Isis

The Door at Dusk

The woman had almost lifted the bar when she saw what was following Isis.

One scorpion crossed the strip of lamplight beneath the gate. A second came up beside Isis’s heel. Behind them, five more waited in the dust, their tails curved over their backs.

The bar fell into its sockets.

Isis caught the wood before the gate closed completely. Horus stirred against her shoulder, his mouth searching at the linen that covered him.

“Only until he has fed,” she said.

Through the narrowing gap she could see a courtyard, a water jar, a little boy crouching beside a heap of pebbles. He was lining them along a crack in the paving. There was space enough inside for a hundred weary people.

“Take those things away.”

“They will remain outside.”

The woman pushed harder. Isis could have held the gate with one finger. She could have spoken her name and made the woman kneel. Instead she felt the warm, small weight beneath her chin and let the wood slide past her hand.

They were still too near the road. Every person who remembered her face was another mouth through which news might reach Seth. Horus needed to grow before the world learned where to find him. Osiris’s son had a throne waiting for him; tonight he needed milk and somewhere without wind.

At her feet, Tefen raised his sting.

“Down,” Isis said.

The scorpion lowered it, slowly.

She turned toward the reeds. Mud sucked at the edges of the path, and somewhere among the low houses a baby was crying with the furious strength Horus no longer had. He had spent his anger during the journey. Now he made a thin, persistent sound that she could feel through her breastbone.

A reed door scraped open.

“Mind the roof,” a woman called. “It leaks dust when you knock it.”

She stood aside without asking a name. Behind her was a room scarcely wider than the wealthy woman’s gate, with a mat, an empty basket and a cooking pot balanced on three stones.

Isis looked down at her companions.

“I saw them,” the woman said. “Will they sting me?”

“No.”

It was a promise, given before Isis thought to make it a command.

She faced the seven.

“You will harm no one in this house.”

Then she bent beneath the lintel and carried her son inside.

The Seventh Sting

The woman poured the last of her water into a bowl and set it within reach. When Isis offered it back, she shook her head.

“After him.”

Horus latched, pulled away, and began to cry. Isis shifted him, loosened the cloth, tried again. This time he settled. His hand opened on her skin, all five fingers spreading as though there were something he meant to grasp.

For a while she watched nothing else.

The room smelled of cold ash and damp reeds. Outside, small hard feet moved across the threshold. Her hostess turned the cooking pot over to show there was nothing hidden inside it.

“I could heat the water,” she said. “There is a little fuel.”

“Keep it.”

“You have farther to go?”

Isis nodded.

“My brother takes fish through the eastern channels. If you wait until—”

A scorpion brushed the doorpost. Isis lifted her head.

Befen. Mestet. Mestetef.

Three shadows at the sill. Petet and Thetet crouched by the broken basket. Matet stood outside facing the road.

She counted again.

A cry came from the large house.

It was short at first, sharp with anger. Then it rose and broke in a way that made Horus jerk against her.

Isis was on her feet before the woman in the courtyard began calling for help.

Tefen came over the threshold. Dust clung to the curve of his sting.

“What have you done?”

“The door is open now.”

The words were dry and close, like reeds rubbed together. Her hostess backed into the wall.

Isis looked past him. Across the road, lamplight spilled from the open gate. The woman who had refused her stood beneath it with her son in her arms, calling toward houses whose doors stayed shut.

The boy’s head hung backward. One of his hands kept closing on nothing.

Isis pressed Horus against her. She could still leave. The marsh began at the end of the path; darkness already filled the channels. She had only to turn away from the light.

The boy’s mother called again.

Isis heard herself answer.

“Bring him here.”

The woman did not move. Her eyes had found Tefen.

Isis stepped into the road instead.

A Child Without a Crown

“Lay him down.”

“Keep them away from him!”

The woman turned her body around the boy. His heel struck the gatepost, and he gave no sign that he had felt it.

Isis stopped beyond her reach. She could see the swollen place above his ankle. Beneath it, one of his little sandals hung by a twisted strap.

“They will stay where I put them.”

“You brought them.”

“Yes.”

The admission cost her the last chance to pass as a stranger who happened to know a remedy. The woman stared at her, waiting for an excuse. Isis gave her none.

Her hostess had followed them with the mat. She spread it on the courtyard stones and held out her arms for Horus.

Isis drew back.

The woman waited. She did not say that she could be trusted. She simply stood there, with an empty space between her hands, while the other child’s breathing caught and stopped and caught again.

Isis placed her son in that space.

“Stay where I can see you.”

She knelt on the mat. At last the boy’s mother lowered him. His limbs resisted straightening; his jaw trembled, and a wet thread shone at the corner of his mouth.

“What is his name?”

The mother told her, so softly that Isis made her say it again. Then Isis bent close to the child’s ear and used it.

His eyelids moved.

There. He was still within reach.

She set her palm above the sting and called to the venom of Tefen. She knew its way of entering flesh, the heat it carried, the tightening it left behind. She ordered it to loosen its hold.

The boy’s leg relaxed.

His mother drew a breath that was almost a sob.

Then his back arched off the mat.

Isis caught his head before it struck the stone. Under her hand the heat changed. What had begun to yield divided against her: a second pain beneath the first, another beneath that, each pressing toward his chest.

She looked at Tefen.

The other six had gathered behind him in the gate.

“How much?” she asked.

No answer.

The boy’s mother gripped Isis’s wrist. “Do it again.”

Isis could not repeat the command blindly. It had opened one passage while the other poisons tightened theirs. She held the woman’s hand against the mat until it stopped pulling at her.

“How much did you put into him?”

Tefen’s tail lifted.

“All of us.”

The courtyard seemed to shrink around the child’s narrow chest.

Seven poisons. One small body.

Isis had gathered the scattered limbs of Osiris. She knew what it was to refuse a stillness everyone else had accepted. But the boy beneath her hand was not her husband, and she could not reach him by calling what she loved back to herself. She knew scarcely anything of him: a name, a loosened sandal, a line of pebbles abandoned beside the wall.

His mother knew the rest.

“Speak to him,” Isis said. “Something he will want to answer.”

The woman swallowed. “I don’t—”

“Look at him.”

She bent over the mat.

“You have left your stones everywhere,” she whispered. “Who is going to put them away?”

The boy did not stir.

Her voice cracked. “You said they were boats. I remember. They are boats.”

What Protection Means

Tefen moved toward Isis’s knee.

“Your son is behind you.”

“I know where he is.”

“This one’s mother would have left him in the road.”

Isis did not look up. Under her fingers, the boy’s pulse stumbled.

“She would have closed that gate with the prince outside it,” Tefen said. “Now she will remember.”

The mother went still. Her eyes flicked toward Horus.

There it was: the word Isis had kept from every village, every boatman, every passing laborer. Prince. The scorpion had set it down among them as carelessly as he had set his sting into a child.

Horus whimpered. Isis could hear her hostess shifting him from one shoulder to the other.

Tefen came closer.

“We can take you out. While there is still darkness.”

For an instant Isis imagined doing it. Gathering Horus, stepping over the scorpions, reaching the reeds before anyone found the courage to follow. She could keep one child safe. She had been walking for days to do exactly that.

On the mat, the boy’s mother was describing a voyage her son’s pebbles had made that afternoon. Her words ran together. She no longer seemed to know Isis was there.

Isis put her free hand flat in Tefen’s path.

“You were sent to guard my son.”

“We have guarded him.”

“Then show me where this child threatened him.”

Tefen’s forelegs touched her skin. He stopped.

“Show me.”

His sting remained raised above her hand. Isis held it there with her gaze until, joint by joint, it lowered.

“Call the others forward,” she said.

They came, six small bodies crossing the courtyard. The mother pulled away from them, but Isis caught her sleeve.

“Keep speaking.”

She set the seven in a line beside the boy. Then she began again.

This time she gave each poison its own name.

Tefen’s first: the heat she had already felt retreat. Befen’s next. The child’s heel slipped against the mat as his leg eased. Isis kept her palm upon him and called to Mestet, then Mestetef. She did not hurry the words together. Each had to reach the thing it governed; each had to leave room for the next.

The boy’s mother faltered when his mouth opened without a sound.

“The boats,” Isis said.

“One overturned,” the woman whispered. “You wouldn’t let me put it back. You said the river had done it.”

Petet. Thetet.

A shudder passed through the child. His chest lifted, but the breath would not come out.

Matet stood at the end of the line, so still that he might have been a chip of dark stone.

Isis spoke his name.

The final poison resisted. She could feel its grip beneath the boy’s ribs. She leaned over him until her hair lay on the mat, shutting out the watching doorway, the scorpions, even the sight of Horus.

She spoke as the wife who had reached Osiris through death, as the mother keeping his heir alive among the reeds. The power with which she guarded her own she brought to bear upon this child whose mother had barred her way.

She commanded the poison to release him.

The boy coughed into her hand.

His mother reached for him, but Isis held her back through a second cough, a thin cry, a whole ragged breath. Only then did she move aside.

He turned his face into his mother’s dress. His fist closed on the cloth and stayed closed.

Across the courtyard, Horus began to howl.

Isis sat back on her heels. For the first time that night, the sound made her laugh.

The Open Gate

By dawn the boy was asleep. His mother had tried to lift him three times and each time had settled beside him again, unwilling to disturb the quiet rise and fall beneath his tunic.

When Isis gathered Horus, the woman stood.

“Wait.”

She went into the house and returned with a folded length of linen and a jar sealed against the damp. She set them before Isis, then brought out another jar, and another, until the courtyard stones were crowded.

Isis glanced toward the woman who had given away her last bowl of water.

The boy’s mother followed her look.

After a moment she picked up the first jar herself.

“May I bring these to your house?”

Her neighbor took one from her. “You’ll strike your head if you forget the roof.”

“I’ll remember.”

Isis waited while they gathered the sleeping boy between them. A pebble lay beside his hand. His mother stooped to retrieve it, then thought better of that and slipped it into the fold of his tunic.

At the gate, Tefen stood aside.

Isis looked down the road. Daylight would make the walking harder, and there was still a long way to the hiding places in the marsh. She adjusted Horus against her shoulder. Fed and warm, he had caught a strand of her hair and would not release it.

The seven scorpions took their places.

“Your faces to the path,” she told them.

They turned.

Behind her, the gate remained open. From the little house came a scrape of pottery, the murmur of two women making room, and a boy’s sleepy protest that somebody was standing on his boats.