by Judith Tarr
“That’s a scarab,” Aunt Jessie said, “but you know that, don’t you? Do you know what it says on the bottom? May Isis grant healing.”
In my dream it helped people fend off the plague. I wondered if it could fend off cancer, too.
Meritre believed in magic. I just wrote stories about it. I hung the scarab around my neck under my shirt.
Aunt Jessie’s expedition worked out of Luxor House, right by the river and the ferry across to the desert and the tombs. On the outside it was a blank white wall with a gate painted brilliant turquoise. Inside was a chain of courtyards and a whole lot of rooms and labs and classrooms and a dining hall, and a library that took up a whole wing.
I called dibs on the library, but first I had to move into my room. Because the digging season was over for everybody but us, I had it to myself. I put up the actual hardcopy picture of me and Mom and the one of me on Bonnie and the one with all the usuals from the midwinter show at the barn, tacked up the map of the Valley of the Kings that I’d got out of one of Dad’s National Geographics from before I was born, plugged all my tech in to charge and made sure the house wi-fi would talk to it, and that was as close to home as I was going to get.
While I was unpacking my wheelie duffel, Cat shot me a text. Now tell me you hate it.
I shot straight back. Love Luxor. Hate how I got here.
That’s fair, she said. Then she sent me a picture of Bonnie and Dora giving each other scritchies in the pasture. Bonnie had to stretch her neck to reach Dora’s withers, because Dora is a good foot taller than she is, but she still managed to look almost as big on the outside as she is on the inside.
Stop making me homesick, I said.
Don’t be, Cat answered. Dig up a mummy for me.
Keep bugging me and I’ll ship you a cat mummy just to shut you up, I said.
Oooo! she said. Do it! I dare you!
Maybe not a cat. Baboon.
Triple cat dare!
Not in three lifetimes, I said.
I don’t know why I shivered. Must have been a draft.
Aunt Jessie had told me to go to bed and sleep off the jet lag, but I couldn’t sit still. I took a shower and changed my clothes, and that was almost as good as sleep. Then I wandered out.
A cat attached itself to me outside the door. It was a little round tortoiseshell cat with a marking like a flame on her forehead, and extra toes, so she looked as if she had thumbs. She didn’t look anything like Meritre’s sleek brown cat, but she had the same eyes, ancient and self-satisfied and wise.
I could never have a cat at home: Mom was deathly allergic. Having one find me here made up for a lot of things, though not nearly all of them.
I scratched her chin and she mewped at me. When I went on she went, too, following from in front the way cats do.
I meant to go down and find the door to the library, but with the cat for company, I found myself going up instead. The house had two floors and a roof, and the roof was a garden.
There were orange and lemon trees up there, more pots of flowers that I could count, and a kind of gazebo with a couch in it and a clutter of chairs.
The roof had a wall around it, low enough for me to lean on. With the sun shining straight into my eyes, I couldn’t see much of the river or the cliffs on the other side, so I turned and looked across the city instead.
There was an excavation right below the house, in between it and a neighborhood of shops and hotels and what looked like apartment buildings. I don’t know why I hadn’t expected that. They were still digging right in the middle of the main temple, the temple of Amon, Aunt Jessie had told me on the way from the airport, and finding new things in places that had been dug and re-dug for two hundred years.
This wasn’t anything so spectacular: just rows of trenches and the straight lines of walls with breaks that might be doors. I knew enough to think it must have been a neighborhood like the modern one on the other side of it. If I squinted just right, I could see how the houses went down in rows, with a street in the middle, and an alley that ran right up to the wall of the house I was in.
Suddenly I was so dizzy I had to grab the wall to keep from falling down. I don’t know what did it—the angle of the light, the way one wall met another, or maybe it was that I looked up at just the right instant and saw the exact line of hills across the river that Meritre saw when she stood on the roof of her house.
If I closed my eyes I could see the rows of mud-brick houses, some of which had gardens on the roofs, and most had tents or shades for people to sleep under when the weather was hot. There was no huge temple of Amon yet: the one Meritre sang in was bright and new, but it wasn’t any bigger than the mosque I could see from Luxor House.
I could see it, feel it, hear it, smell it: smoke and sweat and sicky-sweet perfume, baking bread and sour beer and a really tasty lentil stew with onions in it.
That was ancient Thebes, capital of Upper Egypt, but Luxor was there, too, with motor exhaust and cooking oil and flowers. It was Luxor I opened my eyes to. Thebes was gone except for the bare outline of streets and houses.
I clutched the scarab amulet so tight it dug into my palm. I must have seen a photo of the excavation somehow, with one of those artist’s recreations drawn over it. The other things, the smells and sounds, were too much imagination and my stomach telling me it was ready for dinner.
I hoped that was what it was. Because what else could it be? Reincarnation?
Hello, this is your past life speaking. Sorry you weren’t Cleopatra, but some kind of singing priestess isn’t bad.
Singer of Amon. That’s what I’d seen, been, whatever. The way I knew that was like the way Meru rode the web, which was her world’s version of the Internet, more or less, but instead of a computer she had a chip in her brain that connected her to it. All I had to do was think a question, and the answer was there.
The cat wrapped herself around my ankles once, twice, and then a third time to make sure the job got done. Then she jumped onto the wall and butted her head against my arm. She was purring so hard her whole body shook.
She didn’t start talking. That was a good thing. I rubbed the soft fur behind her ears while she went nuts, purring and leaning into my fingers.
I liked it that she was just being a cat. I needed her to be normal and ordinary and everyday.
The sun sank so low it touched the horizon, and the mosquitoes started to come out. They might not be sparrow-sized like Florida mosquitoes, but there were ten zillion of them. They drove me off the roof.
Chapter 10
After all that, I slept like the dead. If there were dreams, or whatever else my crazy brain was doing to me, I didn’t remember them. The alarm knocked me out of bed and into the dig clothes Aunt Jessie had ordered me to get, and while I wasn’t the first one down to breakfast in the dark before dawn, I wasn’t the last one, either.
I grew up listening to Aunt Jessie’s stories and looking at pictures of hot, dusty, grinning people holding up bits of pottery or chips of old bones. King Tut’s gold is a once-in-a-century kind of find. Mostly, archaeology is dirt and potsherds. And digging. They call it a dig for good reason.
Now, like it or not, I was inside one of Aunt Jessie’s stories. She’d really meant it about putting me to work. She was going to the site this morning, and that meant so was I. Jet lag or no jet lag.
There were six of us at breakfast: Aunt Jessie and me and three grad students, the two I’d met yesterday plus two Americans who were so obviously a couple they might as well have been wearing matching collars. They were wearing pretty much the same pants and shirts and hats, but so were the rest of us. It was a uniform.
At that hour nobody had much to say except the occasional grunt around a cup of coffee. I got names—Gwyn and Jonathan, those were the Americans—and Gwyn sort of smiled in my general direction, but mostly we were all half-asleep.
When we were all fed and caffeinated, we trudged out to the two Land Rovers we’d be riding in, both of them
loaded with gear. There was just about enough room for the six of us to squeeze in around it.
Nobody was particularly nice to me, but they weren’t hazing me, either. They were treating me like everybody else. That was a compliment. I think. Or else they were just too sleepy to care.
I ended up wedged in between Gwyn and a large and lumpy duffel. It was still dark out, but somewhere a bird had woken up and started to holler. We set off down the street in the predawn cool.
In Florida after the sun goes down the heat just gets lighter and the sun stops pressing on your head. In Egypt, once you get away from the river, it’s almost cold in the early morning, enough to need long sleeves to keep the warmth in. Then once the sun comes up, you need them to keep the heat out.
We crossed the river in the very first glimmer of light, and from various points on both sides of the water, we heard a rhythmic wailing sound with words winding through it. Amira and the other Egyptian student, Hamid, got out of the Land Rovers and spread little rugs on the deck of the ferry and started kneeling and bowing, both in the same direction, like just about everyone else on the boat. It was time for prayer in this part of the world, and I’d heard the muezzin calling the faithful to do their duty.
I didn’t remember it from last night, though I had to have heard it. I must have slept through it.
My cell phone whinnied. I jumped. So did Gwyn—then she laughed.
Damn. I had to change that ringtone.
I unlocked the phone. There was a whole stack of messages, hours old, besides the newest one: a text from Mom. Up yet? Digging yet?
The breath rushed out of me. I hadn’t even known I was holding it. Crossing the Nile, I texted back.
Call me later, she said. Will be up for a while.
She was headed toward the end of yesterday. I was just at the beginning of today. That’s the magic of time zones.
It felt like my dreams, a bit. I had a brief, overpowering urge to call her and tell her what was happening to me. She might not get it, either, but she’d listen. Mom always listened. Even if she ended up doing the exact opposite of what I wanted her to.
I couldn’t bring myself to do it. Later, I texted, and put the phone away.
Sunrise found us on the road away from the Nile. No matter what I thought about how I’d got here, I couldn’t hold on to that now. Maybe this was Mom’s dream, and damn her for not taking it for herself, but I’d grown up with it, too.
This was it. I was here. These bare hills, these steep ridges and sandy valleys, were the place to be an archaeologist.
There weren’t any Pyramids here—those were all the way up near Cairo—but there were temples and tombs and hieroglyphs everywhere you’d want to look.
“Almost there,” Gwyn said as if she could read my mind. “We’re working in the Valley of the Queens—in the ruins of a temple that your aunt helped discover when she was in grad school. Over the past twenty years her expeditions have dug most of it out, and started on the maze of tunnels beneath. We don’t know yet how far those go.”
“Far,” said Aunt Jessie from the driver’s seat. “Tomb robbers used them, of course, to get into the tombs nearby. But they’re the same age as the temple. We’re still not sure exactly what they were meant for.”
“A tomb, of course,” Gwyn said. “What else could it be?”
“We can’t be sure,” said Aunt Jessie. “Not without better evidence than we’ve found. And even if it was a tomb, it most likely was robbed long ago. Or priests emptied it before the robbers could, to protect and preserve the royal mummies, if not the goods they were buried with.”
That argument was worn smooth around the edges. Even I could tell that, from the way Gwyn rolled her eyes. “Yes, Professor. Of course, Professor.”
“Watch your heads,” Aunt Jessie said.
I don’t know if she was trying to ding Gwyn for being rude, but she hauled the Land Rover around a corner, nearly bouncing us both out through the roof, and there it was. If I’d had any breath left to catch, I would have caught it.
A cliff reared up ahead of us, cutting off the glare of the rising sun. The temple sat at its base. It wasn’t nearly as ruined as I’d expected; it had a definite shape, with the stumps of columns marching down two sides, though the roof was gone.
I reached for my phone to snap a picture, but nobody was getting it this morning: there was no signal. That gave me the horrors for a minute. Or two or maybe six.
I wouldn’t be getting any sympathy here. I put my phone away, and took a deep breath. I could do this. I could even make myself like it. I just had to think about Cat, and how she would give just about anything to be here.
I wished she was. But that wasn’t doing anybody any good, either.
The excavation crew was already at it when we got there: men and boys whose families had been digging in this valley since archaeology was invented.
“Most of them were tomb robbers before that,” Gwyn said. She was my supervisor, and her job was to teach me how to label potsherds and log them into the expedition’s database.
That meant we got to sit in a tent, out of the heat and the worst of the dust, and she had a tablet but I had to write everything down on paper. Backup, you know. Aunt Jessie was old school.
I hoped I’d graduate to actual digging, but that was skilled work, and I wasn’t ready for it yet. As the morning went on and the heat rose up and up, I didn’t mind being able to do my job in the shade.
It wasn’t as boring as you might think. Potsherds are broken pieces of pots. When you’re digging in ancient places, they’re everywhere, and they’re really important if you’re an archaeologist. You can tell all kinds of things about a place and a time and a people by the dishes and jars and cups they left behind.
These had bits of bright color on them, and some had hieroglyphs or fragments of pictures: a bird’s head, a peacock’s feather, a woman’s hand. I loved handling them, and I didn’t mind pasting tiny little number codes on the backs. Back in the lab at Luxor House, the pot people would take each piece and put it together like a puzzle, and eventually they’d end up with all or most of a pot.
Once or twice, for a sort of treat, I got to label a glass bead, and once an amulet so much like the one I was wearing that I dropped it in surprise. Lucky for me, it only fell three inches to the table. Gwyn didn’t even look up.
I don’t know why my hand was shaking so much. Scarabs are as common as sand in Egypt. The one I was logging had the same inscription as mine, but so did half the scarabs in the country.
It was just me being all jet-lagged and weird. I couldn’t keep the scarab, of course, and I didn’t ask. I labeled and logged it and put it in the box with a dozen others like it.
Well, not exactly like it. The others were nice enough, and some were nicer. That particular one just felt right when I touched it. So right it freaked me out.
“What happens to all these things?” I asked Gwyn. “Do they end up in a museum?”
She looked up from the tablet, stretched and sighed. “Too much of what everyone finds gets studied and noted, then the Department of Antiquities takes it away. Mostly it disappears into boxes in the museum in Cairo. If it’s a tomb with a mummy in it, the mummy goes back in the tomb with a few of the grave goods. Sometimes, if an expedition is really lucky, the site gets its own museum. That’s what we’re hoping for here. We’ve been getting grants, and your aunt has brought in some rich donors. We almost have enough to get started.”
“That’s kind of a big deal, isn’t it?”
“Kind of,” she said.
I don’t think she was laughing at me. I bent back down to my potsherds.
The heat mounted; even in the shade, it got so we could barely breathe. Gwyn had to shut the tablet down before it fried its innards.
That was like a signal. The work outside stopped. We gathered our bits and pieces together and locked them in boxes and helped load them in the Land Rovers. Whatever was left to do would wait until tomorrow, with
guards to make sure it didn’t get stolen before then.
The light outside, just at noon, was blinding even through Florida-strength sunglasses. I’d thought it was hot in the tent. It was a blast furnace in the sun.
When I took a breath, the inside of my nose burned. My eyes felt all crackly. My clothes were hotter than I was.
“A hundred and twelve degrees,” Aunt Jessie said as she started up the Land Rover. “We’re having a cold snap. It was a hundred and twenty-six last week.”
All I could manage was a kind of strangled moan. The Land Rover had air conditioning, thank God, or should I say thank Horus? What they say about dry heat in the desert—they aren’t kidding. I wasn’t even sweating. Any sweat I could squeeze out evaporated before I could feel it.
Jonathan handed me a bottle of lukewarm water. Gwyn had been making me drink every fifteen minutes by the clock, and I’d been taking pee breaks at just about that speed, but I was parched.
The water tasted like plastic, but underneath it I could swear I tasted the thin and sour but weirdly solid taste of ancient Egyptian beer.
Chapter 11
The Land Rover bumped and grumbled down the road to the ferry. I still had the water bottle in my hand, half full, and people were talking around me about heat and lunch and digging in the sand. Inside of me was this whole other world.
Luxor House was cool and dim and made me want to tumble straight into sleep, but I was starved. We ate lunch in the corner of the dining hall closest to the kitchen, gulping down gallons of iced tea and diving into platters of sandwiches and big bowls of salad and pitas and hummus.
The rest of the hall had a weird little echo, as if all the people who would have been in it during the regular season were still there. It wasn’t anything like the echo in my head.
Aunt Jessie and Amira and the others were talking about the tunnels they were excavating under the temple, going back and forth on how big it all really was, how old it was, and who had built it. Apparently today they’d found an inscription that had Jonathan and Hamid in a lather, but Aunt Jessie, as usual, wasn’t quite ready to commit.
