Dead men’s hearts

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.”

Her husband looked leery. “Do I want to know this?”

“Oh, it’s nothing bad. It just makes me wonder about his-well, he asked me what happened to the head that was there last night.”

Jerry frowned. “The what?”

“In the enclosure. He seems to think he saw a yellow jasper head in there, near the bones, or maybe it was quartzite. Look, keep this to yourselves, will you? I wasn’t supposed to talk about it. Not that it matters. Bruno already knows.”

Jerry stood leaning on the railing, silent and contemplative, pulling on his pipe.

“You mean he said it was there last night, but not this morning?” Gideon asked.

“Right. And it worried me, because-look, Gideon, this is not for public consumption either, but he got a little tiddly last night, which he tends to do most nights, no big deal, never during working hours, but this is the first time that he ever-well, hallucinated, I guess you’d have to call it. He even thought he remembered pointing it out.”

“He did,” Jerry said quietly.

TJ swung to face him. “Did what?”

“Point it out.”

She stared at him. “Jerry, I was right there. If he-”

“He didn’t say it was a head. He said… I don’t remember his exact words… he was flashing his light around, and he said, ”What’s that piece over there,“ or, ”See that thing over there,“ or something like that. Don’t you remember?”

“No!”

“Well,” Jerry said, “there was a lot of excitement, you were arguing with him-”

“What was he pointing at? How do you know it was a head? Did you actually see anything?”

“No, I wasn’t really paying attention. But maybe Ragheb saw it, or Ario.”

TJ shook her head. “No. I asked them, even though Dr. H told me not to.”

“Huh? Why would he tell you not to?”

“I think he thinks he was dreaming himself.” She hunched her shoulders. “He was pretty well potted, Jerry.”

“Yeah, he was that.” Jerry banged his pipe on his palm to knock out the dottle, pulled the pipe apart, and blew wetly through the stem. “Tiff,” he said slowly, “you don’t suppose that maybe there was something, and Ragheb came back during the night, and, well…”

“Stole it?” TJ said indignantly. “Of course not. And even if he’d wanted to, all he had to do was take it in the first place, before he ever came in to call us.”

“Maybe he didn’t see it until Dr. H pointed it out.”

“Jerry, I can’t believe you’re saying this. How can you believe Ragheb is a liar and a thief? He’s been here almost as long as we have, he’s the nicest, gentlest-”

“I’m just trying to look at all the angles, Tiff,” Jerry said peaceably. “Why would Dr. H imagine he saw a quartzite head?”

“Why would Ragheb steal it?” TJ countered.

They turned to Gideon as if they expected him to resolve the dispute, but Gideon had reached the end of his rope. He was beyond overtiredness now, finally ready for sleep, wondering only where he was going to find the energy to climb the stairs to the room. He tried unsuccessfully to smother a prodigious yawn.

TJ laughed. “Let’s get this poor guy upstairs before he collapses on us. He’s got a long day tomorrow; six-bit tour in the morning, and then off to Amarna in the afternoon.”

“Amarna?” Gideon said fuzzily. “I thought that wasn’t in the schedule anymore.”

“It wasn’t, but Forrest decided that artistic integrity demanded its inclusion after all. Even if we have to rush like hell through everything else.”

Gideon yawned again. “Good. I’d hate to miss it.”

“We really ought to get up,” Julie said.

“Mm,” replied Gideon.

Neither of them stirred. After a while Gideon gently brushed the backs of his fingers over her cheek, pleased as always by the softness of her skin, pleased as always with himself for having her beside him morning after morning, night after night.

“I mean,” said Julie, “we can’t very well lie in bed all day like a couple of slugs. Not that this wasn’t a nice way to start the day.”

Gideon smiled. “I’d hardly say like a couple of slugs.”

“No,” she said, laughing. She turned on her side to face him, cradling his hand between her cheek and the pillow. Her eyes, glossy and ink-black, were a foot from his. “But we’re going to have to get going sometime. I hear they have a full day planned for us.”

“Whatever it is, it’s going to be downhill from here.”

He had awakened earlier than he’d wanted to, at 6:00, and silently gone to the dining room to bring back coffee from the twenty-four-hour urn. Julie had downed the first cup without quite waking up, which was normal even when she wasn’t suffering from jet lag. She had grunted something and held out the empty cardboard cup, and he had gone for refills. As always, the second one got her blood moving and her nerves functioning, and by the time she had finished it, she was not only speaking in intelligible words, she was feeling playful and affectionate.

He had wound up back in the bed, the time had flown by, and now, somehow, it was 7:30.

“Gideon,” she said when another five minutes had passed and they had yet to move, “do we really have to follow Dr. Haddon’s schedule? What’s the chance of our playing hooky and going out and seeing Luxor Temple? Just us?”

“I wish I could,” he said sincerely, “but I have to take the obligatory tour here at the House. But you don’t. Why don’t you go ahead on your own?”

She wrinkled her nose, the only person in the world on whom it looked absolutely stunning. “I don’t want to go ahead on my own. I want to go with you.”

It warmed him to hear her say it, but thought it only right to say otherwise. “But I can’t, Julie, and I wouldn’t want you to miss-”

“Why do you have to take the obligatory tour?”

“Professional courtesy, for one thing. Haddon expects me to, and I am his guest.”

“You’re not Haddon’s guest,” she said sensibly. “You’re the Horizon Foundation’s guest. You’re here to narrate a film, that’s all. You’re not an Egyptologist and don’t pretend to be one, you’re not a board member like Bruno, or the power behind a board member like Bea, and this may be our one and only free morning in Luxor. Unless you’d rather spend it learning more about Middle Egyptian hieroglyphs and epigraphic techniques, of course.”

He raised the eyebrow that wasn’t pressed against the pillow. “Are you kidding? But how do I get out of it? What do I tell Haddon?”

“Tell him that your wife insists on going into Luxor, and she greatly desires your company, and her every wish is your command.”

Gideon considered this for a few moments. Then he kissed her a final time, on the spot on her nose where the wrinkle had been, rolled out of bed, and began getting back into his clothes.

“I will,” he said, and did.