Stolen Souls

by Sackett, Jeffrey

  He resumed his seat with Harriet, Suzanne, Sawhill, and Goldhaber and stared distractedly off into space. He was suddenly uninterested in the conversation.

  "Great food here," Suzanne was saying as she stuffed another fork of lasagna into her mouth.

  "Ummmph," Sawhill agreed through his veal in wine sauce.

  "I just adore the Romance languages, don't you, Your Lordship?" she asked. "The name of this place is so pretty."

  "Bottadio," Sam said savoringly, rolling the vowels off his tongue.

  "Bottadio," Suzanne repeated in the same manner. "Our language seems so hard and, well, I don't know, unappealing. Don't you agree, Your Lordship?"

  "What? Oh, yes. Yes, indeed." Roderick's mind was miles away.

  "It's an interesting name for many reasons," Harriet added. "Have you ever heard the old legend about the wandering Jew?"

  "Ten colleges in thirty years," Goldhaber mused. "Must be me."

  "Oh, shush. Seriously, do you know the legend?" It was a general question, not directed to any one person at the table.

  "Doesn't it have something to do with an eternal man?" Sam asked.

  "Immortal, not eternal," Harriet corrected him. "The story was that one of the people who mocked Christ at the crucifixion was condemned by him to remain alive until the Second Coming. His name was Salathiel, I think, and the legend has it that he popped up every once in a while throughout the ages."

  "So what does this have to do with Bottadio?" Sawhill asked.

  "Well, the same story is told about the Roman soldier, an Italian, of course, who pierced Christ's side with a spear while he was on the cross. He was condemned to the same fate, to wander eternally until the end of the world."

  "And his name was Bottadio?" Suzanne asked.

  Harriet shook her head as she took another forkful of ziti. "Nickname. Bottadio means 'God striker.’"

  Sawhill smiled at the others as he nodded at Harriet. "College professor. Ask her the time and she tells you how to build a clock."

  "But I'm sorry we drifted off the topic," Suzanne said. "This whole mummification thing fascinates me. Please go on."

  "Sure," Sawhill moaned. "Perfect dinner conversation."

  "Get this! A doctor with a weak stomach!" Harriet took a sip of the deep, rich red wine in her glass. "Where was I?"

  "How they got the idea," Suzanne prompted, glancing at Roderick. He had seemed so interested before, but now he just sat there pensively.

  "Oh, yeah. As I was saying, the predynastic Egyptians generally just buried the bodies in the sand, unembalmed and anenclosed. The earliest known mummies are just dried-out corpses which were accidentally preserved by the dry heat and sand of Upper Egypt, far south of the Nile Delta. We assume that they got the idea of preservation from coming across old bodies which had not decomposed."

  "No embalming and still no decomposition?" Sam asked. "That's hard to imagine."

  "Well, they weren't well preserved. They looked rather like prunes. But the point is they demonstrated that the body could escape the reduction to dust which happened to bodies buried in the north."

  "But how did that lead to the whole process of mummification? I mean, mummification as we use the word generally, with the wrappings and everything?" Suzanne seemed very absorbed in the topic.

  "Nobody knows the exact development, but it's easy enough to guess. Trial and error, different solutions for embalming, different types of coffins, different types of wrappings. Eventually, by the period we call the New Kingdom, they had perfected the technique."

  "And when was that?"

  "Traditional date is about 1570 B.C., after the expulsion of the Hyksos." She took another sip of wine and laughed lightly. "Don't get me started on the Hyksos, by the way. I did my Master's thesis on them."

  "Okay," Sawhill said. "I for one have no idea who they were, and I can probably live without the knowledge."

  "So when they perfected the process, what exactly was the process they perfected," Suzanne asked.

  "Well," Harriet said, a hint of warning in her voice, "it sounds a little grisly."

  "I think we can stand it," Goldhaber said, smiling. "Okay. You asked for it." Harriet placed her wine glass down on the table. "When someone with money died—"

  "This was expensive, right?" Suzanne asked.

  "Damned expensive. When someone with money died, his body was taken to the undertaker, as we would call him. The first step was the removal of the organs of the body, a process called evisceration. The undertaker made an incision in the abdomen and took the lungs, intestines, and the rest out through the incision. The heart was left in place."

  "Why the heart?"

  "The Egyptians believed the heart to be the seat of thought and memory, so it had to be left in the body."

  "What about the brain?"

  Harriet took another sip of wine. "Drawn out through the nostrils with a hook."

  Suzanne threw her napkin down on the table. "Wait a minute. I don't think I want to hear any more of this."

  "You asked for it," Harriet said wickedly. "Anyway, the body and the organs would all be placed in natron for what tradition says was seventy days. Natron," she added before anyone could ask, "is a type of salt. For reasons which I do not understand, it dehydrates much more rapidly than regular salt."

  "Sounds sort of like salting pork," Sawhill observed.

  "Pretty much the same idea," she agreed. "Incidentally, if the body was that of a woman, especially a young one, the family didn't bring the corpse to the embalmers for a while."

  Suzanne seemed perplexed. "Why not? Wouldn't it start to rot?"

  "Sure it would. That was the idea. It was a way of making sure that the embalmers didn't have sex with the corpse."

  "Okay, okay, that's enough," Suzanne said. "This is getting disgusting."

  "The worst is over," Harriet assured her. "After the natron treatment, the body and the organs were taken out of the chemical and wrapped in linen strips. The organs were placed in receptacles called canopic jars and were stored near the sarcophagus in the tomb. The body itself, of course, was placed in a sarcophagus. And that's about all."

  "And all mummies went through this procedure?" Sawhill asked. "It sounds like a hell of a lot of trouble."

  "Oh, it was. Only the royalty and nobility could afford that kind of treatment. The poor were still just dropped in holes in the sand. There was a small—well, what we might call middle class, and they got a cheap version of the full procedure."

  "What did they do, leave the liver in?" Sam asked.

  "Good one, Sam," she said. "Very funny."

  "You said this was done during the—the New Kingdom, was it?" Suzanne asked. Harriet nodded and Suzanne continued, "So what about the mummies you just bought? Are they from that period?"

  "I assume so," Harriet replied, "because the mummy of old Mr. Sekhemib is so well preserved. But I can't be sure until I examine it fully."

  "Fascinating," Sam Goldhaber said.

  "It really is," Harriet agreed. "I know some people think it's kind of a strange thing to be interested in, but it fascinates me. I'm really looking forward to examining the bodies in depth."

  "Did you translate all that stuff you copied off the coffin lid?" Suzanne asked.

  "Oh, sure. I did that this morning while Will was unloading the others." She frowned, remembering her misgivings. "There're a lot of things that don't quite made sense to me, though."

  "Like what?"

  She looked at Sawhill. "I told Tommy already, because he was helping me do the transcription."

  "Some help!" Sawhill grinned. "I held her paper for her."

  "I don't suppose it could do any harm to tell the rest of you. I'm certain the mummy is genuine, but there are problems with the coffin itself and with the hieroglyphs."

  "You mean hieroglyphics, don't you?" Sam asked.

  "No," Harriet replied, holding her wine glass up as Sawhill filled it from the bottle. "Hieroglyphic is an adjective. The individual charac
ters are called hieroglyphs. That's the noun form."

  "You mean they aren't hieroglyphs? They're fakes?"

  "No, no, not at all. It's Egyptian writing, all right. But there are inconsistencies. There's a prayer addressed to Anubis on the lid, but he has Ra's titles. And a section of the Papyrus of Ani, a very famous work, is reproduced with the name of the god changed to Anubis from Thoth."

  No one else at the table seemed particularly impressed with these revelations. "So?" Suzanne asked. "So what?"

  "I know it doesn't seem important," Harriet said patiently, "but the Egyptians were a very consistent people, especially when it came to funerary ritual and formalized religious ceremonies. I'm not saying the sarcophagus is a fake, but there certainly is something out of the ordinary about it. It may take a while to figure it out."

  "Well, if that's all there is that's strange—"Sam began.

  "I haven't really examined the mummy yet," Harriet reminded him.

  "Yes, but it looks authentic to me. I mean, I haven't made a study of Egyptian mummies, but it certainly looks like one." Sam glanced around the table for support, and got nods of agreement from Suzanne and Sawhill and, cautiously, from Harriet. "If there's nothing else amiss, it doesn't seem to me that there is anything for you to worry about."

  "Oh, I'm not worried. Not really. But inconsistencies bother me. There's this, for example." She reached into her purse, which was leaning against the foot of the chair, and took out the golden medallion which she found lying in the coffin beside Sekhemib.

  "Harriet!" Suzanne exclaimed.

  "What?" she asked innocently.

  "You shouldn't be carrying that around with you! That's a damn foolish risk!"

  "Oh, don't be silly. Nobody's going to snatch my purse in Greenfield!"

  "You should keep that locked up in the museum," Sam said kindly but firmly. "It isn't your property. It belongs to the college."

  Suzanne seemed annoyed. "I wrote the policies on these exhibits, remember. If that were lost or stolen—"

  "Hey, come on, all of you. Cut it out. It's not only common practice for curators to remove pieces from a museum for research purposes, it is absolutely necessary. I had to check something about it."

  "Well . . ." Sam was skeptical. "I don't know—"

  "Oh, for Christ's sake, Sam, I wasn't stealing it!"

  "No, no, I know that. Of course not. But I can't help but feel that museum pieces shouldn't be stored in a lady's purse." Harriet understood the concern Suzanne and Sam were voicing, so she said, "Look. If it will make you happy, I won't bring the mummies home with me at night. Okay?"

  The ludicrousness of the image she had just suggested caused a ripple of laughter. "Okay," Sam said. "So what's with the medallion?"

  "Couple of things." She turned the medallion over on its face and pointed to a line of hieroglyphs on the back.

  "Hey, I didn't see that when we opened the coffin," Sawhill said.

  "That's because we didn't turn the medallion over," Harriet explained. "I certainly would have if the Hadji creep hadn't come storming in."

  "What does it say?"

  "Well, that's the problem. It says Anet hrauthen which means 'Homage to you, Anubis.'"

  "So? Sounds okay to me," Sam said.

  "Yes, but you've never studied Egyptian. 'Hrauthen' is a plural form. It should say 'Anet hrak 'Anpu,' using the singular form. In other words, it is grammatically incorrect. If you were a man who engraved tombstones nowadays, you'd be careful enough not to carve something like 'He were a good guy' on a tomb."

  "Hmm," Sam said, nodding. "That's odd, isn't it."

  "Sure as hell is. It really makes me doubt the authenticity of this medallion."

  "What about the evolution of the language?"

  "What do you mean?"

  "Well, might this be an earlier form of the language? I mean, I know enough about Egyptian history to know that its civilization lasted for thousands of years. There must have been changes in the language during such a long period."

  "It is possible that there was an ancient usage of this sort, but it was not used during the New Kingdom period. For that matter, I'm pretty sure it wasn't used during the Middle Kingdom or the Old Kingdom either."

  "It could be an honor usage," Sam mused.

  "What's that?" Suzanne asked.

  "An honor usage? If I remember my lessons from Hebrew school, the Bible uses a plural noun form for the word 'God' when applied to the Supreme Being. The Hebrew word for 'god' is el; but when they wrote of their god, the God of Israel, they wrote elohim, which really means 'gods.' They pluralized the noun to exalt the deity."

  This confused Sawhill. Languages had never been his best subject. "But then how can you tell when the plural means a plural and when it means a singular?"

  "Verb form," Harriet muttered. To Sam she said, "It's possible. I may have to write to Professor Craigo back in Chicago about that. I just don't know."

  Suzanne reached over and took the medallion from the table. She handled it gently, turning it over in her palm and stroking the smooth metal. She ran her fingers over the four images on the face, and asked, "What does this say?"

  "It doesn't really say anything," Harried answered, frowning again. "The cross in the middle—"

  "The ankh?" Suzanne asked.

  Harriet seemed surprised. "How did you know that?"

  Her friend laughed. "If you paid more attention to jewelry that living people wear and less to the jewelry of the dead, you'd know. Honestly, Harriet! Everybody knows what an ankh is! People wear them on necklaces all the time. It's fashionable."

  "Really!" She nodded approvingly. "Good symbol to wear. It means 'life.'"

  "I thought it meant fertility."

  "That too, originally, anyway. The hieroglyph looks like a cross to us because of our Christian culture. It's really an idealized combination of the male and female genitals."

  "No kidding!" Suzanne grinned lasciviously at Roderick. He ignored her.

  "What about the others, Harriet?" Sam asked.

  "Well," she went on, "the two seated figures on top—the seated figures with jackal heads, holding ankhs—are images of Anubis, god of the grave. Sekhemib apparently was a priest of Anubis, so that makes sense as a badge of identification, but the three hieroglyphs don't really form a sentence."

  "What about the fourth one?" Sawhill asked. "That's the one you didn't recognize this morning."

  "Yeah, I had to go and look it up." She turned to Sam. "That's why I had to bring the medallion home with me. I wanted to have it to refer to as I leafed through my dictionary."

  Goldhaber nodded, smiling. "Explanation accepted, professor."

  "Good." She turned back to Sawhill. "This figure is called a tekenu."

  "And it means?"

  She shrugged. "No one knows. It appears in many funerary carvings, but Egyptology has still not figured it out. It looks like a man sitting on a sled, and I read that sometimes it is written as a man lying on a sled. Some scholars have speculated that the reclining form is a depiction of the fetal position, so that the tekenu symbolizes the rebirth of the dead man. Others have said that it is a predynastic hieroglyph referring to some form of human sacrifice."

  "I can't see how this could symbolize human sacrifice," Sam said.

  "Well, it could in a number of ways. The figure lying on the sled may be dead, his blood shed to give life to the deceased. Or perhaps the sled, which of course implies movement, represents some manner in which the tekenu gives new life. No one really knows. This is all speculation."

  "So its meaning might turn these three other figures into a sentence?" Sam asked.

  "Possible, but unlikely," she replied. "This is just one of ancient Egypt's mysteries."

  "Like the pyramids," Suzanne said softly.

  Harriet shook her head. "There's nothing mysterious about the pyramids. They were enormous tombs for absolute monarchs built with slave labor, nothing more."

  "But I thought we didn't know how t
hey built them? I mean, I read that they couldn't have built them with the technology they had at that time."

  "I've heard that too," Sawhill said. "And things about the angles of the sides having some numerological significance."

  "Please, please, don't do this to me," Harriet said, putting a palm on her forehead. "I thought only high-school kids paid any attention to that crap. We know exactly how they built the pyramids, and exactly why. There's no mystery. It's things like

  this—" and she tapped the figure of the tekenu on the medallion which Suzanne had replaced on the table, "which constitute the mysteries of the past. No aliens, no black magic. Just hieroglyphs we can't interpret, gaps in dynastic lists we can't fill, chronologies we can't piece together satisfactorily."

  "That's kind of depressing to hear," Suzanne muttered.

  "Depressing! Why?"

  "Well, I think people get a kick out of things like that. I mean, mysterious, dark things from the distant past, you know? They're fun to think about."

  "Sure, I understand that," Harriet said. "I have a thing for vampire novels myself. But we shouldn't confuse history with fiction. I mean, I get a kick out of Dracula, but I don't for a moment believe that vampires are real." Suzanne did not seem mollified, but Harriet ignored her. "Egypt is ancient enough for many real mysteries to exist, the kind that obsess scholars. The tekenu image, for example. There was an Egyptian civilization long before there was an Egyptian writing system, and figuring out what exactly it was like is a major task. Maybe this tekenu figure refers to something so far distant in the past of Egypt that even the dynastic peoples didn't really understand it. It seems to occur at random in tombs and on sarcophagi, but it's never explained, never used in sentences."

  "But if they didn't know what it meant, why would they use it?" Sawhill asked.

  "Well, let's say that over a period of thousands of years the language of ancient Greece was lost to learning. There would still be Christian communities and Christian churches, and they would follow the tradition of using the symbols for alpha and omega in their churches without knowing what they meant. They might put the Chi-Rho on their altars without knowing what it meant."