He smiled, then chuckled. “A woman with strong passions and great strength of character. She also was quite a beauty, even when she was eighty. My dad used to say his mother was ‘odd,’ to excuse the fact that she was different.” He went quiet, staring into the fire, as if remembering something. “Ever notice how some men gravitate toward women who are the exact opposite of their mothers? Well, that was my dad. I doubt my mother ever had an opinion of her own. She always deferred to him. Not that she wasn’t a caring person. But I suppose that was the way she was raised.”
“Maybe,” Kate agreed, thinking of her own mother, “but then you’d have to say the same thing about your father—that men back then were conditioned to be the boss. Yet from what you just said about your grandmother, that’s not how she would have raised him. So it’s probably more about some people needing to be in control.”
That’s when it dawned on her—something so obvious she wondered why she hadn’t seen it before. “You knew all along that glass necklace wasn’t ancient, didn’t you?”
“I guess,” Max admitted without meeting her eyes. “Listen, that champagne should be cold by now.” He made as if to get up, then stayed where he was. “I figured I needed to know if whoever looked at this one knew what they were talking about.” He hefted the box with the ivory necklace. “So yes, I knew where she got it and all the rest, because I gave it to her back when I was in college. Found it in a vintage clothes shop.”
The irony of that didn’t escape Kate, but she still wasn’t ready to let it go. “Then I was right that she treasured it because of who gave it to her. And I’d prefer a glass of the house red, unless that would spoil your party.”
Relieved, grinning, he grabbed her hand to pull her up with him. “I am not my father, Katie, in case you haven’t figured that out.”
Something tickled Kate’s cheek. “Stop it, Sam,” she whispered. When it happened again, she rolled over and came up against a warm, immovable object. “Get down. It’s too early.”
“Burning incense produces phenol.” A man’s voice. “Carbolic acid. D’you think the Egyptians knew that?”
“Didn’t like crowds,” she mumbled into the pillow. “Unhealthy. Could smell the noxious odors of their bodies.”
“Ah, yes, the deadly miasmas that rise from the human body.” A hand massaged her back through the covers. “Sam was getting worried.” When he heard his name, Sam jumped up on the bed and nudged her face with his cold nose.
“Not fair. Two against one.”
“It’s almost ten o’clock. Are you sure you feel okay?”
“Sleepy,” Kate mumbled. “Eyes won’t open.” She had spen all night trying to escape one harrowing experience after another—approaching the rapids of a river in a kayak with her arms tied to her sides, knowing she was going to turn over, not knowing if she would ever come back up, drawn into the yawning maw of a giant scanner only to emerge at the other end bound in the shroud of a mummy—until finally, too tired to fight any longer, the sense of helplessness and loneliness breached the dam she’d built to hold it back and came pouring down her cheeks, drowning her in salt. Or was it natron?
“Cold out?” she asked.
“Rainy. I thought we’d try to make the Menil Museum before lunch. They’ve got some things you might want to see. Marilou called. Invited us for brunch Sunday. Said to bring Sam along so he can meet her two mutts. I told her I’d check with you.”
She opened one eye, took in the blue chambray shirt and faded jeans, and reached up to circle his neck with her arms. “I’m so glad I came.”
“Me, too.” He rested his cheek on her head.
“I almost didn’t, until I remembered how you always listen and take whatever I say on its merits instead of personalizing everything, or passing judgment. Not because you’re trying to impress me or anything. It’s just the way you are.”
“That bastard really did a job on you,” Max mumbled.
“What I’m trying to say is thank you. For yesterday. Tom McCowan. Everything.”
He gave her a squeeze. “I’ll go scramble some eggs.” He got up, and Sam jumped down to follow him. As he started out he said, “I called my old chief of radiology at Michigan, by the way, to get a name at the dental school. Thought I’d call and see if whoever has those old films will take a look at ours.”
Suddenly in a hurry, Kate showered in record time, brushed her teeth, and pulled on a pair of jeans, then ran for the stairs, still buttoning her shirt.
After breakfast she called Mike Tinsley, the orthopedic surgeon who was looking for a medical illustrator, at home. He suggested meeting tomorrow afternoon, even though it was Saturday, and Kate agreed. As she hung up she was already planning to do a couple of sketches, just to have something to show him.
By the time they left the house a cloud had settled over the city, cutting off the tops of the high-rise buildings they passed on the short drive to the Menil, a museum built to house the collection of Dominique and John de Menil.
“John died several years before her, but they were a force in Houston’s cultural scene. You might even say they put it on the map,” Max commented as he parked along the curb. “But this building is all Mrs. de Menil. No committee of public-spirited citizens would ever have come up with anything like this.” The flat-roofed, single-story white frame building sat in the middle of a double block surrounded by a vast expanse of green grass and trees. “It’s too intimate. Not Texas big.”
When Kate saw the floating white walls and pine floors—painted black, then left for visitors’ feet to reveal the grain of the wood—she understood what he meant. From the high-ceilinged open entrance hall Max guided her to a small room where the architecture gave way to what it was meant to display—in lighted glass cases built into the walls and a large freestanding pedestal. But it was what was in those cases that spoke so eloquently of Dominique de Menil’s eye for the essence of ancient civilizations—small objects from Sumer and other early settlements scattered across the plain of Mesopotamia. The Fertile Crescent.
What caught Kate’s attention immediately were the sandstone fertility figures, all representing the fecund human female, mounted so they appeared to float in space. Little more than three to five inches tall, they made everything else seem insignificant by comparison, because those colorless stone objects symbolized continuity. Birth and rebirth. Something that was at the same time immense and unme-surable.
When she finished the last case and turned to look for Max, she found him only a few feet away, waiting, giving her all the space and time she needed. That struck her as symbolic, too.
“Want to leave instead of looking at the other stuff?” he asked, anticipating her. “We can always come back another time.”
Kate nodded. “Nothing could compete with this. But you knew that, didn’t you?”
Back outside they were hit by a cold dry wind that sent leaves cartwheeling down the sidewalk. “Feels like a blue norther,” Max muttered, grabbed her hand, and ran for the car, where he revved the motor to get the heater going.
They drove several blocks in silence, until Max couldn’t stand it any longer. “Okay, out with it. I can hear the wheels spinning way over here.”
“Remember how the Egyptians put small models of things the deceased might need in their tombs? Little figures they called ushabti to work for the dead person. A house, stables with cattle and other livestock. Surely a physician would need a scribe’s palette.” She turned to him. “One made of ivory, since that would exhibit the same radiodensity as old bone. Those hollow tubes could be reed pens.”
“You think that’s what’s in his mouth, a miniature palette? Maybe to give him back the ability to speak, like touching the mummy’s eyes with the sacred adze to return his sight?”
Kate shrugged. “I was thinking more of giving him the ability to write, because that’s what he was known for.”
“A medical treatise that got him into a peck of trouble?” Max couldn’t help laughing. “No wonde
r Dave felt uncomfortable with you around.”
“That narrow cylinder also could be a scroll instead of a reed pen.”
“I don’t remember any layering, but I’ll check it out. Tomorrow, while you talk with Tinsley. Lift whatever it is out of the oral cavity and bring up a composite. But that fits something else I’ve been thinking about. Remember what I said about his eyes being open, that for the Egyptians to see was to know? Without light there was no seeing. That has to be where our concept of enlightenment came from. Maybe what we’ve got is a physician ahead of his time and condemned for it, just as the early alchemists, or scientists, in Europe were persecuted as familiars of the devil.”
“It fits. Oh god, yes, Max. It fits.”
That afternoon she worked on several orthopedic illustrations, and again the next morning. Then, after lunch Saturday, she dropped Max at his office and drove his car, since it carried a “Physician” parking sticker, to the Medical Center for her meeting with Mike Tinsley. By the time she got back to the South Main Imaging Center it was past four o’clock. The few cars in the parking lot were gone, and it felt more like six, thanks to the clouds moving in from the Gulf, another turnaround in the weather.
She rang the bell and was let in by Max, who seemed inordinately pleased to see her, hardly able to keep from smiling and in a hurry. Shades of the Cheshire cat, she thought, and this time was prepared for what was coming. The object they had speculated about was indeed a miniature scribe’s palette, with landscapes incised into the top and two longer sides.
“I have to get this down on paper,” Kate decided, digging in her purse for the little notebook she always carried.
“I can transfer all these images to a disk so you can view them at home on my computer,” Max told her.
Kate continued with the quick sketch. “I wouldn’t want you to think I’m not impressed with this fantastic technology,” she reassured him, “because I am. That’s what’s so sad, that we didn’t have it before—”
“Before so much was destroyed? Yeah, I know. Same feeling I get when I think how long it’s been, and how wrong we’ve been about how the brain works.” Something in his voice made Kate glance up. “That’s what the latest imaging technology means, especially fast MRI. For the first time in history we can look at how the normal brain functions, not just those that are damaged. By looking at the resting brain, then asking a subject to do something, we can trace nervecell activity and map the brain. In the beginning we found a lot of localization. Now, because we have better machines, we’re seeing more complexity—that multiple areas are activated.”
“Is that what you’re doing in your research?”
“A small piece of the map, yes. At least that’s what it started out to be. It turns out life isn’t so simple.” He gestured at her sketch. “I’ll bet your brain looks like the Milky Way when you do that.”
“Yeah, well, this image you just manufactured is why I’m not too optimistic that I can find enough work to live on. Medical students today study anatomy with computers instead of the real thing, view one male and female cadaver that have been sliced like sandwich meat and then digitized so any organ can be put together or separated out. I’m becoming obsolete faster than the black rhino is going extinct.”
“I’m not touching that with a ten-foot pole, not until you tell me what went on with Mike Tinsley,” Max responded.
“Nothing ‘went on.’ He showed me a few photographs, described what he wants, and asked me for suggestions. I agreed to do a few examples, and that was it.”
“For how much?”
“We didn’t talk money.”
“Why the hell not? You’re a consummate artist with the knowledge and skill to equal his with a knife and chisel.”
“I’m going to watch this new surgical procedure he’s developed first, before I decide, if you don’t mind me hanging around through Monday.”
Max nodded and went to his desk to begin putting things away. “Are you about finished? Sam’s been cooped up in the house all afternoon.” Kate watched him, but surreptitiously. It wasn’t like Max to be evasive, or impatient.
“Almost. Did you know the Egyptians used a three- hundred-sixty-five day calendar, same as ours, with twelve months, each thirty days long?” she asked. “Difference was, they had only three seasons and the new year began around the middle of July, when the Nile flooded the land—the season of inundation.”
“What did they do with the extra five days?”
“Holidays, to celebrate the birthdays of the gods. Osiris, Isis, Horus, that bunch.”
“Well, I find it pretty damn hypocritical for Set to kill his brother, and Nepthys to sleep with Osiris when he’s married to her sister, while ordinary mortals had to stand before Osiris and swear they never committed murder or adultery.”
“Yin and yang,” Kate mumbled. “Can’t have good without bad, white without black and all that jazz. What do you think of Mike Tinsley?”
“He’s okay, why?”
“Oh, just—you know what they say about surgeons.”
“What, that they’re arrogant? Ignorant beyond belief about everything else?”
He’d walked right into it. “That they’re even more antisocial than radiologists.”
Some things remain always true. Life and death. Earth and sky. The gifts of the goddess—intuition and love.
—Normandi Ellis, Awakening Osiris
16
Year Two in the Reign of Horemheb
(1346 B.C.)
DAY 27, FIRST MONTH OF HARVEST
The place reeked of sheep’s urine and rotten eggs, which meant that the sesh per ankh had been there before me to make sacrifice to Amen and burn the yellow powder to drive off evil spirits. Aset’s husband had to be in his late sixties, yet he looked much older, especially with his eyes closed. Like a man on his deathbed.
Lamps had been set at each corner of Uzahor’s couch, leaving everyone and everything else in the smoky shadows, while one old priest chanted a mournful supplication to the gods of creation. The women of his family sat cross-legged on the floor, faces half-hidden by identical white shawls—Aset among them, I assumed, since she had left my house two nights before—while several men stood talking in hushed tones. The only one I recognized was Ramose.
Tuli ran to greet me, baring his teeth in a smile and nudging his nose into my hand. He wore a new collar with prancing red horses stitched to the white leather band. I made obeisance to him first, then the family, before Ramose motioned me to the old man’s side.
“Only say what you need and I will see it done,” he told me straight off, ordering me to treat his old friend no matter what.
“First I must listen to the voice of his heart and examine him with my hands.” From the rapid rise and fall of Uzahor’s bony chest it was plain that he found it difficult to breathe. “Does he complain of pain?”
“His wife says his left arm has given him no peace for several days.” Which wife, I wondered. “When I arrived some hours ago, I thought he looked pale, but he said he felt tired and nothing else.”
“Has he worsened since the priests burned the yellow powder?” I took the old man’s hand in mine to examine his fingernails and found them as colorless as his face.
“No. Aset was right, then?” Ramose inquired. “The sulfur can cause sickness as well as prevent it?”
“Yes, should the fumes turn noxious.” I put my fingers to the base of Uzahor’s throat to confirm that his heart ran shallow and fast, then leaned down to smell his mouth, seeking the sour fruit odor of the sickness that can cause a man to fall into an unnatural sleep. But I could smell little but the stench of rotten eggs. Next I exposed the old man’s abdomen to feel for any hardening or swelling in his vital organs, while I tried to think of a way to get fresh air into the room without embarrassing the God’s Father before his underlings. “What does his own physician say?” I asked.
“That a man’s body wears out the same as a sandal.”
“He
is here?”
Ramose shook his head. “My—” He glanced at Uzahor. “Though he loves me well, my old friend prefers to speak to the gods himself rather than through a priest. He sent his physician to the temple to deliver a message to the Hearing Ear, just before he fell into a deep sleep, as you see him. I suppose he sent the poor man away to save his pride, for he is not a bad physician, only a complacent one.”
To me they are one and the same, but I held my tongue as I bared Uzahor’s feet.
“Sometimes, Tenre, you remind me of my old friend. I wonder if that is why I raised the stakes higher than I ever intended the day I asked you to join my household, when you had the temerity to haggle with me.”
It is not like Ramose to ramble, if indeed that was what he was doing, or openly to exhibit emotion. But he has long been an enigma to me, so perhaps I only imagined that his thoughts wandered in the past out of distress at the prospect of losing his friend. I pressed the flesh above Uzahor’s toes and around the anklebone, to confirm that the swelling was not—like oil in a goatskin bag—the kind that comes and goes under the fingers. I noticed that two of his toenails were missing while the others had turned to chalk. I re-covered his legs, put my ear to his chest, and heard the beat of a distant drum muffled by shifting currents of air, a sound with the soft edge that meant he was drowning in his own fluids.
“We must raise his head.”
“Pagosh!” Ramose called. An eerie sense of familiarity came over me, another experience I cannot explain. “Bring cushions to put under his shoulders.” Ramose glanced at me. “Anything else?”
“His wife”—I caught myself—“his Principal Wife, is she present?”
“Her name is Sati.” He motioned to a woman who hurried to join us. Despite the cloud of white hair billowing around her head, the grace of her body was reflected in her face, where the waters of life ran silent but deep. Not that I mistook her for a placid cow. Just the opposite, judging by the way her black eyes appeared to breathe in the shifting light from the lamps, like live coals in a banked fire. Nor did they waver from mine until I put my palms together and lowered my chin in a bow.
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