In the distance Ky heard the sound of a generator being fired up―not surprisingly, it was the other group of Americans.
Jumping in and out of air conditioning, he knew, only made it more difficult to adapt to the heat. Having grown up in this kind of environment, he was used to it. It seemed Raissa also had no difficulty with it.
John, on the other hand, was always clamoring for air conditioning.
With a nod to Ryan, Ky waited until the others were out of sight.
He looked for Raissa and was caught by the sight of her standing with her face tilted up to the sun, appearing as contented as a cat in a window, loose tendrils of her hair blowing in the breeze. Something tugged low and deep inside him. He couldn’t help smiling.
With an effort, he pulled his thoughts back from where they wandered.
“Raissa,” he called, quietly.
When he beckoned to her, she smiled and came to join him, meeting him at the gap where one of the fort’s small side gates would have been. He liked watching her walk, the graceful swing of her hips, her stride loose, open, as if she was used to walking long distances, and long for her height.
Following him curiously, she stayed silent until they reached the far side of the rise and saw what he’d hidden there.
Very few of the archaeologists roamed beyond the walls, there were scorpions and snakes and what they wanted was within the ancient walls, not outside of them.
Unlike Ky.
“I’m trusting you to keep this between us,” Ky said, looking at her.
She met his gaze evenly, a little puzzled, but nodded.
“Don’t touch anything,” he said, and pointed. “Sit there.”
Obediently, she sat, or rather, settled down on her heels, her hands on her knees, her blue eyes watching him curiously but intently. He had the impression she could kneel like that for hours.
“Ryan and I found this on our last dig out here,” Ky said. “Every site where people have been has a garbage dump called a midden, a place where they throw their trash. We knew there had to be one. Where there are people there is always trash, bones, offal, worn clothing or tools, and garbage. Most are away from living spaces but fairly close at hand, whether it’s the midden of a medieval castle, or as here, outside the walls of a fort. They wouldn’t use the main gate, having visitors pass your trash heap wouldn’t be very welcoming, so they were more likely to use one of the small side gates. They also wouldn’t want to dump their garbage too close as it would attract vermin and predators. Being human they also wouldn’t want to walk too far, so we began probing outward in a radius from the gate. We weren’t the only ones looking but we got lucky and found it.”
Luckily it had been on the other side of a small rise, where the wind had been especially helpful, scouring away much of the loose sand and making it much easier to find.
“You’re trusting me a great deal,” she said, eyeing him.
Pulling his sunglasses down a little so she could see his eyes, see the look in them, he met her gaze.
“I am.”
Carefully, with small fans to blow away the sand, tweezers to delicately pick through what he found and assorted other small tools, he began to probe through the mass of detritus that had been hidden beneath the sand.
“What exactly are you looking for?” Raissa asked, curiously, “if you don’t mind my asking?”
Ky didn’t know if he was ready to tell her the whole truth―he was taking a huge risk showing her this much―but he could tell her some of it. He wanted to trust her completely but he couldn’t quite take that last step, that final chance. He’d been searching for the Tomb or Tombs for too long, almost all of his life. It was too great a chance to take when he was so close to his goal.
“Clues to a myth,” he said finally with a quiet laugh, most of his attention on what he was doing. “Over the course of my studies I came across some references here and there to indicate that the tombs of the priests and priestesses of some of the earliest eras of Egypt were hidden out here somewhere. Just hints, random references, myths and stories. We have very little from that time, if we could find just one of them it would be a major discovery.”
That was the least of it, of course.
Very carefully, he teased a fragment of pottery from the sand and dirt with satisfaction. There was still writing etched into the clay that hadn’t been sanded away by time.
He’d had a sense that something was there when he’d been here last but then some of the others had begun to return and he’d had to abandon it for fear they would discover his secret.
No one knew he was actually looking for the tombs and for one tomb in particular. Many didn’t believe it or they existed.
The Tomb of the Djinn.
In an area as big as the Gilf Kebbir, a region the size of Switzerland and made primarily of a plateau split with chasms and caves, secrets could still be hidden.
He was gambling that they had.
Watching him, Raissa asked, “If you don’t mind my asking, why do you do this?”
He looked at her. “What this?”
“Search for old forts, graves…archaeology…”
“Why did you learn ancient languages?”
Laughing, she shook her head and said, “It’s not the same. I’m not so sure it was so much of a choice, it was more survival but I believe I asked you first.”
“Perhaps because I grew up in this world, going back and forth between the Middle East and the U.S.,” he said. “There is a fascination with being so close to history here, especially such ancient history. This region was the birthplace of so much. Ancient Egypt has fascinated me since I was a boy and my first visit to the Egyptian Museum. I used to imagine what it had been like to live in those times. Times change and yet so much here is unchanged.”
Stopping for a moment, he paused to look around him and waved.
“What do you see?” he asked.
Tilting her head a little, smiling softly, Raissa said, “Sun, sand, sky.”
“And what do you hear?”
Her mouth twitched, a small smile curved her lips.
It was peaceful, serene, silent save for the brush of the sand blowing in the breeze.
“Only the wind…” she said, with a sigh.
She understood what he was saying. It was much quieter out here, without the constant cacophony that assaulted her ears in town, the cars, people and animals. Music blared from a window, voices called or shouted.
“It was a purer time back then,” he said, “with fewer things and gadgets, fewer distractions, people actually knew each other, depended on each other in ways we don’t anymore. It was life or death for them and both life and death were closer to them than they are for us, I think. They talked to each other, spent time with each other, it was their only form of entertainment. They interacted in ways we no longer do.”
Raissa watched his face, the high cheekbones, that full mouth, his dark eyes distant but not unreadable. Some part of him yearned, wanted something he couldn’t quite define… For him it wasn’t merely facts and figures. It was all of it. And that mattered.
“Do you think this time is so very different?” she asked. “Don’t people know how to live, laugh and love now?”
There was an interesting note to her voice, a curious look in her eyes.
Something went through him at the sound and he looked up at her, to see her lovely blue eyes watching him intently, a small frown marring her brow.
“They do but now there are other things to get in the way. Television, radio, the computer…”
Ky looked out over the desert and smiled, remembering how he’d started out on this path, the voice booming in the darkness…
“Then there are the stories. Isis searching for Osiris after Set trapped him, seeking him so desperately she went into the underworld after him. When Set cut Osiris up and scattered him along the Nile, she searched for him and picked up all the pieces she could find, using magic to return him to her. It’s one of the greatest love stories of all time. And there are the real people, the Pharaohs, both good and bad, the peoples and civilizations they created, the ones they interacted with. Learning how they lived, how they succeeded and how they failed, teaches us more about who and what we are, where we came from, how we became what we are, so perhaps we can figure out where we are going.”
“You’re a romantic,” she teased gently.
Looking into her lovely blue eyes, feeling his heart catch when he did, he couldn’t disagree.
With a sigh of amused resignation, seeing the sparkle in her eyes, he said, smiling, “I suppose I am. See what you make of this… Gloves?”
Obediently she drew on the clean cotton gloves.
He handed her the fragment of pottery. It was flat, like a tablet would be.
Studying the writing on it, Raissa shook her head. “I’m afraid that you’ll have to get me more than this.”
There were clearly hieroglyphs on it but only fragments of what might have been words.
“Let’s see what I can find,” he said, teasing another fragment loose. “And then there is this, putting together the pieces of a puzzle.”
He handed it to her.
Carefully, she tried to fit the two pieces together in a way that made sense, after all, they were likely from the same piece of tablet. With a laugh of triumph, she did.
Laughing, too, Ky said, “See. That’s another reason why I do it, that moment of discovery. Not so much aha, but…isn’t that amazing?”
He glanced at his watch.
“It’s time to go back,” he said.
She stood and offered him a hand out of the pit.
With a smile, he took it, let her pull him up.
Heinrich Zimmer watched them all morning but particularly the girl―Farrar’s new translator. With all that shining hair, those pretty eyes and that body, she was beautiful. He went hot just at the thought of touching her.
And she hadn’t looked at him twice although he’d seen her glance surreptitiously at Farrar from time to time.
If he’d been Farrar he’d have been all over that but Farrar had scruples, principles, and judging by the surreptitious looks Farrar gave the girl in return, he hadn’t touched her yet.
He was a fool. What a waste.
Of course, a girl like her wouldn’t give someone like Heinrich Zimmer the time of day and he knew it. He wasn’t pretty like Farrar with his thick dark hair. He was big, bluff, his hair was receding and he was not pretty. Yet he knew himself to be ten times the man Farrar was. He knew it. A woman like that wouldn’t see it, though.
In the back of his mind a small voice whispered, as it did nearly constantly these days.
He’d grown accustomed to it, to that voice in the back of his mind, had even listened to its counsel now and then while trying hard not to think too hard about the source of it.
He wasn’t insane. Only the mad heard voices.
‘You could have her,’ it sighed, whispered. ‘We can help you. Let us in…’
It was tempting, so tempting.
He watched her hair flag in the winds, the long strong muscles of her legs and envisioned them wrapped around him.
The dig had been going on for weeks as they carefully excavated down through the accumulated layers, sifting through sand that had built up over millennia, preserving what lay beneath and within it as the blowing sand above had scoured away the walls. It was tedious, meticulous work but it had to be done carefully or risk damaging what might lie beneath it.
Ky patiently skimmed away another layer of sand and then sat back on his heels, a small chill going through him as it always did in these circumstances, before he began to carefully excavate the surprisingly small gray dome of bone until he’d revealed more of the skull buried beneath the sand.
This was unusual.
In fact it was nearly unheard of, the ancient Egyptians had been nearly fanatic about burying their dead, had even gone to the length of transporting bodies back to make certain they were buried in Egyptian soil, or else their souls would be left to wander. To leave a body here in this place, in the open? He frowned and shook his head, looked out across the site.
What had happened here that had been so terrible they’d abandoned their dead?
He began carefully excavating the skeleton, finding the cause of death easily in the well-preserved specimen―a surprise, too, given that animals and carrion birds usually chewed or carried off some parts―the ribs were cracked in what appeared to have been a sword wound.
Who were you? he wondered. Why were you left here?
The next question was, were there more?
As with everything, there was protocol for something like this.
Ky stood, raised his voice to carry.
“I’ve found a skeleton, intact. We have bodies here, people,” he said, his voice ringing clear. “Bodies.”
Instantly everyone stopped what they were doing, raised hands, brushes, trowels, and stepped back cautiously.
For an occupation so consumed with the dead past, there was reverence for those of the dead they found.
Excavations would now be undertaken even more slowly, with the awareness that the shards they might be uncovering might be bone, had once been someone’s son or daughter, could very likely be someone’s many times removed grandparent.
The sacred dead.
For a time there was silence as the leader of the group paced, his head down, considering what the others had told him. They’d intercepted reports and communications to indicate that the Americans still searched for the Tomb. Progress was slow but there was the matter of the midden that had not been shared with the other archaeologists.
What had been learned there they did not yet know and that was a problem.
In a way it worked in their favor as what was not known to the others revealed nothing to them.
There were other watchers though, as they’d discovered to their dismay and concern.
Even the ancient fort, though, was too close to the Tombs. The possibility was good they might discover something there.
“It’s too great a chance to take,” he said. “Find a way to frighten them away. It shouldn’t be too difficult with the current unrest. They are not to be killed. At all costs.”