Eye of the Moon Read Online Free Page A

truly dead.
    My mouth went dry. This was no ordinary person. Not with that red flaming hair. It hung in a cascade of brilliant auburn that almost swept the floor. Thick and wavy and textured, as if it had seen hours and hours of brushing with oils.
    Beneath the woman’s tilted head was a stone basin. I knew the last liquid of her brain would slowly be dripping into it from a hole made at the base of her skull.
    I could see her earlobes had two holes each. The double piercing of royalty. And there was a ridge on her forehead as if something heavy had rested there.
    There was no mistaking that profile and that hair. It was Queen Tiy! The most beautiful queen ever to rule Egypt. She wore the royal vulture crown with its golden discs of the sun god Amun. The most exalted woman in Egypt now lay dead before my eyes.
    I’d seen her float past on her barge, wearing robes as translucent as a dragonfly’s wings, thinner than gossamer, embellished with dazzling gold sequins, her narrow waist accentuated with broad beaded belts, her long neck hung with necklaces of multiple rows of shimmering beads and gold amulets, sunlight catching stones of every hue on bracelets, armbands,and rings, two tall white ostrich plumes set with gold sun disks on her head making her taller than anyone around her, with the wings of the vulture goddess sweeping back from her face.
    Now I was standing closer to her than I’d ever dreamed.
    The priests were walking around her body, making incantations and sprinkling it with white powder. The body would rot quickly in the heat. The salt was to prevent this. I knew the body would lie in salt for forty days until all moisture was drawn from it. Afterward it would be anointed with resin and juniper oil and beeswax. Then it would be wrapped in linen with the heart amulet and other precious amulets between the bindings.
    Finally, before being laid in her sarcophagus, there’d be the Opening of the Mouth ceremony. Queen Tiy’s mouth and eyes would be touched with an adze. Her spirit would then be able to reenter her body and breathe life back into it for her journey into the afterlife.
    The entire ritual took seventy days. The same length of time that Sophet, the Dog Star, the brightest of all stars, vanished from the sky. After seventynights, when Sophet crept back, the Great River would begin to flood and bring down its life-giving black earth. The same time was needed for Queen Tiy to be reborn. After seventy days she’d make her journey into the Underworld.
    But now in the gloom of the chamber, my eye picked up a group of figures standing as a pack of jackals on upright legs. They wore terra-cotta masks with pointed ears, fierce-painted eyes, and the sharp snouts of Anubis. They stood nodding their sinister heads and bowing awkwardly as they tried to see out of tiny holes cut into the terra-cotta.
    They stood around a second body on another slab. I pressed my eye closer to the gap.
    It was a boy. A leopard-skin cloak covered one shoulder and a jeweled broad collar rested across his chest. In the strange greenish light his face seemed bruised but handsome. There was no bowl beneath his head and no slash across his stomach, so I knew the embalming process hadn’t begun yet.
    An Anubis-headed priest bent over and put an ear to the boy’s chest. As he glanced up, the painted eyes seemed to stare directly at me. I jumped backand held my breath. I couldn’t risk his catching the glint of my eye at the peephole. I pressed my ear against it instead.
    A muffled voice reached me. “His heartbeat is weak. But he still lives.”
    It was my father’s voice. I couldn’t stop myself from peeping. Yes, I could tell by the gold crocodile bracelets on his upper arms—it was him.
    Another jackal-headed priest nodded slowly. By the leopard cloak he wore, I knew he was the highest of the high priests—Wosret, who had fetched us in the royal barge. “The poison