The Eye of Horus

by Carol Thurston

  I handed a packet of powdered kesso root to Harwa, to give her lady should she complain of pain, and instructed the midwife to have her eat leeks cooked in goat’s milk to stop the bleeding. After that I asked after the babe’s nurse-mother.

  “Ani, go find Merit,” Harwa ordered one of the servingwomen. “Tell her the sunu would speak with her.” When the young woman appeared, she called out, “Another daughter, Merit, just as I predicted.”

  Barely eighteen, if that, the wet nurse took the babe into her arms and offered the little girl her breast.

  “Your own child fares well?” I inquired.

  “He went to Osiris two nights ago,” she whispered, eyes cast down.

  “I am sorry for that.” I had no choice but to press her further. “Can you describe how it was with him, whether he felt too hot or—”

  “Harwa said he came too soon.” She blinked back the tears flooding her eyes. “He could hardly catch his breath—” When the babe at her breast chose that moment to fall asleep Merit looked to me with her heart in her eyes. “This one also is too small?”

  I shook my head. “She only needs to rest after her long, difficult journey.” The young nurse-mother continued to hold the new babe close while I instructed her to pour all the water she used, for bathing or drinking, through a finely woven cloth. When I turned away to repack my bag, she waited, then asked, “Is that all?”

  “Ohhhh,” I breathed, pretending to think. “I suppose it would not hurt for you to hug and play with her from time to time.” It took a moment before her eyes lit up with understanding and, finally, delight.

  “I will do exactly as you say, my lord, in all things.”

  I put my palms together and touched my chin to my fingertips. “Then may the gods grant you a joyful body, a healthy mouth, limbs that are forever young, and a long, happy life.”

  When I left the house of Ramose a short time later, my heart was warmed by the knowledge that the babe I had just helped enter this world would be cared for by a woman with so much love to give. For I suspect the tiny girl will get little enough of that from the woman who gave her life, whose ambition is known to exceed that even of old Queen Tiye, Osiris Amenhotep’s Great Royal Wife. Or from her father, the man who guides Amen’s growing wealth.

  How long will it be, I wonder, before he is in a position to make all his lady’s dreams come true?

  2

  Kate glanced up and noticed that the workroom had gone gloomy, all but the drawing table where she sat and the oversize viewbox mounted on the wall behind her. The row of windows above the workbench faced east, so by early afternoon it always turned dim and dreary. Now, in the waning days of November, the monochrome pall invaded the room even earlier than it had back in September, when Dave Broverman first consigned her to this backwater of the museum. She narrowed her eyes and saw the scene around her as an old photograph, absent both contrast and definition—sepia-toned, since the entire two-story building exuded a musty brown smell, as if to live up to its name. The Denver Museum of Antiquities.

  She’d tried to put her own stamp on the high-ceilinged space by consigning the dusty detritus left by those who had been there before her to the shelves lining the back wall, and then never turning on the overhead fluorescent lights. But like the evil spirits the ancient Egyptians once believed in, the aura of failure emanating from all the botched attempts at conservation was beginning to take its toll on her own work. She couldn’t forget they were there. That’s why, without mentioning it to anyone, she’d been working on the artifacts she knew how to fix. All the toy lion with the movable jaw had needed was a new-old piece of string, a small wooden dowel inserted into the two parts of his broken front leg, and someone with sense enough to knot the string so his lower jaw wouldn’t fall open too far.

  It was the ones beyond help that broke her heart. Like the painted wood head of the young Egyptian boy. The gesso had begun to flake loose from the wood, so someone had used a syringe to inject glue into the cracks, then pressed the brittle pieces back into place over his rounded cheeks, breaking the flakes into even smaller fragments. The ultimate insult, though, had been to abandon him before the glue dried, allowing it to seep through the cracks and run down his cheeks, where it hardened, making the once-joyful boy appear to be crying. Sometimes, when Kate sat looking at him, she did, too.

  “I told him everyone else has already left for the day,” Elaine complained, flipping on the overhead lights as she burst through the half-open workroom door. Kate blinked and looked down at the dun-colored floor to let her eyes adjust to the harsh glare.

  “I’m only going to be in town a couple of days,” the man following Elaine explained, “to settle my grandmother’s estate. I’d really appreciate it if you could look at a couple of pieces of her jewelry, so I’ll know whether to bother with them. I’d expect to pay your usual appraisal fee, of course.” He stepped closer and extended his hand. “Name is Maxwell Cavanaugh.”

  It sounded to Kate as if she’d missed something, but she accepted that the way she shook his hand, without a second thought. “Kate McKinnon,” she returned. Unlike his thick brown hair, Maxwell Cavanaugh’s beard was shot through with white. It might be neatly trimmed, but it still obscured too much of his face.

  She glanced at Elaine. “Why don’t you go ahead and lock up the information desk? Just let me know when you’re ready to leave.” The museum volunteer nodded but gave him a hard look as she left.

  “I’ll be happy to look, as you ask,” Kate told him, “but the person you really need to see is Cleo Harris, our curator of Near Eastern Art. Ancient jewelry is her special area of expertise.”

  “My grandmother was really passionate about archaeology, and this one looks Egyptian to me.” He dug into the outside pocket of his tweed sport coat, which he’d paired with faded blue jeans and a white shirt that was open at the neck, and pulled out a long string of beads. “It—I thought it might even be ancient,” he added, watching for her reaction.

  The beads were glass, but one glance told Kate they were neither Egyptian nor very old, because she had a passion, too, for anything and everything to do with ancient Egypt. That was why she had taken this assignment. That and Cleo, her old college roommate. From the beginning they had shared a fascination with how the ancient Egyptians lived, for what they knew and when they knew it, not just their way of death. The glue that held the two friends together, despite all their other differences, was parents who were no longer married to each other. In the end, emboldened by each other, they had mustered the nerve to say no to fathers who didn’t really care and spent their vacations cruising the museums, Kate making detailed drawings for her roommate’s “artifact file” while Cleo supplied the where, when, why, and how. Now Cleo was a recognized authority on ancient jewelry from Egypt, Turkey, and Mesopotamia. She also was a vintage-clothes freak, which was why Kate felt pretty confident about the provenance of her visitor’s necklace.

  “The fat green beads are scored to resemble Egyptian hieroglyphs, so you’re right, they do have an Egyptian look,” she agreed, “but they’re too symmetrical and shiny to be ancient.” She pointed to the small white beads strung between the green ones. “These probably were intended to mimic a papyrus stem, but the stems of the bulrushes that once grew along the Nile were round. These are triangular in cross section, like the papyrus plants we grow here, usually in pots because they freeze.”

  He lifted a skeptical eyebrow. “My grandmother had an educated eye, not to mention a sixth sense for when something didn’t ring true. I doubt she would have been taken in by tourist junk.”

  Kate had her own doubts—that an “educated” eye meant to him what it did to her. It was more than the fact that most people weren’t trained to be consciously observant. Because what she saw was intermixed with how it made her feel. Like the summer she and Cleo had gone to Europe by boat, when she’d spent hours watching the churning blues and greens of the ship’s wake widen and spread to the distant horizon. Somehow
the smell of the ocean, breathing air that was like no other on this earth, had made her so intensely aware of being alive that she had dreamed every night about the coming dawn, seeing the sun rise on the eastern horizon. Re-Horakhte.

  “I didn’t mean that it has no value,” Kate responded, trying not to offend him. She couldn’t tell from his face if he intended to sound argumentative, was just being protective of his grandmother, or what. But she had learned to be wary around anyone—male or female—who felt the need to hide behind a hairstyle or beard. “This necklace is an example of what we call Egyptomania, which is very collectible. I’d say it probably dates from the late twenties or early thirties, after Howard Carter found Tutankhamen’s tomb. That’s when the Egyptian look influenced everything from jewelry to furniture. The tassel of beads at the bottom is a nice blend of the Egyptian look with twenties styling, when they wore necklaces down to here”—she held it up so he could see where it would fall to on her—“with those short, flapper dresses. Perhaps it was a gift from someone your grandmother was especially fond of.”

  “Maybe,” he muttered as he pulled something else out of his pocket. This one was wrapped in tissue paper, which he unfolded with care to reveal the necklace a little at a time. Ivory, without question. But it was the two pieces forming the catch—a sleek ivory ram’s head and slender oval ring that slipped over its neck—that caught Kate’s attention. As she stared, all kinds of foreign yet strangely familiar images began stumbling over each other in her head, until she felt overwhelmed by a sense of—of what, confusion?

  She glanced up to find Maxwell Cavanaugh watching her like a hawk. “Something wrong?” he inquired in a quiet voice.

  She shook her head. “It’s just, for a minute, I thought—the ram’s head reminded me of—I don’t know. It’s really quite beautiful. And very old.” She reached to take it from him and saw his eyes shift to something behind her left shoulder.

  “What happened to her?” He circled Kate to get a better look at the X ray.

  “What makes you so sure it’s a her?” She needed to know if he was guessing.

  “Shape of the pelvic cavity, also the flare of the ilium. It’s a mummy, isn’t it? Egyptian?” Kate nodded. “How old is she?”

  “The inscription on her coffin says she was fifteen.”

  “I’d say she was closer to twenty-five, but I meant how long ago did she live?”

  Anyone could have misunderstood him, Kate told herself, rejecting old habits. “About 1350 B.C., plus or minus twenty-five years. The end of the Eighteenth Dynasty. Why do you think she was twenty-five?” she asked, curiosity driving her tongue.

  “Ends of the tibia, for one thing. I’m a radiologist.”

  “Oh!” Was he, really? She couldn’t help doubting, if only because every M.D. she’d ever encountered—and that was a lot—would have identified himself as Dr. Cavanaugh the instant he walked through the door.

  “Pretty hard to fathom, isn’t it—that she lived more than thirty-three centuries ago, yet we’re standing here looking at her!” He turned to look at Kate and she saw that his entire face had changed, had come alive. Especially his blue eyes. Not as blue as Tashat’s, but close. His pupils seemed dilated, giving his gaze a penetrating quality that Kate found disconcerting. Even so, she couldn’t bring herself to look away. “I suppose that explains the extensive damage,” he added, pushing her to respond.

  “Not necessarily. Her cartonnage doesn’t have a mark on it. Even her wooden coffin has only a chip or two out of the paint, not what you’d expect if she was dropped or moved around a lot.” He turned back to the X ray and pointed to the larger of the two bones in Tashat’s upper arm. The left one.

  “See this faint line running parallel to the length of the bone? About the only time you see a linear fracture of the humerus like that is from a hard fall”—he crooked his left arm and smacked the elbow with the palm of his right hand—“with the elbow bent. But her arm is lying straight at her side, so the elbow couldn’t have been hit the way I just described, not after her body was wrapped. That means this one fracture, at least, happened while she was alive. Or else during mummification.” He glanced at Kate again. “That is what you’d like to know, isn’t it—whether any of this mayhem occurred before she died?”

  As if her answer was a foregone conclusion, he turned again to the backlit transparency. “Fingertips of the right hand disappear into the shadows because that arm is folded across her chest with the fingers curving over one breast,” he observed, continuing his inventory. “Her left hand is lying at her side but appears to be covered with something the X rays couldn’t penetrate … unless it’s a technical blip.”

  Kate hadn’t even considered that possibility, but Dr. Cavanaugh seemed to take her silence for closure. “Sorry, but this is pretty fascinating stuff. Guess I got carried away,” he apologized with a wry smile. “What was it you were saying about that necklace?”

  He couldn’t possibly have missed the extra head! Kate let the necklace slide through her fingers, barely aware of the buttery feel of the timeworn ivory until her fingers touched the carved ram’s head. Glancing down at it, she was struck again by the timeless beauty born of utter simplicity.

  “Do you have any idea where your grandmother might have gotten this?”

  He shook his head. “I never saw it before, when she was alive I mean. I found a slip of paper in the box, but with just one word on it, in her handwriting. Aswan.”

  The ram’s head didn’t look Egyptian, but Aswan was where the First Cataract once had been, one of six rough passages that at times were unnavigable before any dams were built on the Nile. And the god of the First Cataract was Khnum, a ram-headed man.

  “I think this could be a really important piece,” Kate told him, “and that you definitely should show it to Cleo Harris, the curator I mentioned earlier. She knows old jewelry from that part of the world better than anyone else in this country.”

  “Yeah, I heard someone here was good on jewelry,” he replied. “Are you sure it isn’t fake, maybe a copy? I read an article on the plane coming up here from Houston about the traffic in fake netsukes—you know, those little ivory carvings Japanese men used to wear with their kimonos?” He waited for her to nod. “Apparently they can make ivory look really old by soaking it in tea—”

  “This is older than any netsuke.”

  “More than four or five hundred years?” he asked, obviously testing her.

  Kate nodded. “I also think the two pieces forming the catch could predate the rest,” she added, to whet his appetite for bringing it back. Cleo would be absolutely ecstatic about a piece with such unusual iconography. “Anything made of ivory would be too valuable to throw away even if some of the original beads were lost. It probably was handed down from generation to generation, with people adding new beads as needed to replace those that went missing.”

  “I guess the question is who, then? Or is it when?”

  “Both.” She mentioned Khnum. “But he has slightly wavy horns that stick out sideways from his head. These are suppressed to the point of only being suggested.”

  “What about Amen, or Amen-Re? Wasn’t he represented as a ram, too?”

  She took her time, aware now that Maxwell Cavanaugh knew more about ancient Egypt than he was admitting. “Rams were symbols of male fertility, so they always exhibited prominent horns even when they’re curled close to the head. This one is more stylized. More abstract.”

  “That’s what I thought, but doesn’t that mean the opposite—that it isn’t ancient?”

  What he implied touched on one of Kate’s pet peeves, the knee-jerk denigration of ancient abstract forms as primitive. “No. By abstract I mean stripped of decoration, of everything but the essentials, like some of the early female fertility figures that are all breasts and belly, with tiny heads.” She surprised a glint of humor in his eyes. “It’s just that this doesn’t strike me as typically Egyptian. That suggests it could have been influenced by some other
culture, but then I’m no Egyptologist. I’m sure Cleo will know.”

  She handed the necklace back to him, and he let the beads drip into his palm, slowly, forming a puddle of old ivory. Then, as if he’d come to some decision, his fingers snapped closed over the necklace.

  “What’s the story on that head between her thighs? Any idea who he is?”

  She felt, suddenly, like a balloon loosed to float up into the clouds, just because Maxwell Cavanaugh had confirmed her own inexpert opinion that the extra skull was male. “We don’t have a clue,” she admitted. “Sometimes they put a stillborn baby in the same coffin with a mother who died in childbirth, or the body of a relative or servant in the tomb of a pharaoh, but usually in a different chamber. Dave Broverman, the director of the museum, thinks it’s probably an accident. In some other cases, he says, the extras turned out to be chicken bones. Leftovers from some embalmer’s lunch.”

  Dr. Cavanaugh gave her a thoughtful look. “I take it you don’t agree.”

  “That the same accident is likely to occur again and again? No.”

  “Can you tell if she was rewrapped, like all those pharaohs after their tombs and mummies were robbed?”

  “Perhaps you’d like to judge for yourself.” Kate pointed to the bench under the windows, where Tashat lay in all her eternal splendor.

  Dr. Cavanaugh followed her across the room without a word, nor did he say anything as his eyes traveled the length of the cartonnage, then returned again and again to the head and shoulder mask—to the glowing countenance framed by straight bangs and a smooth fall of jet-black hair.