Page 17 of A Discovery: Love and Other Things

“Keep going,” he urged, his voice even quieter than before and tickling the nerve endings in my earlobe.

I moved onto the cross with a loop on top. “That’s theankh. It represents life.”

“Good girl,” he hummed.

My breath hitched at his praise. I wanted whatever this was to keep going, to keep earning his approval.

“And what about the last line?”

I examined the crook at the bottom right, which I knew to signify a ruler since every pharaoh was pictured with it. The next two symbols looked too faint for me to identify. They were long and the last I recognized as a plant, or a flower. I was too distracted to remember, but I wracked my brain anyway, trying to place it. Then it came to me, and I spun to face him. “King of Wisdom!”

“Well done.” The look of satisfaction on Dr. Campbell’s face seared my cheeks with heat.

Diverting my gaze, I twirled the pen in my hand. “Thanks.”

“Care to show me what else you know?” he asked expectantly.

My eyes darted back to his. My throat felt thick, yet I couldn’t read anything lewd in his expression.Get a grip, Kitty! He meant your stellar hieroglyph-reading skills!

For some odd reason, disappointment slumped through me, and my core, which had been clenched tightly with anticipation, released in defeat.

Still, I forced the corners of my lips to tip upward as I turned back toward the wall of symbols. “Sure.”

Chapter 9

The second week of the internship flew by smoother. And the best part was that I was in attendance every day.Glory to God and all of his anointed pharaohs, or whatever prayer was fitting for digging up mummies.

My ankle felt even better, and I could put weight onto it for longer periods of time, though the group wouldn’t let me carry anything heavier than a hand shovel. One time, Dr. Campbell caught me carrying a basket of debris to toss into the waste pile and promptly ripped it out of my hands and admonished me for doing too much. In fact, the dynamics between us had completely shifted ever since we’d spent that day alone together in the temple. He had eased up on me considerably—I’d even gotten a “Good morning” yesterday. However, though I felt more comfortable with my mentor, I was still careful around him because something told me he was as mercurial as the summer days were long.

Sitting cross-legged about five yards from the temple with my ass planted on the ground, I was busy combing through the sand with a brush. I had cleared away some of the surface sand and rock using a hand trowel first, discarding nearly two feet of debris.

I had a sneaking suspicion that this temple had been built by a woman. Most temples built by pharaohs boasted monuments and hieroglyphs that painted the royal in a strong and very masculine light. This was because the pharaohs had commissioned the priests and builders to do so. They would basically spoon-feed the self-serving compliments that ended up on the walls. Even the statues could be intimidating in size—they were possibly the biggest show of small-dick syndrome one could ever witness.

However, while reviewing the hieroglyphs with Dr. Campbell, I’d noticed the description of Tutankhamun was softer and more nurturing than usually used to depict a pharaoh. For example, scenes from Tutankhamun’s burial chamber discovered by Howard Carter in 1922 painted him as a seasoned combatant riding his chariot, even though we now know that he was merely a teenager for most of his rule. He’d even been buried with a dagger made of meteorite material as a show of his power. Like he was a warrior god.

But on the walls of this temple, scenes of the young king were painted in a much different light than I had seen in textbooks.More human. His childhood was etched out in detail: A young boy playing in a garden with his sisters. A child seated at his father’s feet during Akhenaten’s reign. Another image of Tutankhamun alongside his wife, Ankhesenamun. There was only one scene where he was seated on a throne, holding the crook and flail as a woman was pictured kneeling at his feet, presumably his wife again.

There were a handful of notable women who had been close to Tutankhamun in his life. His biological mother, who some researchers believed to have been a woman named Kiya, was one of Akhenaten’s many wives and also his full sister. It would have made for a touching hypothesis that his biological mother was the creator of this temple, but according to historical records, there was very little known about the woman. Could she have secretly commissioned a team to build this temple for her son?

Another more prominent woman of the king’s past was his stepmother and Akhenaten’s primary wife, Nefertiti. Most people would instantly recognize the famous queen whose bust had become a symbol of ancient Egyptian femininity and power. Could she have been the one to construct this temple for her stepson? It was definitely a possibility. She had the means and power to do so, more so than Tutankhamun’s birth mother.

An interesting bit of information about Nefertiti was that she was believed to have been the daughter of Ay, one of Tutankhamun’s advisers after he ascended to the throne as a young boy. However, after the death of Tutankhamun, Ay had fought for power and had become pharaoh himself. It seemed that he always had one eye on the throne, even while it was occupied. It was even believed that Ay had decided to bury Tutankhamun in a makeshift tomb while Ay reserved Tutankhamun’s intended tomb for his own death. Ay’s thirst for power had run deep, even into the afterlife. Where had Nefertiti stood in all of this? Had her allegiance belonged to her father or her stepson?

Tutankhamun was believed to have had six sisters, all of them the daughters of Nefertiti and Akhenaten, making them his half-sisters since they only shared the same father. Of all the sisters, only one was mentioned multiple times in historical records.Ankhesenamun. Tutankhamun’s wife. The pair had been wed when they were only children. Ankhesenamun had become a widow after her husband passed away when he was only nineteen years old. Her story is a common one of most queens who find themselves without a husband.

It was said that when Ay secured the throne, he forced Ankhesenamun, his alleged own granddaughter, to marry him. There was evidence that Ankhesenamun tried to prevent the marriage from happening based on a letter she sent to a neighboring ruler, begging to marry one of his sons for protection. It would have been strange for an Egyptian queen to consider a foreign marriage in those times, which was why it was believed that she had been fearful of the marriage to Ay. But following Ay’s ascension to the throne, very little of the possibly two-time queen was known.

Tutankhamun didn’t have any surviving children, so the hypothesis that it was one of them who’d built the temple in his honor was false.

I hadn’t brought up my theory about the patron yet to Dr. Campbell, mostly because my brain seemed to be malfunctioning anytime he was nearby. I chalked it up to his superficial good looks and nothing more. The man could catch the eye of a blind chimpanzee, with his perfectly symmetrical face.

I refused to be the poor school girl crushing on her professor like another romance novel cliché.

My eyes still couldn’t help but roam to him standing in front of the tent, though. He seemed to be deep in discussion with Isabella. One week, and she had already secured her spot as my least favorite person on the team. Whenever any one of us would answer one of Dr. Campbell’s pop quiz questions, she’d rip apart our responses and supply her own dissertation for a question that had originally warranted a one-word answer. The girl was the first to climb over us to get to Dr. Campbell the second he was alone. And the most irritating part of it was that she assumed she was always right.

The demographics of our internship weren’t normal. Three females and only two males had been selected to participate in a dig. Anall-maledig.There were no females on Dr. Campbell’s team, so I supposed in the grand scheme of things, Isabella was just commanding respect in an already biased field. I just wished she wasn’t so annoying in the way she went about it. Shit, at least be a little nicer to the other two girls on the team instead of treating us like competition!

I watched their exchange. Isabella’s mouth moved a mile a minute, while Dr. Campbell stood in front of her, patiently waiting for her to stop for air. His facial features remained relaxed as if unaffected by her, but I knew otherwise: the way he slowly balled his hands at his side and then extended his fingers. The way his back arched slightly like a lion provoked one too many times. I knew he was just itching to get away from her.

---