Dead Men's Hearts (7 page)

“What was that all about?” Gideon said. “I didn’t have a chance to ask.”

“Good God, it’d take all night to tell,” Arlo said. “You must be falling off your feet.”

“Not really,” he said truthfully. “I’m dragging, all right, but I’m not sleepy.”

Jerry hooked a skinny ankle around another chair and pulled it toward Gideon. “Have a seat, then.” He got up in loosely coordinated segments and brought another one for TJ. Arlo, who seemed torn between staying and leaving, finally sat down too, but on the edge of the chair, prepared to leave at any moment.

Gideon was happy to stay outdoors for a while longer. Their room was on the musty side, and Julie would be profoundly, unwakeably asleep anyway. Out here the night air was fragrant with flower blossoms and pipe tobacco, the breeze soft, the purling of the fountain timeless and serene. The thick stucco walls surrounding the patio softened the steady traffic noises.

TJ flopped into her chair and swung a knee over the armrest. “Okay, we’ve got this Fifth Dynasty skeletal collection that we keep in the museum…”

Ten minutes later, with occasional help from Arlo and Jerry, she’d finished.

“That’s strange, all right,” Gideon said. “But you know, people are always stealing stuff from skeletal collections. They make good souvenirs, I guess.”

“And dumping them in the trash fifty yards away?” she asked.

“Well, that part’s funny,” he agreed. After a moment he said: “Was there anything special about this particular skeleton?”

TJ shrugged. “Not that I could see. I think it’s a male, but that’s about all I could… I don’t suppose you’d like to take a look, would you? You could do it now. It’d only take a minute.” Gideon smiled, more wide awake than he’d been for hours.

“Let’s go.”

“I’ll come too,” Jerry said. “What do you say, Arlo?” Arlo raised his hands. “Spare me,” he said with feeling.

“I’ve done all the looking at bones I care to for some time to come, thank you. They’re all yours.”

Chapter Seven

In roughly anatomical position, under ferociously bright fluorescent lights, on a scarred, rimmed, metal table, they lay where Gideon had placed them: a skull, both femurs, both tibias, one fibula, three vertebrae, four ribs, a right scapula and humerus, and the bones of the pelvic girdle. Some, according to TJ and Jerry, had been attached when discovered, but handling since then had disarticulated them. A handful of smaller bones had been pushed to a corner of the table as being from rodents; all except a couple of metacarpals and the first phalanx of the right index finger, which were anatomically placed with the others.

These, Gideon thought, looking down at them, are my kind of bones: ancient, brown, desiccated. Archaeological, not forensic. Nothing wet, nothing smelly, nothing nasty. And from a man so remote in time that it would have been affectation to talk with sadness or solemnity about his death. But not so remote that the bones didn’t form a link back to him. Gideon ran a hand down the smooth, flat surface of a tibia and thought, with a feeling that would have been hard to describe, although he’d had it often enough: I am touching a man who ate, and walked, and laughed, and made love in the Bronze Age, a thousand years before King Solomon, two thousand years and more before Julius Caesar and Jesus Christ.

“You said he’s from about 2400 B.C.?” he asked.

“That’s right,” TJ said, “Fifth Dynasty. Four thousand, four hundred years ago.”

“Four thousand, four hundred and seven, if you want to be exact,” Jerry said.

TJ looked at him. “Now how in the world would you know that?”

“Because,” Jerry said, “I remember you telling me when we first started here that the el-Fuqani material was 4,400 years old. And that was seven years ago. So…”

They all laughed. “Well,” Gideon said, “then we know that 4,407 years ago, our friend here got himself done in by a nasty crack on the head.” He patted a narrow, four-inch-long fracture in the right parietal, running diagonally forward and down to the coronal suture.

The others craned forward. “This little crack killed him?” Jerry asked.

“That’s the way it can be with brain injuries and subdural hematomas.”

“Subdural whats?”

“Hematomas. Internal effusions of blood. Leading cause of death in head injuries. Sometimes there’s no visible damage to the skull at all.”

“Yeah, but you can’t
know
that that’s what killed him, can you?” Jerry asked -I mean, other people get skull fractures and live. I had one myself when I was a kid, bigger than this, and I’m doing just fine, thanks.“ He scratched the corner of his mouth with his pipe. ”Well, fairly well.“

Gideon smiled. “Sure, but I think we can assume that yours has healed, Jerry. This guy’s hasn’t. That means he died before it had a chance to start mending. Which means the chances are very good that it’s what killed him. Of course, it’s possible that something else might have done it, so if we want to stay within the realm of certainty, all we can say is that he received a severe head injury very shortly before his death.”

“Well, yeah, I guess I can accept that,” Jerry said, getting out his tobacco again.

TJ gave him a brisk double-tap on the shoulder. “Good of you, old chap. So, Gideon, aside from that, is there anything special about him?”

“Give me a minute and we’ll see,” Gideon said.

Using the usual criteria on the skull and pelvis, he had already established that it was a “him,” and probably middle-aged. There was some arthritic lipping on the vertebrae, but not much, which meant that he’d probably made it into his forties, but not out of his sixties. The sutures on the skull, not the most reliable of indicators, were mostly sealed, but parts of the later-closing ones—the sphenotemporal, the parietomastoid, the squamous—were still open, suggesting an age in the forties, maybe the fifties. Except for the oddly worn-down incisors (what in the world had this guy been
gnawing
on?), tooth wear was about right for a man in his middle years too. Taken all together, he estimated the age at forty to sixty-five.

Anything finer than that was difficult because the ends of the long bones had been pretty well chewed away, and so had the pubic symphyses. Those were where the best indicators of age were to be found, but, unfortunately, they were also the softest bone, and the scavengers went for them first and most thoroughly.

The excavation records were no help at all. The yellowing card titled
4360
said
Male, probably tall. No distinguishing characteristics.
That was all. Such brevity was par for the course in 1920s Egyptology, especially for an excavation headed by a rich amateur, at a run-of-the-mill site at which there had surely been no trained physical anthropologist. There wasn’t even a list of the individual bones, which meant that there was no way of knowing if animals had carried anything off while they were lying in the enclosure.

So at least Gideon could say he had contributed a little to the knowledge of the el-Fuqani population by coming up with an age estimate, however approximate. He added a little more: the bones were dainty and slight—“gracile” was the anthropological term—indicating that 4360 had been a man of modest muscularity. And Lambert had been right about the “tall.” Gideon guessed he’d been about five foot eight, which was big for an ancient Egyptian. He might have confirmed the height by taking some measurements of the long bones and applying a formula, but what did it matter?

Now he lifted the skull again. Rodents had gnawed through the zygomatics on both sides, two teeth had come out at least a year before death, and two any time in the four-thousand-plus years since. Beyond that, there wasn’t much to say about it. He turned it gently in his hands. “How long did you say it’s been lying out there?”

“Nobody knows,” Jerry said. “Anytime up to five years. Or it could have been just since last week, for all we know.”

Gideon shook his head. “No, two or three years, anyway.” He picked at a chalky fleck on the curvature of the frontal bone, just above the faded, old-fashioned
F4360.
“This scaly stuff all over the crown. That’s spalling, exfoliation. It comes from weathering, and it doesn’t happen in a week. Neither does this dappling here, these lighter areas. That’s sun-bleaching.”

“But how do you know that didn’t happen before?” Jerry asked. “Like during the Fifth Dynasty.”

Tiffany laughed. “Jerry, how would his
bones
have gotten sun-bleached before he went into the ground?”

Jerry weighed this, then pointed his unlit pipe soberly at TJ. “Good point, Dr. B.”

Gideon went slowly over the pelvic bones with his hands and eyes, not really looking for, or expecting to find, anything notable. It had been half an hour since he had taken the remains one by one from the carton and laid them out, and the grinding, mind-numbing fatigue was creeping back. He had begun to wonder why he hadn’t gone to bed and left this for another time. Why, really, was he bothering at all? What difference—

He halted with his hands on the underside of the left hip bone. His eyes closed. His fingertips continued to explore.

“Progress?” asked TJ.

Gideon didn’t answer. He was alert again, and interested, his fingers playing over the bone as delicately, as sensitively, as a blind man’s on braille. He traced the rough, irregular surface of a large oval eminence at the base of the ischium, the lower rear section of the hip bone—the innominate to an anthropologist.

He opened his eyes, turned the bone over and examined it. He looked briefly at the right innominate and nodded to himself. “What do you know,” he murmured.

“Progress,” TJ decided.

Gideon picked up the fibula—the long thin bone that, together with the more robust tibia, forms the skeleton of the lower leg, and held it out at arm’s length, squinting. Then he placed the solitary finger bone in his palm, lightly ran his fingertips down it, and put it down. “Well, well.”

“Gideon,” TJ said, “are you planning to let us in on this anytime soon?”

He looked up, smiling. “I guess I can tell you one thing special about him, after all. I can tell you his occupation.”

“His
occupation!”
They both said it at once. Jerry’s match had stopped on the way to the pipe.

Gideon spread his hands in a flourish that encompassed all the bones on the table. “The gentleman we have before us,” he announced, “earned his living as a scribe.”

All right, he was showboating. Skeletal work was fascinating in and of itself, but there were things every now and then that also made it good, plain fun, and one of them was pulling magical rabbits out of the hat for the amazement of one and all. He rarely passed up the chance to do it. Julie had once told him it was the ham in him that made him such a successful teacher. He had chosen to take it as a compliment.

“A
scribe
?” TJ echoed. Her right hand caressed the humerus gently, almost reverently.

“Of course I can’t be sure,” Gideon said in a brief attack of modesty, “but that’s what it looks like.”

How, they wanted to know, could he tell something like that? Gideon told them, demonstrating as he went. The craggy, oval area on the bottom of each innominate bone was the ischial tuberosity. It was the site of attachment for several powerful ligaments and muscles. It was also, he explained, the part you sat on, and when you spent a great deal of time sitting, especially sitting on a hard surface like the ground, a chronic osteitis developed, resulting in an appearance even more craggy than the norm.

“And this is more craggy than the norm?” TJ was holding the bone in her hand, thoughtfully feeling the tuberosity.

“Much,” Gideon said. “So—”

“But isn’t this also called a squatting facet?” she asked. “And scribes didn’t squat, you know.”

“No, squatting facets are different. They’re on the femur or the tibia, and our man here doesn’t have any. But he does have something else.” He held up the fibula for them. “Can you see that it’s laterally bowed?”

Jerry had finally gotten his pipe going. He looked at the slender bone through wreaths of smoke. “Nope.”

“I can,” TJ said. “Just a slight curve.”

“Right. It comes from sitting cross-legged, which puts a tremendous amount of sideways pressure on the feet, which in turn—”

“And that’s the way scribes sat,” TJ said, beginning to see the picture. “On the floor, legs crossed, linen skirt stretched stiffly across the thighs as a writing surface…”

“Exactly,” Gideon said. “And here’s the clincher: this ridge along the finger bone.” He held it so that they could see it clearly, although he knew they were unlikely to make anything of it. Even his students had a hard time with the individual phalanges of the fingers. Too many of them— twenty-eight, counting both hands—and too much alike.

“This is the first joint of the right index finger, and the ridge we’re looking at is on the palmar surface. It’s where the flexor ligament attaches. Ordinarily you can barely see it—”

“I can barely see it now,” Jerry said.

“—but it can get enlarged like this from grasping something between finger and thumb, firmly and for long periods of time.”

“A stylus,” TJ said under her breath. “Well, how about that.”

“There’s no way to be sure,” Gideon said, “but it all adds up to a scribe. Put all these skeletal things together, throw in the fact that we’re talking about a Fifth Dynasty Theban, and that’s what you come up with. At least, it’s what I come up with.”

He brushed bone crumbs from his hands, well content. “Not that it gets us any closer to what he was doing in the junk heap.”

“Who cares?” TJ said, beginning to put the bones back in the carton. “This has been really neat. Maybe I should have been a physical anthropologist.”

They were saying good night in the patio, at the foot of the stairs that led to Gideon’s upper-floor room, when he said: “I suppose I ought to mention this to Dr. Haddon. I’d feel a little funny not saying anything.”

“Up to you,” Jerry said, “but if it was me, I wouldn’t. Personally, I don’t think he’d be real thrilled to find out we got you involved in this.”

“Thrilled?” TJ said with a laugh. “He’d have a fit…” She frowned. “That reminds me. There was something funny this morning—I forgot to mention it to you, Jerry. Something Dr. H said.”