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Neil self-consciously dropped his hand. “It’s still growing in.”
“I have seen better mustaches on donkey boys,” Sayyid returned cheerfully. “Perhaps instead of worrying over your not-a-mustache, you might copy down another section of those hieroglyphs.”
“I’m not worrying over my mustache,” Neil retorted. “I am waiting for you to finish up so we can eat.” His stomach punctuated the thought with an audible growl.
“I will stop soon enough—it is nearly time to pray.” Sayyid made another delicate line with his brush. “Just one more section.”
With a sigh, Neil pulled out his notebook and pencil. He moved to the part of the wall where he had left off transcribing earlier that day.
Sometimes, despite the Cambridge-certified letters after his name, Neil felt as though Sayyid were really the one in charge, and he was the assistant. He might have found that slightly mortifying—if it wasn’t farlessmortifying than the thought of bungling things because he insisted on being in charge while Sayyid painfully looked on.
He knew that point of view wasn’t one that many of his fellow archaeologists would share. He’d heard the disdainful way they talked about their Egyptian excavation workers back at Cambridge. But maybe they had never had someone like Sayyid on their digs… or perhaps they were simply so sure of their own superiority, it had never occurred to them to look for talent anywhere else.
Neil had never been particularly sure of his superiority at much of anything.
He pushed his attention to the hieroglyphs, carefully copying down the next line.
“Make sure you don’t mix up the ideogram for ear with a measure of grain again,” Sayyid helpfully suggested.
Neil’s cheeks burned. “It’s a perfectly reasonable mistake. They both consist of the exact same curling line from the eye of Horus.”
“Yes, but the ear retains the vertical line, and the grain does not,” Sayyid pointed out.
“You Egyptians talk about grain far more than you talk about ears,” Neil grumbled.
“Ah yes,” Sayyid easily replied. “I’m sure that is it.”
“Sometimes I wonder why I’m even here,” Neil complained.
“To be fair, you are the one who found the tomb,” Sayyid cheerfully allowed. “If you hadn’t changed the site location, we’d still be sifting through sand thirty meters away.”
Neil supposed he could take credit for that. When he had arrived at Saqqara two years earlier to start the dig, one look at the landscape where they were meant to excavate had left him with the nagging sense that they were in the wrong place.
He’d been terrified to push his funders to move everything ninety feet to the east—but the notion of spending months churning through dirt in a spot he knew in his bones was wrong had been even more unbearable.
Not that Neil could have told anyonewhythe site was wrong. When asked, he had rattled off an elaborate justification based on Ancient Egyptian measurement systems and the relative ranking of known courtiers during the reign of Tutankhamun—all of which was entirely true. But none of it had actually passed through his thoughts when he had looked at the stretch of rubble-strewn desert and known,No—it’s over there.
That hadn’t been the first time some itching instinct had pushed Neil in a particular historical direction. He had come to think of those seemingly out-of-the-blue notions as the result of some unconscious mental process. It wasn’t that they came from nowhere or were mere ‘lucky guesses,’ but rather that his mind coughed up a conclusion after surreptitiously rifling through the extensive library of all the theses, excavation reports, and journal articles that Neil had consumed over his years of study.
Whatever lay behind his hunches, he had learned to trust them—and that if he didn’t, he’d be left feeling uncomfortable and dissatisfied, like a man forced into a wool coat without a shirt.
Neil’s hunch about Saqqara had proved accurate when they had uncovered the upper extent of the funerary temple pylon in the first week of digging. He’d received a hearty pat on the back from his funders, and with Sayyid’s capable help, the temple had revealed its secrets—including the passages and chambers of the subterranean tomb complex where Neil now worked to copy down more of the characters carved into the wall.
“Person… disturb… tomb…” he muttered aloud, working through the translation as he marked down the hieroglyphs. “No life… enemies… me?”
“Looks like you found a curse,” Sayyid noted.
Neil mentally translated the rest and hid a smile. “I don’t think you’re going to like it,” he replied, his tone deceptively mild.
“Oh?” Sayyid returned distractedly.
With a hint of wicked delight, Neil read the words out loud in Egyptian. “Keper ir’ef… her tah…”
“Not keh,” Sayyid automatically corrected him. “Khaa.” The syllable rasped in the back of his throat. “Like the Arabic.”
“Khuuargh,” Neil tried.
“No,” Sayyid replied.
