The Isis Knot

by Hanna Martine

  Amonteh woke in the dim of evening. His flesh pimpled in the chill and his back stung from the hardness of the rock. When he shifted, he jostled Ramsesh awake. She turned her face to him and she looked like a different person. Her eyes seemed lucid now, still. They didn’t dance with the fever of madness.

  “Are you hungry?” he asked.

  “No. I’m cold.”

  He dug out the blanket from the basket, snapped out the dust and wrapped it around his wife’s shoulders. Her fingers closed around it loosely and she looked up at him through her dark eyelashes. She smiled hesitantly.

  A long time ago, when they were children, he’d been drawn to her because of that smile, the full lips stretched over small white teeth. Later he’d fallen in love with her round eyes and the way she gazed at him with pure desire.

  As she did now.

  He forgot why they were hiding there in the dark crevice, far from home. Indeed, he forgot everything.

  She smoothed the blanket over the rock and knelt, lifting her dress to give him a teasing glimpse of the smoothness of her thighs. His body went hard as the stone beneath his feet. She held out her arms and he dropped to his knees before her.

  She took his hand and placed it on her soft breast. She kissed him, but it was not sweet or delicate. Desperation seemed to push it from behind, a forceful need that made him feel as if he was holding someone else, for his wife had always been demure. She clawed at her dress, releasing his lips just long enough to yank it over her head and toss it to the ground. It had taken her over thirty days to bead the neckline of it and she seemed not to care that several beads now lay in the sand.

  Her beauty never failed to amaze him, even after all this time. He slid his hands around her bare waist, loving the softness of her skin. He bent to kiss her breasts, but instead she pressed against his shoulders until he yielded and lay down on his back. With desire darkening her eyes, she fiddled with his clothing. As her shaking hands stripped him naked, he watched her face and the determination he saw there.

  When she’d exposed him, the throbbing evidence of his love between them, she threw a leg over his hips. Her braids swung over her shoulders, grazing his hands where they stroked her breasts. Her eyes fluttered, half closed.

  Grasping her hips, he thrust inside her.

  How many times had he loved his wife in this way, with him on his back and her golden body undulating above him? Each lovely, each beautiful. Yet something was profoundly different this time. With every movement his senses rose to the edge of bursting. The feel of her skin under his hands turned to pure silk. When she kissed him, she tasted like the exotic fruits only pharaohs ate. Every stroke of her fingers on his body left a trail of heat.

  The feel of him inside her felt like the beginning of the world. The end. Love between the gods.

  He saw Isis within her. No, saw was too obvious a word. He sensed the goddess shimmering within his wife. Because of that he felt like Osiris, the man who loved her throughout life and death. As soon as Amonteh thought that, he felt an acute shift in his ka. It opened and changed, and he felt divine. Godlike.

  If he hadn’t believed Ramsesh’s story before, he certainly believed it now.

  “Osiris.” The name shook from her lips as he plunged inside her. It felt right, to be given that name.

  “Isis,” he whispered back, and he could sense the goddess’s approval.

  As pleasure built and built inside them, Amonteh and Ramsesh locked eyes. He watched her lips drop open, her joy and fulfillment leaking out in long, slow wails. He watched as her body shook and knew that he gazed upon something idyllic and graceful, that he witnessed the ecstasy of a woman holding the power of a goddess inside her.

  Afterward, Ramsesh lay on her stomach, her face turned away from him. He smoothed her braids down the brown skin of her back. “You spoke Osiris’s name,” he said.

  “Yes. As you did for Isis.” She turned her face to him. “It just came to me. I didn’t control it.”

  “Neither did I.” He pressed closer along the length of her body.

  “In the temple, Isis told me that you were my Osiris, and that I should join with you and she would make it so.”

  He lay there like one of the gods’ effigies, like stone, and concentrated on assessing his own body. “I don’t feel any different now.”

  “But you did before. When you were inside me.”

  “Yes. How did you…?”

  “I felt it, too.” She entwined her fingers with his.

  “But what does that mean? I didn’t visit his temple. He didn’t speak to me as Isis did to you. I don’t carry your same burden.”

  “She said you are my Osiris, Amonteh. I believe she meant for us to stand together to face Seth as Isis and Osiris did in ancient times.”

  “Seth murdered Osiris.”

  A new sadness settled behind her eyes, which she tried to disguise through a smile. “And Isis found Osiris and brought him back.”

  He nestled against the curves of her body. They were silent long enough for the stars and moon to appear.

  “What are we to do?” he murmured.

  Her voice was sleepy and low. “Run.”

  “Where should we go?”

  “North. To the delta. If we leave Egypt, Tuthotsut may not follow.”

  #

  Tuthotsut followed. Relentlessly.

  He must have guessed they would flee to the sea. He seemed not to need food or water or sleep, for whenever they stopped, he was behind them. Sometimes only a wavering shadow far in the distance, sometimes walking determinedly through the small village in which they had found respite for the night. But always there. Always behind them, like the tip of a snake’s tail following its head.

  This went on for more days than Amonteh could count. They couldn’t turn back. They couldn’t travel west, into the desert. They had to keep heading north. One day they managed to buy passage on a boat and were able to put some space between them and their pursuer.

  He kept careful watch over his wife, who barely spoke anymore except to ask for a rest. Her arms thinned. Her cheeks lost their plumpness. She walked slower and slower each day—so slowly that he feared for their lives, that their sluggish pace would finally allow Tuthotsut to catch them. Or that she would die.

  Most days, she seemed not to care. The shadows underneath her eyes had touched her heart and her ka, and he feared that if he weren’t there to prod her onward, she might have lain down and surrendered. Her burden was heavier than anything any oxen could pull. When she asked to stop, he rarely had the heart to tell her they’d just rested not moments past.

  She touched Isis’s cuff constantly. Sometimes it made her angry, her knuckles turning white. Other times it seemed to give her strength. When she stumbled or clutched her stomach in hunger, she would tenderly rub the gold Isis knot. Her pale and cracked lips would pull back in an expression that just barely resembled the smile he’d loved for most of his life. Just that touch, that simple contact, would give her a few more steps.

  But that energy wouldn’t last. He feared neither would his wife.

  They bartered clothes and goods for food in passing villages. They drank readily enough from the Nile but they couldn’t survive on water alone. Begging no longer proved fruitful, and it took time they could no longer afford.

  The gold in the cuff was priceless and would pay for safe passage anywhere they wished, but they couldn’t remove it. Nor would they ever. The one thing that could save their lives was slowly taking it away.

  In a village south of Edfu, when both had nearly collapsed from hunger, he pulled out of the satchel—now threadbare and filthy—the last item they possessed: a little pot of black paint and the scribe’s reed.

  Her dark eyes widened. “Why did you bring those?”

  “You took food and clothing. But I saw these sitting next to the fire pit and thought they were symbolic of us, our past, and I couldn’t imagine leaving them behind. I’ll trade them. They’ll feed us tonight.”


  She stopped him with a claw-like grip on his wrist. “No.” When he looked to her in confusion, tears coated her eyes. “I know how to use them better. But we need to leave here. Now.”

  “And go where?”

  She lifted her face to the western hills. To the north lay the tombs of great pharaohs. Where Ramsesh pointed lay nothing. Just barren, rocky slopes.

  “I’ve been thinking about this for many days. Seeing that you brought your paint pots and reed…it’s possible now.”

  “What is?” Dread tore at him. He feared desperately for his wife. She wasn’t making sense.

  “When I die…don’t shake your head. Listen to me, Amonteh, for it will happen. At our current pace and with our meager means, I will fall before we reach the next village. I can feel it. But if you die as well, my body will be unguarded. He’ll find me. Tuthotsut will take this.” She lifted the cuff. “He’ll take my ka. He’ll steal Isis’s gifts from me. He’ll take back Seth’s powers. He’ll have everything he wanted.”

  It seemed like the ground shook beneath him and he gritted his teeth. “No. I won’t let him near you.”

  She smiled and it made the tears spill over her lower lids and onto her hollowed cheeks. “Then you agree.”

  She was frightening him more than ever before. He began to shake with it, his stomach threatening to come up. “I’ve agreed to nothing. Speak your thoughts plainly.”

  “Perhaps this is what she wanted of me.” Her eyes grew distant. “In that, I cannot deny her.”

  She turned to press her back to his chest. She wrapped his arms around her shoulders and pulled him tightly to her, and he thought that she’d never felt so frail or so invisible in his own grasp. She stared up at the western hills. The sun set behind the jagged slopes, sending a final blaze of golden light to the sky.

  “The cuff is linked to my ka and my ka alone. If Tuthotsut finds one, he finds the other, and he gets what he wants.” Her voice quivered. “I cannot be separated from Isis’s gift. We feed off one another now. We need each other.”

  He squeezed her tighter, as though that meager embrace might change everything. “I don’t understand what you want to do.”

  “I want you to come with me up there, to those hills. I want you to paint my tomb with prayers.”

  Terror consumed him. Amonteh grabbed her arms and whirled her around. “No. No.”

  “I will die soon, my love. As will you. We won’t make it out of Egypt. Even if we do make it to the delta, we don’t have the means to buy passage across the sea. Tell me you don’t agree.”

  He couldn’t, for he did.

  “Let’s go to the hills. Let me lie down for the last time in a cave that Tuthotsut will never find. Wrap me in cloth and paint prayers to Isis above my body. Roll stones into the cave mouth, fill it with sand—anything—and leave me there. Isis’s powers will be safe, hidden, until the gods’ time comes again. And Seth won’t be allowed his vengeance.”

  He took his wife in his arms and let his head fall to her shoulders, breathing her in. The sense of imminent loss already was too great for him to bear. How would he ever survive without her?

  They stayed that way, locked together, until the sun disappeared.

  Then she traded the satchel for a knife, and he had no choice but to follow as she hiked high up into the desolate hills. He pleaded and clawed at her as she found a small cave facing east and ducked inside. He watched in horror as she knelt in the dirt and held out the knife.

  “Please. You must.”

  He refused to kill her, even though she begged. And begged and begged. Her beautiful face was made of stone determination, like an effigy, and his was a tear-streaked mess. This was his wife, his very life. He’d known she would be his when they’d been children, and he refused to let that go now, before they’d had a chance to grow old and rickety together. He refused to be the one to destroy everything.

  The agony that filled the moment made him a blasphemer. It made him hate Isis.

  “I won’t,” he choked out. “I won’t do it, my love.”

  “Then I shall.”

  Ramsesh flipped the knife so the blade tipped toward her chest. With a silent scream he lunged, trying to steal the knife, but she drove it into her own heart.

  He scrambled over to her as her eyes went wide, her lips opening in pain…and then her whole face went slack in what he could only describe as peace. There was no peace for him, however. Only anguish. He held her as blood poured from the wound and slid over his arms. He cradled her until her beautiful life disappeared, taking with it all that he’d known and loved and cherished since he was a boy. He prayed to Osiris to bring her back, cried into her braids, and rocked her still body.

  Time meant nothing there in the dark of the tiny cave high up on a deserted slope. He didn’t know how long he sat there with her in his arms, only that the loss grew more painful with every passing moment. When he finally eased her body to the ground and knelt beside her, he could feel the warmth of her ka swirling all around him.

  He remembered what she’d wanted him to do, how she’d specifically asked him to paint her tomb with prayers. His hand shook as he drew out the pot of ink and reed. Though he had drawn the words and phrases hundreds of times, now that he had to do it for his wife after her death, he could just barely remember the shapes and strokes. He couldn’t concentrate either. He kept looking down at her body and face, waiting for her to arise and correct one stroke or another.

  Ramsesh had asked him to draw specific final offerings: breads and meats and sweets they had never been able to afford but that she wanted to offer to her goddess in death. So he did that, hearing her instructional voice in his ear the whole time.

  He then drew the symbol of his wife’s ka: a dual image of her beauty, one in miniature. Then he stopped and stared at the wavering black lines, as an idea came to him.

  Tuthotsut harbored the ka of a god—one who would fight for thousands of years without tiring. He would never stop looking for Ramsesh. When Tuthotsut died or weakened, Seth could move his ka to another body. Years would be erased and he would have virtually no barriers to his search. Eventually, he would find this cave.

  Which meant it was up to Amonteh to take extra measures of protection.

  If his wife’s ka was inextricably linked to the power Isis bestowed upon her—as well as what she’d taken from Seth—then Amonteh would make it more difficult for Tuthotsut to use them, should he ever find this cave.

  He dipped the reed into the pot to stroke the final lines of his wife’s memorial. With them, he forbade his wife’s ka to ever inhabit any male body. Tuthotsut might one day find this place and hold the cuff in his hands, but Ramsesh’s ka would never live inside any man.

  The strength of Isis and Seth would never be his.

  This brought Amonteh a sad satisfaction as he stepped back and felt the true power of what he’d drawn. Hopefully it would reverberate through the ages.

  With a great shudder, he turned his back on Ramsesh and went to the cave mouth. There he carved a tiny Isis knot in the stone, with the purpose of directing the goddess where to find Ramsesh when it came time for Isis to return to the world.

  On a different, blank wall he drew his own, much simpler death prayers. In them he linked his ka with that of Ramsesh’s. He prayed that if either his ka or hers were ever removed from this cave, that they would find their way back to one another again.

  Then he covered the opening with rock and sand, closing them in. In a darkness usually only reserved for death, he stumbled back to his wife, found the knife, and drove the blade into his own heart.

  CHAPTER 23

  Maybe if Elizabeth were fair the men working by the water would talk to her. Although appearance had meant little to the convict for whom she’d lifted her skirt in exchange for a wagon ride to Sydney Town.

  She’d arrived mere hours earlier and had begun her search for Sera immediately. Her stomach cramped hard with hunger and her tongue stuck to the roof
of her mouth with thirst, but she shoved aside the nuisances and approached a man hauling nets of squishy fish from a boat to land. The moonlight reflected off their shiny scales.

  Suddenly, the ground shifted. How did the fisherman and dock workers manage their tasks on such unstable land? She held her arms out to the side for balance.

  Like several of the others she’d questioned, the man with the fish sneered before she could even speak Sera’s name. “I heard ya the other thousand times y’asked. Now be gone with ya, hag. No one knows her.”

  How rude of him to snap so. Couldn’t he tell how important this matter was? Didn’t he realize her life depended on finding the woman who wore the gold?

  She moved to swipe the hair away from her face and missed. Tried again, and this time succeeded.

  Maybe a little rest was in order. Or perhaps a search for food. Really, there was no time for either, but Mr. Moore always said one sharp mind was worth more than all the unfocused ones combined.

  Stumbling over the undulating ground, she began to mumble the lullaby he used to sing to her every night when she was young and occasionally missed her family. Later on in life, that lullaby had turned into a promise of something he’d sing to her after they were married and before he took her to his bed.

  Now she was ruined. But once she retrieved the gold, it wouldn’t matter. He’d be so happy he’d take her back anyway. She just knew it.

  “I may have seen her,” came a shaking voice at her back. “The woman you’re looking for.”

  She whirled, heart in her throat and hands on the front of her skirt—preparing to lift it if that was what this new man wanted as the price for information. At last! Someone who could help.

  The man who’d addressed her pulled himself away from the tilted fish-cleaning shed, coming out of the shadows and into the bright moonlight. She dropped the skirt. Indeed, she herself almost dropped to the ground.

  He was younger and taller than her. Taller than she remembered. His body might be different now, but those round, bugged eyes and quivering lower lip were exactly the same.

  She grabbed the hull of a nearby overturned boat, certain she would faint if she didn’t, and managed to say, “Stumpy?”