CLOCKWORK PHOENIX 2: More Tales of Beauty and Strangeness (7 page)

Marie Brennan

For eleven years Hathirekhmet was a goddess, and then they sent her home.

She didn’t understand. They explained it to her, in patient tones just bordering on the patronizing, and she didn’t understand. They told her, again and again, right up until the moment it ended, because they had done this before and they knew the goddess never understood.

She didn’t believe them until the ceremony, when a little girl with wide, dark eyes came into the sanctum and touched her on the brow. That little girl, blessed with the seventeen signs of perfection, was Hathirekhmet now.

After eleven years, she who had been Hathirekhmet was Nefret again—and then they sent her home.

* * *

They said the woman in the wattle-and-daub house was her mother. And Nefret accepted it, numbly, as she had accepted everything since that little girl took her place.

No—not her place. Hathirekhmet’s place, and she was Hathirekhmet no more; that honor passed now to another, as it always did. They told her to be proud; eleven years was a long time. Few girls retained their perfection for so long. Most ceased to be the goddess much younger.

The woman in the house no more knew what to do with Nefret than Nefret knew what to do with herself. She introduced herself as Merentari, and the two of them embraced while the priests looked on with benevolent smiles, but it was brief and unbearably awkward. They parted, and did not touch again.

Slaves carried the priests’ litters away, and the plainer one Nefret had occupied. And that simply, the last vestige of her temple life was gone.

But casting off that life was not so easily done. “You are dusty from the road; no doubt you wish to bathe,” Merentari said, and Nefret stood dumbly, waiting for slaves to come and wash her. “I have prepared food; please, eat,” Merentari said, and Nefret stared at the spiced paste and flatcakes laid before her, the small bowl of dried figs. “You will sleep here, with me,” Merentari said, and Nefret turned her face from the straw mattress, willing herself not to cry.

Hathirekhmet did not choose her vessels according to caste. The seventeen signs of perfection could appear in the meanest hovel as easily as the imperial palace. As indeed they had, eleven years before.

Awkwardness gave way to rage quickly enough. Nefret was accustomed to luxury, servitude, and instant obedience. She did not know how to do the simplest of chores, and became furious when Merentari tried to teach her. “Wash these dishes,” Merentari said, and Nefret slapped them from her hands. “Sweep the floor,” Merentari said, and Nefret hurled the broom out the door. “Bring in more dung for the fire,” Merentari said, and Nefret fled the house.

Had her father been alive, she would have been curbed quickly enough. No woman so useless would ever be bought as a wife; she had to learn a wife’s place and a wife’s skills, soon, before age rendered her a spinster. Nefret’s father would have beaten the willfulness out of her, rather than abandon her to that fate. But he died two years after she became the goddess’ avatar. She had no memory of him, no more than she did of Merentari.

Huddled in the lee of the riverbank, out of the punishing sun and free, however briefly, of the life that now trapped her, Nefret entertained a vision of something different. The priests said this woman was her mother, but what if they lied? Surely Hathirekhmet would not have abandoned her to this, to flies and dust and fires built of dung. For eleven years Nefret had been her vessel; did that mean nothing to the goddess now?

Tears leaked from beneath Nefret’s tightly closed lids, tracking through the grime on her cheeks and falling to the thirsty earth, where they vanished without a trace.

Merentari’s younger brother found her there a short while later, and dragged her back to the house. He was not cruel, but he tolerated no resistance, and there were marks on her arm when he finally released her inside the hut. Merentari scowled, her patience worn thin by Nefret’s intransigence. “There you are. Get washed up, and quickly; we don’t want to miss this chance.”

A tub of water waited out back, and a hard-bristled brush that Merentari used to scrub Nefret clean. Her brisk ministrations were as unlike the gentle service of the slaves as the dull, repetitive food was to the feasts of the temple, but it did the work; Nefret was as clean as she’d been since coming to this place she refused to call home. Her mahogany skin glowed, and Merentari scraped her thick hair back into two braids so tight they made Nefret’s head ache. Instead of Merentari’s cast-off clothing, she wore a thin robe she had never seen before, plain, but neatly pleated, and of good linen.

When Nefret was clean and dressed, Merentari took her roughly by the chin and forced the girl to look at her. Taller than this woman they said was her mother, Nefret felt calm superiority envelop her. She might be in exile, but she still had her pride.

“You keep your mouth shut, except when he asks you a question,” Merentari said. “You be polite and meek. This might be your one chance at any kind of future, girl. If you spit on this, you’ll end your days as a beggar in the streets. Understand?”

Nefret did not, but she learned quickly enough. A man came to inspect her—Nefret’s mind would not let go of that word.
Inspect
, as a temple servant might inspect a cow offered for sacrifice. There were men, it seemed, who would pay a good bride-price for a woman who was once a goddess, men interested enough in prestige that they did not care how bad a wife they bought.

Nefret kept her mouth shut, but not for the reasons her mother might have wished. She thought she might be sick. Reduced to this, after the life she had lived: bought and sold, like livestock.

The man did not speak to her at all, questions or otherwise. When his inspection was done, he turned to Merentari. “Can she cook? Weave? Sew?”

Lying was not among Merentari’s talents. Her hesitation was answer enough.

“I didn’t expect it,” the man said. His own robe was finely woven, with azure embroidery along the edge. Such as he would have some servants, possibly even slaves. Wealth, by the standards of this hovel. “Teach her basic domestic duties. If she passes muster by flood-time, I’ll buy her.”

Merentari’s weathered face showed gratitude that bordered on fawning. She was not old, but hard work had aged her young. Beauty was a luxury few peasants could afford. “Yes, noble one. Thank you. I will make sure she learns.”

When the wealthy man was gone, Merentari turned to her daughter. “You
will
learn. Or you will starve.”

* * *

In the dark hours before dawn, when Nefret so frequently lay awake, she knew that Merentari did not mean to make her suffer. The woman was harsh because there was no other choice; she did not want her daughter to end like this, scraping the barest existence out of the hard-packed dirt. Pity would not buy her a better future.

In the bright hours of day, Nefret hated her mother with a passion she fancied rivaled the rages of Hathirekhmet herself.

Merentari bent grimly to the task of making her daughter into a suitable wife. A thick reed from the riverbank became an all-too-familiar fixture in Merentari’s hand, laying burning lines across Nefret’s back when she rebelled. Never before had she been beaten; rarely had she even suffered pain, and then slaves had raced to bring soothing ointment, tea to numb her senses. Pride kept Nefret’s jaw clenched; she cried out the first few times, but soon forbade herself such weakness.

She tried—if only because it was a path for her to follow, and promised a life more like the one she knew. But the shuttle and thread were alien in her hands, the cook-fire smoky and foul. Other girls learned these skills from childhood, practicing them for years under their mothers’ eyes. The priests had taught Nefret all the wrong things, and then dropped her into a life for which she was wholly unprepared.

She tried, and she failed, until one day she could endure no more and ran away again, her feet this time taking her in a new direction.

Nefret smelled the market before she saw it, a confusing welter of dust and sweat, food and animal dung. She crested a rise and saw the clustered buildings, mud-brick structures huddled up against each other, with sun-bleached awnings branching out from their walls. A market was a recognizable thing to her, though this one was shabby and small. She had gone through markets before, during festival processions.

Her bare feet led her down the slope and toward the market as if of their own accord.

At first no one took notice of her. Nefret felt like a ghost, drifting down the strip of sunlight between the awnings on either side. Silent amidst the market’s clamor, she could almost believe she didn’t exist. But this was a small market; strangers were rare, and even more so strangers like her, beautiful and unweathered by a peasant’s hard life. A middle-aged woman bent to whisper to another, and then someone else pointed, and little by little, the market fell into stillness.

The stillness was broken by a young woman who hesitated at the edge of the crowd, then darted forward and flung herself facedown onto the hard-packed soil at Nefret’s feet. “Mistress of the desert winds,” she said, her voice ragged and unclear, “bless me, I beg you.”

The words struck Nefret like the chilled water the slaves had poured over her for the Ceremony of the River’s Coming. Her fingers twitched, reflexively: in learning to weave, they had not forgotten how to form the sign of blessing.

But she was not the goddess.

She ached to reach out, to make the sign above the young woman’s head, perhaps even to move her foot forward so the supplicant could kiss it. To these people, she was not Nefret, daughter of nobody; she was Hathirekhmet, the Divine Face, the Sand-Mother. Relentless and harsh as the desert and sun, but not without mercy.

But she was not Hathirekhmet. Not anymore. To bless this young woman would be blasphemy.

The magnitude of her loss gaped before her, stretching into the endless distance like the desert itself, even more barren of life.

Nefret stared down at the young woman, stricken and shaking, while the silence stretched tighter and tighter. Then she spun without a word and fled, back to the house, to weep for her loss where no one could see.

* * *

But Merentari was waiting for her there, reed switch in hand and fury on her face.

Nefret stopped dead, facing the woman in the doorway. Her mother, they said, and to deny it was childish. A peasant, whose daughter was born with the seventeen signs the priests looked for. An ordinary woman, whose ambition could rise no higher than to sell that same daughter to a man that wanted for his wife a woman who was once a goddess.

That man—she did not even know his name—wanted her for who she had been. No: for who she was now, the loss she had suffered. Hathirekhmet he feared, but Nefret he could own.

To go into his house would mean accepting that her loss was her only value now.

“I am not Hathirekhmet,” Nefret said to her mother. The words came out steady, with a deadness that could pass for calm. “But I will not sell myself as her leavings.”

Merentari’s face twisted, as she saw Nefret’s one chance—
her
one chance—withering into death. “No one else will take you!”

Nefret nodded, slowly. The logic was inescapable.

“Then no one else will have me,” she said. “I would rather be nothing than be his.”

Merentari’s expression showed that she did not understand. Nefret did not know when her mother realized the truth; by the time it happened, she had turned her back, and walked away from the hut, into the desert.

* * *

The sand burned against Nefret’s forehead and arms, scorching her body even through the cotton of her robe, cooking the flesh beneath, but she remained motionless, accepting the pain.

In the temple, there were slaves whose sole duty was to stoke the fires beneath raised platforms of sand, so the penitents above continually felt the sun’s heat against their bodies. Here, without slaves, the sand grew cool. Nefret rose and crawled sideways, then stretched out again, burning herself anew.

She did not pray. No words could express the screaming need in her heart. She did not know whether she wanted to be purified, made perfect again so she could once more be Hathirekhmet’s vessel; to deny and disfigure the flesh that had known divinity and lost it; to die, and feel this pain no more.

All of them. None of them. She did not know.

I would rather be nothing than be his.

She would rather be nothing than what she was now.

When sunset came, the sand chilled quickly. At first it was a pleasant change from the heat of the day; then it became unpleasant, and the desire for self-punishment withered. She rose and walked unsteadily to a rocky upthrust nearby, and there she found a tiny spring; she drained it in moments, then had to wait for the pool to refill. But it was enough to keep her alive.

She did not want to die.

It was more than she had known that morning.

“Very well,” Nefret said to the night sky, to the pale and envious crescent of Hathirekhmet’s younger brother. “I will live. And I will stay alive, until—”

She paused, thinking. Looking at the tiny, glittering pinpricks of the stars, cast off when the moon’s folly caused his power to explode outward and be lost.

“Until I am the goddess once more.”

* * *

They came to her refuge, there among the rocks.

She had not fled so far as to vanish. Men went out into the desert’s edge, to hunt lions, to trade with distant oases. They saw her silhouette atop a ridge, or glimpsed her hiding when they came to her tiny spring. A ragged figure, her robe sand-brown with dust, her fine black hair tangled into whips. She was far from perfect now. But Nefret could not regain the qualities she had lost—not now, when blood ran from between her legs, answering the moon’s call. If she was to be Hathirekhmet again, she would have to find another way.

So she remembered what the scriptures said about Khapep, how the holy man had survived upon the flesh of lizards and the venom of scorpions, and she learned to do the same. It was bitter fare, even as the desert was bitter, and she welcomed it.