Channeling Cleopatra by Elizabeth Ann Scarborough Page B

wasn't taking any crap from her body, so to speak, but she
made herself walk as much as the others, back and forth across the
miles of scaffolding covering the harbor floor, up and down the
ladders reaching to the top of the dam, the island, and the dike
supporting the island.
    She spent hours bent over the scaffolding,
unearthing carved bits of stone from the muck on the harbor bottom.
She squatted, sifting dirt. She lifted what felt like tons of soil
and stone. She sweated buckets and buckets and felt she was
drinking as much, but as the water poured out of her body, she grew
lighter and that made the moving quite a lot easier. Also, even
though the Cecil had very nice European-style meals, she wasn't
there for most of them but snacked on cold food at the site or in
the lab.
    After awhile, the sweating even lessened her
frequent trips to the chemical toilet, which was not in the harbor
basin where somebody might pee on an artifact—never mind that the
sewage had been dumped all over them for years—but up top.
    If the other members of the expedition
wondered why Nucore had sent a beluga to house the work of someone
who seemed to be doing about the same thing the Egyptian laborers
did, they were too busy telling her all about their own ideas and
personal problems to ask. All the while, she maintained an internal
fantasy of being a modem-day counterpart to her favorite fictional
Egyptologist, Amelia Peabody. This helped her listen through the
sweat pouring down her face and the throbbing of her joints and
muscles.
    As she worked, she looked up often to see
her old man prowling the dike and the dam, staring into the hole
with his eyes shaded like some Indian scout from an old politically
incorrect Western. The kind he liked. His eyes were still pretty
sharp, though he needed reading glasses, and he could spot her from
clear back at the dam. If she happened to catch his eye, she waved,
and he returned it. She didn't bother returning to the Cecil in the
afternoon but went to the air-conditioned lab. The air-conditioning
was a waste of money, when she was spending little time there and
had only the specimens she brought with her, but they were precious
specimens, obtained through a lot of trouble and at high cost. And
she could keep a few beers in the little fridge. Her dad often
stopped by and helped her drink them. And sometimes she actually
took a siesta, though more often she input data on her computer,
keeping track of the work done on the site. Then by around three in
the afternoon, it was time to return to the basin and get back to
work until dark.
    After dark, she returned to the Cecil. If
Dad wasn't on duty, he might come by to enjoy the luxury away from
the former Egyptian Navy barracks he occupied with the other
foreign men who had no families. Once or twice he brought Pete with
him. They had really hit it off. She asked Pete why someone in his
surely highly paid position didn't indulge in a hotel room, too. He
grumbled something about needing to be on the site to keep an eye
on the dam.
    "That's not it, though," her dad told her
later. "You were right about the guy not being any good at
marriage, Kid. He keeps marrying women who make less than he does
and don't know how to manage money, so he has to pay a lot of
alimony and child support and stuff. Keeps the poor devil broke."
Leda got a lot of grim satisfaction from that, as her father had
known she would. Dad, of course, had always married women who had
enough money that they wouldn't miss an extra withdrawal once in
awhile when there was a toy her dad wanted or a fishing or hunting
trip he wished to take. He worked, of course, but the things he
liked to work at didn't quite support him in the style he
liked.
    One day, as she was returning to the beluga
for the noon break, Namid surprised her with company.
    Namid was dressed a little more formally
than usual, in the togs he wore for conducting TV interviews,
looking as dashing in a bush shirt and pith helmet as a