How exactly does a person end up drinking poisoned wine on their anniversary, when they don’t even like wine and hated celebrating their marriage to a walking, talking pig?
Wine was expensive, and why drink wine when the family business was overflowing with beer since it was a brewery? Good beer, even great beer, if I do say so myself, since I was the one running the place.
The fact that the cheapskate paid for a special drink should have been my first clue that something was off. Also, that he dedicated a special bottle for our use alone as the “esteemed husband and honored wife.”
Oh…
Stupid, stupid, stupid!
Now that I’m writing it down, I can’t believe how clueless I was.
He’d never honored me once in the entire fifteen years we were “married.” He’d done plenty of other things—thus my intense hatred of him—but had never bought me a gift of any sort and had certainly never held a celebration for me.
Drinking poison came down to peer pressure. That thing teenagers have to learn to overcome that grown women should have no problem with.
But before we get into that, I need to straighten out this name thing. I wasn’t happy about being forced to bear the family name of a lout. But I kept the business’s books—two sets of them—and us accountants tend to be particular about details, even uncomfortable ones.
“Satsohimopltep” is—let me be clear on this point—not an Egyptian name, ancient or otherwise.
I blamed my ex for the misspelling, but it could as easily have been a donkey-butt scribe joke. When 98% of a population can’t read, you can get away with a lot, which scribes did constantly.
Besides altering documents and inscriptions in exchange for bribes, they also did it for fun.
Take a patriarchal society, put a bunch of juvenile man-children in the same room for ten seconds, and what do you get? Crude opinions, dirty jokes, and a huge heaping helping of misogyny. We didn’t even have locker rooms and it still happened.
Now, give them the power to write down anything they want without getting in trouble, since only other scribes and the smarter priests can read it.
Result: Satsohimopltep. Satsohotep was my husband’s name, which meant it was my name, since he owned me.
It means “I’m a jackass.”
I’m kidding! It means “animal herder” or something dull and peasanty like that.
He kept that name when he started lying, cheating, and bullying his way up the levels of merchants. He used it to his advantage, acting like he was a simple country goatherder from bumpkin-land who didn’t understand how things were done in the big city.
Then, while the other merchants were thinking they got the best end of a deal and not paying attention, he ripped them off right under their noses. He rerouted products, paid off scribes to lie on inventory documents, and ran a whole host of other schemes.
Stealing was the only thing he was good at, but he was really good at it.
Believe me, I know. Running our large brewery included doing the crooked bookkeeping and general hiding of assets from the tax collectors.
He was an important local merchant, but scribes would make fun of anyone. Satsohimopltep is a play on words that takes “animal herder” and turns it into something animal-related that I can’t repeat to readers with innocent ears. You can remember what I said about “crude” earlier and use your imagination.
Boys will be boys, ha ha! Labeling some rich guy’s property (me) with an obscene inside joke.
My first name wasn’t easy to pronounce, even in ancient Egyptian: Tnamycra. Doesn’t exactly roll off the tongue, especially since there’s a click in the middle. It means girl who looks like her grandmother. I never knew either of my grandmothers, and that name never felt like it fit.
As soon as I was old enough to get an attitude (when I became a toddler, according to my mother), I refused to answer to anything but Tnommy or Tommy, your choice.
I thought it was fitting to get a new name for a new life.
The name Crindi gave me, Teppi, means “baby goat” in ancient Egyptian, Old Kingdom version. Baby goats are cute lil’ things that’ll knock you on your bum if you turn your back on them.
That girl—who looked for the silver lining in everything and believed that deep down, every person has some good in them—without even knowing it, that girl gave me a perfect name that came straight from her heart.
I loved it the moment I heard it.
It makes me think of her holding me in her arms that first night and looking down at me with one of her rare serious faces, making a promise to take care of me forever, no matter what.
What really burns is that the monkey’s name was spelled correctly.
. . .
OK, back to How to Get Poisoned in Three Easy Steps!
We covered step one: Be as dumb as a mud brick when it comes to highly suspicious activity.
I already mentioned the next step: Be way too concerned about keeping up appearances in front of all the Very Important People at a party. I was in no position to refuse anything my husband wanted, especially attending a celebration in my honor.
The party was big enough that it was held out on the wide street that ran in front of our house and brewery compound in Zawty. The street was dusty, but as solid as pavement since it was formed by gravel and tan, sunbaked clay that had been compressed by hundreds of years of use and the impact of millions of feet and hooves.
Neighbors brought out their tables made from woven willow branches and set them up haphazardly between the one- and two-story, earthy-brown, mud-brick houses of the well-to-do merchants.
As the last rays of the setting sun neared the western horizon, cooler air, laden with the lush, green scent of the wetlands bordering the Nile, settled over the city. The nightly chorus of frogs began and the oil lamps were lit.
The extra help we’d hired—I’d hired, since of course I had to plan my own party—laid out bread and stew made from leeks and fish, plus bowls of dates and nuts, and a few melons. My household wasn’t poor by any measure, but we weren’t rich enough to feed meat to a crowd. We set out large, ceramic crocks of all three types of beer we brewed, which is what everyone was really there for anyway.
It was BYOD—Bring Your Own Dishes. Guests knew to bring their own bowls and drinking cups, so at least cleaning up after these sorts of things was easy.
All our biggest business partners—grain suppliers, spice merchants, potters—began to arrive with their wives. They were there for me and the murderer—I mean husband—but also the free food and unlimited alcohol.
In my part of ancient Egypt, women could take on a lot of jobs that men normally did, as long as you weren’t telling any men what to do. Which, of course, I did all the time, since that’s an art perfected by all women since the beginning of time. You ladies know what I’m talking about.
These guys all knew me, knew I was the brains of the operation, and were all around decent human beings. We got along well. They sometimes had me over for meals with their families when the pig was out of town on “business.” (He considered debauchery a legitimate business expense.)
I wasn’t loving my life at that point. I had unending worries about the future and was working on my secret plan. But outside the house, in the brewery or market or conducting business, I could feel normal and even safe. These other families were part of that and I was glad to pay them back for the kindness they’d shown me over the years.
Even I have my moments when I’m not a totally horrible human being.
Many of the guests were happy I was finally getting some recognition, which, it’s nice to be appreciated and this probably made me drop my guard a bit. But that wasn’t why I drank suspicious wine.
Which brings me to defining the capital P Peer Pressure I was under.
Being an accomplished woman of business only got you so far in a male-dominated society. You still had a place in the system where you belonged and you could never fully leave it. In other words, being an ungrateful wife was not a label you ever wanted to stick if your plan was to survive for long.
I never complained about my husband to anyone. I wasn’t stupid. Besides, they could see he was trash with their own eyes. No explanations were necessary. I was a “good wife,” and good wives don’t refuse their husband’s orders and expectations in public.
Also, even though my own relatives had sold me into that arrangement, it was drilled into you not to disgrace your family name in the eyes of society or the gods. Being a bad family member was even worse than being a bad wife.
Which brings us to step three: When in ancient Egypt, do as the Egyptians do. Which means drink way too much, way too often.
As I mentioned before, we drank beer all day long, every single day, from the age of about five until we keeled over. I’m not condoning it, so don’t even try to use my explanation as an excuse. It was the way things were done back then. Beer was basically liquid bread and just as important.
(More on this topic later. Much more.)
I had a pre-party cup of beer so I could more easily fake a smile when all I wanted to do was stab my ex with a serving fork. I slapped backs and punched arms, greeting everyone like old friends and—
Oh, gods.
Friends who I now realize had been invited as witnesses to the wonderfulness of our marriage so my ex could avoid any suspicion later.
Women may have been second-tier citizens, but killing them off was still considered bad manners. Besides, I was the popular one the other merchants liked. A suspicious death would have been bad for business.
I now wish I hadn’t started this story, but I’ll finish it.
By the time I’d sat through five toasts, all from the special bottle of sickly sweet wine, the conversation was a roar in my ears and the smoke from the candles was burning my eyes.
I was done for the evening.
I remember thinking it was weird that the full-on alcoholic sharing the bottle was barely sipping rather than guzzling. Then I remember things getting blurry and being carried away from the party as I fell asleep.
And then terrifying, confusing nothingness for the next four-plus eons until I woke up staring at a crazy woman armed with power tools.
Don’t make me tell that story again. It’s so embarrassing now that I’ve put all the puzzle pieces together and ended up with a picture of an idiot (me).
. . .
Sweet lemon-berry tea and lounging in bed wasn’t the cure-all I’d hoped they would be.
Neither was bacon, as delicious as it was, since I couldn’t keep down any food Crindi offered.
I’d gotten all the oomph I was going to get from easy sources, and I was still as weak as a kitten. Every ounce of muscle from that point forward would have to be earned the hard way.
That was my status late on the night of New Year’s Eve, as I sat propped up in bed trying to focus on Crindi’s tablet while raindrops pelted the window. The room was cozy at night, too, with the floral notes of the jasmine candle and the little Christmas tree replaced by a tiny bouquet of fresh flowers.
Gloomy outside, cheerful and safe and comfortable inside—because Crindi kept it that way. I knew that and understood how much time she was putting in, all for me.
But I was appreciating her tireless efforts less and less.
The tablet was somehow showing miniature moving images of people, jabbering in languages that I could tell weren’t English, on the other side of the world.
Or so she claimed.
She got the point across with flash cards as she showed me a map, something I’d never seen or even imagined before. Who needed a map when everything of any importance was located along the banks of the Nile River, and the only directions you’d ever want to travel were upstream or downstream?
I’d nodded like I understood, which made her happy, but come on—other side of the world? That would be the bottom, right? I’m ready to admit now that the world is probably a globe, but at the time, I knew without a doubt that it was as flat as the Nile’s floodplain.
Crindi was sorting piles of paper with cryptic marks at the kitchen counter and casting worried glances at me.
(I keep wanting to say papyrus instead of paper. I have to remind myself they cut down gazillions of trees to make pages for writing now, instead of squishing a bunch of reeds together and letting them dry.)
I wasn’t eating, and I was hardly drinking anything, so the mysteries that lay behind the narrow yellow door were still hidden from me. Plus, I was sleeping at least fifteen hours a day.
Crindi had brought home a walker, a framework of gray metal tubes with wheels I could use for support while I built my leg strength up from mouse level.
I could only use it with her help. I’d stumbled around the flat a few times, but never made it more than five or six steps before I had to turn back. Taking a single lap around the little table with its two small chairs had felt like running a footrace.
The mental toll of my long, slow days was far worse than the physical.
I was having to push back harder and harder in a vain attempt to bury memories that kept bubbling up. Like a fading dream, the endless years of my seemingly eternal sleep that had stretched so long into the past when I first woke up, were transforming in my perception to a single night.
Which meant that, to me, less than a week had passed since I had walked the streets of Zawty, holding a delicate hand as we shopped in the heady aroma of the spice market under the hot Egyptian sun.
That feeling of profound loss—once distant, now fresh and raw—was devastating as I lay under a perpetually cloudy sky, an immeasurable distance from my homeland and everything and everyone I’d ever known.
I still didn’t know how far in the future I was, but thousands of cycles had to have come and gone. That knowledge lay heavily on my mind, sapping not only my strength, but my will.
I shifted my gaze to the dark, rain-splattered window. The constant lack of sun was also demoralizing. I’d never before gone a single day in my life without seeing it at least once.
I assumed Khepri was still on the job, doing his sun-rolling thing, since it did get light every day and dark every night, but I was used to more visual proof of his efforts. I knew I should turn whatever Crindi tried to feed me next into an offering to him. The comforting routine of an offering and prayer might lift my spirits and convince Khepri to stop pouting, turn up the furnace, and burn off some of those clouds.
And maybe favor me with a little bit of his resurrection powers, because I was sure in need of them.
As for Crindi, she was still looking as tired as I felt. Still wearing bright colors, still chatty, still cheerful, but I could see a deep weariness in her eyes.
Crindi caught me looking at her. She checked the camera that was filming us from its perch atop a tripod, then sat by me on the bed and turned off the tablet. She was wearing a new, emerald-green cardigan and navy blue pants with a crease. Blue clips and ties held her deep-black afro in a new style I hadn’t seen before.
She peeled back the covers to anoint my body with moisturizing cream, something she had to do twice a day. My medium-brown skin was continuing to soften, but was still prone to cracking.
“I mentioned some problems that first morning you woke up.” She helped me sit up. “I’ve taken care of the biggest one.”
She opened the jar of cream she’d mixed for me and removed my Christmas stocking cap. The smell of cocoa butter and coconut oil mixed with the scent of the jasmine candle.
“Oooh! Your peach fuzz is coming along nicely. I bet it’s two millimeters now! A few more weeks and I’ll have to style it.”
That remark came with one of her trademark winks.
She finished rubbing cream into my scalp, my neck and, carefully, my face, and put my reindeer stocking cap back on. She removed my baggy blue pajama top, guiding each of my arms with slow, gentle movements.
These sleeves for both my arms and my legs were an interesting clothing style. But I appreciated them for their warmth-retaining qualities.
“I hid your mummy wrappings behind some equipment in my workshop lab for a few days, but I knew I’d have to do better. It’s not something you can sneak out and shove in a bin. I couldn’t bring myself to trash a mummy anyway, even an empty one. Seems sacrilegious for an Egyptologist to do that.”
Crindi finished my back, helped me lay down, and began smoothing cream onto my belly, working her way up. She’d apologized at least twenty times for violating my privacy the first time she spread the cream while I was awake, but I couldn’t do it and it had to be done.
What she’d said about a lack of a nudity taboo on the first night was true. Look, people—clothing was expensive! All that flax was harvested by hand and woven into linen the same way. If you didn’t want to wear it out when you were working, you took it off.
And in case you haven’t heard, Egypt is either hot or hotter most of the year. The gods gave us sweat to cool off, and sweat only works when it can evaporate, which it does better the less you wear.
This modern meltdown over nakedness is unbelievable. You can relax, though. This story won’t get racy. I never took off my clothes unless I was alone behind a closed door, because I couldn’t.
Nakedness simply wasn’t a problem from my perspective. I’m also the opposite of voluptuous in the chest area. I found her discomfort amusing. But she’d quickly snapped into nurse mode, gotten clinical about it, and now it was routine.
“The Egyptian section of the British Museum basement is an absolute maze of shelves and shadows and nooks and crannies. Smells a little bit musty and a lot dusty, too.” She laughed. “Sometimes I pretend I’m the first archaeologist to discover some ancient tomb when I’m down there.
“Anyway, I finally found a spot in a dark corner where I could rearrange an old display and I put your mummy cocoon behind it. Nobody is going to find that thing, cross my fingers!”
She helped me back into the pajama top, then pulled off my bottoms and started rubbing cream onto one leg.
“The other problem was my short-term grant running out and me having to go back to California. I scraped together enough of my initial findings to prove I was onto something—well, prove on paper—and my adviser at UCLA told me she was 99% certain my research grant will be extended six months. Cross my fingers again!
“That’s a massive relief, I’m telling you. I was so stressed about that, since, you know, I’ve made a promise which I absolutely refuse to break.
“However, to stay longer than that, I have to make real progress, which I don’t know if I can. My big idea of taking all these microbe samples from mummy intestines—mummies’ tummies!—to study how gut microbiomes evolved…” She trailed off, continuing to rub.
“Everything’s more degraded than I thought it would be. Very hard for the DNA lab to sequence, even with all the latest advances.”
If you’re not following this voodoo, don’t worry. I didn’t know what she was saying then, and I still wasn’t sure what it all meant once I could understand her. All I knew was that it involved power tools applied to innocent mummies. But, “science matters!” as Crindi always says, so I can speak for the mummies and verify that we’re all happy to do our part in the name of progress.
She slowly bent one of my knees up to get to the back of my leg.
“We’ll just hope for the best. The more samples I can get, the better my chances of finding some that’ll work. So, I’m sorry, but I’m going to be home even later most nights.” She began working on the back of my other leg. “I hate leaving you alone so much. Um, but, maybe you could get up more on your own?”
She nodded toward the walker and I knew what she meant, even if I couldn’t understand her words. I was feeling increasing guilt for slacking off so much and being nothing but a dead-weight burden to Crindi when she was so busy. I resolved to try harder, even though I knew I wouldn’t.
“It’s probably good you’re still sleeping a lot to pass the time.”
She silently finished the cream treatment and carefully dressed me. She laid me back and arranged the covers. I always felt sleepy after these full-body massages, and I was starting to drift off when I heard loud cheers and the clanging of metal on metal coming from the mysterious world outside the window.
“Oh! It’s midnight!” She leaped up, opened her purse, pulled out a blue paper cylinder and aimed it into the air. She mimicked something coming out of it.
“Don’t be scared! But we should celebrate.”
She pulled a string. There was a loud pop and the smell of something burning. Bits of colorful paper rained down on me.
What…?
“Happy new year to us! It’s going to be a great year!”
Her hopeful smile was forced, but I still appreciated it. “I know we can make good things happen if we try hard enough.”
A few glimpses ahead
Short, non-spoiler moments from later in the story—just enough to give you a hint of what lies in store for Teppi and Crindi.
. . .
Some people might have mistaken these meetings for casual conversations between flatmates, but no. Two people with no blood relation sitting at a table with serious expressions was, by her definition, still a family meeting. She liked to say, “two people make a family,” which undoubtedly came from her grandma.
It was like she was trying to get something important right, and family meetings were on the best-practices task list. She even wrote up some ground rules for us to follow. Really mystifying stuff like:
“Assume positive intent.” (I had to look up every one of those words in the dictionary Crindi gave me, and I still didn’t understand what they meant when they were all strung together.)
“Listen with an open heart.” (I thought this one was a little graphic before she explained it.)
And “always remember this is a safe space.” (Whatever in Hades that’s supposed to mean.)
We started having meetings about all kinds of flatmate things.
. . .
Let’s talk personal hygiene!
Always a fun topic to chit chat about.
For people who didn’t know germs existed, us Egyptians of the ancient variety were pretty darn clean, considering we lived in, on, and around a finely powdered mixture of dirt and animal poop, and pumped out our bodyweight in sweat every day.
Bathing (with soap!), tooth scrubbers (with toothpaste!), and perfumed, odor-disguising body oils (with the best of intentions!) were all part of the potential regimens we followed.
. . .
If you’re from England, you’re going to want to skip this next part.
I’m as serious as a burnt crumpet.
I’ve been trying to accommodate my British readers.
Kind of trying.
OK, not trying very hard, but doing my best.
I’ve been throwing in words like “fortnight.” Tossing around an occasional metric measurement. Even using your preferred body-part names, like “arse,” all for you.
But now I’m going to undo every single bit of that goodwill.
This troubles me deeply, but the truth sometimes hurts, and I’m about to speak some hurtful truths about your grand and glorious past.
I honestly think it would be best if you’d bid me “Ta-ta!” and cheerio off to the next chapter and we’ll pick up our mutually respectful dialogue there and pretend this part never happened.
If you do choose to forge ahead, then try not to do any damage to the whole “stiff upper lip” mythology that the rest of the world imagines is true.
In other words, no whinging.
You’ve been warned.
. . .
Crindi was better at cleaning than me, so maybe she would…?
“The driver is responsible for whatever happens in the car. Like a ship captain.” She shrugged. “I’d help, but that’s the rule in America.”
That didn’t sound right. I’d heard in the UK that Americans loved being in charge, but they always expected everyone else to clean up their messes.
Also: Who was this girl? My flatmate suddenly had an attitude.
. . .
She wasn’t filling in the holes.
I tightened my grip on her arms and pulled her gloved hands from her face. “Tell me.” I didn’t know what else to say.
“You don’t—” Her voice broke. “You don’t want to hear my dumb problems.”
“Yes I do. I’m your—” I could do this. “I’m your very best friend.”