Pharaoh

Egypt, 2560 BCE. The largest building on earth is rising from the desert. And the woman mixing its mortar knows it will outlast everything - including her.

Meryt is not an architect. She is not a priest or an engineer or a scribe. She is a worker in the mortar crew, mixing the gypsum compound that fills the joints between the Great Pyramid's 2.3 million limestone blocks. She works in heat that presses the air flat against the ground. She breathes stone dust that coats her lungs white. She performs a task so repetitive and so essential that the building cannot rise without it and will never credit her for it.

The mortar is extraordinary. Its composition - a gypsum-based formula with properties that modern chemists can analyze but cannot replicate - is one of the minor mysteries of the pyramid's construction. Meryt does not know she is making something irreproducible. She knows only the proportions, the mixing technique, the consistency that the stone demands, knowledge passed to her by her mother, who learned it from hers.

Above her, the pyramid grows. The architect Hemiunu oversees the construction with the systematic intelligence of a man building the tallest structure the world will see for four thousand years. The blocks arrive by barge and sledge. The crews haul them up ramps that will be dismantled when the work is done, leaving no trace of the method. The building will be its own explanation. The building will say: I am here. It will not say how.

PYRAMID is a novel about the people the monuments forget. About the labor that makes permanence possible and the workers who dissolve into the permanence they create. About a woman who mixed the mortar that holds the Great Pyramid together - mortar that is still there, still holding, still irreplaceable, five thousand years after the hands that mixed it turned to dust.

The second book in the PHARAOH series, a collection of standalone historical novels spanning three thousand years of Egyptian civilization. Each book tells the story of a different pharaoh's reign through the eyes of the people who lived it.