Excerpt
The House of Two Sisters
Unwrapping1887The room is so thick with spice you could take a spoon to the air. We must evoke atmosphere, he always says, so she’s scattered the cloves and lit the lavender candles: the ones that normally burn at a wake to mask the smell of the dead. It’s fitting really, and the headiness mingles with the myrrh oil she’s dripped about the place, not bothering to see if it stains the Turkish rug or mars the beeswax shine on the mahogany. The smell will linger for days, but there’s something pleasant and exotic about it, as if they’ve traveled to another land. Her shoulders relax—the oils must be working—and she can almost forget that the audience relies on her as much as the unwrapper.
But who wants to forget? She’s a woman doing the same job that philologists once mashed their brains over. When she translates the hieroglyphs, when she retells the myths and explains the meaning behind an artifact, people look at her in astonishment mixed with admiration, the perfect cocktail of reactions. She has no desire to exchange her night of interpretations for one of dancing, or her rapt listeners for a line of men proposing courtship.
It lies there, on the table. Bundled like a caterpillar in its chrysalis, still waiting to emerge. When she was young, she watched a butterfly split the sheath confining it, wings damp and temporarily useless. But it was beautiful. Every occasion they do this, when a new specimen has been procured and they receive the handsome amounts socialites will pay to satisfy their inner desire for the macabre, when her father reveals the embalmed skin, dark with gum and so carefully preserved one might go as far as to call it beautiful, she thinks of that butterfly.
Under the first swaddles he reveals small trinkets, each carefully chosen to bring protection to the dead. These he hands to the crowd, letting them enjoy the tactility of the moment before relinquishing them to her. She lays them out carefully, admiring the typical shapes—green scarabs and blue wedjat eyes—more of the same beautiful relics to add to her father’s collection. There is a space waiting for them in the nearest locked cabinet, glass polished to a diamond’s brilliance to best flaunt the treasures within.
He unwinds the folds of cerement, those strips of cloth that bind the neck. There must be many layers left, the neck and head are thick with them. It is here that he finds the last piece and passes it to her, his fingers quaking, reluctant to surrender this new find.
She holds this final amulet in her hands. Larger than the rest. Bigger than any she’s ever known. The amulet is perfectly preserved. It is carved from red jasper, that stone once believed to be synonymous with the blood of Isis. The wonder of this piece magnifies the more she looks at it. Perhaps six inches across, even more from base to top. Cut from a large piece of quartz. It’s not just the size of the amulet that’s impressive. The shape is unusual too. Much like the ankh, the stem reaches to a loop. However, instead of the arms stretching out, as they do on an ankh, here they fall to the sides. Holding itself. Embracing.
She recognizes the shape. It’s called a tyet, or knot of Isis. A symbol of life and protection, typical for a funerary token. But what makes this one unique is the duplication. Instead of one tyet, there are two carved as one piece. Twinned, sides touching. Her skin prickles with the feet of ancient scarabs, passing unseen. She’s never seen a Double Tyet before.
That’s not all. Her father had no choice but to relinquish this piece, for she is the hieroglyphist, and those enigmatic icons are lying on the surface, winking at her in the lambent light. The amulet is engraved, the characters small and familiar. That mysterious script that she’s dedicated her life to understanding. Some people enjoy reading novels, others pass the time conversing with friends, but she prefers to translate an almost lost language. To hear the voices of the dead.
Tracing the hieroglyphs with her fingers, she is oblivious to the buzz from the guests as they watch her father work. It’s her role to interpret for their audience. Messages from the past. Sometimes it is the glyphs on a sarcophagus, sometimes cryptic shapes on papyri. She knows what words to expect. They tend to follow a traditional formula referring to the story of Osiris, worded as a plea for the soul of the dead.
She feels each engraving under her finger, like pockmarks on skin. All along the spines of the Double Tyet she strokes and translates, finger becoming a third eye. Beginning at the top, she moves downward, from left to right.
A throne. A house with a basket.
Piece by piece, the images make characters, and those make words. Some are words of their own; others are sounds, and she threads them together. Doubting herself at times, looking for the determinative signs, wishing she’d brought along her Birch dictionary, but no. She’s studied long and hard. She can do this.
The walls are lined with antiquities from Egypt and books that hold more dust than the local churchyard. In the center of the room, he continues his monologue as he fiddles with the remaining bandages, droning on about the country of sand and Pyramids, explaining the science behind embalming, giving the performance paid for by these women wearing brooches of bees and spiders, and boasting hats made of taxidermied cats and squirrels, and men smelling of tobacco.
The words on the amulet form sentences and she translates them in her head. Slowly, then faster. Building a rhythm. It’s as they make sense, passing from ancient Egyptian to English, that she grasps their true meaning. The weight behind them becoming so heavy her wrists can barely hold the amulet up. She has never read an inscription like this before.
Protection. Wrath.
Her eyes widen, nostrils stinging with the shock of realization. She must show him what she has discovered. If only she could talk to him privately. The pits of her arms are damp. Sweat mingles with the spice.
I must stop this, she thinks. It cannot go on.
But when she looks up, she sees that he has already unwound what should be the head. And when they see what’s there instead, a collective gasp rises from the gathering like a summoned spirit.
She is too late.
