Dead Men's Hearts

anything special about him?”

“Give me a minute and we’ll see,” Gideon said.

Using the usual criteria on the skull and pelvis, he had already established that it was a “him,” and probably middle-aged. There was some arthritic lipping on the vertebrae, but not much, which meant that he’d probably made it into his forties, but not out of his sixties. The sutures on the skull, not the most reliable of indicators, were mostly sealed, but parts of the later-closing ones—the sphenotemporal, the parietomastoid, the squamous—were still open, suggesting an age in the forties, maybe the fifties. Except for the oddly worn-down incisors (what in the world had this guy been gnawing on?), tooth wear was about right for a man in his middle years too. Taken all together, he estimated the age at forty to sixty-five.

Anything finer than that was difficult because the ends of the long bones had been pretty well chewed away, and so had the pubic symphyses. Those were where the best indicators of age were to be found, but, unfortunately, they were also the softest bone, and the scavengers went for them first and most thoroughly.

The excavation records were no help at all. The yellowing card titled 4360 said Male, probably tall. No distinguishing characteristics. That was all. Such brevity was par for the course in 1920s Egyptology, especially for an excavation headed by a rich amateur, at a run-of-the-mill site at which there had surely been no trained physical anthropologist. There wasn’t even a list of the individual bones, which meant that there was no way of knowing if animals had carried anything off while they were lying in the enclosure.

So at least Gideon could say he had contributed a little to the knowledge of the el-Fuqani population by coming up with an age estimate, however approximate. He added a little more: the bones were dainty and slight—“gracile” was the anthropological term—indicating that 4360 had been a man of modest muscularity. And Lambert had been right about the “tall.” Gideon guessed he’d been about five foot eight, which was big for an ancient Egyptian. He might have confirmed the height by taking some measurements of the long bones and applying a formula, but what did it matter?

Now he lifted the skull again. Rodents had gnawed through the zygomatics on both sides, two teeth had come out at least a year before death, and two any time in the four-thousand-plus years since. Beyond that, there wasn’t much to say about it. He turned it gently in his hands. “How long did you say it’s been lying out there?”

“Nobody knows,” Jerry said. “Anytime up to five years. Or it could have been just since last week, for all we know.”

Gideon shook his head. “No, two or three years, anyway.” He picked at a chalky fleck on the curvature of the frontal bone, just above the faded, old-fashioned F4360. “This scaly stuff all over the crown. That’s spalling, exfoliation. It comes from weathering, and it doesn’t happen in a week. Neither does this dappling here, these lighter areas. That’s sun-bleaching.”

“But how do you know that didn’t happen before?” Jerry asked. “Like during the Fifth Dynasty.”

Tiffany laughed. “Jerry, how would his bones have gotten sun-bleached before he went into the ground?”

Jerry weighed this, then pointed his unlit pipe soberly at TJ. “Good point, Dr. B.”

Gideon went slowly over the pelvic bones with his hands and eyes, not really looking for, or expecting to find, anything notable. It had been half an hour since he had taken the remains one by one from the carton and laid them out, and the grinding, mind-numbing fatigue was creeping back. He had begun to wonder why he hadn’t gone to bed and left this for another time. Why, really, was he bothering at all? What difference—

He halted with his hands on the underside of the left hip bone. His eyes closed. His fingertips continued to explore.

“Progress?” asked TJ.

Gideon didn’t answer. He was alert again, and interested, his fingers playing over the bone as delicately, as sensitively, as a blind man’s on braille. He traced the rough, irregular surface of a large oval eminence at the base of the ischium, the lower rear section of the hip bone—the innominate to an anthropologist.

He opened his eyes, turned the bone over and examined it. He looked briefly at the right innominate and nodded to himself. “What do you know,” he murmured.

“Progress,” TJ decided.

Gideon picked up the fibula—the long thin bone that, together with the more robust tibia, forms the skeleton of the lower leg, and held it out at arm’s length, squinting. Then he placed the solitary finger bone in his palm, lightly ran his fingertips down it, and put it down. “Well, well.”

“Gideon,” TJ said, “are you planning to let us in on this anytime soon?”

He looked up, smiling. “I guess I can tell you one thing special about him, after all. I can tell you his occupation.”

“His occupation!” They both said it at once. Jerry’s match had stopped on the way to the pipe.

Gideon spread his hands in a flourish that encompassed all the bones on the table. “The gentleman we have before us,” he announced, “earned his living as a scribe.”

All right, he was showboating. Skeletal work was fascinating in and of itself, but there were things every now and then that also made it good, plain fun, and one of them was pulling magical rabbits out of the hat for the amazement of one and all. He rarely passed up the chance to do it. Julie had once told him it was the ham in him that made him such a successful teacher. He had chosen to take it as a compliment.

“A scribe?” TJ echoed. Her right hand caressed the humerus gently, almost reverently.

“Of course I can’t be sure,” Gideon said in a brief attack of modesty, “but that’s what it looks like.”

How, they wanted to know, could he tell something like that? Gideon told them, demonstrating as he went. The craggy, oval area on the bottom of each innominate bone was the ischial tuberosity. It was the site of attachment for several powerful ligaments and muscles. It was also, he explained, the part you sat on, and when you spent a great deal of time sitting, especially sitting on a hard surface like the ground, a chronic osteitis developed, resulting in an appearance even more craggy than the norm.