Bat

The Face Against the Heart

Someone was coughing on the wrong side of Bat’s face.

She listened. Beyond the painted coffin, men were dragging a stone across the passage. Ropes creaked. A foreman called for another pull. Beneath those ordinary sounds came a small, dry cough, so close that she felt it in her teeth.

The dead king stood before her in the dark. He held a pendant against his breast with both hands. It bore her human face, her cow’s ears, her horns. On its reverse the same face lay pressed into linen stiff with resin.

“Walk with me,” he said.

Bat tried to turn her other face toward the cough. The linen tightened.

“What have you bound?”

“Nothing that is not mine.”

He had spoken sharply, as though servants were still present to hear him. Then the ropes outside groaned, and his shoulders lifted toward his ears.

“Stay where I can see you.”

Bat put her fingers beneath the cord of the pendant. The king’s hands closed over hers. His skin had the cold, yielding feel of clay left overnight beside a well.

The cough came again.

This time a child said, “Mother?”

The king looked down.

“That was not meant to happen.”

Bat pulled one hand free. With a nail she lifted the edge of the resinous linen. Through a slit no wider than a reed leaf she saw a boy’s eye.

He was pressed against darkness. Dust clung to his eyelashes.

“Do not rub your face,” she told him. “Tell me your name.”

“Hori.”

“Where is your mother, Hori?”

“She said to wait by the jars.” His eye moved, seeking a place to look beyond her. “I only wanted to see the other side.”

Bat heard footsteps leaving the chamber. Somewhere among them a woman shook a sistrum: two short rattles, a pause, then a third. The sound reached the boy, and his eye opened wide.

“That’s her.”

The slit began to close. Bat held it with the edge of her thumb.

“Keep speaking,” she said. “What happened when you touched the pendant?”

“The cloth stuck. I tried to put it back.” His breath scratched. “Don’t tell her I went near the coffin.”

“No one will punish you for coming out.”

She turned her forward face upon the king.

“Release it.”

He shook his head before she had finished.

The Last Music

During his last illness the king had watched men approach his bed from behind the curtains. Some carried medicine. Some came empty-handed and left with things hidden in their sleeves. He had heard them argue over his rings while they thought him asleep.

So he had ordered the pendant made with one face outward and the other bound against his heart. In death, at least, nothing would look away from him. Nothing would stand behind him unseen.

He told Bat this while she worked her thumb deeper beneath the binding.

“They obeyed you,” she said. “Your linen caught my other face. The boy touched it while they laid you in the coffin.”

“Then send him back.”

“Open your hands.”

“If I do, you will go with him.”

The boy’s breathing stopped for a moment. Bat felt him swallow.

She caught the pendant by its horns and pulled.

A white line sprang across its cheek. Hori cried out. The darkness behind Bat’s other face narrowed until she could feel his small shoulder crushed against her own.

She ceased pulling at once.

Outside, the sistrum sounded again. Farther away now.

“Tell her to come back,” Hori whispered.

Bat could hear the woman, but the bound face could not carry a voice into the chamber. The boy was neither lying among the jars nor standing beside the coffin. A living hand had touched a door that the king had ordered shut, and the door had taken him between its sides.

Bat lowered herself until she and the king were eye to eye.

“You have not brought a servant,” she said. “You have caught a child.”

“I did not ask for him.”

“Look.”

She moved her thumb. For a moment the narrow opening lay toward him.

The boy was holding a torn piece of his tunic over his mouth, trying not to cough. The king saw the strip of cloth rise and fall. He moved one finger away from the pendant.

A stone struck stone in the passage.

He seized it again.

“They are leaving.”

“Yes.”

“There will be no one.”

Bat had heard the words of kings beneath stone roofs before. They asked for thrones, bread, enemies laid low. This one could scarcely finish his sentence.

The musician stopped playing.

A woman’s voice called the boy’s name.

Hori pushed against Bat so suddenly that her nail slipped. The binding closed over the small opening, and the woman vanished from his hearing.

He struck the darkness with both fists.

“Mother! I’m here!”

Bat held him against the reverse of her face until his blows weakened. With her forward face she watched the king. He had shut his eyes.

“Listen to her,” Bat said.

“I can hear her.”

“Then you know what you are keeping.”

His lips moved. No answer came.

She set her palm against his breast, over the pendant, and felt the terror there: not a beating heart, but a clenched thing that would not soften.

“I will walk with you,” she said.

He opened his eyes.

“And with him?”

“With him.”

“That is two roads.”

Bat lifted her head. In the darkness above her horns, a star appeared. Then another. The king looked up, and for an instant his hands slackened at the sight of distance where he had expected a ceiling.

“I have two faces,” she said.

An Open Hand

The woman was arguing with the men at the passage. Bat could hear only pieces: the jars, the boy, the last time anyone had seen him. The foreman insisted everyone had come out.

“Ask her to play,” Hori said.

His voice was faint now.

Bat listened toward the passage. A rattle answered, brief and uneven. The woman had moved her arm while speaking.

Bat pressed a finger to the inner surface of the pendant. One of its little horns rang.

Outside, the woman fell silent.

Bat struck again: twice, then once.

The reply came immediately. Two short rattles. A pause. A third.

Hori lifted his head.

“She knows that.”

“Then follow it. Keep your hand against my cheek.”

Bat reached through the narrow place with her other face. Beyond the boy she could sense the chamber’s air, thick with lamp smoke; she could hear the brass moving on the woman’s instrument. But the linen held her still.

She looked at the king’s fingers.

“You must lift it away from your heart.”

He tried. His hands moved the width of a grain, then stopped.

Bat did not pull. The white crack still crossed her carved cheek.

The woman played again, harder. A man told her to step back from the stone. She answered with the same three beats.

“Will I see you?” the king asked.

“Yes.”

“Even if I cannot hold you?”

Bat placed his thumb against her living cheek. He felt its warmth. Under his other hand the pendant remained cold.

For a moment he held both.

Then he lifted the cold face from his breast.

The linen stretched between it and his wrappings. Resin broke with the sound of a dry seedpod. Bat caught the lifted edge before it could fall back. She tore the strip along its weave, slowly at first, while the king’s fingers trembled against her cheek.

Hori gasped. Air moved through the dark around him.

“Now,” Bat said.

He followed the rattling. She felt his hand slide from her jaw, catch at the carved ear, then slip away entirely.

The king made a small sound and reached for the pendant.

Bat kept her cheek beneath his thumb.

Outside, a jar fell. The boy cried out in the chamber, loudly, with all the breath he had been saving.

The woman dropped her sistrum. Brass struck the floor and skittered toward the coffin. Her feet followed. Bat heard a sharp intake of breath, then the rustle of cloth as she gathered Hori up.

“Where were you?”

“I was—” He began coughing too hard to speak.

“Never mind. Hold on.”

The woman carried him past the stone. Someone recovered her instrument. The foreman called for the ropes, but more softly this time.

The king’s pendant swung loose. Both of its faces were uncovered. The thin crack remained, white against the dark cheek.

He looked at it for a long while, then let it rest upon his open palm.

“Which way?” he asked.

Bat offered him her hand.

Above them, the stars had spread beyond the reach of the walls. He took a step beneath them, and another. When he stumbled, her fingers tightened around his.

With her other face she watched the woman sit down outside in the cooling sand. Hori lay across her knees, one fist tangled in her dress. She put the sistrum beside him and stroked the dust from his hair.

He touched the brass once to make certain it was there.