Qebhet (coolwaters) wrote in nevermore_past, @ 2021-09-04 02:13:00 |
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Once, you were called goddess. The people of the great River came first. It was they who saw the shimmer of your scales in the sweep of the night sky above, they who named you for the cool waters of the Iteru below. With their hearts and their voices, they spoke you into life. Midnight-dark and galaxy-bright, you uncoiled yourself (your body, which is the arched belly of your mother’s mother’s mother, which is the life-giving milk of the Celestial Nurse, for you have never been a goddess who stands apart) and you saw them, these people who called you Lady, these people who bathed their dead tenderly and wrapped them in clean linen and swathed them in charms and in blessings, all in the hope that they would not go alone into the dark, that they would find their way to a place without strife. And seeing this, how could you not love them? So when they called your name, you answered. In the silence of the vigil and the chill of the tomb and the dread anticipation of the final judgement, you came to them with cool waters and gentle words. You came to them, the living and the dead (for in that land of the great River, the divide was never so sharp, each side enriching the other), and you soothed what you could. You were the embalming, sacred science and subtle magic, salt and oil and wine to purify and restore, and by your ministrations the souls of the dead would awake. No longer. Now the sealed tombs are pried open, the grave goods interred with such love are riches for the plundering. The dead can protest not; once vibrant souls, now all that remains are bones and desiccated flesh. And you? You are but six pictograms sliced into stone, their significance lost entirely to the shifting desert sands and the tides of empire. Gods, they say, are undying, but you, 𓏘𓃀𓎛𓏁𓅱𓏏… lacking mortal eyes to perceive the language in those carvings and mortal voices to speak meaning into your word, there is nothing left for you but the heavy oblivion of sleep. So it is for fifteen hundred years. The waking is a slow, disoriented thing. It starts with voices in the tomb, with boots stirring up the dust in chambers where no living thing should walk. It starts with hands that snatch and tools that defile, with sarcophagi split open and tablets pried from walls. You feel it, this violation, and your drowsing soul shudders without knowing even why. Soul is not quite the word. A soul, as the people of the River knew, is many component parts: it is thought and emotion, memory and name, shape and shadow. You had these things once, but they, like the people of the River, were swallowed by time. You are ka alone now, awareness without purpose, creation without form. So you know not why you tremble at these sweaty, pink-faced men with their loud voices and acquisitive eyes, only that there is a wrongness here, and you shrink from their presence. Too late for that. When they carry the tablets and grave goods from the tombs, they carry your six pictograms with them. You are already a spoil. Awareness seeps back in disjointed snatches. Creaking boards and close, fetid air. A sense of jostling, movement. Voices, foreign, excited. The same word repeated over and over: antiquités. Then: Stone walls. Windowless chambers. Crates packed close. Shelves upon shelves of statuary and sarcophagi. It comes to you in your half-awake state that you have been transplanted to another tomb. Here, though, the halls are never silent. Here, there is the tramping of feet and the murmur of voices and again, again, those snatching hands, prying open canopic jars and tugging loose funerary wrappings, etching their marks of ownership into wood and stone and ceramic. They are so casual, so unwitting in their violence. Lacking even a voice with which to cry out, you sink deep into the fine carvings of a sarcophagus wall and you wait, tense and watchful. More men come. Some remain only a short time to tut and marvel over the antiquités. (They turn the amulets over in their hands and trail their fingertips along the sarcophagus lids, and in this, too, there is a cloying sense of ownership.) Others linger, sometimes hours at a time, poring over inscriptions, pausing regularly to consult the volumes kept close to hand or to scrawl notes of their own. One man hunches close over a crumbling papyrus, brow straining, spectacles slipping down his nose as he mouths each glyph’s sound one by one. They all struggle with the language, stumbling tongues and uncertain pronunciation, but each spoken word casts a ripple that stirs your fragmentary spirit and calls it closer. The man’s pencil works and the sentence takes form: ỉnk śꜣtꜣ ꜣw rnpwt śḏr mśw rʿ nb. He stops there, pushes up his spectacles, taps the tip of the pencil against his chin, then begins a second line beneath the first. Je suis le serpent… Foreign glyphs and sounds, and you should not comprehend and yet you do, and the understanding surges through you with a thrill of elation. Oui! You cannot shout, but that doesn’t stop you from trying. Oui, c'est moi, oui! Je suis le serpent! Stray dust motes waver in the air, stirred up by your excitement. The man doesn’t raise his head, and yet you cannot but wonder. Could he have felt it, too, this studious mortal with the pinched brow and round spectacles? Did he taste the heka on his tongue, did he feel the soft weight of the incantation in his mouth? Does he know how those words call to your fragmentary soul? I am the serpent, the verse reads. I am the serpent, long in years, I pass the night and am reborn each day. Long after the man has packed up his work for the day, you linger in the small study and you repeat those words to yourself, first in your own tongue and then in his, and the truth of it is warm as the desert sun soaking into midnight-dark scales. I am the serpent. I am the serpent. No sunlight reaches these rooms. You’ve learned to mark the cycle of night and day by the rise and fall of activity, by the slap of shoes and the slamming of doors and the murmur of conversation. There have been many days – months? longer? Enough, at least, that you’ve come to recognise the men who come and go from the musée. (Which is the name for the treasure house where they exhibit your people’s grave goods. You think you can grasp a little now why they celebrate these sacred things as antiquités. The musée, you’ve learned, is one of the oldest palaces in this land. It is barely six centuries old.) You can tell, now, the resident Égyptologues, like the man with the spectacles, from the visiting scholars and the men who come only to admire things of wealth and beauty. This one today, he is a visitor. He walks through the door with long hair flopping into his eyes and a satchel filled with sheaves of a paper that soon are spilling out across a work bench: hand written notes and transcriptions in hieroglyphs and in French and in some other language that eludes your understanding. He is all excited energy, this man, riffling through his notes as he works, snatching up this or that page to compare against the papyrus laid out on the table opposite. You like the ones who talk to themselves while they work. It’s almost like having a real conversation. This one mutters and mumbles, testing new words on his tongue as he comes upon them. “Ikhem-sek?” He trips on the second syllable, blinks, tries again. “Ikhem-sek.” And, satisfied, he leans over his work again— another quick notation, a dawning thought, and then he’s back to pawing through his notes, tutting and chiding his own disorganisation, and your laughter quivers through the frayed edges of the papyrus. Then: “Qébéhout.” If the other words were mere ripples, this one sweeps through you like a monsoon that causes the River to engulf its banks. It’s instant and it’s overwhelming and if you had eyes to weep, you’d be flooded with tears. It’s you. 𓏘𓃀𓎛𓏁𓅱𓏏. Qébéhout. Six pictograms, unintelligible to most, but with a mortal voice to breathe it to life— Oh. Your broken soul swells and you feel it, your ren, feel it sing through you, cool and clear as libation waters. You have a name. Qébéhout. She of ḳbḥw, the cool waters, the libation vessel; ḳbḥ the promise of purification and cleansing, wt the hint of fresh linen bindings. A name, and within a name, identity, purpose, a core of being that lives apart from conscious thought or even memory: that is ren, and it is beautiful. Qébéhout. Your voice this time is a puff of air that lifts the edge of the papyrus and sends the fragments sliding along the desk. The man lunges for them, cursing drafty old palaces, and you laugh again. I am Qébéhout. Where ren returned in a torrent, ab and ba trickle back slower. You cannot say for certain when first you sensed the brush of feathers, only that each passing day the wingbeats feel closer, and each passing day thought and memory flow clearer. The floppy-haired scholar leaves, and you are sorry for the loss of companionship, one-sided as it was. When he returns (days? years?) later, it is with a more respectable haircut and a leather-bound volume of translations (his own, so you learn). He talks at animated length with the bespectacled man about a planned expedition to the Saqqara necropolis and the local guide who has a credible lead on the whereabouts an untouched tomb in the region. The man with the spectacles laughs, not unkindly. “Dear boy, every Arab with half an enterprising mind has ‘reliable information’ of an untouched tomb. No, no, I don’t mean to put you off, but careful as you go or you’ll find yourself being held to ransom by Berbers!” “He comes recommended,” the scholar argues. “He’s no common thief.” The man with the spectacles offers a mild shrug, palms spread wide. “Well then, think on this. If your fellow is so sure of his information, why does he need you at all? The gold alone would buy him a fortune.” “They’re superstitious.” “Or swindlers.” The man shakes his head. “No, my friend, much as we all might wish it, I fear you are chasing a dream. The pyramids are all long-plundered.” The book joins a rapidly expanding collection of volumes. Description de l’Egypte and Grammaire égyptienne and Das Altägyptische Totenbuch— with every expedition that goes out and every artefact that comes back, the library grows and so does your sense of yourself. Long-plundered, all of them. Could it truly be so? Sacred sites of rest and resurrection, every single one, ripped apart for the sake of wealth and— and antiquité. You know your ab has come home to you in this moment, because even without a body you feel your heart squeeze tight. This is the cost of your waking. All those souls. All those people who came to you in fear and in need. They were supposed to live forever among the reeds, and now— Sun and stars, you promised them peace, now their destruction brings you life! Your soul weeps, and your heart weighs heavier than a feather. You begin to wander. Solid form still eludes you, but the nights here are thick with shadows, and you find it is easier than you expect to call your own to you. (You are getting stronger, and the knowledge of this suffuses you with a blend of hope and horror. Antiquités are a popular commodity.) It comes, flowing from the spout of a pitcher and the crevices of a coffin, rivulets of dark that pool and lengthen into something small and serpentine: shuyet, your shadow. Another piece of your soul returned. The palace is beautiful, even at night. The Musée Égyptien is but four rooms of dozens, maybe hundreds (you lose count almost immediately amid the ornamented ceilings and the marble sculpture and the intricate model sailing vessels). It is the biggest building you’ve ever been in. More than anything, it is the paintings that draw you in. Desperate sailors cling to a storm-buffeted wreck; brightly-garbed people feast in a marble palace; a fond mother reaches for an infant determined to play with a lamb. There are stories here, mortal stories. Not the ones you know, and yet… and yet. The anguish in the dying men’s faces. The love in the mother’s eyes. The stories elude you. The painters, their lands, even their gods are strangers to you, but gazing on their works, you understand two things about them: they know suffering, and they know love. For the first time, you begin to wonder about the world beyond the musée. And then there comes a night when a great tiredness steals over you. You are bodiless still, your shadow-form needs no food or warmth or sleep to sustain it, and yet you find yourself craving all of these things, and all at once the cold stone walls of the collection storage room are intolerable to you. The man with the spectacles keeps an office upstairs. He retreats there sometimes in the evenings after the other men have left. You have watched him at his desk, taking puffs of his pipe as he labours over a translation or reads over correspondence. Occasionally he will tip his head right back and a great weary sigh will issue forth, and you can only wonder at what he might be thinking. The man is not there tonight, but he is not long gone. The embers in the fireplace still carry a dying glow, and the warmth carries to the thick hearthside rug. It is the perfect place for a little shadow-snake to coil up and sleep. Khat, the final remaining piece. Khat, the anchor, the soul made manifest in the world. You have spent so long able only to watch and to listen, you had forgotten what it was to touch. The first breath overpowers everything. It tastes of stale tobacco and dust and some sharp chemical you cannot place, but it’s more than that, so much more. It’s the warm lifebreath from Meskhenet’s lips, it’s the cool dry winds of Shu and it’s Tefnut’s moist monsoon breezes; it is life, expanding your lungs and fizzing through your veins and prickling the hairs on your skin (you have lungs! you have skin!), it’s the rush of coming home after a long absence. You don’t know how long you spend just breathing, glorying in the rise and fall of your chest, relearning the rhythm of your beating heart. You feel the waft of cold air across your thighs and back, but it’s one sensation among so very many (plush carpet itching against bare skin the heavy creak of floorboards the pins-and-needles tickle in your fingertips the smell of charred wood and burnt tobacco the growl of your empty stomach the tick-tock-tick-tock of the mantel clock your tongue sweeping out to moisten your dry lips) and it is only at the sound of a throat being awkwardly cleared that you open your eyes. It’s the scholar who stands in the doorway, he of the formerly floppy hair and the eager erratic notes, and it strikes you through your daze what a strange and fitting thing that is, that the one who first spoke your name awake in this place is the one that should greet you now. Then you become aware that he is staring, and trying very much not to show it, and that you are entirely naked. You fumble for the edges of the rug, clumsy in your new body. The rug is stiff and awkward to handle (or perhaps you are stiff and awkward in your handling) and you struggle to wrap it around you. “Please, Monsieur.” Your French is fluid, because it is the language that dreamed you back to waking, but it is accented, because the people dreamed you Other. “Please, would you help me?” And, moved by the memory of his companionship, unknowing though it was, you add, “My name is Qébéhout.” The scholar’s throat works, confusion skating across his features. His eyes flick to the bare curve of your shoulders and dart just as quickly away and he shakes his head with an embarrassed smile. “Mademoiselle Qébéhout. Forgive me my shock; of course I will help. Let us start by finding you some clothing.” And then. And then. Oh, merciful stars, the casual violence of it. The acquisitive eyes, the hands that snatch. To them, you were always a spoil. I am the serpent, long in years, I pass the night and am reborn each day. I am the serpent, long in years, I pass the night and am reborn each day. I am the serpent, long in years, I pass the night and am reborn each day. I am— I— Anpu, Lord of the Hallowed Land, help me! Nebt-het, Mistress of the Oasis, help me! Nut, Mother of Gods, help me! Please— PLEASE— You still weep for him when Ammit tears his beating heart from his chest. Isn’t that foolish? It is two nights later when the Devourer tears the apartment door from its hinges. Your father stalks behind, radiating cold fury, vengeful as you’ve never seen him. The Guardian of the Scales is known to be impartial in judgement. Not this night. Those grabbing hands are bruised into your flesh, dark handprints staining your upper arms, your jaw. (You’ll see them in the mirror later, and when you do you will think of the men in the musée, how they carved their marks of ownership into each pillaged amulet and vase.) You fall against Father Anpu’s chest with a cry and his arms close around you, solid and merciful and protective as the walls of a tomb. There is no reason to look back. But you do. The man’s voice — panicked, begging — falls silent with a wet crack and a lifeless thump and, knowing already what you’ll see, you turn. Ammit snaps the heart down in two derisive bites, and the scream that it makes is one no mortal ears can hear, the scream of a soul being eaten alive. It’s then that the broken sob rips from your chest. “It’s over, nedjmet,” your father promises. “You are safe now. You are safe.” Later, you will believe this. In this moment all you can feel is the heart-scream and the awful knowledge that yet one more soul has been destroyed so that yours may go free. |