The Eye of Horus

by Carol Thurston

  A smile lit Ramose’s blue eyes. “Tuli, but no one else.” He went down on one knee. “Come here.” Aset went to him and clasped her arms around his neck. “I will miss you, my little Nile goose,” he murmured into her hair. “Now leave us in peace.”

  “That is all?” she asked, as he set her away. “Did you not see my feet?”

  “I noticed, just as you intended.” I saw the smile he tried to hide. So did Aset.

  Later Pagosh told me Ramose took pleasure in informing Nefertiti that it was her history of consorting with the priests of Aten that tainted their daughter, making it impossible to find any man willing to accept Aset as more than a minor wife.

  “But the bitch is not done. She must be sure the High Priest will deny Horemheb the throne, and cannot wait until the old Pharaoh’s clock runs dry. That means Paranefer will be next.”

  I begin to understand Pagosh’s constant state of restrained fury, since I, too, taste the bitterness of a truth I have long denied—my own helplessness. Not to prevent the disasters decreed by the gods, but by mortal men … and one woman.

  13

  Kate hit the city limits of Houston around four-thirty and let several exits go by before she took one, then followed the access road until she came to a service station. The pay phone was set out away from the pumps, so she steered straight for it, turned off the motor, and dug in her purse for a coin. Then she rolled down the window so that Sam could stick his nose out and told him to “stay.” By the time she punched in the number at the clinic, her heart had jumped into her throat.

  “Imaging Center.”

  “This is Kate McKinnon. Is Dr.—”

  “Can you hold please, Miss McKinnon?” Kate assumed the receptionist had someone on another line. If Max was tied up, she’d just leave a message, then get a map and cruise around on her own, maybe find a motel where they would allow dogs.

  “Kate?” He sounded out of breath. “Are you all right? Where the hell have you been?”

  “What? Sorry, the traffic is kind of noisy.” He repeated it, louder. “Oh. Northern New Mexico, the Red Land. That’s what the Egyptians called the desert. It seemed appropriate at the time.”

  “I called your house every couple of hours until Christmas Eve. Then I tried Cleo, figured you were over there. But I couldn’t get her until Christmas Day. Why didn’t you come here like we planned?”

  “I’m here now.”

  A stunned silence. “Where?”

  “Uh, wait a minute.” She leaned away from the phone so that she could see the street sign. “Corner of Voss and Eye-Ten.”

  “Why the hell didn’t you say so?” he exploded.

  “I thought I’d better call, see if you were even in town.”

  “I’ll be there in ten minutes. Fifteen at most. Don’t move, okay?”

  “Yes, except, well, is it all right if I let Sam out of the car to—you know?”

  “Not funny, Mac.” He hung up and Kate went back to her car, snapped Sam’s leash to his collar, and let him drag her toward a patch of tired grass.

  “Can you believe this weather?” she commented to Sam. “Feels like we’re on a different planet from that windy mesa where we almost froze to death. But he didn’t sound too happy, so when Max gets here we better be on our best behavior. Otherwise it’ll be back on the road for us … unless I decide to stick around long enough to look for a job. Might as well, since I’m here, if I can think of some way to keep anyone from contacting my last employer.”

  It seemed only a few minutes before she heard the squeal of tires and looked around to see a gray Mercedes brake to a stop about twenty feet away. Sam started barking as the driver’s door swung open, then lunged at the leash with the strength of his namesake. Kate let go and he tore off, too excited to slow down before crashing into Max’s legs.

  “Okay, boy, take it easy,” Max said as he ruffled the dog’s fur, then let Sam kiss him on the chin while he grabbed for the leash.

  Kate stayed where she was, trying to read his face as he came toward her. When he was still a couple of feet away, he stopped and just looked at her. Then, in what couldn’t have been a practiced greeting, he stepped closer and wrapped his arms around her. It wasn’t the breezy cheek-to-cheek embrace she’d seen at museum fund-raisers, but a real, honest-to-God hug—as if he needed to confirm physically what his eyes were telling him. She knew then that something had changed between them, even if she wasn’t sure how or what that might mean.

  “I haven’t had a decent sleep in days,” Max confessed. “Kept seeing a little red car mashed flat between a couple of eighteen-wheelers.” He stepped back then, to confront her. “I know you don’t owe me anything, but—”

  “Yes, I do,” she whispered.

  “I didn’t mean the scan.”

  “Neither did I.” What she owed him was an explanation. The truth, even if it hurt. It had taken a couple of days for the anger and humiliation to dissipate under the vast expanse of blue sky and red cliffs, eroded by eons of time, and for her to realize that she had reacted like a child, without considering anyone but herself. “I wasn’t thinking very straight. I was angry, mostly at myself. Felt guilty.”

  “Why, for God’s sake?”

  “For letting us both down—you and me. This isn’t the first time I’ve failed at something I really cared about.” Admitting it was a risk she now felt compelled to take, a kind of vow she had made to herself … and Sam. “Before, it always helped to get away and be alone for a while, to try to get things back on an even keel. Except this time I wasn’t really alone. Sam and I spent three whole days up on a mesa without any other human beings in sight. It was so clean up there, under that vast expanse of unsullied blue with fresh snow all around us. And still. A quiet so profound it made you wonder if you’d gone deaf. Except I have reason to know I’m not.” His eyes never left her face, even with Sam tugging on the leash. “I don’t mean to make it sound like an epiphany or anything, but something happened while I was on that mesa. Maybe it was just the place, but I guess—like Camus said—‘in the depth of winter I finally learned that within me lay an invincible summer.’ Anyway, Sam and I decided to come on to Houston even if it was a couple of days late.”

  A smile started in his eyes as he lifted a hand to skim away the strand of hair blown across her eyes by the balmy Gulf breeze. “I’ve got a fenced yard full of squirrels for Sam, a case of red wine laid in especially for you, and a freezer loaded with steaks. I might even let you wear your old sweats if you promise not to make a habit of it. No strings attached.”

  Without warning, her eyelids began to burn with incipient tears, and she reached for a joking reply. “That’s what I was afraid of.”

  The smile reached his lips. “Sam can ride with me if he wants.”

  Kate followed him through a residential section, then past a neighborhood shopping center and the Rice stadium. A couple of blocks farther on, Max turned into a street canopied by huge live-oak trees, obviously one of the older—and better—parts of town. When he turned into the driveway of a Tudor half-timber with a peaked roof, Kate realized she’d been expecting something less traditional or at least not so formal.

  A gate to one side of the house swung open, and she followed him back to a three-car garage with living quarters above it. Max was out of his car even before she stopped, and then Sam was racing across the grass in hot pursuit of a gray squirrel. She took it all in at a glance—the tall pines and shrubs edging the backyard, the solid wood fence that acted as a noise filter, and the fenced-in tennis court. What caught and held her eyes, though, was the swimming pool with a lily pond at one end, set at a slightly higher level so that a thin stream of water would trickle into the pool.

  “Lilies are sort of a hobby,” Max explained as she moved toward the purple-blue buds jutting up from the spreading flat circles of dark green. “That particular color is a hybrid I’ve been experimenting with for a couple of years.”

  Kate just nodded, accepting that some things wer
e simply meant to be. Tashat. And now Max’s fascination with the plant the Egyptians called a lotus. One with blue flowers. The color of the sky. Azure, a word derived from lapis lazuli, the blue stone prized by pharaohs and commoners alike.

  He waited until she had her fill of looking, then led her toward the back door. “This is the kitchen,” he explained unnecessarily, “but we could cook outside tonight if you want. You might even want to take advantage of the weather to take a dip and get the kinks out. The water’s heated, but January can be pretty unpredictable.” That he sought refuge in the weather at least told her he wasn’t used to inviting a woman to stay at his house.

  As she followed him up the stairs, he even swung around to apologize for how dark the house was, because of all the trees. “That’s why I thought you’d prefer the yellow bedroom.” Two windows looked out over the backyard, reflecting light onto the opposite wall of built-in closets and drawers. An arched opening beyond the queen-size bed revealed a mirrored dressing alcove and bathroom, also bright yellow.

  “Nice,” she commented, wondering why, if he thought the house was dark, he hadn’t replaced the old-fashioned windows with floor-to-ceiling glass. Certainly he could afford to, judging by the neighborhood and that new Mercedes. Imaging machines weren’t cheap, but with scans costing four to six hundred dollars a pop they quickly paid themselves out, especially in a group practice. And anything to do with the brain commanded the highest fees, which probably put him in the multihundred-thousand-dollar income bracket. Like a teenager suddenly aware that she’s dressed all wrong, Kate felt acutely out of place, which only brought home how little she really knew about Maxwell Cavanaugh.

  “The house belonged to my parents. I moved into the apartment above the garage when I came back from Ann Arbor. My father had died several years before and my mother was undergoing chemotherapy for breast cancer, so I wanted to be close. After she died I just stayed on.” He shrugged. “It’s convenient to my office and the Medical Center.” As if that explained everything, he turned to leave. “I can loan you a T-shirt and shorts if you didn’t bring a suit.”

  “I did, in case I got lucky on a motel with an indoor pool.”

  After a few laps in the pool followed by a relaxing bath in the yellow tub, Kate joined Max on the patio, where Sam lay stretched out with his head on his paws, keeping one eye on the fire. “What can I do to help?”

  “The coals are just about ready, and I’m almost through with the salad. Don’t want to overdo on the lettuce.” The corners of his eyes crinkled with humor. “Think it’s too cool to eat outside?”

  “Not for me.” She followed him to the kitchen, accepted the place mats and silverware he handed her, and carried them out to the glass-topped patio table. Max followed her with glasses and a bottle of wine, then spread the coals and laid the steaks on the grill. Afterward he settled into the lounge chair next to hers and for a minute they sipped and exchanged comments about the wine, but Kate could feel him waiting.

  “Did you talk to Dave?” she asked, wanting to get it over with.

  He nodded. “Paranoid bastard claimed you and Cleo were trying to make him look the fool. I told him he was doing a damned good job of that on his own and didn’t need any help from you or anyone else. I also called him an ass for letting his ego blind him to what he had and he ought to be down on his knees begging you to come back.”

  “You actually said that?” He nodded without looking at her and drank some wine, as if he were embarrassed.

  Kate was trying not to dwell on what might have been, but the sense that she’d failed was still there—one more disappointment she would have to learn to live with even if it hadn’t paralyzed her as it always did before. She began to talk, and in the end gave him a blow-by-blow description of everything that had happened. Max listened without comment until she finished, then got up to turn on the lights in the pool. “What a jerk!” he muttered as he went to check the steaks, then sat back down on the side of his lounge chair, facing her. “Did you get any pictures of the finished head?”

  She nodded. “I haven’t stopped long enough to get them developed, but I took an entire roll, from the front, back, and in profile, with different wigs. One short and curly, the other long with tiny braids like those two wooden figures in the museum, from the same period. Isis and Hennuttab, daughters of the Sun King.”

  “I thought Akhenaten’s daughters—”

  “Not Akhenaten. His father, Amenhotep the Third, Egypt’s Dazzling Sun. How I wish you could have seen her.” She hesitated. “I think someone did try to kill Tashat, Max, but not for the reason Cleo dreamed up. Only she didn’t die right away, maybe because of that other sunu, the one who’s walking beside her on the road to eternity.”

  “Could be. I doubt she would have lived long enough for primary callus to form without someone at least trying to treat her.”

  “A physician back then was supposed to examine the patient and consult his handbook before pronouncing his verdict, to treat or not to treat. If the outcome looked hopeless, he was to do nothing. He also wasn’t supposed to deviate from the teachings of the medical scrolls, and could be called before the Bureau of Pharaoh’s Physicians for malpractice if he did. Maybe this physician put himself in double jeopardy, first by deciding to treat her at all, and then by how he treated her, if it wasn’t in the scrolls. The question is, did punishment ever include death?”

  Max forked the T-bones onto a platter and motioned her toward the table. Once seated he cut the tails off both steaks and set them aside for Sam. Then, while she helped herself to salad, he refilled their glasses. “Have you thought about what you’re going to do next?”

  “Look for a job.” She gave Sam an affectionate smile. “Have to keep the ravening beast supplied with crunch.”

  “I ran into a professor at UT a week or so ago who’s looking for someone to do illustrations for a textbook. Houston is bulging at the seams with medical schools and hospitals, but not illustrators like you. He was complaining about how all anybody can do now is computer-generated stuff. I could give him a call, see if he’s still looking.”

  “It’s nice of you to offer, Max, but I didn’t come here to impose—”

  “Look, let’s get something straight. An orthopedic surgeon I know needs a medical illustrator and you happen to be one of the best. Maybe the best. For me to call and ask if he’s found anyone yet is no big deal. And just because I can give you some names to contact about a job doesn’t mean I’m trying to push you into anything. Maybe you just need time to think. Whatever you decide is fine with me, and I’m going to do what I need to whether you’re here or not. So you can forget about imposing. You can’t leave Sam cooped up in some flea-bitten motel, so stay here as long as you want or need to. Got that?” He waited for her to nod.

  “Okay. So what are we going to do about Tashat?”

  For the past three months Kate’s every thought had been driven by the need to rescue Tashat from oblivion—to somehow make it matter that she had ever lived. To do that she needed to find out not only who she was but what happened to her. And why. So she hadn’t really failed, she just wasn’t finished.

  “Start over,” she answered without hesitation. “Follow every lead, turn over every stone.” The laughter in his eyes told her she hadn’t let him down, either.

  He nodded. “Good. Now eat.”

  She did, but a sense of lightness so unexpected and unfamiliar that she couldn’t help wondering where it had come from made her want to laugh, too. Partly it was relief. It also had to do with the fact that Max had actually been worried. About her.

  He caught her watching him. “What?”

  “Do you really think I might be the best?”

  “Easily.” He teased her with his eyes. “But I’ll withhold final judgment until I see those photographs.”

  Kate woke to a blinding yellow light and realized she’d gone to bed with the drapes open. Sam was gone, so she threw back the covers and went to the window. The sur
face of the pool glistened undisturbed under the early-morning sun, and just the sight of that lush green grass made her toes itch.

  A few minutes later she crept out the bedroom door, face scrubbed and teeth brushed, hoping Sam wouldn’t hear her and wake Max. As she reached the bottom of the stairs, the dog came bounding out of a room a little way beyond and she bent to fondle his ears. That was when she realized Max was talking on the phone, so she motioned for Sam to go outside with her.

  In the backyard she peeled off her sweats and dived in, surfaced and then struck out for the far end, where she did an underwater flip and headed back the way she’d come, holding to a steady rhythm of stroking and breathing. She could feel her brain begin to take up oxygen, lap by lap, until some noise made her lift her eyes out of the water. She saw Max first, then Sam, barking like a fool.

  “What’s up?” she gasped, letting the water smooth her hair back from her face.

  “Time to get this show on the road. We’ve got to take your film to be developed, go by my office, and get to the Health Sciences Center by eleven.”

  “I can fix my own breakfast, Max, and take the film. Just leave me a map, if you have one.”

  “Uh-uh.” He extended a hand to pull her out of the water. “Appointment at Health Sciences is yours, not mine.”

  “The friend who’s looking for an illustrator?”

  “Nope. I did talk to him, though, and he wasn’t a bit happy when I said you were busy today and would call him tomorrow. Think he’s worried you may get away.”

  “I didn’t bring anything but a few drawings of Tashat, but a freelance assignment would help tide me over while I look for a full-time job.” She wrapped the towel around her waist as they started toward the house. “So who is this mysterious appointment with?” Max shook his head. “You don’t know or you’re not going to tell me?”

  “Can’t. Better for you to see for yourself.” Sam ran ahead and jumped against the screen door, making it bounce open, then stuck his nose in to keep it from closing. “Smartest dog I’ve ever known,” Max mumbled as he held the door for her. “Have you considered going into business for yourself? I’ll bet you’d have all the work you could handle once word got around, probably get commissions from all over, not just Houston. You’d have flexible hours and a lot more freedom to pick and choose, not to mention more money. All you’d have to invest in is a computer to access whatever databases you need, a printer, and maybe a scanner.”