The Isis Knot (36 page)

“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.

#

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.