Bastet

The man at the steering oar swallowed, and an eye opened beneath the skin of his throat.

Bastet saw it from the quay. Around her, women were shaking rattles at a boatload of men who had composed a song about the local beer. It was a poor song. The women were improving it by shouting different words, and the boatmen, delighted, were trying to sing both versions at once.

The eye blinked.

For a moment its light showed the bones of the steersman’s jaw. He pressed his fingers to his neck, glanced at the people sitting around his feet, and swallowed again.

Bastet stopped laughing.

She had felt the theft before dawn: a sharp absence, like a tooth torn from the world’s mouth. Seth had taken the Udjat Eye, and every waterway out of Bubastis had become a possible road for him. She had searched the empty boats first. Now she understood why she had found nothing.

The steersman was reaching for the mooring rope.

She stepped from the quay onto his ferry.

It carried wine jars, bundles of onions, a drummer with a split lip, and more people than its owner had ever intended. A woman near the stern moved her basket to make room for Bastet. Then she looked up into the goddess’s face, and her hands stopped.

“Keep singing,” Bastet said.

The woman made a small, obedient sound.

“That is scarcely a song.”

“I have forgotten the words.”

“So have they.” Bastet nodded toward the neighboring boat. “It has not troubled them.”

The woman gave a startled breath of laughter. At the steering oar, the man’s throat tightened.

Bastet watched it.

“What is your name?” she asked him.

“Dedu.” His answer scraped. “Lady, I cannot—”

His mouth stayed open. A different voice came out of it, dry and comfortable.

“You may go ashore again, sister.”

Seth.

The ferryman’s eyes filled with tears. He tried to shut his mouth. The tendons stood out in his neck, but his jaw would not move.

Bastet laid one hand on the gunwale. “Come out.”

“And disappoint all these people? They have paid for their crossing.”

Beneath Dedu’s skin, the stolen Eye turned toward her.

She could split the throat and catch it before it fell. Seth knew it. He made the man lift his chin, offering the soft place below the jaw.

The woman with the basket rose.

“Sit down, Tia,” Dedu whispered in his own voice.

“You said your throat was better.”

“It was.”

His hand snatched a knife from his belt and cut the mooring.

The ferry swung away from the quay.

The crowded boat

Bastet caught the severed rope before it slipped into the water. For one breath she held the boat against the current. The passengers pitched forward. Someone caught a wine jar between his knees; someone else grabbed a stranger’s braid.

Dedu’s chest stopped moving.

“Pull us back,” Seth said, “and I shall keep the breath.”

Bastet looked at the ferryman. His lips were already darkening. He could not even gasp.

She let the rope run through her hand.

He dragged in air so violently that Tia flinched.

The current took them between two larger boats. Their passengers were still singing. A man raised his cup toward Bastet, saw her expression, and slowly lowered it.

Dedu’s hand pushed the steering oar. The ferry turned toward a narrow side channel.

Beyond that channel stood a low stone bridge. Beyond the bridge, the water divided among the fields. A small boat could be lost there among reeds and irrigation cuts before anyone on the quay understood what had happened.

Bastet moved toward the stern.

The lioness rose in her shoulders before she had chosen it. Her hands broadened against the planks. The air filled with the hot smell of her mane-less pelt, and the nearest passengers flattened themselves away from her teeth.

Dedu fell to his knees. There was no place for him to retreat.

Under Bastet’s forepaw, a plank cracked.

Water sprang through it.

A wine jar rolled, striking a woman’s ankle. The boat tipped. The people on the lower side lurched together, and the river came over the edge in a flat brown sheet.

“Stay still!” Tia cried.

She had caught the injured woman by the upper arm. Her other hand clung to the gunwale. Behind her, a young man was trying to climb onto a heap of cargo, making the tilt worse.

Bastet drew herself inward.

The great paws narrowed. The pressure left the boards. Where the lioness had crouched stood a cat, light enough that the broken plank no longer bent beneath her.

The ferry righted with a slop of water.

Seth laughed through Dedu’s mouth.

Bastet had to wait until the last passenger stopped scrambling before she could move. She disliked that wait more than the laughter. Her city was spread along these channels, her people were close enough to touch, and he had made their very nearness a defense against her.

A hand reached down beside her. Tia was pushing a folded cloth into the crack.

“Under the seat,” Bastet told her. “There is a wooden scoop.”

Tia found it and passed it to the woman with the hurt ankle.

“Bail.”

“I cannot stand.”

“You need not stand to be useful.” Tia pressed the scoop into her hand, then looked back at the little cat. “Can he hear us?”

“He can hear you.”

“Dedu, then. Look at me.”

The ferryman’s eyes turned toward her. His mouth smiled without them.

Bastet sprang onto the cargo. She could reach his shoulder in two bounds. She could reach his mouth in three.

She did not yet know how to bring him back alive.

A borrowed voice

“Tell me what he gave you,” she said.

Dedu shook his head once, violently.

Seth made him smile wider.

“Tell her,” Tia said. “You have made a fool of yourself before. We survived it.”

The smile broke. Dedu’s lips pressed together until a thin line of blood appeared between them.

“Water,” he forced out.

His knees dragged across the boards as his hand, still caught on the oar, pulled him toward the stern.

“My voice. Gone all winter. He said—”

A cough doubled him over. Light shone through his fingers.

Bastet glanced at Tia.

“He used to sing,” the woman said. “From this quay to the next. Even when nobody paid him. Especially then.”

Seth jerked the steering oar. The ferry scraped the bank, and dry roots rattled along its side.

“Good water,” he said. “Clear water. A mouthful for a voice. He should have asked whose.”

Dedu had taken the thief into his own breath. Cutting would kill the host before it troubled the guest. Bastet watched the pulse of the Eye, then the strained movement of the man’s chest.

On the quay, Tia’s surprised laugh had made that throat contract.

She stepped along the rim of a wine jar.

“What did your brother sing?”

“Lady?”

“Before the winter.”

Tia stared at her. The bridge was visible now between the banks, its arch low and black over the water.

“He knows one about a brewer,” she said.

“Is it indecent?”

“Very.”

“Good.”

Tia tried the opening line. Her voice wavered and stopped.

Seth made Dedu strike the oar against the side of the boat.

“Be quiet.”

Bastet’s ears turned toward him.

“Again,” she told Tia.

The drummer, who had been holding his instrument above the bilge water as if it were a child, tapped its skin. Tia began again. By the second line the injured woman knew the song. She sang while bailing. At the third, the drummer supplied a word so unsuitable that Tia turned on him despite everything.

“That is not where he keeps it.”

Dedu laughed.

It was only a broken snort, cut short almost at once. But the Eye leaped upward beneath his jaw, and something dark pushed between his teeth.

Bastet lunged.

She struck his chest, hooked one forepaw into his collar, and reached for the darkness with the other.

Dedu’s head snapped back. The teeth closed a whisker’s breadth from her paw.

Seth rammed the steering oar beneath an overhanging root.

The handle tore free of Dedu’s grasp. The shaft wedged. The ferry slewed broadside to the current, and Bastet slid across the man’s shoulder as the whole vessel shuddered.

The young man on the cargo fell overboard.

For an instant she had a clear way into Dedu’s open mouth.

Then the swimmer’s hand vanished under the hull.

Bastet dropped after him.

The river closed over her ears. Below the boat, legs kicked among the hanging roots. She caught his tunic in her teeth and drove against the current, fur flattened to her body, claws finding the rough bank. Cloth tore. She caught it again higher, near his shoulder.

Hands reached from the boat. Tia seized one of his wrists. The drummer caught the other.

They dragged him aboard coughing.

Bastet climbed after him with a strip of linen still between her teeth.

At the stern, Seth was smiling.

The trapped oar broke.

The ferry swung free, sideways, toward the bridge.

Between the teeth

The arch would admit the boat lengthwise. Broadside, it would catch them against the stone and let the current do the rest.

There was no steering oar left.

Bastet looked from the bridge to the wine jars, then to the people crowded along the edges. Tia followed her glance.

“The jars?”

“Over.”

A man clutched the nearest one. “They are mine.”

“Then you may choose which goes first,” Tia said, and pushed the jar beside it into the river.

The splash broke his hesitation. He shoved the next after it. The drummer put down his drum. Three men lifted the largest jar together, grunting, and tipped it over the side. The boat rose a little. Empty space opened along its middle.

“Boards,” Bastet said. “The seats lift out.”

Dedu had managed to get both hands around his own throat. His face was swollen with the effort of holding something down. Seth wanted the mouth open now. He had the boat headed for stone; he needed only to leave it.

Bastet climbed onto the stern seat.

“Keep your brother here,” she told Tia.

“How?”

“Sing to him.”

Tia drew a breath.

“No,” Dedu whispered.

She went still.

“Not that one.” His eyes squeezed shut. “The ending is wrong.”

The drummer barked a laugh. Tia stared at her brother, then began the song once more, angrily, daring him to correct her.

Bastet climbed his chest.

He was shaking. She felt each held breath strain against his ribs. Behind her, the passengers were lowering the loose seats into the water. The boards were awkward paddles, too broad to lift cleanly; their first efforts fought one another and turned the boat the wrong way.

The bridge shadow reached the bow.

Bastet pressed her muzzle against Dedu’s cheek.

“When she reaches the last line,” she said, “let it out.”

“He will get away.”

“He will try.”

Tia’s voice rose. The drummer, working a board now, struck its wet edge against the gunwale on each beat. The others found that beat and pulled together.

The bow began to turn.

Dedu laughed at the last line.

His mouth opened, and the darkness came forward carrying the Eye.

Bastet put her paw between his teeth.

Seth bit.

Pain shot to her shoulder. Dedu’s jaw clamped on her flesh, but beyond it she felt the other mouth, the one that had taken the breath and would not surrender its stolen light. She curled her claws into that mouth.

Seth tried to recoil. She held him.

The Eye burned against her pads.

Behind her, a board split. Someone screamed that they would strike the pier.

Bastet pulled.

Darkness stretched from Dedu’s mouth like a wet cord. His body followed it, heels dragging, until Tia caught him around the waist. She braced one foot against the stern and hauled backward.

For a moment the man hung between them.

Then he vomited river water, and Seth came loose.

Bastet fell into the cleared space among the passengers. The Eye struck the planks beside her. She pinned it beneath her unwounded paw.

Above her, the torn darkness gathered shoulders.

She let the lioness rise.

This time there was room.

Her roar struck the low arch as the ferry’s bow slid beneath it. Seth recoiled from her open jaws. She drove him across the boards and over the side, into the narrowing strip of water between the hull and the stone pier.

The ferry scraped hard enough to tear a splinter from its gunwale.

Then the current caught its bow and pulled it through.

Sunlight crossed the deck.

Bastet stood over the Eye, waiting for the darkness to surface. Brown water boiled behind them. A patch of reeds flattened against the bank, though no wind touched the others.

Seth had left without his prize.

Dedu was breathing.

The return

They brought the ferry against the bank beyond the bridge. Nobody sang while they counted one another. The young man who had fallen overboard counted twice, touching each person’s shoulder with a trembling hand.

Tia made Dedu drink clean water from her own cup. He held it without swallowing until she struck his knee.

“Mine,” she said. “You know where it came from.”

He drank.

Bastet sat near the bow in her smaller shape. The recovered Eye lay in the hollow of a folded cloth. Her wounded paw rested beside it. Blood darkened the fur between the toes.

Dedu knelt before her.

“I carried him into your city.”

“Yes.”

“I cut the rope.”

“Yes.”

He looked at her paw and could find nothing else to say.

From beyond the bridge came the distant rattling of instruments. The festival had gone on without them. Dedu flinched at the sound as though it accused him.

Bastet nudged a loose seat toward him.

“You know the channels.”

He touched the edge of the board.

“The current is against us now.”

“Then you will need help.”

Tia took the other end. They carried it to the side of the boat, and the drummer found another. One by one, the passengers took their places.

Dedu gave them the first stroke.

His voice was rough. It broke on the second call, and Tia supplied the word he could not finish. On the third, the others joined her.

The ferry moved toward Bubastis, slowly, against the water.

At the bow, beside the restored Eye, Bastet tapped the rhythm with her unwounded paw.