Authors: Carol Thurston
Max dropped his briefcase on the floor, peeled off his all-weather coat, and tossed it over the back of the only chair in the room. As if that was a signal, Sam took off like the devil was after him, tearing across the living room to the kitchen, where they heard him crash into a chair. Then he was back, heading straight for Max, who opened his arms only to have Sam swerve aside at the last second and circle toward the kitchen again. Bemused, Kate watched Max play Sam’s game a few more times, until he glanced over at her bare feet.
“Why don’t you go put something on while Sam gets this out of his system?”
Kate was bursting with questions, so she made quick work of a pair of faded blue sweatpants and top to match, gave her hair a lick with the brush to tame the Shirley Temple look, and glanced in the mirror one more time. It was after ten, and she didn’t want to give Max a bum steer about why she’d invited him in.
She found him in the kitchen talking to Sam. “Where do you suppose your Kate would keep the makings for hot chocolate, assuming she has any?”
“Right in front of you, on the shelf with the coffee,” Kate supplied. “If you had let me know you were coming—” She stopped, shocked at hearing herself repeat her mother’s favorite refrain.
“Need to get something hot into you.” Max glanced down at Sam. “Wouldn’t want her to get pneumonia and die, would we, boy?” He took a wooden spoon from the basket on the side of the cabinet and added cocoa mix to the milk he already had heating. “I was on call this weekend, but one of my partners needed to trade so it was a last-minute deal. How about getting us some cups?”
Kate took two stoneware mugs from the cabinet, opened a bag of marshmallows, dropped two into each one, and set them on the stove. After that she let Sam out the back door, stalling for time so she wouldn’t sound too anxious.
“I haven’t had hot chocolate with marshmallows since I was a kid,” Max remarked as he handed her a steaming mug. “Anyway, we sat on the ground in Lubbock for a good three hours waiting for Denver to clear the runways. Didn’t know if I was even going to get here.” He took a careful sip, then drilled her with an accusatory look. “What the hell were you doing out walking in the dark alone?”
“I worked late.” The picture in her head was doing battle with his naked face.
“Couldn’t you have called Cleo or someone?”
“She’s in Aspen. Phil’s teaching her to ski.”
He grinned. “I wonder why that doesn’t surprise me.”
“Did you finish the workup?”
“Yeah, it’s in my briefcase. Still no cause of death, though.” He paused. “How’s it going with the head?”
“Good. The closer I get the harder it is
not
to work on it.” She watched him slosh the marshmallows around in his mug, not looking at her, as if he felt ill at ease—and decided she didn’t want to hear any excuses.
“Would you like to see some pictures?” she offered, starting for the sunporch.
As she passed him he caught hold of her arm. “In a minute. I need to say something first.”
“That’s okay, Max, we didn’t expect—”
He gave her arm a little shake. “Just listen, will you? It’s just, well, the last time I called I—you sounded sort of distant, remote, like you didn’t much want to talk to me. I thought maybe I was pushing too hard, asking too many questions, or—” He paused. “D’you want the real reason I didn’t let you know I was coming? So you couldn’t say ‘just put it in the mail.’”
“Dave was in the workroom when you called.”
“I never even thought of that.” He began shaking his head at how far off the mark he’d been. “But it doesn’t change anything. What I’m trying to say is—I’d like to stay involved, Kate. Do whatever I can to help, but only if you want me to. You, not Dave.”
“Why did you shave your beard?”
“You called me a barbarian.”
“I was teasing, and you know it. And it’s not going to help for you to retreat from the field of battle without ever engaging the enemy”—she waved in the direction of the front porch—“the way you did out there!”
Taken off guard, he couldn’t help himself. He laughed. “I should’ve kept the beard. Those cat’s eyes see too damn much.” He lifted a hand as if to touch her, then let it drop. “Gimme a break, will you? I’ve never been around anyone like you.”
“Then we’re even.” They just looked at each other, until Sam scratched on the back door.
When Kate went to let him in, Max followed her to the sunporch. “Where are those drawings you wanted to show me?”
“Not drawings. Photographs. Pinned up on the wall around my worktable.”
He twisted the switch on the flex-arm lamp, stretched it almost straight, and directed the light at the giant mosaic covering the wall on either side of the table, blowups in full color of Tashat in all her forms. The cartonnage viewed from the top and underside, then the outside and inside of her wood coffin, including the lid and floor.
“Wow!” He stepped back. “This is what her coffin looks like?”
Kate nodded. It was the usual mummiform shape except where Tashat’s face and wig were articulated in plaster, but the predominant color was light blue, the color of royalty. “On the left is the underside of the lid. The two figures on the right, Ptah and Khnum, are on the floor of the coffin.”
He leaned forward to examine something she had tacked up over the table. “Don’t tell me—” He held up a hand and glanced from the pink blossoms she’d cut from a seed catalog to the garden painted on the inside of the lid. “This is one of the plants in that garden, right?”
“Foxglove. Except they called it hyena’s tongue.”
“Must be those yellow-ringed brown spots spilling from the throat of the flowers. Not that I’ve seen a hyena’s tongue. Are all the plants medicinal?” It was common knowledge that foxglove contained digitalis, a heart stimulant, so she wasn’t surprised that he’d made the connection.
“You tell me.” She pointed to a gray-green patch. “These are poppies.”
“Opium. Morphine and codeine, to sedate or deaden pain.”
She pointed to another spot. “These with the yellow flowers and forked root are mandrake.”
“Hyoscyamine. Numbs the central nervous system.” He sounded like he was really enjoying this.
“And the castor plant?”
“The oil is a purgative but the beans contain ricin, one of the deadliest poisons around.”
“They burned the oil in their lamps, but they must’ve known about the beans,” Kate agreed, before moving her finger again. “Garlic.”
“Heart problems again?” Max guessed.
Kate shook her head. “Insect bites and tapeworms. And this one, with the lacy leaves and clusters of tiny white flowers, is an acacia tree.”
“Contraceptive.”
“Uh-uh, intestinal worms.”
“If you say so. But the spikes contain gum arabic. And fermented gum arabic gives you lactic acid, which immobilizes sperm. Acetic or tannic acids are more effective, but—”
“Where in the name of Thoth did you learn that?”
He shrugged. “Read it in some journal I suppose. Are there any more?”
“Onions for dysentery, but most workers were paid in bread, beer, and onions.” She pointed to a dark green area. “Parsley for urinary incontinence. Leeks to stop the bleeding after miscarriage or childbirth. Sage to treat a sore throat. Saffron and ginger for stomach disorders. Cabbage to prevent a hangover, and lettuce to stimulate the sexual appetite. I know,” she added before he could, “it’s not like any lettuce we know. Too tall.”
“Stranger still if it affected the libido.” He swung around to face her. “It’s not just your ordinary ancient Egyptian garden?”
“Hardly. Sage and saffron came from Crete, ginger from beyond the Red Sea.”
“Interesting, but where does it get us? Unless we can find some way to tie that coffin to Tashat—” He let the words trail off when he caught her grinning. “Show me.”
Kate adjusted the lamp downward, to where the flower-
bordered road began. “This path symbolizes the road to eternity, and this is the beginning, where the road emerges from a pond of blue lotus blossoms—the symbol of rebirth. See where the little girl is drawing in the sand with a reed or stick? She’s using her left hand.” Next Kate pointed to the man and woman farther along the road, seated side by side with a scroll unrolled across their laps. “Their legs are crossed, the traditional way of depicting a scribe, and she’s using her left hand again. It has to be the same person.”
“Unless it’s her mother and father,” Max pointed out.
Kate drew in a quick breath. “I forgot handedness can be familial.”
“More often than not it’s the result of a stressed birth.”
“It’s a stretch, but I think the lotus blossom in her hair signifies a new beginning for her, a kind of rebirth as an adult. From here on they’re always shown side by side and the same size. Yet artistic convention demanded that a wife, even a queen, be shown behind her husband and smaller, with their children behind and smaller than her. The only exception is a relief where Nefertiti is standing beside Akhenaten with her arm around his shoulder.”
“You don’t think Tashat might be Nefertiti, do you?”
Kate shook her head. “Cleo says they’re probably Isis and Osiris. The stair-stepped throne in the woman’s headdress is the hieroglyph for Isis, who the Egyptians called Aset. But there’s nothing to identify him as Osiris—no green face, no tightly wrapped body or sheaf-of-wheat headdress.”
She pointed to the cartouches and told him about her conversation with Dave. “But
sunu
is a title, not a name. Pharaohs had two names, the one given to them at birth and another when they took the throne. That’s the reason for the double cartouches. But why the same word over and over, even if it takes two different forms?”
“Maybe the words aren’t really identical. What about two physicians but with different specialties?” With Max, trying to solve a puzzle was like a game of leapfrog, each player able to jump ahead because of the other.
“To differentiate status, maybe,” Kate agreed, “but they didn’t have specialties in the Eighteenth Dynasty like they did earlier, in the Old Kingdom, when they had titles like Shepherd of the Anus.” She ducked her head to hide a smile. “I guess that makes proctology the second oldest profession.”
“Okay, suppose she
was
left-handed. So what?”
“I don’t want to sound like some New Age nut, but I think we could be looking at a kind of puzzle, where each piece contributes to the meaning of the whole—and we should be looking for how she might have used that hand.” She searched through the mess on her worktable for a piece of paper, and scribbled
swnw
on it.
“That’s the word for physician.” Next she wrote
swnw.t.
“T is the feminine particle, so now it’s a female physician. For a long time Egyptologists insisted there weren’t any, that the extra character was just scribal error, until a French doctor in Cairo connected it to a physician he knew was female from other evidence.” She paused. “What if the arrow is masculine and the bread is feminine?”
“Two physicians, a him and a her?”
“Whoever painted that mask had to be someone close enough to Tashat to know that her idea of heaven was a garden filled with medicinal plants. The coffin inscription says she was a well-educated woman, or words to that effect. Why couldn’t she have been a physician, a healer? It’s a place to begin, isn’t it? A working hypothesis?”
“Why not? I say run with it, see where it takes you.”
Kate let out her breath and gave a little laugh. “Oh, Max, I’m so glad you came. Otherwise, I might never have—” She almost threw caution to the winds and hugged him, but Sam started barking and jumping up, wanting in on the fun, so she grabbed his front paws and danced him around on his hind legs. “Cookie time for you, Samson, while Max and I celebrate with a glass of wine.”
She stopped suddenly and dropped Sam’s paws, leaving him watching her with a puzzled tilt of his head. “If Tashat is the cartouche with the loaf of bread, then the cartouche with
the arrow is the head between her legs. They’re traveling the road to eternity together. But surely no one would dare put an adulterous lover on her coffin.”
“Who else could he be? Her father? I know they had priest-physicians back then, but why the hell would anyone put
his
head between her legs?” He started shaking his head again. “Jesus, and I thought I was hooked before.”
Kate realized he meant it—that Maxwell Cavanaugh couldn’t walk away from Tashat any easier than she could, not without examining every possibility, including some that sounded pretty far out, not to say unlikely. More than that, questioning the conventional wisdom, no matter how sacrosanct, was as much a way of life to him as it was for her. The only way.
“Join the crowd,” she murmured, covering her eagerness to accept his offer with a cliché. She might be overjoyed at the prospect of having Max as a cohort, but that didn’t mean she trusted him completely. Not yet.
“Enough for now,” he decided. “Let’s go have that wine.” Crooking a comradely arm around Kate’s neck, he guided her toward the kitchen.
Sam tagged along, not ready to let either of them out of his sight.
“Aside from the evisceration, her body struck me as relatively undisturbed,” Max told Dave, who had agreed to meet them at the museum even though he didn’t usually come in on Saturdays. “We can see soft-tissue collections in the orbits, extending posteriorly. Probably the remains of the globes and optic nerves. In the end we had thirty-four measurements to plug into the formula to establish age, so we’re confident that she was somewhere between twenty-two and twenty-five. With only the teeth and cranial sutures to go by on him, we have to stay with a wider range—forty and forty-eight.”
“What about that canopic bundle in his mouth?” Dave asked. “Did you find out what that is?”
Max shuffled the stack of plastic sleeves that held the X-ray film—color transparencies presented twenty to a sheet, four across and five down—searching for the axial images he wanted. When he found it he slid the sheet onto the lighted viewbox, the reason they had moved from Dave’s office to Kate’s workroom.
“I passed these around to my partners in Houston, but we all came up empty-handed. Maybe you’ll recognize something. This is the base of the maxilla, and here’s the missing molar I mentioned. And here, dead center of the arch, is some rectangular object—see how the shape stays the same from one image to another? The wrapping conforms to the contours of the mouth, but the rectangle inside it has the radiodensity of bone. There’s also a hollow, tubelike object
inside it.” He traced the gray circle inside the white rectangle. “Only thing I can think of is a box of some kind.”
Kate had an idea what both objects might be, if the diameter of the tube stayed constant along its entire length, but she didn’t want to interrupt Max’s presentation.
“Could it be a penis?” Dave asked. “Yes or no.”
“I doubt it.”
“Thought so, or Cleo would have been here strutting like a peacock.”
“Do you attach any significance to the fact that Tashat’s child wasn’t mentioned in that coffin inscription?” Max inquired.
“Because it was fathered by her lover? Hardly. The child probably died in infancy, or was a girl. In case you didn’t notice, there’s no mention of her mother, either. Females were of little importance unless they were royal.”
Max flipped the switch on the viewbox. “Well, that’s about it, then. We estimate she stood four feet, ten inches tall, with no obvious skeletal abnormalities … unless you consider being left-handed abnormal. The ulna and radius generally are a little longer in the dominant arm, in this case the left one. Same with the humerus.”
The significance of what he was saying hit Kate like a clap of thunder, leaving behind a profound silence. Why, if the skeletal evidence showed Tashat was left-handed, had he let her go on about it last night, building a case on those painted figures alone?
“Also the humeral head tends to be a little more rounded,” Max continued for Dave’s benefit, before he finally looked at Kate—and couldn’t keep a straight face any longer. It dawned on her suddenly that he was paying her back for Sam!
“What’s the joke?” Dave groused.
“Kate got there a different way, that’s all,” Max replied, “a way that ties up another loose end. The coffin wasn’t intended for someone else, then for some reason got switched and ended up with Tashat.”
“How so?” Dave inquired.
“The girl, then woman, on the inside of the coffin lid—they’re both left-handed.”
Dave stalked over to where the lid leaned against the wall and squatted down to see for himself. When he stood up his face was an unhealthy pink except for the ring of white around his lips. “Have to give you credit, McKinnon. That’s pretty good detective work for an amateur. But you’re still just a hired hand, so don’t go expecting to get your name on any publications coming out of this project.”
“Oh, by the way,” Max put in, saving her from saying something she might regret later, “I found those articles you gave me pretty fascinating reading.”
“Well, that’s nice to know,” Dave replied, losing interest in Kate.
“Was Akhenaten stark raving mad or what? Have to be, wouldn’t he, to go for another man when he had a looker like Nefertiti for a wife?”
Kate froze, not daring to look anywhere but out the window. Max was engaging the enemy on his own territory!
Dave shrugged. “Maybe there’s something to the genetic thing, after all.”
“Intrigued me how you fit all the pieces of the puzzle together—” Max went on, disarming Dave with an admiring smile. “Nefertiti’s disappearance, making Smenkhkare his coregent, that relief showing two pharaohs fondling each other, giving him her throne name. After what you said about names being so important, that must’ve been the ultimate dirty trick.” Like a warning shot across the bow, something in Max’s voice sent a shiver down Kate’s spine. “I was just wondering what she did to provoke that kind of retribution?”
Dave exhaled a nervous chuckle. “One thing you have to live with in my field, Dr. Cavanaugh, is rarely having all the evidence you’d like. Don’t you ever have to deduce something from whatever you’ve got, incomplete as it may be?”
“Sure, I guess we all do. But it makes even more sense for two pharaohs to be shown in an embrace if they were hus
band and wife, and for her to keep the name he gave her when she became queen, along with the name he gave his coregent.”
Rendered momentarily speechless, Dave sputtered like a dying sparkler. In the end he sought refuge in maligning the messenger. “That theory is not the first absurd notion to come from one of the Egyptologists who put it forward in the first place.”
“But doesn’t it make more sense to send a royal heiress to Thebes rather than a homosexual lover, to pacify the Amen priests who are stirring things up?”
“Queen Tiye was on occasion referred to as an heiress, too, and she was a commoner. So a little knowledge sometimes can lead you astray.” Dave glanced at his watch, then rose and extended his hand to Max, bringing their encounter to a close. Still, he couldn’t resist a parting shot. “I’m afraid I don’t have time for any more history lessons today, Dr. Cavanaugh, but we do appreciate all you’ve done.”
Once outside Max took off so fast Kate was hard-pressed to keep up with him. He also kept muttering under his breath, but the only thing she heard clearly was, “Blood grouping my ass, with pharaohs sleeping with their sisters, even their own daughters!”
“I wonder if that’s really true,” Kate volunteered, just to distract him. She was seeing a side of Maxwell Cavanaugh that surprised her, a man who let it all hang out. “They’re supposed to have used the same word for sister and wife, but I think it’s more likely that our ability to translate their language is flawed. Academics argue over how to interpret some minor variation in a symbol—is it just a mistake, something unintended, or does it have a different meaning?”
He jammed the key in the car door, then pulled it open for her. “Do you have to put up with that kind of crap all the time or does something about me bring out the worst in that bastard?” He went around to the driver’s side, started the
motor, and drove out of the parking lot as if the hounds of hell were on his trail. A man with a temper.
“I think he suspects something—you know, with Cleo. He’s been coming by the workroom every day, watches what I’m doing for a few minutes, then leaves without a word. I’m worried that he might get riled up about something I do or say and use it as an excuse to send Cleo packing. Museum jobs are scarce as hen’s teeth these days, even with a Ph.D., which she doesn’t have.”
He took his foot off the accelerator so fast it felt like he’d hit the brake. “I’m sorry, Kate. I didn’t much cotton to the way he treated you the last time, but I figured he was busy, had other things on his mind. When he called you a hired hand I just saw red, wanted to hit him where it would hurt most.”
“It’s Tashat I care about. I can live without Dave’s good opinion.”
“Is that why you were quiet in there?”
She shook her head. “Mostly I was afraid I might put my foot in my mouth. Didn’t sleep too well last night.”
“Too much medicinal garden?”
She shook her head. “Crazy dreams. Part sleeping-dream, part waking-dream, if you know what I mean. You’re the doctor. You tell me what’s going on when that happens.”
“Mostly too much.” He didn’t say anything for a block or two, then, “Are you spending the holidays with your family?”
“Maybe. I haven’t decided yet. I know Christmas is less than a week away, but I’ve been too busy to make any plans. Cleo and Phil are cooking a turkey and want me to have dinner with them.”
“Where do your folks live?” he persisted, fishing.
“They’re divorced, so I don’t see either one very often. Mom moved to California and my father lives in Ohio. He has two boys from his second marriage.” She had intended to give ancient Egypt a rest, but any port in a storm. “I wonder what it was like to be left-handed back when everyone
believed in magic spells and evil spirits. Could that be why it was damaged?”
“Like driving a stake through the heart of a vampire or burning a witch at the stake?” Max shrugged. “Possible, I suppose. A lot of lefties are marked in ways that don’t appear to be related to handedness. One syndrome includes alcoholism, epilepsy, and autoimmune disorders, for instance, probably the result of a stressed birth that affects the left hemisphere of the brain. Remember George Bush? A high incidence of dyslexia among lefties might explain his syntax problems. He also has Graves’ disease, an autoimmune disorder. We know right-brain hemispheres in lefties don’t perform exactly the way left hemispheres do for righthanders, but we’re still trying to track all the ramifications of that.”
‘Track how?”
“Looking at the neurological activities of the brain under conditions where we control the stimuli and can map the response.”
“You mean you’re involved in research in addition to your practice?”
“Yeah, with a group at the UT Medical School.” He barely paused. “So how much time do you have off?”
“Five days, but I’ll probably stay here and work,” she answered, wondering why he kept asking. “I’m really anxious, now that we’re about to see what Tashat actually looked like.”
That was true, but Christmas was for kids and families. Just not the kind she had. Now that she was twenty-eight her father treated her with studied politeness but with none of the warmth he exhibited toward her two half brothers. But then they hadn’t failed him … yet. Worse was the guilt she felt, even now, about letting her mother down.
“How about coming to Houston for a couple of days? I could show you some stuff you won’t see outside a big teaching hospital. A colleague of mine uses a computer to
plan how he’s going to rebuild the skulls of patients with malformed faces. All we’d have to do is plug our measurements into his software and you could play with the tolerances on tissue depths, try out different lashes and brows, hairlines, lip shapes—on both heads, if you want.”
It was a reminder that she was fast becoming obsolete, that technology soon would supersede everything she could do. When that happened she’d be lucky to get a job at McDonald’s, given her Achilles’ heel—her inability to deal with noise. Not that anything was wrong with her ears, as her father liked to remind her every chance he got. Max’s voice brought her back from a place she didn’t want to be.
“You don’t need to decide right now, but think about it, okay?”
She nodded, relieved that he wasn’t going to push. Relieved, too, that the session with Dave was over. She needed a breather from Egypt and Tashat, though nothing she had tried so far was working. Last week she’d been driving the back road to Boulder—the open fields on either side covered by a thin blanket of snow, Flatirons looming straight ahead, sharp as a scissors-cut silhouette against the Milky Way—when a hushed stillness came over the car. Suddenly, everywhere she looked, the snow had turned to sand. The broad valley became a vast, lifeless desert, except dead ahead, where the massive red cliffs stood guard over the Place of Truth. Now, as if triggered by that memory, the same stillness muted the noise around her. She waited, but nothing came, neither familiar nor imagined images, only a vague sense of something about to happen. That’s when she decided she was going to Houston.
“Kate? What do you think?” Max asked.
“Sorry. I was somewhere else.”
“How about swinging by to get Sam, then drive up into the mountains a little way, clear Dave out of our heads.”
“Two of Sam’s all-time favorite things are riding in the car and getting to sniff out all the prairie-dog holes in some
high meadow.” She smiled, pleased that he would think to include her dog. Sam was going to be more than a little unhappy when Max left. Truth to tell she was going to feel a little let down herself, back to going it alone.