Scorpion House

by Maria Hudgins

  * * *

  Lacy found Lanier on the porch, sipping a gin and tonic and watching the shadows drift across the hills and the temple. He waved her toward an empty rocking chair and offered to make her a drink.

  “Whatever you’re having,” she said.

  Lanier ducked into the house and returned a minute later with a gin and tonic and a freshened one for himself. “Susan replenished our booze supply in the duty-free shop when you flew in.”

  “I was wondering how you buy it here,” Lacy said, sampling the drink. “Selim’s taking me to the airport to meet Joan, shortly. I’ll buy some while I’m there.”

  “You can’t. You have to buy it within twenty-four hours of your arrival. There’s a new duty-free shop in Cairo, though, that only requires you to show a passport. Next time we have someone heading that way, we’ll send them with a shopping list for the house. You can contribute.”

  Lanier raised his drink toward Lacy in a perfunctory, wordless toast. “Do you want someone else to go with you to meet Joan?”

  “I think it would be best if I went alone.”

  “You know her pretty well?”

  “Yes.” She picked an ice cube from her glass and ran it behind her neck. The afternoon had heated up into the nineties. How should she broach the subject of what Lanier was hiding? Susan had charged her with that responsibility, but who was she to make such a demand? That’s how Susan was. She and Graham had talked about it several times. Susan Donohue considered herself to be in charge of everything as if the other six billion people on the planet had been put here for her convenience.

  It was a safe bet the item Lanier had hidden from Susan this morning was the papyrus Joel mentioned. Hadn’t Joel told her Lanier would let her see it? She decided she might as well try. “Joel told me you had an important papyrus to show me. Is that right?”

  “Aha.” Lanier set his drink on the floor beside his chair. “I couldn’t remember whether I told Joel to keep it under his hat or not. Obviously, I didn’t. Oh well, Roxanne knows, Joel knew, and you may as well know, too. Come with me.” He led the way inside. “It goes no farther than this, though. Agreed? What is it they say? Two people can keep a secret but if three people know, it ceases to be a secret. Well, you’ll be the fourth, and it must go no farther.”

  Beyond the door to the hall, Lacy could see that the doors of all five occupied bedrooms were open. Lanier motioned her to stay put and walked the length of the hall alone, turning to glance into Susan’s room as he passed. He turned back to Lacy and waved her forward.

  “Did Joel tell you what I’m doing here?” Lanier asked, opening the door to his laboratory.

  “Well, basically, the same thing you told us. He told me you’re trying to reproduce the recipes and medications the ancient Egyptians used. He said you were using local materials, attempting to make them exactly like they were in ancient times.”

  “Do you know about the Aswan High Dam?”

  “I know it was built back in the sixties to control the Nile floods.” Lacy’s eyes scanned the room. She’d never seen a lab this neat, this clean. The tile floor gleamed. Two rows of shelving on the wall behind the long lab bench held perhaps fifty sparkling glass jars with screw-on lids and neatly printed labels like Frankincense, and Mandrake Root, and Camel Grass. All the labels were printed in the same font and all faced precisely forward.

  “That’s right. And it did—does—limit the floods that controlled the pace of life along the Nile for thousands of years. Their year had three seasons. Flood time, seed time, and summer. They waited for the Nile waters to recede before they planted their crops. But now, there is no flood time and the growing season is longer. With irrigation the total amount of arable land is greater.” Lanier turned and looked straight into Lacy’s eyes. “Is this a good thing?”

  “I would imagine that, like most of man’s improvements on nature, it has an up side and a down side.”

  “Correct.”

  “I would imagine the floods brought fresh silt to the flood plain and without them the soil would get poorer every year.”

  “Of course. And farmers, quite predictably, have to resort to commercial fertilizers.”

  “And the land above the dam would be permanently flooded.”

  “They call it Lake Nasser.” Lanier walked to a cabinet along the north wall, bent forward as if to open the bottom drawer, then straightened back up and turned. “Now the down side. The water table here is rising and the soil is less fertile. The population has increased, putting more pressure on resources. Plants that used to live along the banks of the Nile from Aswan to the Delta are threatened. Some are going extinct. Lake Nasser is a whole new ecosystem.”

  “I think I see what you’re getting at. The plants the ancient Egyptians used are disappearing and it may soon be impossible to recreate the ancient recipes.”

  “Exactly! And that’s why I have to do this now.” Lanier’s face took on an almost frightening intensity. His hands, fingers spread wide, quivered on either side of his face. “Papyrus itself has almost disappeared. Oh, you can still find it up at Lake Nasser, but is it the same papyrus they used in the old days? There’s such thing as genetic drift, you know. And I can give you a dozen more examples.

  “We’re finally beginning to recognize that ancient Egyptian medicine wasn’t just magical hocus-pocus. It was good medicine. Not all of it, of course. Some of it was hocus-pocus. But they used honey on wounds. Great anti-microbial stuff. Have you ever had to throw away moldy honey?”

  Lacy shook her head.

  “Of course not because it won’t mold. Bees put something in it. The blue lotus was almost sacred to them, sort of an aphrodisiac. They associated it with birth and rebirth. Now they’re telling us lotus does contain stimulants. So, were they crazy? I think not. They used aloe to soothe the skin and acacia for coughs.”

  “We use those today,” Lacy said.

  Lanier gathered up a few shriveled black lumps from an open dish on his work bench and placed them in Lacy’s hand. They were too big to be raisins, wrong texture to be prunes. She tossed them lightly. They were hard.

  “They’re practically petrified because they came from Kheti’s tomb,” Lanier said. “An offering for the dead. They apparently ate these, but I’ve heard they taste terrible. Ah, well. For whatever reason, the ancients prized these because they’ve been found in lots of tombs including King Tut’s.”

  “What are they?”

  “Argun palm fruits. Remember what I was saying about the changing environment? These trees were thought to be extinct until a few years ago, and then somebody found a few growing in the Sudan.” Lanier got down on all fours near the end of the bench. Under it, a dozen or more clay pots were lined up and leaning against the back wall.

  Lacy, remembering Lanier suffered from arthritis in his knees, said, “Can I help you?”

  “No, thanks.” He reached under the bench and dragged out the seventh pot from the left end. Groaning and reaching out to Lacy for a steadying hand, he stood up, the pot cradled in one arm. He set the pot on the bench as if he was about to remove the clay seal from its neck, but got side-tracked again by a flattish mass of dried-out plant material lying on the bench in front of him. “Ah ha! Another prime example.”

  It reminded Lacy of seaweed but it wasn’t. It looked as if it might grow on a rocky shoreline, but she knew everything one might find on a rocky shore and it didn’t include this. “What is it?” she said.

  “Bacopa monnieri. Water hyssop. Used to grow in wet places along the Nile, but now it’s threatened. Good for epilepsy, hysteria, and insanity. Too bad, because there’s a lot of insanity about these days.” Lanier pointed to a box of latex gloves on a table behind Lacy. “Hand me a couple of those gloves and put some on yourself.”

  Lanier tore a strip of thin white paper from a roll and spread it out on an empty stretch of the workbench. He removed the plug from the neck of the pot and reached in. Slowly, he drew out a cylindrical strip of brown pa
pyrus, laid it on top of the clean paper, and coaxed the curled ends of the papyrus down, anchoring them with two smooth rocks that Lacy imagined stayed on the bench for this purpose alone.

  The papyrus was about three feet long and a foot wide. Running lengthwise were three rows of precise drawings interspersed with writing that looked similar to the scribbles she’d seen on Susan’s steno pad.

  “Hieratics, right?”

  Lanier tapped his head and winked. “You learn fast, Dr. Glass.” He looked at the papyrus through the bottoms of his bifocals, moving his head back and forth as if he was looking for something in particular. “This is a botanical catalog. By far the oldest ever found. Eighteenth Dynasty. I found it in the tomb last season and sneaked it out before anyone else knew about it.”

  “Why? I’d have yelled ‘Eureka,’ and opened a bottle of champagne!”

  “Because of what I’ve been talking to you about for the last half hour.” Lanier looked up from the papyrus strip. “I’ve got what, maybe ten more years before I’m either dead or too old to work? Some of the plants called for in the recipes may have even less time before they’re gone forever, too. Who knows what wonderful cures may lie in the recipes they left carved on temple walls?” He turned and thumped Lacy on the shoulder with the back of his hand. “The problem is, if the Supreme Council takes charge of this papyrus, I’ll guaran-damn-tee you it’ll stay locked away where nobody can study it until long after I’m dead and half the species in it are gone!

  “It’s not really their fault.” Lanier lowered his voice. “I realize that. They’re working with limited resources and they like to proceed conservatively. That’s good, because when you act too quickly, you make mistakes. Sometimes you make mistakes that can’t be corrected. But in this case, quick action is what we do need!” He made two tight fists to emphasize his point.

  “What happens if the Supreme Council finds out you have this thing?”

  Lanier drew his forefinger across his throat. “I don’t know if they’d arrest me or deport me or what. But for damn sure, I’d never work in Egypt again.”

  Lacy turned back to the age-darkened papyrus. “Tell me about this.”

  “We have three rows of drawings and labels. About twenty plants on each row or about sixty altogether. Sixty of the most commonly used plants in ancient times. Some of these, you see, show the leaves, stems, flowers, and also the roots.” He pointed to a drawing of a plant stem with leaves and flowers. On its lower end, a hairy root. “This is unheard of. Check out the plants on the tomb walls tomorrow. They’re very stylized. The only reason we know what most of them are is because they’re always drawn the same way. It’s easy to recognize lotus, for instance. Looks like a droopy bell. Papyrus always looks like one of those art deco lamps.

  “But these! I have no idea why the artist who drew these threw out the book on how to draw plants and went realistic. It may have something to do with the fact that artistic styles in the Amarna Period, which is about when this was done, underwent a revolution. Maybe the artist was working in an environment where breaking rules was the norm.

  “Let me show you why this is so important. Look at this.” Lanier pointed to the drawing of a leafy plant with five-petalled flowers and a knobby taproot. “This is marshmallow. Obviously. Althaea. All parts of the plant are used for asthma, coughs, and gastritis. We’ve found dried marshmallow, plenty of times, in garlands left in tombs. We know they used it, grew it, considered it important. But we don’t know what they called it. We know the modern Arabic, we know the Coptic, and we know the Greek. But what did the ancient Egyptians call it? Here’s your answer.”

  Lanier tapped the hieratic symbols beside the drawing. “When we know the hieratic, we can also write it in hieroglyphics. Now, wherever I see the hieroglyphic version of this on a temple wall, I know it means marshmallow.”

  “I see.” Lacy noted that the drawings were done in black ink but filled in with brown, red, yellow, and blue. Like a child’s coloring book.

  “Look at this one.” Lanier pointed to a brown spike sprinkled with yellow flowers. “Wormwood. Good for getting rid of intestinal worms. We already know the ancient Egyptian name, and this is it.” He pointed to the hieratic symbols next to the drawing. “That tells me this document is accurate. I’ve checked the hieratic names of twenty-five of these and in every case they agree with what Egyptologists already knew.

  “The other thirty-five? Most of them are new identities. So this one document tells us what most of the plants called for in the recipes really were.” Lanier’s voice drifted off as he searched along the middle row of drawings. “Here. Look at this one. This is chicory. Full of vitamins, good for fevers. People use it as a coffee substitute and put it in salads. You can use the leaves to make a blue dye.”

  The word “dye” got Lacy’s attention.

  “There has been a lot of confusion about the Egyptian name for chicory. But no more.” Lanier straightened up and looked at Lacy, pride written all over his face.

  “What did they use for colors on this thing?” Lacy bent over and looked at the drawings more closely. “I assume they used lamp black for the black, but what about the other colors?”

  “That’s what I want you to tell me.”

  “I’m guessing that the brown-red is ochre, but there’s also a more yellowish brown. That could be yellow ochre. It should be easy enough to find out. The new spectrometer will tell us if it contains iron.” Lacy let her eyes scan the whole document, ignoring the actual images and concentrating only on the tints and shades of color. “I think we’ll find that most of the colors have changed. Faded out, you know. Fortunately, this has been in the dark for the past … how old did you say this is?”

  “About thirty-five hundred years.” Lanier stood back, letting Lacy take the central position in front of the papyrus. He moved around behind her back and pointed to the right margin of the document. “This is the end that was on the outside of the roll. It’s in worse shape than the rest. Maybe because it was more exposed to air, I don’t know. But I think there’s some writing along here that’s too faint to make out.”

  Lacy looked at that end more closely. Lanier handed her a magnifying glass, and she pressed her left hand against the table to make certain she didn’t topple over onto the papyrus. A nose-print would do it no good. She searched along the top and bottom edges with the magnifying glass. “I think there may be more symbols and writing along here as well.”

  “I wouldn’t be surprised, but my old eyes do have their limits. I’ve already done the best I can photographing it, but you can’t expect a camera to show you more than the original does.”

  “Have you tried infrared light?”

  “Pardon?”

  “Infrared. It’s great for illuminating ink that’s invisible in white light.”

  Lanier’s eyes widened. “You’re kidding! Where can we get an infrared light? Could we find one in Luxor?” He was almost dancing with excitement. “I’d hate to have to order it from the scientific supply house because it would take weeks.”

  “I can get you one in less than a minute. There’s a brand-new one in my lab. All I have to do is find the right lamp to put it in.”

  Lanier dashed toward the door, then back to the bench. “I can’t leave this out,” he said, referring to the papyrus. “You go and get the light. I’ll wait.”

  They heard Roxanne calling Lacy. Selim and the Jeep had arrived to take her to the airport and pick up the new widow.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  Lacy spotted Joan Friedman in the duty-free shop, her grey head drifting like a rising moon beyond a row of vodka bottles. Dressed now in black, Joan raised her dark glasses when Lacy called her name.

  They hugged and Lacy felt the older woman’s bony frame shake as they embraced. “I thought I might buy a little something for the house before I leave the airport.” Joan pulled her purse strap back onto her shoulder, handed Lacy two bottles of vodka, and carried two more bottles toward the check-out c
ounter. “Wait a minute. Where did I leave my suitcase?”

  In a rush, Lacy remembered Joan’s little problem with alcohol and Joel’s long battle to keep her sober. As long as he was at home it was all right, but when he was out of town Joan drank. She would promise him she wouldn’t, but she always would. Joel would appoint someone to check on her periodically and Lacy supposed he had recruited one of their friends back home to do so while he was in Egypt. Now that Joel was gone, would Joan become a hopeless alcoholic?

  She resolved to prevent it. Joel would expect no less of her. Starting now, she’d watch her and do whatever she could. “Joan, I don’t think four bottles is necessary. One or two will be plenty.”

  “You’re allowed four liters. Might as well get four liters.” She set her purse on the counter. Her hands trembled as she opened her wallet. “Oh dear. This Egyptian money. Lacy, would you count it out for me? I have no idea how much the man wants.”

  Lacy pulled out a couple of one-hundred-Egyptian-pound notes and handed them to the cashier. Grabbing Joan’s luggage and one bag of liquor, she steered her toward the exit. “They need to see you at the hospital, Joan. There’s papers for you to sign. It’s near here, but if you’re not up to it, we can come back tomorrow.”

  Joan stopped. “Oh dear. Do I have to identify the body?”

  “No, I’ve taken care of that. But you’re the responsible party now, and arrangements have to be made for taking Joel home.”

  Joan met Selim, settled herself in the front seat of the Jeep, and then whispered to Lacy, “I think we should go to the hospital now. I might as well get it over with.”

  * * *

  As the Jeep sped past the Colossi of Memnon, Lacy was surprised to see Paul and Shelley walking together, engrossed in conversation. They were more than a mile from the house. Selim pulled the Jeep to the side of the road and Lacy asked them if they’d like a lift. They said they’d rather walk.