Osiris

The Thread Back

The strip of linen tightened around Osiris’s wrist, and somewhere above him Isis said his name.

He pulled himself toward her.

His knee found a ledge in the darkness. The joint held. He paused, astonished by that small obedience, then reached higher. He remembered having no knee, no hand, no place from which to remember anything. Now his fingers closed around stone. The linen smelled of resin and of the oil Isis rubbed into her palms when the skin cracked.

“Again,” he called.

“Osiris.”

A narrow opening brightened overhead. Through it he heard a bowl being set down, the scrape of a stool: the ordinary sounds of a room in which someone was waiting for him. He climbed faster.

Something caught his ankle.

He kicked before he looked. A man fell back from the ledge, spilling grain from a little leather pouch. The kernels struck the stone without a sound.

“Forgive me.” The man tried to gather them. His fingers went through the grain. “I thought you knew the way.”

Osiris looked up. The opening was no wider than his shoulders. Isis had worked for this, finding what Seth had scattered, tending what his brother had meant to leave beyond repair. He could feel the effort of her hands in every part of him that held together.

Below the ledge, the man was still trying to close his pouch.

“Your name,” Osiris said.

“I am the measurer at the eastern granary.”

“Your name.”

The man looked offended. Then frightened.

“My father called me—” He put a hand to his mouth. Light from the opening passed through the hand. “I had it when I came here.”

Osiris lowered himself one step.

He knew that terror. Before Isis had called, he had felt himself spread so thin that even his hatred of Seth belonged to no one.

“Take my arm.”

The man grasped it with both hands. Osiris waited until the grip became firm, then hauled him onto the ledge. Together they began to climb.

At the Opening

The last reach brought Osiris’s face level with the room.

Isis knelt beside a bier. Nephthys stood behind her, holding a shallow bowl. On the bier lay his wrapped body, and on its chest rested the hand with which Isis was drawing him upward. The linen ran between her fingers, through the opening, to his wrist.

He had expected his palace. Instead there were stained cloths, water, a broken needle. Isis’s hair was caught under one knee. She had not noticed.

He wanted to free it for her.

“You have come so far,” she said.

“There is someone with me.”

The grain measurer lifted his head beside Osiris’s shoulder. For a moment his eyes filled with the room’s light.

“My daughter,” he said. “She will be at the granary. She is waiting to be paid.”

He thrust his hand through the opening.

His fingers came apart.

They did not break. The spaces between them widened, and his wrist thinned into separate strands. He stared at the empty place where his hand had been. Then his elbow began to follow.

Osiris caught the man’s upper arm and drew him back. The touch left a grey smear across his own palm.

“Call him,” he told Isis.

“What is his name?”

The man opened his mouth. Nothing came.

“He measures grain.”

Isis looked at the stranger. Her fingers tightened on the linen.

“Measurer,” she called.

He tried to turn toward her. His face blurred.

“The man of the eastern granary. The father whose daughter waits.”

The words reached him, but they did not gather him. Osiris felt his weight dwindling against his side.

“Tell me more,” Isis said.

The man clutched his pouch to his chest with his remaining hand. “She is waiting.”

Isis looked back at Osiris.

“I know your bones. I know the places your feet have stood. I have searched until there is no part of you that I have not called.” Her voice roughened. “Help me find something of him.”

Osiris could think only of the man’s fingers coming apart. He pressed him against the ledge and commanded him to remain whole. Once, men had hurried to obey that voice. The stranger’s cheek crumbled beneath his thumb.

Osiris stopped speaking.

He eased the man down, away from the light. As they descended, the pull on the linen grew fierce. He heard Isis draw a sharp breath.

“Do not go where I cannot reach you.”

“Keep hold,” he said.

The Measure

At the foot of the ledge, Osiris laid the man across his knees. The broken arm rested against his own bindings.

He tried to wind a loose edge of linen around it. There was barely enough to circle the wrist. Each time he released the cloth to make a knot, the arm lost its shape again.

The man watched without complaint. That was worse than pleading.

“Tell me about your daughter,” Osiris said.

“She works beside me.”

“What does she do?”

“Keeps the tally. I fill the measure, she marks it.” His mouth almost formed a smile. “She watches the rim. No heap. No hollow. She says I let my arm grow tired when the rich men come.”

“Do you?”

The man looked down.

Osiris held the little pouch open. Inside lay a few kernels of barley, dull and dry.

“Were these taken?”

“Saved.”

“From whose portion?”

“Mine.” He tried to lift the damaged hand. “I took grain before. When the store was full, I told myself nobody would miss it. She found the difference in the tally.”

“And then?”

“She put her own bowl back.”

The room above them had become a pale slit. Osiris heard Nephthys say something he could not make out. The linen dragged at his wrist.

“What did you do?”

“I put mine back too.”

The man spoke with sudden irritation, as though Osiris were a slow clerk refusing a simple account.

“We ate onions. I remember the smell on her hands. She would not speak to me all evening. Then she came to bed and put her cold feet against my legs.”

His remaining fingers closed around the pouch.

Osiris bent nearer.

“What did she call you when she was angry?”

The man laughed once, painfully.

“Heni. Like my wife. Never Father when she was angry. Heni.”

Osiris repeated it.

Under his palm the man’s shoulder became solid.

“Heni, who returned the grain.”

“Not all of it.”

“Then you will tell me the rest.”

He called him again and fitted the loose linen around the place where his wrist should have been. For an instant Osiris felt another hand covering his own: the remembered pressure of Isis setting a fragment of him into its place. He followed that pressure. He gathered, supported, waited.

A thumb appeared beneath the cloth.

Heni caught it in his other hand and began to weep.

Behind him someone moved.

Osiris looked up. A woman stood just beyond the reach of the light, holding one side of her face. Farther back were others. He could distinguish shoulders, bowed heads, a child pressed against a man’s hip. Each time he tried to count them, more emerged from the darkness.

Heni followed his gaze.

“They heard you.”

What the Linen Held

Isis pulled hard enough to raise Osiris’s arm.

He stood, keeping Heni’s unfinished hand closed inside his own, and climbed until he could see her face again. The stranger remained on the ledge below him. The linen stretched between all three.

“I can hear them,” Isis said.

He had meant to ask her to come down. The request was already in his mouth. Then he saw the exhaustion in her shoulders and the fierce attention with which she watched his face. She had crossed the country for him. She would try to cross this too.

“Our son,” he said instead.

Her free hand moved to her belly.

The gesture struck him harder than the sight of his body on the bier. There was a life beginning there that he would not lift from sleep, would not teach to judge the river’s depth or hold a crooked reed pen. For a moment he hated the waiting figures below him.

He reached for her.

Isis put her palm against his. He felt its warmth. She pressed so hard that the tips of her fingers whitened.

“Stay there,” she said. “Let me think.”

Below, Heni gave a small cry. Osiris looked down. The little loop of cloth had slipped. His thumb was disappearing again.

Osiris lowered his free hand. He could reach Heni or Isis. With the linen taut, he could not hold both.

“There is more cloth in the room,” he said.

Isis took a length from the bier and fed it toward him. It fell through the light, pale and weightless. Osiris caught it, but it passed through his fingers. Only the strip wound around his own restored body had weight here.

He looked at that strip. At the knot Isis had made.

“No,” she said.

He had not spoken.

“I have only just found you.”

He held her hand against his mouth. The scent of the oil was still there.

“I know.”

For several breaths neither moved. Then Isis loosened her fingers, one at a time. She did not look away from him.

Osiris drew the linen across the edge of the stone. It resisted. He pulled again, bracing his foot, and felt the strain run through every joined part of him. The cloth tore with a sound like a sail splitting in wind.

He fell back onto the ledge.

The opening narrowed above him. Isis was still visible, one hand held out, the severed linen hanging from the other.

“Keep him from Seth,” Osiris said.

“I will.”

“Tell him—”

The light thinned to a line. There was too much to tell, and none of it would fit through that last small space.

“I will speak of you,” Isis said.

Then he could no longer see her.

Osiris sat very still with the linen across his knees. Heni waited beside him. Once he reached toward the god, then withdrew his hand.

At last Osiris took it.

He wound the torn cloth from wrist to elbow, drawing each turn close. He spoke Heni’s name as he worked. When he reached the end, he made the knot Isis had taught his fingers without ever teaching him.

“Try.”

Heni opened his hand. Closed it. With great care he touched each fingertip to his thumb.

Then he offered Osiris the pouch.

“For the others,” he said.

The First Furrow

The ground beneath the ledge was hard. Osiris pressed his fingers into it, and the crust yielded to dark earth.

Heni knelt beside him. He tipped the pouch into his repaired palm and counted the kernels.

“Too few,” he said.

Osiris held out his hand.

“Show me the distance between them.”

The measurer set the first seed in the furrow. He moved the god’s fingers a little farther along before placing the next. Behind them the waiting woman came closer. She lowered herself carefully and began to break the clods with her heel.

They sowed the last kernel. Heni turned the pouch inside out to be certain.

Osiris drew earth over the row. When he lifted his palm, a green point had caught against the linen at his wrist. He held still while it straightened.

“Leave room,” Heni said, touching his arm. “There will be more.”

Far away, Isis began to call his name again.

This time the sound reached him with his hands in the earth.