The Isis Knot

by Hanna Martine

  Ramsesh reeled. “But how can he possibly take what’s yours?”

  He has been waiting to come here, into my temple, to face me. I am diminishing. I am weak, but while my effigy still stands in this shrine he cannot step foot on the island. Tomorrow, when the Romans remove my effigy and turn this temple into something else, I will be unguarded. I am not strong enough to defeat my brother. Not alone.

  She buried her face in her hands. It was so much to think on. The world was changing too quickly and she stood right on the axis, watching everything spin, unable to focus.

  There is something else. Tuthotsut.

  She let her hands fall to her lap. “You worry about the mad ferryman?” She gasped, realizing. “Of course. He’s a follower of Seth.”

  He is more than that now. Seth has given his ka to Tuthotsut. The ferryman as he was born no longer exists. His body belongs to my brother now. It is how Seth will enter this temple and challenge me.

  It explained the look in Tuthotsut’s eyes as he’d stared up at the temple. It explained why he hadn’t stepped foot on Philae himself.

  Ramsesh exhaled and stood, showing strength for her goddess, as she knew she should. “What do you ask of me? How can I help you?”

  The goddess paused and the weight of that pause made the very air feel heavy. What will you do, my daughter?

  “To keep you protected, to keep the world safe from Seth’s wrath and deception, I will do anything.”

  You give me your trust, your love. Still. You are the last of my faithful, Ramsesh, and now I give something to you in return.

  Isis’s effigy exploded with light. It burned from red to yellow to white. Ramsesh blinked hard against it, but the light continued to flicker behind her eyelids.

  Something landed with a thud at her feet. Sand and dust tickled her nose. She knuckled her eyes then opened them. Though the statue’s light had faded, something glowed on the ground. It was a gold cuff, a hand’s width long but delicate. The knot of Isis was carved on the top, images of Seth and Isis on the underside. It lay open on the sand, its hinges and clasp invisible. Magical.

  For you. Isis’s voice wavered. Hide it. Protect it.

  “What is it?”

  It is me. It is what Seth wants. It is all my power. My healing, my fertility, my protection, my gift of life.

  Ramsesh looked into the goddess’s disfigured face, utterly speechless.

  It is linked to you now, to your ka and your ka alone.

  She thought of Tuthotsut waiting for her back in the boat. She’d come across the water bearing bread; she couldn’t return with this beautiful gold piece the likes of which only the pharaohs had worn. “Tuthotsut…”

  … will not know. Keep your sleeves pulled down over your hands. He thinks you a commoner and will never venture to guess what has transpired here. But when the Romans remove my effigy and he comes here, he will find emptiness, a gate to nothing. My powers will have disappeared. By then you will be gone.”

  “Gone?”

  Sweet child. Dear believer. I am always stronger in the hands of my children. Through you, I am manifest. Through you, I will complete the circle meant for me. I trust you to know what to do.

  But she didn’t. She felt faint and overwhelmed, and was starting to think she’d gone mad. Or that she was still back in her home, lying in Amonteh’s arms and dreaming.

  “And my husband?”

  He believes as you do. Ramsesh thought she heard a smile in Isis’s voice. Amonteh will be your Osiris. Go back to him. Lie with him, take him into your body as a wife does with her husband, and I will make him into your Osiris. Together you will protect me from Seth. This I ask of you.

  Ramsesh still didn’t quite understand. She opened her mouth to ask more questions, but the temple dove into darkness. The glow of the gold cuff died and Isis’s statue returned to red-gold stone, layered in shadow. The world seemed to churn and Ramsesh steadied herself with a hand on Isis’s carved toes.

  Why had she been chosen for such a huge responsibility, such a grand gift? The wonder of it all rooted her in place, and all she could do was look from gold to effigy and back again. If she left the gold on the ground and ran out of the temple now, she could safely return to Amonteh before the sun god awakened.

  If she left the gold on the ground and ran out of the temple now, Tuthotsut or one of the Roman centurions could enter here tomorrow and take the gold for himself. By doing that, she would have betrayed Isis.

  Who was she to defy her goddess? Who was she to refuse such trust?

  She picked up the cuff and cradled it in both hands. Shifting its feather weight to one palm, she tilted it over her forearm and watched it snap around her skin, sealing itself with an eerie fit. A hum emanated from it, entering her body from the pulse at her wrist. Isis flowed into her, through her, made the air buzz like insects.

  Though the shock and the magnitude of this responsibility threatened to steal her consciousness, she bravely beat it back and stood tall, pulling the long sleeves of her sheath down over her fingertips.

  She turned and hurried back through the outer shrine, into the great pillared hall, and beneath the two pylons. She raced past the colonnades. To the east, the first pink lines of light appeared over the hills. Re was awakening. She had to return home.

  And Tuthotsut was her only means.

  Tuthotsut. Seth.

  The ferryman perched in his boat, gnawing on his fingernails. When he saw her he jumped to his feet, almost upending the vessel. The whites in his eyes gleamed.

  She froze, water lapping over her toes and panic setting in. The sight of him made her want to dive off the wall and swim to shore. She wanted to turn around and run back to Isis’s stone arms.

  “Have you finished?” His voice sounded different to her now. Hollow. Inhuman.

  She was being foolish. Her hesitation could tell him what had truly happened in the temple. She must act as if nothing out of the ordinary had occurred. It took all her effort not to touch the gold cuff underneath her billowing dress. Opening her hands, empty and, thankfully, not shaking, she looked him directly in his disconcerting eyes. “Yes. I left hetep and prayed.”

  “And did she answer your prayers, young one?” His stare probed her like icy fingers. Could he see what was inside her now, the magic that she carried? Would he kill her for it?

  “She was silent,” Ramsesh replied, forcing disappointment into her sigh.

  Tuthotsut cocked his head, his long hair swinging, and bent for the oars. She forced herself onto the boat and took her seat in the bow. A glance over her shoulder revealed the ferryman watched her and not the water, and she trained her eyes on the bank, willing it to move closer, faster. She gripped the fabric of her dress so tightly her hands cramped.

  But anticipation and nervousness made her careless. Before the boat ran aground near the shore she stood. Tuthotsut ordered her to sit but the sound of his voice only made her want to disobey. To run. The boat rocked violently then struck mud. She jumped out.

  Warm water soaked her sandals and rose halfway up her calves. She pushed through the shoreline reeds, but one tangled around her ankle, twisting her to the side and pitching her forward. She fell hard on her elbow and hip.

  The force shoved up the long sleeve of her dress. Across the water, Re stretched and yawned. Pale light touched the cuff and it flashed gold and brilliant.

  Tuthotsut howled.

  His body shimmered and separated into two images, one overlaid upon the other. Still the bedraggled ferryman from Nubt…but also a screaming giant of a man with the head of long-nosed beast and a swishing, arrow-tipped tail. Seth.

  Though pain lanced up Ramsesh’s leg, it was terror in the face of the god of chaos that truly paralyzed her.

  He leaped onto shore and bore down upon her. She tried too late to scrabble away and he fell on her, the force knocking out her breath. Isis had chosen poorly. Ramsesh was weak and riddled with fear. Already she had failed her goddess.

  “Isi
s…” she managed to hiss in a fearful prayer.

  Tuthotsut clamped her body between his thighs. He grabbed her arm bearing the cuff with both hands. His palm covered the Isis knot, and the shape of the symbol burned into his skin like hot coals. He tried to pull the gold over her hand. She writhed, fought, and the cuff did not budge.

  Seth’s power slammed into her. She could feel it reaching inside her body, trying to steal her ka. Trying to steal what harbored Isis’s magic.

  But Isis met him head-on. The goddess soared inside Ramsesh, resisting Seth. Seth increased his power. A battled raged inside her body—more pain and sound than she thought she could bear. Death and life pushed and pulled in a violent ebb and flow.

  “Isis!” she cried, a wail of the defeated.

  She sensed Isis’s imminent loss. Seth’s rage was simply too powerful.

  Until Ramsesh realized that she owed her goddess more than surrender. Isis had trusted her, and Ramsesh owed her bravery.

  “Help…me!” she yelled into the night.

  He has left himself unguarded, came Isis’s voice in her mind. Take what he has not protected. Take his power.

  Ramsesh felt it then—the blind physical violence Tuthotsut used against her left his ethereal being open and unprotected, primed for an attack.

  Take his power. Take his chaos and his control over death. Or else he will take and use you.

  She acted on instinct and out of sheer terror. With all her strength, Ramsesh thrust her ka outward, wielding it as a weapon. She couldn’t see it as it wrapped around the ferryman’s body, but she felt it invade his skin. She felt it seep into his own unguarded ka.

  Using Isis as a tether to keep her anchored to her own body, Ramsesh let her ka fill Tuthotsut. Consuming him. His crazed eyes widened as he realized his mistake, how he’d been focused on overpowering her physically and had left his divine magic undefended.

  Ramsesh pulled with all her might, the strength of a goddess at her back, and took Seth’s powers.

  Now stripped of his control over death and chaos, the ferryman’s weathered face turned the color of ash. Seth’s ka still roiled inside him, but it was powerless now. Tuthotsut convulsed, his eyes rolling back into his head, and collapsed off her. The great image of the beast twitched and flickered and faded.

  This time Ramsesh’s terror propelled her to her feet, and she didn’t think of anything else but running.

  CHAPTER 22

  A crash jolted Amonteh awake. Rising to one elbow, he watched Ramsesh stumble through the front room toward him. Her braids were in disarray, the bottom part of her dress and cloak were soaking wet, and tears drew wet lines down her dusty cheeks. But it wasn’t her appearance that frightened him so much as the alarm in her eyes.

  Amonteh came to his knees and caught her as she fell onto the mat beside him. “What happened?” She shook like the crops submitting to a seasonal wind. He smoothed errant braids from her face. She wouldn’t look at him.

  Outside, the first rays of light graced the homes just opposite their narrow lane. His wife had been awake for a long time. Awake and outdoors, while he’d slept like Osiris, the god of the dead. She’d always teased him about his ability to drop into so deep a sleep, and he’d always taken it with humor. But not now.

  “Where were you?” But as soon as he asked it, he knew. “Philae? You went to the temple?”

  With her looking so afraid, he couldn’t find it in himself to be angry with her, so he clung to his wife until her shaking eased. When he kissed her forehead, it tasted of sweat.

  “How?” he whispered. “How did you get across?”

  “One of the ferrymen,” she whispered back, then shivered.

  “The Romans? Did they see you?” He feared the answer.

  “No. No.”

  He sighed with relief so deep he actually smiled. He took her face and kissed her lips, but she didn’t return it. “Then tell me. Tell me what happened. You’re frightening me.”

  She gently pushed his hands away, then tugged on the sleeve of her sheath, revealing a bright gold bracelet wrapped around her brown forearm. The sight of the Isis knot rising from its surface made his mouth go dry.

  “How did you get that?”

  Tears pooled in her round, dark eyes. “She…she gave it to me.”

  “She?”

  “Isis. Isis has entrusted me…us…” The tears fell in streams now and sobs surrounded her nonsensical words. “Tuthotsut…Seth… Oh, Amonteh, he knows! I gave him my name when I wasn’t thinking, and when he wakes he will hunt for me.” She jumped to her feet and began frantically moving about the room. “We need to leave. Today. Now.”

  Her fear was infectious. He could feel it crawling across his own skin. “Please tell me what’s happening.” He took her arms and tried to still her but she wiggled from his grasp.

  She draped a shawl over one shoulder and tied it into a crude satchel. In it she shoved all the clothing she could fit, then moved to the front room and stuffed the satchel’s crevices with dried meat and other morsels of food.

  “Please,” he begged. “Stop and talk to me.”

  She was moving too quickly for him to grab her again; his wife, who was always so careful and quiet about her movements. She seemed like a different person, and that worried him greatly. She paused near the cooking pit and looked at him. She was breathing hard and there was a sad glaze to her eyes, but at least she’d stopped moving about.

  “All of Egypt has turned against the gods,” she said. “It’s their time to diminish, Isis said, but Seth is refusing to do so. He means to exact revenge on those people who deserted him.”

  Just the mere mention of Seth’s name made Amonteh shudder.

  “He wants to take back his place in the world,” his wife said, “and he’ll use destruction to get it. He has given his ka to Tuthotsut.”

  Amonteh blinked. Nothing she said made sense. “The ferryman?”

  “Yes. He’s a hunter for Seth here in this world.”

  He gasped. “Was it Tuthotsut who took you across the water? Did he harm you?”

  “He…he tried.”

  Rage expanded inside Amonteh like a brush fire. “I’ll kill him.”

  “No!” She reached out and took his arm, the only thing stopping him from flying out of the house and running down to the river.

  “If you go to him, he’ll find me. He knows you’re mine. We can’t be separated. We need to leave. He’ll come after me.”

  Panic started to hollow Amonteh out. He gripped her shoulders harder than he intended, but she didn’t wince. “Why would he hunt you?”

  She raised the cuff and pressed the gold into her arm. When she slid the cuff toward her wrist, an indentation appeared on the revealed skin underneath. Isis and Seth, facing one another in battle.

  “What does that mean?” He barely recognized his own voice. “What’s happened?”

  “I have their powers in me. In here.” She thumped a fist against her heart. “And here.” She ground her fingers into her forehead.

  He took a step back. “I don’t understand.”

  Her eyes swam with emotion and fright and something otherworldly as she gazed up at him. “I can feel their magic inside me. Isis gave me her gifts, and then when Tuthotsut attacked me, trying to take them for himself, the goddess told me to steal Seth’s power, too. They’re at war inside me, my love.”

  She brought him into her arms. All he could do was stand there in shock as she held him tight and told him everything that had happened on Philae and the weight of the task Isis had given her. He finally understood.

  His wife, his heart, the vessel for opposite, warring powers. Chaos and stability. Death and life.

  Isis and Seth. Brother and sister. Goddess and god.

  Amonteh’s first reaction was anger. How dare Isis place such a burden on this woman? Then he looked down at her and felt ashamed. She was brave and beautiful, sincere and desperate. Vulnerable and intelligent. She needed him, not his anger.

>   He enveloped her in his arms and kissed her for a long time. When he pulled away, his lips tingled with magic and her skin felt like fire beneath his hands.

  “Where do we go?” she murmured, their foreheads together.

  When she lifted her face and looked deeply into his eyes, his chest constricted with love. It reminded him of the first time he’d seen her, when he’d caught her eye while walking through the village. She’d been sitting cross-legged outside her parents’ home and had smiled at him over her beadwork.

  “Away. Like you said. This morning we’ll travel toward the sunset, toward the hills. From there, I don’t know.”

  She nodded.

  They carried all they could in her hastily made satchel and the basket she used to bring goods to and from the market. He balanced the basket on his head as they wove through the village, heading away from the river and toward where the land rose up. Re had fully risen and people started to emerge from their homes, shaking out their reed mats. His wife kept her eyes straight forward while he watched the corners and the shadows for the ferryman.

  Amonteh had never traveled so far away from the Nile before. They walked across bare rock until midday, when Ramsesh’s shoulders sagged and her mouth hung open in a silent plea for water. They’d made it halfway up the slopes of the western hills. No sign of pursuit.

  The annual floods never reached this far, and the land here was rough and dry and slashed with vast, echoing crevices. Pharaohs and their offspring were once buried here, but their tombs were unmarked, hidden. Amonteh feared that with the invasion by Rome, they would no longer be secret or safe.

  He guided his wife into one of the shadowed crevices, out of the sun. He gave her some of the water from an animal bladder and settled her on the ground, her small body tucked into the crook of his arm. She hadn’t said a word since leaving the village. Her head lolled against his chest and within moments she fell asleep. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d been awake to watch her do so.

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