Living in Threes (10 page)

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.

“You know it is!” Jonathan insisted. He was a stocky guy, but quick and surprisingly light on his feet, and when he got excited he bounced. The first time I saw him do it, I had to fight not to laugh.

He was bouncing now, stabbing the last of the hummus with a wedge of pita and glaring at Aunt Jessie. “It’s right there in the cartouche. It
is
Tawosret.”

“Maybe,” Aunt Jessie said. She can drive you crazy being noncommittal, and she was doing a good job of it now. “It’s fragmentary, and there are other interpretations. If this was a woman pharaoh, she’d have made sure to build her tomb and temple in the Valley of the Kings, not here with the queens.”

“So she built it for someone else,” Gwyn said. “Mother, maybe.”

“Daughter,” I said.

That came straight out of nowhere. I froze, hoping they were too busy arguing to notice, but of course they heard.

They all turned to stare at me. I braced to be jumped on, but even Aunt Jessie nodded. “That’s possible,” she said. “We know she had a son who died before he could father an heir, which left her to rule as king. She very likely had a daughter as well.”

I bit my tongue. Of course she had a daughter—one she loved with her whole heart and soul, and raised to be king. I knew that the way I knew what Egyptian beer tasted like.