— a scraping of bronze on bone, a stumble, the looming shadow, the man-like shape a weight falling—
— Teb wrenching himself sideways with all his strength, his draining fading strength, what strength? and driving harder with his spear, a rupture a puncture a gush and a thump—
— the spear shaft jarring from his grip, its bronze head buried, embedded—
— the stench of bowels, of bladder, of death—
— as he crawls, crawls through sticky-wet dirt, through mud—
— mud and dung, he had come from mud and dung and now was here again—
— but a brightness grows, a brightness and heat… shining and brilliant, warming, eternal… the sun, the sun rising in the middle of the night…
…to be swallowed whole by darkness.
“Will you take refreshment?” Neferisu inquired. “Wine and bread?”
At his nod, she did not gesture for a servant but went to the side-table and poured from the jug herself. The salon was cool and private, shaded, secluded amid garden courtyards and behind walls. Cats lounged, a tame white monkey picked at bits of fruit, a harpist strummed the strings, and her maids kept a discreet distance.
When she turned, a tray of alabaster drinking cups and dishes in her hands, Khemet’s expression of discomfort at being so waited upon was such she could not help but laugh.
“There was a time,” she said, “not so long ago, when you would run to me with skinned knees, or begging honeyed dates.”
“I was a child then, my queen.”
“Yes. You and Mahenef, like brothers, as if I’d borne two sons.”
She placed the tray between them, on a low stool carved in the overarching likeness of Geb and Nut. Along with the small loaves of emmer-bread were boiled quail’s eggs and a plate of sliced cold meats in pomegranate sauce.
“The pair of you,” she went on, smoothing her fine linen garment as she sat. “Up trees, and down wells, and into everything. We despaired of what to do.”
“As I recall,” Khemet said, “you threatened more than once to take us by the side-locks of our hair and knock our heads together.”
Neferisu laughed again. “But I never did.”
“No. You were always kind.” He rubbed the side of his shaven, oiled scalp, his side-lock long since a thing of the past. “Though I would gladly have my head knocked, if it meant seeing Mahenef again in this world’s life.”
“He will be waiting for you in the Seven Halls,” she said. “Then, let your boyish mischiefs be the problem of Osiris.”
“My boyish mischiefs may be well behind me now, my queen.” His eyes had gone dark. “You know what I am, what I’ve become.”
“A guest who has not yet touched his refreshment,” she said, regarding him with a look of gentle chiding over the rim of her cup.
Khemet sighed, picking up a piece of bread, dipping it in wine. “You make it very difficult to be a dangerous figure, dark, and grim.”
“Be at ease. That is why I’ve summoned you, for a business dark and grim.”
Firelight dances down the tower’s mirrored throat, casting caught radiance from the bronze brazier above to lavish chambers below.
By day, the sun’s own reflected light itself illuminates the murals — bulls and lions, scarabs, horse-pulled chariots, fields of grain, spearmen and archers, falcons, maidens with baskets of flowers — in bright and vivid color. By night, as now, the effect is more a honeycomb of dappled gold, softening stark angles and edges.
It cannot, however, soften the stark angles and edges of two priests, standing like tall herons with their heads bent together in conversation. Gangly of leg and neck and nose, they are brothers, only just beginning to sport the small round bellies of comfortable station.
“I do not know how much longer we can keep him alive,” says Sennu.
He is the younger by half a day, and the fact of their unusual birth — one son at the dawning, a second at the zenith — made their long-suffering mother an object of some fame.
“For so long as Ut-Aten wills it,” Bennu replies.
Unkind village rumor has it there’d been a sickly third brother born at dusk, and perhaps a midnight fourth, who’d come dead and breathless into the world… or been hastened to that fate… but no one in their family has ever spoken of it, and they have never asked.
“But if he dies before—”
“It is in Ut-Aten’s hands. Until then, we tend to him. We protect him.”
Sennu nods. “When he last woke,” he said, “he called again for her.”
“If anything in this world will finish him…” mutters Bennu, pinching the patch of skin between his plucked and narrow, gilded brows.
“What should we do?”
“What else can we do? Send for her. Bring her. He is still our king.”
“The royal blood,” Khemet began, troubled, when the queen had finished telling him just what her dark and grim business was. “The blood of Pharaoh, the bloodline of the gods…”
Neferisu shrugged mildly as she peeled the shell from an egg. “Spills as red and readily as the common, as you and I both know.”
He fell silent again. Thinking — no doubt, as she was — of Mahenef. How sudden it had been, his death. How senseless, even for war.
The day had been theirs, the battle won, the enemy vanquished and scattered and bleeding on the sands. Khemet himself had been with the prince, the two of them and their drivers, racing side by side in their chariots, chasing down fleeing Hittites. And it had not been a broken axle, a stumbling horse, Mahenef sent flying to break his neck or be trampled… it had not been a final desperate challenge from a still-standing adversary… it had simply been some stray arrow out of nowhere.
“We will be famous for this,” he’d said, grinning. “Our victory painted in murals, our names chiseled in stone. We will be famous, and I will be Pharaoh, and I will marry Sia and you’ll marry Tanit—”
“Tanit likes you better.”
“Then I’ll marry her and you’ll marry Sia; it doesn’t matter to me, they’re already my sisters. What matters is that then you and I shall truly be brothers!”
One moment, he’d been there, grinning and brandishing his spear, their drivers laughing along with them in great good spirits. The next moment, a bristle of ibis-feather fletching jutted from where Mahenef’s twinkling eye had been. His breath and soul had left his body before it hit the ground.
Some stray arrow out of nowhere.
However much Khemet had wanted to believe otherwise — even treacherous murder would have given the chance to punish and avenge! — in the end, that was all it was. A twist of chance, a spiteful whim of the gods. No way of knowing from whose bow it had sprung, friend or foe. No way of knowing anything, or doing anything, except to bear Mahenef to the houses of purification and rest, to be prepared for his journey.
No way of knowing, no way of doing, nothing to be done.
Khemet looked at Neferisu, who held his gaze with a calm steadiness few others could. But, then, as she’d said, she remembered him as a child who’d run to her with skinned knees or to beg honeyed dates, as a youth who’d been her son’s constant companion, as a young man who might have married one of her daughters.
She remembered the Khemet from before, yet she also had need of the Khemet of now.
What she asked of him… no.
What she commanded of him.
“To save Egypt,” he said, more musing aloud than speaking to her.
“Our history has shown us what happens when madnesses take hold.” Neferisu gestured around with an elegant hand, indicating the salon’s furnishings, the low stool in the likeness of Geb and Nut, a statuette of wing-armed Isis in her regal beauty, the Eye of Horus over the door, a woven hanging depicting Thoth and Ma’at. “They would destroy all of this. The images, names, and symbols of the gods… painted over, chiseled out. Temples torn down. Priests attacked and people punished for their worship.”