Mut

The Boat That Could Not Leave

The woman struck Mut’s sacred boat with an oar.

Wood cracked against the gilded prow. The bearers stopped on the landing steps, the singers lost their measure, and inside the little curtained shrine Mut felt the blow through the soles of her feet.

“Again,” said the woman to someone in her skiff. “Push.”

A man lay across its bottom. One hand hung over the side, trailing in the Isheru. His other hand was wrapped in a cloth that had once been white.

The chief priest raised his staff. Mut caught it through the curtain before it fell.

“Let her come alongside.”

The skiff scraped nearer. Its owner had a split lower lip and the shoulders of someone who had rowed long past exhaustion. She looked at the closed shrine rather than the priest.

“They told me your boat could pass.”

“Pass where?” Mut asked.

“Out.”

Beyond the lake, the king waited beneath an awning. He had come barefoot for the festival, his crown heavy on his bowed head. That morning he had put both hands against Mut’s shrine and asked her to keep his city safe. There had been such naked fear in his voice that she had answered before he finished.

Now the afternoon lay motionless over Thebes. No breeze touched the awning. The woman lifted her brother’s wrapped hand.

“The south gate,” she said. “He reached through it.”

Mut drew back the curtain.

The cloth had dried into the burns. When the man saw her, he tried to sit upright; pain folded him over his wrist. She knelt and lowered his sound hand back into the water.

“What was beyond the gate?”

“Our mother.” The woman swallowed. “Her house. We take her grain. Every sixth day.”

Mut looked past the temple roofs. At the edge of the city, where dust usually drifted across the road, the air shone with a hard, unbroken brightness.

She knew that light.

The king approached, sending servants ahead of him to clear the steps.

“My mother,” he said. “You have heard us.”

Mut kept her fingers beneath the burned man’s elbow.

“What did you ask me to keep?”

“My people. My house. Everything entrusted to me.”

The woman tried to draw her skiff away from the royal servants. Its stern knocked against the stone.

“Her mother lives outside,” Mut said.

“There is grain inside. Send for the old woman.”

“She cannot walk,” said the boatwoman.

The king glanced at her, displeased less by the answer than by its interruption.

“Then she will be brought.”

Mut rose. The water left her hands in slow, shining drops.

“Open the south gate.”

What the Wall Held

The gate was already open.

Its wooden leaves stood flat against the walls. Through the entrance Mut could see a donkey cropping the roadside weeds. A fly settled on its ear, escaped its twitch, and settled again. Beyond it a woman shaded her eyes, waiting.

Inside, people crowded behind the guards. Baskets pressed against knees. A little boy had fallen asleep upright with his face against his father’s hip.

Mut walked between them. Heat tightened across her cheeks.

At the threshold she put out her palm. The light leaned into it like an animal recognizing the hand that fed it. She had sent this power out to hold danger away. It had found the city’s boundaries and closed them.

“Let that woman through,” she said.

The boatwoman stood with her brother supported between two bearers. Mut drew a finger downward. A dark seam opened in the brightness, wide enough for a person turned sideways.

The brother took a step.

Above him, the lintel cracked.

Mut felt the whole enclosure move. Power drawn away from this opening gathered elsewhere, pressing inward. A cry rose from the crowd. Along the wall a line of baskets caught fire, one after another, and the guards stumbled backward into the people they had been holding still.

The sleeping boy disappeared.

Mut closed her hand. The seam vanished. She thrust her shoulder beneath a fallen cart and lifted it while the father crawled among the wheels. He emerged gripping the boy by the back of his tunic. The child was coughing, furious, alive.

The king’s captain ordered everyone away from the walls.

“Into the courts,” the king said. “There is room in the temples.”

Mut heard how easy that would be: gather them closer, remove every outlying life, make the circle small enough to watch without turning her head.

The heat pressed inward again.

“No.”

She set down the cart. A black mark remained where her shoulder had touched the wood.

The king came close enough to speak without being heard by the crowd.

“If they scatter, how am I to keep them?”

Beyond the gate the waiting woman had begun to call a name.

Mut had heard thousands of kings call her Mother. She had received them in their strength and their terror, had known the small voice beneath the titles. She had answered this one as if nobody else had spoken.

“Take your guards away from the people,” she told him.

“They will run.”

“Then keep the road clear.”

She turned toward the lake. With each step she drew the heat after her. Behind her, someone stamped out the burning wicker; someone else began to weep with the rough, angry sound of a person who had held it back too long.

By the time Mut reached the landing, the soles of her feet had scorched the stone.

Khonsu was waiting beside her shrine.

He looked first at her feet, then toward the brightness surrounding the city.

“Mother.”

“Find where it ends.”

His eyes lifted to the deepening sky.

She almost caught his arm before he left.

The Unfinished Song

They carried her boat onto the lake at dusk.

The shrine’s curtains had been soaked in water. Steam rose from them. Mut sat inside, hands open on her knees, holding the tightening force away from the banks. Wherever she let her attention slip, reeds curled black at the waterline.

Outside, a rattle shook. A drum answered it too quickly.

“Keep time,” the chief priest whispered.

The singers began again. Mut knew the song. It had accompanied her across these waters when the men now singing it had still been carried against their mothers’ breasts. Usually the second verse made the rowers smile.

Tonight she heard the spaces where frightened people forgot to breathe.

The boatwoman stood in the stern, pulling an oar. Her brother lay beneath a strip of wet linen near her feet. When the priest pointed to her at the refrain, she shook her head.

“You know it,” he said.

“I know it.”

“Then sing.”

She pulled against the water. The boat moved scarcely a hand’s breadth.

Mut parted the steaming curtain.

“Leave her.”

For a moment there was only the creak of the oar.

Then Khonsu cried out above them.

A pale curve hung over the eastern roofs. It should have been rising. Instead it bent toward the lake, dragged down until its reflection stretched across the water like a taut cord.

Mut stood so sharply that the boat rolled. Khonsu appeared at its edge, one knee against the gunwale, his fingers locked around the carved rail. Light pulled from his shoulders toward the motionless curve in the sky.

“It goes over,” he said through his teeth. “There is no edge.”

She seized his wrist. The pulling stopped.

Around the lake, every ripple flattened.

He looked at the hand holding him.

For one merciful instant she had him safe. She could keep him there. She could have the bearers carry them both into the temple, have the curtains lowered, have the doors watched. Nothing would get near him.

Khonsu tried to turn his hand in hers.

The brightness sank lower over the roofs.

“Does it know the difference?” he asked.

She could feel his pulse. She could also feel the city: the boy choking on smoke, the old woman beside the road, the king waiting for someone greater than himself to make loss impossible.

“No,” she said.

The boatwoman let her oar lie across the stern.

“Can you make it?”

Mut looked at the curtains, at the gilded walls of the little house built to carry her safely among her people. Then she put one foot over the side.

The priest reached for her. “Lady—”

“Bring the boat to the southern landing.”

She stepped into the water with her son’s hand in hers.

An Open Hand

The lake hissed around Mut’s knees.

She walked toward the bank, pulling the enclosing force down with her. A brightness gathered between her fingers, too fierce to look at. Khonsu struggled beside her; each pace toward the shore drew him farther from the sky.

At the landing she stopped. The boatwoman’s skiff waited beyond the steps. Her brother had been laid in it, and the king stood above him with two guards, staring at the water that boiled without a fire.

Mut lifted her free hand toward the south road.

A passage opened.

The first breath of wind reached the lake. Then Khonsu’s fingers tightened, and the passage snapped shut so violently that the skiff struck the steps. The burned man screamed.

Mut swayed. She had tried to open the city while keeping her own child inside her grasp.

Khonsu’s face was close to hers. He was waiting for her to understand something he could not do for her.

“When you go,” she said, “I cannot follow every step.”

“I know.”

The light was cutting into her palms now. She wanted him to promise he would return untouched. He had not promised it.

She opened her fingers.

His hand slipped out of hers.

For a moment she reached after it. The brightness lunged with her, and she drove both hands into the water instead.

Heat entered her arms. She bent beneath it. Every fierce wish she had sent to the city’s edge came rushing home: keep this one breathing, keep that door standing, let no beloved face vanish beyond sight. She held her palms apart while the force tried to close them.

Above the roofs, the moon moved.

The boatwoman caught up her oar. She pushed her skiff off the lowest step, but the king’s guard grasped its rope.

“Wait for the king,” he said.

The king looked at Mut. She could not lift her head to answer him. Water streamed past her wrists into the dark opening between her hands.

He bent and pulled the rope from the guard.

The skiff began to turn.

From its stern came the second verse of the song.

The boatwoman’s voice was hoarse. She broke off to set the oar, found the rhythm with her next stroke, and sang again. She was not looking at the priest. She was looking at the goddess standing in the water, whose hands were shaking.

Mut drew breath.

The next breath hurt less.

Behind the skiff, wind wrinkled the lake. The brightness loosened from the rooftops, from the gate, from the road where the old woman had sat down to wait. Mut felt it settle against her skin, fierce still, but no longer reaching to close around every living thing.

The skiff passed her. Its side brushed her open palm.

“Will you come back?” Mut asked.

“When he can row,” the woman said.

Her brother lifted his unburned hand.

Mut stood until their wake had passed. Above her, Khonsu climbed; on the lake his reflection broke into a hundred moving pieces, and she let them go.