Tilda the Ice Maiden and her life in the tundra circa 1785 BCE by Lincoln Hayes

Let’s make one thing clear: I’m not a necrophiliac.

But I am in love with a three-thousand-eight-hundred-year-old corpse.

There.

I said it.

Ethics committee be damned.

No, it’s not exactly consensual, but if anyone could tell you what she would have wanted, if she were still alive, it’s me, the archaeologist with a PhD and twenty-seven peer-reviewed articles on Tilda the Ice Maiden and her life in the tundra circa 1785 BCE.

From the day she carelessly plummeted from that icy escarpment into the deep, lonely crevasse that was her home for almost four millennia, we were destined to be together. Only time and distance kept us apart.

***

Well, I guess I’ve got some explaining to do.

Nefertiti was my first love.

Okay. Maybe we need to go back a tiny bit further.

***

I was a lonely kid. My dad was never in the picture and my mother spent her days at the bottom of a martini glass, listlessly muttering “that’s nice hon,” to just about anything I said.

So I occupied myself as best I could, and in doing so, developed a fascination for all things ancient, absorbing tales of historical heroes from the 300 Spartans to Spartacus. I watched, read and absorbed everything. Obsessively. And, armed with what I learned, I lived it; participated in it. So active was my imagination—so fanatically focused—that if I shut my eyes and concentrated hard enough, I would find myself there, in bronze- or iron-age times, warding off Persian arrows in the shield wall or brandishing net and trident in the Circus Maximus.

And the reward for my exploits as an ancient warrior? The love and devotion of a beautiful princess or queen. This was how I went to sleep at night and woke up in the morning: dreaming or envisioning movie-like scenes in my head about long-past times, where I was a peerless conqueror, and the damsel was always mine.

It was on a school excursion to Ancient Wonders House, a small museum in a dank alleyway in the city center, that I first met Nefertiti. I was fourteen, with hormones coursing through my body like the Visigoth hordes, when the Queen of Egypt stole my heart.  

I was already beyond excited (they had a mummy, for Pete’s sake), but when I saw Nefertiti’s bust—cheap replica though it was—I was smitten. She was a being of exquisite beauty, painted in smooth, olive-tones with a long, slender neck and piercing, cat-like eyes, set under an ornate turquoise crown.

For weeks, she was all I could think about. I fantasized that I was the great Pharoah Akhenaten, and she was my consort. Together, we ruled the Nile. In the real world, I visited Ancient Wonders House as often as I could. We could not bear to be apart.

I was in my last year of high school when she broke up with me. Rather, she was put into storage. They wouldn’t tell me why; only that I was no longer welcome there.

Heart shattered, I flipped burgers in my spare time, determined to save enough money for a ticket to Cairo, to find the original Nefertiti in the Museum, and beg her to take me back.

I never made it to Egypt because, just after I turned eighteen, Tilda came along — a discovery in the Scandinavian tundra that sent a lightning bolt straight through my heart.

I first saw her on the cover of National Geographic. Her wispy hair, sallow, desiccated skin and sunken eyes called out to me in Siren song. This was a real woman. My imagination was inflamed and, in an instant, I knew I would stop at nothing to be with her.

Naturally, archaeology was the only career for me. I finished my degree with Honors and applied to Gothenburg to undertake my doctorate. My thesis topic would be: “Ice-preserved Bronze Age mummies of the northern tundra.” After much persistence, I was accepted, and moved to Sweden, to be with her.

Our first meeting was electric, and despite the myriad academics and lab-rats in the room, we only had eyes for each other. From that moment, we were almost inseparable, and my only mission was to know everything about her life prior to descending into that crevasse to wait for me. What was her routine? What did she eat? What were her aspirations? Was there another … before me? I used every method in my archaeologist’s toolkit—and the powers of my imagination—and the more time I spent with her in that cold, sterile laboratory, the more her ancient life, and my modern existence, melded into one.

Clacking out research papers on my laptop by day, at night I would sneak into the lab, sit with her, and teleport into a parallel reality. There, with Tilda the Flesh-and-blood Maiden by my side, I wandered through the crisp, frosted tundra, hunting caribou and collecting berries. Then, by the warmth of her campfire, I would lay in her arms beneath the stars, snuggled in arctic fox furs, gazing at the Aurora Borealis. In that world, she was not the fragile, withered corpse you see on that stainless steel table; she was soft and warm, full of zest and life and humour and devotion. Her eyes sparkled, and her kisses inflamed.

And thus continued my love affair with the world’s oldest woman, until one night, I fell asleep. Campus security discovered me there, on the table, arms around Tilda in a loving but innocent embrace. To my unending shame, my warrior spirit abandoned me. In the bedlam of flashlights and violence, I could not protect her.

They have locked her away in a drawer now, indefinitely, pending a full investigation.

They think they can keep us apart, and perhaps they can—physically.

But they underestimate the power of our love.

Lincoln Hayes

Image by Alexandra_Koch from Pixabay – An Egyptian Sarcophogus with a woman’s face painted in greens and reds and flesh colours