Page 85 of Tomb of the Sun King

“What is it?” she demanded instead. “What’s wrong?”

Neil looked down at his shoes and drew in a breath. “It has recently come to my attention that I have not been as good a brother to you as I ought to have been,” he confessed awkwardly.

“What do you mean?” Ellie pressed, confused.

“Only that you are so dashed good at this!” Neil burst out, pacing. “When you were sitting under my desk, stealing my textbooks to read—well, I encouraged it, didn’t I? Because you were so terribly clever. But I was treating it all like a game, and then I realized that you were serious. And why wouldn’t you be?” He threw up his hands. “You have the knowledge, the skills, the drive, the intelligence—but I…”

His words choked off.

“What?” Ellie set her hands on her hips.

Her brother stared at her helplessly. His hair was mussed and his eyeglasses were a little crooked. “I hoped you would give it up.” He closed his eyes. “Because I didn’t see how you could do this—how it could possibly happen. And I didn’t think you could ever be happy if you had your mind set on a life that was impossible!”

Ellie felt as though the ground beneath her trembled, threatening to give way. Any response she might have made to him caught in her throat.

“But Iknowyou have just as much right to it as I do!” Neil protested, throwing out his arms. “That the rest of the world is mad when they say a woman can’t do this sort of work! I just went along with it because I couldn’t see how I could change it. And I still can’t! I haven’t the foggiest idea where I could even start! But I… I…”

He trailed off, his eyes pleading.

“…feel like you ought to have tried,” Ellie filled in softly.

His words stirred up a storm—a whirling tumult of frustration, disappointment, sadness, and rage. Or perhaps the storm had been there for years, only Ellie had always held it at bay—staving it off with discipline and stubbornness, principle and determination.

She felt it all now in the face of her brother’s words. The brother she hadn’t been born with. The brother who had appeared in her life far enough along that Ellie could remember what it had been likenotto have one.

Neil had dropped into the empty landscape of her childhood like a miracle. Once she had been alone, and then Neil had come, who was clever, and kind, and deeply passionate about the same history that captured Ellie’s own imagination and set it afire. She had believed that the pair of them shared a camaraderie—two scholars under the same roof who could serve as partners and companions in their explorations of the lost mysteries of the past.

That had changed. The change had hurt. Ellie had managed to lock that hurt away inside of her, but now it rose from the secret place where she had hidden it.

“When you went to Cambridge,” she began. “You… you left… and when you came back, you were…”

She swallowed painfully, fighting for the words.

He had gone to university, and when he returned home for his first holiday, Ellie had found a new distance between them. She had stumbled into it like an invisible wall set in her path. They hadn’t been comrades anymore. Neil played the part of the serious scholar, and Ellie was simply his pesky little sister. When she attempted to draw him into discussions about a new excavation report or a linguistic anomaly, at first it would be as though she had lit a spark. Neil’s interest would catch, and he would pepper her with questions, throwing back his thoughts and ideas… until something shifted. His expression would shutter, the enthusiastic light falling from his eyes.It’s nice you’re keeping up with your reading, he would say distantly, and then turn back to his work as though he had just been caught doing something he shouldn’t have been.

It had only been Neil moving on, stepping further into the realm of growing up—but Ellie had never been able to understand why it felt like in doing so, he had left her behind.

“You were going to get hurt if you kept at it,” Neil said quietly. “And I… I didn’t know how to…”

Ellie’s hands were shaking. She tucked them under her arms to keep them still. She was very afraid that if she let herself truly think about what Neil was saying, she might start to cry, and she didn’t want to do that—not here, not now.

She was so angry—and so wretchedly sad. The sadness piled onto her quiet fear and worry about the conundrum of her relationship with Adam Bates, and it was simply too much—a dam that threatened to break right there in the middle of the sun court at Deir al-Bahari, where at any moment one of the tourists from the hotel might wander in to see them.

“I can’t do this right now.” Ellie raised a hand to her face, furiously shoving away a tear that had somehow started streaking down her cheek.

Neil’s face drew into deeper lines of dismay. “I’m making it worse, aren’t I? I’m just buggering things up again. I… I’m…”

He caught himself at the desperate look on her face and bit back whatever he was going to say next. Instead, he paced across the courtyard to the vestibule and drew in a breath.

When he turned, he pushed his spectacles back into place. “So do you think the sun disk might be somewhere on the altar?” he asked deliberately.

He was giving her a way out—an escape from the painful maelstrom of hurt and memory he had stumbled them into. Ellie accepted it, fighting back the rest of the tears that threatened to spill out.

“It’s a logical place for it,” she agreed carefully. “And it’s the only space here that has a ‘behind’ for any sun disk we might find—though of course, we can’t know for certain at what point in the past the altar was expanded.”

She shot Neil a look as though daring him to contradict that by blurting out a date he couldn’t possibly have read about.

“The work might conceivably have been done before Akhenaten’s time,” he said more carefully instead.

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