Medjed

The woman lost her sight three steps from the door.

She stopped so abruptly that the man behind her struck her shoulder. One hand flew to her eyes; the other reached for the wall and missed it. Medjed watched her fingers searching the air. A moment before, she had been counting the blue stones above the entrance to the House of Osiris.

“There were seven,” she said. “I had reached seven.”

Across the passage, a pair of painted eyes opened.

They belonged to a figure on a wooden panel, small enough to carry beneath one arm. The man holding it jerked the wood against his chest. Too late. Medjed had seen the painted pupils turn, and he knew the grey ring around them. It had been in the woman’s eyes.

“Put it down,” he said.

The man looked towards the voice. His gaze passed through Medjed and struck the wall beyond.

“Who spoke?”

Medjed moved between him and the woman. No shadow moved across the floor with him.

“You have brought something hungry to this door.”

The man tightened his grip. Beneath his thumb, letters named the painted figure. Medjed read his own name.

Then the picture spoke.

“Put it down,” it said, in his voice.

A God Small Enough to Carry

The bearer was a painter. Medjed knew it from the hardened ridge on his middle finger and the black lodged beside his nails, marks that had survived the washing of his body. He wore good linen, poorly fastened. Someone living had tied its last knot with shaking hands.

“Your name,” Medjed said.

“Seneb.”

“Cover the eyes, Seneb.”

Seneb pulled a fold of linen over the panel. The voice ceased. Behind Medjed, the woman lowered her hands, but her sight did not return.

“What did you ask it to do?”

“Nothing.”

Medjed waited.

“To be recognized,” Seneb said at last. “At the doors. There are so many names to remember.”

He had painted funerary rolls for people with enough silver to purchase room for every danger. Kings of the dead, keepers of passages, beings whose names filled a column and whose teeth filled another: Seneb had given them all clean edges and proper colours. When his own breath began to fail, he had found that he remembered the prices better than the words.

So he had made himself this little god.

“The one who strikes unseen,” he said. “I thought, if I could carry his likeness—”

“You could hold him before you.”

“I could get through.”

The covered panel pressed against the cloth. Two small hollows formed where the eyes had been painted.

“Scrape them away,” Medjed said.

Seneb took a step back.

At the far end of the passage, others were arriving. Their bare feet whispered over stone. The blinded woman caught a stranger’s sleeve and asked him to tell her where the door was. He shook her off, frightened by the whiteness of her eyes.

Seneb watched her turn towards the sound of the arriving feet.

“Will you take me in?” he asked.

“I will stop what you brought.”

“That isn’t what I asked.”

“No.”

His thumb moved over a crack in the wood. “My boy went before me. I painted his roll myself. I knew every stroke was right. Afterwards I kept thinking of the strokes I might have missed.”

Something tugged the cloth from within.

Seneb pulled it tighter.

“This one I could keep beside me. If it failed, I could mend it.”

The linen split between his hands.

The picture looked out.

A young man beside the door cried and clapped both palms to his face. Seneb flung the cloth over the panel again, but a second cry rose farther down the passage. Then a third.

Medjed saw the painted pupils close. The panel was becoming ordinary wood.

Its hunger had found other eyes.

The Borrowed Gaze

The young man lowered his hands. For an instant the image looked out of him: a flat white face beneath his skin, two black strokes where living depth should have been.

Medjed fixed his gaze upon it.

A bright incision opened in the stone beside the young man’s head.

Medjed had turned the strike at the last instant. The painted face had slipped backwards, leaving the man blinking, his cheek warm from the blow that had missed him. Farther along the wall, another mouth began to smile.

“You see?” it said to Seneb. “He strikes at you.”

Medjed could have broken the wall. He could have split the panel where Seneb held it. Neither would touch the thing now moving from face to face. Wherever he found it, somebody’s eyes stood between his gaze and its borrowed shape.

It was working towards the door.

He heard Seneb draw breath to call out. Medjed spoke first.

“All of you. Close your eyes.”

Some obeyed. Others looked towards the voice, seeking a figure to tell them whether they should trust it. One woman shut her eyes only after her companion began to scream.

The painter set the panel on the floor.

“I can break it.”

“It has left that.”

Seneb raised his heel anyway, then stopped. Medjed watched understanding reach him. The thing he knew how to mend was empty. What he had released wore people.

By the entrance, the first blinded woman had found the edge of a doorpost. She stood with her fingers laid against it, feeling each joint between the stones.

“Is anyone still there?” she asked.

“I am,” Seneb said.

He went towards her. Medjed heard the soft scrape of wood: the painter had picked up his panel again.

“I made it,” Seneb told her.

She reached in the direction of his voice and touched his wrist. Her hand closed hard.

“Then take it back.”

Seneb tried to free his arm. She held him. He stopped pulling.

Across the doorway, a man with his eyes squeezed shut began to prise one lid open with a finger. The image was inside him, looking for a way out. Medjed placed himself before that stolen gaze. It looked through the space he occupied and could find nothing to seize.

“It wants to see you,” Seneb said.

“It wants eyes that can.”

The man’s finger dragged his eyelid wider. Tears ran down his cheek.

Seneb looked at the panel, and at the woman holding his wrist.

“Mine made it,” he said. “Will it come for mine?”

Medjed considered the little black eyes. They were patiently waiting for someone to believe in them again.

“If you offer them.”

“Will you give them back?”

He could break what Seneb had made. He could not promise to restore what Seneb chose to give it.

“I do not know.”

Seneb’s mouth worked. He looked once through the doorway, where the passage beyond bent out of sight.

Then he lowered himself to the floor.

What the Painter Gave

He set the panel upright against his knees. The woman kept her hand on his wrist until he gently loosened her fingers.

“Stand behind me,” he told her.

He searched the pouch at his waist. There was a reed in it, split at the tip, and a little flake of stone with an edge worn smooth by his thumb. He took the stone.

“Tell me where you are,” he said.

“Beside the picture.”

Seneb turned towards the voice and found only the floor.

“Stay there.”

Medjed spoke down the passage. “Keep your eyes shut until I tell you.”

This time the dead obeyed. The woman behind Seneb covered her face with both hands, though there was still nothing for her to see. Beyond the last tightly closed lids, the entrance stood empty.

Seneb looked into the painted eyes.

At the doorway, the man stopped clawing at his face. He fell against the post. All down the passage, mouths opened in short, astonished breaths.

The wood bowed towards Seneb.

Grey returned to its pupils, then brown, then a succession of colours too swift to follow. Medjed watched the stolen sight pour back along the path Seneb had opened. The painter did not blink. His hands clenched on either side of the panel, making the wood creak.

“Now,” Medjed said. “The eyes.”

Seneb lifted the scraping stone.

He stopped with it just above the paint.

“Father?” said the picture.

The word was small. No divine thunder, no command. A boy calling from another room.

Seneb’s hand began to shake.

Medjed could see the false face spread across the grain: round cheeks, a nick in an eyebrow, the gap left by a tooth. It was drawing from the painter now. Every detail he longed to see gave it another place to hide.

“You’re late,” the boy said.

Seneb bent over the panel. The scraping stone lowered to his lap.

The figure lifted its painted hand towards him.

Medjed let his gaze rest on that hand. A finger blackened. The image snatched it away and Seneb recoiled, shielding the panel with his arm.

“Don’t.”

“It is using what you brought.”

“You don’t know his face.”

“No.”

The answer left Seneb with nothing to argue against. He stared at the little figure. Behind him, the woman touched his shoulder, not knowing what he saw.

“Is it done?” she asked.

The boy on the wood smiled.

Seneb pressed the stone against one painted eye.

The smile tore sideways. A sound came from the panel like a reed pen dragged against its grain. Seneb cried out and scraped again.

His own eyes went white.

He dropped the stone.

The panel lurched against his knees. Its remaining eye rolled towards the door, seeking another face. Every eyelid stayed closed. Only Medjed watched it, and the image searched the emptiness where he stood, unable to find the gaze it could feel upon it.

“The stone is against your left heel,” Medjed said.

Seneb swept his hand across the floor. His fingers struck it and sent it skittering.

“Stop. A hand’s breadth farther.”

The woman knelt behind him. She put her palm over his searching fingers. Together they found the stone.

Seneb gripped it so tightly that its edge cut him.

“Where?”

“Find the top of the wood.”

He felt along it, breathing through his teeth.

“Two fingers down. To your right.”

The boy began to call again. Seneb dug the stone into the paint. He dragged it across the voice, across the remembered face, until bare wood rasped beneath his hand.

For one instant the likeness stood clear of everything it had borrowed.

Medjed struck.

The panel split between Seneb’s knees. The blow went through the false eyes and into the floor, leaving a narrow groove in the stone. Two halves of wood fell apart. Neither spoke.

Seneb remained bent over them, still scraping at the air.

Beyond the Door

“You may look,” Medjed said.

The woman saw her hands first.

She turned them over, watching their shadows move. Then she looked at Seneb and caught the wrist that held the stone.

“Enough,” she said.

He let her take it.

Around them, the dead began to move. Some hurried through the entrance without looking back. Others lingered long enough to touch a shoulder or return a dropped sandal. One man picked up half the panel. Finding nothing on it he wished to keep, he laid it down.

Seneb raised his head.

“Has the door opened?”

“It was open,” the woman said.

He passed a hand before his eyes. Medjed watched him do it twice, slowly. No colour returned.

The woman helped him stand. He was reluctant to let go of the floor; then he found his balance and offered her his empty hand.

At the threshold he stopped.

“Medjed?”

“I am here.”

Seneb did not turn towards the voice.

“If you see him—”

He broke off. His fingers tightened around the woman’s hand, and she waited while he found the words.

“His name is Hori.”

Then he crossed the threshold. The woman described the turn in the passage as they came to it, and Seneb listened.