- Home

- Johnny Bass

- Blood of Egypt

- Shadow Over London

- NightWalker

- Short Stories

- Professional Credits

- Contact Info

The Blood of Egypt

By Christian Klaver

 Back to Part One: Chapters 1-5

Chapter Six: Wandering to the Altar

The wisest of the Egyptian gods was Thoth, the ibis beaked god of the moon.  Thoth was often the champion of the underdog.  He used trickery to overcome the curse of Ra, allowing Nut to give birth to her five children.  His cunning and lore helped Isis work the ritual to bring Osiris back from the dead,  drive the magical poison of Set from Horus, and was Horus' supporter during the young god's deadly battle with his uncle Set.

Djorkekt’s Story

            I flitted once around the shameful grave, tending to my long fallen body, but to no avail.  My reward would never include a trip to the Western lands, for my body was no longer fit for the trip.  It hadn’t been for nearly a decade.
            I left the body, drifting out of the poor excuse for a tomb, a common shallow grave long ago defiled by the gods.  Walls of stone or dirt did not hinder me, a bodiless spirit, the ba of a long dead priest.
            A haunt.  Except, I was haunting those who would help me.
            I drifted away from the tomb, across the desert toward Gethos and the swirling dust of ancient cities followed in my wake.

Druset’s Story

            I dreamt of the old ways, of the beauty of the temples in the great city of Thebes and Memphis, somehow moving from city to city with ease.  I wandered many temples and buildings in my dreams among the tall, tall columns and larger than life mosaics.  Each gallery opened into a series of vaulted rooms such that whole nations of thriving clergy seemed to thrive within.  Every time I moved, the swirl of dust walked with me, so that I was at the center of a great cloud, but it did not bother me. 
Gold glistened on the walls next to pure white limestone like sunbeams streaming down a great waterfall.  Monstrous paintings with gold and dark enamel were being erected in numerous places, statuary being shaped or polished.  As grand as it was, there was always some part that was being made grander yet.  I wished I could have brought my daughter, Ikthea.  Then I remembered that the Pharaoh’s priests had taken her. 
            You could actually feel the gods in this place, so that passing a painting showing the battle of Set and Horus you could feel it thrumming with power.  The cunning and beauty of Isis clung to her statue in the entrance, and Osiris’ stone gaze was benevolent, but stern enough that no one passed without lowering their eyes in deference.
            I passed in front of a shrine to Horus and his sons.  Among these was a lion headed god with mighty arms, holding a naked sword.  I fell to my knees in front of it.
            Only it wasn’t me.  A shallow bowl of water revealed an older man, like myself, but sterner, harder.  It was not a scribe’s face, but rather a warrior’s face and it included a vertical scar where someone had tried to take the left eye, but not quite succeeded.  He wore the white linens of a priest.
            “Help me, great Khumenakt, son of Horus,” he said to the statue. 
            “Help me,” he said to himself, to me in the dream, but it was not in the tone of a plea, rather a command.  His voice was rich, and sounded like the kind of man that was used to having his commands followed.  It sounded like a voice I’d heard before.
            “Help me.”

“Master Druset?”
            The voices came to me muffled, slipping down through murky depths like silt of the Nile, whirling in eddies around me.
            “Is he dead?”  A deeper voice asked.  A man’s voice that I didn’t know.
            “No.  I don’t think so.”  The second voice, a younger voice, shook with concern in a way that stirred something inside of me.
            “Ikthea?”  A hoarse whisper.  It was a shock to hear my own wasted voice, separate from me.  I expected mine to be deeper.
            “No master, It’s Mulhoep,” he said patiently.  Memories of the boy came to me, but slowly, and I knew that they were not my own. 
            “Who’s Ikthea?” the young voice asked, but Mulhoep barked at him to be quiet.  I pictured the trusting brown eyes for a moment before I could place his name.  Usis.  Yes, of course. 
            “Master?”  Mulhoep helped me to a sitting position and held an earthen bowl for me to sip from.  That was my bowl, wasn’t it?  My uncertainty rattled me, but it was conquered by my thirst.  The thirst was definitely mine.  I drank deeply.
            “How long?” I whispered after.
            “It was very long this time, Master,” Mulhoep said.  “And much has happened.”
            This time?  My next words came of their own accord.  “Bring me my reeds and the texts.”
            “We don’t have any time for this!” the older man complained. 
            I knuckled my eyes and stared for a moment.  Yes, the crazed man from the desert.  It seemed odd that he should be here, but it was a distant thing.  Mulhoep had rushed to get my things, paying no attention to the man’s objections.  When he thrust them in my hands I turned myself from the man’s accusing glare and began to write:
           
The World of the Dying comes upon us all.
The World of the Dying comes upon all of Egypt.        
The beaten will rise to serve the Nameless.
The Nameless will chain them.
The Nameless will drive them with lashes of fire.
The Nameless will drive the beaten until they are Nameless no more.
Or all of Egypt will burn to ashes in the Western Lands.
Until the Sun-Disk burns the mightiest of kings.
Until the Sun-Disk burns the scavengers and the poor.
Until the Sun-Disk burns the artisans and the prophets.
Until the Sun-Disk burns the farmers and the herdsmen.
Until the Sun-Disk burns the scribe and the warrior.
Until the Sun-Disk burns even The Lion and the Falcon
Until the Sun-Disk burns even the Storm Hammer of the Gods.
Until the Sun-Disk turns upon itself.
Until the Sun-Disk burns its own flesh and all of Egypt is taken in flame.

            I knew that The Nameless had two meanings.  One was the banished gods, driven to near obscurity by Pharaoh’s banishment.  The other meant myself.  And in a way, I was part of the first group as well.  Only I was just a man.  A man who had been made bodiless, when my sworn patron had been cast down.  I could still feel the power that thrummed in my hands when I spoke Khumenakt’s name.  Djorkekt the warrior was growing inside of me.
            But I could also feel the pen, for the old scribe was me too.  We both swam together, as close in mind as any two lovers, the watcher and the watched.
I pushed the papyruses back into Usis’ arms.  He bundled them off into the other room while Mulhoep offered me his arm so that I might lever myself from the rushes. 
            “So then,” I said, levelly.  “Why are you in my house?”  Though I felt I already knew the answer.
            “I had nowhere else to go,” the desert man said reluctantly.  His manner differed dramatically from before.  Instead of the wildness I had seen, a listlessness infused him, weighing him down like a great sodden fishing net.  “And I knew that she would…”
            “You knew she would be here,” I interrupted, "because you’ve already been here once before.  Last night.  Following me from the desert, after your daughter.”
            He nodded guiltily.
            “My attacker revealed,” I said flatly.  “I suppose I should be angry, but there are larger things at hand.”
            I turned to Mulhoep.  “Bring me a sharp knife and some water and oils,” I said.  I didn’t need Mulhoep’s arm to get up, and pushed him gently on his way.    
            “Do you have any idea what has happened?” the man asked.  When Mulhoep returned with the knife and two bowls, the young girl from the desert followed him.  She tugged on the man’s fingers until he sat down so that she could crawl into his lap.  The girl mollified him somewhat, but his voice was tight as he repeated his question: “Do you have any idea what has happened?”
            I had only vague recollections of my actual encounter with the man and the girl in the desert, but the banished part of me had seen the man in my dreams.  And I knew the writings spoke of them with a greater clarity.  The beaten will rise.  Chain them, drive them.  I regarded them solemnly.  “Let us say that I do not know what has happened.  Perhaps you should inform me.”  I pulled one lock of my hair aside.  To Mulhoep I said, “Shave me.”
            “But Master…”
            “Let us pretend for a moment,” I said gently, “that you are the apprentice and I am the master.”  I pushed the knife into his hands.  “Shave it.”
            He did so with shaking hands, careful in the extreme not to intrude on the priest’s lock that I had pulled aside.  
            “Lord Hurin is dead,” the man blurted out.  “No one knows how.”
            “I heard from one of Yuk-Chek’s porters that he was attacked,” Mulhoep offered quickly.  “In the night.  But they didn’t know who.  The wife of one of the guards that he had whipped says it was a plague sent by the displeased sun-disk.”
            “During the night?” I said.
            Mulhoep shrugged.  “Why not?”  But it still didn’t feel right, regardless of the all-powerful aspect currently encouraged by the priests.  Their arrogance bred blindness and lacked understanding.
            “The Aten would never strike down one of his chosen,” I corrected.  “Not for any reason, but especially not over a guard, and not at night.  The woman knows nothing.”
            “Something happened to him,” the man said.  “And the priest is gone too.  The big one.”
            “Bolis?”  Usis asked, which was a relief.  My memory was still fragmented, though his name throbbed within me in recognition.  Long forgotten pain lashed briefly through me, then was gone.
            “Senior Prophet Bolis!” Mulhoep corrected.  “And he hasn’t been seen since last night.  Ofu says that either he did it himself and is wandering mad in the desert or that Lord Hurin’s curse has gotten him…”  His voice trailed off and his hands stopped their work on my head.
            No one spoke for a moment.  When it became clear that no one else was going to ask, the man pointed to the left side of my head.  “What is that?” he asked quietly. 
            “It looks like a lion,” Usis said.  His voice was filled with wonder, and I wondered if he could feel the low surge, like the deepest of voices far away.  I was sure he did hear, though perhaps not with his ears.  Khumenakt was the guardian of this small town, would be again.
            He looked again.  I knew that Druset’s hair had been thin, certainly not thick enough to hide such a thing, and yet the boy had lived with the scribe, with me, for years without seeing it.
            “It is the past,” I said.  As much explanation as I could offer.  “And possibly the future.  At least it will be if I live long enough.  It may be your future as well, which reminds me, perhaps it is time I heard what you were doing in the Pharaoh’s quarry.”
            The man looked down at the small girl in his lap.  “Yes.”  He opened his mouth and then closed it again, his brow furrowed.  He looked confused.
            I took a deep sigh, “What is your name, then? 
            “Menhu.”
            I pointed to the girl and he added, “Menna.”
            “She was named after you?” I asked, and he nodded.  “Where do you live?” 
            “I used to live near the river.  I am a fisherman.  I mean, I was.”  He frowned, his gaunt face deepening with lines, seemingly at a loss.  “I am not much of anything right now.”
            He paused for a long time before I spoke.  “What happened?” I asked quietly.
            “My wife died.  That’s what I was doing in the quarry.  I thought I might be able to find pieces of my house there, some things of my wife’s that I’d lost.”
            “In the quarry?”
            “Yes,” he sighed.  “My house was dismantled to help pay my debts.  I haven’t been able to pay any bills without fishing, and I couldn’t fish after she was gone.  We haven’t been left much of anything.”  He put his hand on Menna’s forehead, smoothing back her hair. 
            “And what will you do now?”
            Menhu just shrugged with a lost and defeated expression on his face. 
            “Where will you go?” I asked.
            He frowned again.  “Away.  There is nothing here.” 
            “Nothing here?” I said.  “There are things here that concern everyone in the black lands of Egypt.  You no less than I, except that you cannot see them.”
            “What should I see?” he replied bitterly.  “There is nothing here.  No food, no house, no wife.  Only the sun-disk.  I am cursed.  I will never pass to the Western lands.”
            “How long have you lived in this village, Menhu?”
            “I have never lived anywhere else.”
            “Then you are old enough to remember some of the old ways, are you not?”
            Menhu paused, and his face bleached.  The girl in his lap sucked in her breath suddenly.  Menhu looked down, and relaxed his grip. Menhu must have clenched her too tightly, for he now stroked her hand gently, soothing her.  But his voice was soft and dangerous when he turned back to me.  “Some things are best forgotten.  It is law.”
            Mulhoep dropped the knife behind me, but I ignored both him and the girl.  They were just reacting to the two of us, Menhu and I.  Neither of the children would know what we were talking about.  The Pharaoh’s blanket order forbade such discussions and even I had not dared to break it.  How does the storm crow fight the thunderstorm?  Only Menhu and I were old enough to have lived through it, and not even the god’s chosen one could make us forget. 
            “It is the Pharaoh’s law, yes,” I agreed.  “But not even Pharaoh is all.”
            “He is close enough!” Menhu spat.  “He is like the sun and the moon.  A man cannot disobey them, it is not possible.  Men can only choose whether or not to fall within his protection or to die in the desert.  There is no other way.”
            “When Horus and Set fought, their legions battled under the skies as they fought…”
            “Enough!  I will hear no more!”  Menhu shouted.  “Such names are forbidden!  There is only the sun-disk!” 
Mulhoep stepped back towards the door, ready to bolt.
            I wouldn’t stop.  I couldn’t.  “Each man who chooses to fight for one god must first disobey the other.  It is not blasphemy, only a pebble fighting among opposing tides.  This is where we are now!”
            “I will hear none of this!  It is forbidden!”  Menhu pulled his daughter to the doorway.   
            I lurched from my chair, but my legs wouldn’t hold me.  Mulhoep cried out as I crashed to the dirt floor, but Menhu never looked back.  I blacked out, the world closing in a circle of darkness around his exiting back.
           
           
            When I awoke it was morning again.  I could hear the Nile, barely, but no hawkers or other early risers outside.  It was still dark, but it wouldn’t be for long.  Already the peering rays of the Aten disk were starting to transfix Gethos again.  There were no sounds in the house.  I had slept through the day, but awaking before the others gave me a few precious moments to collect myself before I set things in motion.
            I could feel both of us, Djorkekt the warrior priest of Khumenakt side by side with Druset, scribe of Gethos.  Then the specter was gone, leaving me puzzling over what had happened.
            I reread the translation that I had copied.  The beaten will rise.  Chain them, drive them.  I remembered things, though.  The presence had left me with a clearer sense of what to do.  I could feel the power of dust within me.  The voice that whispered old secrets.
            I hobbled on my old man’s legs across to a shelf in the rock.  This shelf held the fragments I’d taken from the quarry, wrapped in a cloth.  They sat next to the chest I’d found in the rocks underneath.  I set the chest aside and lay the fragments on a low table. 
When I opened the cloth.  The fragments from the quarry were nestled there, as dangerous as a pet scorpion to the right hands.  I fingered open a small jar of stone paste and carefully smeared the edges of the broken stone.  Putting the stone back together was patient work, old man’s work.  I had to hold each piece delicately to the last so that the paste would have time to hold.  It took longer than I thought possible and Aten’s rays angled closer as I worked.  The chore would have suited me better a few weeks ago.  I was never impatient before now.  The last few weeks had filled me with unfamiliar emotions.  I held my head up more as I walked, but jumped more at shadows in the night.  And my motions were filled with a sense of urgency.  I could feel powers gathering in Gethos, like blood swelling in a fat blister.
            At last I was done.  I set the cracked but complete stone on a white linen cloth in the center of the room.
            Then I used a cloth to clean the dust from the outside of the chest.  I opened it carefully, sliding back the grooved lid, knowing that it had been closed for many years.    I pulled out the kilt of fine linen.  Underneath lay a small collection of pottery jars.  Scented oils.  It was improper for me to go unsanctified.  It had been far too long.  No more.
            I dressed myself in the white linen and smoothed the most expensive of unguent oils over my limbs, chest, legs and smooth scalp.  I paused briefly to finger the scars on my back wondering.  I was sure Druset had been unmarked, but it was of no matter.  I finished my preparations and then chanted:
            “The earth of Gethos and the sky overhead are my horizons.  I am what lies between.  Beast, man, stone and vegetable, the man who stands in his garden or the way the boats of the fisherman rock in the Nile—I am all of these things.”
            I found myself standing.  I lifted my voice, crescendoing until I was shouting.
            “I am the hidden priest of a broken temple, the mighty lion who will roar again for, and with my people.  The very stones of Gethos roar with me as I shake off my imposed slumber.  I am Khumenakt and Khumenakt is me as he is all things!”
            It did not take long for the boys to cluster in my doorway, gawking as if I were part of the thespian troupe. 
            “Pack the rest of the items in this box into two separate bundles.  Then take the rest of the supplies and pack those on my horse.  Not the mule, the horse that is in Ay’s stable.  He will give it to you for me if you tell him I need it.  Pack them carefully, and then you will depart this place.  Go south.  The scribe there is named Orris.  He will care for you until I send.  It is a short walk, but take plenty of water just the same.  Mulhoep, I expect you to watch out for the younger ones.  You should be safe, safer than here at any rate, for it will be a time of upheaval here.”
            “Master?  Are you…?”
            “Has the man Menhu spent the night under this roof?  Is he still here?”
            “Yes master.”
            “Then he belongs to the god that sheltered him.  He is of Gethos and belongs to Khumenakt.  Bring him to me.”
            “Khumen…?”  Usis asked.  It was a new word for him.
            “Go!” I barked, and they scattered like fish.
            When Usis brought Menhu to me, he froze in the doorway.  Usis prostrated himself before me.  “I have brought him, Revered One.”
            The youngest are always the most adaptable.  Whatever he may have thought, he had been too long subject to the trappings of the priesthood and knew too well what was required of him.  Could he feel the throbbing of power in the dirt-packed floor underneath our feet as I could, or did my sudden shift merely intimidate him?  Could he see the swirling dust in my eyes?  Hear the whispering?  No matter, all of Gethos would surely follow him, or it would be gone.  What is the passing of a man, or a town, compared to the destruction of its patron god.  How could one survive without the other?  Even if Gethos did not properly understand, I knew that if Aten successfully crushed Khumenakt, then Gethos would perish.
            “Enter and kneel before your patron.” I intoned.
            “I’ll have no part in this,” Menhu said flatly.  His voice was filled with fear, but firm.  In other circumstances I would have admired his bravery.  But this time it was no matter.  I wasn’t asking.
            “Enter,” I repeated, And I pushed with my ka and heard the whistling of hot winds whip around us.  “Enter and prostrate yourself before your patron god!”  I felt the mark on my skull throb with sympathetic power and the etched sigil blazed on the stone behind me.  Menhu stumbled into the room and fell to his knees. 
            “You have always been in the service of Khumenakt, as he has served you and all of Gethos.  It is time that we of Gethos rose, like Horus’ army and moved to protect ourselves.”
            Menhu moaned, in pain or in inescapable rapture I did not know.  Perhaps I did not know the difference.  Did Druset?    
            “The earth of Gethos and the sky overhead are our horizons.  We are what lies between.  Beast, man, stone and vegetable, the man who stands in his garden or the rocking of boats on the Nile—we are all of these things.”
            I lay my hand on the burning sigil on the stone.  Fire blossomed and I watched as it licked up my unresisting arm.
            “We are the hidden priests of a broken temple.  We serve Khumenakt, the mighty lion who will roar again for, and with our people.  The very stones of Gethos roar with him and us as we shake off our imposed slumber.  We are Khumenakt and Khumenakt is us as he is all things!”
            I lay my flaming arm upon the bowed head of the crazed fisherman and listened as he wept.  In his weeping he begged for forgiveness.  I didn’t recognize the name he used.  When I raised my hand it was whole, regrown as the crops come again each spring.  My palm was clean, empty, but a patch of Menhu’s skin on the back of his head was bare and blistered with the sigil of Khumenakt.  He still whimpered quietly.
            I picked up the oils and the shaving knife and went to work.  Djorkekt had much work to do.

            With the boys gone, it fell on Menhu and I to do most of the preparations for our own departure.  I had told my boys to take the horse, a decision I did not regret, but it meant that both Menhu and I would walk.
            Menhu moved in a daze about the house, where I felt restored, he felt lost.  Menna followed him around, never taking her eyes off him.  What she thought of her father in priest’s garb, I had no idea.  The trappings of the priesthood that we both wore: the whitest of kilts, the purifying oils, the shaved scalps and the worked sandals; these things were like coming home to me and filled me a with a sense of purpose and renewed intensity.  Even the weapons that I had found for us, a gold dagger for myself and a slightly larger blade of worn ivory for Menhu, these were old tools of mine from long ago, and felt comfortable to me.
            Menhu had never known any of these things, and was going to have very little time to get used to them.  His hand drifted often to his bare scalp, and then jerked back when he found the brand still burned.
Perhaps very little time left for either of us, if things did not go well.  But he moved now with deliberation, his eyes catching each time he reached for something or brushed against the expensive articles we packed.  His face held an obvious wonder that the clean hands and spotless clothes he wore were attached to him, and not some other, better man.
            Our preparations were small, pitiful in my eyes.  Honey cakes, small pieces of smoked fowl and water carefully packed in small supplies.  Menhu had only his knife and Mulhoep’s sling for weapons and a wide hat, one of Ay’s old gifts from his wife that had “accidentally” been left and never reclaimed.  His kilt and shaved scalp made him almost impossible to miss, but we are the tools of the gods and I knew this was how things should be.  The oils and purifying incense went with me.  I would have need of them.  I’d sent my knife with the boys, I would not need it. 
            When it became clear that we were splitting up, Menhu seemed even more lost.  The hieroglyph burned into him would bring obedience, but not understanding.
            I clenched with my ka and spoke a word long unused that caused the hieroglyph to flare into my skull.  I swayed with the near ecstatic pain.  Menhu cried out and fell to his knees.  His arms shook as he tried to raise himself.
            “Menhu,” I said gently.  “Our actions may be like flinging ourselves at the sun and moon.  But if the storms of the mighty command it, then so shall it be.  We may both die unsheltered in the desert.”
            “My wife died in the desert,” Menhu spoke in the barest of whispers.  “I deserve no better.”
            “I am sorry.  We cannot fight the will of the gods, but you may find honor waiting for you in Western lands after this, Menhu.  The old ways are like the rising and setting of the sun and moon, they have been with us for all of history, for all of Egypt’s existence.  You will find that returning to them will be like drawing a breath after a deep swim.”
            I knelt beside him and placed my hand on the back of Menhu’s head.  “This will get easier.  I am sorry for the pain.  Close your eyes and do not think, but feel.  Feel the pain, the drawing of breath, the hot desert wind, my hand.  Do you feel these things?”
            He spoke between clenched teeth.  “Yes.”
            “Now do you feel how the wind connects to the other winds.  Do you feel them blow from Gethos to the deserts to Pharaoh?”
            “I…  I think so…”
            “There are two spots that we seek, Menhu.  One of them is Gethos.  Do you feel the slumbering presence there?”
            “Yes… and …  something else.  Something hungry and growing.”
            “Yes,” I said.  “This battle will be mine when these two meet.  Now reach for the Seat of the Aten.”  I had closed my own eyes, trying to will my own senses to help guide him, so far from Gethos.
            “I see a bright light, harsh, burning…”
            “That is Aten, the sun disk, or Ra as he used to be called.  He is no longer sheltering, but only harmful.  And he is not himself, but only a thing.  Pharaoh’s Aten.  What you feel is Pharaoh’s city.  Do you sense anything else?”
            “Yes.  The company of shadows.  They dance in the burning light, at its edges.”
            “Excellent.  The theatre troupe.  That is where you are going.  There are going to be many players in this drama besides Khumenakt and the Aten, though they have all been long slumbering.  It is important that we identify the patrons of each of these players.  The shadows are for you to find, the reason that Khumenakt needs you.  Find them and find out who they serve.  Then return to me in Gethos.  Try not to confront them.  That will come later.”
            “Yes, I will try.”
            We both lifted our heads and felt again the warmth emanating from the sands and the arid gusts playing about our ankles.  I could hear again the Nile and the murmur of people in Gethos as the small town filled with guests rose from slumber.
            It was a long time before we had recovered enough for Menhu to speak. 
            “What of my daughter?”
            I stood and carefully dusted off my kilt before reaching down to help my newest disciple up from the dust.  “I would have sent her with the boys, in truth, except that I did not believe that she would go.  And they could not contain her.  There are few places that will be safe, but I hope that she will be willing to stay in Gethos with me.”
            “She will be safer here?”
            “No,” I said gently.  “She will be safe nowhere and the risk for her is equally great.  But if you have to watch for her in Pharaoh’s city it would distract you.  It will be safer for you if Menna remained in Gethos with me.”
            My glance strayed to the floor.  There was no one there, but I saw a small stain in the corner of the doorway.
            I gripped Menhu’s shoulder, turning him.  “Are you hurt?”  I checked around the nose and eyes.  New disciples had been known to bleed from these places in the past, but Menhu was clean.
            “No,” he said, shaking me off.
            I turned back to the doorway and knelt by the stain.  For the second time in a few days I rolled the ruby wetness in my fingers and wondered who might be watching us. 
            “Find Menna,” I said over my shoulder.  “And make certain that she is not hurt.”  I knew that she would be fine, but I almost hoped otherwise.  I knew that my boys had all left a while ago, and the blood had not even been absorbed into the sand.  It was very recent that something had left this in my doorway.
            Something tugged at memory’s chord.  So it begins.  The mighty awake again and all the players were now entering the game.  An old memory came to me, a figure of blood and disease, and then it was gone.  Perhaps this was Isis', doing.  She would be the strongest in such ways.  Perhaps not.
            I wiped my fingers carefully on a cloth, not wishing to get any on my kilt.  I could hear Menhu’s voice calling for Menna.
            “She is here,” he called from the other room.  “And she is unhurt.”
            “Yes…” I whispered.  “Of course she is.” 

            We waited until near dark.  When we left, I left behind nothing.  It wasn’t that my house was empty.  It was filled with trinkets: tools of scribe work; gifts from friends in Gethos (many portraying Aten, the Sun Disk, reaching to Pharaoh with benedicting hands—dutifully kept in the main room); toys or crude tools that the boys had been forced to leave in their haste; old clothes, all carefully neutral in color, undyed clothes (nothing too pretentious for a scribe); water jars and other pottery.  Their meaning, history and usefulness all seemed distant things to me now.  But I could remember clearly the things that had happened years ago, things I had kept locked away, had dared not allow to resurface until they had been called out of me.
            Menhu and Menna were both silent traveling companions.  They both obeyed any instruction, Menhu with a grudging nod.  He still shuffled through the dirty streets as a man beaten.  His eyes darted to the edges of the street, as if he was uncomfortable in the center, uncomfortable when not in hiding. 
            Menna watched the both of us with a fearful attentiveness, as if we might abandon her or do something equally dangerous at any moment.  We trudged through the silent streets.  I was no better now, silent and heavy with thought and purpose.  I could no more have changed my steps than the sun-disk settling into the horizon on our left could fail in its inexorable course.  There was much sifting in my mind, most of it difficult to grasp.  But I knew our destination.
            There were fewer people in the streets, and they moved with a fearful intensity.  I thought of the news that the children had brought to me.  Lord Hurin mangled in his bedchambers.  Pharaoh’s blessing was a second only to a blessing from the Sun-Disk himself.  But Hurin was dead, and the Sun-Disk’s disfavor was unmistakable in their eyes, irrefutable. 
            Passers moved by me with their eyes forward, concentrating only on their destination.  The hawkers called to them half-heartedly, but with a watchful eye around them, like besieged soldiers.  There was a low level of hushed talk.  It was far more subdued than the usual raucousness.  I could hear the murmuring increase as we passed, falling like the first few stones of an avalanche in hushed whispers around us.  I held to my course in the center of the street, pulling my two unwilling partners in my wake.  I knew I should have recognized many of the faces I passed, people that had spent all their lives in Gethos, men I had done business with, dined with and spoken in earnest to just these past few weeks.  But they were distant to me, and none of them hailed me as I passed.  My priest’s garb changed me, swathed me in Khumenakt’s glory, the Pharaoh’s wrath and blasphemous treason all in one broad stroke.  I was no longer the man they had known.  In truth, it was more than their perception, for I myself felt that I shared little with the humble scribe of days ago.  
            A group of soldiers crossed the square in front of us in a dignified march, eyeing the white kilts and priestly garb.  They didn’t so much intentionally stop, but rather milled uncertainly in our path.  I knew many of them had known me, but there was little recognition in their faces.  I could feel an increasing of that second presence.  Djorkekt the warrior strode towards battle, feeling the heat come up from the sand and bathe his feet like a sacrament.  The was less and less of Druset around anymore.  Now he was the ghost.  Now I saw the world through the dust of ancient cities.
            When I strode unswervingly into the guards’ midst, they melted before me like uncertain cattle, their mouths hanging open, their questions unvoiced.  Menhu and Menna cringed, but followed me.  They moved with sluggish steps, as if into deadly cold waters.       No one stopped me as I stalked my way through town until I reached the temple of the Aten.  The last grasping fingers of the Sun-Disk were still clinging to the horizon, blood colored talons stretching from the desert across the Nile to paint Gethos, the building in front of us, Menhu, Menna and I with its somber touch.  I was a little early, so I settled just outside the outer wall to wait.  Menhu looked curiously at me, but didn’t seem inclined to ask any questions.  Or perhaps it was because he knew that no answers would be forthcoming any sooner for the asking.  I carefully pulled the cloth containing the affixed stone pieces from my bag.
            There was a guard at the front gate, but I ignored him when he hailed.  His voice fell past me like eddies over the hippopotamus’ watchful eyes.  Mine were locked on the sunset, waiting.  After a few more tries, there was silence.  Menhu still said nothing, but he edged to the side, pulling Menna to sit with him out of the way near a vendor’s cart.  A shelter of sorts.  I waited.
            I was not surprised to hear Yuk-Chek’s voice come to me, scant heartbeats before I was ready.  I was fearful for a moment.  Had he known what was to come he would have brought guards and had me immediately arrested.  I was fortunate that he took the time to bluster and yell, his pride being his last undoing. 
            “Bad enough taste,” he sneered, “To falsely garb yourself priestly white, but to bring your disgrace to my front gates.  When I was told, I called the messenger a lying woman, and had to come see for myself when he protested that he spoke only the truth.  Even now, I am disbelieving.  You will look at the Blessed One when he addresses you or by Aten’s mighty hand I will have guards enforce my will upon you in a much less pleasant manner.”
            When I did not stir or tear my gaze from the horizon he bellowed for the guards to seize me, but by then it was too late.
            “Listen, fat foolish priest,” I intoned, and a low rumbling accompanied me.  As I knew it would.  I thrust my words into the moment between day and night, when the Aten-Disk was relinquishing its hold on the world and Set and the other gods that held sway in the night had not yet fully claimed the sky. 
            “Aten is mighty, but he is not all,” I continued, and the rumbling increased.  “And he has stepped into places that are not wholly his. When the bright spears of light pierced his eyes so that he could not see, he did not cry out.  When the heavy fire burned him so that he could not bear himself erect and walk like a man, but only twist and burn as a flaming corpse, still he did not cry out.  But when they took his name, all divinity could hear the roar, as you hear it now.  Listen…”
            Menna squeaked and hid herself in Menhu’s arms.  He looked around, just as frightened as she, but met my stoic gaze and calmed somewhat.  He stood and carried Menna to stand at my side.  There was only a scattering of people left in the street at this late hour.  The nearest was a tall thin man carrying a bundle of papyrus reeds with a young man at his side.  The young man started pulling at the tall man, his bare feet raising clouds of dust that covered both their bare legs, but still the man did not move.
            “You will surrender yourself…” Yuk-Chek said weakly.
            The rumbling had increased and for the first time I turned to face him.  When I opened my mouth next I felt the rumbling increase to a roar that started in the stones beneath the temple and then flared in my feet and heart and finally burst from my mouth with the challenge of a lion’s charge.
            Yuk-Chek’s eyes went wide.  The summoned guards that had just passed through the outer gate blanched and stumbled to a stop. 
            I brandished the stone and bellowed, “Khumenakt will no longer be forgotten!  And he has risen to take his own again.”  I saw the name break over them like a wave, planting a thousand seeds in the scattering winds like a burst pomegranate.  “This is his place, begone.”  And the roar continued on, shaking the temple stones from underneath.  “Go!  You are no longer the keepers here.”
            The guards ran, and Yuk-Chek’s feet gave way so that he crashed to a sitting position, dust on his white kilt.  He stared avidly at our small procession as we passed.  I stalked through the temple grounds with the roar of Khumenakt carving my way.  I moved as the spear fisherman wades through the stream with priests milling around me and fleeing in droves from my every step.
            We came to the center of the temple without accompaniment.  Fifty men could have stood underneath the pillared ceiling.  Not huge, compared to the wonders of Pharaoh’s city.  The walls were covered with etchings of the Sun-Disk reaching down its blessings to the royal family, and then through them extending its reach to include all those beneath them until it had finally reached the simple folk of the fields and river.  The center of the ceiling was open, to let in the god, but now the moon was revealing itself overhead.  It would be fully night soon.  I wanted to move quickly. 
            I placed the repaired stone on the altar, for any to see that might come, and the roar died away.  In its wake, the silence around us settled in like dust.
            I talked as I knelt before the altar.  “You have seen what has happened here, Menhu.  Leave the two of us and go.  There is little time.  I will care for her, as will Khumenakt.  No harm will come to her as long as we stand.”
            “I thought you said nowhere was truly safe,” he said hoarsely. 
            “As long as we stand,” I repeated simply.  “The night will be the easiest.”
            “I see.”  Then he kissed his daughter and moved with a determined stride through the forest of pillars towards the gate that faced Pharaoh’s city.

Act II: The Gods are Restless

Chapter Seven: Lover’s Quarrel

The main drink of Egypt was beer.  It was probably very similar to the way beer is still produced in Sudan today. Traditionally, the making of beer was regarded as a female activity, since  it was an off-shoot of bread making - the basis of the beer were loaves of specially made bread.
            When archeologists examined the pyramids of Giza, they found five kinds of beer and four kinds of wine.  Beer was depicted on the walls of the tombs, as were scenes of the ancient Egyptian .

Sivku’s Story

            Pharaoh’s city was even more of a nightmare.  We crept around during the late day and night, when most of the construction work was over.  Keafus seemed to be looking for something, but he wouldn’t tell us what.  We prowled through the streets behind him like macabre fledglings.  He didn’t speak, and so we didn’t either.  We only followed him around the deserted construction stones, or through the crowded living sections for hours at a time.  Hours went on, but even Aster never asked any questions..  Bad things happened to the younger troupe members when they questioned him, so I knew better than to speak up myself.  I pledged with uncomfortable swiftness to not fall prey to his stormy moods.
            The moon lay a silvery shadow over us as Aster led us to an unoccupied part of the construction site to bed down for the night.  We picked a likely spot and settled ourselves on the hard stone.  Little more than a cleared space with a stone foundation and a few unfinished pillars, but a discarded pile of wheat trimmings made it somewhat comfortable.  I fell asleep almost instantly.
            I awoke later in the night to find the troupe huddled closely around me.  A hand clamped on my mouth, bringing me sharply alert.
“Make no sound,” Keafus hissed in my ear, and I went limp.  Brother Aster stood over the group of us, the only one standing.  He swayed directly above me and played a soft and haunting but tuneless melody on his flute.  The rest of the stone foundation should have been bare, a large expanse of dusty stone to all sides.
            But that space was entirely filled with rats.
            They all sat uncannily still, swaying only slightly to the same rhythm as Aster, like a field of fire eyed soldiers.  My foot brushed against their bristly and slimy warmth, but they only kept watching, entranced.  The closest of them was almost touching my foot.  
            I gasped and would have flung myself backwards, but Keafus still held me fast.
            “Do not move!” he said in a low voice.  “You’ll startle them.”
            “Startle them?” I whispered, but he didn’t answer me.  Aster reached and briefly used one hand to calmly stroke my hair.  I was already so used to the gesture that it stilled me immediately.  I looked at Pahiri and Djarum, who both looked as scared as I did.  The rats were getting closer, starting to crawl up our legs, but nobody moved.  I hid my face against Aster’s leg with a very small shriek.  I could still feel the rats, slowly covering my legs, scratching my thighs and settling onto my stomach.  The weight of them was oppressive and stifling.  I remembered the rats in the street when the troop first found me and shuddered.
            We sat there for long minutes, the entire troupe of us covered by rats so that I could imagine a watcher would see an enormous mound of rats with only Aster’s torso and head showing, all of them filled with stillness and the melancholy notes of Aster’s flute.  Finally, after a long time, the rats receded as soundlessly as they came, leaving us alone.
            I remember Aster comforting me as I cried.  Then I remember sleep.  Rats stalked and danced around in my dreams, too, but I was too bitterly exhausted to let that bother me much.  
           

Chapter Eight: The Grave Stirs
Rerira’s Story

The Immortal part of the Egyptian soul was called the khu.  While the ka went on to its judgement in the heavens, and the ba protected the body on earth, the khu would be passed on to allow the birth of another.  This was the immortal part, the radiant and shining being that transfigured death.  It was through the passing of khu that an Egyptian would be reborn again in the world.  A khu might, upon the death of the body, go on to inhabit the body of an animal or even a more weak-minded human instead of waiting to be reincarnated.
What happened to the khu of murderous souls is something that was not often discussed, except in the darkest and most sinister of places.

            I spend little time in human form now. 
            I pour back in the window in Yuk-Chek’s house, a fragmented cloud of bedraggled carrion.  I am exhausted beyond reckoning, with only a few pieces of me strong enough to take wing.  After a night of listening to the rumors dribbling from the mouths of the common folk, I have decided the irony of this locale appeals to me.  They talk of the beast that slew Pharaoh’s favorite, and Yuk-Chek’s fall from power.  They talk of his murder in the streets by the common folk, hoping to win themselves back into Pharaoh’s good graces by stoning the man so clearly out of favor.
            With his death, the ex-priest’s house will be the ideal lair, and I nestle into the cushions still stained with Hurin’s blood with a delicious thrill.  I can feel Set’s embrace all around me, nestled in the sticky fabric.  The air is filled with the smell of blood and feathers.
            I have to rest more than I expected after Hurin’s death.  For the next few days, I hide like a wounded animal in my new den, regrowing.  After a full day, I dispatch a portion of myself to bear tidings to the storm crows.  It is time to feed now, but I am too weak to hunt properly.  Instead I send smaller sparrow sized fragments to scrounge akin to their bird-shapes.  They find only vermin and insects, but it is enough for now.
            There are other things not human adrift in Gethos.  I can feel their presence like a heavy storm front.  And I find traces.  One of my fragments drifts near the outskirts of town looking for food.  There it finds traces of blood among the poorest sections.  The taste is unlike man, woman, child or animal, rich and heavy with power.  The others are stirring.  Set and Khumenakt have awakened others.  The Aten wishes to keep all of the others in slumber, particularly the other pieces of the sun.  But the deific struggling of the Aten and Set are not so quiet as we supposed.  The others are starting to rise.  Pharaoh’s plan is already starting to come apart at the edges. 
            Days later, the messenger fragment returns to me, and I smell the blood on it.  It has been wounded.  So long a time far from me has weakened it, leaving it barely strong enough to return.  No matter.  It is here now and I am strong enough to stand and welcome it like a falconer welcomes the falcon.  Only the bird doesn’t just land on my arm, but flows into me, and I open to welcome it.  It enters me like a glass of water poured into the ocean and all it’s experiences flood into me.
            A vision comes to me like a dream as the small glimmer of sentience is rejoined.  Only this dream is true, and has already happened, a recounting of the trip.
            I am flying in the hot desert air.  It would be better in the night, but that did not occur to the fragment.  Only now, as I relive it, does the scene contain any complexity of thought.  In my dream, I know only the taste of my trophy in my beak and my destination.  Hurin’s left eye, to be taken to the storm crows.  As the fragment, my thoughts are sluggish, if they can be called thoughts.  It is really only my desire that carries it, for apart from me, my thoughts cannot guide it.  Like an animal, thoughts and desires are second to the sensations of the moment, the taste of blood in my mouth. 
            I can feel the storm crows, too.  I can feel them as they revel in the sun-disk’s city.
            The dream is painful, the desert’s arid strength batters at me, filling my nostrils and baking at my beating limbs.  Each push of my wings thrusts me along at the price of pushing hot air through the feathers of my wings until the heat has worked its way into the deepest parts of my bones.  The Sun Disk’s fingers are talons in the heat of the day, sharp and persistent. 
            The trophy makes my mouth water and I am so hungry.  Also there is the cool invitation of the Nile curling off to my left.  But these temptations are not allowed.  I cringe and smirk within my dream as both master and slave.  My journey carries me for hours past only arid stretches of land.  Does the hand question why it is driven to work?
            My eye rakes the desert sands as I pass.  A trail of large prints, canine, curl towards the Nile.  The pitch beasts still prowl the night, as do I.  Gethos is to be mine, but they rule the desert.  We are both servants of Set, but they know only destruction, where I can see the power of man and truly work for our lord's release.  Set made them in his glory, but he made them wild, like a thunderstorm, and they answer to no plan.  They are little better than clever animals.  Their presence in the city can only end in ill.  Soon, there will have to be a reckoning between us. 
            It becomes easier when night falls.  I curve in upon the storm crows low and silent, as if they were prey. 
            They are easy to find, reveling upon the roofs of one of the tall flat buildings of the central quarter. They stalk clumsily in the fire lit shadows, their black robes flapping as if they were storm crows in shape as well as destiny.  Better it would be for them, but Set has need for them as they are.  Birds cannot use spades and could not have chanted the proper incantations needed for my awakening.  Weak as they are, humans are the only ones besides gods to hold the powers of the words.  That is their might.       
The bearded one is spinning some tale to a small group of richly dressed youths.
            “One day the Doomed Prince walked abroad in his fields, his dog following him.”  The watchers were entranced, and the rest of the storm crows were seated around, softly adding percussive melodies to the telling. 
            I land on the edge of the roof, holding my trophy.  One of them motions in my direction.  “Keafus…”
            “And his dog chased after the wild game, and he followed after the dog, who plunged into the river,” the bearded one goes on.  “He also went into the river, and then out came the crocodile, who took him to the place where the mighty man lived. And as he carried him the crocodile said to the youth, ‘Behold, I am thy doom, following after thee...’”
            “Keafus!”
            The leader pauses heavily and turns to the speaker with some scathing remark, until he looks and sees my presence.
            “Ahh...” he stalks over to me and gently plucks the eye from my offering beak, shielding his actions from the others with his body.  There is some commotion behind him, but it mattered not to either of us.
            “Mighty is Set.” He intones, and places the eye in his mouth.  Then standing he shouts: “It is done!  Mighty is the coming storm!”  The closest man looks at me with wide eyes, watching me close.  I can smell his fear.  There is shrieking behind him.
            My tidings done, I turn and push into the open space, wings spread.
            When the drag pulls at me, I almost fall to the ground entirely.  Instead, I plummet in a barely controlled dive to the dirt-packed street.  As the fragment, there is no thought.  I am pulled; I go. 
            As the whole reviewing the fragment’s past, I rail against this intrusion.  But it is useless.  I might be living it now, but it has already happened, last night.  I land on the stone next to him like the tamest of trained birds.
            The face that calls me, whispers in my dreams.  Gaunt and weathered, with wild dark eyes that pierce me and whisper commands that feel like the very commands of Set coiling in my brain.  Fragment and whole both are mesmerized, caught in memory’s web, writhing.  I know things about this man.  His angular face is familiar to me, and the memory lashes at me, pulling out pieces of my mind untouched by Set like scattered drops of blood.  His name I know: Menhu; another slashing stroke.  The name of his child, Menna, another stroke.  And with each blow I dance in the strangling web.
            “I feel them,” he muses.  “As I feel you, but you are different.”  Each whispered word by the familiar voice thrums the restraining strands that hold my mind.  “Must save the woman.  I must repent for not saving my love.  And you will help me.”  So saying, he launches me as a falconer does and I leap back the way I had come to fling myself into battle as he told me to. 
            I plummet into their midst, and kill the screaming woman first.  Then I am driven by the taste of blood, without the reason of my own self or the intruder to guide me.  Only the blood.  I hear the screams of the men and women.  I kill again, and possibly again.  It is difficult to tell as the dream becomes clouded with the bloodlust.  The rest of the fragment’s traitorous actions are gone, and what remains of my memory of this time is hazy.  I can hear the ringing cries of accusation, though. 
            The time after is entirely blank.
            I know only that the fragment returns to me, battered and drained with no memory of the return trip. 
            I lurch to my feet, free of the traitorous dream.  A burning fury rides me at being so used.  I don’t know how many of the storm crows survived.  And the man’s hypnotic face still burns in me with febrile strength.  I know nothing about the storm crows except that they bore witness to my weakness.  The are nothing.  Necessary for the beginning, but far less than me and they had seen my shame.  I wondered if they know more about the man that burned within me than I did.  
            I stalk out of my hiding place into the lattice work of staggered pillars that comprise Yuk-Chek’s upper floors.  My need to revenge myself upon man flares within me, stronger than any guile.
            I pause for only the briefest of moments at the blood-slicked railing.  The blooded hag was here, Isis’ witch.  I finger the blood.  So.  I am not the only dead-born thing walking in this place.  It does not surprise me.  There are several players moving in this game.  The festival of the dead is aptly named, but the people of Gethos will come to understand that too late.  I shriek my anger into the night, ready to come from hiding and face any who would challenge the might of Set and his favored instrument of death.
            I explode into fragments of feathered darkness, a wild waterfall of predatory birds pouring over the railing.  It is time for the real hunt at last.
            Prey is ridiculously easy to locate.  A drunken guard lurching home from some dalliance in the fields back to his fellows.  There would be time enough for them later.  For this hunt, I pull myself into human shape.  It is necessary, for I am more than hungry, but with the return of human shape comes the resurgence of memories, the closest thing I will ever have to nightmares.  I remember the feel of the tomb, and lying cold on the embalmer's slab, and before.  The memories from before are the worst: the warm touching and life of humans.  And the man’s face still haunts me.  But the hot breath of Set drives me now, and the other thoughts are cold and distant.
            It occurs idly to me that my resurrection must have taken place in the desert, in the domain of the pitch dogs.  Perhaps this has gotten their unwanted involvement.  And almost assuredly given them my scent.  Unfortunate. 
            I push these things from my mind and return to the hunt.  I am nearly healed now, so the guard sees nothing awry when I reveal myself to him, only a pale woman naked and slender in the moonlight.  He stops and takes another pull from a skin as he looks at me with appraising eyes.  He wears the sword in his kilt that marks him as one of Hurin’s guards, and his bare chest is crossed with an angular scar that runs the length of his torso.  I care not what past squabble of men earned it for him. 
            There are too few pleasures in this form, but this is the most profound.  My skin shines like opals in the moonlight and I am regal and fair in his eyes, and briefly, in my own.  Even so, he shakes his head and begins to trudge away. 
            It is like a children’s game to get ahead of him between the mud flap houses.  He starts visibly when he sees me, but then only shakes his head.
            “None of your games now, girl,” he says gruffly.  “I’ve a wife in Pharaoh’s city.  There are enough of the lads around game for that.  I’m tired.”  He sounds firm but wistful and his eyes linger.  He does nothing at first when I take his hands, but then he tries to resist my pull.  He might as well try to play tug rope with a hippo and I pull him into the shelter between two squat mud buildings.  I can hear the conversational voices of people nearby.  There is no solitude in the city, even for the hunt.      
            I still his cries with my lips.  After a moment, he relaxes and melts into my grasp, his hands molding feebly to my sides as I cover his lips tightly and grasp the sides of his face.  He grinds his body into mine with a sudden capitulating insistence and I can feel his arousal underneath his kilt.  His body is warm against my coolness. 
            I continue my kiss and he pushes gently, then more fiercely as I hold his breath with my own.  As he realizes his peril he strikes at my arms but I hold him firmly and watch his frantic eyes as he drowns in my kiss, lingering on the last few convulsions as his body sags, though his manhood remains erect.
            There is a moment of great import when the ka is shuffled free of the body.  Such things are easier during the festival of the dead.  The soul splinters and I am there to reap my grisly harvest.  The ka dissolves to pass to the next land and its reward, but the khu remains and I cup his face more firmly to mine, drinking his essence from the empty shell like the Pharaoh drinks from a golden goblet. 
            The guardian ba bursts forth from the spent body and tries to harass me, cawing and moaning, but this is not a concern.  It flies helplessly as I finish devouring its charge.  Then I drop the body and regard the guardian with predatory eyes.  I am a creature that feeds on the Khu, but my body is formed from the ba of my victims.  But this one will not come to me.  Finally the guardian ba realizes that there is nothing left to guard and flees.  Only the ba of murderous and treacherous souls come to me.  The rest will scatter about the land of Egypt, adding their haunted tears and cries to the greater din that heralds Set’s coming.  
            “Now my love, we wait,” I whisper to the broken corpse.  “Until later, when you are truly ready to receive my love.”  I pick him up and cradle him in my arms and begin the laborious process of carrying him back.  I hate to be trapped in this form, but it is needed.
            I had more prey to collect before the night ended.  

            I spend the next few days making my nest, and arranging the bodies of my prey carefully inside.  The darkness is deepening and the time has nearly come for my nestlings.  There are only six days left in the festival of the dead.  It is time.  The night is mine, full of promise, with heady scents lingering for me.  Underneath me, the people of Gethos have become aware that something moves among them in the night, and I enjoy their panic as the crocodile enjoys spooking waterfowl on the water’s surface.  People are leaving Gethos, and those that stay keep to their houses for safety.  It pleases me.  I can feel the gathering strength in Gethos’ center, but it is nothing to the coming storm.  My efforts will close my circle on the city’s protector. 
            Also, the cries of the displaced ba call in my ears.  This feeds the substance of my soul as the blood of my prey feeds my body.  As about me, I can feel each thing in the city as it dies.  As the soul fragments, I can feel Set’s power extend itself.  The ba that come from the followers of Set remember this, and bring their khu to me.  And so I grow.  This and blood strengthens me, for like man I require both.
            Also I can feel other powers move around me.  Not Set’s.  I know the blooded hag is here, close, which means that Isis has awoken.  She is the most dangerous.  Perhaps also the pitch dogs, fellow servants of Set not withstanding.  For they know only destruction, and Set favors only the strong, so this sits well with him.
            And the lion god, the Guardian of this town.  I feel him too, but his anger will die.  If we can lull the gods back to sleep then he will be too weak to survive.  And if he rouses them, then the full anger of Set will fall upon him.  It is the depths or the flames for Gethos.
            There are other forces in Gethos in addition to the protector, but they fear me and scurry like rats from the farmer’s tread.  I fear none of them, for the blood magic, the protector and the dogs are none as strong as I am.  I can feel the power as I draw closer to the nest and finally enter the broken down building that houses it.  Several fragments circle the nest, for I do not wish to be disturbed during the awakening rapture. 
            A small fragment awaits me in the cellar.  I always leave a piece of myself there now.  The nursery needs to be protected.  For awhile longer yet.  I do not become fully ready until my scouts return to me, but then, all is well.  There is no one around.  No one dares.  There will be no interruptions. 
            Inside, my actions are hidden from the voyeuristic senses of those scurrying around me.  I am free to move unshackled.  The smell of rotting meat and voided bowels is strong in this place.  My prizes are waiting, ripe and ready.  My seeds.  They await me.  They will require nourishment.  For these flowers, only my essence will bring the bloom.  They know this.  They yearn for me.  I am their sun.  I can almost hear their limbs rustling like dried parchment in the wind, calling for me with the cricket-like voices of lost children.  They will bloom for me.  It has been promised to me.  Nothing breaks the promise of Set.
            I move to the first, the soldier who once had a wife.  She is nothing to him now, and I am his new beloved.  I cradle his ruined body in my lap and press my lips to his face.  I took his Khu, his existence from him, and now that he is ready, I shall give it back.  But this will also seal his destiny forever as my tool.  My beloved.  Little is different from his death as I kindle the smallest bit of the stolen khu inside him.  So small, not the entire thing, of course, but it will be enough to start the process.  Like a seed, my offspring’s khu will grow and blossom, and the human infant’s khu grows.  And always he will be my creation. 
            Ludicrously, he is still wearing the same kilt, and it is underneath the dirty cloth that the first signs of life blossom.  Then his chest stirs, not with the breath of life that man has, my breath is not like that, but with motion nonetheless as he flexes his arms slightly and moves his head.  His arms flex only to clasp at me, his head moves to my mouth. 
            When he is fully ready, I straddle his hips.  His passion slides inside of me, strong and willing.  It feels sweet.  It is like strong drink and the rush in my body makes me whimper with pleasure.  My lover moves beneath me in erratic spasms, but I provide the rhythm for both of us.
            There is a slight moment of rebellion.  The memories of life crash at him, I can hear them roaring through his mind.  It is nothing, and I have anticipated it.  Our connection allows me to invade his mind as I have taken everything else.  I savagely crush the reawakened will inside him as I make him my own, Set’s own.  It is for the best, the pain of life is no longer for him. 
            He relaxes again and then clenches me tightly.  Pulling what sustenance he can from my nurturing embrace.  He rushes to feed and I nurse him gently, holding it fast to control his greedy mouth.
            I must not spend too much time with the first.  There are other seeds to feed.  But the first is always so beautiful.  I will not rush him overmuch. 
            I moan deep in my throat as we take each other, each of us the beast and the wet, moist meal upon which the beast feeds.
            There is plenty of time.

Chapter Nine: Digging into the land of the Dead

Anubis was the Egyptian god of the underworld who guided and protected the spirits of the dead. He was known as “Foremost of the Westerners” - the Land of the Dead was thought to be to the West, where the Egyptians buried their dead.
His statues show him as a black jackal-headed man, or as a black jackal. The Egyptians knew of the jackals prowling around the graveyards, and the link between them and the dead.  Anubis was painted black to further link him with the deceased - a body that had been embalmed became a pitch black color.  Anubis was also seen as the deity of embalming, as well as a god of the dead. To the Egyptians, Anubis was the protector of embalming and guardian of both the mummy and the necropolis.

Druset’s Story

            I woke in the middle of the night.  I felt myself again, and wondered at the strange feelings of the last few days.  Djorkekt wasn’t in me now, but I felt he lingered nearby.  Waiting perhaps.  For what?  Sometimes, during the day,  I imagined that I could hear him move around me, on silent feet or ghostly wings, but when I turned, nothing.
            Menna’s stifled cries came again, and I realized what had woke me.  It seemed to happen every night.  I moved to her room through the near darkness and awkwardly stroked her hair, trying to wake her out of it.  Her cries became more terrified, more frantic, and I pulled her into a sitting position.  She woke up enough to cling to me for protection, instantly silent again. 
            When I held her like this, often for hours, I dozed into another place.  Djorkekt’s world.  I held a girl in this place too, Ikthea.  If I watched carefully, she might live through the fever.  Might.  I was in this same place, the temple, but things were slightly different, too.  But I could not place it.
            Then Menna would murmur in her sleep.  Occasionally I heard “Father” and once, “Mother”.  The rest I could not make out. Menna hadn’t spoken much since the night Menhu had stumbled into Yuk-Chek’s house, but a little was better than none.  It was always monosyllabic.  I suspected that it wasn’t a lack of knowledge as much an unwillingness.  She spoke even more in her sleep.  I wondered if anyone but me knew it.  What kind of life did Menhu and Menna lead?  Did he even know she could speak?  I decided he must know, but it must have seemed benign.  Of what consequence could such a thing be to him in his own solitude?  Now that I knew her throat still worked, I couldn’t help wondering if she might be induced to speak in the right environment.  She sniffed and wiped her tears.      
            “There is water here if you want,” I said softly, forgetting her deafness.  Then I lit a candle and offered her water again so she could see my lips.  She shook her head.  She sat up and hugged her knees, determined to stay awake again.  I didn’t know what dreams haunted her, though I could guess some of the content.
            “Come, then,” I said to her.  “If we must stay awake then I have things that need doing.”
            She shuffled after me as I went back to my chamber.  As always, she sat out of the way on my pallet as I prepared for my morning translations.  She had been doing this the last few days and was quiet enough that I often forgot about her presence. 
            Djorkekt’s work came first, and I wondered if he left the rituals in me, or came to me during them.  I felt the lines between us were blurring.  The purifying rituals took some time, but even so, it was still not close enough to morning.  I had to light several tapers in order to do the morning’s translations, Druset’s work.  Sometimes I felt he was the intruder, the foreign one.  I pulled the old sheets onto my makeshift desk, marveling as always in the pure symbols of the old language.  Then I pulled my notes out that I had brought from home.  Then I found a new papyrus sheet and reed quills.   
            I’d never seen two of the symbols.  There were some similarly shaped ones in my notes, but it still took several guesses based on content before I was satisfied.  When the translation started to fall into shape I was thunderstruck.

A Full Awakening.
Djorkekt Comes.
As the Serpent Sheds his old self in favor of the new.
Djorkekt Comes.
Death is the Final Awakening, and the least of Sacrifices.
Even the Mighty square their shoulders as their roles are made clear to them.
And everyone faces Destruction without a passing into the Western Lands.
The Old Ways are at hand and Blood is their Reckoning.
For those who are ruled by the ever Dying, Ever Renewing quail at their loss.
And fear the coming of the Blooded Hag, Disease’s foul minion.
Djorkekt Comes.
He sheds his own skin, for his own is but a shell.
Djorkekt Comes.
He discards all that is not useful.  His life of old.
Djorkekt Comes.
He arises and he will chain the weak and powerful alike.
Djorkekt Comes.
The Lion has need, and his mane shakes as he calls to his servant.
The Lion bellows his warning.
Egypt shakes with it.
Djorkekt Comes.
Against Sun-Disk, The Storm Hammer, The Falcon, Dog and Enchantress.
Djorkekt Comes.
For the Sun-Disk, The Storm Hammer, The Falcon, Dog and Enchantress.
Djorkekt comes.
           
            The name crashed around in my skull like rolling thunder.  Barely aware of what I was doing, I lurched to my feet.  I could hear things amplified, huge crashes of noise without meaning.  My pen rattling like bone on the surface of my desk.  The rough texture of the papyrus as sheet after sheet slid sensuously onto the floor.  Menna’s voice, small and harsh with disuse, calling my name.  A small part of my mind reflected that she had never said my name before this.  My own awkward footsteps were as loud as falling pillars.  But the name thundered in my head, and I could not bear it.  Everything else was small and insignificant compared to the pain of that name.  The room canted at wild degrees, back and forth.  I hit my head trying to claw my way out of the doorway and then the cool night air was on my cheek.
            I felt that I could count each grain of sand that struck my cheek as I fell, but the night closed in upon me before I could begin.

            I awoke with the name still on my lips: Djorkekt.
            Like a ghost stepping into my shell, I could feel him come to me.  The displaced ba of a slaughtered priest.
            Then I was the priest again, and I came awake for true. 
            The morning sun warmed my back, though someone had draped a linen sheet over me to help shield against it.  My mouth was parched and dusty from pressing into the sand.  I wiped grit from my face and spit, then twisted to rise.  A child lay across me, lightly pinning me to the dusty sand.  Ikthea?  But no, this child was darker, smaller.  Of course, Ikthea was dead, wasn’t she?  I gently pried the child off of me and slid out from underneath her.  She did not awaken.  I crouched and lifted her in my arms.  I had meant to be smooth and gentle, but the child’s weight surprised me.  I felt weak and feeble, and my hands shook.  I barely took the weight, and staggered towards the temple.
            I stopped.  The temple looked different.  Shallow steps led up to an inner courtyard, open to the sun from above, with walls on three sides, one with a gate that led further into the temple.  Pillars graced the open space, smooth and beautiful, but unadorned.  Gone were the statues and decorations that I remembered.  Only the symbols of Pharaoh receiving the blessing of the Sun-Disk graced the inside walls of the courtyard entrance.  Much would need to be restored.  I shook my head as I examined each of the paintings. 
            The servant of Set, an unnatural smoke colored bird, rested on the outer walls to my left and gazed speculatively at me.  I could see bloodshed and battlefield-chaos in its eyes.  I was transfixed.  It ruffled its wings and canted its head to view me with one eye, visibly unimpressed.  I noticed that it had defecated on one of the walls picturing the Pharaoh.  I chuckled in spite of myself.   
            It cawed a raucous challenge, the scream of dying soldiers.  Its eye peered behind me.  Almost against my will, I peered over my shoulder quickly, not wanting to take my gaze off of the bird. 
            A shrouded figure stood just behind me inside the courtyard, with one hand leaning on one of the pillars for support.  It didn’t look necessary.  The shrouded blackened linen hid details, but the firm stance and large shoulders defined a towering silhouette that almost seemed a pillar itself.  The silence of the morning allowed me to hear the small pat-pat-pat as red fluid dripped from the other hand onto the tiled stone floor.  The bird shrieked again, but no one moved.
            I drifted back to one of the walls, and the shadow and bird both closed slightly, like wary pit warriors, each of us sizing the other.  The child chose this moment to wake up, clinging to me suddenly.  I put her on her feet and pushed her behind me.
            “Do not move unless I tell you, and make no sound!” I hissed.
            “The woman from my dreams,” the girl said, in a quavering voice.  “Don’t talk to her, all she will take is blood.  She doesn’t have any of her own.”  I sucked in a nervous breath.  The blooded hag.  I remembered vaguely, like sifting through the memories of a stranger.  Then it came to me: the drops of blood in the market square, at the house.
            I couldn’t spare the time to ask Menna any questions, though I felt her anxiety.  “Just don’t move,” I repeated sternly.
            “She calls like death,” she said dreamily, “And her price is blood now, and more blood later.”
            Vaguely I remembered the girl’s name, and that Menna hadn’t spoken that many words in all the time I had known her.  Why didn’t I remember that before this?
            The bird screamed again, a hateful sound unlike anything made by bird, man or animal, more like the high pitched scream of metal scraping metal on the battle-field.   
            Then the shrouded figure ran at the bird.  She shouted wildly and her voice screamed like a chorus, an unorganized howling with voices of young and old, men and women all screaming together.  The bird lazily took to the air, with a last disdainful shot of feces onto one of the pillars.  It screamed its horrible call twice more, filling my head with the taste of death before it slowly glided from sight.
            The strange visitor chuckled somberly, and her laugh held the voices of giggling young girls, lecherous old men, doting grandparents and kindly mothers all twined roughly together, not quite in unison.  Different voices seemed to swell and fall even as she spoke so that the timbre changed constantly, but always a multitude.  She strode purposefully closer and I could see that it was shaped like a woman, but so decrepit and shapeless as to make her almost genderless.
            “There are two of us, two of us now, yes…” I could barely make out the words through the mass of sounds that issued forth.  She was large and hefty, though scraps of her blackened flesh peeked out between the folds of her blood-soaked shroud.  She slid towards me with an odd, sidewise gait and the salty stink of the nitrate pits came with her as well as an undercurrent of decaying flesh.  The rags were burial shrouds, though so dirty and blood encrusted that the tidy wrappings no longer held, allowing more of her blackened flesh to be seen when she moved.  She left a trail of bloody smears on the tiled floor as she passed.  She hunched over so that I couldn’t see her face, for which I was infinitely grateful.
            The blooded hag was a walking corpse, which explained the blackened flesh, the tattered and clotted wrappings.  Only flesh prepared for the next world had that color.  Where the blood came from was a mystery, as the bodies of the deceased were fully bled.  Besides, fifteen strong men couldn't hold enough blood to leave the stained trail she did and keep walking.  Another creature of the dead, though different than the bird creature.  And not allies, apparently.
            “Blood is the price,” Menna whispered.  I wondered where these visions of hers were coming from.  Knowing the source might help me determine their veracity. 
            “Quite, quite right,” the crowd of voices said when the hag opened her mouth.  “Blood now, and more blood later.”
            “Blood now,” Menna intoned.  “Blood now, and more blood later.”  
.           “But, but, there will be two of us, yes, yes,” the eerie choir of voices whispered.  She extended her hand.  Being able to hear her better only made the sound more frightening.  Some were kindly and seemed like people I’d once known, though I couldn’t remember who.  A few of them sounded filled with madness, and I felt I’d known them too.
            I did not take the hand.  “I don’t have any blood to give,” I said.  “Neither of us does.”
            “Always blood to give, if one digs far enough, yes, yes.”  She pulled back her hand.  The next was just a chorus of whispers. “We shall see.  I will go, but not far.”  She started to slide away, but turned suddenly.  “But remember,” she said and turned her face fully into mine for the first time so that I could see that one eye burned fire like the noon sun, while the other glinted, a silver crescent.
            “Remember,” she finished, just before she slid from the courtyard.  “The Sleeping Lion may need all the allies that he can get before this is done, and less enemies, lest all of the black lands suffer.”
            I rushed after her retreating form, though I do not know exactly why.  Menna rushed after me, nearly on my heels.  Heat shimmered down the stone steps.  I didn’t see the shrouded woman, but I nearly tripped over someone sprawled on the steps.  I bumped my shins against rounded shoulders and had to clutch at the bare sweaty back to keep from falling.  The man wore only a ragged cloth tied around his waist.
            “Druset?”  A large browned face looked up at me.  His wide eyes locked onto my face and his hands shook as he reached for me, then he snatched them back looking from the clean white linen to his own dirty hands.  “So it’s true what they have been saying.”
            I cast about for the bloody woman, but could see nothing but deserted city buildings and swirling dust and sand.
            “Druset?”
            The name the man used slipped into me and I felt a part of myself returning to me.  It still took a moment before I could remember the man’s name, and then it all came back to me, knowledge returning in a slow wash like the Nile slowly filling each cultivated irrigation channel.
            “Ay?”  I helped the bronzed farmer to his feet, as ludicrous as the motion was.  He towered over me, heavy limbed and awkward.  “What are you doing here?  It’s not safe.”
            “Safe?” he wailed.  “There is no safe.  Haven’t you heard what has happened outside of your temple?  Haven’t you looked at Gethos?  Don’t you even know that we’re all dying?”
            “Dying?”
            “You’re worse than a blinded mule!!” he shrieked.  Then he slipped in my grasp and sank again to the stone steps.  “How can you?” he whispered.  “How can you not hear the things that feed on us in the night?”
              “I try not to go out at night,” I said.  I knew this man, but now his thoughts and deeds were far away to me.  My gaze strayed back to the columned walls of the buildings around me.  The hag could have gone almost anywhere.
            “They killed Ula…”
            “Ula?” I repeated quietly.  I thought hard.  Hadn’t I known him?  No, her.  Yes.
            “Don’t you care, Druset?  They killed my wife and all I could do was call out to her as they took her in the night.  She had to check on the mules.  I told her not to, but you know Ula.  And when she went out..”  He waved his big hands helplessly.  “They got her.  Oh, by the Lion, her screams went on forever.”
            Ay’s face snapped in to focus.  I levered his unresisting form up from the steps. 
            “Forgive me,” I murmured.  I could see that he didn’t hear me.  He went on talking to me as if I had not spoken.
            “They say that there is something in the Nile that moves like the crocodile, but is never directly seen by the fisherman.  It leaves tracks the size of a hippopotamus and several large barges have gone missing.  Giant dogs, talking birds, sea serpents come up the Nile, and Sun reaching down to burn all of Gethos in a cleansing flame.  And my wife’s child was not the only stillborn.  I’ve heard of several more, all healthy women, but dead babies.  Oh, I will dwell in eternal damnation with no trip to the West for me when the carrion feasts on my corpse.  Like my wife and the child.”
            He let me help him up the steps, and I saw that his legs were covered with a thatch of scars.  One of his hands was bleeding, an odd reminder of my recent strange encounter.  I couldn’t help but wonder what might be drawn to that blood. 
            Menna stared at me with wide eyes, but said nothing, of course, as I led the beefy farmer inside.  I wondered when she might speak again.  Did she even know she had, or was it like a waking dream for her?
            As for Ay, he continued his long stream of babble, tales of monsters and cutthroats loitering in Gethos.  I was certain some of what he said must be—I knew that things of power were stirring in Gethos.      
            “The gods don’t serve us!  They protect the worthy, but what matter is that?  Both Khumenakt and the Pharaoh’s sun disk are too enmeshed in battle to be concerned with us.  The mighty do not concern themselves with one farmer.  Nor usually do priests.  Our place is to worship the gods, yes, but they are not in our service.  And with a blasphemous Pharaoh, we are doomed either to follow his heretic’s path or to blaspheme against the son of the sun.  Either way lies Damnation.  We will rot and our souls will not travel on.  Oh, by the Lion…”
            At least someone else remembered the older gods.  Though he let me lead him like a child, he might later recover.  How many other denizens of Gethos remember, but had been afraid to speak?  Khumenakt’s name would ring in this town once more.  Fitting that his people should regain faith during the festival of the dead, so much was it like a resurrection.
            I lay him tenderly down to rest in the protection of the temple.  His appearance seemed a great lifting to me.  I turned to go, but he grabbed my hand.
            “Wait,” he said.  “There is more.  Here.”  And so saying he sat up and pulled a scrap of cloth from his belt.  It was a strip of leather, long and supple.  It seemed familiar somehow…
            “I’m sorry, Druset,” Ay blubbered.  “I truly am.  I gave them the horse just as they asked.  I knew they wouldn’t have thought of it themselves.  And things didn’t seem quite so bad then.  I think whatever…happened, happened that night when they left.  I didn’t find them until I tried to at least cover Ula in the ground some, though there wasn’t much left.  I would have sworn that it was some kind of animal attack, and there were feathers, but no bird I know could do such a thing.  They were all dead, and the horse.  There was so much blood, Druset.  So much blood.  I did what I could and buried them with Ula, but it wasn’t proper.  How could it be?”
            Then it flooded back to me.  I was holding Usis’ sling in my hands.  He was talking about my horse.  And my boys.  And of course I knew what kind of bird might mutilate a band of children.  My boys.
            The last part of me that had been wandering came back to me, and I would have felt whole had not the youngest parts of me just died.
            When I could remember all of their names I sat down and wept.

Chapter Ten: And the Blind Shall Lead

The Aten gained its prominence during the reign of Akhenaten, and passed out of favor shortly thereafter.  Later known as the Heretic King, Akhenaten made an effort to unite all the peoples of Egypt under one god. He abolished the traditional cults of Egypt and replaced them with the Aten. The king considered the Aten to be the creative force in the universe and the only god worthy of his worship.  His new capital, the city of Akhetaten (the horizon of Aten) was known for its startling changes in art and policy.
            Inscriptions show that the god had no physical image, but it was represented as a solar disk projecting many downward rays that ended as human hands. Sometimes holding ankhs, the symbol of eternal life.
            There is reason to believe, however, that the people of Egypt did not wish to change their ways.
            But few were willing to speak against the Pharaoh of Egypt.

Sivku’s Story
           
            I followed Menhu through the central quarter, trying not to look at the enclosing cliffs.  He had refused to tell me any more than his name.  Besides his silence, there were the sounds of the city surrounding us: the barking of dogs and the murmurs of couples loving and bickering, and the crackling of several watch fires.  I wanted to break in and separate the couples, maybe kick the dog.  I thought of Bolis’ bitch and the pitch dogs in the desert.  Definitely kick the dog.
            I still clenched the dead prince’s dagger in my hand and moved as silently as I could.  It didn’t matter much, the man who had rescued me moved like a troop of soldiers.  His large feet crunching in the sand and constantly kicking small pieces of rubble made me grit my teeth at every silent street corner.  We were lucky to avoid the Pharaoh’s patrol, for they were competent, sober and plentiful in the Pharaoh’s home city.  Our luck didn’t last though.
            I followed Menhu closely around the corner of a large stone supply house, but stopped when I heard someone speaking ahead.  I was afraid to call out, but plucked frantically at Menhu’s ragged clothing to pull him back.  The only result was a loud tearing sound as I tore a strip off the ragged priest’s kilt.  He looked back with irritation and I tried to gesture with my dagger, indicating the direction of the noise.
            “Halt!  Who challenges the Pharaoh’s guard?” 
            Damnation.  Too late.  I discarded the rags and slid quickly away from the wall, across the street.  A statue of some forgotten desert general shielded me from view.  Menhu turned as a guard stepped around a corner.  The guard looked belligerent and large enough to be dangerous.  He held a flickering torch in his hand and a long spear in the other.
            Menhu strode fiercely at him, flexing his big hands.  Stupid, stupid, stupid.  The guard used the shaft of his long spear to bar the way.  I could see two other guards from my vantage point, and they started to take an interest, retrieving their own spears and leaving their post by a watch fire.
            I reflected briefly on the idea of abandoning my rescuer, but reluctantly.  I hadn’t done so well by myself last time, and he seemed to know where he was going.  Still, Menhu hardly cared if I followed him or not.  But he was working against the Pharaoh’s Aten as well as Keafus’ dark Set, a sinister pairing of day and night.  It might not make much sense to ally myself against that much power, but Menhu might be the only ally I could ever find and the rest of Egypt had already proved to be my enemy.  We had someone to hate in common and it was more than I’d shared with anyone in a long time. 
            And I had watched him kill, and this moved me.  It had been somehow more terrible for its lack of violence.  Something moved inside him that might be a match for the Pharaoh, something that might let a man, or woman fight the gods.  If only something had shown on his face when he’d taken the young boy’s life, the man might’ve frightened me less.
            The guard tried to push Menhu back.  I drifted behind the two guards advancing from the watch fire as Menhu reached across the warding spear.  I didn’t think they’d seen me.  I couldn’t see what happened, but the guard slumped to the ground much the way Pahiri had.  Menhu had barely touched him. 
            A dark glimmer of something flitted away from the dead man, trailing a gossamer thread of black smoke.  For the briefest of moments, I saw a birdlike shape, then it disappeared. 
            The other guards yelled and charged him.  I slid around the statue and came up behind the slowest of the two and buried my dagger in his kidney.  He stiffened with a grunt and fell stiffly to the ground.  I kept my grip on the dagger, though it was slick with the guard’s blood.  I stepped over him while a wide pool formed underneath him in the sand.
            While I’d dealt with one of them, Menhu had squared off with the other.  Finally, as I over moved toward them, the guard charged, driving his spear at Menhu’s stomach.  I expected some brilliant martial prowess or divine powers of protection, and was shocked when Menhu sprawled in the dirt as he flung himself backward to avoid being impaled.  The guard stabbed fiercely and the big man crab walked away, looking awkward and foolish.
            “Hey!” I shouted.  I stuck my dagger in the sand and slid the spear from underneath the groaning guard I had stabbed.  I waved it threateningly in his direction and advanced in what I hoped was a menacing manner.
            The guard snarled, but hesitated long enough for Menhu to get to his feet.  The guard backed against the wall and tried to keep his eye on both of us.  He knew enough about that spear to keep both of us at bay.  I considered throwing mine, but then he could stab us at his convenience when I missed.
            “Come on!” I snapped at Menhu, backing away.  I had to shift my grip on the spear for a minute to brush a black hair from my eyes.  I flinched and nearly dropped it when I bumped my left hand.  Some mighty warrior, I thought, but the guard didn’t move.  I stepped in the pool of blood as I kept my eyes on the guard as I fumbled around to retrieve my dagger.  I wiped it on the colors of Pharaoh’s pretty uniform.
            “He’ll call a warning,” Menhu said, looking grimly at the trapped guard. 
            “There are bodies in the street,” I snapped.  “There’s going to be a warning anyway.” 
            The guard edged away when I pulled Menhu after me.  Relief flooded me.  I thought the guard might have taken us face on.  The shouting started as we left.  Who knew how long he'd have to do that, but I knew we wanted to be far away.      
            He let me lead the rest of the way through the dark streets.  After living with Brother Aster, I moved with the barest whisper.  I felt I could almost steal into the Pharaoh’s personal quarters and slit his neck open as he slept.  Almost.  This was a skill I’d been honing like an assassin’s blade.  I did not feel such the foreigner during the night, as if Egypt had been buried in night and a new land emerged.  One that belonged to me as much as anyone born here.  Menhu allowed me to scout in front without argument.  Twice I was able to steal back and touch him lightly on the shoulder before he became aware of me.  I kept both the spear and my new dagger close at all times, and felt like a predator of the night. 
            The guards moved in flickering circles of light, they were easy to spot and easy to avoid.  I hid Menhu and myself once amid a small residential construction site, and once in an artisan’s storage room filled with paints and brushes.  Menhu moved like the hippo, but he had its cunning and patience too, and could sit silently with me as the hippo rests underneath its own dark watery covering, patiently waiting.
            When we reached the Southern edge of the central quarter, I paused.  The huge cliffs loomed before us, impassable.  My skills had earned me a few questions, I thought.
            “If we go this way, we will have to pass the village chapel, then pass somehow through the eastern borders of tombs.  We’re going back to Gethos, aren’t we?”
            I could feel rather than see Menhu turn and regard me in the dark shadows of Pharaoh’s marker.  He didn’t speak for some time.
            Finally he said, “We are going around the southern tombs, well south of the guards in the Royal tombs, who will be alert.  Then through the quarry.  I know the way well from there.  There will be no trouble.”
            “Why Gethos?” I asked, insistent.  “I just don’t want to be captured by the Pharaoh’s guards.  Isn’t Gethos a little close to Pharaoh?  That’ll be the first place he looks.”
            “Not himself,” the big man chuckled.  “He might send troops, but probably not until the festival of the dead is over.  The Pharaoh might rule all of Egypt, but right now he has little sway in Gethos.  That gives us ten more days.”
            I started to object and he cut me off.
            “A lot can happen in ten days.”
            I didn’t like it, but he wouldn’t discuss it further.  I vowed to learn this area better and followed, muttering to myself.

            We did it just as he said:  we went around the southern tombs, then through the quarry.  We encountered no one.  The quarry was a sinister place in the night grayish light of near dawn.  The building sized piles of rubble shaped a formidable maze of looming and indistinct shapes.  Menhu took my hand, but not to be romantic.  My slight vision was no match for the uneven terrain.  Anyway, he seemed incapable of such a feeling.  We moved through the maze slowly, but without error.
            By the time the lightening around the quarry’s edges foretold of dawn, stretches of rubble surrounded us on all sides.  Past the edges of the quarry the cliff faces dwarfed the place, making me feel uneasy.
            “We will rest and spend the heat of the day here.  Then move on as night comes.”
            “Rest where?”
            On another man, I might have looked for a smirk.  He carefully moved a boy sized piece of slate and gestured at the hole it made.  The entire pile was made of irregular stones, many of them fragments of torn down buildings or artisans discards.  I poked my head into the hole.  It was dark and uncomfortable looking, but he was right.  No one would find us here.  We crammed ourselves in the small space, though there was barely space for Menhu’s gangly height and me.  I ended up with my feet across his lap and my head wedged in a crevice not quite big enough for it.  When Menhu reached out and awkwardly pulled the stone on top of us, I nearly screamed.  I closed my eyes and tried not to think about being trapped in a place like this.  But frightened or not, uncomfortable or not, I fell asleep almost immediately.

            I awoke twice during the day.  The first time the sun was still out and there was nothing to do but go back to sleep.  It was later that I woke up again, but the sun still shone weakly through the gaps in the stone.   A weak snuffling shook the rest of sleep from me.  At first, I thought some kind of animal had fallen in with us, and only when the gasps coincided with the jerks of his body next to me that I realized it was Menhu.  He might be dreaming, but it didn’t sound pleasant.  I had no idea what to do, and after a while the sounds quieted and his breathing leveled out.  I went back to sleep.
            He woke me later without comment and we pulled ourselves from the rubble like serpents.  Menhu showed no trace of emotion as he extricated himself, but started out of the quarry without a word or backward glance.
           
            We traveled in brief stints, during the transitionary times of the desert.  We had no clothes thick enough to protect us from the cold, and the heat of the day sank into us is if determined to blister the skin off a crocodile’s back.  We spent all of our time in the valleys so that we could not be seen.  We did not make good time this way, but we didn’t run into any of the Pharaoh’s troops either.
            We did find some tracks, signs of a large group passing between Pharaoh’s city and Gethos.  It seemed to disturb Menhu slightly.  When I pointed out that we expected the Pharaoh’s guards to be searching for us he shook his head. 
            “Should be chariot marks,” he mumbled so that I could barely hear him.  “Pharaoh’s troops would be using chariots.”  He shook his head in confusion.  I merely shrugged.
            “Short on chariots?” I suggested.  He did not look convinced. 
            After the second day our water skin ran out.  We were close to Gethos then, but still needed water or we would not survive the last night in the desert.  But Menhu showed a certain craft for living in the desert that made me believe he’d spent a lot of time there.  He knew places to find water that I had never seen.  It was all disgusting: plants dug from the ground, insects and grubs dug from underneath shale.  His plan was far more repulsive than simply eating them.  He showed me the first time with scarab beetles, crunching the first one in his mouth and sucking the juices noisily.  I turned pale watching him.  He nursed it for ages, grimacing, but sucking all the same until he finally spit the husk into the sand.  He offered me one.  I gagged, but was afraid he might not offer again.  I took it. 
            “It’s a little easier if you kill them first,” was all the comfort he offered.  He demonstrated by crushing the head of his next beetle, but then he had to lick the mess he made off his fingers, which just made it worse.
            I bit into mine quickly, before I had time to think.  It took longer to stop squirming than I thought and I almost spit it back out.  Finally it stopped, but that only made it slightly less nauseating.
            The dusky, acrid taste lingered in my mouth long after we began moving again, so I didn’t notice the birds at first.  Only when Menhu veered direction suddenly did I see the cloud of black shapes.  They clustered near the slight shelter of a rocky outcropping the size and shape of a ship’s bow thrust upwards from the sand.  I stopped using my spear as a walking stick and carried it properly as we drew nearer.
            It was the early morning, just after dawn.  The flock of birds whirled in blood red eddies and cast crazed shadows on the sand that lurched in our direction like a deranged puppet show.  Something cringed underneath the outcropping, but the birds obscured most of it, and the rest was hidden in the huge shadow cast by the outcropping.  The cawing of the birds rang out like the dying on the battlefield and the wind suddenly carried a fetid musk.  I knew at once that they were the same kind of birds that had been on the roof and attacked Aster.  I had seen just one of those kill.  There looked to be as many as twenty now.  They must have killed whatever had hidden in the protective niche long ago.
            Menhu’s face went tight, and he started for the swirling group of birds.  I cried out and tried to pull him back, but he was too fast.  I wasn’t going to follow him, so I flung myself in the lee of one of the desert dunes so that I could peer over the top and watch.  It wasn’t much protection, but it was all I could muster in the stinking desert.  If the bird things wanted me, I couldn’t outrun them.
            Menhu strode directly into their midst, merely a silhouette in the dawn shadows.  The birds screamed higher and louder still, like tortured children.  The scent of corpses baking in the desert emanated from the flock, battling with the sand and heat.  The flock parted as he moved though, abandoning whatever they had cornered.  They reared and dove in clusters, but he repulsed them again and again.  Still the birds and he made no actual contact.  They moved back and forth in a sinister dance. 
            Again and again, the birds descended on him like an early dusk, but he repulsed them time and time again.  It went on for long minutes with Menhu waving and the birds screaming and neither of them touching the other.  Finally, when the sun was fully above the horizon and brushed the last of the night time shadows aside, the flock of birds screamed once more in unison, as if at the sun itself, and flew over my head to disappear to the North.  Towards Gethos.
            I heard a weak wailing previously drowned out by the cawing of the birds as a tall man stumbled out from the scant protection of the outcropping.  He loomed nearly as tall as Menhu, and twice as burly.  Blood covered his face and his skin shone pink and blistered, without any protective clothing.  He gestured helplessly and flailed, but Menhu placidly stayed just out of arm’s reach. 
            Menhu stooped and lifted a small shape from the protection of the outcropping.  The wailing man fell, still crying out and reaching desperately up from his prone position.  I couldn’t make out what he was saying, but I was pretty sure it wouldn’t make much more sense when I was closer.  Even so, I looked back apprehensively over my shoulder before I climbed to my feet and slogged down the dune to join Menhu. 
            Menhu straightened, and in his arms he cradled a small child, naked, unconscious, badly burnt from the sun and covered with gashes from the bird attack.  But Menhu’s attention wasn’t on the boy in his arms.  He pulled a fistful of jewels from the crevice.  I watched while he carelessly let gold rings and glittering necklaces fall into the sand while he held onto an blue faience stone of some sort. 
            Menhu paid little attention to the fallen man, or the unconscious child  He staggered a few feet, still clutching and staring at the necklace, and slumped in the sand.  I didn’t realize how much of a mask Menhu’s face had been these past few days until I watched his facade shatter.  His eyes looked like haunted hollows and his skin had turned the color of ash.  The hand that held the faience shook.  His mouth opened as if he wanted to speak, but nothing came out.
            I wanted to ask him about it, but my own mouth stopped working when I took a second look at the fallen man.
            No wonder I didn’t recognize him at first.  His skin was burnt a deep red, and ragged flakes of it covered his naked back.  He had no clothes, so there was no expensive kilt, no golden dagger.  It was probably the first time I had seen him without a weapon, either the dagger or a lash in his hands.  The sun had also done something to his eyes.  They bled constant trickles of red that marked his face and pooled in his neck and chest hair.  There was no doubt in me that he was blind.  The arrogant expression was gone.  His face was as marked by anguish, blood and heat.  But Senior Prophet Bolis’ face slid through all of my nastiest nightmares.  And I knew him now.
            With a hoarse cry I launched my spear at Bolis.  It wobbled when I threw it, and only struck him sideways with the shaft and bounced off his head, giving him a slight rap on the head.
            “No!” Menhu shouted.  He dumped the boy on the ground and pulled himself up, but I was already two steps ahead of him, my dagger drawn.  Menhu made a strangled sound in the back of his throat.  “Don’t touch him!”
            I didn’t care.  Maybe he recognized our voices.  Bolis knew something.  He’d already been hit once.  He twisted backwards, his arms upflung.  He fell to the sand as I slashed the space he’d been before.  I nearly tumbled on top of him with my wild miss.  Somehow, he found my lead leg with both of his feet and levered brutally on my knee.  I went sprawling with a cry and landed face first in the sand.  I dropped my knife near him and he must have guessed what it was from the sound of it sticking in the sand, because he snatched it up effortlessly.  He grabbed me in a brutal grip, pushing my face further into the sand with his hand on the back of my neck.  I grabbed frantically at his huge hand, which nearly spanned the back of my head, but didn’t have the strength to pry his fingers off me.
            He hauled me to him and regained his footing, holding me out in front of him as a shield.  I clawed at his hand still, but it was like a kitten scratching the outside of a wooden door.  I tried to bite, but his grip was too firm on my throat and I couldn’t reach hand or wrist.  I don’t think the pain would have bothered him.  He was half dead already, and that didn’t seem to matter.  I could feel the blood from his eyes hot and sticky in my hair.  My vision started to cloud over in a bloody haze as I gulped desperately for breath.
            “Don’t,” Bolis rumbled.  Speaking to Menhu.  He didn’t need to talk to me.  The dagger was leveled in Menhu’s direction.  My dagger that he had taken from me.  God’s piss.  “I don’t need this knife to kill her.”
            “She means nothing to me,” Menhu snarled.  “But this does.”  And I would have gasped if I could have drawn breath.  I believed him.  Bastard.  He knelt next to the boy and lay his own knife against the boy’s chest, poking the chest hard enough to draw blood.  The boy lay as if already dead.   He half dropped the boy in the sand.  They both waited several heartbeats, and Bolis loosened his grip slightly.
            “I need you now more than I need her,” Menhu finally finished.  “I need to know where you found this.”  He dangled the faience piece, clay dyed a deep blue.  A common material, and not as valuable as many of the pieces that he’d spilled on the ground.  His voice was husky.  I would have turned away if I could have, after seeing his face.  Whatever he was after, it was too private, too naked, a need larger than himself.  I could see that it was a piece of jewelry, made of clay dyed blue and shaped like a crocodile.  It looked like a necklace.             
            Bolis shifted slightly towards Menhu when he spoke, and I realized he really couldn’t see.  I wasn’t sure before.  Taken by a half dead blind man.  Damnation.  I tried to claw at his wrist again, but he crashed the hilt of my knife casually into the side of my mouth and I tasted blood.
            “Don’t make me do that again,” he said, without rancor.  Which I found even more frightening.  He wasn’t even paying any attention to me.  His main focus was on Menhu.  But frightened or not, I struggled like a mad animal.  When I tried to twist and claw at him, he forced me to the ground with his hand on the back of my neck, crushing my face into the sand so that I had to frantically push up with my hands to keep from suffocating.  He knelt behind me, retaining his grip.
            “Why should I bother telling you?” Bolis said to Menhu.  “I need nothing from you.”
            I looked up, spitting sand and grit.  Menhu visibly pulled himself together.  He clenched the faience necklace in his fist until I thought he would grind the pottery into powder.  Time crawled by as I caught flashes of him struggling with something inside himself, while I fought for breath.  I would kill them both if I could. 
            When I could next spare a glance, Menhu’s face was blank and his fist relaxed.  Bolis seemed content to wait.  Nothing moved in the murderous heat.  My labored breathing husked loudly in the otherwise silent confrontation. 
            Finally, Menhu spoke.  “You need us.”
            “The Aten will give me all that I need,” Bolis stated instantly.  “What’s to stop me from killing you and taking it?  I have the Aten as my sword and shield.”
            “The Aten is mighty,” Menhu agreed blandly.  “It might even stop me from shooting you down in your tracks.  But somehow I doubt it.  I’m an excellent shot, I assure you, and it seems that you must have been doing some fending for yourself lately.  I’d hate to see you catch an arrow in your chest because you’d misinterpreted the signs.”
            I knew Menhu had no bow, but I still hated Bolis more, so I said nothing.  But I thought about it.  
            “Perhaps the Aten has sent you,” Bolis said.  “To help me in my time of need.”
            “Perhaps the Aten has sent me to stake you out in the sun and take what information I need from your last breath.”
            “I have no more fear of the sun.  And you would find carrying out your plan to be quite difficult.”
            The boy whimpered, but neither Menhu or Bolis paid any attention.  They stared at each other like enemy generals, calculating deaths.
            "A blind man in the desert,” Menhu said dryly.  “Certainly has some needs.  Water.  And there is always the possibility that the birds will return.”
            “Minions of Set!” Bolis spat.
            “Yes…and what was it they wanted?”  Menhu moved closer to the boy.  “This?  And you wanted to save him bad enough to put yourself in the way.  Must be important to you.”
            “One of the old scribe’s boys,” Bolis said.  “I rescued him from a pile of corpses.  The evil things from Set want him dead, but the sun shines on him!”
            “I would let her die…to get what I want,” Menhu said.  “I have no problem adding this boy to my conscience.  Tell me where you found this necklace.”
Bolis rolled it in his head for awhile.  “Very well,” he rumbled at last.  “It is from a gravesite.  I had need and it was the easiest way.”
            “You will take me there.”
            “Perhaps.”  
            Bolis flexed the fingers on my neck, but relaxed a little when I stopped struggling.  His attention was still on Menhu.  Looking behind me, I decided that something other than the birds had wounded Bolis’ eyes.  They looked more like burns.  The eyes themselves were scarred and wrinkled blisters, like putrid fruit.  Dried rivulets of blood and pus caked on his lower face, cracking as he spoke.
            My voice sounded husky from being half choked.  “What happened to your eyes?”
            He slowly looked down, the ruined eyes turning towards me as if he was just now considering me for the first time.  The bloody film over his eyes made them shine and glisten in the sun like freshly sharpened knives.  “The Aten has given me vision,” he said.  “Like no man before me.”
            “It doesn’t look like it.”
            “Of course you would not understand.”  His voice started soft, gentle with scorn, but louder as he went on.  “You do not see dreams given to those who contemplate the Aten, the rivers of burning dreams and smoldering visions that are now searing into me deeper than my name, deeper than the memory of the burning sands that have known the power of the Aten since before ever there was the written word.  You do not see any of this, but only the paltry vision that I have lost.”
            I had nothing to say to that.  His grip had lessened a fraction while he spoke, and he leaned towards me with religious fervor.
            Close enough for me to for me to twist in his grasp and jam my fingers into his ruined eyes. 
            He bellowed like a speared lion.  When he clasped his hands to his face, he had to drop my dagger and let me go.  Fresh blood dripped from his fingers, staining the hot sand.  I scrambled to my feet, claiming my dagger and kicking him in the shoulder.  It hurt my foot, but he went sprawling.  He curled in the sand and groaned, clutching his hands to his sun-scorched eyes.  His thrashing kicked up sand until a fine grit clung to his face and chest,  glistening in the brilliant sun.
            “Your mother beds leprous crocodiles,” I said venomously, but he couldn’t hear me over his own noise.  I kicked him twice before Menhu could stop me.  Bolis lay rocking on the sand, barely twitching as I kicked him.  He clutched his face as if trying to hold himself together.
            Menhu said nothing, but his jaw clenched hard enough to break bones. 
            “He’ll live,” I said.  “And he can still talk.”  It wasn't an apology.  I didn’t feel I owed Menhu any explanation.  “I should kill the both of you,” I snarled. 
            “Likely we’ll all die before this is over anyway,” Menhu said flatly.  “But I have some things to do first.”
            “As soon as we’re clear of the desert.  I’m gone,” I said.  “I’d get what you need from this one before then.”  I glared at him and he glared back.  We exchanged hostile glares for a moment.
            The small boy groaned, and Menhu reluctantly went over to check on him.  His only leverage.
“Don’t worry,” I said.  “I’ll just watch him for now.”  I gestured at Bolis, still twitching in the sand.  Menhu made no reply.  I considered Bolis again.
Menhu knelt and gently checked the small boy.  Then he moved him back into the shade of the rocky outcropping and used some of  our water to clean the boy’s wounds.  The small and fragile form bore great slashes, though he still had his eyes.  Partway through the process, Menhu grunted in surprise.
            “This is one of Druset’s boys,” he said.
            “Who?”
            “The man from Gethos who sent me.”
            “Oh.”  I found Menhu to be scary enough.  I tried to imagine the kind of man who would command him.  And failed.  I couldn’t imagine him having boys either, except for dinner.   I moved close enough to see better, still keeping an eye on Bolis.  There was little need, he hadn’t done much.
            “And you would have let him die?”
            “I still will, if I have to,” was his only reply.  I wasn’t sure if that made me feel better about my place in his plans or not.
            I poked my knife in the boy’s direction.  “Is he going to make it?  He looks pretty bad.”  Bloody wounds ran all over and his skin was badly burnt, already peeling in great bloody strips.
            they’re shallow.”
            “Will he make it to Gethos?”
            “We’re not going to Gethos,” Menhu spoke without emotion.  Whatever it was about the necklace that had rattled him, he showed no outward traces of it now.  “I’m going to where he found this.”
            “He doesn’t seem to be ready for any questions,” I said judiciously.  “Let alone any kind of travel.  He might not make it.  Too bad.”
            Menhu left the boy and stood over the wounded soldier.  “He’ll live,” he said.  Then he raised his voice so that Bolis could hear.  “And you will take me to the gravesite.  Your life, and the boy’s life depend on it.  Without me to protect you at night, the birds from Gethos will have you.  Do you understand?”
            Bolis snarled once in the dust and sand, then nodded.
            “And you?” he said turning to me.  “You're staying?  For now?”
            I hesitated and he went on.  “If it helps your decision, there are reasons besides this necklace that drive me.  When I left Druset, I understood that the beast of Set’s and Pharaoh’s Aten were in collusion.  While I can believe that Pharaoh might abandon Hurin if it suited him, and all of Gethos, I can’t help but wonder about Bolis’ claim to have seen the Aten.  And why the beast of Set’s wanted him dead so badly.  If there is some kind of schism between the two, our only chance may involve us finding out more about it.”
            My eyes floated from the burning sun, to the long shadows it cast.  And me caught in between.  I could see no other path.  I nodded.

Take me to Part Three: Chapters 11-15