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. “Now what 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?”

He hesitated, a breath away, and I realized that he was waiting for me to say yes.

Instead, I reached up and started to unbutton his shirt. His skin was hot and smooth under my palms, and muscles shuddered when I touched him, as if my fingertips were made of electricity. He didn’t seem to know what to say anymore, either, so he kissed me instead. He tasted of smoke and sugar.

I rose up, tidal, my arms holding him together. Somehow we switched places so that he was spread on the sand, his discarded shirt and pants beneath him. When I came up on my knees beside him, granules bit into my palms and rubbed me raw.

He was naked except for his socks and I was still fully clothed and I could not stop shaking. My hand slid down his stomach; he twitched in my fist. “Olive,” he groaned. “You’re killing me.”

I touched the very tip of him. He was circumcised, which was one of the ways you could culturally become Egyptian, if you were a foreigner. There was actually a stele where a captive man talked about being inducted into the Egyptian army with a hundred and twenty other men and—

Suddenly Wyatt’s hand closed around mine. “Stop picturing that stele,” he gritted out, and my eyes flew to his as he finished my sentence. “I was circumcised with 120 men. I struck no one; and no one struck me. I scratched no one; and no one scratched me,” Wyatt recited. “I know what you’re thinking.” In one fast, grating move, he flipped us over. “And frankly, if you’re still thinking, I’m not doing this very well.”

His thighs bracketed mine, but he was careful to not rest his weight on me. He unraveled me, pulling back the edges of my shirt and shucking my pants as if they were lotus petals, she loves me, she loves me not.

She loves me.

He poured bourbon on me and licked me dry, his mouth moving from one breast to the other. Sand scratched between us when he fitted his body against mine. Pain and pleasure; somehow that seemed right. We had been enemies and now I couldn’t remember the war we had been fighting.

“Dawn,” Wyatt whispered.

A name was once seen as part of the soul, and now I understood its magic. It’s why cartouches were surrounded by shen rings, for eternal protection. It’s why a king would hack out the name of his predecessor. It’s why, as long as someone held your name on their lips, you were alive.

I stared into his eyes when he sank inside me. We moved together, a chord of music I could never sing out loud, but would never stop hearing.

Somewhere in time, others drank and danced. A star flashed green on the horizon.

We were ancient.

* * *

—

HIS HANDS TANGLED in my hair.

Brushed sand off my belly.

Scrapes, cuts, teeth, elbows.

Wyatt curled around me like Mehen, the protective serpent that encircled the sun god in the Book of Two Ways, protecting him from chaos.

I lost track of the number of times we came together, or slipped apart. And even then he touched me or I touched him, until the distance between us was like the line between sea and sky, so hazy it was impossible to see where one stopped and the other started.

We fell asleep wrapped in a blanket made of night, and when it became threadbare, I knew Wyatt was just as awake as I was. “What are you thinking about?” I asked, and his arms tightened around me.

“Sakhmet,” he said.

Sakhmet was the flip side of Hathor, a sky goddess and a consort to Re. As Hathor, she represented joy and creativity and beauty and love, and she was depicted wearing a sun disk headdress between cow horns. But as Sakhmet she was a lioness goddess, a fierce hunter who protected pharaohs and led them into battle. Hathor on a rampage, with PMS, was Sakhmet. Sakhmet, pacified, was Hathor. And during the Sothic rising, Sakhmet/Hathor was Sothis, the daughter of Re.

In New Kingdom tombs, like Tutankhamun’s and Seti I’s, there was a text called the Book of the Heavenly Cow. In it, mankind rebelled against Re, who decided to retaliate by destroying them. He ordered Sakhmet to do it. But the night before the deed was to be done, Re had a change of heart. The problem was—he had already dispatched Sakhmet. How did you stop unstoppable destruction?

The answer: You made men brew beer and women grind red ocher. At the end of the night, they took the tinted beer and spread it all over the fields. When Sakhmet came to destroy humanity, she saw all the red beer and mistook it for human blood. Bloodthirsty, she lapped it all up and got so drunk she couldn’t destroy a fly, much less mankind.

At the inundation festivals, when Egyptians drank the night away, they were imitating Sakhmet—soothing her anger with beer, so that she would swallow up the overflow of the Nile when it ran red with silt from upstream, threatening to wash away settlements.

I turned slightly in Wyatt’s embrace. “You’re thinking about a drunk girl with bloodlust?”

Against the back of my neck, I could feel his smile. “I’m thinking that you’re the drunk girl with bloodlust.”

“I like you so much better when you’re not talking.”

Wyatt laughed. “Do you know the Tale of the Herdsman?”

It was a story from the Middle Kingdom, but I’d never read it. I shook my head.

“The narrator meets Sakhmet in the marshes before she’s changed back into Hathor,” he explained. “She’s a wild animal, and he’s scared shitless because he thinks she’s going to eat him. But the next day at her festival, she’s all woman and ready for the new year.”

He buried his face in the curve of my shoulder. I could smell him on my skin.

“I’m thinking that I came to the desert with a lioness,” Wyatt said softly, “and ended up with a goddess in my arms.”

Together we watched the sun rise—my namesake, gilded in pinks and oranges; the universe being born again.

* * *

—

WE CREPT BACK to the Dig House then, to snatch a few minutes of sleep before the day officially began. But I woke up alone with the sun streaming into my room, panicking because I had slept through the morning’s work. I jumped out of bed, already wondering how much trouble I was going to be in.

The Dig House was empty because everyone was at the site. Or so I thought until I heard something crash in the magazine. I padded down the hall to find Wyatt picking up pieces of pots and setting them into a box.

A thousand thoughts cycled through my head: if he was here, and we were alone, he should have come to my room. Unless he didn’t want to. Unless there was a piece of him, like me, that believed last night didn’t happen. Or shouldn’t have.

“Tell me that was already broken,” I said evenly, and he jumped.

“Jesus, Olive!” He turned around. “You’re going to give me a heart attack.”

“That may be the kindest way to die after Dumphries figures out we slept in.”

“Relax,” Wyatt said. “I told him we were both hungover. Apparently, finding a new dipinto and a potential tomb allows us one grace period of fucking up.”

“Speaking of that.” I swallowed. “This thing. Us.”

“What about it?”

It felt like knives in my throat, but I said what had to be said. “We had a lot to drink.”

He stared at me. “Are you saying you took advantage of me?”

“I’m saying maybe we took advantage of each other.” It was the most earth-shifting moment of my life. “We were celebrating. It was…bound to happen.”

Wyatt slid his hands into his pockets. He was quiet as he walked deeper into the magazine, trailing his hand along the box where George, the mummy, rested. “You think last night was a mistake.”

I tried to say yes. Really, I did. I had a hundred reasons why this was not a good idea, starting with the fact that we didn’t really like each other and ending with the reality that two graduate students would not be taken seriously for this discovery if we weren’t acting the part. But, still, I couldn’t say it.