by Stephan Loy
Bleak defeat hid within Isis's robes, a stoop of the shoulders, a trembling stance, and red-rimmed desolate eyes from beneath the hood of her heavy linen cloak. Both goddesses burst into tears, then fell into each other’s arms for long, anguished minutes. The priestess watched, her feelings unfathomable. The barge crew pretended the deck stood empty.
Finally, Nephthys forced a separation. Wiping her face with the backs of her hands, she made an effort at strength.
“I’m so sorry,” she said, her voice quavering. “He’s my husband, though I’ve never known such shame. I thought myself the queen of shame, until he went after you. Now, I guess I’m an empress.” Her hands fluttered as she tried to read through her sister’s black mood. She gestured toward the table. “Come. I’ve prepared us tea.”
Such a small thing, the offer of tea, but its normalcy was its own abomination. Isis choked at the offer. Her eyes darted in dumb confusion. Then she convulsed in shrieking despair. Merferet caught her before she hit the deck and held her as if she were a child.
Gods, gods, gods! Nephthys thought, panicking. “Please, bring her here.” She helped carry Isis to the table mid-deck. They lowered her onto a stool and Merferet soothed her with hugs.
She isn’t just distraught, Nephthys realized. My sister is going crazy.
Terrified her plans had careered out of control, Nephthys cast about for an anchor. She found only one. “Isis, please,” she said, and reached for the pot on the brazier. “Isis, calm yourself. Have some tea. It’s the best Syrian green. Your fav--”
“She doesn’t need tea, you imbecile!”
Nephthys froze, the pot in her hands. It took her a moment to realize -- to conceive -- that the priestess, that meager piece of human gristle, had spoken to her so.
But, that was impossible.
A human wouldn’t dare...
“Goddess,” Merferet said to Isis, ignoring Nephthys’s astonishment. “Hear me, goddess. It rends at me to see you this way...”
Nephthys had never killed a human, had no idea how. But something boiled up from within her being, something that threatened to do so.
Merferet took Isis’s hand and held it to her breast. “You need strength. Here, take mine. Take the essence of my life, that yours might be renewed.”
Nephthys’s indignation faltered. This ... animal would give up her life for Isis? Yes, she would, as she protected her now, as she supported her in despair.
What was I thinking? Nephthys wondered. These humans would dare anything to protect the ones they love. Oppression made them bold. Every day, they had less and less to lose.
“No!” Isis moaned, thus focusing her sister’s attention. Nephthys felt heat at her hands and replaced the pot on its coals. “No,” Isis repeated, fighting to master her outbursts. “I don’t want your life. I don’t want mine. I just want to die, to be with my husband.”
“But, that’s ridiculous,” Nephthys said. “A god can’t die.”
Isis rounded on her. “Your husband killed Osiris!"
“No, he didn’t.”
It just slipped out. She had no control of her boiling brew of angst, and it just ... slipped ... out. Frightened, Nephthys glanced across the water to the waiting Setim. Could they hear? No, too far away.
Isis stared at her sister as if watching a lunatic. “What?”
Nephthys shrank away. She had never been good at confrontation.
Merferet leaned forward, but Isis restrained her by grasping her arm.
“He’s alive,” Nephthys said in a tiny, fearful voice. “I know he is...”
Isis rumbled, barely in control. “And how do you know that, Nephthys?”
Gods, gods, gods! “I just do. I know. I know he’s alive.” She shrank to that timid mouse everyone knew so well. “This isn’t the way I wanted it to be. Please, can’t we start over?”
“What do you mean my husband is alive? Is this another ploy of Set’s? Are you in league with Set?”
“No!” How could she think such a thing? “Set knows nothing, I swear it. I just ... know.” Her hands trembled. She didn’t believe they could find her head until her fingers pressed at her temples. “I feel him here...” She clasped her heart. “...and here.”
Isis deflated. She fluttered a hand in dismissal. “You’re mistaken. If there were anything left to feel, it would have come to me. He was my husband. I loved him--”
“--but you aren’t pregnant by him.” Nephthys barely whispered, but she couldn’t have used a bludgeon to any greater effect. Isis gaped a moment, understood her sister’s words, then, finding no tasteless joke buried within them, she recoiled, falling backwards off her stool. Merferet grabbed for her and the two struck the deck. An animal moan clawed up Isis's throat, growing wilder the higher it scurried, approaching a scream.
“Isis, no! Please, listen!”
“Leave her alone!” Merferet raged. “Haven’t you done enough?” Hate spewed from her, actual hate.
“I knew it would hurt, but I didn’t want it to, not like this,” Nephthys cried.
Merferet helped her goddess onto stumbling feet. “Take me back,” Isis gasped, barely removed from a raving fit. “Take me away from this place.”
“Isis, don’t go! I love you!”
Merferet called for assistance, but none of the crew seemed to hear her. Growling invectives, she supported the goddess herself.
“Isis, please, you don’t understand! Please, let me explain!”
Isis’s voice was a shower of acid. “You’ve explained quite enough, dear sister. You took my husband. Your husband killed him and then took me. And now you want to destroy what’s left.” She clung to her straining priestess. “But it won’t work, Nephthys. Osiris loved me; he would never have gone to another. You won’t poison the love we shared should you try for an eternity!”
“No!” Nephthys was frantic. It all fell apart. Her incompetence smashed this one clear chance. She must set things right. “That’s not how it was! That’s not it at all! Oh, please, I’ve made a mess of things. Please let me explain!”
Merferet ushered Isis toward the launch, still roped alongside the barge. Nephthys couldn’t stop them from leaving; she had no will and she had no means. She could hold the launch, but to what effect? To imprison her sister as Set had done? To prove her accusations true? Everything lay in ruins! Thoth, Ra, and all the others had risked so much on Nephthys’s influence, and she drove away the object of that risk.
If she hadn’t responded to the crisis in anger, all really would have been lost.
“Damn it, Isis, I’m trying to complete my dream!”
Isis stopped at the rail, one step out of the launch. “Talk,” she said in a voice that shook with emotion.
Nephthys, relieved, didn’t want to fail again. She leveled her breathing. She chose her words with utmost care. “Osiris didn’t know. I tricked him. He thought I was you. He was half asleep, exhausted. I left before he knew any better.”
Isis remained at the rail, supporting herself on her priestess’s shoulder.
Nephthys felt lost again. “I didn’t mean to hurt you. I ... I never intended to tell you what I’d done. I intended to claim the child was Set’s.”
No reaction. Nephthys drifted further into panic. What could she say? What would make it better? Could anything make it better? “Please, Isis, I’m sorry. I ... I just wanted to find my place. I just wanted a child, to be mother to a god.” She burst into guttering sobs. “I didn’t want to be alone anymore!” She sank to her knees in shame, holding herself, since no one else would. Her sobs were ragged and deep. “I’m sorry,” she cried. “I’m sorry for everything...” She bawled like an infant, her face to the deck. She was sure they must have left, but footsteps eventually answered her laments.
“You’ve done an evil thing,” a tired voice warned. “But never in creation have I thought you evil. Please, show me ... show me I judged you right.”
Finally, they attempted tea. It wasn’t much in the way of respite, n
ot with their sniffles, their muscles aching from crying, and the kohl streaming black along their cheeks. The grapes were lost, blackened to crisps in the presence of despair, and the tea tasted of poison. But they sat across from one another and fiddled with the bowls, and perhaps had a chance to do good things.
“I feel so odd,” Nephthys said, all emotion drained from her voice. “I’m having tea with the goddess I betrayed.”
Isis stared at the table things, so dainty and bright, so out of place in the world she now knew. Did her sister expect a response, something about adultery, perhaps? Fornication? Sin? “I’m sorry. I don’t have any small talk. Nephthys, why did you tell me ... that thing?”
Nephthys surrendered her pretense at pleasantry. She leaned elbows on knees. “I’ve come to atone, Isis, for all I’ve done against you, for all Set’s done against you. I’ve come to ... to be a good sister. I’ve come to set you free.”
Isis found no interest in the words, as if they represented mere academics. “I can never be free. I die inside each day.”
“Osiris lives, Isis. I know it. I feel it in the life I carry, a life that will someday spring from my head as a god. How can I feel the life of a god if the god who made him is dead?”
Isis looked at her, miserable. The question really was academic, and far out of her depth. It said nothing of mourning, or rape, or terror, and so said nothing to her.
“He’s alive, Isis, or something of him is.” Nephthys squirmed in her seat. “Hapi was supposed to take Osiris, suffocate or drown him. He didn’t do it.”
“He did it. There were witnesses...”
"What?" Nephthys snorted. "Humans? Who can trust their meager senses?" Then she glanced at Merferet and winced. She might have apologized, Isis thought, and that would have been a first under Ra. Instead, she straightened, and shouted.
“Hapi!”
On the river side of the barge, water splashed up to the gunwale. It transmuted into a humanoid figure down to the waist, supported on a swirling column of liquid. Hapi, the Nile Personified, was bearded, naked, and puzzlingly male despite his huge, pendulous female breasts. He carried himself timidly, not too near the ship’s rails and low against the barge’s mass so as not to be seen from the quay. In one hand he held a flower: a lotus, the favorite of gods.
“Greetings, fair goddesses,” he said with overblown gentility. “Though circumstances suggest a solemn meeting between us, I must confess honor at such lovely company.”
Isis glared at him. Even cradled in the hand of the Nile, the lotus shriveled to ash.
“Oh, dear,” Hapi moaned, and let the refuse flutter away.
“You killed my husband, you whore of Set...”
Nephthys clamped a hand over Isis’s knee. “Sister, wait. Let him explain. You listened to me. Just one more, is all.”
Compliance didn’t change the hate Isis felt. It was a rushing sound in her head.
“Well,” Hapi began, fidgeting so much he spattered. “Let me say, I never intended harming Osiris. He was the best of us, the best of all gods--”
“Talk.” Isis gripped the seat of her stool, the wood frame hurting her fingers.
Hapi straightened, an odd mix of cowering indignity. “Set threatened to kill me, too. He threatened to deluge my headwaters in dunes, mountains of dunes to blot out Ra. He threatened to dam me, to poison my fish with salt from his accursed deserts. I denied him for years, but he wore me down. That he certainly did.” He opened his arms for mercy. “I am only a river, not a great one such as you. I can be channeled astray.”
“Would Osiris have betrayed you?” Isis showed mercy as she had received it. “Would he have harmed you or any other being? He honored you, Hapi. Each year at inundation, he held you up even above himself. You sicken me. He honored you, and you repaid him with murder.”
“Not true, fair goddess, though Set would strangle me if he knew. No, that evil night when I took away your husband, I was in a delirium of fear. I admit -- yes, admit -- that I fully intended to drown him. I intended as Set ordered to drown him and drag him far from Egypt, where he could not reach his power or the power of the godhead. Only then might he be killed, and we didn't even know that for sure, no? That was why Set locked him up, in case it didn't work. But, we speak not of Set; you speak to me. I truly intended to kill your husband and face the wrath of Ra, because Set had agreed to leave me be if I did this thing for him--”
“You took the word of that liar?”
“--but I could not do it, my beautiful goddess. Though I feared Set more than Ra himself, I could not take the life of my friend Osiris.” Hapi grew more animated the more he spoke. He sloshed himself onto the deck, onto Merferet’s skirts. “But, what else could I do? I had the box, the suffocating box, and I had the means to enter it. I couldn’t just throw him up on my banks. A quandary, I tell you. I’d never had a quandary before. Start here, go there. That is all the difficulty of my life. I hope you understand.”
Hapi, like every other god, was incapable of reaching beyond his nature. Had any river, no matter how well intentioned, ever prevented a man from drowning? Isis knew the answer. She knew Hapi had churned in the conflict of saving a god or drowning him, but his dilemma gave her no comfort. It made her all the angrier.
“So, I did what I could, that’s all, you know. I cast him adrift, out through the delta, out beyond my person and into the great sea beyond. Where he went, I cannot say. I know little of salty currents.” He wrung his hands. “But, I know who does!”
Isis curled a lip at him, as if he were urine, not the river of life. “You set my husband adrift, suffocating him in that horrible box, and you call that charity? The same charity, no doubt, that you’ve given his people by failing to fertilize their fields this year? You’re a liar, Hapi. You killed my husband, and now you kill his land. You’re still a puppet of Set.”
Hapi splashed his fingers against one another. He looked distressed. If a river could sweat, he would have.
Nephthys covered her eyes a moment, then brought her hands to her mouth. She cleared her throat. “Isis, Hapi isn’t killing the land. You are.”
Isis flushed. The accusation hit her like a slap.
“Since Osiris ... vanished, the land has wilted,” Nephthys continued. “It suffers as you suffer. As your life burrows within to survive, it takes from the land what you once gave. Hapi doesn’t withhold himself; he sees no point in watering death, that’s all.”
For long moments, the party fell silent. Only the creak of the barge sounded around them. Then Nephthys leaned closer to her sister. She peered beneath the camouflaging cloak and reached a tentative hand to touch Isis's knee. “Ra will never rescue you, Isis. He will leave you here with Set forever.”
Isis recoiled into Merferet. Her eyes flew so wide they pained her. She scrambled, needing to flee, owning no control of her muscles.
“No, no!” Nephthys insisted, and scrabbled at her, grasping her hands. “No, Isis! We won’t leave you to him! We won’t, do you hear? We won’t!”
Isis barely had breath to speak. “Does Ra hate me so? What have I done...” Her voice trailed away.
Hapi, who, despite Isis’s insults, was incapable of deceit, offered a shy suggestion. “Well, truthfully, goddess, you’ve done quite a lot in your day.”
He was right. She had. She had played the practical joker more times than she could count, and had once throttled the creator's pride. “But that was eons ago!”
“Ra has rather a long memory and not much sense of humor.” Nephthys squeezed her sister’s hands. “But he has given us permission to help you ourselves.”
“Us?”
“Hapi, Thoth, and I.”
The words swam in Isis's head; they made no sense, nothing did. She sank, and needed a line to swim for.
“Osiris lives," Nephthys insisted. "I know it. But, it may be too little, barely enough to guide his Ka.” She held her sister’s eyes. “Unless you feed him the life he needs.”
Isis furrowed her
brow. This was too incredible. What did Nephthys say?
“I’m saying that you are powerful, among the strongest of gods. You can save Osiris. You can resurrect him. And we are prepared to help.”
And we are prepared to help. Hapi was gone, and Nephthys had revealed her plan. Isis groped to understand, to find a way to accept her new reality. It was a tough one, unprecedented in many ways. Osiris lived, she had to understand that. Love for her husband was the lifeline that would right her. Her sister hatching an elaborate plot filled with subterfuge and mortal risk? Her fidgeting mouse of a sister, who so feared to fade? Not even Nephthys could drink it in. If her purpose was to cower in the shadow of Set, how could she plot against him as she did? And, the humans! In revolt? Willing to die, and for the queen of their usurped land? After a while, Isis shook her head by habit. It was far too much to absorb.
Thankfully, Merferet accepted that burden. “And these rebels, they can accomplish what they claim? They sound like boys.”
“Most of them are,” Nephthys admitted. Isis saw how put out she was. Nephthys hated the wonderful, insolent priestess, but she made more sense than her goddess just then. Nephthys tried to allow for the hardships -- the terror -- Merferet had suffered in the bowels of the palace, for the anger she had eaten every day under Set. But, even so, even though the effort showed in her magnanimity, Isis knew Nephthys saw before her only an animal who had insulted her. “Most of them still wear sidelocks, and they’re just farmers and trade apprentices. But these boys have killed many Setim. They’ve been hard-formed by tyranny.”
“If they fail in their part, I and my priestesses will find ourselves with Set. He won’t deal kindly with the conspiracy you propose.”
Nephthys set her jaw. “I never said there wouldn’t be risk. You may die. Your women may die. That should weigh on the choices you make.”
Merferet sniffed. “I would gladly die to protect my goddess. So would the others.”