“Idiot!” he cried, struggling to free himself. Romero took an instinctual step back.
Logan looked on in shock. It was as if all the setbacks and vicissitudes of this expedition-capped just now by the discovery that Narmer’s crown was, in fact, completely unexpected and bizarre-had caused the normally dispassionate Stone to snap, to lash out in frustration and anger.
“Incompetent!” Stone shouted at the Egyptologist. “Thanks to you, all my effort, all my money-wasted! And now, there’s no time… No time!”
Logan came forward. “Dr. Stone, calm down,” he said. “Just what exactly has happened?”
With an effort, Stone mastered himself. He freed himself from Rush and Valentino, who nevertheless stayed close.
“I’ll tell you what’s happened,” he said, his breathing loud and ragged. “That was Amanda Richards on the horn. She was repairing the damage to Narmer’s mummy-when she learned it wasn’t Narmer, after all.”
There was a moment of shocked silence.
“What do you mean-not Narmer?” Dr. Rush asked.
“That mummy was a woman. All this time, we’ve been working the wrong damned tomb.” He looked back at Romero. “No wonder nothing’s as it should be. You’ve led us to the wrong spot-a subsidiary tomb, for his queen, or-or a concubine! My God!” His hands balled into fists, and he seemed about to lash out once again. Rush and Valentino moved in still closer.
“Just a minute,” Logan said. “There can’t be any mistake. The seals, the inscriptions, the treasure-even the curse-everything indicates the resting place of a pharaoh. This has to be Narmer’s tomb.”
For a moment, nobody spoke. Stone struggled to get his breathing under control. “If this is Narmer’s tomb,” he said, “then where the hell’s his mummy?”
“Wait a minute,” said Logan. “Just hold on a minute. Don’t be so hasty-let’s think this through.” He turned to Tina Romero. “Haven’t you said, all along, that there have been things in this tomb that didn’t add up-that didn’t make sense?”
She nodded. “Little things, mostly. I ascribed them to the fact this was the tomb of the first pharaoh; it was only natural that we’d find the unexpected. The later tradition hadn’t yet been fully established.”
“Excuses,” Stone said. “Mere excuses, nothing more. You’re just trying to explain away your stupidity.”
Ignoring this, Romero turned toward Logan. “It first started when you mentioned that skull to me. The one you examined, the skull of one of Narmer’s priests, ritually killed to protect the secrecy and sanctity of Narmer’s tomb. Do you remember telling me that one of the eye sockets-the left-had scratches?”
Logan nodded.
“And that was just the first sign that something was amiss. The rest of the signs are right here, among us. The serekhs we found in the tomb’s royal seals-the glyphs are Narmer’s, but they aren’t quite right. They have unusual features, like the feminine ending of niswt-biti. Then there are those inscriptions in chamber one, with the ritual sequences reversed, the gender wrong. And the glyphs on this chest, here, with the head of the catfish, Narmer’s symbol, scratched out.”
“You said it had been altered,” Logan added. “Defaced.”
“What are you getting at?” Stone growled.
“That mark in the eye socket of the priest’s skull,” Romero said. “I’d assumed it was just decay, damage over time. But the fact is, that was the ritual way a priest or priestess of a queen would be killed-a knife through the eye into the brain. That way, symbolically, the queen would not be viewed in death. At the tomb burial of a king, the priests were killed by a knife blow to the base of a skull, severing the spinal column.”
“So this is the tomb of Narmer’s queen,” Stone said. “Niethotep. That’s my whole damn point! It’s the wrong tomb!”
“No, no, you don’t understand,” Romero replied, a new urgency in her voice. “The evidence is conflicting. Everything about this tomb implies it was built for Narmer, following his royal instructions-except for those particular rituals that would be carried out after death. That’s where the evidence becomes self-contradictory. The royal seals with the feminine flourishes. The final, ritualistic inscriptions-recall how I said they looked rude? And the mummy itself-I only got the briefest of chances to study it, but I noticed that the cut over the mouth was imprecise, incomplete.”
“As if the actual burial ritual was rushed,” Logan said.
A faint rumble, almost below the level of audibility, echoed through the chamber. The guards and several of the roustabouts glanced uneasily around at the supporting structure. But the sound appeared to have come from the surface, down to them via the Umbilicus, and after a moment the debate resumed.
“You’re not making sense,” Stone told her. “All this is hypothetical. Inconclusive.”
“I’m not so sure,” Logan said. He spoke slowly, thinking through what Tina Romero was saying. “You need to look at all this from another angle. If the crown we found here in chamber three could be used to simulate, practice death-in effect, to render a pharaoh immortal, ensure his divinity… wouldn’t a queen desire that as much as a king? Especially a queen as powerful, as headstrong, as Niethotep was?”
There was a silence.
“You’re saying…” Stone began. “You’re saying that Niethotep, Narmer’s queen- took Narmer’s place in the tomb?”
“It’s the only thing that makes sense,” Romero said. “Nothing else explains the conflicting evidence I’ve laid out for you.”
“And it may also help explain why future generations misinterpreted Narmer’s symbols and practices,” Logan added. “It wasn’t Narmer in the tomb, he wasn’t buried in the proper manner. The wife would have substituted herself-and seemingly hastily, even prematurely.”
“Then what happened to Narmer?” Dr. Rush asked.
“Who knows?” Romero replied. “Poison. A dagger to the throat, late at night in the conjugal bed. Perhaps killed with his concubines. You know the legends of Niethotep, of how strong-willed, bloodthirsty, and selfish she was. This would have been just her game. Can’t you picture it? She may have even waited him out, let him die a natural death. Then she would have accompanied his body here, with their twin sets of retinues, to be present at the rituals of his interment-and then, by a prearranged plan, her guards overpowered his… and now his skeleton is lying in the muck of the Sudd, entangled with all the others, and her mummy took his rightful place.”
Stone stared at the Egyptologist. The anger, the ferocity, had slowly left his face. “But if you’re right about the-the crown,” he said, “then only one person could be allowed to use it. If you were Narmer, once you had passed over into the netherworld, you wouldn’t want another to take your place, to compromise your life force, your immortality. The crown would be linked to the soul of the person who wielded it.”
“Which is exactly what Niethotep must have done,” said Romero. “She tricked Narmer, had him killed, used the crown in his place. And then, believing herself immortal, she had herself buried in his tomb, which was hastily converted-the seals, the inscriptions-into her own.”
“Is that even possible?” Logan asked. “Isn’t a pharaoh’s tomb designed to be the resting place for a specific monarch, and only that monarch?”
“That’s just the problem,” Romero said. “We need much more time to examine the evidence. Maybe she thought the gamble-eternal life as a supreme deity-was worth the risk.”
“But why the haste?” Stone asked. “With Narmer out of the way, she could have taken all the time she wanted.”
Romero thought for a moment. “I can think of several reasons. Maybe Narmer’s main priests, with their private army, were still on the way to the tomb-and they wouldn’t have taken kindly to what they found. She had to retrofit the tomb as best she could, seal it up before they arrived. Another possibility is that she and her retinue were unfamiliar with the operation of the battery-the double crown. They may have been… overzealous.”
“What was supposed to be a near-death experience turned into a deadly one,” Logan said.
Romero nodded. “If that was the case-the queen dying unexpectedly-they would have had to rush to get her mummified and entombed. Even to the point of cutting corners in the death rituals. As we’ve seen in some of the carvings here-the carvings that deal with those specific rituals.”
“And if the queen had herself entombed without sufficient preparation?” Rush asked. “Sufficient rites?”
“Impossible to say. I mentioned the imperfect cut in the mummy’s mouth. That’s an important part of the Egyptian funerary magic: the Opening of the Mouth ceremony. It allows the ba to leave the dead body, reunite with the ka in the next life. It frees the mouth to accept food and drink so the soul can receive nourishment-in essence,
