Dead Men's Hearts (12 page)

Gideon nodded. The Eye of Horus, or
udjai,
with its characteristic, curling ornamentation, was familiar to anyone who had ever opened a book on Egyptian art. “What are they then?”

“What?” Arlo shrugged and put k down. “Bits of toys, funerary objects, what difference does it make? No doubt they’d be of interest to others, but not to me.” He flicked some of the other things with his fingers. “Very possibly there are some things here that might amount to something, but it would take someone months of restoration even to begin to know.”

“And you don’t want to do it?”

“Me? I wouldn’t know how. I’ve spent my whole life as an epigrapher. I’m not like you, you know. I don’t know how to
do
anything.”

Well, what was there to say to that? Arlo’s doughy, woeful face and subdued little mustache, combined with the depressing state of the Tel el-Amarna Museum, was getting to him. His spirits, which had started the day blithely enough, were sinking fast. “I guess I’d better get back to the workroom, Arlo,” he said. “I’m up next after Haddon, and Forrest will get nervous if I’m not around. He wants to shoot before the sun gets too bad.”

“Yes, do that.” Arlo’s eyes were still on the boxes of blackened metal. “Do you suppose I really ought to talk about this on camera, or find something else?”

“I’d say something else,” Gideon said gently. “Whatever ‘visual’ is, I don’t think this is it.”

When he peeked gingerly back into the workroom, Gideon found things much improved. Haddon, perhaps more relaxed now that he was used to the lights and the equipment, was being charming. In front of a broken tablet that had been mounted on the wall, he was bent sharply at the waist and had his head tipped ludicrously, as if he were trying to read the inscriptions upside down.

Indeed, he explained for the camera (but looking at Forrest), he
was
reading them upside down because it was the only way he could translate them. That was the way he’d learned because in 1944, with the war going on, books were hard to come by. The class had been held—in this very room, sitting right at this very table—with only one copy of the text for old Professor Wiedermeister and his three students. The professor, a better scholar than he was a teacher, had mumbled his lectures with the book on the table in front of him, turned toward himself most of the time.

“And I,” Haddon said with a comical grimace, “had the misfortune to have the seat directly across from him.”

Forrest urged him on with a rolling wave of his hand.
“Great,”
he mouthed. Gideon, smiling, thought so too. Haddon could be charming when he wanted to.

“And let me assure you,” Haddon added, twinkling away, “that was far from the worst aspect of sitting opposite him, in his line of fire, so to speak. Old Wiedermeister, you see, had the habit of chewing raw garlic cloves.” He rolled his eyes. “The man had breath that could knock over an Apis bull at fifty yards.”

“Cut, that’ll do it right there,” said Forrest. “That was wonderful, Dr. Haddon, just outstanding.” He was patently pleased but already glancing at his watch and worrying about the time. “Don’t go anywhere, Gideon,” he called over his shoulder. “We’ll set up outside on the King’s Street, in front of the palace.”

* * *

King’s Street. Palace. The words seemed overblown now, even ironic, Gideon mused aloud, trusting that the tiny lavaliere mike that Patsy had clipped onto his windbreaker was picking it up. His hand rested on a leaning, rusted stake that was part of the single-strand, barbed-wire fence surrounding what had once been the house of the pharaoh. The royal boulevard of Akhetaten was now the desolate, sandy track stretching away into the distance behind him, the remains of the royal palace all of two feet high. The gracious villas and open temples, the elegant pools and gardens, were desert once again. In the whole of this vast, once-glorious capital city, virtually nothing remained that was higher than the waist of a man.

It had all been built of mud-brick that began to deteriorate the day it was made. In ancient Egypt, stone had been saved for the afterlife: for the tombs of the dead and the temples to the gods. Living people, from humble laborers to great pharaohs, had settled for sun-baked mud. In all of Egypt, with its hundreds of temples and thousands of tombs, not a single standing building remained to tell us how the ancients actually lived. What we knew, we knew from the clay models sometimes left in the tombs and—here Gideon waved an arm to encompass the acres of crumbling, desert-colored foundations glaring in the sun—excavations such as this one.

“Very nice, very nice,” Forrest said, nodding, as Gideon went on in this vein, “but could we get to the city itself now? And just stick to the main points, okay? All right?”

Gideon had thought he was doing rather well but was willing to trust to Forrest as the director. “The royal city of Akhetaten—” he began accommodatingly.

“And could you make it a little punchier? You know, just the main points? We’re not looking for ‘Ozymandias’ here. No offense, but we have a boat to catch and I still have Arlo to do.”

Gideon took no offense, or hardly any. It was probably good for him to have somebody like Forrest around. His students were hardly in a position to tell him when he was getting windy, and he had recently noticed, as most professors did after a while, that his lectures mysteriously seemed to be getting longer with time.

And he was glad now that he’d taken Julie’s advice and decided not to start with a quotation from “Ozymandias” after all.

Sticking closely to the main points, he told of how Akhenaten and his beautiful queen, Nefertiti, had decided in 1348 B.C. that the mighty priests and pantheon of Thebes had had their day. They had built this completely new capital city far to the north, and almost overnight the cult of Amon, supreme until then, had been stripped of its power. The new supreme deity—the only deity—was the god Aten, until then very small-fry indeed. The political and social ramifications were terrific.

The Amarna Age it is called now, and its religious and artistic upheavals were tremendous. In religion, it was the beginning of the great tide of monotheism. In art, a revolutionary new style, naturalistic, varied, and no longer unquestioningly reverential, burst on the scene. The famous head of Nefertiti, possibly the best-known piece of art in the world, had been sculpted in a studio in the workmen’s village a few hundred yards from where Gideon was standing.

Society, in short, had been stood on its ear—for a while. After Akhenaten’s death, the supporters of Amon had their revenge. The city was razed. The court and all the people were moved back to Thebes. The subversive art style was purged. Images of Aten were obliterated. The name of Akhenaten was chipped out of inscriptions and struck from the historical roll of kings.

The grand experiment had lasted fourteen years.

“That’s a wrap,” Forrest said jubilantly. “Just great, Gideon. Nice and lively.”

Nice and short was what he meant, Gideon thought. Under half an hour in all. There would be plenty of time for Arlo’s segment before they had to get back to the ship.

Arlo’s search had turned up a few modestly presentable items—part of an inscribed boundary stela, a bit of painted pavement, some fragmentary inscriptions dealing with Akhenaten’s eldest daughter, Meritaten—and Forrest had agreed that they were sufficiently visual. It took a while to get the lights set up in the main exhibition room so that they didn’t reflect off the glass cases, but finally everything was ready.

Forrest pointed one finger at Arlo, who swallowed, and the other one at Cy, behind the camera. “All right, Arlo, tell us what’s so interesting about that stela,” he said, and to Cy: “Roll tape.”

Arlo peered woodenly and somewhat dazedly into the lens, like a frog gazing down the throat of a snake.

“Well—” he began.

Gideon quietly made his escape.

Chapter Eleven

“This could be a hundred years ago,” Julie said dreamily.

“Hm?” Gideon wasn’t sure where his own thoughts had been, but he brought them back and turned toward the eastern shore, in the direction she was looking.

He nodded. “It could be a thousand years ago.”

It could have been five thousand. Along a waterside path, perhaps a hundred yards from where they sat, walked a family group and its animals, slowly returning from its maize or bean plot to their village a quarter of a mile downstream The
galabiyaed
father, head down, led a water buffalo on which a young boy sat. Behind it came a veiled woman on a donkey and a little girl on foot, holding on to its tail. Against a near background of date palms and tamarisks and a distant horizon of tawny desert hills, moving at the lolling, rhythmic pace of the animals, they made a picture that would have been familiar in the time of Abraham.

And even then, thought Gideon, even then as it was now, the tomb complex at Saqqara, not far to the north along this same river, would have been the oldest man-made structure in the world.

It had been like this all afternoon, ever since the crew had let loose the
Menshiya’s
mooring lines and the big white ship had drifted to the middle of the river and begun to pull against the slow, steady Nile current, heading upstream toward Abydos, Dendera, and Luxor. Gideon and Julie had found an awninged, isolated corner of the upper deck, and there, a stack of untouched novels and guidebooks on the table beside them, they did what boatloads of Nile cruise passengers had been lazily and contentedly doing for centuries: they sat and watched the Nile slide by.

Flocks of white egrets drowsed in brown, foam-flecked shallows and rose in great, wing-beating clouds when the boat came too near. Children shouted “Hello-hello!” from the banks and responded with glee to any hint of a friendly response while their more reserved mothers and sisters washed clothes in the river. They saw mud-brick village after mud-brick village, the next one coming into sight before the previous one was gone. Since el-Amarna, the only reminders that they were in the twentieth century had been the clattering, ramshackle diesel engines that pumped water up the low banks and into the fields every few hundred yards, replacing in a single generation the primitive, counterbalanced
shadufs
that had served since the time of the pharaohs.

Whether the local inhabitants were pleased with the simplicity of their lives was open to question, but to a couple of tourists—and for the time being Gideon and Julie were working at being tourists—it was Egypt as Egypt was supposed to be. For over four hours they sat at the railing, hardly moving, speaking little except to point things out to each other. And even then they were sorry when it came time to leave.

But at five o’clock everyone had been asked to gather in the Isis Lounge, a handsome, vaguely nautical room outfitted with polished brass and old, oiled teak. There, a slender, softly smiling Nubian, as black as obsidian, stood behind the bar in white jacket and black tie, serving cocktails, sherry and soft drinks, all courtesy of the Gustafsons, while excerpts from the day’s takes were viewed on a television monitor set up on an overhead rack.

“Posh is right,” Gideon said to Julie, returning to a corner banquette with two glasses of single-malt Scotch on the rocks. He sank down into the chamois-soft leather and sipped gratefully. “You know, I could get used to this kind of life.”

“Don’t,” Julie said. “Not unless you’re expecting the next edition of
A Structuro-Functional Approach to Pleistocene Hominid Phytogeny
to make the best-seller lists.”

“You never know. I’ve been talking to my editor about retitling it. What do you think of
Forbidden Lusts of the Cave People?”

As Gideon had expected, Haddon’s taped segment, shown last, was the hit of the cocktail hour, bringing great belly laughs from Bruno and Phil, and a smile or two even from TJ.

Ensconced in a big wing chair, still in his White Hunter’s bush jacket, Haddon preened happily. “So the old man still has it when he needs it, eh? Not
quite
ready to go tottering off to his well-earned rest, after all.”

He swirled his Manhattan while people smiled and murmured politely, and went on. “Oh, yes, that reminds me. I should also like to take this opportunity to reassure you, without qualification, that Clifford H. Haddon is not, after all, suffering from
dementia praecox.”

“Do you know what he’s talking about?” Gideon heard Jerry, sitting on Julie’s other side, ask Arlo.

“I never know what he’s talking about,” Arlo said.

“Or
non praecox
either,” Haddon continued from his seat. “I am quite aware that the prime topic of conversation at Horizon House for the last two days has been the existence or nonexistence of a certain statue head. Was it there or was it not there? Was the esteemed director imagining things, or was he not?” He paused for some further complacent swirling and another sip.

People exchanged frowns and curious glances. TJ, who was drinking her third sherry and showed it in the red blotches on her cheeks, rolled her eyes but said nothing.

“Well,” Haddon continued, “I am happy to report that with the exception of one or two minor aspects, the enigma has been solved. The solution is quite simple. The fragment
was
there… and then it was
not
there.” He smiled.

People fidgeted some more. Gideon looked more closely at Haddon. How many Manhattans had he drunk?

“The fragment in question,” Haddon told his audience, “is from our own collection, a small, Amarna-style head of a young girl made of yellow jasper, approximately five inches from top of head to base of neck, attractive but not particularly distinguished—”

“Clifford,” Bea Gustafson interrupted with something like regal annoyance from the opposite corner of the room, “if you’re under the impression that all of us know what you’re talking about, you’re dead wrong.”

“Really? That surprises me,” Haddon said. “I would have thought people had been talking of nothing else.”

“Amazing,” Jerry murmured to Ado with something like wonder in his voice. “He really, truly thinks people spend all their time thinking about nothing but him. I mean, ”the
prime
topic of conversation‘? Give me a break.“