Thirty-Five
E llie felt like she was walking through a dream. The halls and chambers around her whispered with the story of the woman who had become king.
She had read about Nefertiti before, of course. What self-respecting lady scholar of ancient history wouldn’t have paid special attention to a queen who was depicted on near equal footing with her husband, present at his side through everything from worship to war? Now she was faced with irrefutable evidence that the same woman had also ruled Egypt in her own right, guiding an empire with benevolence under the blessings of a compassionate sun.
A discovery like that destroyed paradigms and revolutionized entire schools of thought. To find the tomb at all would have been life-changing. To discover it untouched, with all its treasures left exactly where ancient hands had set them three thousand years ago, was nothing short of awe-inspiring.
Neil was a numb presence beside her, blinking with shock behind his spectacles. Sayyid had looked close to tears in the hallway above, where Ellie herself had been fighting the urge to break down into helpless, joyful laughter. Even Constance was caught up in the spell of the tomb, gazing with wide-eyed wonder and childlike excitement at each new secret it revealed.
Zeinab kept a grim set to her mouth, the lines of her body tense as a cat deciding whether to pounce or flee.
Adam, too, seemed more subdued rather than swept up in the excitement of the discovery. The wary glances he kept casting back the way they had come were a sobering reminder of their circumstances. Ellie couldn’t afford to stop and translate every line of hieroglyphs or carefully catalog each packed hoard of funerary objects. They had stumbled into this revolutionary discovery more or less under a gun, and she was deeply uncertain how much of it they would be able to save before this was all over.
Those worries crowded against the awe flooding her mind as Ellie turned the corner of the narrow corridor and found herself at the threshold of the final chamber.
Like the room before, the space was packed with grave goods. Gold shone at her from every corner of the massed artifacts that were piled halfway up the walls, chests and statues mingling with shining piles of jewels.
In the center of it all lay the sarcophagus.
Neferneferuaten’s resting place was a box of rare red granite, polished to a subtle sheen. The sides were carved with the many-handed disk of the Aten while winged goddesses stood sentinel on each corner, their arms held out in a gesture of protection.
The mortal remains of the larger-than-life figure who had decorated the paintings above lay inside—and stopped Ellie short. She was struck by the painful sense that this entire complex had been meant to remain inviolate, waiting for the moment when Neferneferuaten would answer the call of her god and join him in eternity.
The pharaoh-queen wasn’t a figure in a textbook anymore. She was a being of real flesh, blood, and feeling, who now lay in dusty silence amid the ancient relics of her life.
Ellie forced herself to examine the rest of the burial chamber. Between what was here and the inventory back in the treasure room, the tomb contained an absolute trove of priceless information about royal life in the late Eighteenth Dynasty. A full team of archaeologists could spend a lifetime cataloging, stabilizing, and analyzing it all.
She had absolutely no idea how they were going to locate a single was-scepter in the midst of it.
Her gaze rose from the grave goods to the walls. Like the hallway above, these were decorated with beautiful artwork. The paintings ran only three-quarters of the way around the room. They stopped at a bas relief that was only partially painted.
The murals had obviously been meant to continue. The pharaoh must have died too soon, forcing the royal artists to abandon the work while only partway complete.
Ellie stepped closer to the first panel, which sat nearest to the entrance. It depicted a group of captives kneeling before the looming figure of a conquering king.
“Amenhotep the Third.” Neil nodded to the cartouche by the pharaoh’s knee as he joined her. “Akhenaten’s father.”
“These look like members of a Semitic group,” Ellie said, noting the curled hair, bearded faces, and paler skin of the kneeling prisoners. “But they’re not all warriors. There are women and children here.”
“They still might have been war captives. Prizes taken after battle,” Neil pointed out.
“Slaves,” Sayyid clarified bluntly, stepping to Ellie’s other side.
Neil went still. “There’s a name here.” He lifted a hand, pointing to a cluster of hieroglyphs below the prisoners.
Ellie carefully leaned forward over the jumble of furniture that sat between her and the wall, squinting to read the phonetic symbols. “Ha… pi… ru.” She straightened, frowning. “Hapiru?”
Sayyid looked over at her sharply, his eyebrows rising. “The Hapiru was the name given by the Egyptians and the Akkadians to the nomadic people who roamed the deserts of the Sinai and the Red Sea.”
“Like the Bedouin,” Ellie filled in.
“Like the Hebrews ,” Neil corrected her, his voice a little strangled. He was still staring at the image. “The Hapiru are considered a plausible candidate for the people who would evolve into the tribes of the Hebrews.”
Sayyid and Neil locked eyes.
“You realize what this means,” Neil began urgently. “An Egyptian depiction of a group of people who might well have been early Hebrews captured and enslaved by a New Kingdom pharaoh…”
Sayyid clearly did realize what it meant. His eyes were wide with a shock and wonder that mirrored the expression on Neil’s face.
Academics and archaeologists had been searching for years for evidence that the Hebrews might actually have once been enslaved in Egypt, as the Bible claimed.
Now they were looking at exactly that.
The shared awe between Sayyid and Ellie’s brother lasted only for a moment. Then Sayyid’s expression closed, and he looked away.
In the painting, the Aten shone down from the sky above the captives… but oddly, its rays didn’t center on the noble figure of the pharaoh, as they usually did in Amarna-period portraits featuring royalty. Instead, the long beams with their delicate hands brushed against the slight form of a child who knelt among the mix of captive warriors and their families. The little girl had high cheekbones, straight brows, and a generous mouth—features that Ellie recognized, because she had seen them over and over again in the hallway above.
“That’s Nefertiti!” she blurted out, pointing to the girl. “That’s her among the prisoners! But why would she be there? Unless…” The epiphany swept over Ellie, making her feel dizzy. “Could she possibly have been a slave herself?”
“Of course!” Neil burst out. “Why hadn’t I considered that before? It’s right there—it’s right in her name!”
“What are you talking about?” Ellie pushed back.
“Nefertiti,” Sayyid cut in solemnly, his eyes locked on the girl in the mural. “That is what it means. ‘The Beautiful One From Afar.’”
The beautiful one from afar… The significance shocked Ellie to silence as she gazed at the slender child who sat straight-backed under the benevolent rays of her god.
Constance pressed in, drawn by their outbursts. “But who’s that fellow beside her with the rest of the little hands on him?”
Ellie was startled to realize that Constance was right. Another figure sat beside the future queen, a boy whose body was half-obscured by her own. His shoulders were also graced by the soft, brushing touch of the rays of the Aten.
The features of the two children looked remarkably similar. Ellie wondered if perhaps that was just a shortcut taken by the ancient artist who had carefully chiseled their forms out of the plaster covering the walls… but none of the rest of the assembled captives had those same high cheekbones and full lips.
Sensing a deeper story, Ellie looked at the next image.
The child Nefertiti sat on the ground between two noble figures who loomed in throne-like chairs to either side of her. A cat rolled lazily at her feet, sleekly gray and dotted with black spots.
The boy from the previous scene was there as well. Once more, his form was almost obscured by that of his sister—but Ellie could just pick out the lines of his profile where he sat behind her like a shadow. He held a tablet and stylus in his hands in the pose of a young scholar.
Sayyid pointed to the hieroglyphs by the man and woman who framed the two children. “These are Ay’s names and titles. Ay and his wife Tey.”
Ellie felt a little chill. She was looking at an image of the same Ay who had been a leading courtier during the reign of Akhenaten before placing Tutankhamun on the throne… only to rule Egypt himself after the boy-king’s mysterious death.
And then undo all Akhenaten’s accomplishments, right down to chiseling his face from monuments across Egypt.
“Nefertiti was Ay’s slave?” Ellie guessed tightly.
Sayyid shook his head, pointing to another cluster of hieroglyphs. “Not just his slave. This says that she was his daughter.”
“How is that possible if she was a war captive?” Ellie demanded.
“Egyptian families sometimes adopted slaves as their full legal children, especially if they had none of their own to honor their funerary rites after they died,” Sayyid explained.
“But what about the boy?” Ellie asked.
Sayyid frowned as he studied the glyphs that surrounded the painting. “I don’t see a name.”
“It’s obviously Moses,” Constance said with a dismissive wave of her hand.
Neil went still beside her. “But… that almost fits. I mean, it isn’t a perfect parallel—Tey wasn’t an Egyptian princess, but she was a very high-ranking aristocrat in Akhenaten’s court.”
“Only he was captured instead of washed up in a basket,” Constance filled in cheerfully.
“It is a more likely story anyway,” Zeinab offered as she stuck her head under a table for a better look at a pile of jumbled relics. “What mother in Egypt would set her child into the Nile in a basket? You would be asking for the baby to be eaten by crocodiles.”
“Well, there you have it, then,” Constance concluded. “Moses was obviously Nefertiti’s brother.”
“Her brother?” Ellie protested.
“Just look at them,” Constance countered with an airy wave of her hand.
Ellie did—and found herself once more taking in the remarkably similar features of the two captive children.
Constance didn’t wait for a response, perfectly comfortable with her conclusions, whether the scholars in their group agreed or not. “This one looks like a wedding,” she mused as she reached the next mural.
Nefertiti had grown in this depiction, appearing as a lovely young woman. She faced the distinct, lanky figure of Akhenaten, gazing up at him with an affection that Ellie could sense across the centuries as the rays of the Aten fell down over their shoulders.
“The Egyptians didn’t have weddings,” Neil countered a little crossly. “Marriages were most likely arranged through an exchange of gifts.”
“They’re holding hands,” Constance countered authoritatively.
“I didn’t say that meant they couldn’t like each other!” Neil protested.
“They look happy,” Constance concluded as though that was the end of the matter, leaving Neil to gape at her helplessly.
In the scenes that followed, the royal couple held up offerings to their god and played with a growing cluster of children. They were moments of warmth and intimacy, offering a glimpse into the life of the woman who now lay behind Ellie in that gleaming granite sarcophagus.
“Oh!” Constance exclaimed softly. “Everyone is dying in this one!”
Ellie joined her at the next panel.
In the vivid colors on the wall, Nefertiti wept over a funeral bier. Three bodies lay on top of it. Sayyid quietly pointed out the hieroglyphs identifying them. “The Great King’s Mother Tiye. His daughter Meketaten. And the Horus of Gold, King of Upper and Lower Egypt, Neferkheperure Waenre Akhenaten.”
“Her mother-in-law, her daughter… and her husband,” Ellie quietly filled in.
“It was the plague,” Neil elaborated solemnly as he gazed at the mural beside her. “It swept through Egypt near the end of Akhenaten’s reign, perhaps brought in by a party of foreign diplomats. Thousands of people died.”
In the detailed, realistic style of the ancient artist, Nefertiti’s grief looked raw. Tears coursed down her cheeks as she extended her arms in a gesture of despair.
The rays of the Aten spilled softly down onto her bowed back, tiny hands brushing the length of her spine.
The last image was unfinished. The woman it depicted was no longer Nefertiti but rather the pharaoh Neferneferuaten. She stood in royal proportions over the massed people of Egypt, who were depicted in hues from soft copper to midnight black. The pharaoh was kilted like a man with the double crown of Egypt on her brow and a false beard on her chin—but her face was still the same, with those elegant cheekbones and wide-set eyes.
To her left, she raised up a hand to the rays of the Aten. To her right, she reached down to the people crowded by her sandaled feet. An assemblage of otherworldly figures clustered in her palm—blue-faced Osiris and hawk-beaked Horus mingling with Hathor, Isis, and even Amun with his crown of soaring plumes.
Some of the people below the pharaoh reached out to accept the deities while others held up their hands to the greater god that rose over Neferneferuaten’s head.
“Why is she handing them those strange little dolls?” Constance asked.
“Those are the old gods of Egypt,” Ellie replied slowly as the significance of the image dawned. “I… think she’s giving them back.”
“Akhenaten didn’t strictly ban the worship of other gods, but he removed all royal patronage from their temples,” Neil explained. “And certainly no one who admitted allegiance to another cult would have been granted a position in his court.”
“She must have been trying to change that,” Ellie said, following a sense of intuition that tugged at her from the noble figure on the wall. “To show some grace to those of her subjects who found their solace in the other deities, even as she remained loyal to her own god.”
“But why is it only half painted?” Constance asked.
“I… think she must have died before it could be completed,” Ellie replied uneasily.
“From the plague?” Constance pressed.
Ellie found herself turning to look back at the other wall—at the stern face of the grand courtier Ay. Any man who would eventually rise to the position of pharaoh must have possessed a great deal of ambition. Just how far might Ay have gone to consolidate his own grip on power? Would he have eliminated his own adopted daughter if she stood in his way?
“Oh, but there’s one more!” Constance exclaimed, moving a little further along. “It’s very small, though.”
She leaned over a beautifully preserved model of the great solar barque—a long, narrow boat lined with dozens of tiny oars. It sat atop a carved wooden table painted and shaped like a roaring leopard.
A smaller carving marked the wall above the ship. Beside it, the plaster split in a dark, thin fracture like a lightning bolt that darted from the ceiling to disappear under the piled artifacts on the floor.
It certainly wasn’t unusual to see faults in the stone of a space that had rested in the earth for three thousand years, Ellie reminded herself—but she also couldn’t help but think of the bigger gap through which they had all climbed into the tomb to begin with.
A trail of unease crept through the back of her mind at the thought.
The image beside the crack was of a very different nature than the grand royal portraits Ellie had just been studying. Instead of an elegant bas relief, it looked like a rough caricature scraped into the virgin plaster with the tip of a dagger.
The style of the work was also entirely different from that of the other tomb art. The eyes of the roughly drawn figures were too large, their noses prominent and angled.
In fact, to Ellie’s eyes, it did not look Egyptian at all.
“This is clearly a later graffito,” Sayyid commented. “Something you might expect to find if the tomb had been looted.”
Despite the artistic differences, Ellie could pick out the figure meant to represent Neferneferuaten. A rough approximation of the double crown had been slashed into the plaster atop her head, and something about the noble lift of her chin reminded her of the other portraits she had seen.
In the graffito, the pharaoh held her hand out over a cluster of smaller figures who faced away from her, walking toward the rising disk of the Aten.
“Hold on!” Neil burst out. “There’s cuneiform here!”
Ellie had taken the marks he pointed to as natural defects in the plaster—but realized that he was right. She leaned further over the exquisitely formed oars and sails of the solar barque for a better look.
“Those phonemes sound out Hapiru .” She pointed at a cluster of lines and wedges. “And this is… durāru . Hmm.”
She cast a questioning glance at Neil, who shrugged helplessly.
“Durāru… roaming?” she offered with a frown. “Converging? No, no—that’s not it. Freedom!” she concluded triumphantly. “Durāru is freedom.”
“What about this one?” Constance asked.
She pointed to a smaller cluster of cuneiform. The symbols hung over the head of the tallest of the people in the group that departed under Neferneferuaten’s hand—the only figure turned to gaze back at the pharaoh. The man carried a staff, the object primitively represented by a line topped with a few jagged slashes. Even though the drawing was primitively done, sadness marked the rough lines of his features.
Ellie’s brain automatically picked out the sounds indicated by the Akkadian characters.
“Moseh,” she said, her voice tight as she stared at the figure scratched into the wall. “It says Moseh .”
Neil paled beside her. He whirled back to the other portraits. “This… this is all of it. The whole story.” He pointed a shaking finger. “The taking into captivity. The plague. The pharaoh who freed the slaves. It’s all here—the entire bloody Exodus is on these walls!”
“Allahu ‘akhbar,” Sayyid breathed, his eyes wide as he looked over the murals. “You mad fool—you were actually right!”
Neil lifted his hands to his head, swaying a little. “I… I think I need to sit down.”
He plopped onto the floor, bracing his forehead against his palms.
Ellie’s mind spun with the implication of the evidence before her—that the prophet of three of the world’s great faiths had found some part of his inspiration in Akhenaten’s religious revolution.
It was all right here, where it had lain in secret for three thousand years.
The impact of that made her wonder if she ought to sit down as well.
Adam’s voice cut through the spell. “I hate to break up the party, but I’m counting over seventy-five staffs in this chamber alone. And that’s just what I can see—not what’s likely buried behind all the rest of this stuff. If we wanna find this arcanum before the sun comes up and makes sneaking out of this place a whole lot more complicated, we need to narrow things down.”
Ellie raised her eyes to the dagger-carved sketch of the prophet on the wall—and the significance of those scratched lines at the top of the rod he carried in his hand clicked into place.
The angular line like an elongated snout. The two upward dashes like pointed ears.
The man in the graffito, gazing back at his royal sister, was holding a was-scepter in his hand.