Isis Wept

by Stephan Loy

  The others took up their chores. They tried to ignore Hordedev and their passenger, but he knew jealousy bit at their thoughts. They wanted to hold her as he did. They wanted to hold her flesh. Even bent as she was, in that tired dress and that heavy, hooded cloak, the goddess of life was a stealer of breath.

  Nephthys had warned them about such urges. They worked hard to control them.

  Hordedev had a more difficult problem. Though barely out of boyhood, he knew the attraction of women. And this one -- this goddess, rather -- electrified him like no other. Her touch prompted physical responses better left hidden, if he didn’t want to upset her. After all, unlike his mates, he didn't just watch and yearn. It would be so easy, his worst impulses told him, to go beyond support, to take her for his own.

  He beat aside those shameful whispers. This goddess had protected his family for as long as he could recall. He wasn’t about to betray that fidelity. His father certainly wouldn’t.

  He led her to the foredeck where she could see the sun. On that leg of the river, it rose directly ahead. He helped her to her knees, then crouched there ready to serve.

  The sun warmed the skin of her hands to a perfect golden hue. Hordedev looked at the deck.

  Isis stretched out her arms to the sun and breathed an almost inaudible prayer. “Grandfather Ra, great god-creator, I ask so little, and deserve far less. So many have suffered so much in these awful, awful times. So many have suffered far worse than I. But still I beg this one boon from you, for I’ve nowhere else to go. Please, Ra, if it be your will, grant that what they say is true, that my love still lives and that I might revive him, and grant me the wisdom to find him in this vast, evil world. I ask this in love, for the sake of love, so that evil may not drive love from the world. Hear me, Ra. Hear me, and have pity on the oppressed.”

  The sun, in answer, exposed a greener, more vibrant land than the one she left behind.

  Chapter Six:

  The port at Damietta bustled with business. Hundreds of ships moved merchandise. Thousands of people, colorful and boisterous, scurried throughout the meandering, overcrowded city. Some people bought, some sold, and some gawked at that haphazard metropolis sprawled at the frontier of Egypt. Many weren’t even Egyptian, as Damietta attracted trade from all over the world. It was the heart of Fayum.

  With so many strange people about in strange costumes, no one noticed a woman covered head to foot in goat’s wool, her face invisible beneath a voluminous hood and behind an opaque black veil. She stayed in one place, resting in the shade of a low-growing acacia, hunched within herself so that the bustling world passed her unseen. A lone young man came to her on occasion. No one of consequence, he dressed in a loincloth, a rag over his head as shade from the sun. His hair grew too long, and he didn’t seem particular about personal hygiene. He came to her with water and occasionally food, but always conversation, whispered and intent, a tone for hatching plots.

  Damietta rushed about them, busy and oblivious. It had no time for the machinations of vagrants or, as it turned out, the dark affairs of gods.

  “I’m sorry, goddess, but he hasn’t much presence here on the coast. Perhaps if we checked deeper into the Delta...”

  A warning finger extended from within the baggy robes, a finger wrapped in linen, like that of a leper. It paused before Hordedev’s eyes, a shadow of hinted beauty. He blinked to break its spell.

  “Never call me goddess,” Isis warned him for at least the tenth time. “I don’t want Set to learn where I am.”

  “Yes, god-- Mother. I’m sorry.”

  “Don’t apologize, Hordedev. I don’t know what fate brought you my way, but you are a treasure. Just watch your words, won't you?”

  “Yes, Mother.” Hordedev felt pride at serving such a mistress. The others of his team were long-since dismissed, but Isis had insisted he remain.

  “Hapi may be hard to find, but his words are still fresh to me,” Isis said. “He told me the box went out to sea. Someone would have seen it; the delta is too highly populated for such a curiosity to go unnoticed.”

  Unless Hapi lied, Hordedev thought. “Perhaps it came through in the night, or perhaps in a storm...”

  “I can’t accept that it's lost.” Isis had reclaimed her strength since escaping Abydos. Hordedev only hoped it wasn’t mixed with bitterness. Or obsession. “We’ll check the smaller villages, and be more direct in our questioning. Prepare the boat. We head west immediately.” She paused, and cocked her head. “I’m sorry, I forget myself. Have you eaten? Are you prepared to move?”

  “I’m prepared to serve you,” Hordedev said.

  Isis nodded her draped head. “You’re an honorable young man, Hordedev. Osiris thought the same of your father. Now, let’s depart. This chaotic excuse for a city overwhelms my senses.”

  Hordedev nodded agreement as he helped her up. She did not need his assistance; it was a condition of her disguise. He held the sleeve of her robes; it was the safest, least distracting way. As he did so, he nodded at her last observation, that Abydos had been far and away the cleanest, safest, most livable city in Egypt. Damietta was big, and Damietta was loud, but it showed as much planning as a fall of rock. Hordedev only appreciated Osiris’s legacy now that those comforts were gone.

  The two traversed the docks to Hordedev’s meager boat. The big fishing vessel had returned upstream with its rebel crew.

  “He should have made himself known by now,” Hordedev complained. “He’s all around us. Surely, he knows we’re here.”

  “Patience.” Isis touched a shielded finger to her escort’s arm. “Hapi is immortal. These few weeks are little to him. He will make himself known in his own good time. You’ll see.”

  Or not, Hordedev thought. Her forced optimism failed to cheer him. After all his trials, Hordedev trusted Hapi as much as Isis did, and he knew she trusted him not at all.

  For months, Qebera had lived among the Bedouin, following with difficulty the afflictions of his homeland. Now, for the first time since failing his king, he saw Abydos again.

  The clan Djafa had approached to within a day’s caravan of the border and sent forth a trading party replete with goats, sheep, and assorted hardware gathered for barter. They had hoped the city was open for trade, but had planned to turn to the outlying towns if the Setim barred their way. Qebera had wrangled a place among the traders. As a courtesy, Abadi Saliim and Djafa Seniram accompanied him.

  Now they stood an hour’s walk out of the city, high on the slope of a massive dune. What they saw alarmed them. Qebera in particular reeled at the sight. He barely kept his footing under triple stabs of guilt, regret, and the deeper thrust of sorrow.

  Abydos had ceased to exist.

  A few shattered columns peeked above mountains of sand. What might have been an entire building lay strewn over the inexplicable dunes. Only the palace stood in one piece, and even it sagged under drifts of sand.

  “Gods,” Qebera muttered. It was all he could think to say.

  Abadi placed a hand on his stricken friend's shoulder. “I have never known a home,” he said, “not what you’d call a home, Qebera. I cannot imagine what this does to you, but you have my ... condolences.”

  Djafa Seniram grunted agreement. A moment passed while the others stared aghast, then the Djafa spoke in heavily accented Abydan. “We go now. There are no merchants today.”

  Qebera flinched at the calloused tone. The Djafa had taken him in, had provided shelter and the means to eat based on Qebera’s history with the honored Isis. Still, such heartless pragmatism couldn’t go unanswered. “Merchants?” he groaned, and reached for the city as if to cradle it in his arms. “Is that all you see? A failed barter? This was my home!”

  “Yes,” the old Bedouin agreed. “It was. We go now.” He turned and trudged down the shifting slope toward the waiting camels.

  Qebera still faced the ruins of Abydos.

  “He’s right.” Abadi sighed. “Even if he’s short about it. The desert doesn’t coddl
e the sentimental. This is no home for you, Qebera. This is a place for the dead.”

  “I have to go down,” Qebera forced past his lips. “To say good-bye to my home.”

  Abadi frowned. Qebera knew the horror out there was beyond his friend's understanding. The city, to Abadi, was a collection of things, and things were doomed to be lost. They were broken, exhausted, given away or stolen. It was the way with possessions. Still, Abadi was a friend, Qebera's host, and always tried to honor his friend’s odd beliefs.

  “Wait one moment,” he said, and turned down the slope after the leader of his clan.

  He caught up with the Djafa just short of the camels. They exchanged animated gestures and argued intensely in Bedouin, but Qebera paid no heed. He drowned instead in memories of places that no longer existed, places where he had lived, and loved, and enjoyed life and sorrow. All gone, like trash swept away in the annual floods.

  Abadi once more came to his side. He carried a worn hunting bow, and a quiver of arrows hung from his back. “Djafa Seniram grants you leave to investigate the ruins below. Bring back anything we can sell. I will go with you.”

  “I don’t need company.”

  “And I don’t need to walk a city of death, but the Djafa’s family does not enter danger in numbers less than two.”

  Qebera, embarrassed, looked at his friend. “I’m ungrateful, Abadi. If your people have taught me anything, it’s the safety of the clan.”

  Abadi shrugged. “If we’ve tried to teach you anything, it’s that my people are your people. Now, come along. The Djafa won’t wait forever.” He started around the dune, just on the reverse slope so as not to expose his party to prying eyes from the city. Qebera doubted any human still watched.

  But humans were not what he feared.

  There were no streets, no buildings, not even posts at what once had been the docks. Great dunes spread over the Abydan capitol’s grave, the new, rolling landscape relieved only by an occasional outcropping of rubble or the scattered debris of interrupted life. A brick lay there, or a rush mat or shards of pottery. The once great city was shattered to pieces a child could hold in its hand.

  No trace remained of Qebera’s farm. He found the spot only by relation to the palace across the river. He sat there in the sand for long, melancholy moments, turning to thoughts of his family.

  Sanni, he agonized, his heart clenching, will I ever see you again?

  “I raised five children. Here. On this spot,” he said to Abadi. “It was green then, a blessed farm. We had a bountiful crop of barley and emmer. Now...” He gestured at the barren earth.

  “A great evil was done here,” Abadi said. “We heard the stories of storms and thunder, but no one ever suspected... Are we done here, Qebera? Can we leave this terrible place?”

  Qebera peered toward the stricken palace. “No. There’s one more place to go.”

  The river choked on so much sand that they crossed half its width without getting wet. The rest of the Nile squeezed around the massive dunes that choked it, and ran so shallowly that the men hardly dampened the hems of their tunics as they waded to the opposite bank. Just beyond the river, the desert piled up against the palace wall. Qebera and Abadi struggled up that shifting slope of sand and then, incredible to the native Abydan, stepped over the wall and into the courtyard. Their entry was surreal in its affront to the architects and to Qebera's already throttled pride in palace security. To walk on the Nile, that transporter of ships! To scamper over the palace walls of gods like children over the muddied lips of irrigation ditches! A year ago, Qebera would have laughed at the suggestions. Now the reality cut him with despair.

  Smashed trees and toppled statuary littered the courtyard. Sand had crashed up the ramp to the palace entrance, had filled the main hall’s anteroom knee-deep with grit. The men negotiated all this with difficulty, and with a terrible feeling of reality gone wrong. Ghosts lived in the shadows of those violated rooms. The home of Osiris, once full of life, now bowed to death. Qebera wiped sweat from his face as he passed through the empty halls. Then he realized it wasn’t sweat at all, but tears.

  The rooms they checked were dusty holes, more like animal burrows than the former haunts of the powerful. Even Osiris’s apartments, for which Qebera had held out hope, offered little more than smashed furniture and ransacked clothes under a thick coat of sand.

  “I’m not ashamed to tell you,” Abadi whispered to minimize the echoes, “this place frightens me. No living thing should tarry in here.”

  Qebera said nothing. He feared breaking down if he opened his mouth.

  But, he couldn’t help it when they reached the goddess’s quarters. Aside from dust and a few grains of sand, Isis’s rooms stood perfectly in order, as if arranged for her imminent return. Nightclothes draped her bed. Towels hung in the bathing room near ornate rinsing jars, their water evaporated. A bowl of desiccated grapes stood atop a table before one of the main room’s divans, exactly, Qebera knew, where the goddess entertained visitors.

  Within that ghostly order, an ebony and ivory bow rested on another table centered in the room. Qebera picked up the weapon. Dust puffed from between his fingers, and grit fell from bow to table. “The king received this from Djafa Seniram,” he said. His voice quavered on the edge of failure. “He received it two days before he was betrayed. The first thing he did was come to see his queen.” For a moment, he remembered them, so magnificent, so much in love. He couldn’t think what to say. His mind clouded over, and his heart drummed the eternal dirge. He sat down heavily on the dusty floor. “He must have put it here, just for a moment, and forgot. It must have lain here ever since.”

  Abadi stood several feet away. He waited for more, but Qebera could give him nothing. After a while, the enclosed space, the evidence of death, and the afterimage of evil permeating the town proved too much for such a simple man. “Come,” Abadi begged. “There is nothing more to see here. The Djafa will leave us soon.”

  Qebera nodded agreement, and saw his friend's relief.

  The evil god-king Set did not meet them in the sun, and that was good. Nor did they stumble onto any of his men. In fact, the palace and its surroundings felt like a violated tomb. No life marred its perfect deadness, not even insects or birds. The stillness filled Qebera with dread, so of course he flinched at a rough animal snort as he and Abadi left the main hall.

  “What was that?” Abadi whispered, and put an arrow to his bow.

  Qebera stood with his head cocked, waiting.

  Another snort, distant, weak, but sounding like thunder in the utter quiet.

  “I know that sound,” Qebera said, and turned off the ramp toward the palace shops.

  Only half a year before, their walk would have been a pleasure of scents and color, a pageant of beautiful cedars, acacias, and palms, of cool fountains and glorious gardens, and then of neatly kept workshops, granaries, stables and kitchens. It had been a lark of a walk, the whole way paved in brick and shaded by vine-covered arbors. Now, the few hundred feet to the working palace meant struggling over drifts of sand, falls of rubble, and the knife-sharp obstacle course of the collapsed and splintered arbors. All that had once been beautiful was now supplanted by chaos.

  They entered the workshop yard, and gaped.

  Two horses stood among sand and wreckage, both as docile as lambs, and skeletal from starvation. They should have been black, but dirt and malnutrition had long since dulled their coats.

  “Are they demons?” Abadi hissed. “What manner of beasts are these?”

  “They’re horses,” Qebera said. “They’re like camels, but with better dispositions. Most of the time.” He inched toward the animals, his movements as fluid, as non-threatening, as possible. They seemed not to notice him.

  “What are you doing?” Abadi hissed. “Aren’t you afraid? Won’t they attack?”

  Qebera didn’t answer, but of course he was afraid. He had seen these animals club a soldier unconscious with their hooves. They were ordinarily spirite
d creatures, averse to easy surrender. If not for Osiris, Qebera could never have gotten the pesky things to Egypt.

  These, however, seemed more spent than proud. Qebera saw that the usual blaze in their eyes had dulled as much as their coats. The horses stood there, heads hung low, as if awaiting the death that had somehow missed them the first time through.

  Qebera said something soothing, something he wouldn’t remember later. He reached out his hands. A scant few feet separated him from the nearest creature.

  “Qebera, are you crazy...?”

  Qebera touched the horse on its neck. Except for a twitch of ears, the animal did not react. Whether starvation, monsters, storms or men, what difference was the source of pain? Let it come, and be merciful.

  “I don’t think he’ll hurt me,” Qebera said to the horse as much as to Abadi. “He won’t hurt anyone.” He stroked the animal’s neck with one hand and tentatively touched its muzzle with the other. Osiris had taught him as much. “Are you hungry, boy? You and your lady? How have you survived this place?”

  The horse snorted. The second animal sidled up to Qebera and watched him with rheumy eyes.

  “No, I haven’t anything for you, not here, anyway. Where are your sisters, hmmm?” Qebera spoke over his shoulder to Abadi. “Check the stalls right over there. We had four horses in all.” He continued petting the stallion. Abadi’s report did not surprise him.

  “I see two carcasses, weeks if not months old. Two other stalls are damaged. The two with you must have escaped.”

  “They’ve subsisted in the desert, and return here now and again.”

  “Return, Qebera? What on earth for?”

  Qebera looked into the stallion’s dull black eyes. He really had spent too much time with the silly, impractical animals. “To find their master,” he said. “The poor things wait for Osiris.”