Free Maria Hudgins - Lacy Glass 01 - Scorpion House by Maria Hudgins

“Look what I’ve brought you.” She pulled a large cellophane pack of ballpoint pens from one of her bags and handed them to him. “For your children.”
    Lacy assumed Susan and Akhmed had become acquainted during her stay at Whiz Bang the previous winter.
    “Ah, thank you very much, Dr. Donohue.
Inshallah
, my children will have no more excuses for not doing their schoolwork.”
    Roxanne turned to the new arrivals and whispered, “Schools supplies are so hard to come by, here. Pens and pencils are like gold to the locals.”
    “Wait, Dr. Donohue,” Akhmed said, slipping Susan’s gift into a pocket of his gallabeyah. “I have something for you, too.” He dug around in another pocket and pulled out a pack of Marlboro cigarettes. He handed them to her. “Your own special brand.”
    Susan thanked him, and stuffed the cigarettes in her pocket. She turned slightly and shook her head at the rest of the group, a silent warning not to mention she had quit smoking. She waited until they were inside the tomb’s entrance. “It was nice of him to remember me. We needn’t tell him I’ve kicked the habit.”
    Shelley said, “Have you really kicked it? You’ve been wearing the nicotine patch for what, two weeks?” She glanced warily at Susan, then at Graham.
    Lacy said, “I’ve heard that Egyptian cigarettes are harsher than ours, even if the brand name and the package are the same.”
    “Right. They aren’t the same at all.” Susan pulled the Marlboros out and looked at the pack. “I promise you, if any of us were to smoke one of these right now, we’d go weak in the knees.”
    They were standing in what Roxanne called the Transverse Hall. Extending left and right from the tomb entrance, its walls were covered in low relief carving except in places where the original surface had fallen off. A dozen or more clay vessels, most of them decorated with a powder-blue paint, leaned against the wall at one end of the hall. The ceiling, blackened in spots and crumbling in others, was covered in a multi-colored geometric pattern of overlapping circles.
    At first, Lacy thought the wall reliefs had not been painted but when she looked closer she found remnants of blue and black pigment still stuck in the grooves. The reliefs directly in front of her appeared to show a man, a woman, and some stylized birds. Hieroglyphic writing in all the spaces between figures. A long row of girls, their hands raised, appeared to march along in single file toward the arched doorway opposite the main entrance.
    “When we first started,” Roxanne said, “this room was all we knew about. The hall we are about to enter had yet to be excavated.” She led them through, down a few steps, and into a long, sloping hallway.
    Lacy was overwhelmed. She had to stop for a moment to keep from falling. The colors on the walls and over her head couldn’t have been sharper or more dazzling on the day they were painted. Except for the floor this narrow passage was completely covered in art. Palm trees, men with heads like jackals, men with heads like birds, stylized flowers, long snakes. Hieroglyphics overhead.
    Roxanne stopped them. “Along this wall we have a scene that shows the process of dyeing cloth. This, plus the fact that we’ve found a lot of dyed linen in the inner chamber, is why we believe Kheti had something to do with the dyeing process, probably as a supervisor. Here, you can see two men pulling cloth from a vat, two others wringing it out and stacking it in wet piles.”
    Roxanne turned to the opposite wall. “This entire wall is like a garden. You see birds and insects flitting in and out. You see rows and rows of plants. This is obviously a formal garden. Here is an olive tree in a pot. Here is a pond with lotus blossoms floating and fish underneath. You see?” Roxanne ran her finger along, close to but not actually touching the wall.
    Lacy saw browns, blacks, blues, whites, and greens. The reds were red-browns rather than bright