Free Living in Threes by Judith Tarr

archaeologist.
    There weren’t any Pyramids here—those were all the way up near Cairo—but there were temples and tombs and hieroglyphs everywhere you’d want to look.
    “Almost there,” Gwyn said as if she could read my mind. “We’re working in the Valley of the Queens—in the ruins of a temple that your aunt helped discover when she was in grad school. Over the past twenty years her expeditions have dug most of it out, and started on the maze of tunnels beneath. We don’t know yet how far those go.”
    “Far,” said Aunt Jessie from the driver’s seat. “Tomb robbers used them, of course, to get into the tombs nearby. But they’re the same age as the temple. We’re still not sure exactly what they were meant for.”
    “A tomb, of course,” Gwyn said. “What else could it be?”
    “We can’t be sure,” said Aunt Jessie. “Not without better evidence than we’ve found. And even if it was a tomb, it most likely was robbed long ago. Or priests emptied it before the robbers could, to protect and preserve the royal mummies, if not the goods they were buried with.”
    That argument was worn smooth around the edges. Even I could tell that, from the way Gwyn rolled her eyes. “Yes, Professor. Of course, Professor.”
    “Watch your heads,” Aunt Jessie said.
    I don’t know if she was trying to ding Gwyn for being rude, but she hauled the Land Rover around a corner, nearly bouncing us both out through the roof, and there it was. If I’d had any breath left to catch, I would have caught it.
    A cliff reared up ahead of us, cutting off the glare of the rising sun. The temple sat at its base. It wasn’t nearly as ruined as I’d expected; it had a definite shape, with the stumps of columns marching down two sides, though the roof was gone.
    I reached for my phone to snap a picture, but nobody was getting it this morning: there was no signal. That gave me the horrors for a minute. Or two or maybe six.
    I wouldn’t be getting any sympathy here. I put my phone away, and took a deep breath. I could do this. I could even make myself like it. I just had to think about Cat, and how she would give just about anything to be here.
    I wished she was. But that wasn’t doing anybody any good, either.

    The excavation crew was already at it when we got there: men and boys whose families had been digging in this valley since archaeology was invented.
    “Most of them were tomb robbers before that,” Gwyn said. She was my supervisor, and her job was to teach me how to label potsherds and log them into the expedition’s database.
    That meant we got to sit in a tent, out of the heat and the worst of the dust, and she had a tablet but I had to write everything down on paper. Backup, you know. Aunt Jessie was old school.
    I hoped I’d graduate to actual digging, but that was skilled work, and I wasn’t ready for it yet. As the morning went on and the heat rose up and up, I didn’t mind being able to do my job in the shade.
    It wasn’t as boring as you might think. Potsherds are broken pieces of pots. When you’re digging in ancient places, they’re everywhere, and they’re really important if you’re an archaeologist. You can tell all kinds of things about a place and a time and a people by the dishes and jars and cups they left behind.
    These had bits of bright color on them, and some had hieroglyphs or fragments of pictures: a bird’s head, a peacock’s feather, a woman’s hand. I loved handling them, and I didn’t mind pasting tiny little number codes on the backs. Back in the lab at Luxor House, the pot people would take each piece and put it together like a puzzle, and eventually they’d end up with all or most of a pot.
    Once or twice, for a sort of treat, I got to label a glass bead, and once an amulet so much like the one I was wearing that I dropped it in surprise. Lucky for me, it only fell three inches to the table. Gwyn didn’t even look up.
    I don’t know why my hand was shaking so much. Scarabs