"No chance of that. I barely met her myself, since she died when I was six. I told you that. But I don't think Maman would have approved of you either, my little opera queen who makes babies. By the way, is Auset here tonight?"

"No, she reminded me the last time she came to one of my performances she got pregnant. I said I'd call tomorrow and we'd make plans to get together."

"Uh, you might want to make that call tonight." Valerie leaned against the back of his chair.

"Why? What's going on?" He snatched up tissues to wipe makeup-tinted cold cream from his throat.

"Derek, darling. We have an emergency. My department chairman has tracked me down and is about to take the excavation away from me."

The singer turned around to face her, Orpheus mascara magnifying his already large eyes. "I don't understand. Did you tell him you've found something?"

"No, of course not. He'll try to publish it under his own name.

He's a predator, a hyena, showing up after someone else's hunt. Once he's gotten his hands on the discovery, I become invisible. We have to open the tomb before he gets there."

"Before he gets there? What"-his voice dropped in pitch and volume-"does that mean?"

"It means we have to leave a day before he does."

Derek threw his makeup-stained towel aside. "But the day before he leaves is-"

"Tonight." She nodded.

* 48 *

"Tonight?" His jaw fell behind pursed lips, and his eyebrows did a ballet from astonishment to indignation. "I...just...sang...an...entire...

opera."

She picked up his leather rucksack from a chair and began dropping in objects from the dressing room table: cold cream, towel, bar of soap, toothbrush. "You've got clean socks and undies along, I assume? Good.

I've already called my foreman. We'll take a taxi from here to the stable in Giza where he's waiting with the camels. I'll change there." She zipped up his bag and reached for the doorknob.

He stood dumbfounded, his scowl rendered ferocious by stage-makeup eyebrows. He looked at his wristwatch. "But it's-"

She threw his rucksack over her shoulder and opened the door.

"Don't whine, Derek. Midnight is perfect. Nice and cool."

v Midnight was long past when the little caravan set out southwestward over the Giza plateau. Four camels padded, somnambulant. Ahmed drew ahead, leading the heavily laden pack animal and leaving the two friends to their own company behind him.

They rode without speaking, adapting the sway of their bodies to the lopsided gait of their mounts. In the quiet of the desert they listened to the chuf ng of the camels, the soft opping of the animals' feet, the creaking of the saddle frames.

Derek dgeted on his unfamiliar seat, leaning forward, then sideways, shing with his foot for a stirrup that was not there.

"Valerie, I'm sure we look really fabulous on these camels, but my butt's killing me. Is there any special reason that we're not riding in a nice jeep?"

"Very special. No road. The sand's hard-packed here, but it gets very soft about a kilometer from the excavation and won't support the weight of a car."

"What's it like at the camp? Am I going to have to sleep on the sand? I have such sensitive skin." He touched his brow.

"Don't worry your pretty head, Derek. The workers sleep on mats in a common tent, but I have a tent all to myself. You'll be accorded the status of weakling, thus permitted to sleep on a camp bed there."

"'Weakling' is ne with me. I don't have to sleep on rocks to prove I'm a man."

* 49 *

"No, you don't. And since we're on the subject, what'll you do about Auset?"

"I called her while you were changing and apologized for leaving.

When I get back to Cairo, I'll nd out what she needs. You know, just because I'm gay doesn't mean I'm irresponsible. And, well...the more I think about having an Egyptian son, the more it pleases me. I like these people."

"I do too. But not all of them like us." She raised her hand to the barely closed wound that she had covered with her head cloth. "I told you I was accosted at the pyramids by fundamentalists. What I didn't tell you is that I nearly shot one of them."

"Girlfriend, you can't go around shooting people for that. And besides, you're asking for trouble. You're doing the Antiquities president's wife, remember?" He looked pensive. "Weren't you already getting in trouble back in school for that sort of thing? Some little Egyptian girl they caught you in bed with?"

"She was Moroccan. I forgot I told you that story. Yes, the nuns expelled her, but they couldn't send me home, so they simply beat me and locked me in a dark room for the rest of the night. I was nine years old. After that I simply made up friends I couldn't lose-Cleopatra, Hatchepsut, Ramses..." Her voice trailed off as she remembered loneliness.

"I know what you mean. Only in my case, it was Batman and Robin." He sighed. "We spend our lives looking for love, don't we?

And here we are, adults, still looking. Or have you found it?"

She dropped her voice, although Ahmed was a good hundred meters ahead of them. "With Jameela? I don't think climbing through a window for a few hours of forbidden sex with a powerful man's wife counts as true love."

"Oooh, when you say it like that, it sounds delicious!"

"Yes, but dangerous. Islam is just as hostile as Christianity is to people like us. More so. They all go by the same book of rules."

"What's the answer, then? What religion would accept us?"

The nocturnal predators became audible-the shriek of a kestrel, the high-pitched yipping of desert foxes, and farther away the deeper bark of the jackal.

"Listen to them. They were here long before there was a West.

Before there were pharaohs, even. The Egyptians made a theology of them."

* 50 *

"Vultures and jackals and snakes, oh my!"

"Don't scoff at vultures and snakes, Derek. They've survived for millennia in a searing desert. Particularly those two. They were revered as protectors of Pharaoh. That's why their heads are on his crown. Not to mention that we wouldn't dare eat them. But for a million years, they've eaten us."

"Eeeeewww!"

"It's just the balance of things." She patted her knapsack, which hung from the horn of her saddle. "The papyrus that woman gave me yesterday lists certain crimes. Holding back the Nile ood, driving animals from their pasture, for example. Even tampering with the merchants' scales. It's all about balance."

"Hmm." Derek rode for a while without responding. "God's world as ecosystem. I like that. But who was that woman anyhow-the one who gave you the palette and scroll? Did you ever nd out?"

"No, I didn't have a chance to ask around the souq."

"She was a looker, too. Do you think she was making a pass?"

"I dunno. I've been thinking about it."

"I'll bet you have, girlfriend," he said dreamily.

In the bluish desert light Valerie watched his outline slouch as he managed to doze even while in the awkward camel saddle. Suddenly a screech cut through the darkness, and a ragged form swept across the face of the moon.

"Huh? What the hell was that?" He lurched upright.

Valerie laughed. "You'd better stay awake, cheri. Looks like there's a vulture watching."

"A vulture? Oh, Jesus," he muttered.

She chuckled again. "Jesus? I don't think so. We're way out of his jurisdiction."

* 51 *

* 52 *

CHAPTER VII:.

THE TOMB.

Alhamdulillah!" Ahmed exclaimed as the excavation came into sight.

Slouched in a semitrance from the six hours of monotonous rocking, Valerie was startled by his voice. She squinted through the folds of her head cloth at the blurred ellipse of activity a shade darker than the eye-scorching sand on both sides of it and the featureless shapes moving in the distance. "It looks like everyone's already up working.

That's a good sign."

"Look!" Derek awoke as well and leaned forward, rubbing his back. "They've seen us too. Someone's running out to meet us."

"It is my son," Ahmed said with quiet pride.

The boy waved both hands excitedly, and as he neared, Valerie could see that his galabaya was torn in several places.

He met the oncoming camels and then danced alongside them, breathless. "As salaamu 'alaykum. Father! Doktor Foret! Come along, quickly. We have found a door!"

"Good man, Ibrim! Let's have a look."

At the edge of the excavation site, the four animals knelt down rst at the front and then at the back and blinked long eyelashes at the boy who took their reins. Valerie and Ahmed swung their legs over the saddle post with the ease of long familiarity.

Glancing behind her, Valerie watched Derek pry himself with obvious effort from his own mount. "You okay?" she asked.

"I'm ne, really. I'll be along in a sec." He stamped his feet and squeezed the back of his thighs, encouraging circulation, then limped behind the others.

* 53 *

In and around the pit, Arab workers leaned on their shovels and greeted the archaeologist as she arrived. She felt a wave of affection for the men who had labored while she was away. She offered her hand rst to Hamada, Ahmed's second in command. A slender man in a wide turban from a family of Su s, he had a mysterious authority. Though she had never heard him raise his voice, he had kept the men working intensely while she was away. "Hamada, thank you. Selim, good job.

Thank you for all your work, Sha k." She met each of them eye to eye for a moment as she walked past them. "Gamel, can I use your torch?

Thank you." She clicked the switch once, to test the batteries.

Valerie stepped down into the cut they had made in the chalky ground. It was obvious that in their hurry to uncover the ramp and tomb entrance, the men had dug only the narrowest channel. She felt the abrasions of the shale and limestone chips on both sides and understood why everyone's clothing looked so ragged. Finally she stood at the end of the pit before what was unmistakably a door. She pressed her hand against it.

Sealed. The lumps of clay were still pressed into the door lintel and jamb, and the priests' markings were still readable. She ran ngers gently over the priestly seal, a vertical cartouche of the Anubis jackal squatting on a platform over nine captives. It was an ef cient way of suggesting harm to any who might violate the tomb.

"Have you taken pictures of the seal?" she called up to the men at the edge of the pit.

"Yes, many pictures," one of them said.

"All right then. Ahmed, have the men break it open."

The workers chiseled around the sides of the mud-brick door and pulled at it with crowbars. A section broke away; then the whole door collapsed in a shower of mud bricks. They stepped back, fanning at the cloud of dust until it settled.

Derek threaded his way down the ramp to join them. "Oh! It's just a tunnel!" He peered into the darkness.

"There's supposed to be a tunnel." Valerie stepped over the rubble, swinging the light beam back and forth, illuminating rough-cut stone walls and the oor, which inclined gently downward. At the end of the corridor, they stood before a second sealed doorway.

"Give me your tools, Ahmed," Valerie said, hooking the ashlight onto her belt. The foreman handed over chisel and hammer, and she gave a single tap with the chisel tip, knocking away a chip from the * 54 *

surface. "Wood covered with mud plaster. Standard."

She scraped a layer of plaster from the surface and incised a circle a few centimeters in diameter. Euphoric but exhausted, she wiped her sleeve across her face and began hammering. In three rm taps she was through.

There was a faint whoosh of air moving from one pressure to another. She sniffed carefully. "No organic gasses." She hammered around the periphery, enlarging the hole to the size of a st. Pressing her forehead to the wood over the aperture, she peered in over the rim of the ashlight, waiting for her eye to adapt. In a moment she could see it. She felt like weeping.

The circle of light slid along a wing to a red-orange disk anked by cobras, then to another wing. Unmistakable. The merged goddesses of Upper and Lower Egypt.

"Bonjour, Mesdames," she murmured through the hole. "Have you been waiting for me? God knows, I've been waiting for you." She stepped back and covered her face again with her head cloth. "Finish the job, Ahmed."

The foreman hooked the crowbar into the wood and pushed the iron bar sideways. The door split cleanly at the center and fell in two pieces against the opposite walls. The group waited for a few moments, and then Valerie stepped inside. She turned slowly, sweeping her light beam like a lighthouse, in a full circle.

"Oh...yes," she exhaled.

The four walls were covered in brilliant colors. Scenes, texts, invocations called out to her as if they had sound. The oor was cluttered with objects, and she dared not take another step for fear of trampling on them.

She was drenched with sweat and could scarcely breathe in the dust that still hung in the air. Yet when she drew off the long twisted cloth from her head, it seemed as if a breeze wafted over her face, cooling the fever of her wound. She felt a familiarity, a powerful deja vu, like a traveler coming home. The texts on the wall seemed private messages, and the mummy, which she knew with certainty would be there, waited for her alone.

"Oh...wow," Derek whispered from the doorway. Around him in the tunnel the men murmured, "Alhamdulillah."