“Then maybe her name isn’t Tashat, either. If the inscription is a red herring, the truth of who she is lies in that portrait and the scenes on her cartonnage, plus the ones inside the coffin lid.” Max straightened and turned her to face him. “Take a flying leap, the first thing that comes to mind. What’s her real name?”
“Isis. Aset in ancient Egyptian.”
He nodded. “It’s also more fitting for a royal princess.”
“Even if it is, where does that get us?”
“Say she was someone important, either because of something she did or who she was. Having to hide her identity after death doesn’t fit an act of adultery. That’s what I came home to tell you. I got a call from Ann Arbor. Bill Ragsdale finally got around to looking at those films I sent, and wants to know who we’re looking at.” His lips twisted into a devilish grin. “I told him I wasn’t at liberty to say yet.”
“No fair, Max. Give. What did he say.”
“One of our skulls exhibits the cluster of craniofacial features they’ve identified with the Eighteenth Dynasty royal family. But it gets complicated after that, so hold your fire, okay?” Kate nodded. “Do you remember telling me that there was some doubt about who a couple of the royal mummies really are? Well, it’s more than a couple. Ragsdale thinks some of them probably were misidentified back in the Twenty-first Dynasty, when the priests rewrapped and reinterred a whole bunch of the royals together—the cache of mummies found in the late 1800s. You still with me?”
Kate nodded, hardly able to breathe. “Jim Harris and Ed Wente, who put together that X-Ray Atlas you showed me in Denver”—she waited while he pulled a piece of paper from his pocket and unfolded it—“think the mummy identified originally as Thutmose Four probably is Amenhotep Three. Because of the similarity in the craniofacial morphology of both Tut and the skull found in Tomb Fifty-five—who they assume is either Smenkhkare or Akhenaten. What you’d expect if Amenhotep III is their father.” He shrugged. “Not that that’s conclusive, or they wouldn’t still be looking for any confirmation they can get. Anyway, one of our skulls exhibits features similar enough to the mummy they now believe is Amenhotep Three to be his daughter.”
Kate blurted, “Nefertiti!” Max nodded. “What about Tashat?”
“Definitely related. Close enough to be the granddaughter of the Magnificent Amenhotep—the third Amenhotep. If that’s who that mummy really is. That means she could have posed a threat to someone who coveted the throne simply by existing.”
“That’s why she was killed—so she couldn’t legitimize the opposition’s claim to the throne by marriage to a half-royal princess?” Kate felt something crumple inside her. “Oh, God, Max, I hope not. What a terrible waste.”
“I know, but suppose she did die at the hands of some power broker intent on claiming she never even existed. And that her friends arranged for her to be named the wife and daughter of two fictitious men, a diversionary tactic to protect her body so she can come forth another day. Her child isn’t mentioned in that inscription because that might put him or her at risk, too, assuming the kid was still alive.”
A new thought fought its way to the surface of Kate’s consciousness. “Do you think we could twist this Ragsdale person’s arm one more time and ask him to look at the male skull, give us a second opinion about whether he could be her father? Not that I doubt your—”
“I already sent the films this afternoon, FedEx overnight.” Max held out his hand to take her with him. “But I need to E-mail him so he’ll know they’re coming.”
He was keyboarding the message to Bill Ragsdale when Kate had another brainstorm. “Remember the juggler—the mouse who’s performing for an audience of animals? He’s wearing a ram’s head mask, like a priest. Rams were the sacred animal of Amen, so maybe he’s her father.”
“So maybe we’re looking at another Aesop’s Fables, or Brer Rabbit, where all the animals wear clothes and talk like humans?”
“Not just any human. What if each of those animals represents a real person, someone Tashat actually knew? Do you remember the big yellow tabby cat sort of half-hidden behind a bush, so only one eye shows?” She picked up a pen and drew the magic eye of Horus, with the tear mark of a cheetah but without the cheek mark of a falcon. “Whoever that cat is, something is wrong with her. She isn’t whole.”
The following Friday Max came home early again, using the excuse that he just wanted to beat the traffic. But he seemed preoccupied, and after changing his clothes, he went to his study to work.
Kate decided to give Sam a bath and was in the yard brushing him dry when Max came flying out the back door. “Ragsdale, the guy at Michigan, just confirmed my reading on the head between her legs. He’s no relation. Can’t be her father.”
“I never thought he was, but at least we can rule that out.”
“I asked Ragsdale whether any of the mummies in that attic room at the museum in Cairo were missing any parts—a leg or an arm, something like that.” Max eased down on the edge of a lounge chair, then jumped back up, too excited to sit still. “You’re not going to believe this, Katie. One, he says. A physician.” He waited for her to look up. “No head.”
She dropped Sam’s brush. “Did he know where this mummy was found?”
“Necropolis at Thebes. He gave me the name of a professor at Cairo University, someone who has an in with the curator of mummies at the Egyptian Museum. Otherwise, he says, you can wait months for them to answer a letter.” He paused before spilling the rest. “I already called him. Name is Seti Abdalla, but he speaks English like a native. Of England.”
“And?” Kate urged, impatient that he wasn’t telling her faster.
Somehow Max managed to hold off grinning long enough to deliver the coup de grâce. “Don’t just stand there burnin’ daylight, girl. Better go start packing your duds.”
My heart resonates like the bow string of an archer. It hums like the string of a lyre. Love. Love. Give me love, sibilant love, thundering love.
—Normandi Ellis, Awakening Osiris
22
Year Seven in the Reign of Horemheb
(1341 B.C.)
DAY 16, SECOND MONTH OF HARVEST
My daughter has curly black hair and tiny toes, like her mother. She gasped for breath but soon quieted, as if sensing she was safe in my hands.
“What about her eyes?” Aset whispered, weak from her labor.
“I think yours were not so dark, but it is too early to say.” “I offered to Amen every day, begging him to make them brown.”
I did not have to ask why. Instead, I handed our babe to Kiki, the girl Senmut sent from his own household because Aset refuses to have servants, probably to guard our privacy for the times when the impulse to couple comes upon us without warning. Even my examining table has been the site of experiments I could never have imagined, but surely that will change now, just as she must care for our daughter instead of waging war on the women of Aniba who cut the genitals of their daughters. Which she has done with Senmut’s encouragement.
Tuli clicked his nails on the tile floor as he pranced in place. “Soon, Tuli,” she assured him as I pressed down to expel the membrane, which I collected in a clay crock and set aside. When I pressed again, though, a rush of blood spilled from her body.
“Bring the babe and a roll of that clean bandaging you set in the sun,” I called to Kiki as I lifted Aset from where she knelt and carried her to our sleeping couch. She cradled our daughter and directed a nipple to the babe’s mouth. Soon I felt her uterus tighten and knew a great sense of relief.
By the time I finished cleaning up, both of them had dozed off, so I watched them a while, storing the sight in my memory to be able to bring it before my eyes at will in the years to come. Then I carried the bloody membrane to the back corner of our garden and buried it under a struggling young tamarisk tree—and finally gave vent to my great need to tell someone about my new daughter. Tuli.
Afterward he watched me bathe and slip a tunic
over my head, tie my best kilt around my hips—the one I wore only for special occasions. At that he ran to his basket of toys and collars, took the strip of crocodile hide decorated with white cowrie shells in his teeth, and brought it to me.
Mother and daughter were wide-awake, looking at each other. “Does she please you?” I asked, easing down on the couch.
“I find her truly beautiful, don’t you?”
“Almost as beautiful as her mother,” I agreed, for Aset’s beauty remains unsullied by sun or wind or the rigors of daily life. I would have said more except for the cold nose nudging my leg. “Our friend’s patience wears thin.”
When she called him by name he stilled, ears perked, waiting for one word. “Come.” He leaped up, stumbling over Aset’s blanketed legs in his haste. “The little girl I told you was coming is here at last.” Twisting with excitement, he licked the tiny fist, causing my daughter to kick out her legs.
“You told me it was a son you carried,” I reminded Aset.
“To learn whether you would be disappointed in a daughter. Also”—a smile pulled at her mouth—“because I enjoyed hearing you argue in favor of a girl.”
I put my lips to hers. “I would love any child of yours, though you fill my thoughts and my heart until I fear there is little room for another.”
She cupped my face with her hand. “As you do mine, but already I feel a new kind of love, different from any I have known. Surely our hearts are amazing in that way, something else the ancient ones left out of your scrolls. Did you send word to Senmut?”
I nodded and handed her the scroll I had tied with a blue ribbon. “But she must have a name before you can introduce her to our friends.” I had taken Pagosh’s advice and prepared ahead of time for this momentous event, so the papyrus was larger than need be for the few words it contained, in order to surprise her.
“What a gorgeous thing!” she exclaimed as her eyes fell on the inlaid box. Made of wood from the yew tree, it feels smooth as water to the touch, even where the triangles of ebony and ivory are set into the wood. “I asked Senmut to name the finest craftsman in Aniba, who turned out to be the Assyrian’s woman.”
“The physician who can make the old ones see again? He mentioned no wife to me.” Aset makes it her business to meet all those who come to Senmut’s House of Life, to learn the customs of people from other lands.
“I did not say she was his wife. Nor have I seen her. I passed a message through the Assyrian, asking only that it suit the occasion and be large enough to hold what is inside.” Until then Aset thought the box itself was my gift, but inside on a piece of light blue linen lay a string of ivory beads, each perfectly formed and polished. What made it unusual was the clasp—a delicate ring that hooked over the head of a ram.
She stared at it so long I began to think she found it crude, but when she looked up I saw tears in her eyes, along with the beginnings of that glorious smile. I tried my best to match it though a rush of emotion blurred my sight.
“The ram honors Khnum,” I said, “who guided us through all the cataracts in your short life to this place of happiness.” I alluded to the rocky place in the Nile where all is turmoil and danger, and to the god who watches over it, because I do not want her to associate the ram with Amen or her father, and so be reminded every time she wears it of what she left behind.
“Go on, read what I have written,” I said as I took my daughter in my arms. “It is time she learns her name.” Though it is customary among the People of the Sun for the mother to name an infant, Aset had asked me to do as her own father had. “Tuli, too.” He stood when he heard his name, to be ready for whatever Aset commanded. First, though, she fastened the ivory necklace around her throat, positioning the ram’s head over her heart.
“The night was bright, and Sopdet, evening’s brightest star, had spiraled into being. A white ram came down to the river’s edge to drink. In the distance I could hear men singing, water rushing.
I held my wife’s hand—we were new lovers then—and learned the art of inundation. ‘Enter me and I shall make you a god.’I take her into my arms, taste her lips, lose myself in beauty and chaos. In her body I come to life.
I am he who stood in the rising water and washed himself in love. I am he who heard beneath the music of hurrying water the laughter of she who in nine months became my daughter.
I am he who names her beloved of the River God. Hapimere.”
DAY 10, THIRD MONTH OF PLANTING
At Senmut’s insistence we occupy a remote wing of his brother’s palace, with its own private garden, which he claimed for the use of honored visitors to his Per Ankh. The royal residence in no way compares with Pharaoh’s House of Jubilation, but is a compound of one-and two-story apartments that have been added on as needed.
Meri’s eyes begin to turn brown, but in all else she is the image of her mother, even the way she studies my face when I cradle her in my arms—until I look down and catch her. Then she kicks her feet, wanting me to play with her toes or make a growling sound in my throat while I hold her fingers to my lips. At three months she is unusually responsive, but then not every mother talks to her child as Aset does.
The two outline scribes Aset instructs come to our rooms now, and Senmut drops by every day or two to see how my daughter does, he claims, though I suspect it is really his “sister” he comes to see. I realize now it was jealousy that caused me to misread her feelings for him, to my everlasting shame, and that she sought only to determine if he was good enough for her beloved friend. For it seems that Nebet even at that tender age had sworn she would have no other. Nor does it appear that Senmut will be satisfied with any other woman. He sent a letter to her along with Aset’s announcing the arrival of our daughter. But he is first in line to inherit the throne and so cannot speak for her until his brother gets his Principal Wife with child, since Mena would never let his daughter go as second wife to any man, even a prince.
Today we were relaxing in the garden when Kiki came running with the news that an emissary from Pharaoh had arrived in Aniba. “His entourage is on the way to the Hall of Ambassadors even now. They say he carries a message for King Hiknefer.”
Tuli lifted his head and sniffed the air, his ears pricked to catch some distant noise, then leaped to his feet and began racing around the garden. I looked toward the gate and saw Pagosh, but he motioned for me to stay where I was. In the next instant I saw Nebet just behind him, and my heart leaped with joy, for I knew with absolute certainty the identity of Pharaoh’s emissary.
Aset and Nebet hugged and laughed and hugged some more. Then Aset went to Pagosh and threw her arms around his neck. Before he could protest she had kissed his cheek whispered something in his ear, and hugged him, too. What surprised me was seeing him lift Meri from her basket. She stared at his scarred face without making a sound, until a smile welled up from within him and broke like the sun across his face.
“I would know you anywhere,” he told her, perfectly serious, then glanced at me. I nodded, letting him know that I, too, see the disconcerting likeness.
They came bearing many gifts, from Nofret and Tamin, Sheri and Ramose. Aset’s father sent a length of pink cloth from the land of the purple dyers, and a delicate openwork bracelet dotted with tiny granules of gold, sized to fit the wrist of a babe. But nothing gave Aset more pleasure than the little wooden monkey with movable arms and legs from Merit, along with a letter written in her own hand.
By the time Mena got free of his duties at the palace I was no longer fit company for anyone. We had moved inside, for the nights are colder here than in Waset, just as the days are hotter. Even so, seeing Mena in the flesh made me newly aware of how much I miss the city of my birth, in spite of Senmut’s efforts to see that I meet every scholar and dignitary who visits his brother’s court. And there are plenty of those, since Aniba lies on a busy corridor of trade, halfway between the First and Second Cataracts. It is a fortress town built long ago to guard the mouth of a desert wadi that lead
s to the gold mines to the south and east.
Senmut brought him to us, for we have rooms aplenty and can accommodate all three of our guests. “He carries the flail to Khai,” Senmut burst out at once, unable to hold the news any longer. For good reason. Huy, Pharaoh’s longtime Viceroy in Kush went to his eternal home some months ago, but Khai had been his deputy. Since Khai’s Principal Wife comes of a Nubian mother, his own children feel at home in Wawat—and Senmut is assured that Pharaoh’s overseer will continue to indulge him in his Per Ankh. “Merenptah of Waset, Chief Physician to Pharaoh, is to place the gold ring on his finger.”
I looked to Mena and found a grudging grin on his face. “I have little experience of such occasions,” he joked, “but Prince Senmut is to guide my hand, if not my tongue.”
“Will you wear wild cattails on your arms,” Nebet asked, “and ostrich plumes in your hair?” Senmut makes the rest of us look colorless by comparison, for he wears the colorful tunics of his people along with the white headband of a prince. But he does not ape the antics of an uneducated tribesman.
“I will do what I must to see Khai named Pharaoh’s Son in Kush,” he told her.
“And tasseled earrings?” Nebet persisted. At fourteen, she combines the earthy coloring of her father with an aura that becomes ever more ephemeral with time.
“Not if I can help it,” he muttered, chagrined that she teased him.
“Oh, I wouldn’t want to miss that for anything”—Nebet looked to Aset—“would you?” Aset smiled and patted the bench beside her, inviting Senmut to her side with a gesture that took the sting from Nebet’s teasing.
Later, when Nebet made much ado about Meri’s cradle, Senmut informed her that it had served both him and his little sister. He not only named the many woods used in its construction but pointed to the teeth marks on the edge, which he made as a boy watching over his baby sister. Afterward their eyes kept meeting and looking away, only to seek each other again and again. For the remainder of the evening Senmut was to Nebet as a flower is to the sun—eyes following her wherever she went.
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