| Subject: Chapter 1 |
Author:
Kate
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Date Posted: 20:01:59 03/29/01 Thu
In reply to:
by Kate
's message, "Things My Mother Taught Me" on 19:49:51 03/29/01 Thu
Chapter 1
Trust your instincts.
When Milla had reached the dig this morning, she'd actually been chilly. Now her shirt stuck to her back. The air was hot and heavy and it wasn't even nine yet.
The landscape was rough and rocky, a dull yellow color, and the sky overhead was a shimmering pale blue. Lying half in the shade and half in the sun was a lightly snoozing brindled cat, its tail quirking up every now and then. Milla took another long drink of water from her canteen, wiped the sweat from her forehead and fanned her face, trying to cool off. May in Egypt was hot; she wondered absently if Cairo was hotter than the desert, then decided that after it reached a certain point, hot was hot, no matter what the degree the thermometer read.
The tombs were hot, too. You'd think that being underground they'd be cooler, but the truth was, it was like an oven down there. Still, she'd spend 24 hours underground if she'd had some decent murals to look at.
Milla sighed and took another breath, scanning the horizon. Nothing seemed out of place, and yet ... she felt uneasy. She had all morning, from her first cup of tea till now. She focused on her workers, first making sure that they were all accounted for, then looking for signs of heat exhaustion. Of course, they weren't really hers: everyone, including Milla, was under Professor White's supervision. But Professor White, along with every other non-Egyptian worker on this dig, didn't speak Arabic. Until they realized that normal Egyptians didn't speak English, Milla's grasp of languages had been seen as a sort of curiosity. Then they discovered how valuable she was and, instead of letting her study exquisite tomb paintings, they decided she was more suited to being a translator.
It's not fair, Milla thought savagely. Here I am in Egypt and I haven't even been close to a good undiscovered mural yet. Instead of studying the tomb paintings, which is what I'm supposed to be doing, I'm stuck out here supervising the workers and sorting pottery ...
It didn't help that Professor White's tombs didn't appear to have decorated walls. From all the clues they'd gathered so far, these tombs were of middle class citizens. There were some paintings, but they were crude. She'd been hoping for scenes of hunting, of happy families, of catalogues of wealth that high-powered individuals would take with them to the afterlife.
Instead, she got rough cartouches. In only two colors. And a lot of mediocre pottery and poorly formed ushebtis.
To put it mildly, she was disappointed.
Still, there were other, previously discovered tomb paintings she could have studied on her own. It wouldn't have been as much fun as being the first -- besides the grave robbers -- to see the lovely, bright funereal pictures the Egyptians painted on the tomb walls, but it certainly would have been better than separating pottery shards from ushebtis, the little figurines Egyptians put in with the burial goods to do the labor in the afterlife.
Milla stretched, then sat back down on the ground, lightly stroking the sleeping cat, one of about a dozen that flitted in and out of the camp. She'd been feeding them bits of left over food. This one was the friendliest of the group and had taken to Milla quickly. The others were more skittish, perhaps because they were not used to friendly people. One cat in particular Milla had her eye on -- it appeared to have been in a fight and she was concerned about its ear, which looked like it needed tending. And though she knew she wouldn't be able to tend it, she thought that if she were clever, she could catch the cat and take it to Sara or maybe Sammy, who worked at the medical outfit nearby.
She glanced quickly around but she didn't see the injured cat. Below her, the workers were clearing the latest of a series of group tombs. Two had already been partially cleared of rubble and pottery pieces; the rest of the team was excavating what remained--mostly mediocre jewelry and mummies, some in sarcophagi. Milla was supervising the initial clearing of the third chamber, which, from what she could tell, was identical to the previous two: filled with rubble and approximately 20 mummies, all from the late period, which meant they were poorly preserved.
Their pottery had survived though, and, even though it was pretty smashed up, you could tell a lot about people from their pottery. It wasn't Milla's driving interest, but she still respected the wealth of information that someone else could read from it. It wasn't hard work, but she had to be careful for some of the pottery shards were sharp as knives. Mixed in were ushebtis, little human figurines of all sizes, from an inch long to nearly five inches, some in bright green-blue faience and some in nondescript unfired clay. Occasionally she found an unbroken one, but more often she found the lower or upper half of a ushebti, feet, legs, sometimes a head. It was a little gruesome. On the other hand, it was better than sorting through smashed up canopic jars, which contained embalmed entrails.
She emptied a rush basket carefully so none of the pottery broke further and quickly separated the ushebtis from the rest of the pottery, putting them aside for later. Perhaps if she were lucky she could fit some of the ushebtis together later on. Next, she began dividing the small, medium and large pottery shards carefully, looking for any pottery designs that would help piece them together again.
"Miss?"
Milla squinted up at a tall, white garbed Egyptian. "Yes, Hassan?"
"The workers, they have found something. A door."
"False? Or a passage to another chamber?" False doors were painted on the tomb walls; occasionally they were very intricate, beautiful paintings. So far, the only ones they'd uncovered were utilitarian, just painted lintels and dark squares to fool the evil spirits. Milla stood.
"Another chamber."
Milla frowned.
"It is occurring to me --" Hassan hesitated, but Milla looked interested, so he continued. "It is occurring to me that perhaps this is a chain of tombs."
"It's beginning to look like it. Maybe we'll get lucky and this next one will be worth something."
"It is possible. Would you like to continue?"
Milla frowned again. "That will be Professor White's decision. He's in the other chamber still, isn't he?"
"Yes. I could fetch him for you." Hassan was under the mistaken impression that Milla, despite her sex, was in some way superior to Professor White because she knew Arabic; as a result, he treated her with respect that she really didn't deserve.
"No, I'll get him," Milla replied. "Keep working where you are for now. We'll have to stop work in an hour or so anyway for a morning tea break."
"As you wish."
Hassan went back to the others, and she heard him relay her message to the workers. They nodded and went back to work, but Milla turned around slowly.
Milla's uneasiness returned. A sort of nagging awareness that something somewhere wasn't right. At first she'd thought it was because last night, her tentmate had been bubbling on about the mummies and Milla couldn't work up the same kind of enthusiasm for the work she was doing. When she'd finally gotten to sleep, she'd been restless. But now ...
Milla scowled, eyes darting over the landscape. Everything looked normal. Several cats dozed in the sun, waiting for a morning snack. Milla looked at them carefully, but they appeared to be healthy -- her injured cat wasn't among them. She wondered if he'd gone off to die by himself, and felt a pang of regret for not catching him. She continued to scan the landscape, looking for something out of place. The workers were efficiently clearing the tomb. Not far away in the other chamber she could hear the muffled voices of the Americans. Further away, several miles, she could see the vague shapes of the medical team that was stationed in the desert.
Everything was as it should be. And yet ... yet ...
Milla shrugged, unable to put her finger on what was wrong. She turned, intending to fetch Professor White and ask him what she should tell the workers, when she thought she saw something from the corner of her eye and she swung around.
It was only a cat chasing a lizard. But she turned so quickly, she lost her footing and stumbled. She automatically put out her arms to stop her fall, but instead of protecting herself, she landed with one arm on the rock-hard sand and one on top of the pottery.
Milla cursed and picked herself up, checking her knees first, then the pottery. That's funny, she thought. I thought all the pottery I'd seen today was brown. But that looks like ochre paint --
More confused than anything else, Milla picked up the piece of pottery and was even more surprised to find the red paint was wet.
What on earth?
That's when she noticed that her left hand -- the one that had landed in the pottery -- was split wide open and bleeding all over the sand.
Milla took one look and fainted dead away.
**************
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