When he finally pulled away and came back to himself he found Charlotte—Charles—in his room, directing a few servants who were filling a tub set in front of the fireplace. When they’d topped it up with steaming water, Charles ushered them out and closed the door behind them.
“Your bath, my lord.”
“I didn’t order a bath.” Rorin’s protest was weak.
Charles made no answer.
“Well leave, at least,” Rorin snapped.
A smile ghosted at Charles’ mouth. “Am I so frightening, my lord?”
“I’m not afraid of you.”
“I should hope not. Come, let me help you. You haven’t changed your clothes since you returned.”
“I would if I could, but I haven’t any clean travel things and all my other clothes are impossible to get into without help,” he huffed.
“I know. Go ahead and get in, I won’t look at you. I’ll lay out your things while you wash.”
Rorin didn’t like it, but he didn’t like the way he smelled either. He waited until the other man had turned away before he scrambled out of his clothes and into the tub, sinking with a sigh into the water and closing his eyes.
He settled deep into the heat and the familiar sounds of someone attending him. He was so tired, so thoroughly exhausted, that he let his consciousness drift, seeking peace in the lingering touch of the castle’s mind. At first, he was barely aware of the sensation of hands in his hair, the strong smell of soap, and the crackly sound of lather.
“Tip your head back.”
The voice brought him bolt upright, water sloshing to the floor.
“Don’t touch me!”
The hands disappeared.
“As you wish, my lord.”
Huddling low in the water, Rorin sluiced water and soap from his hair with trembling hands, giving a cursory swipe to the rest of his body, and snatched at the towel laid out in front of the fire. He whipped it around his nakedness before he was standing, the bottom half wicking up soapy water.
“You’re dismissed,” he cast over his shoulder. “I can do it myself.”
“You cannot.”
Rorin whirled around. “Get out!”
Charles hesitated, holding Rorin’s eye for only a moment. He bowed.
“Yes, my lord.”
For a long time Lord Rorin stood shivering in front of the fire, clutching the towel around him like a blanket in a snowstorm. After all these decades, after a lifetime of fighting, after all he’d done to destroy this, was he to be undone by something so simple as a bath?
He put on the clothes he could manage, the breeches and the shirt, though he couldn’t manage all of its ties, and sank into the chair at his desk, still littered with the books of magic, his intended saviors. He laid his forehead on a cool leather cover and squeezed his eyes shut.
5
When Charles entered his room the next morning, Rorin said nothing. He did not acknowledge him when he set the breakfast tray on the table, or as he tidied up the room. When Charles began to absentmindedly hum that little tune Charlotte would sing, Rorin almost yelled at him to stop, but then he didn’t.
When the voice came from just behind him, he jumped.
“Have you found anything, my lord?”
Rorin spun around in his chair to find Charles peering at the text from over his shoulder.
“Step away!”
Charles took two steps backward but didn’t leave.
Rorin turned back to his book, closing his eyes for a moment to block out the smell of him, the desperate craving bubbling up within.
“If I’d found anything, you’d know it.”
Charles went back to work, but after a moment he said, “I hated it at first. Who would want to be a man if he could be a woman?” He wasn’t looking at Rorin, but there was a hint of teasing in his voice. “I’m getting used to it, though. There are even some advantages.”
Rorin scoffed. “Of course there are. Being a man is infinitely preferable. I would never be one of those delicate things; weak and weepy, taken advantage of by any passing brute, despised.”
“Despised?”
“I mean— Never mind, I didn’t mean despised. Just, I’d never let myself be less than others simply because they were bigger and stronger, stupid and cruel. I’d kill myself first.”
“Or other people, if you thought it would help.”
Rorin’s head shot up. “What does that mean?”
Charles shrugged. “Just a thought.”
“Your thoughts are not needed or welcome in my room.”
“Yes, my lord.”
5
He had spent many nights bent over his books, and it was very late. Rorin linked his arms over his head and stretched sore muscles, dropping his neck forward.
He jumped when warm hands settled on his shoulders, massaging with strong, familiar strokes.
“Stop,” he said.
The hands stilled but were not removed.
“You used to like for me do this,” Charles said, his voice quiet and very near.
“That was before.” Rorin’s voice came out rough and hoarse.
“Am I really so different now?”
Of course he was, but that wasn’t really the problem. Rorin silently cursed his weakness. Though whether it was the weakness of wanting, or of being afraid to want, he was no longer sure.
“You’re completely different,” Rorin rasped.
“And when you close your eyes?” The voice was closer now; he could feel the heat of breath on his ear.
Rorin shivered. “You feel different.”
“Different isn’t always bad.”
The brush of fingers ghosted over the sensitive skin on the back of his neck and Rorin gasped, leaning into the caress without meaning to.
“Don’t touch me like that.” It was barely a whisper.
The fingers withdrew and were replaced by the brush of firm lips. “Like this, then?”
Rorin opened his mouth but the words didn’t come, only a soft moan.
A quiet chuckle tickled his neck.
Charles took his hand and pulled him up. Rorin kept his eyes closed. Strong arms pressed him into a broad chest and he dropped his head on a shoulder higher than his own. He knew he should hate this feeling, but he couldn’t remember why.
An intoxicating vision of giving up this struggle, of just not fighting any more, made him giddy and lightheaded.
Charles took his hand again and pulled him in the direction of the bed.
Rorin didn’t move.
The hand slid away but the voice was soft, husky, melty.
“Shall I go?”
Rorin trembled, his mind racing, his body aching with confusion and need.
“I’m sorry,” Charles said. “I’ll go.”
Rorin’s eyes flew open. “No.”
Charles turned back but stood still, waiting.
“No?”
Rorin closed his eyes, bowing his head, clenching his fists. “Stay. Please?”
He opened his eyes and looked up at Charles.
Charles’ smile was warm, soft.
“Yes, my lord.”
LEAH PETERSEN lives in North Carolina. She does the day-job, wife, and mother thing, much like everyone else. She prides herself on being able to hold a book with her feet so she can knit while reading. She’s still working on knitting while writing. Her first novel, Fighting Gravity, is available now from Dragon Moon Press.
THE LORD OF THE SOUTHERN SKY
J. P. Moore
Lord Set, brother of King Osiris, watched ghostly arms of dust weave among the sandstone columns, through shafts of white sunlight. The dark of the underworld seeped up between black marble tiles and blanketed the temple floor. So, the world of light was far above. The realm of
mortals was dark and low, and men were like insects at the feet of the gods.
This was Ombos of the Upper Nile. Arid, hot, and dead. This was Set’s home.
Panahasi, short with a broad bald head and big ears, crouched like a monkey in the shadows. The priest spoke.
“You do not look like Lord Set. It has been years, but I remember Set well. You are not Set.”
“But I am,” he hissed.
Panahasi approached, his staff clacking against the marble so sharp and loud that Set thought the stone tiles might shatter. The far, high dust whorls shuddered with each strike. The old priest squinted at Set. As he did, his forehead furrowed and his ears tipped forward. He looked even more like one of the monkeys, one of the chimps from the jungle.
“Your ears are like a giraffe’s,” Panahasi said. “And your snout is an aardvark’s snout.”
“You do not see beneath my robes.”
“What is there?”
“I am a jackal,” Set said. “An animal.”
Panahasi’s face burst in surprise.
“A demon!” the priest shouted.
“No,” Set whispered.
“Prove it. Tell me something that only Set would know.”
Set thought for a moment—a moment too long, he feared. Panahasi would strike him with that holy staff and send him to the floor, to the cold tiles. Set looked at the floor and thought he saw his reflection, the image of his monstrous transformation, in the infinite black depth of that marble. Indeed, he was a strange beast. He was many animals. He had once been a striking man.
“My brother Osiris once lost a race for me.”
“Doubtful,” Panahasi said, looking into the sky. “He was a fast boy. No one would believe that he could lose.”
“He was fast,” Set agreed. “But you should remember this. He was winning. There were ten of us on the racecourse. I tripped and Osiris turned to help me. I pulled him to the ground and ran ahead. Another boy had already won, but I pulled my brother down as he helped me, just to beat him. You said, ‘Set, why did you do that? You are an animal.’”
Panahasi hummed and nodded.
“You felt the back of my head,” Set continued. “You said that I had a bump at the base of my skull. And you said that was a sure sign that I was descended from beasts that our grandfathers’ grandfathers had killed and eaten when the jungles receded and the Nile wound up from the sea.”
The priest looked at him, boring a sharp gaze from tight black pupils right into Set’s forehead.
“I remember. I also remember that your brother nevertheless mastered a beast that day. Tell me what it was.”
“A ram stood on the ridge over the racecourse. It kicked and stomped like it was going to charge us. Osiris climbed the ridge and wrestled the ram to the ground. He broke the ram’s neck with his own hands.”
“Yes,” the priest said. “You are Set. I see it now. What has happened to you?”
“I do not know.”
“Your brother is dead, you know. King Osiris is dead.”
“I killed him, Panahasi. I have come to see my mother. I have something for her.”
5
Osiris had presided over a tyranny of benevolence. Set considered this as he walked the bank of the Nile, his feet sinking into the black mud and leaving dog tracks with the gait of a man. Osiris and Isis had created opportunity and abundance, as if the very power of their breath, some tingling magic that rose from the delta of their chests, fell to the land like magic seed, like powerful dust from the sun itself.
Set knew that it had been his duty to kill his brother.
To win, to lose—this was the order of things. Gods ruled it. The wilderness preserved it day in and day out, for the lion and the beetle and everything in between. No king or queen could deny it. No edict could forbid it.
“We are sport for the gods,” Set said to himself. “Most of us are meant to suffer.”
The royal couple had even approached their station with a nauseating humility. They wore simple clothes and eschewed the entourages and riches of their fathers and grandfathers. Osiris dismantled the great memorials, using the stone for aqueducts to carry fresh, sweet water from sparkling pools in the hills to the slums of the cities, where the Nile was a muddy and diseased thing. He did much of this work with his own hands, standing beside the workers and slaves. He ordered the witches to cease their explorations into potions and curses, and instead charged them to learn the magic of the seed and flood. The priests turned from royal astrology to intense study of the clockwork of the harvest that Osiris insisted the gods had scribed into the stars. Isis was mother to all. Peasant mothers spoke of Isis offering her breast to their children. Though it was a figure of speech, the dirty crones had such a look in their eyes that Set believed they had seen the poor, toothless children of the desert suckling in the arms of the queen. That milk cured all disease and sated all hunger.
Set reached the broken column, a monument to some ancient tyrant. A short walk from this, and Set was on the edge of the racecourse. This was a simple thing, a rough track worn into the dirt. Nothing would grow here. Some said it had been the sight of devilish massacre. The legend was that soldiers had killed thousands of escaping slaves. The children of Ombos still raced here. They had raced three decades earlier, when Set and Osiris were children.
Osiris had once been the king of this course, and nothing more.
Three young boys now ran the course, kicking clouds of dust into the air behind them. One boy lagged far behind the other two. And the leader, a tall and thin boy with sandy hair and foreign eyes that were slightly too far apart, like the eyes of Osiris, stopped and turned to help the fat, far boy at the end of the line. Set licked his lips and groaned. It was disgusting. Here, this boy—he could win, but he refused.
It had been nothing to kill Osiris. And then nothing to dismember him. What would it take, he wondered, to kill this kind boy? The legend, the ghosts of shrieking slaves, vibrated through the sand and sent red clouds to the sky. It would be nothing. A twist of the boy’s neck, and that would be all.
Set opened his robe and threw back his cowl. He walked onto the course and made straight for the boys. The fat boy was still on the ground, clutching his ankle. Where, Set wondered, was the strategy in this? The trickery? The fat boy was no hunter, no beast. He did not take advantage of his comrade’s compassion.
Set was growling. His voice rolled in his throat and broke now and then into yelps. The three boys turned to see him and froze. Their eyes widened in horror. The kind boy lifted his fallen companion and tried to escape, pulling the fat boy through clumsy steps. The third boy was already far gone. Set was now close to the lagging pair. He could smell their musk and hear their quickened hearts. He could sense their tracks around the course, around and around. As he felt and saw all of this, as he heard their footfalls in the track and, now, in the softer ground at the foot of the ridge as they retreated, his hunger spiked. Drool fell in glistening strands from the corners of his long mouth.
So close, now—Set could smell their panic.
The fat boy dipped, took a rock and threw it. The stone hit Set square in the forehead. Set’s vision shuddered and he stumbled for a moment. He lost the boys in explosions of color and light. Shapes spiraled in sickening swirls. Set rubbed his eyes with the backs of his paws. He tried to stand still, but the ground seemed to move and swell beneath him. He was then on his knees, rocking and swaying like a cultist worshipping the desert moonlight.
The kind boy pushed his fat friend forward, then stopped and turned.
“You are a fool,” Set said. “You would stop to help me?”
But the kind boy did not hear, or perhaps did hear, and turned to run, to guide his friend to safety.
So, Set thought. He had failed to save the world from another Osiris.
5
“Your mother’s to
mb,” Panahasi said. The priest was leaning against a column, gesturing toward a cave. Inside, a sealed stone door displayed fine, colorful paintings of Set’s mother and father, Nut and Geb. Beneath both likenesses, ages of priests and family had left sacrifices for the couple’s nourishment in the afterlife. Wilted flowers and rotten food baked in the heat. Blue flies buzzed about this carrion.
“I have news,” the priest said. “Do you wish to hear it?”
Set said nothing, but grunted as he passed through the first pair of columns at the head of the colonnade that led to the cave. Panahasi turned and walked behind Set.
“You no longer hide yourself,” Panahasi said. “You are quite a mystery. Quite a demon.”
“Children ran from me,” Set said.
“I do not doubt it.”
“But I had tried to kill them.”
“They escaped?” Panahasi asked. “That is good for them.”
Set snarled. Osiris was dead, but it was little consolation for this latest defeat on the racecourse.
“What is that bundle you carry?” the priest asked.
“A gift for my mother.”
The two walked in the gravel for several steps, their feet crunching. The sharpness of that sound spiked in Set’s head, in the knot at the front where the stone had hit.
“Do you want to hear my news?” Panahasi asked. He spoke loudly, as if to the sky and hills rather than to Set.
“No.”
“Isis is with child.”
Set stopped. He looked at the bundle in his left hand, and then at the priest.
“It is not possible,” Set said.
“You see,” Panahasi said. “I have now heard all about it. I have heard how you poisoned your brother and set him adrift on the Nile in a coffin made to his exact size. I have heard how you transformed into an animal. Tell me, though. How did Osiris come to be maimed?”
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