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.
“And this is more craggy than the norm?” TJ was holding the bone in her hand, thoughtfully feeling the tuberosity.
“Much,” Gideon said. “So-”
“But isn’t this also called a squatting facet?” she asked. “And scribes didn’t squat, you know.”
“No, squatting facets are different. They’re on the femur or the tibia, and our man here doesn’t have any. But he does have something else.” He held up the fibula for them. “Can you see that it’s laterally bowed?”
Jerry had finally gotten his pipe going. He looked at the slender bone through wreaths of smoke. “Nope.”
“I can,” TJ said. “Just a slight curve.”
“Right. It comes from sitting cross-legged, which puts a tremendous amount of sideways pressure on the feet, which in turn-”
“And that’s the way scribes sat,” TJ said, beginning to see the picture. “On the floor, legs crossed, linen skirt stretched stiffly across the thighs as a writing surface…”
“Exactly,” Gideon said. “And here’s the clincher: this ridge along the finger bone.” He held it so that they could see it clearly, although he knew they were unlikely to make anything of it. Even his students had a hard time with the individual phalanges of the fingers. Too many of them- twenty-eight, counting both hands-and too much alike.
“This is the first joint of the right index finger, and the ridge we’re looking at is on the palmar surface. It’s where the flexor ligament attaches. Ordinarily you can barely see it-”
“I can barely see it now,” Jerry said.
“-but it can get enlarged like this from grasping something between finger and thumb, firmly and for long periods of time.”
“A stylus,” TJ said under her breath. “Well, how about that.”
“There’s no way to be sure,” Gideon said, “but it all adds up to a scribe. Put all these skeletal things together, throw in the fact that we’re talking about a Fifth Dynasty Theban, and that’s what you come up with. At least, it’s what I come up with.”
He brushed bone crumbs from his hands, well content. “Not that it gets us any closer to what he was doing in the junk heap.”
“Who cares?” TJ said, beginning to put the bones back in the carton. “This has been really neat. Maybe I should have been a physical anthropologist.”
They were saying good night in the patio, at the foot of the stairs that led to Gideon’s upper-floor room, when he said: “I suppose I ought to mention this to Dr. Haddon. I’d feel a little funny not saying anything.”
“Up to you,” Jerry said, “but if it was me, I wouldn’t. Personally, I don’t think he’d be real thrilled to find out we got you involved in this.”
“Thrilled?” TJ said with a laugh. “He’d have a fit…” She frowned. “That reminds me. There was something funny this morning-I forgot to mention it to you, Jerry. Something Dr. H said.”
Her husband looked leery. “Do I want to know this?”
“Oh, it’s nothing bad. It just makes me wonder about his-well, he asked me what happened to the head that was there last night.”
Jerry frowned. “The what?”
“In the enclosure. He seems to think he saw a yellow jasper head in there, near the bones, or maybe it was quartzite. Look, keep this to yourselves, will you? I wasn’t supposed to talk about it. Not that it matters. Bruno already knows.”
Jerry stood leaning on the railing, silent and contemplative, pulling on his pipe.
“You mean he said it was there last night, but not this morning?” Gideon asked.
“Right. And it worried me, because-look, Gideon, this is not for public consumption either, but he got a little tiddly last night, which he tends to do most nights, no big deal, never during working hours, but this is the first time that he ever-well, hallucinated, I guess you’d have to call it. He even thought he remembered pointing it out.”
“He did,” Jerry said quietly.
TJ swung to face him. “Did what?”
“Point it out.”
