“We must speak alone, husband,” she said.
Nuin paused with his hand outstretched to push the curtain aside but didn’t bother glancing back at her. “We will speak later.”
“Husband—”
He looked over his shoulder, shooting a warning glare past me. It was filled with such venom that even I shrank back a bit. “When I first took you as my wife,” he said to Ipwet, “Kari and the others not only made you feel welcome among them, but gave us plenty of time alone. Are you so spiteful that you would deny the same courtesy to Hat-hur?”
I was guessing that “Kari and the others” was a reference to Nuin’s other wives, or previous wives. Nuin, it seemed, was the proud keeper of his very own harem. Which now included me . . .
“But she cannot give you children,” Ipwet persisted. In my opinion, it was a pretty dumb thing to do; angry Nuin was definitely one of the last people I would poke with a verbal stick. “Why do you need to—”
Nuin’s gaze, still swirling with vibrant colors, darkened ominously. “If you continue with this argument, Ipwet, I may no longer have need of our union. After all, you have not borne me a child for over a decade. What further use do I have of you?”
Ipwet gasped.
“That was harsh, Nuin,” I said. Ipwet and I might not have been fast friends, but that was just plain mean, especially when he knew full well that there wouldn’t be any sexual relations between us.
He turned his cruel glare on me.
I straightened my shoulders, stuck out my chin, and held my head a little higher.
The angry glint faded from his eyes, and the corner of his mouth rose in a small, lopsided smile. He stepped to the side and turned to face Ipwet fully. With a slight bow of his head, he said, “Apologies, wife. I spoke without thinking.”
Much to my surprise, Ipwet turned a furious glare of her own on me. “Do not ever presume to defend me again. I do not care what you are; I am his primary wife. I am the mother of five of his living children. You will never be able to say the same.” With a huff, she spun away and strode back up the hallway toward the courtyard.
I watched her storm away, absolutely dumbfounded.
Nuin took my hand. “Ignore her, dear Alexandra. I fear I have spoiled her by favoring her above others. Once, she was not so . . . affected.” He sighed. “But come, there is much for us to discuss.”
I let him lead me through the curtain and into a small room lit only by the evening light streaming through a line of windows set high in the far wall. Most of the wall to the right was another cerulean curtain, and based on the few carved wooden chairs in the room, I was guessing we were in the sitting room of a suite. Beyond the curtain, I would likely find a larger room containing a bed.
Nuin sat in one of two chairs arranged near the far wall, separated by a small, rectangular table covered in tiny, sectioned off squares. It wasn’t a table, I realized, but a game board—senet, I was fairly certain.
I sat in the chair opposite Nuin. “You promised to teach me . . . to explain,” I said, switching to English. “So please, Nuin, tell me what I need to know. How am I here? How can I protect Marcus? How can I get home?”
“How you came to be here was not my doing, dear Alexandra. I only knew what Aset told me and hoped that she was right, because however unlikely, it was the only way.”
“They only way for what?”
“The only way for there to be a chance that everything will work out in the end . . . for ma’at to be restored to the universe,” he said, using the ancient term for balance and order for the second time since I’d met up with him.
I leaned back in my chair and tilted my head to the side and smiled, just a little. “You know, sometimes I think you enjoy being cryptic.”
Throwing his head back, Nuin laughed.
I crossed my arms and stared at him. “If you didn’t bring me here, then who did?”
Nuin’s laughter quieted, but his smile remained. He truly was exceptionally beautiful, but it was the kind of beauty that could make eyes bleed after staring for too long. I couldn’t imagine truly being one of his wives. “You contain the power to make such a leap through time,” he said matter-of-factly and lifted one perfect shoulder.
“But don’t you know? Can’t you see it . . . how it happened?”
Nuin shook his head. “Your ba is not of this time; therefore, it does not appear in the At. It is, as the people of your time say, ‘against the laws of physics.’”
My eyebrows lifted.
“You must have done it yourself,” he added. “Tell me what happened, how you came to be here, and perhaps together we can make sense of it.”
I frowned, biting the inside of my cheek as I considered what he was saying. “There was a statuette . . . originally from around this time. I thought it was made of alabaster, but Dr. Isa—Aset—broke it open and revealed a smaller figurine made of At.” I squinted as I recalled those final few seconds in my own time. It had all happened so fast, it was hard to piece together. “It started glowing, and as soon as I touched it, I was thrust back here—er—now.” I pressed my lips together, studying Nuin closely. “You didn’t make the statuette? Or . . . you could not in the future? You’re certain?”
He shook his head, his bafflement genuine. “At this point, in this time, there is only one person who could make such a thing and set it with such a trigger.”
I held my breath, waiting.
“You,” he said.
My mouth fell open. “You’re kidding, right?”
“I’m not.”
“But—but . . . maybe you just haven’t made it yet, or . . .”
“No, my Alexandra.” Nuin was shaking his head slowly, a sadness to the movement. “I’m no longer able to make such an object. I’ve only retained as much of my power as was required to keep this body alive so I could train you, should you successfully make it back to this time . . . and, of course, to maintain appearances.” He pointed to his kaleidoscope eyes.
I rubbed one of my temples with my fingertips.
“Does your head ache?” Nuin asked, concern evident in his tone.
“No, I’m just exhausted. Jumping back in time really takes it out of a girl . . .”
“Tapping into your new power will become easier, and the aftereffects will lessen as you strengthen your control over it . . . which is one of the reasons you coming here was necessary.”
“One of the reasons?”
Nuin nodded. “Eventually, it will consume you, tearing your ba apart . . . sooner rather than later, if you don’t learn to control it.”
“You—you stuck me with a power that’s going to tear me apart?” My eyes started to sting, and I gritted my teeth together to hold back tears of outrage.
Nuin held up his hand. “I did, and I also know how to rid you of it safely, but if you don’t learn to control it . . .” He raised his eyebrows. “Of course, there is also the reality of what would have happened should you have remained in your own time.”
I swallowed, blinking too rapidly. “Which would be . . . ?”
“As I already told you—you would die.”
“Why? How? How do you know?” I asked in a rush. “With the Nothingness clouding the At in my time, it’s practically impossible to see anything. Can you please just tell me what’s going on? What is this Apep spirit? What does it want? Why does it want to hurt me? And what’s it doing to Set? To Marcus? I need to know, Nuin . . . to understand. Please.”
Nuin leaned back in his chair and sighed. “The power you contain is fractured, making it unstable, and it will remain so until I pass the final strands on to you. That instability alone is enough to kill you. And if it doesn’t, Apep will, through either Set or Heru.”
“Okay . . .” I was nodding as I processed his words. This could work. We could do this. “So why don’t we just complete the transfer, and—”
Nuin shook his head. “As soon as we complete the transfer, this body will perish.”
My heart sank into my stomach. �
��Nuin, no . . .” Until this moment, part of me had still been in denial. But this was confirmation. The final nail in the coffin. I was the harbinger of Nuin’s death.
“It is always what had to be, I think.” Nuin offered me a consoling smile. “Apep is . . . well, he was once as powerful as me, very long ago, but we were both very different then. His behavior forced me to separate his sheut from the rest of his being, and—”
“His sheut?” I recognized the word as one of the ancient parts of the soul, like the “ba,” except whereas the ba more closely resembled the modern idea of a “soul,” this term was historically identified with a person’s shadow.
“Yes, his sheut. You may think of it as his ‘power,’ or the thing that gives him access to his power. Unlike you or Aset or Heru, Apep and I are not Netjer-At, gods of time, but Netjer—beings who belong on all planes of existence—and our sheut, our power, is an essential part of our beings. There are others of our kind, who hold dominion over other universes, though we alone exist in this one.”
Holding up a hand, I furrowed my brow. “Hold on. What?”
Nuin laughed. “It is beyond what you knew of existence, I know. None of this time truly know what I am. God, they call me. Nuin.” His laugh turned slightly bitter. “If they only knew my true name, the identity of my ren, that part of me that is eternal, just as Apep is eternal . . .”
“Your ren,” I said, my voice rising in pitch. It was another part of the ancient Egyptian concept of the soul, most closely identified with a person’s name. It was the reason pharaohs and other wealthy ancients of this culture took such pains to ensure that their name would be remembered centuries—millennia—after their death: as long as their name was remembered, part of their soul lived on.
I leaned forward. “That’s the part of your soul that makes you you, isn’t it? Like my ba is me, regardless of whether or not it’s in my physical body?”
Nuin’s eyes widened, and a moment later, he smiled and nodded. “Yes, my Alexandra, that is precisely it.”
“Okay, so why did you have to separate Apep’s power—”
“His sheut,” Nuin corrected.
I waved my hand between us. “His sheut. Why’d you have to separate it from Apep’s ren?”
“That is an excellent question.” Nuin leaned forward, resting his elbows on the edge of the small table. “You see, ma’at—universal balance—is deteriorating, and if it goes unchecked for too long, then this universe and everything in it will unravel into raw, unbridled chaos.”
I took a deep breath. Then another. I wanted to interrupt with further questions, but even more so, I wanted to hear what Nuin would tell me, so I forced myself to remain quiet and attentive.
“In the beginning, when our universe first came into existence, there was balance. Two beings known as Netjer in their complete state, Re and Apep, maintained ma’at simply by existing in perfect equilibrium. Each Netjer was made up of a ren—an eternal soul—and a sheut, which functioned as a powerful link between the Netjer and the very threads that make up the universe.
“Together, Re and Apep guided the formation of nebulae, galaxies, solar systems, and individual planets, conscious that every minute change would cause a reaction somewhere else, which was good—right—because this was ma’at. But when Re made a change to a moon near one edge of the ever-expanding universe, resulting in the destruction of Apep’s favorite galaxy near the other, Apep grew resentful of Re and dissatisfied with the unpredictability of how ma’at would play out. He became mad with the desire for control.
“He decided that if order could not be maintained through ma’at, then chaos—imbalance—would be better. He sought this end, this beginning, the only way he knew how . . . by unleashing his own sheut on the universe, wild and unrestrained, and by attempting to tear Re’s sheut away from the rest of his being. Except Apep underestimated ma’at; he underestimated the power that could come of a Netjer being truly in balance with oneself, as Re was—and Apep no longer was—and it was Re who tore away Apep’s sheut.
“Re maintained a semblance of ma’at by carrying Apep’s sheut to a little blue planet that had only recently given rise to a species of sentient beings, and he implanted both his own ren and sheut, as well as Apep’s sheut, inside a woman who was days away from giving birth.”
“It was your mother, wasn’t it?” I said softly.
Nuin nodded.
Awed, I shook my head ever so slowly. “Everything you just told me blows most of what scientists and theologists of my time believe about the universe out of the water . . .”
Nuin chuckled. “They are still not ready to know, I think, though I will leave that decision to you.”
I blew out a disbelieving laugh. “Great.” A moment later, I said, “So you’re Re? The Re?”
“I am, and I am more,” Nuin said.
“I don’t quite follow . . .”
He pointed to his own chest. “This body contains not only Re’s ren and pieces of Re’s and Apep’s sheuts, but also a human ba. Together, these pieces combine to make me, a being you know as Nuin. Re is very similar to Nuin in many ways, and will retain all of my memories when this body dies, but he is not exactly the same as Nuin, for a human ba is not eternal . . . in death, it will fade as its energy is reincorporated elsewhere.”
My mind, stubborn as it was, refused to consider the deeper meaning of his final words. Instead, I licked my lips, thinking it was both strange and sort of appropriate that Nuin was sitting across from me, talking about himself in the third person.
He exhaled, suddenly looking so incredibly weary. “And I only have pieces of Re’s and Apep’s sheuts now, because three years ago, I transferred most of them into the ankh-At and gave it to you.”
I leaned forward, my skin crawling. “Are you saying Apep’s sheut is the power that’s now inside me?”
“No, dear Alexandra. You hold only the majority of my sheut.” His eyebrows drew together. “It is Heru and Set who absorbed most of Apep’s sheut.”
“Okay . . . so why’d Apep come after me? I mean, if Marcus and Set are the ones with his ‘power’ . . . ?”
“In your time, Apep is after both his and my sheuts. And if he wrenches them out of you, Heru, and Set, he will unleash their power fully. Then, he will unmake the universe, much as he’d originally intended ages ago.”
I felt like the air in the room had thinned, like I’d suddenly teleported to Mt. Everest, except my Mt. Everest was hot and dry, and I really could have used a splash of frigid mountain air at the moment. I took long, deep breaths, trying to slow the erratic beating of my heart. Inhale, exhale. Inhale, exhale. Inhale, exhale.
I leaned forward and looked deep into his eyes. “Marcus almost drowned me.” I studied Nuin’s expression. “You don’t look surprised.”
He exhaled heavily. “It would seem that, split as it is, Apep’s sheut gives him an inroad to possess the Heru of your time. Apep is still tethered to Set, but because Set and Heru share his sheut, he is able to possess Heru for short periods.”
I ran my hands through my hair, yanking off the jeweled headband and scratching my scalp as though I could dig out my frustration and overwhelming sense of helplessness. “I kind of hate this, you know? If you weren’t here . . .” I let out a despondent laugh. “I think I’d lose it. I just want to go home.”
“In time, my Alexandra. In time.”
I had an endless supply of questions, but before I could ask any of them, Aset pushed through the curtain into the sitting room, closely followed by Set, who obviously wasn’t currently possessed by a psychotic Apep. But if Apep isn’t possessing Set . . .
A jolt of panic shot through me, and I half-stood. “Nuin, where’s Apep right now?” Breathing hard, I stood the rest of the way, the chair screeching on the limestone floor as I pushed it backward. “What if he comes after me? He could be in any of those people out there.” I was breathing too hard, too fast. “I can’t stay here!”
Standing, Nuin rounded th
e table and wrapped his arms around me, hugging me tightly. His skin was warm and dry, his body solid, something I could hold onto. And at that moment, I really needed something to hold onto. He was such a good man—god—Netjer—and I hated the idea of him being gone.
“Be calm, my Alexandra.” He stroked my hair, over and over again, and simply held me as I clutched his shoulders. “Be calm.”
“I don’t want to be torn apart,” I whispered.
“Shhh . . .”
“And I don’t want to lose you.”
“Shhh, my Alexandra. Do not fret. And Apep will not harm you while you’re near me. He’s certainly around, stirring up trouble, but he knows that coming after me directly would be suicide. There is no reason for him to suspect that you now hold most of my sheut, and the only ways for him to find out would be for him to witness you using your new powers—which he will not—or for someone to tell him.”
I pulled away enough to look up into his eyes. I’d always loved his eyes, found comfort in their swirling colors. “Does anyone know besides you, Aset, and me?”
“I know, too,” Set said . . . in heavily accented English. I turned wide eyes on him.
“How—what—” I pushed away from Nuin and stared at him. “You taught him English? Why?”
A small smile curved his lips. “It seemed appropriate.”
8
Lemons & Lemonade
Nuin had been teaching Set English for almost two years in anticipation of my arrival. His justification was vague and more than a little dodgy, but I didn’t push the subject; Nuin could be the king of non-explanations when he wanted to be, and I was too tired—emotionally and otherwise—to even try.
Nuin did explain a little of my situation to Set—in English. It didn’t matter that Aset didn’t understand, since she already seemed to know everything about me. Set was obviously one of the Nejerets that Nuin trusted most, and it only went to show me just how different this pre-possession Set was from the deranged man Apep would make him into. Set took Nuin’s explanation of where and when I came from rather well, my connection to the future Heru seeming to be the revelation that shocked him the most.
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