Tomb of the Sun King, page 15
part #2 of Raiders of the Arcana Series
A shiver flashed over Ellie’s skin at the sound of Neil’s solemn words.
“What’s that from?” Adam pressed, frowning. “Psalms?”
“Ha!” Neil declared triumphantly. “One might think so, but it’s from The Hymn to the Aten, written by Akhenaten himself!”
“Not all of us have memorized the Hymn to the Aten,” Ellie reminded him.
Mr. Al-Ahmed snorted lightly without looking up from his study of the jewelry box.
Constance leaned forward on her ottoman with a glimmer of unusual interest. “How very… intriguing.”
Ellie felt a quick dart of alarm. There was something less than purely scholarly about the glint in Constance’s eyes.
“At any rate,” Neil went on obliviously, holding the ring out in front of him, “that is how I know this ring belonged to an Atenist. It was common during Akhenaten’s reign for his courtiers and supporters to change their names, replacing references to other gods with the Aten or just dropping them entirely. The Amarna period is the only logical point of origin for an artifact with these characteristics.”
“Amarna?” Constance echoed.
Ellie repressed a sigh, cutting in yet again to clarify her brother’s scholarly excesses. “It’s the term scholars use for the period of Akhenaten’s reign. It refers to the modern name for the location where he built his capital city—Tell al-Amarna.”
“Akhenaten didn’t want to rule from the city of Thebes, like his father had,” Neil eagerly elaborated. “Thebes was a city rife with the influence of other cults, like those of Hathor, Isis, and Amun. He built an entirely new capital devoted to the worship of his god and called it Akhetaten—Horizon of the Aten. But this?” He shook the ring again and let out a slightly wild laugh. “I have speculated for years that Moses’ origins lay in the heart of the Amarna period! After all, Moses’ story in the Book of Exodus more or less describes how he was first raised as an Egyptian, and then guided the Hebrews to worship a single god above all others.”
“The whole golden calf bit,” Adam offered, finally pulling his attention from the window.
“Exactly!” Neil agreed excitedly. “Now—what makes more sense? That a shift toward monotheism happened spontaneously and independently among two disparate cultures—proto-Hebrew and Egyptian—at roughly the same period of history? Or that one culture exerted an influence over the other? For the love of God, Moses is an Egyptian name!”
Neil caught himself, shooting a nervous look at Ellie, whose mouth had already pulled down into a disapproving frown. “Or name element,” he corrected quickly, and then pressed on. “I have been working on this theory for years now. The only thing I have been missing is an explicit link between the Hebrews and the Atenists. But if hard evidence exists that Moses was in fact an official in Akhenaten’s court—”
“Hold on,” Constance cut in. “Are you saying that the Egyptians invented God?”
Neil’s mouth clamped shut. His gaze shifted from Constance to the others—and stopped on Mrs. Al-Ahmed, who had crossed her arms over her chest as she regarded him with a challengingly raised eyebrow.
“When you put it that way, I suppose it sounds rather…” He cleared his throat. “That is to say—we are talking about historical theory, not a theological argument…”
“It is a very compelling historical theory,” Mr. Al-Ahmed offered, pulling his attention away from the jewelry box. “If one allows for a historical basis behind the Exodus story at all.”
His wife cast him a wry and affectionate look. “And only a little blasphemous.”
Mr. Al-Ahmed stiffened with quick alarm.
“I did know I was marrying a scholar and not an imam,” Mrs. Al-Ahmed reminded him warmly.
Her husband flashed her a slightly rueful smile before going back to his study of the inscription.
“So your only-a-little-blasphemous theory is that Moses learned about God from this Akhenaten character,” Constance filled in. “And then carried that off and taught it to the Hebrews. But how did his ring end up in Mutnedjmet’s tomb? Was she an Atenist too?”
“Mutnedjmet was Nefertiti’s sister,” Neil replied, as though the answer ought to have been obvious.
“You’re jumping ahead again, buddy,” Adam noted with a hint of wry affection.
“Nefertiti was the great royal wife of Akhenaten—his queen,” Ellie filled in. “And one with an unusually prominent role in Egyptian life. Most of the time, the wives of pharaohs are shown as smaller, secondary figures to their husbands. But Nefertiti is given equal size in the art of the Amarna period—as though she were his partner, sharing his high status as they made offerings to the Aten or accepted tribute from lesser kings.”
“It is even possible that Nefertiti inspired Akhenaten to invent an entirely new form of Egyptian art,” Neil jumped in to add, eyes bright with scholarly excitement. “One that was incredibly lifelike and intimate, as opposed to the more stylized and formal scenes we find both before and after the period. You can actually see the flaws and imperfections, like Akhenaten’s rounded belly or the wrinkles around Nefertiti’s eyes. Instead of conventional scenes of the pharaoh marching along with the gods, Akhenaten and Nefertiti are shown playing with their children or sharing a meal. Grieving for a dying daughter. It’s… It looks like…”
“Love?” Constance filled in when Neil’s voice trailed off.
“But we do not know for certain that the Mutnedjmet who was Horemheb’s queen is the same Mutnedjmet mentioned in the tombs of Amarna as Nefertiti’s sister.” Mr. Al-Ahmed’s words had the air of an old argument.
“We know it for certain now,” Neil retorted, waving the ring at him. “I did tell you that we would find a connection!”
Mr. Al-Ahmed sighed. “Sometimes I wonder if I would like you more if you were not such an obnoxiously lucky guesser.”
Neil frowned. “It’s not guessing. It’s—”
“But is this a well-known theory?” Adam pressed a little impatiently. “All this stuff about Moses and Akhenaten, and the queen in your tomb being Nefertiti’s sister? I’m just wondering how the hell Dawson would’ve thought to look for a clue to the location of Moses’ staff at your Eighteenth Dynasty excavation.”
“It’s… possible that I might have engaged in a little theoretical speculation in some of my reports to the British Athenaeum,” Neil admitted uneasily.
Adam’s tone went dry. “In other words, you wrote your bosses a nice report about all of it.”
“It is my job,” Neil pushed back crossly, and then caught himself, his shoulders sagging. “Was my job.”
“But does any of this tell us where we can actually find the damned thing?” Adam pressed. “You know—the dangerous artifact that can unleash plagues of boils and locusts on the world if the wrong guys get hold of it?”
At the mention of the staff’s purported magical powers, Neil stiffened.
“Perhaps the inscription in the box will help with that,” Ellie suggested uncertainly.
Mr. Al-Ahmed sighed with a note of frustration. “This hieratic is a variety mostly seen in letter-writing, and it is positively rife with abbreviations and shortcuts—a bit like your English shorthand. I will need to consult some of my father’s old notes before I can hope to make any sense of it beyond those first few words.”
“If you wouldn’t mind, Mr. Al-Ahmed,” Ellie pleaded. “We must know whether there is anything else in that text that might help us.”
“Call me Sayyid,” he corrected her tiredly. “If we are to be working together on the mystery behind the life of one of the world’s greatest prophets, we might as well dispense with the formalities.”
“Of course, Sayyid,” Ellie agreed gratefully.
“I will see what I can do with the hieratic.” Sayyid cradled the box as carefully as he might an infant as he rose and headed for his study.
His wife stood as well, casting a ruefully assessing look over the rest of them. “And I will find you all somewhere to sleep.”
“Is there anything to eat?” Constance asked, yawning. “All of this history has made me a bit peckish.”
“I will put on some rice,” Mrs. Al-Ahmed conceded, flashing another irritated look at her husband as he settled down at his desk in the next room.
“I can help!” Constance brightly offered, hopping to her feet.
Constance looked at Ellie expectantly.
Ellie’s stomach sank at the thought of being asked to assist. She was an absolutely rotten cook. “I can… er…”
“I got it, Princess,” Adam cut in a little dryly.
At the sound of that comfortable nickname—Princess—Neil stiffened. He put his fingers to his temples as though fighting a wave of dizziness.
“I need some air,” he declared abruptly.
He pivoted on his heel and hurried out of the house at a pace that was barely short of a run—as if he might somehow escape all the various ways that his life had taken a turn over the last two hours.
Adam watched him go, his expression flashing with guilt and unease.
Ellie was feeling much the same herself.
Constance hooked a hand under each of their elbows, steering them after Mrs. Al-Ahmed. “Come on, then, you two. Let’s see if Sayyid has any dates.”
𓇶
Thirteen
With two bowls of lentils in his hands, Adam set out to face the music.
Neil hadn’t come back to the house since he’d run out an hour before. The lion’s share of Neil’s angst seemed to be coming from the whole busting-into-his-tomb and possibly-costing-him-his-job thing… but Adam knew the revelation that he’d been running around with Neil’s sister hadn’t helped.
At all.
When Adam had first shown up at Cambridge University, he’d been a big, awkward American who couldn’t spend more than ten minutes staring at a book before he realized he’d just read the same sentence six times and gave up. He hadn’t fit in with the guys who didn’t bother even trying to read, because they were mostly stuck-up rich kids in need of a good dunking. And he’d figured the ones who actually did read were probably a lost cause, since it wouldn’t take them long to figure out that all Adam knew about history was what he managed to pick up during lectures when his mind wasn’t wandering.
Neil had definitely been one of the reading guys, but he’d started sitting next to Adam in their Greek class, asking him questions about America or what his thoughts were on the historicity of the Iliad. Before Adam quite knew what was happening, Neil had absorbed him into a friendship like some kind of osmosis.
He still wasn’t sure why Neil had picked him, of all people. Adam certainly hadn’t asked for it, but he’d been grateful all the same. Neil—whose mind was practically exploding with things he’d read in books—had never once made Adam feel like an idiot or a failure. He’d just start rambling at Adam about the reliability of Roman accounts of early Celtic culture, and before Adam knew it, he’d be theorizing about ancient British kinship structures right alongside him.
He liked to think he’d given something back to Neil as well. Fairfax definitely wasn’t the kind of kid who jumped at the chance for an adventure, but Adam was pretty sure Neil had enjoyed that prank with the stuffed emu and the incident with the soda canister and the Dean’s miniature schnauzer more than he’d let on.
To Adam’s even greater surprise, he and Neil had actually stayed close even after Adam blew off his final exams and ran away to Central America. Neil had asked for Adam’s address, but Adam hadn’t actually expected to hear from him. He’d figured the whole ‘quitting university out of spite’ thing would’ve made star-student Neil realize how little they really had in common—but then the letters had started coming, and they’d come like clockwork every two weeks for seven years. Hell, there were probably three of them waiting for him back in Belize Town even now, full of ramblings about Middle Egyptian grammar and how Neil missed plum tarts—and had Adam seen the latest excavation report from Teotihuacan?
Adam hadn’t, but it wouldn’t matter. Just like Adam never made Neil feel bad for being bookish, Neil had never made Adam feel lousy for using books as paperweights—even when he really did intend to try to read them.
Maybe that was the real secret to why they’d stuck together. They’d never made each other feel less for being who they were.
It was pretty lousy for Adam to repay all that by ruining the guy’s sister.
Not that he’d meant to… but even after he’d found out that Ellie was Neil’s Peanut, he’d kept making bad decisions.
Hot, passionate bad decisions with his hands and his lips and his… well.
Friends didn’t do that, and Neil would have every right to cut Adam out of his life over it. But Adam couldn’t let that happen, because Neil was Ellie’s brother. He was always going to be a part of her world, and if Adam had any hope of sticking with her—whatever the hell that might end up looking like—he owed it to her to try to make things right, no matter what he had to do to earn that.
He figured the effort would at least involve getting verbally torn up, down, and sideways. Maybe even taking a solid punch to the face… not that Neil could hit all that hard.
So that was the plan. Face the music, get what he deserved, and hope that on the other side of it there were still enough fragments of their friendship left to come to some sort of peace.
He found Neil on the path by the canal. The narrow waterway lay maybe a dozen yards from the house, but it was far enough to be out of earshot and past any fall of light through the meshrabiyeh screens over Sayyid’s windows.
Tall, slender palms rose around them. Beyond the narrow, gleaming water at Neil’s feet, the landscape turned from shaded garden to sprawling, starlit fields.
It wasn’t the smartest spot to hang around in the dark. In fact, it looked to Adam like exactly the sort of place where you might expect to find a lurking crocodile.
Adam wondered if maybe Neil didn’t know about crocodiles—though you’d think a guy who had been in Egypt for two years now might’ve learned at least the raw basics of survival.
Then again, Neil had never had a particularly strong instinct for self-preservation.
Adam would’ve felt a little better about walking into a potential encounter with a croc if he’d had his machete in his hand instead of two bowls of dinner. Thankfully, he had a solution for that problem.
“Take this, would you?” Adam pushed one of the bowls at Neil.
“What?!” Neil exclaimed, whirling in surprise and nearly stumbling into the canal.
Adam wondered if he’d have to drop a bowl in order to catch him, but Neil managed to right himself, arms wheeling.
“Why did you sneak up on me like that?” Neil demanded.
“Pretty sure I was making plenty of noise,” Adam offered back. “It’s a hell of a lot better to scare a crocodile off than come up on it unawares.”
“Crocodile? What crocodile?” Neil looked around wildly.
“You’re standing in a swamp.” Adam glanced over the edge of the canal. “Looks all right for the moment. Still, wanna take one of these?”
Neil awkwardly accepted his dinner, which freed up Adam’s hand. The bowl he still held was stuffed with rice and lentils topped with chunks of ripe tomato, salty olives, briny cheese, and a big folded hunk of flatbread to scoop it up with. Adam would’ve normally dived into that kind of meal with relish—but his appetite was lacking.
With a sigh, he set the bowl into the crook of a tree branch.
Neil’s own supper remained forgotten in his hand as he continued to stare morosely out at the fields.
Adam wondered how to broach the subject that had brought him out there.
So about your sister…
It wasn’t his finest turn of phrase, but it was the best he’d been able to come up with.
“So…” Adam started.
“This is all patently ridiculous!” Neil burst out. “We’ve paraded into unsurveyed burial chambers, crawled through unstable tunnels—and now we’re hiding in the house Sayyid didn’t even tell me he had—and for what? Because Ellie thinks the British Athenaeum for Egyptological Studies is in the pocket of some cabal of dastardly villains looking for magical artifacts?”
“That’s… well, not entirely inaccurate,” Adam awkwardly admitted. “But the way you’re putting it…”
“My funders aren’t unreasonable.” Neil paced along the bank of the canal, gesturing with his bowl still in his hand. “They certainly won’t be happy that we entered the burial chamber contrary to their instructions, but I’m sure that if I… if I just explain…” He stopped short, his face pale with panic. “Mr. Forster-Mowbray is perhaps not the most scholarly in his inclinations, but I’m sure if I tell him that it was all a terrible… Or scorpions!” he burst out, clutching the bowl to his chest. “I could say that we were assaulted by a… a whole… flock?”
“Nest,” Adam filled in tiredly.
“—A whole nest of scorpions! So of course we had to retreat to the burial chamber for safety reasons!” Neil closed his eyes and let out a moan. “Oh, blast it. This is a mess! And you—you, of all people! Showing up on the wrong bloody continent, waving around enormous knives and talking about gunshots and glowing bones… I know you enjoy a good prank, Bates, but this is really beyond the pale!”
“Prank?” Adam echoed.
The word sounded a little dangerous. He hadn’t intended for it to come out that way. After all, he was there to apologize to Neil, whatever that ended up requiring of him—not get his hackles up in the first two minutes.
“What else could it be?!” Neil waved his arms—one hand still precariously clutching the bowl. “Unless it’s all part of some bizarre scheme to win over my sister—and I haven’t even begun to share my thoughts on that subject. What are you doing here with her? I can’t imagine what I’m going to tell David and my mother about all of this. ‘I’m sorry, sir, but my best friend has ruined your daughter and dragged her off to the other side of the world where she is now invading people’s tombs and raving about magical artifacts!’”
