Shadows on the Aegean

by Suzanne Frank

  At the sun’s zenith they took a break and walked outside. The light was pale, the ledge before the cave slick from the storm. The younger women played with a small ball, kicking it into the air, laughing and giggling as their elders sliced cucumbers and spread goat cheese on flat bread.

  A group of nymphs challenged one another to footraces, mimicking the games at the midsummer festival. After loosening their waist cinchers, they stripped off their skirts and ran barefooted back and forth, tagging each other, shouting encouragement, and causing such commotion that one mother banned them all to the next ledge. “Go run there, and we will all watch you,” she said with a smile.

  “Nera, you did that just to get them away!” an older woman whispered, her voice almost drowned out by the girls moving to the ledge below.

  “All season Lillina has been racing! Up and down the muddy lanes, back and forth through the fields! By the skirts of Kela, if that girl doesn’t calm down, I may make her eat wood!”

  Sibylla laughed, knowing this woman would no sooner beat her child than she would beat the oracle. The women of the village laughed as they sliced onions and broke cheese onto coarse winter greens. As they sipped wine from the matriarch’s vineyards they discussed how to follow Kela’s wishes. Should they flee before the Season of the Lion? Leave in the middle of harvest?

  However, if Kela said to move, they would pack up their looms, their donkeys, and their white-clothed infants and move. They believed the goddess loved them and protected them. They didn’t understand why, but they believed. If only Aztlan had so much trust, Sibylla thought. Even if the very Nostrils of the Bull spewed blood, Sibylla doubted the Aztlantu would believe. Hundreds of years free of conflict with earth or mortal had made them arrogant. They had no fear or respect. Would they leave their lush garden villas, the cobbled streets and shops where any merchandise known to the Aegean could be purchased? Would they leave their vineyards overlooking the glittering wide expanse of Theros Sea?

  If they did leave, where would they go?

  After lunch the village women retired to the shade of the hill, sitting like crows on a phone line, Sibylla heard in her mind. She dozed, feeling the sunlight on her breasts, face, hands, and feet. Her mind seemed still, content to be part of this community of women. When they awoke, they drank more wine. Today was special because the sweet girl who had been in Sibylla’s vision was marrying after the full moon. Would Mistress Sibylla bless the union by attending? The vision was faded, easy to forget. A marriage party would hearten them all. Sibylla agreed with a smile.

  The bride was almost fourteen summers. Her body had developed a little ahead of her spirit. Surrounded by her aunts, cousins, sisters, and mother, she listened wide-eyed as her grandmother took her hands and described the mysteries of the wedding night. With giggles and suggestions from the matrons, the girl’s questions were answered and her sparkling brown eyes were no longer fearful.

  Sibylla sat back, contemplating the differences between Caphtor, a rural vassal, and the cosmopolitan islands of Aztlan. Was this what Aztlan was like before the clan structure, when families were linked by blood ties only? In Caphtor everyone did a little of everything; had their own garden, owned their own goat, carded their own wool, wove their own cloth. At home in Aztlan, each clan had a separate responsibility to the empire. The Mariners sailed the sea, the artisans on Delos beautified the empire, her own clan fed and cared for the cattle.

  Together they entered the sacred cave and bathed the bride in the icy waters of the sacred spring. They rubbed her skin dry with fresh herbs and flowers, then led her outside. An elderly aunt mixed henna and with graceful strokes began to paint the bride’s hands.

  Sibylla’s glance fell to her own hand, long fingered and elegant. She wore no symbol of marriage. No tattoo wound around her wrist and over her fingers, declaring she was wed. Would she ever love like that? I already have, she heard an impatient voice say. I lost him, and what the hell am I doing here?

  Disoriented, Sibylla ignored the voice in her head and focused on the celebration. This was her youngest grandchild, the weathered woman leading them had announced proudly. May it be the wish of Kela that she have a great-granddaughter by next harvest. The bride blushed as the women laughed. Sibylla shrugged away her sense of unease—the vision was false, surely.

  Kela wouldn’t let them come to harm, would she?

  The women of the village brushed the bride’s hair, braiding sections and tying in an odd number of trinkets in honor of the goddess as bride. In Aztlan the bride would wear gold and silver and precious stones, but the Caphtori were poor and found their wealth in herbs, flowers, and ribbons. The situation worked to the benefit of Aztlan.

  Finally the bride’s hands were finished, vines and flowers winding over her palms and inner wrists, the butterfly of Kela in the center of her left palm.

  Please don’t let this be for naught, Sibylla begged Kela. She is so young, so full of life. Please spare these people.

  Sibylla thought she smelled burned flesh in the air already.

  CHAPTER 2

  JANUARY 1996, EGYPT

  THE SECRET HAD BEEN GUARDED FOR AGES. Hidden beneath and within tons of stone, waiting for those chosen.

  A living sentinel, the last lion sat in a rare patch of shade in Egypt’s eastern desert, his tawny gaze fixed in the distance where humans toiled, moving the earth, scrabbling beneath it like jackals. They were working in the den where his ancestors had died. There they had given their lives, watching, waiting, and defending.

  It was his turn.

  Only his instinctual need to return to this den motivated him. He licked his paws clean, watching the humans. They had now all descended into the den.

  Rising to the call he felt, the old lion began to hobble his way across the sands, to end his life where it had begun. To end his ancestors’ mission.

  To reveal the secret.

  SWEAT TRICKLED BETWEEN HER BREASTS, but Dr. Camille Kingsley ignored it, as she ignored everything that interfered with her excavation.

  Bubbles of excitement boiled in her blood. Anticipation that she didn’t dare voice. They were so close now. She could feel it in the air: all her senses were on full alert. So close, so very close! The swishing sound of brushes on stone was musical in its rhythm. Please let this be it, she petitioned blindly.

  After a cartouche had been found inscribed on the rock above them, funding for this project had escalated. The excavation had stepped into the spotlight, and Cammy was lucky she was still a part of it. Though she was an expert on the early eighteenth dynasty, she still was a lowly postdoc. Fortunately her location (already being in Egypt) and her role in the early finds (as one of the diggers) had helped her case.

  The cartouche they found was Hatshepsut’s, the woman pharaoh of the eighteenth dynasty and arguably one of the most powerful female rulers in history. Finding anything from her reign was miraculous, not to mention suspicious. Why would she have carved her name way out here in the eastern desert? No one could answer that question, at least not in a way that made sense.

  Please be the find of my life, Cammy thought again.

  She heard one of the others coughing from the centuries of stirred-up dust. Cammy kept at her detail work, brushing away the wall dust in fragile layer after layer, searching for the slick plaster the ancients had painted here almost 3,500 years ago. If this room had been anything more than a storeroom, the Egyptians would have painted the walls. It was their way.

  The cavern was eerie. The subterranean room had apparently also served as a lion graveyard. Piles of bones had been found and removed. Within the chamber her team of Egyptologists had found some of the most amazing papyri ever unearthed in Egypt.

  The huge, elaborate drawings were in a style unlike that of the ancient Egyptians. The ink and papyri unmistakably placed them in the early eighteenth dynasty. An enigma wrapped in a mystery most assuredly, she thought. The drawings were so odd, so debatable, that the team leaders were relieved to have the di
scovery upstaged when Rameses the Great’s sons’ tombs were found. The drawings could still be an elaborate hoax.

  But the cartouche was not.

  Pharaoh Hatshepsut.

  Her near twenty-year reign had brought peace, prosperity, and foreign trade. She had then been usurped, presumably murdered, though by whom was anyone’s guess. Her nephew Thutmosis III had taken the throne. During his long, bloodstained reign he had become one of history’s greatest conquerors: the Napoleon of ancient Egypt.

  Cammy pushed her glasses back onto the bridge of her nose and blinked, then blinked again.

  Ink!

  With trembling hands she brushed lightly at the dust. There, beneath it, was the faintest tracing of a line. She frowned. The paint wasn’t typical; it was far too thick and inconsistent. Swallowing carefully, she continued to brush away. A fine crossbar. Another line, parallel to the first. A few pieces of the ink flaked off, and Cammy bit her lip to keep from cursing. She rubbed her sweat-soaked face on her dusty shirt, then brushed away some more at the wall.

  A ladder—the common symbol used to portray climbing to Osiris. The means to get to heaven, to the afterworld … which meant the chamber …

  It was a tomb!

  “Jon,” she said calmly, calling the head archaeologist.

  A tomb? Hatshepsut’s cartouche above? Was it possible that this was Hatshepsut’s tomb? The tomb prepared for her in the Valley of the Kings had never been inhabited. Would Pharaoh have built a tomb on the east bank of the Nile? In the middle of the desert? It was unheard of, but so was a female pharaoh.

  “Jon,” she said a little louder.

  Above them she heard muffled screams, which she ignored. Hatshepsut’s tomb? The idea was too fantastic!

  “What the—!” said Brian, the Aussie.

  Tearing her gaze away from the ladder drawing that stretched up the wall, Cammy looked over her shoulder.

  A golden roaring blur soared in from the opening in the roof. Camille heard her screams mingled with the others. A giant cat! A lion? The rushing of blood in her ears was so loud that she couldn’t hear. The lion advanced on her, his massive chest spattered with blood, tufts of fur missing from all over his body. Cammy’s mind dashed from utter darkness to fears of rabies, attacks … He advanced and she stepped backward, crashing into the seven-foot wooden ladder that leaned against the wall.

  Ironic that it leaned in parallel to her new discovery, Cammy thought fleetingly. She couldn’t look away from the lion. Clumsily she backed her way up one step and then another and another, hoping the angle of the ladder would support her.

  The lion growled low in his throat and swiped at her with a massive paw. Cammy shrieked and clambered up another step, her trembling arms reaching toward the ceiling for balance. He sat down, his shaggy head and huge mouth just inches from her sandaled feet.

  With a whimper, Cammy scooted onto the highest step, her shoulder blades against the ceiling, her legs tucked close to her. The lion roared and Cammy cringed, backing against the ceiling. She felt her hands, already near the meeting point of wall and roof, go up …

  And inside the rock.

  “Camille! I’ve got him in my sights! Duck!” Jon’s voice filled the chamber a moment before the lion leaped.

  An explosion rocked the room and Cammy grabbed the rocky ledge above her, struggling to hang on and pull herself up to safety as the lion collapsed against the ladder, sending it crashing onto the dirt-packed floor.

  Cammy glanced up and into a hallway, lit with the dull gleam of gold. This was it!

  Then the ceiling gave way.

  Gold. Dust. Darkness.

  Camille opened her eyes. The shock of waking up in a hospital had diminished only slightly in the past two weeks. Impressions she still didn’t fully understand clung to her. She rubbed her face with her shoulder. At least she felt fairly safe here. Gold, dust, darkness … what were these images from? Her gaze drifted over the baskets and bouquets of flowers assembled for Camille Kingsley, Ph.D. Egyptology. She felt more like a child than a professional woman.

  She didn’t remember anything about the dig, the fall … trained her entire life for archaeology and she couldn’t recall anything. Gold, dust, and darkness. She wished she could reach into her mind and see what she had seen. If she had seen anything.

  What a miserable way to spend the winter season.

  It still hurt to breathe, but not as badly as before, so she knew her ribs were mending. Her nurse, Fatima, smiled as she uncovered Cammy’s breakfast. Hospital food was hospital food, even in Egypt. She looked at the window toward the modern town of Hurghada on the Red Sea. If she had to stay in this nouveau tourist trap, then she’d much rather be on the beach!

  Patiently she opened her mouth, hating that she had to be spoonfed, but with her left arm broken and her right wrist tendon torn, she literally couldn’t get her hand to her mouth. Fatima told her she had visitors waiting. Cammy let Fatima brush and twist her long brown hair away.

  After an assisted trip to the bathroom and a rinse of her teeth, Cammy gratefully climbed back in between the sheets and fixed a smile on her face. She wished they wouldn’t come. She felt horribly guilty: just seeing their false-bravado faces made her cringe inside. They were unemployed because of her.

  After the lion collapse incident, the Egyptian Antiquities Authority had closed the dig as unsafe. If Camille hadn’t held on to the roof, it might not have fallen and they could all still be working. Big ifs that had no effect on the situation now.

  Negotiations were under way to reopen the dig, but it was the Middle East. Time was fluid. Today, tomorrow, next week, next year … who knew? A dozen people had to be bribed, then they bribed another dozen. The wheels of government weren’t just slow, they were only recently hewn. Until that far-off day when they received permission again, the eastern desert dig was sealed, an iron grate was installed over the well, and three guards patrolled twenty-four hours a day. The university had pulled the grant, terrified of lawsuits.

  Jon was the excavation leader, most recently the lion killer and her rescuer. She got chills when she realized what the lion could have done to her. Yet even when he had swiped at her, his claws had been sheathed. It was a strange detail she hadn’t noticed until she thought about it afterward. If only she could remember other details.

  Brian the Aussie still wore a white bandage around his head, giving his rakish good looks a piratical twist.

  Clyde, a talented photographer and copyist whose skill rivaled that of Camille’s sister, Chloe, was from one of the Carolinas. Blond and slender, with a gentle, slow accent, he had inspired a handful of crushes. All the young nurses wanted to be his wives, fatten him up, and give him golden-haired children.

  Lisa was the only other woman on the team. Her specialty was in mid—eighteenth dynasty funerary objects, though she was well versed in many other eighteenth-dynasty artifacts. When it was apparent the cavern was eighteenth dynasty, she had come in from Cairo.

  “We brought you this,” Lisa said, laying a tabloid on Cammy’s coverlet. “If laughter is indeed the best medicine, this article will cure you.

  “It’s amazing what the public will believe about archaeology,” Brian said. “It’s bunk. Just like the ‘Curse of Tutankhamen’ all over again.”

  Clyde opened the pages for her, and Cammy, mystified by the chortles and giggles of her usually reserved comrades, skimmed the headlines that reported Elvis sightings and the scoop on alien lovemaking techniques. “Should I even ask how you found this? Which one of you reads it?” she asked.

  Jon turned beet red. “My sister mails me anything that even mentions Egypt. Go ahead, read it.”

  Clyde turned the next page, and Cammy stared, openmouthed.

  ARCHAEOLOGIST TALKS TO GOD THROUGH MAGIC STONES! the headline proclaimed in huge letters. It was always a bad sign when the headline used exclamation marks. The story continued in the same overblown fashion. “Renfrock Holmes, the real-life ‘Indiana Jones,’ finds the tel
ekinetic devices to tune people into God’s frequency!” read the subtitle.

  “Oh no, please not Renfrock,” Cammy said. “How he even got a degree is beyond me.”

  “Keep reading,” Lisa said. “It gets better.”

  “Beneath the waters of Israel’s Lake Kinneret, Renfrock Holmes has unearthed the keys to talking to God.

  “‘God Himself told me where to dig,’ the world-renowned archaeologist said, pointing to a sandy finger of land that leads into this deep lake, the site of much of Jesus’ teaching and the base of operations for the rabbis who wrote the Talmud.”

  Cammy skimmed over the paragraphs extolling Renfrock’s brilliance, his tete-a-tete with God, “just like Moses, God made me take off my shoes!” and found the actual details of the artifacts.

  She read it twice and looked up. “No way. This is unbelievable.”

  Jon chortled. “You’d think that even Renfrock would realize no one would buy this story.”

  “An Egyptian leather pouch, containing two stones that Holmes believes are ‘telecommunication devices with God—’”

  Cammy resisted laughing—it hurt too much.

  “ ‘The pouch is circa 960 B.C.,’ Renfrock said. ‘This may be the same pouch the priests used to carry the stones when they fled the invading Egyptians.’”

  “Did Egyptians invade Israel in 960 B.C.E.?” Cammy asked.

  “Keep reading.”

  She slogged her way through a poorly written paragraph in which Renfrock claimed that “through electromagnetic impulse” the Egyptians had used the stones to build the Pyramids. Cammy couldn’t help it; despite the pain she hooted with laughter.