Anuket

The Weight in the Boat

The boat would not rise with the river.

Anuket felt its keel scrape the granite beneath Sehel, felt the small, stubborn weight pressing into the stone while the water climbed around it. Baskets floated past. A folded sleeping mat struck the stern and disappeared underneath. In the boat, a child kept dipping a bowl into the dark water gathering around his ankles.

“Over the side,” the woman at the steering oar told him. “Not into your grandmother’s basket.”

“I know.”

“Then do it.”

She had tied her skirt above her knees. Blood from a split fingernail made a thin red track across the oar. Anuket knew her: the girl who used to run along the sanctuary terrace with stolen dates in her cheeks, grown now into the woman who brought people across the river. Her name was Tia.

Anuket stepped onto the rock beside the boat.

“Why is your stern so deep?”

Tia turned. Her mouth opened, but the boat grated again and she threw her weight against the oar.

“Help me push.”

Anuket put a hand beneath the gunwale. Under her palm she could feel the cargo through the wood: blankets, a jar of grain, six frightened people, and something much heavier lying along the bottom.

“Show me.”

Tia pulled back a mat.

The goddess looked at her own stone face.

They had wrapped the sanctuary image in linen and lashed it to two poles. Its painted eyes stared upward. One feather of the headdress had broken during the carrying; someone had carefully tucked the piece into the crook of its arm.

“The lower houses were empty,” Tia said. “We had room.”

“Until you came onto this ledge.”

“The channel was open when we started.”

It had been. Anuket could feel where the rising Nile had covered the familiar rocks and made a false stretch of smooth water above them. Beyond the boat, the true channel ran white between two black shoulders of granite. It carried branches northward so quickly that they seemed to vanish between one glance and the next.

Tia looked from the stone face to the woman beside her.

“My lady?”

“Move everyone forward.”

The old woman crawled past the grain jar. A man with a bandaged foot dragged himself after her. Tia caught the child by the back of his shirt and set him between their knees.

Anuket lifted the water under the stern.

The keel came free.

For a moment the boat rocked easily beneath her hand. Then the current caught its side. The bow swung toward the white channel; the stern slammed against the rock. Tia fell across the steering oar, and the grain jar rolled onto the bandaged man’s leg.

He cried out. The child dropped his bowl.

Anuket caught the boat before it turned broadside. Water climbed the hull, pressed against her wrist, and stopped there, trembling.

Behind her, the Nile began to pile up.

The Narrow Place

“Leave the image,” Anuket said.

Tia knelt beside the lashings. “We can pull it onto the rock.”

“Not before this water takes you.”

“It has stood there since my grandmother’s grandmother.”

The woman in the bow made a small sound.

Tia glanced back at her. “Since before that, then.”

Anuket kept her hand against the hull. Around Sehel she could feel the river dividing, shouldering through its many narrow passages. She had checked only this one arm of it, but the pressure was already spreading upstream. A reed fence leaned, shuddered, and disappeared. Water slipped over the first step of a house where two men were carrying bedding onto the roof.

Farther north, beyond the cataract, the fields waited for this same water. Their dry channels would carry it between the ridges; its silt would darken the earth. She could not hold it here until the people in one boat had finished saying farewell.

“Tia. Cut the ropes.”

The woman drew a small knife from her belt. She slipped it under a lashing, then stopped with the blade resting against the cord.

“My mother washed its face every morning.”

Anuket remembered the cool cloth. The old woman had always begun at the forehead and worked downward, taking care around the painted eyes. On mornings when the cloth came away clean, she washed the face again anyway.

“She did.”

“She made me promise.”

“What did she ask?”

Tia’s grip tightened on the knife. “That I would take care of you.”

The river struck the hull hard enough to shake them both. Anuket spread her fingers against the wood. Behind Tia, the bandaged man had shut his eyes. The grain jar still pinned his leg; his wife was trying to move it without upsetting the boat.

Anuket looked toward her sanctuary.

The low terrace lay just above the swelling water. Its retaining stones filled a cleft between two outcrops. Beyond it, an old, dry channel sloped around the island and rejoined the river below the dangerous rocks. The little shrine stood directly across that channel, its doorway facing the landing.

She had known the cleft before the terrace was built. She remembered water running there.

Tia followed her gaze.

“The steps,” she said. “If we could reach the steps, we could lift it out.”

Anuket felt the pressure under the terrace. Water was already finding the seams between its stones.

“No. That is where you must pass.”

Tia stared at the doorway, too narrow even for the boat’s bow.

Anuket took her free hand from the rock and pushed it into the rising water. Beneath the terrace she found the lowest retaining stone, broad and carefully fitted. The people who had set it there had worked for three days to make it sit level. She remembered their satisfaction when it finally settled.

She pressed against its underside.

A crack ran through the terrace. Dust fell from the shrine lintel.

“You will break your house,” Tia whispered.

“Yes.”

What the River Carried

The first stone shifted. A black tongue of water thrust through the gap and struck the dry channel beyond. It carried sand, then gravel, then the little clay lamps that had been left along the sanctuary steps.

Anuket widened the opening.

The river pulled at the boat. Its bow turned toward the terrace, and Tia scrambled back to the oar.

“Everyone down,” she said.

The child reached for his bowl. His grandmother caught him around the waist before he could crawl beneath the crowded seat.

Anuket lifted the water beneath the boat again, slowly this time, feeling the weight move above the ledge. She eased the stern around until the bow pointed into the opening. The shrine wall stood ahead of them, white plaster darkening from the bottom upward.

“Cut it loose now.”

Tia wedged the steering oar beneath her arm and bent over the statue. She sawed through the first rope. Its severed ends leaped apart.

The image slid an inch.

“Together,” she told the others.

The man with the bandaged foot pushed the grain jar away and reached down. His wife took the other end of the carrying poles. They heaved. The stone face tipped toward the gunwale, and for an instant Anuket saw the sky reflected in one polished eye.

Then the second lashing drew tight.

It had caught beneath a seat.

The boat tilted. Water poured over the side, knocking the knife from Tia’s hand. The child screamed as his grandmother slipped backward.

Tia caught the old woman’s wrist.

The statue hung half over the gunwale. Its weight dragged the boat lower, and the trapped rope creaked under the strain. Tia looked down at the knife, shining beneath the water in the bottom of the boat, then at the fingers sliding through her own.

She pulled her grandmother upright and shoved her toward the bow.

“Hold her.”

The child flung both arms around the old woman.

Anuket pressed her shoulder against the hull. The surge behind her rose, heavy with uprooted reeds. On the bank, one of the men on the roof was reaching down for someone she could no longer see.

She could hold the boat or check the water. Soon she could not do both.

“Tia.”

“I have it.”

The woman had gone onto her knees. She plunged one arm beneath the seat, found the knife, and brought it up with the point turned toward her own chest. There was no room to saw from above. She pushed her hand down again and worked the edge against the underside of the rope.

One strand parted.

The shrine wall bulged. Anuket drove her palm beneath the terrace stone and turned it.

The wall fell outward into the old channel.

The noise struck the boat like a blow. Tia flinched; the knife scraped her knuckles. She put her other hand over the first and pulled the blade hard against the cord.

The rope broke.

Anuket’s stone image rolled into the Nile. A carrying pole struck the side of the boat and snapped. The painted face went under without turning, and the freed hull sprang upward so sharply that Tia fell against the seat.

Anuket let the held water go.

It rushed through the broken terrace, lifted the boat over the fallen wall, and carried it into the channel beyond. Tia seized the oar. The stern slewed toward a jagged stone; she thrust the blade against it and pushed until the wood bent.

The boat swung clear.

Anuket moved with the current beneath it. She felt every scrape of the keel, the quick shift of a passenger’s weight, the empty space where her image had lain. The boat dropped through the last shallow rush and slid into quieter water below the island.

Tia kept rowing. She did not look back until the bow touched the bank.

Bare Stone

By dawn, the old channel ran brown and full.

Nothing remained of the shrine wall above the water. A strip of white plaster turned slowly in an eddy, coming close to the bank and slipping away again. Anuket stood on the rock where the sanctuary steps had begun.

Tia climbed toward her carrying the child’s bowl.

The cut across her knuckles had dried. One of her sandals was gone. She stopped below the rock and looked into the water for a long time.

“I thought it might wash ashore,” she said.

Anuket watched a small branch turn in the eddy and pass through.

“It was heavy.”

Tia nodded. She rubbed her thumb over a chip in the bowl’s rim.

“We are all on the bank.”

“I know.”

“The man can stand. His wife says he will complain for a month.”

“Only a month?”

Tia gave a short, unsteady laugh. Then she knelt, filled the bowl from the river, and climbed the last step that remained.

There was no offering table. She set the water on the bare rock beside Anuket’s feet.

Below them, someone called for the ferrywoman. Tia turned toward the sound. She waited until the voice called again, then went down to her boat.

Anuket lifted the bowl. The water was cool, and a little sand settled against her fingers.