—

WHEN HOWARD CARTER found 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 WE had 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 the wadi without him saying so. There was a guard stationed there at night now, but we would tell the gaffir that 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 1473 B.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 a nemes headdress 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?”

“—but none of it had anything to do with her gender. It would be like having a female president and saying that any of her achievements were because she was a woman, not because she was a leader.”

“Hatshepsut definitely got shit done,” Wyatt said. He framed my face and kissed me.

By the time we broke apart, I was fighting for breath. “You have a problem with smart, ambitious women who get shit done?”

He rolled me on top of him, so that I straddled his body. “You know what they say,” Wyatt murmured. “Beneath every powerful woman is a very, very lucky man.”

I loved that we could fight about Egyptian kings and queens in the middle of the desert at night. I loved that I didn’t have to explain to Wyatt who Hatshepsut was. I loved the physics of our relationship: that we could argue with the same intensity that we came together. I loved how every minute with him felt like a storm, the moment before it happened.

I loved Wyatt.

I think the reason I remembered that one night so clearly was because it was the first time I admitted this to myself, and instead of feeling panic or confusion I just felt this soft, flannel blanket of right. It was like staring out your bedroom window the morning after a blizzard and seeing the hills and slopes of a landscape that seemed unrecognizable, but that you knew you could still navigate by heart.

The other reason I remembered that night was because we overslept in the morning. We yanked up the comforter and raced through the desert to get to the Dig House before anyone else could wake up. But when we stumbled into the kitchen, the five other grad students and Dumphries were already sitting at the table, tucking into their breakfast. “Thank the gods,” Dumphries said, without looking up from his coffee. “Now we can all stop pretending we don’t know you two are getting it on.”

I flushed so deeply that I thought my face would melt. Wyatt mumbled something unintelligible and handed off the comforter to Hasib, slinking into the chair beside mine. We didn’t touch. We barely even breathed. “You’re not the only one who can hear a loose tile,” Dumphries said, and he turned to me. “Pass the creamer?”

* * *

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