Nephthys

Isis had put a knife across the doorway, its point toward Nephthys.

Behind her, Osiris lay on a low wooden bier. Someone had washed the mud out of his hair. His feet were wrapped, his hands folded, and a length of linen hung unfinished from his chest to the floor.

Nephthys stopped with one foot above the blade.

“Did he send you?” Isis asked.

“No.”

“Does he know you are here?”

Outside, a reed scraped the wall. Nephthys had heard footsteps behind her on the riverbank, then nothing. She had walked faster. Now she could not make herself look back.

“I brought clean linen.”

She held out the bundle. Isis did not take it.

From where Nephthys stood, she could see the place beneath her brother’s jaw where the wrapping would have to pass. As a child she had pressed cold fingers there to make him jump. He had always jumped, even when he saw her coming.

She lowered the bundle onto the threshold.

“You cannot finish with one pair of hands.”

Isis glanced at the strip trailing from the bier. Her own hands were sticky with resin. For an instant Nephthys thought she would shut the door anyway.

Then Isis lifted the knife.

“Take his head.”

The Second Voice

The room smelled of cedar oil, wet earth, and the bitter dregs of a lamp. Nephthys knelt behind the bier and eased her hands beneath Osiris’s neck. Isis passed the linen underneath. They had to lift together, but neither spoke the count, and the first attempt went wrong. His shoulder rolled toward the edge.

Nephthys caught it against her breast.

“Wait,” she said. “Again. On three.”

This time they moved together.

When he lay straight, Isis began to call him. She named him as husband, king, beloved; each name came out with the force of an order. Nephthys answered from the head of the bier, adding her voice to the spaces where her sister had to breathe.

Nothing stirred beneath the linen.

Isis tried again, louder. At the word husband, Nephthys faltered.

Seth’s house had been quiet when she left it. There had been bread laid out for two and a lamp beside her seat. She had taken the linen from a chest he had once carried through the doorway himself, laughing because it was too wide to fit. She remembered telling him to turn it. She remembered his hands on the wood.

Those same hands had broken Osiris.

“Answer me,” Isis said.

Nephthys drew breath.

A knock came at the door.

Not a blow. Two familiar taps, a pause, then one more.

Isis stopped. The silence left Nephthys’s unfinished note painfully exposed.

“Keep calling,” she whispered.

“Who is it?”

The door moved against its bolt.

“Nephthys.” Seth’s voice was almost conversational. “Come outside.”

Isis looked at her. Nephthys had faced her sister’s anger on the threshold; this was worse. Isis drew the loose linen away from her hands as though it had become dirty.

“You said he did not send you.”

“He did not.”

“But you knew.”

“I thought I could lose him.”

“On a riverbank?”

Nephthys had no answer that would make the journey less foolish. She had wanted to be brave only as far as the door, to arrive with a bundle and help, and afterward somehow go home.

She stood.

Isis snatched up the knife. “Move away from him.”

“I am going to the door.”

“You will let him in.”

Nephthys looked down at Osiris. The new wrapping lay smooth beneath his chin. For a moment all she wanted was another small task: hold this, lift here, pass the thread. Something her hands could finish.

Instead she went to face her husband.

What He Had Come to Take

She left the bolt in place.

“I will come out when the work is done.”

“There is no work to do.”

She watched the narrow strip of light beneath the door. His shadow divided it.

“Then you can wait.”

Beyond the wood, Seth let out a breath. She could picture the slight turn of his head, the look he gave a servant who had misunderstood an obvious instruction.

“I have brought a boat. You need not walk back.”

“Who else is in it?”

“No one.”

“And what will it carry away?”

The shadow did not move.

Nephthys pressed her palm to the bolt. She had hoped he had come for her. Only for her. The hope shamed her now, with her brother lying a few steps behind her.

“Go home, Seth.”

“Open the door.”

“No.”

The first blow tore the lower hinge out of the wall.

Nephthys stumbled backward. Isis seized the other end of the bier and began dragging it away from the entrance. One leg caught between two floor stones. Oil slopped from the lamp.

Seth struck again. The bolt held, but the wood around it split. His arm came through, fingers working at the broken edge.

Nephthys caught his wrist.

For a moment they stayed that way: his hand inside the room, hers clasped around it.

“Let go,” he said.

“Leave him to us.”

“He will be on his feet tomorrow if you leave your sister to her tricks.”

“Then you should have feared her before you killed him.”

His wrist turned under her grip. She felt how easily he could crush her hand.

“Come through this door with me,” he said, “and I will forget you were here.”

Behind her, the bier scraped the floor again. Isis was trying to free its trapped leg without letting Osiris fall. Nephthys heard the small, furious sound she made with each useless pull.

Seth tightened his fingers around Nephthys’s hand.

He had offered her something she still wanted: the room before the murder, the bread still warm, the chance to sit beside him without seeing another pair of hands folded on linen.

She slid her fingers free.

“I was here,” she said.

She stepped back beside her sister.

Seth struck the door again. The remaining hinge came out of the wall, and the door fell inward. He shoved it aside to enter.

Nephthys caught the bier beneath Osiris’s shoulders. Together the sisters lifted it over the caught leg and set it down. When she looked up, her husband was standing at the foot.

He looked first at her, then at the body.

“Move.”

Isis raised the knife.

Seth knocked it from her hand. It rang against the wall. He bent and seized the foot of the bier.

The Way Beneath

The wood rose sharply. Osiris slid toward Nephthys, his weight striking her knees. She folded herself around his head and shoulders while Isis threw both arms across his chest.

Seth pulled.

One of the wrappings caught on a splinter and began to unwind. Nephthys saw her brother’s wrist emerge, the hand hanging open beside the bier.

She caught it.

“Osiris,” she said.

Seth hauled again. Her knees scraped over the stone.

She called her brother by name once more, and this time she did not stop after the name. She told him where his body was. She told him who held his head, who lay across his heart. She gave him the room piece by piece: the lamp, the doorway, the two voices waiting for his answer.

Isis joined her. Their words crossed, broke, found each other again.

Under Nephthys’s fingers, the open hand closed.

“Stop,” Isis cried.

Seth felt it too. He released the bier so suddenly that it struck the floor. Nephthys took the jolt through her arms rather than let Osiris’s head fall.

His fingers tightened once. Then his hand turned in hers.

Downward.

A seam of darkness opened between the boards beneath him. It had no breadth at first, only depth. Nephthys looked into it and could not see the floor.

Isis gripped his shoulders.

“Up,” she said. “Come up. I have you.”

Osiris’s hand pulled gently against Nephthys’s. The darkness widened beneath his back.

Seth stepped around the bier and caught one of the crosspieces. He jerked it sideways. The wood split in his hand, but the body did not follow it. Osiris lay between the sisters as though the broken frame still supported him.

For the first time since entering, Seth hesitated.

Isis tugged at her husband. “Help me.”

Nephthys shifted to lift. It was what they had worked for, what every call had demanded. Let him rise. Let him walk out past the man who had killed him. Let this room become something they could leave behind.

But his fingers were pulling the other way.

She looked at his face. His eyes were open. He was watching neither the door nor Seth. Beneath the ruined bier, something vast moved in the dark, and Osiris turned his head toward it.

“Isis.”

“Lift him.”

“He is going below.”

“No.”

Isis drew him hard against her. His hand slipped in Nephthys’s grasp. She could feel the strain travelling through his arm, through the places they had so carefully bound.

She let her own grip loosen.

Isis stared at her.

“Do not abandon him.”

The words nearly made her close her fist again.

Nephthys slid her other arm under Osiris’s neck. Slowly, keeping his head supported, she bent toward the opening. The cold that rose from it entered her mouth and silenced the next word of her lament.

She swallowed, drew breath, and began again.

She called him onward. Not to the lamp or the doorway now, but beyond the reach of the hands that had torn him. She kept her voice steady enough for him to follow while her sister held him back.

Seth reached across her.

Nephthys turned her shoulder into his chest. The blow drove the breath out of her. She clung to Osiris with both arms, unable to sing.

Then Isis answered.

Her first words came out broken. She stopped, pressed her mouth to Osiris’s forehead, and tried again. This time she eased her arms beneath his chest instead of around it.

Together they lowered him.

Seth caught a strip of linen as it passed. For a heartbeat it stretched between his hand and the darkness. Nephthys kept calling. Isis kept answering.

The linen came loose.

Seth staggered back with it. The dark closed over Osiris, leaving the sisters kneeling on opposite sides of the broken boards.

Bread at the Bier

The lamp had gone out. Light from the doorway showed the knife against the wall and a long scrape in the floor where the bier had dragged.

Seth stood with the linen in his fist.

Nephthys waited for him to speak. Her arms still held the shape of her brother’s weight. She could not yet unfold them.

At last Seth dropped the strip.

“When you come back,” he said, “you will find the door shut.”

She looked at the door he had broken. One hinge still clung to the wood.

“I heard you.”

He went out. She listened to his footsteps until the reeds took them, and then to the knock of an oar against a boat.

Across the empty space, Isis sat with her hands on her knees. Nephthys wanted to ask whether she had done the right thing. She wanted her sister to say it before the sound of the boat was gone.

Isis reached instead for the small loaf beside the oil jar. She broke it badly; the crust was hard, and crumbs scattered over her lap.

She held out half.

Nephthys took it. Neither of them could eat at first.

When the river sounds settled, she moved around the broken bier and sat beside her sister. Isis brushed the crumbs from the place where she would sit.