Hathor

The dead woman clapped on the wrong beat.

Hathor heard it beneath the temple musicians: one small, stubborn sound, always arriving where the hymn left a space. The singers stood shoulder to shoulder in the court. Beyond them waited jars of beer, baskets of bread, a crowd whose smiles appeared whenever the priest looked their way.

The woman clapped again.

No one turned. She stood beside a pillar with her hands raised, transparent in the late sunlight. A blue thread circled one wrist. When the chorus called Hathor merciful, the woman brought her palms together so hard that the goddess felt the blow in her own hands.

Hathor lowered her sistrum.

The musicians stopped. The priest held his mouth open around a note he had not finished singing.

“Leave us,” she said.

The living hurried out. The dead woman remained, looking at the place where the beer jars stood.

“I know what you put in those.”

“Beer.”

“Red beer?”

Hathor remembered waking with it crusted along her mouth. Ra had poured the fields full of it to stop her. She had gone out as his Eye against the people who defied him, and the killing had pleased her past the point where his command was satisfied. The beer had ended that pleasure. It had not emptied the fields of bodies.

“Not today,” she said.

The woman drew her hands under her arms.

“What is your name?”

“Tia.”

“Why have you stayed here, Tia?”

“My mother comes every evening. She brings my sistrum. She thinks if she gives it to you, you might let me come home.”

Through the gate Hathor could see a woman sitting outside the crowd, an instrument wrapped in linen across her knees. Everyone else had risen when the goddess appeared. This woman had remained on the ground.

“And what do you want?” Hathor asked.

Tia looked toward the long shadow running from the gate.

“To stop hearing her call me.”

The Broken Rattle

Hathor took the menat from her shoulders. Its strings of beads spilled across her fingers, their weight drawing the counterpiece into her palm. She shook it gently.

The sound was soft and close. She had heard women make it beside cradles and in her sanctuaries; it had soothed her when no spoken petition could. Now she set a slow rhythm beneath it, a road of sound extending through the gate toward the western hills.

Tia unclenched her hands.

“Come,” Hathor said.

The singer took a step. Then another, too quickly. She caught at the pillar, but her fingers passed into the stone.

“Wait.”

Hathor softened the rhythm. Beyond the gate, reeds stirred where there had been bare sand. The opening into the West widened, cool under the evening light. Tia slid toward it, her heels leaving no marks.

“I said wait.”

Her voice broke on the last word. Hathor saw her try to crouch, try to put her weight against the pull. There was no weight left to put there.

The goddess closed both hands around the beads.

Tia stopped at the threshold, bent forward with her arms over her head.

For a moment Hathor could still feel the ease of it: one more shake, one more note, and the singer would have been safely through. The welcome would have been completed. The musicians could have returned to their hymn.

Then Tia lifted her face.

“You said that before.”

“What?”

“Come.”

Hathor remembered a doorway. A woman had stood in it with a rattle held out before her, shaking it so fiercely that its metal frame struck the wall. Behind her, someone had been trying to lower a child through a window.

There had been a blue thread around the musician’s wrist.

“I remember you,” Hathor said.

Tia stepped backward into the court.

Outside, the woman on the ground unwrapped the sistrum. One side of its frame was crushed inward. Two of the loose metal pieces had fused against a bent crossbar.

Hathor put away the menat and went to her.

The woman struggled upright, not to bow but to keep the instrument out of reach.

“Henut,” she said before Hathor could ask. “Her mother.”

“I know where your daughter is.”

“Then bring her.”

“She is in the court.”

Henut pushed past her. She called Tia’s name once, firmly, as if summoning someone who had let a pot boil dry. Then she called again. Hathor watched Tia come as close as she could and reach for the loose edge of her mother’s sleeve. Her hand moved through it.

Henut turned.

“Is this your kindness?”

“No.”

“Then stop showing it to me.”

Hathor let the words stand. She could have filled the court with the glory that made people cover their eyes. Instead she sat on the low step where Henut had been waiting.

After a while the mother sat too. She held the broken sistrum upright between her knees.

“She played with that?” Hathor asked.

“She played with everything. Bowls. Doorposts. Her teeth, if I took the other things away.”

Tia made a sharp sound that was almost a laugh.

“She wanted a new one,” Henut continued. “I said this one had served me, and my mother before me. I said she could learn to make it sound properly before she asked for better.”

She turned the damaged frame toward Hathor.

“Can you mend it?”

“Yes.”

“And her?”

Hathor looked into the court. Tia had stopped reaching for the sleeve.

“I can take her where the dead are sheltered. I cannot give you back the life I took.”

Henut placed the sistrum flat across her lap. With one thumb she rubbed the crooked crossbar, slowly, as if working at a stain.

“You remember taking it?”

“A doorway. A child behind her.”

“My sister’s boy. He got out.”

The boy lived. Hathor had not known that. In the court, Tia pressed the heel of her hand against her mouth.

Henut looked up sharply.

“Don’t make that into a reason.”

Hathor had been about to speak. She closed her mouth.

A Song Without Praise

When the temple lamps were lit, Henut was still on the step.

Hathor sat beside her while servants carried the untouched feast back through a side door. The smell of warm bread made the mother swallow. She looked away from it.

Hathor called for a loaf and broke it. Henut did not take the offered half until the goddess put it down between them. Then she ate with quick, angry bites.

Tia sat on the other side of her mother, listening to her chew.

“She used to sing while we ground grain,” Henut said. “Made the work take twice as long.”

“What did she sing?”

“A foolish thing.”

“Sing it.”

Henut’s fingers tightened on the bread.

Hathor heard the command she had put into the words.

“If you wish,” she added.

“No hymns.”

“No hymns.”

“And no one writes it down afterward and says I thanked you.”

Hathor turned toward the priest, who had been lingering within earshot. He withdrew into the temple.

Henut brushed crumbs from her palms. She tapped the sound side of the sistrum against her knee, found a little scrape of metal, and began.

The song concerned a brewer who watered his beer until the fish complained of thirst. Henut sang it badly. She kept climbing toward a note she could not reach and dropping back in irritation. At the end of each verse she paused, leaving room for the answer.

Tia knew it. Hathor could see the words forming on her lips. But the singer made no sound.

Henut sang the second verse. A crocodile went to collect the brewer’s debt; he tried to pay it with a jar of river water. Again the mother paused.

Again Tia’s mouth moved without a voice.

Henut stopped tapping.

“She always took the answer.”

“Do you know it?” Hathor asked.

“Of course I know it.”

But she would not sing that part.

Hathor could hear the missing rhythm now. It was the beat Tia had been striking beneath the hymn, the place where she should have answered her mother. The singer had not come to spoil the music. She had come to find her way into it.

Hathor reached for the menat, then let her hand fall.

“Will you come as far as the gate?” she asked Henut.

“To do what?”

“Let her hear you from the road.”

The mother stared into the empty space beside her. Tia had risen.

Finally Henut gathered her skirt and stood.

The Western Road

At the gate, the air cooled against Hathor’s face. The desert opened into a narrow passage between dark slopes, with pale reeds crowding its mouth. Far within it lay a glimmer of water.

Tia stayed on the stone threshold.

Hathor passed through first. Sand settled beneath her hooves. Her shoulders broadened, her spine stretched, and the horns above her forehead rose against the first stars. She stood in the passage as the great cow, her flank warm beside the cold rock.

Tia recoiled.

“Does that make you someone else?”

Hathor lowered her head until she could see the singer beneath the curve of a horn.

“No.”

“Then why should I come?”

The goddess had no promise that could remove the doorway from Tia’s memory. There was shelter beyond the passage; there was drink for thirst that had outlived the body. She could show the singer those things. She could make her go to them. A part of Hathor still wanted to, wanted to end this helpless waiting with the force of her own welcome.

Behind Tia, Henut began the first verse again.

Her voice barely carried beyond the gate.

Hathor knelt.

She folded her forelegs into the sand and laid her head down beside them. The passage remained open. The singer could see the road beyond her, and could turn back without passing under a horn.

“I will wait here,” Hathor said.

Henut reached the answer and fell silent.

Tia looked back. Her mother could not see her; she was watching Hathor with both hands locked around the broken instrument. The singer lifted her own empty hands, once, then lowered them.

“Walk beside me,” she said.

Hathor began to rise.

“Slowly.”

She stopped halfway, waited, and rose as the singer stepped forward.

They went into the passage together. When the path narrowed, Hathor took the rough outer edge, where stones slipped under her hooves. Tia walked close enough for her shoulder to brush the goddess’s flank, though she did not touch it. Behind them the mother’s voice diminished to a thread.

At the second verse, Tia halted.

Hathor halted too.

“The crocodile,” Tia said.

The goddess waited.

“He drinks the brewer instead.”

Tia tried the answer. It emerged as a breath, broke, and came again. This time the note held. She sang the crocodile’s complaint in a dreadful, deep voice, so unlike the thin voice in the court that Hathor turned her head.

The singer looked startled by it herself.

“That was her favorite part.”

“Sing it again.”

Tia gave her a warning look.

Hathor stayed still.

After a moment, the singer repeated the verse. Louder. Its rude, lurching rhythm went back between the rocks, carrying toward the gate. There was nothing in it about the gods.

At the water Tia knelt and drank. Hathor stood over her, keeping the loose stones from the bank with the weight of one foreleg. When the singer rose, her wet hands left two marks on the cow’s side.

She walked on beneath the trees. Once she glanced back, checking that Hathor was still there. The goddess remained until the pale trunk between them hid her from view.

Then Hathor returned to the gate.

Henut was alone on the step. She did not ask whether the journey had been easy. She did not offer the broken sistrum.

“Did she sing the last part?”

“Yes.”

“The crocodile?”

Hathor nodded.

Henut bent over the instrument. She worked a fingernail beneath one of the trapped metal pieces and worried it sideways until it moved. Then she tipped the frame.

One small note sounded.

She listened until it was gone before she tried another.