ve been in our basement on a shelf for years.”
“And Mom will never miss it,” Rachel added. “Not that she even remembers we have them. If our explorers came up the Mississippi—like we’re making it appear—they would’ve paddled past tons of slate deposits on the way here. It’s perfect.”
I continued staring at the stone in my hands. It really was ideal. Our Egyptians wouldn’t have travelled across the ocean with heavy stone tablets, but once they got here, if they wanted to record their adventures, the slate would have provided the perfect backing for their hieroglyphic log.
I felt more optimistic than ever that we could pull off our prank. I stood and passed the stone slab back to Eric.
“Then let’s go make an artifact,” Eric said, holding the slate up over his head. “Because that’s what Indie would do.”
Rachel shook her head and laughed. “Somehow . . . I can’t see Indiana Jones making fake artifacts.”
AFTER RACHEL RE-WRAPPED the clay, the three of us pedaled back to my house. The best place to work was in the garage, where Dad had a great workbench with lots of little hand tools.
“How do we slice this?” Rachel asked. She thumped the clay down onto Dad’s countertop, next to the slate shingle.
Eric scrutinized the pegboard on the wall. “Saws are for cutting.” He grabbed a handsaw that was hanging next to a collection of wrenches, hammers, and pliers. “And your dad has enough of them.”
Rachel and I watched as Eric tried to cut through the clay like he was sawing a stick in half. Only the clay wouldn’t cut at all. The teeth gummed up after his first stroke, and that was it. No more sawing.
“Try pushing down on the blade,” Rachel said, “without sawing.”
Eric lined up the saw again, and put all his weight on it. Nothing!
Our brick of raw clay now had a dent in it, but not a clean cut.
“This is stupid,” Eric complained. He hung the muddy saw on the wall again.
I made a mental note to clean it before Dad noticed all the clay on it. “We need something super-thin and super-sharp,” I said, looking around.
“CHEESE!” Rachel cried suddenly.
Eric and I both jumped.
“Huh?” I said.
“On TV, when they’re cutting a huge brick of cheese, they use wire. Cheese is kind of like that clay. Right?”
“Absolutely.” I quickly rummaged through the boxes under the bench. I found what I was looking for after a few minutes. It was a coil of thin copper wire. Eric and I had used it the year before to fashion animal snares. We had dreamed of making money selling furs, but we couldn’t bring ourselves to kill anything. We let the first rabbit we snared go free and dismantled our trap line the same day.
I uncoiled two feet of wire and wound each end around a screwdriver. “Here we go.” I stretched the wire tight by yanking on the screwdrivers, and then I pushed down on the brick of clay.
“Perfect,” Rachel said, clapping her hands together with unabashed delight.
Eric cradled the first slice of clay in his hands and placed it on the shingle. Then, attempting a fake British accent, he said, “Please, sir, may I have another piece.”
We all laughed. And like a butcher in a meat shop, I cleaved off another centimetre-thick slice.
Rachel placed that piece next to the first. “We’ll need one more,” she said.
I cut a third slice, positioned it on the slate, and trimmed away the excess with my wire knife. Rachel, who had a softer touch, pressed the clay against the stone. The stone had a smooth, almost slippery feel to it, which made me nervous, but Rachel had no trouble getting the clay to bond firmly with the rock.
“Yeah.” Eric leaned in close, with his elbows on the workbench. “That’s perfect.”
“Cody, go get some water,” Rachel said without looking up.
“But I’m not thirsty . . .”
“—For the clay, Cody. If I had some water, I could work out these seams.” Her fingers ran down one of the two cracks where the clay pieces butted together.
“Right.” I left before she could see the foolish look on my face. I took an old ice-cream container outside, and brought back some water from the rain barrel.
Rachel dipped her fingers in the water and continued rubbing the surface. She was doing such a great job, Eric and I didn’t bother offering to help.
“How’s this?” Rachel leaned the plaque against the pail of water and wiped her face with the back of her wrist.
She had pressed the clay perfectly into the slate, the seams had disappeared, and the whole surface was smooth and shiny.
“This is going to work,” Eric whispered, more to himself than to us. “I just know it.”
I unfolded the pictogram message I drafted last night and placed it next to the unfinished tablet. “Then let’s start carving,” I said.
Rachel pleaded with me to be allowed to do the inscriptions onto the clay. And after seeing her bedroom art, I had no doubt she would do the best job. She pulled an old bar stool up to the workbench, while I searched for pointy tools that she could use.
I sent Eric to the house to find some cookies and drinks—we hadn’t had any lunch yet and I was getting hungry.
I sliced another wedge off of the original brick for Rachel to experiment on. She selected a tool and practised carving the pictogram symbolizing death. She was trying to use a flat-head screwdriver like a pencil, to press and cut the image into the clay, but the edge kept digging in, making it tough to carve smoothly.
“Hold on, Rachel . . . I’ve got an idea.”
I took the screwdriver from her and started up the electric grinder at the other end of the workbench. When it finished vibrating up to speed, I ground the tip of the tool so that one of the flat sides no longer had a blunt edge.
Rachel dipped the head in the pail of water, and leaned over the practice slab again. With the new edge on the screwdriver, and the water acting as a lubricant, she effortlessly cut a symbol into the surface. The symbol looked unfamiliar and wasn’t on my notes.
“What’s that one mean?”
I asked.
“It’s one I found in my book.” She started on a new glyph. “It means ‘friendship’ .”
“Oh,” I said. “It’s . . . uh . . . it’s nice.”
“What’s nice?” Eric asked, returning to the garage with granola bars, apples, cookies, and drinks. He dumped a week’s supply of food—food from our kitchen, I might add—on the workbench.
Rachel showed him a sample of her handiwork.
Eric nodded vigorously, and in between bites of his granola bar, said, “Great, Rachel. Work on the real one now. Forget the practising. Cody’s mom is going to be here soon.”
My head automatically turned to look at the old kitchen clock on the wall. “Yikes!” I said. “We’ve got maybe an hour before she gets home.”
Rachel ordered us to back off and got ready to work on the real thing. I hung a utility light over her head, and she spent forever adjusting it to reduce the glare. Finally, she took a deep breath, bent over the slab, and, like a surgeon, prepared for the first cut.
“Wait!” Eric screamed in alarm.
Rachel leaned back and gave a frustrated sigh. “What?”
“Remember what that book of yours said. Egyptian hieroglyphics were usually written from right to left, not like English.”
“Good point.” Rachel exhaled deeply, blowing strands of hair away from her face. “That could have been a major mistake. I’ll have to reverse the order of the pictograms on Cody’s page.”
She studied my first glyph again, took another breath, and began carving the top right corner of the plaque.
Eric and I paced the garage, ate cookies, and paced some more. Every five minutes—to Rachel’s annoyance, I’m sure—one of us would stick our head over the work bench to see how much she’d done. She would look up and frown, and we’d shrink away again, feeling like scolded puppies.
The waiting really is the hardest part.
Eric, meanwhile, discovered an old Tarzan comic book and made himself comfortable in a lawn chair. An apple rested precariously on his stomach.
I couldn’t relax, though. I wanted Rachel to finish before Mom got home. But I also wanted the tablet to be perfect, so I had to let her work at her own pace.
I tried to kill time by pretending to clean and organize the area around Rachel. I hung up tools on the pegboard, I moved boxes around, and I even swept the floor. And while I was doing all that, I was also monitoring her progress and the driveway, nervously watching for Mom’s car. I was sure I was irritating Rachel, but she was either too polite to yell at me, or so engrossed with her work than she didn’t care.
Thirty minutes later she finally stopped.
I wondered if she had had enough of me and was going to kick me out of the garage. Standing two feet from her, I had been spending a ludicrous amount of time sorting Dad’s collection of pliers. I got ready to explain how my dad liked all his tools sorted according to size, or colour, or . . .
Rachel groaned.
Eric looked up, but remained in his lawn chair. “What’s wrong?”
“Nothing.” She shrugged her shoulders in circles. “I’m just getting muscle cramps.”
“Do you want me to finish it?” I moved closer to get a better look at her handiwork.
“Thanks. But I think for consistency, I better do it.” She reached over her head and massaged her neck.
That was when I really saw the half-finished plaque.
“Holy smokes,” I said. “That’s amazing. You gotta look at this, Eric.”
He grunted, but refused to budge from his seat. He had obviously decided that if there wasn’t a problem, he wasn’t needed.
Rachel beamed as she picked up the tablet and handed it to me. I ran my fingers along a few of the symbols. Each pictogram was carved to the same depth and had crisp, clean lines—it was flawless.
“Gosh, are we lucky you’re doing this,” I said. “Eric and I would’ve messed it up for sure.”
“Speak for yourself,” Eric said. “I would have done an awesome job too. I just chose to let Rachel do it because . . . because I’m nice.” He laughed and took a giant bite of his apple.
Rachel ignored Eric. But her face reddened from my compliment. I think she knew I was right.
I stayed at her side as she resumed engraving. After every glyph she would pause and display it to me for approval.
Each time I would mutter something—“nice,” “stylish,” “too cluttered,” and so on. Once, when she showed me a pictogram of a river, I shook my head sadly and told her she’d inserted the wrong symbol.
Rachel’s head snapped back to my notes. Two seconds later, she realized I was joking and jabbed me in the ribs. “That’s not nice,” she said, laughing. “I believed you.”
“SHHH!” Eric hissed suddenly. “I think I hear a car.”
Rats! I’d totally lost track of time. Jumping over some boxes, I raced to look out the small door at the side of the garage. “It’s my mom!” I announced. Rachel froze at the workbench.
Eric dropped his comic on the floor and bolted to the window. He squinted through the dirty pane. “You think we’re busted?”
I thought for a moment. Mom and Dad never parked the car in the garage—it was more like a big storage shed. “We should be okay.” I looked around the cluttered space. “Unless she needs something, she won’t come in here.”
I prayed she didn’t need anything.
Rachel didn’t look convinced. “Maybe I should stop. We can finish it tomorrow.”
“No!” Eric spun around and faced his sister. “Just finish it. We don’t have enough time. You’re almost done anyway.”
Rachel looked down at the tablet and then up at me. I nodded—it was a risk worth taking. “Yeah, let’s get it done. Eric and I will stand guard and make sure she stays in the house.”
Without another word, Rachel turned to the workbench and continued working on the clay tablet.
Then, ten minutes later, I heard the worst sound I could imagine—the familiar bang of the screen door by the side of the house.
Three seconds later my mom came around the corner carrying a garbage bag.
I didn’t even think—I just reacted.
As casually as I could, I walked out of the garage toward my rapidly approaching mom. Twenty feet from Mom, I pretended to notice her for the first time. “Oh, hi,” I said.
“Hi, Cody,” she said. “What are you up to?” She wasn’t suspicious—that’s just what she always asked when she saw me.
“Oh, nothing.” I was trying really hard to control the panic in my voice. I reached for the garbage bag she was carrying. “I can put that in the garage for you,” I offered.
She probably thought this was silly, since she had lugged the bag 90 percent of the way already. She gave me a quizzical look, but passed me the garbage anyway. She turned and headed back to the house. My heart didn’t stop racing until I saw her disappear around the corner. I sighed with relief.
That was way too close!
Three minutes later, I was standing next to the workbench again. Eric kept watch at the window and Rachel finished the message by adding the date to the very top of the plaque. Then she surprised me again. Rachel took her carving tool and etched a box around the three symbols that represented King Tuthmosis.
“Why’d you do that?” I asked.
“When ancient hieroglyphics mentioned a king,” Rachel explained, “the name was always encircled, making it a cartouche. Out of respect, I think. Anyway, there it is. All done.”
CHAPTER 7
“HOW ARE WE going to bake it?”
“What?” Rachel glared at Eric. She sounded offended by the idea of cooking her masterpiece.
We had taken the tablet from the garage and shuttled it back to Rachel and Eric’s yard. There, under a shady Elm tree, we pondered our next move.
“Well, we can’t just leave it in the sun to dry.” Eric wiped a speck of chocolate from his mouth. “That’ll take way too long. We have to heat it up, so that it gets good
and hard.”
“Could we make a fire?” Rachel asked. “And bake it on the coals? That’s probably what the Egyptians would have done.”
“We can’t make fires anymore,” I said. “Mom told me the ban on open fires and camp fires has started again. And the bans won’t be removed until it rains—rains a lot.”
“What about just sticking it in the oven?” Eric offered. “It might stink up the house a bit, but our mom won’t be home for hours.”
It made sense. There was no point in taking the plaque back to my house, since my mom was home now. Plus, we’d just narrowly escaped getting caught by her.
“Good idea,” I said. “Let’s go cook up a piece of history.”
BAKING OUR PHONY ancient tablet seemed to take forever. Eric had cranked the heat to maximum—probably over 450 degrees Fahrenheit—and Rachel had slid the plaque in the stove on top of a piece of aluminum foil. Now we were sitting on the floor around the oven, taking turns peeking through the tiny window.
Every muscle in my body tensed as the minutes went by. First I was worried that the plaque would blow up and destroy the stove. Then, I fretted that our masterpiece would crack, crumble, and disintegrate—all in front of our eyes. And finally, I imagined that I could smell burnt mud.
“I smell smoke,” Eric said.
“Me too,” Rachel confirmed.
I guess I hadn’t been imaging.
We watched in horror as grey smoke spilled into the room from the front of the oven.
Eric jumped up and opened the kitchen door, before the smoke alarm could go off.
“Should we turn the oven off?” I wondered.
Eric sniffed the air. “It’s not too bad yet. Let’s let it finish cooking.”
Ten minutes later, Rachel leaned forward and squinted through the tiny oven window for the hundredth time. “Something’s happening. Quick! Take a look!”
Eric and I wedged our heads next to Rachel’s and peered through the glass. She was right. Through the smoke, we saw that the clay no longer looked shiny—it was drying. Hair-like cracks were spreading out across the surface. I didn’t think that was bad, as long as all those small cracks didn’t form huge cracks. Because then it would be unreadable.
History in the Faking Page 4
