Behind his back, Wyatt met my gaze. The secret was caught between us like a star, its edges sharp, its seduction blinding.
—
DUMPHRIES CELEBRATED WITHbourbon. Alotof bourbon. We sat on the roof beneath the same constellations that pharaohs had seen, and our mentor toasted us. “To Wyatt’s bladder and Dawn’s eagle eyes,” he said, “which have transported this dig season into the realm of something truly spectacular.” He declared that we would use the rest of our brief time in Deir el-Bersha to split into two teams: one that would continue the work at Djehutyhotep’s tomb, and one—led by Wyatt and me—that would copy the newly discovered dipinto and get it ready for publication. But because we had twice the work to do in the same amount of time, now our celebration ended by nine o’clock.
When I left, Wyatt was doing shots with some of the younger grad students. Dumphries and I went down the staircase, shoulder to shoulder. At the spot where we’d part ways to go to our individual rooms, he put his hands in his pockets and rocked back on his heels. His eyelids were at half-mast. “Dawn,” he told me, “I am quite glad U Chicago relinquished you to us.” Then he gave me a little bow and walked away. Drunk on bourbon and on this unexpected praise, I made my way back to my own room. The walls of the Dig House slanted, and the floor tipped beneath my feet. I closed my door and tumbled onto the bed, still fully clothed when I fell asleep.
I woke up tangled in a cocoon of darkness, with someone’s hand over my mouth. I thrashed against the sheets, my eyes going wide, and then as they adjusted to the darkness, I saw Wyatt. He was sitting on the edge of my bed, outlined in moonlight. He let go of me and put a finger to his lips.Shh.
“Come on,” he whispered.
My mother had told me that people are born leaders, or they are born followers.Be the first,Maidan,she would tell me,or all you will see is the back of someone braver than you.I had always believed that I was a trailblazer, but the truth is, I would have followed Wyatt anywhere that night. If he’d walked me to the edge of the earth, I would have stepped off right behind him.
Instead, he held up a full bottle of bourbon from Dumphries’s private collection. “Did you steal that?” I whispered, and he just grinned.
We slipped out of the Dig House, and Wyatt’s hand curled around mine. His palm was warm and a perfect fit—so necessary pressed against mine that I wondered how I hadn’t noticed, all this time, that something was missing.
The desert at night was a world of shapes and shadows—the rough, undulating tongue of a beast beneath my feet, the eye of the moon peeking out from a veil of clouds, the sky as wide as a scar. I would not have been surprised to see a basilisk rise in our path and turn its stone stare on us, to have a sphinx block our way with a riddle. We didn’t speak, as if words might break the spell.
Wyatt didn’t turn on the flashlight he carried in his other hand until we reached thewadi. Almost by instinct, we navigated to the rocky ledge that shaded the dipinto. In the dark, it was a smudge of color. He opened the bottle of bourbon and drank from its neck, then passed it to me. “To Djehutynakht,” he toasted. “We’re going to find him.”
“We?” I asked.
He nodded.
Dumphries had not mentioned searching for this lost tomb. He was already busy with his work in a different tomb, and going on a wild goose chase for Djehutynakht without actual directions or a starting point didn’t seem like a smart use of time. But just because Dumphries was too busy or too close to retirement to take on a challenge didn’t mean we had to let it fall to the wayside.
We would be a team, McDowell & Armstrong, and we would unearth the tomb of Djehutynakht. Our work on the Book of Two Ways would be seminal, thanks to a new version found at the bottom of an intact coffin we could only dream about right now. Little girls who never pictured themselves as archaeologists would know my name. We’d cochair an Egyptology department at a university—Wyatt focusing on philology, while I specialized in iconography and imagery. We would be interviewed by every foreign press about what we’d found underneath a rock ledge.
A dipinto. A tomb.
Each other.
I glanced at Wyatt from the corner of my eye. He was sitting against the rock wall, underneath the dipinto. “How?” I asked.
He understood immediately what I was talking about. “I don’t know. Of all the parts that were damaged, ithadto be the numerical distances.” Without the actual directions once given in cubits in that text, it was going to be a struggle to find Djehutynakht’s final resting place. The necropolis had been excavated for nearly two hundred years by Egyptologists; how could all of those archaeologists have missed a tomb?
“Well,” I said. “If it was easy, then someone else would have probably found it by now.”
“True. We have a lot of work to do.” Wyatt reached for the bourbon again. “But tonight, Olive…we celebrate.”
We drank, sitting in the quiet, muddled joy that was still left over from the day, much like the heat that the sand retained. I thought of how perfect it was that we were drinking, here, just like Djehutyhotep had thousands of years ago.
“What are you thinking about?” Wyatt asked.
That your long eyelashes are criminally wasted on a guy. “What it would have been like here during the Sothic rising,” I said.
He took my hand and brought it to his lips. Such a courtly gesture, and so British, and still, when his mouth touched my skin I shivered. “One unique is the sister,” he murmured. “Without her equal, more beautiful than all women. Behold her like the star, having appeared in glory at the beginning of a good year.”
Wyatt was quoting Ancient Egyptian love poetry. Festivals were social get-togethers, among the few places to meet someone outside your village and hook up. To that end, poems would be exchanged to attract someone of the opposite sex. “Shining of excellence, luminous of hue,” he said. “Beautiful of eyes when glancing, sweet her lips when speaking…for her no word is excessive.”
His voice was a river, and I was stone, and every syllable reshaped me. “Long of neck,” he said, leaning closer to kiss a spot beneath my ear. “Luminous of chest.” His teeth, on my collarbone. “True lapis is her hair.” He tugged loose the tie of my braid and unraveled it with his free hand, sliding his palm up to my shoulder. “Her arms putting on gold…her fingers like lotuses.” He finished where he’d started, kissing my hand, his tongue a quick brand between my knuckles. “Nowwhat are you thinking about, Olive?” he whispered.
At that point, I couldn’t answer. I couldn’t form words.
Wyatt laid me down on the ground beneath the dipinto, cradling the back of my head. My hands fisted, sand spilling through them like through an hourglass.
“Maybe once, instead of admiring your brain,” Wyatt murmured, “I could admire your body?”
