I have my lying, cheating, tightfisted ex-husband to thank for the fact that I got the cheapest possible mummification package.
But of course he cheaped out. I know exactly the way his mind worked.
Why waste a few extra pieces of copper on the old model when you’ve already got another wife—the new kitchen girl—lined up to take her place? One who couldn’t reveal the shame our marriage brought him, and who might bear the son he wanted that I couldn’t provide (thank the gods).
So, I got the version of mummification where they don’t yank out your brain and stuff your vital organs into small, ceramic canopic jars. They just sink you into a vat of powdered natron for a couple of lunar cycles until you’re barely dried out enough not to stink.
Slap on a few wraps of linen, goop on some tree sap resin, and you’ve got the fast-food version of mummification.
It’s really unpleasant. Trust me on this.
For one, natron gets positively everywhere and tastes terrible. Swallow a big spoonful of salt mixed with baking soda and you can imagine it. It’s super gross.
The whole thing—and by “thing” I mean my attempted murder, to be clear—was done on a shoestring. Ra only knows what kind of rat poison he put in the (cheap) wine he brought out to toast our fifteen-year wedding anniversary.
Whatever he used, it wasn’t quite enough to kill me, so I’m assuming he scrimped on the amount as well. Or maybe it cost extra for the kill-the-rats version, so he went with the stun-the-rats-until-you-can-mummify-them-alive budget option instead.
Yes. I know. I shouldn’t be grumping since his cheapness saved my life over the long run. But here’s the thing: You don’t get credit for anything that comes after attempted murder.
Being the murderee, I get some leeway to complain about whatever I want. Such as being undervalued, and worse, during our entire marriage right up to the last second.
And you get to stop being judgy.
Anyway, by the time Crindoline cracked open the resin-crusted wrappings covering my face, I’d had plenty of time to think about it. Like, over 4,000 years, plus several centuries.
When my life finally restarted, he was long dead and I was just almost dead. I was lying on a stainless steel table under blinding lamps in a dark lab in the sprawling labyrinth of the British Museum’s basement, hearing Crindoline’s impressive scream and desperately struggling to draw a breath.
To be fair to Crindoline, who was a good sport right from the start, all things considered, I’d screamed first. She’d rolled up the sleeves of her white lab coat, pulled safety goggles on over her afro, snugged them over the look of focused concentration on her deep-black features…
And started piercing my belly with an electric drill, which will really get your attention if you’re not expecting it.
Actually, wanted to scream. But having no air in my powder-filled lungs—and a face covered in linen wraps—all I managed was a massive, panic-filled shudder. It was enough for Crindoline to stop what she was doing and stare as she tried to decide if my spasm had been real, or a result of her twelve-hour days, constant sleep deprivation, and way too much late-night coffee.
By that point, I was fully awake and wanted to take a breath more than I’d wanted anything in my life. My next shudder was unmistakable, and Crindoline started screaming enough for two people.
But my favorite Egyptologist is a real trooper. She’d been a nurse before deciding she preferred cutting open long-dead people to caring for living ones.
Later, she showed me pictures of mummy-me. I wasn’t looking my best at that point, but one thing I didn’t look was dangerous—or even mobile—so she’d only felt the need to scream for half a minute or so before her caregiver side kicked in.
It was the longest half minute of my very long life as I struggled to extract oxygen from natron without any success.
Before I knew it, she’d quickly, but carefully, cut open the wrappings over my face and put a vacuum tube in my mouth. Soon I was able to hack out the remaining powder and she was babbling with excitement as she finished the de-mummification process.
Before I’d drawn ten ragged breaths, she’d expertly peeled back the entire stiff, linen cocoon—she was obviously an expert at cutting open mummies—put drops in my staring eyes, and dribbled water down my parched throat.
I was lying under the twin beams of crazy-bright lanterns—spotlights, I’ve since learned—and my eyes burned like I was looking directly into the sun.
(They didn’t even bother to close my eyes! That’s something you do for dead people, right? It’s, like, the first thing. Remember that if you’re ever mummifying someone.)
Crindi had good instincts right from the start.
By which I mean, I was obviously looking stressed out, so the first thing she did was carry me from her workshop deeper into that darkened, gloomy, musty maze of a basement and lay me in a bathtub—an ancient, white porcelain, clawfoot tub with gold trim.
She fussed around a bit, trying to make me comfortable, which was impossible since I was rock-hard and unbending. A bony, stiff, brown board. Picture trying to fit a fence post with stick arms crossed over its chest into your bathtub. All she could do was put a folded washcloth under my head where it lay on the rim of the tub.
However, and let me be clear on this point, it was the best bath I’d ever taken. Probably the best bath in the entire history of baths.
(I’ve never been able to find anyone who has any idea why there’s a functioning bathtub in the basement of the British Museum. Maybe curators need to de-stress after a hard day of whatever it is they do with the eight million items the place owns, of which I was one. If I ever uncover the truth—and it’s not too scandalous—I’ll report back.)
After she had me soaking, blissfully if not comfortably, she’d calmed down enough to introduce herself.
She leaned over from her perch on the side of the tub and gazed down at my (now blinkable) hazel eyes with her excited, brown ones and introduced herself.
“So. Where do we start? I’m Crindoline Masterson, but I like for people to call me Crindi. Weird name, I know, but nothing compared to your na—sorry! I didn’t mean that!”
I, of course, didn’t understand any of this until a couple of hectic months had passed of me learning English like my life depended on it, which it absolutely did. But like a good little doctoral candidate, she diligently filmed or recorded everything.
(And if she ever puts any of those early, horror-show clips of shriveled, brown, wrinkly, bald me online, she’ll be able get an advanced degree in mummy cursing, I swear to Ra and Isis.)
“Anywho, I’m Crindi Masterson. Soon to be Doctor Crindi Masterson! I mean, I could trot you out in front of the doctoral review committee, no dissertation needed, and—sorry, sorry. Anyway, it’s so nice to meet you and oh my God, you’re totally naked! Um, um, just a minute!”
She raced off into the narrow aisles of the labyrinth, row upon row of cluttered, dark shelves, flapping her hands and shouting, “I know I’ve seen it in the postwar toiletries collection! I’ll be right back!”
Crindi returned in a few minutes, out of breath and holding out a small, milk-white glass bottle with a gold cap.
“You have to promise you’ll never tell anyone! But this a bath emergency, so I think I can borrow a little.”
She opened it and quickly splashed a liquid into the warm water still streaming into the tub.
It must have been an expensive potion, maybe even a magical one. Whatever it was, I learned the most useful thing since waking up: Even the best bath in recorded history can be improved by adding lavender-scented bubbles.
“I know there wasn’t a nudity taboo during your dynasty, but still, when in Rome, or London, I guess. Ha, ha! Definite nudity taboo! We can’t have you getting arrested for indecent exposure on your first night.”
FYI, Crindi talks a lot—high-pitched and fast—when she’s nervous, in case you haven’t picked up on that yet.
Also, she’s usually nervous.
“Oh! Oh! Not that you don’t look great, considering!” She gestured at my nearly skeletal body, all four-feet-nine-inches of it. “I know beauty standards could be stringent back in your day and you really, um, kept your figure? Not that I’m objectifying you! Oh, jeez, this is so hard.
“But, seriously, you look like you were healthy when you died—or not-died, or whatever—for a being a low-status housewife—I mean matron!—I mean woman!—sorry, sorry, and not low-status, just-fine status…”
Crindi took a few deep breaths and leaned over me again.
“I’m trying really hard, but I’ll try harder, OK? It’s just that twenty minutes ago, you were a number and a few notes on a tag written by some English dude who carted you back from Egypt 200 years ago.
“I mean, you were you, but all anyone knew about you was—anyway, I’m sorry, and I’ll do better.”
She held out her hand to me in some form of greeting, then looked embarrassed and pulled it back.
“Merry Christmas! I’m Crindi Masterson and I’m so pleased to make your acquaintance, Ms. Satsohimopltep.”
Yep. That’s right.
The cheap jerk even spelled my name wrong on my burial plaque.
. . .
When my spine and hips unfroze, I learned that my lungs and throat were working well enough to produce a real scream.
(I’m calling it a scream but it was more like the gasp of an old, punctured, blacksmith’s bellows.)
The sharp cracking of each of my vertebra snapping loose, followed by the horrible screeching rasp of my loosening pelvis, made the dark, dingy basement sound like a torture chamber. The pain was beyond imagining, far exceeding the capacity of lavender bubbles to soothe.
Crindi must have sensed exactly what I needed most in that moment of extreme agony. She rushed off again into the maze of shelves and was back at the bathtub in less than a minute.
“Look! Wine!” She held up a tan, head-sized, clay jar with a narrow, sealed opening. I could hear liquid sloshing inside.
Really? A drink was sounding good at that point, but given my last living memory, I wanted anything but wine.
“Or the Professor thinks it’s wine. It’s got a weird hieroglyph on it. It’s like breaking museum law, or something, I’m sure, but I’ve always wanted to pop the cork on this, so to speak. It’s within two centuries of being your exact vintage!” She was beaming with excitement. “I’ve already borrowed some foam bath. If ever there was a perfect occasion to bring out the good stuff, this is it.”
The glyph on the jar clearly said “vinegar.”
Suddenly wine didn’t sound so bad.
She dragged over a small metal table and set the jar on it, then carefully pried off the tight-fitting lid with a pointy tool from her lab. She sniffed it and shrugged.
“It doesn’t smell bad. Just, wine-y?” She dipped a small paper strip into the liquid and studied it, then did the same with two more. “Good news! It’s not poisonous.”
Crindi dipped a finger in. “I’m breaking all kinds of protocols, so mum’s the word.” She giggled. “Mummy’s the word! Get it? Oh, but too soon? Probably too soon. Mummy jokes are an Egyptologist thing, but I’ll try to control myself.”
She licked her finger and grimaced. “I don’t drink, so maybe this is how aged stuff is supposed to taste? A wine snob might say it’s got a touch of pucker to it, I guess, but whatever, wine keeps forever, right?”
She poured some into a white paper cup, then put the cup to my lips. I braced myself.
A straight shot of pure vinegar, aged to perfect acidic potency for over four millennia, burned a trail straight past my tongue—my gag reflex wasn’t functioning yet—and down my throat to my stomach.
It was not pleasant.
But it did do the trick of waking up my esophagus and the first several feet of my digestive tract, although I recommend trying everything else first if you ever find yourself in that situation.
As a bonus, the half that went down the wrong tube got the ol’ lungs pumping. I don’t recommend that, either.
My heart rate picked up from one beat every century or so to something closer to normal and I could feel other organs responding to the shock therapy.
I forced my neck in jerky stages—snap, snap, snap—to turn my face to look directly at Crindi. I could barely open my mouth, but I summoned the vilest curse words I could recall from my time working on the docks at the pyramid project, and rasped out my first words in over 4,600 years.
“What in the fiery hell is wrong with you?”
That is a highly scrubbed version for sensitive readers. I could trade insults with boat crews from at least six different kingdoms by the time I was ten years old, so what I really said would melt your eardrums.
(Later, after I casually pointed out the true meaning of that glyph, Crindi apologized profusely. Which didn’t stop me from continuing to bring it up during our occasional little flatmate tiffs, because that’s the kind of person I am.)
She was exultant. “You can talk! Oh my God, I was so afraid you’d be, you know, brain dead. You might still be a little, uh, confused, let’s say, which would be totally understandable since your brain was basically instant ramen for thousands of years.
“But a full sentence! Probably!
“And that pronunciation! I have no idea what you’re saying—you might be babbling like me, ha, ha! But if you can tell me how to properly pronounce Old Kingdom hieroglyphs, we’re talking Nobel Prize in Egyptology. I wish! No such thing but there should be.
“Oh! I hope you’re not illiterate. Not that you would be! But I know you weren’t a scribe based on, well, based on what was in your tomb, which the records say wasn’t much, to be honest, for one that hadn’t been raided by grave robbers. It was more like mummy warehouse.”
Newsflash: Scribes were stuck-up donkey butts who thought knowing how to draw little pictures of beetles made them Ra’s gift to humankind. Merchants had to know how to read their scribbling if they didn’t want to be ripped off. I reviewed every single contract my worthless, terrible-at-business, illiterate husband ever had drawn up.
Saved him a ton of copper, none of which was apparently used to send me off with any trinkets to bribe my way through the underworld.
(Don’t even get me started on the “mummy warehouse” thing. Nothing he did would surprise me and, seriously, I’ve moved on, so drop it already.)
The vinegar was powerful motivation to push through the pain of getting all my joints moving so she’d stop. Thankfully, I had barely enough strength in my muscles to bend them beyond the frozen point, but moving each one even an inch was exhausting.
I focused first on my jaw muscles, putting all of my strength into forcing my mouth firmly shut against Crindi’s gently prying fingers.
In spite of my best efforts, the madness didn’t stop.
“Hey, it looks like vino agrees with you. Let’s get some more down. Here we go, upsy-daisy.” My eyes rolled back into my head as she tipped the paper cup again.
. . .
After another cup of acid burned its way through my stiff body, Crindi finally put the vinegar away.
“I’m cutting you off for the night. I need to seal it up again with a little bit left to hide my crime. But that should definitely get your liver’s attention, at the very least.”
She leaned over closer and ran her fingers tenderly over my bare, brown scalp, from my wrinkled forehead to the back of my head, where it lay against the washcloth laid over the smooth porcelain of the bathtub. Her smile faded to a look of concern that was almost maternal.
“Probably enough excitement for your first night, huh?”
She looked into the darkened spaces surrounding us. Ceiling-high shelves lined with boxes of artifacts stretched off into the distance, muffling all sound. A few of the magical lavender bubbles popped against my nose and cheeks.
I followed her eyes and noticed several tacked-up images of little people in pointy hats and a large man with a long, white beard dressed in red.
“You’re the best Christmas gift I’ve ever gotten. And you’re a living, breathing woman, not a specimen. There’s no way in heck I’m leaving you here, or even telling anyone else about you.
“It’s kind of cutthroat, Egyptology. Only so many jobs out there waiting for us. The other two grad students… they’re OK, I guess, but I wouldn’t put it past either one of them to dissect you if it meant a tenured slot at a university.”
She sat back and twisted a few strands of her afro.
“Now that you can bend a bit, I can wrap you up enough to sneak out the back way if I keep your face covered. If anyone asks, I’ll tell them you’re my friend’s kid from Egypt, all tuckered out. It’s at least 90% true, which is honestly higher than my average, truth-wise.”
Crindi started draining the bath.
“Teppi—if I can call you that—I’ve been in love with ancient Egypt since I was a little girl. I even had my black Paleontologist Barbie finding mummies in the sandbox instead of dinosaur bones!” She laughed. “I tried wearing a cute neck scarf like her, but I could never pull it off.
“It’s just, to me, ancient Egypt is—I know, I know, life back then for all the non-pharaohs wasn’t all dates and honey, but…” Her eyes grew distant, looking into her past.
“To me, ancient Egypt is magical. I’m obsessed. And, I guess, a bit more willing to believe in magic than the next girl? Maybe one of your gods decided to make a special exception, or Anubis was taking a break when you showed up at the front desk of the underworld.”
Or, Anubis had pointed at the scales in the Hall of Truth, and I had to shrug and show him my empty hands. So, he bared his fangs and shook his jackal head and snarled at me to get lost and stop wasting his time.
She leaned down and gently picked me up out of the lavender-scented bathwater as if I was a doll made of glass. Water and bubbles dripped from my wrinkled, brown skin onto the tiled floor.
Crindi walked back through the dim labyrinth of shelves to her lab. We passed brown cardboard boxes, all carefully labeled, that reached to the ceiling. She cradled my stiff form, hardly recognizable as human, to her chest, caring for me as if I was a child.
A memory started to bubble up in my mind. I pushed it back down.
The blindingly bright lights that weren’t candles, the tools that screeched and whirred, the bath with hot water running directly into it with no boiling copper kettle in sight. I wasn’t dead and I wasn’t in any afterlife I’d ever heard described by the priests, even the drunk ones.
Every single experience of the last hour was beyond anything the most advanced wizardry could conjure up. Which could only mean one thing.
As unbelievable as it was, I was in my future.
The long, long night hadn’t been a nightmare. At the time, I had no idea how far in my future. But certainly far enough that—
I wasn’t ready to think about what that meant, not yet. So I focused on my rescuer.
My neck had barely enough flexibility that I could turn my head to look up at her. I examined her features. I’d never asked anyone in my entire life to help me with anything, and now I was completely dependent on a Nubian woman I’d just met. I felt utterly helpless. Helpless and vulnerable and weak.
I didn’t like it. Not one bit. But I had no choice.
At least we were on good terms with Nubia the last I knew, even trading with them, and not at war, slaughtering each other. She didn’t appear to hold any anti-Egyptian grudges, so I didn’t think she’d clean me up just to turn me over to the army.
And, aside from the vinegar treatment, she hadn’t tortured me.
I couldn’t understand her words at the time, but I could tell they’d all been spoken in kindness. I consoled myself with the thought that the situation could have been a lot worse, all things considered.
Crindi’s lips were pressed firmly together and a slight scowl wrinkled her forehead. She gazed down at me for a long moment before speaking.
“I know this is really, really hard for you. And I don’t know how or why it happened. It’s like an ancient miracle. But, I want you to know that I’m here for you, and you’re not a specimen to me, and you can trust me.”
A small tear had formed in the corner of her eye.
“You’re a precious and beautiful person, and more than anything else, you need a friend. I hope you’re OK with that friend being me, because…” She tipped her head to wipe the tear off her cheek onto the shoulder of her lab coat and managed a small smile. “Well, expats gotta stick together, right?
“I know there’s a reason you woke up when you did, and that I’m the one who made it happen. You belong here and now. We’ll figure it out, I promise.”
As I looked up at her face, I was clueless as to why she’d suddenly become so serious. Most likely something I’d already screwed up without knowing it. She might as well get used to it. Given the mess I’d left behind in my own life, I was undoubtedly going to be the reason anything good she was hoping for was never going to come true.
“Anyway, I want you to know that I’ve got you, and I’m going to keep you safe. And I’ll help you with anything you need. Anything at all.”
Crindi paused at an old, unused display set on a pallet on the floor and used one hand to drag the white cotton dust cover off it. In a few more moments, we were back in her workshop filled with strange and menacing tools and machines.
“I swear that no matter what it takes, I won’t let anything bad happen to you. I might slip out a little white lie here and there, but I never go back on my word.”
She gave me one more squeeze before setting me on the white cotton sheet to wrap me up.
Exhaustion settled over my stiff body like a lead blanket. I felt myself fading into unconsciousness.
Crindi gathered me into her arms. “Let’s go home.”