Twelve
M r. Al-Ahmed led them along a winding trail that was barely discernible from the rocky ground of the desert necropolis. Overhead, the last vestiges of twilight slipped below the horizon, bringing a greater array of stars out against the rich darkness overhead.
They passed into the tidy rows of towering date palms that loomed silently against the sand like watching sentinels. Mr. Al-Ahmed steered them unerringly along a dirt path through knee-high fields of rice and sorghum threaded with the shimmering lines of canals. Here and there, low mud-brick houses punctuated the scene, lamplight flickering from behind their window screens.
A mile later, Ellie’s guide took a turn onto a narrower track that led them to a tidy single-story house of whitewashed mud-brick framed by flowering shrubs and palms. The building was set on a little rise safely above the level of the inundation. A cluster of humbler homes stood a little distance away, but the spot was otherwise quite private, with views across both the green fields and the broad, still sands of the desert.
Light glimmered through the meshrabiyeh screens over the windows, framing a freshly painted door.
“Whose house is this?” Ellie asked quietly.
“Mine, for now,” Mr. Al-Ahmed replied.
“Hold on!” Neil stopped short in the path. “You have a house here?”
Mr. Al-Ahmed sighed and turned back to him. “Yes?”
“I thought you slept in one of the tents!” Neil protested.
“Why would I sleep in a tent when I can stay in a nice house?” Mr. Al-Ahmed countered.
“But I’m sleeping in a tent! I thought that was the way it was done!”
Mr. Al-Ahmed made a dismissive noise. “Pssh. My abba always rented a house for his excavations if there was one available nearby for a reasonable rate.”
Ellie hadn’t thought it was possible for her brother to look even more dejected, but somehow he managed it.
They reached the door. Mr. Al-Ahmed paused at the threshold with an awkward look back at the rest of them. “Could you… wait here for a moment?”
A little spill of lamplight fell across the path as he slipped inside.
Ellie could just make out a rapid and tense exchange from beyond the door. Mr. Al-Ahmed’s tones were apologetic. A strong female voice answered him. It sounded frustrated and disapproving.
“I thought he stayed in a tent,” Neil voiced in low, mournful tones as he stared bewilderingly at the house.
The door swung open, framing both Mr. Al-Ahmed and the woman Ellie had heard speaking. She was an Egyptian lady dressed in a fitted yelek gown slit at the sides to reveal loose trousers. The fabric was an emerald hue that set off the green tones in her eyes. The hijab that covered her hair was elegantly embroidered.
She was studying them with obvious irritation.
“Please, come in,” Mr. Al-Ahmed said with an uncomfortable smile.
Past the crooked entryway, Mr. Al-Ahmed led them through a small courtyard into a comfortably appointed sitting room. The furnishings were in a mix of Egyptian and European styles, with a low divan, a few overstuffed chairs, and a coffee table. A pile of books with titles in English, French, and Arabic sat beside a wooden desk clock.
The green-eyed woman planted herself in one of the chairs in a manner that clearly indicated she had no intention of being moved from it.
“Ya habibti,” Sayyid said a little nervously. “I believe you remember Dr. Fairfax. This is his sister, Miss Mallory, and her friends Mr. Bates and Miss Tyrrell. Everyone, this is my wife, Zeinab.”
“Do sit down.” Mrs. Al-Ahmed’s words were ostensibly polite, but they had the air of a general issuing an order. “I am, of course, eager for my dear husband to further explain what brought this unexpected visit about.”
Ellie plopped down onto the nearest piece of furniture, which happened to be the divan. Mr. Al-Ahmed took the chair beside his wife, eyeing her nervously, while Constance cheerfully made herself at home on an ottoman.
Neil stopped behind a sofa, staring at all of them blankly as though he couldn’t quite fathom how he had come to be there.
Adam crossed to the window, leaning against the wall as he gazed out through the screen, his posture one of careful readiness.
Checking to make sure they hadn’t been followed, Ellie realized.
An awkward silence followed. Ellie took it upon herself to break it. “Do you live here throughout the dig season, Mrs. Al-Ahmed?”
“No,” Mrs. Al-Ahmed replied shortly. “My work is in Cairo. Fridays are the one day of the week when I can visit my husband.”
“Zeinab is a daya—a midwife,” Mr. Al-Ahmed explained with a note of pride. “She is very sought after for her skills.”
“A midwife, did you say?” Constance perked up.
“Yes?” Mrs. Al-Ahmed replied cautiously.
“And you don’t veil or retire to the haramlek when there are guests,” Constance noted. “So you must be fairly modern.”
At Constance’s look of razor-sharp interest, Ellie recalled her curiosity about methods for avoiding pregnancy—to better facilitate her plan of taking a lover.
“Oh drat,” she muttered under her breath.
Adam cast her a curious look.
“As modern as the word of Allah,” Mrs. Al-Ahmed retorted, “which I happen to have read for myself, and which does not require any such practice on the part of faithful women. Not that I can fault some of us for wishing for space to ourselves.”
She punctuated this with a pointed look at her husband, who blanched and sank down in his chair a bit.
Ellie couldn’t entirely blame her for being irritated with the poor man. She didn’t imagine that she would be terribly pleased herself if she had only one day a week with her spouse, and he turned up to it with a load of bedraggled foreigners in tow.
“Ha ha ha,” Mr. Al-Ahmed said nervously. “Very funny, ya habibti.”
Neil slumped forward in his chair, pressing his face into his hands. “This is a disaster!” He lifted his head again, wide-eyed with dismay. His glasses were still a bit crooked and his mouse-brown hair was wildly askew. “We just stomped through the burial chamber of one of the most important figures of the late Eighteenth Dynasty! Plundered artifacts! Collapsed a two-thousand-year-old looters’ tunnel—an important archaeological find in its own right, as it happens! And lost both Sayyid and I our jobs!”
Mrs. Al-Ahmed slowly turned a sharp green-eyed gaze on her husband.
“Technically we have not been formally dismissed,” Mr. Al-Ahmed pointed out a little weakly.
“At least nobody was shot,” Constance offered cheerfully. Her fashionable dress was very dirty.
“ Shot? ” Mrs. Al-Ahmed echoed dangerously.
“We are not entirely sure that there were gunshots,” Mr. Al-Ahmed hurriedly assured her. “Perhaps someone simply dropped a boot… or three.”
With her eyes still fixed on her husband, Mrs. Al-Ahmed slowly arched a single eloquent eyebrow.
Ellie felt a burst of guilt. None of what Neil had said was wrong. She had burst into his tomb, plundered an artifact, and probably lost him his job.
Never mind the gunshots.
Looking back, it was hard to see what else she could have done—not without leaving the field wide open to Professor Dawson. But that didn’t change the fact that Mr. Al-Ahmed and her brother hadn’t asked to be involved in this. Ellie had inflicted it on them without giving them any say in the matter.
She raised her chin. “The situation is my fault and my responsibility, Mrs. Al-Ahmed. I deeply regret that it brought your husband into any danger. I did not expect our circumstances to become quite so—er, complicated—but I assure you, it was prompted by a matter of the utmost seriousness and importance.”
“What matter?” Mrs. Al-Ahmed demanded flatly.
Ellie looked at Adam, a little helpless as to where to begin. He met her gaze steadily. The quiet confidence in his look bolstered her—at least enough for her to draw a breath and dive in.
“Last month, Mr. Bates and I were involved in an incident in British Honduras. One that brought to our attention a particular… quality … of certain artifacts mentioned in the historical documents and folklore of various parts of the world.”
“Quality?” Neil echoed anxiously. “What quality?”
“That they are… well…” Ellie began.
“Magic,” Adam finished for her from his place by the window. He swept a gaze over the rest of the room as though daring anyone there to object. “All that stuff in those old books you spend so much time with,” he elaborated, fixing his eyes on Neil. “Invisibility bracelets and flying boots. They’re real.” He paused. “At least, some of them are,” he hedged less comfortably.
Mr. Al-Ahmed’s expression was darkly thoughtful. His wife raised a careful, surprised eyebrow—and then turned a penetrating glance at her husband.
Neil’s expression was one of utter horror. “Are you—” he spluttered. “Have you completely lost your—”
“I’ve seen it!” Constance bounced on her ottoman with excitement. “On our roof in Cairo, Ellie’s bone lit up like a comet!”
Neil’s pale cheeks flushed. “Show me.”
“I… can’t,” Ellie replied uncomfortably. “It’s broken.”
Neil laughed, the sound a little mad. He dropped onto the sofa as though someone had cut his strings, putting his head in his hands. “Of course it is.”
Adam’s eyes narrowed on his friend—and then he sharply looked away again, as though torn between his temper and an even less comfortable emotion.
“I… may have heard of something like this,” Mr. Al-Ahmed said carefully.
“ What?! ” Neil gaped at his foreman with dismay.
Mr. Al-Ahmed bristled, holding up a defensive hand. “I am not saying that I have seen any… glowing bones. Only that my father might have mentioned such things to me before, when I was a boy.”
“Your father?” Ellie pressed.
“Kamal Hussein Al-Ahmed. He was…” Mr. Al-Ahmed drew in a breath as though struggling to think of how best to complete the sentence. “He served as a foreman on digs throughout both Upper and Lower Egypt. He told me once that he had found artifacts that held flashes of the old powers described in the ancient stories.”
He cast a quick, uncomfortable glance at his audience, clearly nervous as to how his revelation was being received. Constance had set her elbows on her knees, leaning forward eagerly. Mrs. Al-Ahmed’s expression was more hooded—enough that Ellie found it hard to guess what she was thinking.
Neil looked betrayed, gaping at his foreman from behind his smudged spectacles.
Mr. Al-Ahmed’s jaw tightened at the look. “They were just a few things in glass cases in the museum. I remember a bronze amulet inscribed with a spell of protection against snakes, along with a senet board. My abba… claimed it might receive messages from the dead.”
“But that’s a load of superstitious nonsense,” Neil blurted, obviously bewildered. “I thought your father was a scholar.”
“He was a scholar.” Mr. Al-Ahmed’s eyes briefly flashed with hurt. “A scholar, linguist, and scientist. And he was not the sort of man who teased children with a bit of fancy. He was not fanciful.”
He looked at the rest of them as though challenging anyone else to echo Neil’s accusation. “My father told me that he had worked very hard to make sure those pieces stayed here in Egypt instead of going to the partage share and disappearing into Germany or America. He would not have taken that risk out of superstition .”
Ellie was familiar with the system of partage—the law that dictated which of the artifacts found in Egypt stayed there and which belonged to the foreign museums or investors who funded the various excavations.
Any artifacts of significant historical or archaeological value were supposed to go to Egypt’s share, with duplicates or less-important pieces granted to the excavators and their sponsors—but that wasn’t always how it worked. The network of powerful men who dominated Egypt’s archaeological scene was small and close-knit, and those sorts of ties could result in ‘favors’ being done… or there was always bureaucratic incompetence or deliberate fraud to help a desired artifact escape the country.
For an Egyptian foreman to go up against that system and win spoke of careful brilliance and a great deal of quiet ingenuity.
Mr. Al-Ahmed looked to Ellie—and almost defiantly not at Neil. “I cannot dismiss what you claim as impossible.”
Neil stood. He crossed over to the door, looking into the open-air courtyard with his arms crossed over his chest as he oozed silent frustration.
“In British Honduras,” Ellie continued, “Mr. Bates and I were drawn into an effort to prevent one such artifact from falling into the hands of the gentleman you briefly met this evening, Professor Dawson, and his… rather unsavory colleague, Mr. Jacobs.”
“I had a brief run-in with Mr. Jacobs in London before Ellie left,” Constance added with a note of relish. “I can confirm that he is desperately intimidating, even when one has only seen the top of his head.”
“And he is thankfully not here,” Ellie added. “If he had been, our escape from the tomb would have been far more… complicated ,” she finished with an awkward look at the obviously disapproving Mrs. Al-Ahmed.
“That guy turns up like a bad penny,” Adam cut in grimly. “I wouldn’t count on having seen the last of him.”
“In British Honduras, we were able to keep Dawson and Jacobs from acquiring the object they sought, but it was destroyed in the process. Along with… a great deal more,” Ellie admitted with a wince and a burst of guilt.
It still horrified her to remember the sight of the city of Tulan crumbling into oblivion—as a direct result of her own actions. She had spent many nights lying awake as she wondered whether there might have been a different way for her to stop the Smoking Mirror from falling into Dawson and Jacobs’ hands. Surely she should have been able to think of something—though she couldn’t entirely take credit for the course of action that she had taken.
The words of an old priest echoed through her mind.
You followed the path the mirror set for you. You buried it with the bones of all its dead.
“This Dawson,” Mr. Al-Ahmed asked slowly. “What does he mean to use these…”
“Arcana,” Ellie filled in, even though it irked her to have to use Dawson’s word for it. She hadn’t been able to think of a better one.
“…these arcana for?” he finished.
“That jackass isn’t using them for anything,” Adam replied. “He works for somebody else.”
“We don’t know who,” Ellie quickly added, anticipating the next question. “Only that it’s some sort of secretive organization… one that doesn’t mind resorting to theft or murder to achieve their goals.”
“I suppose that assessment is confirmed by the… er, very slim possible presence of perhaps a gunshot or two in the tomb this evening,” Mr. Al-Ahmed said, flashing an uncomfortable look at his wife.
Her mouth thinned.
“And clearly, Julian Forster-Mowbray is working with them,” Constance noted. “Though I still find it hard to believe that Julian is half so interesting as all that.”
Neil stiffened. “You can’t possibly be implying that the British Athenaeum for Egyptological Studies has anything to do with this!” He threw out his arms. “It’s a scholarly organization that has existed for nearly two hundred years, with an impeccable reputation for supporting the most respected research into Ancient Egyptian history. It publishes papers! And an annual journal! The members are all retired university lecturers, for goodness’ sake! They get into arguments about translations. They do not hire thugs to steal supposedly magical artifacts at gunpoint!”
Mr. Al-Ahmed cleared his throat a little. “They do take artifacts, strictly speaking.”
“That’s partage!” Neil burst out. “It’s a perfectly legal share of the finds, overseen by the Egyptian Antiquities Service! It’s not stealing !”
“That is a matter of one’s perspective,” Mrs. Al-Ahmed countered with razor-edged crispness.
“And it may do to recall that the Antiquities Service is run by a Frenchman who continues to operate a sale room out of the Egyptian Museum, where he hawks artifacts to tourists,” Ellie added with a familiar burst of indignation. “Which is also perfectly legal .”
“But t-those are… They’re extras. They’re items that are already… already represented in the…” Neil trailed off, his shoulders slumping.
Mr. Al-Ahmed sighed tiredly.
Adam cast Ellie a significant look. “The Mustache isn’t a retired professor.”
“No,” Constance agreed wryly. “He most certainly is not.”
“Mr. Mustache—I mean Mowbray— Forster-Mowbray ,” Neil spluttered, “is not a member of the Athenaeum. He’s a… well, you know. He… represents them.”
“If that fellow knows hieratic from demotic, I will eat my hat,” Ellie asserted firmly. “He is entirely a dilettante. Why would the Athenaeum trust someone like Julian Forster-Mowbray as their liaison?”
“Money,” Mrs. Al-Ahmed asserted flatly. “If he is not a scholar, then he is connected to the money. That is why he oversees your work.”
Adam looked at Neil. “So where’s the money come from?”
“The money?” Neil echoed helplessly.
“You know—the stuff that pays your salary?” Adam elaborated in a drawl. “If your Athenaeum is all a bunch of retired professors, where’s the cash for your dig come from?”
“Oh!” Neil said. “Well, there’s a small endowment, of course, but most of the funds come through private investment.”
“Of course!” Constance straightened, eyes bright. “Your nefarious mystery organization must be funding the Athenaeum. That’s why they were able to make Julian their Johnny-on-the-spot for Neil’s dig—though why they chose him is anyone’s guess.”
“He’s probably related to somebody,” Adam sighed tiredly. “Where he comes from, they’re always handing out easy jobs to idiot nephews.”
“Where he comes from?” Ellie asked. “You mean England?”
“I mean rich people,” Adam corrected her. “That guy’s got idiot nephew written all over him.”
“And now they are after the Staff of Moses,” Mr. Al-Ahmed said flatly.
“You are speaking of the prophet Musa?” his wife cut in, her eyebrows arching with surprise.
“Dropped into the bulrushes. Adopted by an Egyptian Princess,” Constance recited easily. “Cursed Egypt with ten terrible plagues, freed the Hebrew slaves, and drowned Pharaoh’s army in the parting of the Red Sea.”
The others stared at her.
“What?” Constance returned blithely. “I don’t always use church as a chance to catch up on my adventure novels.”
“That would be the one,” Mrs. Al-Ahmed confirmed dryly.
“Let me see if I can remember all the plagues he brought with his staff,” Constance mused. “There were frogs, gnats, locusts, flies… er, pestilence?”
“Boils,” Ellie automatically corrected her.
“Turning water into blood,” Constance added. “Eternal darkness… well, a few days or so anyway… and the wholesale slaughter of helpless infants!”
An uncomfortable silence followed her words.
“Then we inspired him to throw down his rod,” Mrs. Al-Ahmed recited quietly. “And it swallowed their illusions. It is in our book, too.”
A chill danced across Ellie’s skin that defied the warmth of the night, and she remembered black stone smooth as water and the scarred face of a ghost.
“I’ve seen… felt, ” she corrected herself, “what an arcanum can do.” She raised her eyes to the rest of them. “I can’t let them find this one.”
“This is madness,” Neil announced, looking at them all with a dazed, shocked expression. “All of you are mad.”
“Where do we start?” Constance eagerly rubbed her hands together.
“How about with the ring?” Ellie looked pointedly at her brother.
Neil’s face was drawn, but his hand moved automatically to the pocket of his battered tweed waistcoat. He pulled out the electrum ring, and the others gathered around him—all but Adam, who remained by the window, and Mrs. Al-Ahmed, who watched in thoughtful silence from her chair.
“So these hieroglyphs spell the name Moseh,” Constance mused. “Which sounds an awful lot like Moses.”
“Moses is Moseh,” Neil grumbled. “It’s an Egyptian name—Moseh. We’re the ones who say it wrong.”
“To the Arabs, he is Musa,” Mr. Al-Ahmed offered. “For the Hebrews, Moshe.”
“It means ‘son of,’ and is generally preceded by the name of a patron deity,” Ellie added with a pointed look at her brother. “It’s an Egyptian name element ,”
“Not when the rest of the name has been blanked out,” Mr. Al-Ahmed noted distractedly, studying the ring as Neil held it out in the lamplight.
“It’s been blanked out because it’s Atenist,” Neil declared.
He shoved himself off the sofa with a new energy, pacing the room with the ring in his hand. “I knew it! I knew the connection would be there! But of course, she would have had to downplay it—to pretend loyalty to the regime that was defacing Akhenaten’s image from the walls of every temple from here to Aswan. But how could we not find some evidence of her continued sympathy for the cult that had been of such vital interest to her beloved…”
Neil trailed off as he realized the rest of the room had gone silent. Ellie was fighting to suppress a smile.
Constance arched an eyebrow. “You realize your sister is possibly the only other person in the room who knows what you’re talking about,” she pointed out, and then caught herself. “And Mr. Al-Ahmed, I should imagine.”
Mr. Al-Ahmed had carefully removed the jewelry box from his tool case, unwrapping it from the white froth of Constance’s scarf. He flashed her an indulgent smile before peering down once more at the inscription.
Ellie waded into the breach, as Neil was rotten at providing simple explanations for his favorite historical topics.
“Throughout the history of Egypt, the Egyptians worshiped an extensive pantheon of deities,” she explained. “There were sun gods and moon gods, gods that oversaw childbirth, gods of vegetation and farming, gods of death—”
“Loads of gods,” Constance said, sitting up straight and looking the part of the eager student. “Got it.”
“Then midway through the Eighteenth Dynasty, along comes a pharaoh named Akhenaten,” Ellie started.
“Actually, at the time he was made co-regent, he was Amenhotep IV,” Neil interrupted her quickly. “It was only after his father, Amenhotep III, had passed to the Field of Reeds that—”
“ Akhenaten, ” Ellie continued deliberately, cutting him short, “worshiped only one god—the Aten. As I mentioned back in the tomb, the Aten had originally been a relatively obscure form of the god of the sun, represented by the solar disk. But when Akhenaten became the sole king, he made the Aten the preeminent god of all of Egypt. A few years later, he went even further. He ruled that the Aten wasn’t just the most important of all the gods—it was the only god.”
“What did he do—outlaw all the others?” Constance suggested.
“No,” Neil replied defensively. He caught himself, his tone shifting. “I mean—possibly. It’s not entirely clear. But what is clear is that Akhenaten proclaimed the Aten not just as the chief among the gods, but as the only true god in existence.”
“You have to understand how revolutionary this was,” Ellie jumped in to explain. “This was thousands of years before the emergence of Judaism. The people who would later become the Israelites weren’t monotheists at this point in history. Their Yahweh was a tribal god—one that they thought was superior to all others, but his rivals were no less real than he was. It was only much later that the likes of Baal and Asherah came to be thought of as demons instead of deities. Akhenaten was the first person that we know of in history to say that there was only one. ”
“‘Oh sole god, like whom there is no other,’” Neil recited, “‘you created the world according to your desire, while you were alone.’”
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.”