Masks of the Lost Kings (Suzy da Silva Series)

by Tom Bane

  “The CAT scan also demonstrated that Tutankhamun was not murdered by a blow to the head, as previous studies had suggested, nor did his spine reveal deformities, dispelling rumors that he was handicapped. The rear of Tutankhamun’s skull that was shown as broken in earlier X-rays had been placed incorrectly on the plates, distorting the X-ray images. CAT scanning and the DNA did show, however, that he had a serious case of malaria, so our understanding of his death is developing.

  “So, besides exhibiting some of the most beautiful jewelry and the oldest knickers you’ll ever see, why am I showing you all these? To explain more about Tutankhamun? Well, yes and no. You could spend a lifetime going through these objects trying to understand his life, from his birth to his death and all the mystery in between. But you’ll never get to the complete truth because the tomb tells us so little about the man himself. His successors destroyed all his images and most of his records, so putting together the jigsaw puzzle of his life is a daunting task. And if you feel up to the challenge, just be careful not to get lured into drawing false conclusions in your desperation to explain his mystery.”

  “So, if there’s still so much we don’t know, is there a conspiracy going on?” Suzy asked, sensing Piper still had one last conclusion to make. “Is there something someone’s trying to hide?” Again, the excitement of conspiracies attracted the group’s attention. They also sensed a challenge in Suzy’s tone and were eager to hear Piper’s answer.

  “What exactly do you mean by ‘conspiracy’?” Piper asked, staring at her hard over the top of his glasses.

  “Well,” Suzy asked, “Why is it that so many of the objects remain hidden and why is there no serious research conducted into what they signify?”

  “Young lady,” the professor replied. “You can find a conspiracy in anything if you look hard enough. Everyone wants to believe in conspiracy theories and nefarious secrets. Why? Because it is easier than getting down to doing some detailed research.”

  Piper paused, and looked pointedly around at the group, catching as many pairs of eyes as he could.

  “Real archaeology is more interesting once you abandon the superficial and the mystical mumbo jumbo. In the quest for truth you must not dream up contrived stories or concoct theories from tissue-thin evidence. What you must all strive for is collective evidence. And with that comes proof.”

  Having ended on a suitably dramatic note, Piper gestured toward the exit and pumped the wall button to open the steel door and release them.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Five years before, following her father’s death, Marcello, one of the clinic’s junior psychologists, had taken to visiting Suzy each afternoon. Suzy’s mother, struggling to find space for her own grief, had enlisted the help of a psychiatrist she knew socially who had recommended the post-trauma clinic. Getting support for Suzy had been an immense relief to her mother although it showed little sign of progress. The one glimmer of hope seemed to be Marcello who, with extraordinary patience, seemed to be eliciting a better response than she could manage from the tortured girl. Suzy had even started to get up and dress in readiness for his daily visit. Her mother had no idea what they talked about the other side of the study door but it was heartwarming just to hear her daughter speaking again.

  A few weeks later Marcello called earlier than usual, asking Suzy’s mother if they might speak confidentially. He had a suggestion, something that might finally shift the psychological inertia that swamped Suzy and help her reconnect to the world around her. But he needed her mother’s support.

  “Suzy’s fighting an internal battle that is impossible for her to win,” he explained gently. “She blames herself, of course, for suggesting the evening stroll with her father, for being late to meet him, for not being there to defend him, for letting him die on the street. Only time and love can erase that sense of blame. But she’s also developed an obsession with knives, for an obvious reason.”

  Marcello had feared that Suzy’s mother herself might find this too distressing to discuss, but she was listening carefully and nodding. She’d tried and failed to interest Suzy in one of her favorite activities, cooking. Suzy would follow her into the kitchen but then stand ambivalently, disengaged except for the quick fearful glances she darted toward the kitchen knives hanging by the window.

  “However,” Marcello continued, “I think that, for Suzy, the image of a knife is actually a representation of something bigger, something that challenges any sense of her own continuity. And for her to begin to heal, she needs to face whatever it is and find a way to live with it, rather than in terror of it.”

  Suzy’s mother leaned forward to listen to the young man who spoke with such tenderness about her daughter. When Suzy was born, she and her husband had pledged to each other that if anything happened to one of them, the other would move heaven and earth if necessary to keep their only child safe. She felt she had already failed to keep that pledge and was completely dependent now on what Marcello was about to recommend.

  “We’ve been exploring how Suzy feels about the murder and her father. She seems unable to grieve in any useful away and I’ve suggested to Suzy that she’s blocked by an overwhelming fear—she doesn’t dismiss it completely but she won’t yet discuss it for long enough to uncover whatever it is. It’s like there is an invisible gate through which she simply will not go. So, if you are in agreement, I would like to begin to push a little harder. We simply cannot make any further progress without crossing this emotional barrier.”

  Suzy’s mother nodded. Marcello’s was the only practical suggestion anyone had made so far. Her own idea, to encourage Suzy to wear the locket her father had presented on her birthday, had failed. She had worn it previously, every day since the party, proudly rereading the inscription, her father’s private acknowledgment to her of her fierce intellect. But since the murder it had been left untouched in a drawer by her bed.

  Suzy’s mother looked straight into Marcello’s eyes. She trusted this young man.

  “Yes, you’re right, and I know what you’re telling me. I need to be strong too, and I can do that. I have to. So please, if you think this will work Marcello, please do it.”

  “Phew!” gasped Suzy, in the cool evening air. “How can rolling on the floor still be so exhausting?” Marcello laughed. It was their second jiu-jitsu class, and the instructor had spent the entire hour working on core body strength and posture. The classes had been mostly her own idea, and were so far the only times she had left the house since her father’s murder. Trusting his hunch, Marcello had spent many of his daily visits probing Suzy’s thoughts and sitting quietly with her while she broke down into uncontrollable sobbing. Once, unable to bear it any longer, her mother had burst in, with Suzy barely noticing, and Marcello had reached up to give Suzy’s mother a gentle reassuring squeeze on her shoulder. She had understood and quietly slipped out again. Finally, on the day when even Marcello doubted his method, Suzy had met him at the front door and said with quiet urgency, “Marcello, I understand, I really do,” and hurried him into the study, their usual meeting place.

  She had explained that she had inherited her father’s instinct to interpret everything intellectually, not emotionally, but now thanks to Marcello’s interpretations she had a rational framework from which to examine and confront her own feelings. Now she understood. Yes, she couldn’t look at any knife without seeing the one that killed her father, but it wasn’t the knife that haunted her, it was the mindless, brutal and random violence that governed its use that day. Marcello knew this was the breakthrough they’d both been searching for. A few days later he had introduced the idea of martial arts, describing the discipline as the antithesis of the random thuggery she dreaded so much. It offered a means not just to acquire self-defense skills but also to maintain a mental focus stronger than that of any mugger, murderer or psychopath. But it was Suzy who elected to try jiu-jitsu, a form her father had practiced as a student. For him it had been a means of tuning his physical fitness; for Suzy i
t would be the key to a new self-confidence.

  Four years later, by the time she started her post-graduate course at Oxford, she had earned the coveted black belt.

  CHAPTER SIX

  After Piper’s museum visit, Suzy and Kathy just had time to grab a quick sandwich in the Kings Arms before their afternoon date at the Sheldonian Theatre. The visiting American’s lecture was Kathy’s turn to shine and Suzy’s to take a back seat. As the chorus of rooftop spires chimed out two o’clock, they hurried into the Sheldonian, overlooked by the huge stone masks that punctuated its high railings. Kathy walked determinedly to the front row in the theatre, leaving Suzy with no choice but to follow. The theatre was designed to hold eight hundred people and Suzy doubted there were more than thirty of them there for the lecture, sitting in a small intimate group near the stage. Kathy was fussing with the top button of her shirt and hitching at her skirt.

  “A bit obvious, don’t you think?” Suzy teased.

  “Some of us have to be, to catch the guys,” Kathy retorted. “We can’t all just toss our hair and flash our gorgeous eyes.”

  “Oh, shut up!” Suzy punched her friend playfully on the arm.

  Moments later, Piper appeared stage left from behind the purple felt curtains, beaming around the auditorium as if he was the star of the show, clutching a steaming mug of coffee.

  “Hello again,” he boomed, “and thank you for attending today’s guest lecture. We are always keen to encourage inter-faculty cooperation and cross-fertilization. Sharing knowledge always enriches human understanding. So, please welcome back Dr. Brooking from the University of Oxford’s Astronomy department, who has already shared many of his interesting discoveries with us. As you know, Dr. Brooking is a visiting Rhodes Scholar from Harvard, where he graduated in astrophysics. I am sure you will find his lecture thought provoking.”

  There was a ripple of polite applause as Tom Brooking strode athletically onto the wide empty stage. Dressed casually in light blue polo shirt and stone chinos, with a cricket sweater draped around his shoulders, he could have been heading out to a bar on a summer’s evening. To Kathy he was every inch her fantasy Oxford rowing Blue, 6’1", broad-shouldered and with tempting glimpses of a natural tan. “Oh my God,” Kathy sighed as she clapped. “Look at that body!”

  He reminded Suzy of an arrogant pinup model from a ’50s advertisement, a rich, preppy, wannabe-Gatsby, but she said nothing. There was something about this man’s confidence that undermined her own and made her feel antagonistic. But she felt guilty for monopolizing the morning lecture and wanted to support her friend’s enthusiasm, whether academically inspired or not.

  “Thank you, Professor Piper.” Tom scanned the small audience as the professor took his coffee to a seat a few rows back and sank down with a comfortable sigh. “I will be talking today about the new science of archaeo-astronomy, the combined scientific discipline that brings together the analytics of modern science with, shall we say, the old vestiges of archaeology. Archaeo-astronomers bring scientific rigor to the field by determining whether observed data meet the criteria for intentionality. After all, it is all too easy for the undisciplined mind to fall victim to delusion.” He looked around their faces pointedly before continuing.

  “A prime example of this is whenever your typical archaeologist is looking for evidence of the sophistication and advanced knowledge of some ancient civilization.”

  Suzy had already bristled with indignation at the implied suggestion that anyone in the audience might have a “less disciplined” mind than the mighty Tom Brooking. Now she was furious with his belittling of her own scientific field. But, seeing Kathy staring adoringly up at the stage like she was at a rock concert, Suzy kept her silence. “I’ll give you a couple of examples. I recently travelled to Nubia, the country we now know as Sudan. Did you know there are more pyramids in Nubia than there are in Egypt?”

  “Yes,” Suzy muttered under her breath, ignoring Kathy’s warning scowl, “We did know that.”

  “Six hundred years after the reign of Tutankhamun, a series of black Pharaohs from Nubia reigned over Egypt for more than five hundred years, as the twenty-fifth dynasty of the Egyptian Royal Pharaohs. The ancient world was devoid of racism; the fact that their skin was dark was irrelevant. Artwork from ancient Egypt shows a clear awareness of racial features and skin tone but there is little evidence that darker skin was seen as a sign of inferiority. Only after the European powers colonized Africa in the nineteenth century did western scholars pay uncharitable attention to the color of the Nubians’skin. Even the famed Harvard Egyptologist, George Reisner, who discovered the Nubian pyramids, besmirched his own findings by insisting black Africans could not possibly have constructed the monuments he excavated. He believed that Nubia’s leaders must have been light skinned Egypto-Libyans, who ruled over the primitive Africans. But he was very much mistaken. The Africans are not primitive and there are many examples of sophisticated surviving cultures like the Dogon tribe of Mali.

  “I also visited the little known site of the Nabta Playa, deep in the desert 100 kilometers west of the Nile near the Sudanese border. It is the oldest known human site dedicated to the heavens in the world, one thousand years older than Stonehenge and four thousand years older than the pyramids. Findings in the area date some of the settlements to 10,000 BC.”

  As he switched on an overhead projector, which shone an illuminated outline of stone megaliths arranged in a circle onto the screen above his head, Suzy had to admit he had actually begun to catch her interest. And, if she was truthful, she found him quite good-looking too. She just wished she could like him more.

  “It is much smaller than Stonehenge,” he continued, “only about four meters in diameter. It’s called the calendar circle. It looks like a derelict site now, very windswept and desolate, but ten thousand years ago it was lush grassland. The nomadic herdsman from Africa grazed their cattle on the land and worshipped the cattle god, which later became Hathor, the first statue Howard Carter saw on entering the tomb of Tutankhamun.

  “If you step away from the small calendar stone circle, there are other megaliths. It was the distinguished archaeologist, Fred Wendorf, who helped discover Nabta and uncovered an abundance of artifacts and cattle sculptures. Wendorf concluded that the megaliths were aligned to Sirius, the brightest star in the sky in 4820 BC, as well as to the constellation of Orion.”

  Suzy, who had been doodling pyramids on her pad, was impressed that Dr. Brooking had managed to describe an archaeologist as “distinguished.” She realized Kathy was watching her and scribbled on the pad, “Where the hell is this all leading?” Kathy took the pad and drew a large heart, with an arrow through it, before passing it back and returning her eyes to the stage. Suzy rolled her eyes and resumed her scribbling.

  “I re-examined Wendorf’s measurements,” Tom was saying, “and I took my own GPS equipment to the site. I measured the megaliths scientifically and I discovered that there was a consistent error in Wendorf’s measurements so that Sirius was not aligned with the megaliths. Wendorf measured the east-west axis from a satellite photo inaccurately by about 12 meters. I found that the rising azimuths of Sirius and Ursa Major were significantly in error, and furthermore the correction of that error moved the stars even further away from the megaliths. Here are the corrected alignments, and as you can see they are way off.”

  Suzy was now really intrigued as he placed a new slide on the overhead projector. It looked like a plate of spaghetti with hundreds of lines pointing away from the megaliths toward stars in the sky. She stared at the picture through half-closed eyes, and had to admit she could see the point he was making. He was claiming that the error in the original measurements meant that if you drew a line through two megaliths with an arrow on the end, to see where it pointed to, then the arrow did not point to Sirius. She knew that the stars in the night sky appeared fixed in position at the same time of year, but over the course of thousands of years they moved about slightly. It was something h
er father had explained to her late one night when they had been sitting on the veranda together, staring up at the sky.

  Aware her mind was wandering, she jerked her concentration back to Dr. Brooking.

  “The alignment azimuths are the primary basis for calculating stellar correlations, an error of even one degree or less can significantly alter a stellar alignment date and hence its significance. So what, if anything, does Nabta align to in the nighttime sky?” Tom looked around the room but no one volunteered an answer so he continued. “Well, we don’t yet know, and without sufficient scientific proof rather than just an archaeological hunch it would be undisciplined to speculate.” Suzy tensed at this repeated insult. “It does seem that some megaliths might align to the stars of Orion but it is a long shot, and it may be a coincidence, so I’m still doing more work to find out whether there is sufficient evidence. If I had to guess, I would say Wendorf was wrong on Orion as well, and the real answer about Nabta’s alignment may be far more fascinating. This same alignment can actually be found in many other ancient monuments like Stonehenge, so what is it?”

  There was still no response from the students.

  “My theory is that Nabta was built as an astronomical observatory to track the precession of the earth.”

  Suzy scribbled on her pad again, “What!?” and nudged Kathy. Kathy shrugged.

  “Precession,” Tom said, as if answering her unspoken question, “is what happens as a result of the earth’s axis wobbling like a spinning top. The earth wobbles as it spins, so the North Pole moves around. You could point a stick in the ground to the Pole star called Polaris or the North Star and what you would find over the course of thousands of years is that the stick does not point directly at the North Star all the time. What it means in practice is that the stars that rise in the east at nighttime gradually rise progressively more west as time goes on. Over the course of 25,756 years they go full circle and rise in the east again, since that is how long it takes the earth to wobble around. It is a very slow process, so, for instance, in Egypt the sun currently rises in the constellation of Aquarius, hence the song lyric, ‘The dawning of the Age of Aquarius.’ By contrast, 12,000 years ago at Nabta in Egypt, it would have risen in the constellation of Leo the Lion. Why the ancients would have tracked the wobbling of the earth’s axis is a mystery, but a fascinating one.