He was not the persona he projected—an arrogant, quick-witted Brit used to being the smartest one in the room. That, I learned, was an act. He had nightmares that made him thrash in my arms. He was mischievous, leaving me dirty hieroglyphic messages that would steam up in the bathroom mirror when we were showering. He touched me as if I were made of gold or mist or memory.
It was hard to hide a romance from eight people living in a single small household, but we were determined. We had to work together at thewadion the newly discovered dipinto, so we continued to snipe at each other and generally act as if we could not stand to be in close proximity, when—in fact—every time Wyatt passed me he’d slide his hand along the shallow of my spine, and when we were sitting beside each other at dinner, I’d hook my pinkie finger with his and draw his hand onto my thigh beneath the table.
When the household napped in the high heat of the afternoon, I would listen for Wyatt’s footfall outside my bedroom door. There were two loose tiles that rocked, no matter how quietly you moved. I’d count to a hundred, and then I would follow. Sometimes I would have to sneak past Hasib, Harbi’s father, sleeping in the shade of the courtyard underneath the bright flags of laundry flapping on the line. As soon as I was outside the gates of the Dig House, I’d look down at the dust, shading my eyes from the glare of the sun. Wyatt would have left me a handful of stones in the shape of an arrow, or a line carved along the edge of the path that led to the bank of the river. I would be halfway to the Nile when I saw him waiting. Or he’d spring from a crop of corn planted by a farmer and wrap his arms around me from behind.
We stole those hours for ourselves. The sun never bothered us, even when our cheeks pinkened and our hair bleached lighter. We would walk the narrow paths between raised garden beds, kissing amidst the sharp smell of wild onions. We lay on a bed of hay, Wyatt painting me from nape to navel with a brush made of timothy, as a donkey rolled in the dust and sang for us. We would sit on the edge of the river and talk—about his father, who had managed to deplete the family fortune on a series of terrible business investments, but still insisted on sending his sons to Eton to keep up appearances; about my mother, who worked two jobs to pay off my student loans. What it would be like to see our names in print together. How it felt to get lost in time by getting lost in time.
At night, I’d count off the number of people who headed to the showers, waiting until I was second to last. Then I’d wander into the bathroom and Wyatt would follow—which wasn’t odd, because there were multiple stalls—except that we’d wind up in one together. He would lift my hips and pin me against the tile wall. Or he’d sink to the tile floor and feast on me until my own knees gave out. I remember his head thrown back in the steam; his fingers leaving bruises on my thighs. I remember being so close to him that even the water couldn’t slip between us.
—
WHENHOWARDCARTERfound the mummy of Tutankhamun and attempted to lift it out, he didn’t realize the innermost coffin was solid gold and the entire operation nearly collapsed. For Djehutnakht’s mummy, Safiya has set up a winch, positioned over the burial shaft on long wooden legs. The conservator has already removed the two coffin lids to the main tomb chamber, and has padded the mummy where it lies and bound it tightly so that it doesn’t move as the nesting-doll coffins are hauled up by local workers. From there, she will move the mummy into a wooden crate that breathes. Mummies are not unwrapped anymore, but given CT scans instead. Wyatt has teamed up with a hospital in Minya for that sometime in the future, but he’s not a physical anthropologist, so it’s not the focus of this discovery. I know that everyone equates Egyptology with mummies, but the truth is, they don’t really tell us all that much. Yes, someone died thousands of years ago. Always good to confirm. But it’s what’s underneath him in that coffin that might help us understand how Djehutynakht lived, what he believed, what he hoped for.
The tomb chapel is once again packed with people—Mostafa Awad is back, and there are antiquities directors I’ve never seen before, plus Safiya has brought a team with her to assist with the transfer of the mummy from coffin to crate. We all technically have work we could do in the tomb but this is one of those days we will be telling the story of for years to come, and Wyatt doesn’t seem inclined to order anyone back to copying texts on the walls. We mill around, listening to the call of the foreman at the winch and the coordinated shouts from the workers below as the pulley system is engaged. Inch by inch the coffins are lifted, until finally from my vantage point behind Wyatt, I can see the cedar lip of the coffin emerging from the burial shaft.
It takes the better part of the morning for the entire coffin to clear the shaft and balance beneath the winch over the hole. Three more hours for it to be gently removed from the pulleys and ropes and set on padded splints in the tomb chapel. We work past lunch, when the sun is bleaching the sand and the rock around us and the heat becomes a living thing, because no one wants to leave before seeing this through.
Finally, the wooden coffin is settled and the conservation team can do their work. They gently lift the mummy from where he rests on his side and place him on his back in the waiting crate. Like a transplant surgeon waiting for the handoff of the organ, Wyatt then takes his place at the center of the action. Alberto seems to be everywhere at once, photographing the transfer of the mummy and the golden funerary mask and the reveal of the interior coffin.
The transfer of the coffins has dislodged more limestone dust, as has the removal of the mummy. Wyatt waits impatiently for Alberto to finish documenting the inside of the narrow cedar box and then takes a clean brush from his pocket. He leans way down, stretching to reach the bottom, gently brushing away the powder to get a better look at the floorboards of the coffin, which were previously obscured by the mummy.
With a whoop of delight, he drops the brush onto the stone floor of the tomb chapel, lifts me off my feet, and swings me in a circle. I stiffen, aware that everyone in the vicinity is staring at him. At us.
But then he sets me down and I completely disregard their raised eyebrows. Because there on the bottom of Djehutynakht’s inner coffin is a wavy line of blue, a rolling stripe of black, a narrow red rectangle. Egyptology’s newest discovery is the world’s oldest version of the Book of Two Ways.
—
THE SEASON WEhad a hidden relationship, Wyatt would come to my twin bed every night, and to fit we’d flatten our bodies together. I got so used to falling asleep beside him that I couldn’t do it on my own, which is why one night when he didn’t come to the shower or to my bedroom, I found myself headed to his room instead.
I collided with him in the hallway in the dark. He steadied my shoulders, dropping the comforter he carried. “Change of scenery,” he whispered.
I knew he was headed to thewadiwithout him saying so. There was a guard stationed there at night now, but we would tell thegaffirthat we wanted to look at the inscription with glancing light, which you sometimes did after dark. Wyatt gave me a headlamp, and we struck out, two shooting stars.
Underneath the inscription, Wyatt spread the comforter and then gestured to it. “After you, my queen.”
I stretched out. “Queen?” I said. “How come I can’t be a king?”
He laughed. “Like Hatshepsut?”
She had been the daughter of Thutmose I, and became queen of Egypt when she married her half brother, Thutmose II. When he died, she acted as the reigning queen until her stepson, the baby Thutmose III, got older. But because she had all these other remarkable qualifications like bloodline and ritual training, she decided she shouldn’t limit herself. She became co-king around 1473B.C.E., taking on male royal titles.
“She was pretty damn ambitious,” Wyatt said.
I came up on my elbows. “How come when a woman takes power it’s ambitious? And when a man does it, it’s the natural order of things?” I frowned. “Being politically motivated and being female aren’t mutually exclusive. For all we know, she was in the middle of a family crisis. Like maybe someone was threatening to take the throne from her stepson and she had to figure out how to save it. That’s just being a good mom.”
“Mommy dearest, maybe. After she died, Thutmose III smashed all her monuments and erased her name—”
“Not till it was time for his own kid, Amenhotep, to take over. Being a woman was literally the least important thing about her. She didn’t hide it. In art, she wore anemesheaddress and a male kilt and was topless—but you could still see she had breasts.”
Wyatt unbuttoned my shirt. “Do tell.”
“Even when she was a king, her name was still written as Foremost of the Noble Ladies. And all the royal texts describing her have female pronouns.”
He nuzzled my neck, tugging down my pants. “I love it when you get all feminist.”
I swatted him. “She also built Deir el-Bahari as a huge memorial temple and she led a trading expedition to Punt that was huge—”
“You know what else is huge?”
