Nine
W ith her boot braced on a loop of rope, Ellie dropped awkwardly down the dark, narrow length of another shaft. At least this one was shorter than the first they had descended, so it was less likely that Adam would reach the bottom of it and need to lie down.
She bumped against the tight stone walls as she haltingly descended. Above her, Adam reeled the rope out around one of the big columns in the pillared hall, a handkerchief tied around his palm to keep the fibers from irritating his scar.
Ellie had spotted a scattering of blue faience shabtis—real ones this time—among the rubble on the floor of that chamber. The find strongly indicated that Neil’s foreman, Mr. Al-Ahmed, was right. The tomb had almost certainly been looted in ancient times. A Roman-era thief wouldn’t have found much value in the little statues, but a modern one would have been able to fetch a good price for them on the black market.
Ellie didn’t let that dissuade her. She had a theory about the nature of the clue Dawson was seeking in the tomb. If she was right, what they were looking for wouldn’t have been of interest to a Roman thief, either. It would take the form of something more humble—something meant to be kept hidden.
Her rope slipped lower, bumping her against the wall of the shaft again, and finally her boots swung out into the open air. The rest of her followed, bringing the final sacred room of the tomb complex into view.
The burial chamber was perhaps twelve feet long and a little less wide. It was also a mess.
Plaster boxes of ox bones lay smashed in piles, mingling with rotted bundles of linen. Broken sticks of furniture stuck up from the debris beside sharp-edged shards of shattered vases. The destruction was mounded in piles halfway up the walls—and yet Ellie could already pick out treasures that had survived.
A beautifully carved ebony walking stick. A huntsman’s bow, still strung, beside an overturned quiver of arrows. More shabtis, their placid faces gazing out at her from amid the dusty tatters of old robes.
The tomb was covered with artwork. Murals of scenes from Horemheb’s life—then a general in the service of Tutankhamun—intermingled with the usual excerpts from the Book of the Dead.
One of the walls featured a grand depiction of the twelve great gods of the afterlife overseeing the weighing of the heart of the deceased. The great black mouth of a tunnel braced with ancient, unsteady-looking beams had been cut into the heart of the mural.
“I suppose we know how the thieves got in,” Ellie observed as she released the rope and dusted off her skirt.
“And who they robbed,” Mr. Al-Ahmed added, his tone reverent.
Neil’s foreman had quietly but firmly insisted on being the first to descend into the burial chamber, hoping to identify any vulnerable objects and keep the rest of them from coming too close. Thankfully, the ancient thieves had left an area of the center of the floor fairly clear of debris, which meant that they were able to enter the room without crushing priceless pieces of the historical record under their boots.
Neil had followed after Mr. Al-Ahmed, and the two men now crouched over an area of rubble to Ellie’s left. As she joined them, she realized that they were gazing down at a jumbled set of bones.
The remains were terribly old and looked as though they had been unceremoniously dumped from their coffin, pieces of which lay in a splintered, dusty mess nearby. The skeleton was still partially articulated. Enough scraps of the wrappings remained to show that the body had been mummified. The rest had been callously unwound, likely by looters searching for the charms and amulets that would have been carefully positioned around the deceased.
“It’s not Horemheb, presumably,” Ellie deduced. When the great general was made pharaoh, he would have abandoned this tomb at Saqqara to build a new one among the other royals in the Valley of the Kings.
“It’s Mutnedjmet,” Neil replied automatically without taking his eyes from the bones. “His wife.”
“We suspected she might be here,” Mr. Al-Ahmed filled in. “The Valley of the Queens only routinely came into use for the burial of great royal wives during the teenth Dynasty.”
“But how do you know it’s really her and not someone else?” Constance pressed, peering over Ellie’s shoulder.
Ellie had been so focused on the bones, she hadn’t heard her friend climb down.
Neil blinked as though coming out of a daze. “I…”
Mr. Al-Ahmed reached out with the tip of his pen and tilted up a piece of the shattered coffin. “There’s her cartouche,” he said, peering at the circled hieroglyphs on the underside of the wood.
“Well, those thieves were a batch of cads, tossing her around like that.” Constance straightened, brightening. “What are we looking for?”
Neil stiffened, and Mr. Al-Ahmed looked uncomfortable. Ellie couldn’t blame them. She was feeling rather uncomfortable herself. She was too much of a scholar not to sense the wrongness of what they were doing—barreling into a vulnerable and important archaeological site without taking the time to properly survey and catalog each step of the way. It made her feel far too much like the Roman bounders who had tossed Mutnedjmet’s bones onto the floor.
But there simply wasn’t any time to do things properly—not with Dawson on their heels. Too much was at stake for Ellie to let the professor and his handler get their hands on whatever secrets this tomb held.
“I… can’t say exactly,” Ellie admitted awkwardly. “But I do have a theory.”
Behind her, Adam slid down the rope from the shaft, his boots landing solidly on the carved stone of the burial chamber floor. He cast an assessing look over the jumble of toppled furniture and broken artifacts stuffed against the walls of the room.
“Hold on!” Neil stiffened, turning on her. “This burial chamber was only meant to be entered after careful clearing and documentation of all the proceeding chambers—and even then, I was explicitly instructed not to open it without the presence of the designated representative of the British Athenaeum, the organization that is providing every cent of the funding that makes this excavation possible! This entire dig depends upon maintaining their approval and goodwill, and now you tell me that I am risking all of that on a theory? ”
“Well, it’s your theory!” Ellie snapped back.
Neil’s eyes widened with surprise. “It is?”
“The one about the possible connection between the Egyptian cult of the Aten and the later emergence of monotheistic religion in the Levant?” Ellie clarified impatiently.
“What’s an Aten?” Constance asked, leaning down for a closer look at an ancient beaded sandal.
“Well, it was originally another aspect of the god Ra, represented by the golden sun disk,” Ellie eagerly rattled off. “But it began to rise in prominence as a deity in its own right during the reign of—”
“What do you mean?” Neil cut in urgently. “What does this have to do with monotheism and the Aten?”
“You mentioned in your letters that you thought this site might have Atenist connections. Because of her.” Ellie pointed to the bones of the dead queen by their boots.
Adam caught her eye. He raised a questioning eyebrow, but Ellie pressed on, knowing any more detailed explanation would have to wait.
“If your theories about the cult of the Aten and the move toward monotheism among the Hebrews during the time of the Exodus are correct…” she continued.
“What does your invasion of my tomb have to do with the Exodus?!” Neil burst out, throwing up his hands.
“Because we’re looking for the Staff of Moses!” Ellie retorted, her patience snapping.
Sayyid’s eyes widened. Neil’s jaw dropped—and then snapped shut again, his eyes blazing with anger and bewilderment.
“This is barking!” he burst out. “First you show up in my tomb out of nowhere, and then Bates pops up like a bad penny—which makes absolutely no sense at all…”
Ellie shot a guilty look over at Adam, who grimaced.
“And then she’s here,” Neil jabbed a finger toward Constance, “rambling on about clues and villains like we’ve plunged into some tawdry dime novel! And the next thing I know, we’re breaking into an extremely important New Kingdom site against the entirely reasonable wishes of my funders, and you’re ranting about the parting of the Red Sea!”
“Goodness!” Constance said, pulling her attention from a miraculously upright Eighteenth Dynasty table covered in debris. “I haven’t seen him this worked up since that time I glued all his textbooks to his desk.”
Neil made a strangled sound in the back of his throat.
“Might want to save the rest of the lecture for later,” Adam suggested. “Last we heard, that jackass professor was headed for the tomb shaft—and he doesn’t usually travel alone.”
“So will the clue be round?” Constance returned her gaze to the rubbish on the table. “Or stick-like?”
She picked up the neck of a smashed vase to give it a better look.
Ellie, Neil, and Mr. Al-Ahmed all lurched forward.
“Don’t touch that!” Neil cried out.
“Connie, you really oughtn’t…” Ellie started.
“If you could please refrain from handling…” Mr. Al-Ahmed began, his voice strangled.
“Oh!” Constance said. “Sorry.”
She quickly set the vase back down on the table.
The table promptly collapsed.
The small mountain of damaged artifacts cluttering its surface tumbled to the ground. Mr. Al-Ahmed let out a groan of dismay as he rushed toward the catastrophe, Ellie close on his heels.
She sneezed against the dust that filled the air, waving it aside for a better look. The tabletop hung askew, slanted over two broken legs, while its contents lay in a heap at her feet. It was hard to tell what was newly damaged and what had already been broken.
“We should clear the fallen objects first,” Mr. Al-Ahmed recited as though on instinct as he gazed forlornly at the pile, “after documenting their positions. Then we can see if the table can be stabilized or whether it must be carefully disassembled.”
Ellie’s gaze snagged on something that protruded from a nest of papyrus matting—an arc of gold like the first glimpse of the rising sun catching her eye. Instinct tugged at her, and she reached out, carefully withdrawing the artifact from the shredded material.
The slender, square wooden box was a little larger than her hand. Its lines were still plumb, the wood grain reasonably tight even after three thousand years. The only ornamentation on its surface was a single, perfectly round disk of thinly inlaid gold, set into the narrow front face.
“It’s a jewelry box,” she said wonderingly.
The lid consisted of a panel that slid against grooves carefully carved into the sides. It was partially open, left that way by the thieves who had rifled the piece for treasure.
“Please,” Mr. Al-Ahmed said worriedly. “May I see that?”
He sounded like a mother asking for the return of her child. Ellie obliged him, hovering close by as he examined the relic. His immediate panic settled as he took in the box’s relatively sound condition.
“Cypress wood,” Mr. Al-Ahmed observed. “Naturally resistant to pests and humidity.”
“It’s empty,” Constance noted, poking her head over Ellie’s shoulder to peer down at the artifact.
It was still a lovely find—just a wooden shell to the looters who had ravaged the tomb over a millennium before, but to a scholar, the jewelry box offered a poignant glimpse into the everyday life of the woman who lay on the floor behind them. Ellie could picture Mutnedjmet carefully sliding it open to pick out a set of earrings to wear for the day.
“That’s it,” Neil declared behind them. “I’m going back up to do the best I can to save this dig.”
He grasped the rope that still hung down from the shaft opening in the ceiling.
“Oh, no, you don’t!” Constance whirled after him.
Mr. Al-Ahmed turned the box gently in his hands as though unable to resist the urge to appreciate its details. Ellie hovered near him.
Adam stood at her back. “Am I gonna need to hogtie your brother?”
“I think Constance has the situation under control,” Ellie replied distractedly.
“Stay away from the rope, Stuffy,” Constance warned menacingly from behind them. “Or I may be forced to resort to violence.”
“ Violence? ” Neil spluttered. “What on earth does that mean?”
“Is it just me, or is there something off about the depth?” Ellie leaned closer to Mr. Al-Ahmed as she studied the box.
“It seems more shallow than it ought to be,” he confirmed thoughtfully.
He tilted the angle of the artifact for a better look—and Ellie heard a soft but distinct rattle.
Both she and Mr. Al-Ahmed went still, their eyes locking with a matched look of significance.
Neil’s voice called out stridently behind her. “I will not be threatened inside my own—”
“Quiet,” Adam ordered, his voice low and serious as he looked up at the tomb shaft. “We’ve got company.”
Ellie’s gaze snapped to the dark opening in the ceiling… and the clamor of distance voices echoed down to her from above.