Ammit

Hori had almost reached the scales when the thing beneath them opened one eye.

He stopped with his foot above the last step. The eye was yellow, the pupil narrow. Below it, teeth stood at uneven intervals along a crocodile’s jaw. The jaw rested on two great lion paws. Farther back, where the mane thinned, the body swelled into the heavy, bare haunches of a hippopotamus.

There was room between those teeth for the green stone in his hand.

He closed his fingers over it.

“Your heart,” said Anubis.

Hori mounted the step. He had rehearsed this passage through the dark: his name, the names of the doors, the words that must not be forgotten. Now the scales were in front of him, one pan holding a feather, the other empty, and all he could remember was the sound of his daughter testing the knot of his burial necklace.

It will hold, Father. See?

He laid the scarab in Anubis’s outstretched hand.

The black muzzle lowered. The god turned the stone so that its inscribed underside faced Hori, then gave it back.

“Your heart.”

“I have brought the words.”

Anubis waited.

Hori put his free hand against his chest. Something moved beneath his palm, a small hard contraction. He pressed again, meaning to hold it there, but his fingers closed around something warm. When he drew his hand away, his heart lay in it.

It was smaller than he had expected. He had kept accounts for three granaries. He had stood in a doorway with both his children asleep against him. This little fist of flesh had been with him through all of it.

Beneath the balance, the creature lifted her head.

“Ammit,” Hori whispered.

Her jaw parted a little. No growl came from it. She was watching his hand.

He cupped his other hand around the heart, hiding it, and the carved beetle knocked against his knuckle.

Anubis held the empty pan steady.

The Measure

Hori set his heart in the pan as gently as he had once set down a sleeping child.

The beam dipped, rose, and hovered crookedly. He watched the feather travel upward. Only a little. Enough for a clerk to notice.

Beyond the upright of the balance, an ibis-headed figure moistened a reed. Hori heard its tip touch the writing surface.

“I have not taken what belonged to another,” he said.

Ammit moved one paw. The claws made a brief, dry sound on the floor.

Hori looked back at the beam.

“In my charge,” he added. “Nothing was lost from the stores in my charge.”

He could see the accounts as clearly as if someone had unrolled them: deliveries, distributions, seed held back for the next sowing. Totals at the bottom, each one correct. His superior’s seal beside his own mark.

The pan sank another finger’s breadth.

There had been a wooden measure with a split along its side. He had ordered it repaired. That was all. The workman had fitted a new piece of wood inside the bottom, and afterward the measure held less grain.

Hori had discovered it on the first morning.

He shifted his weight. The green scarab was slippery in his palm.

“There were instructions to make the grain last.”

Anubis touched the plumb line. Hori leaned forward, hoping to see a kink, a thread caught against the upright, anything a practised hand could straighten. The line hung free.

A woman had noticed the measure too.

He had been sitting at his table in the granary shade. She came back from the distribution door and put her sack beside his palette. Dust marked the place where she had carried it against her hip.

“This is short.”

“It is your ration.”

“It is less than last time.”

He had told her the register showed the same amount. She did not argue with the register. She opened the sack.

“Look.”

Her son stood by the door, holding the repaired measure. He must have picked it up when the attendant turned away. The boy’s thumb rested inside it, on the raised bottom.

Hori remembered the thumb before he remembered the boy’s face: black beneath the nail, the skin at the joint bitten raw.

“The wood is thicker,” the boy said.

Hori had got up so quickly that he knocked his water cup over. Water ran across the table toward the accounts. He snatched the papyrus clear, then went to the boy and took the measure from him.

Put that down. You have no business touching it.

The memory stopped there, at the place where he usually stopped it.

He swallowed.

Ammit’s head was level with the pan now. He could see a pale scrap caught between two teeth. A flake of something dry. He looked away before he decided what it was.

“I did not know what happened to them afterward.”

Thoth’s reed kept moving.

That was true. He had never learned whether the woman found grain elsewhere, whether the boy grew tall, whether either of them lived through the season. For years the blank space after their departure had made the incident easier to carry.

But they had not left at once.

The woman had held her sack open while Hori returned to his table. She stood there as he blotted the water with a rag. At last she said, very quietly, “Then measure it again.”

He could have done that. The old standard stood on a shelf within reach of his chair.

Instead, he called the attendant.

Now, beside the scales, Hori turned his hand as though the measure were still in it. He remembered how little grain rose above the false bottom.

“I knew,” he said.

The words came out without force. He had expected that saying them would hurt more than keeping them in.

“I knew before she asked.”

The beam did not rise.

What Could Be Given

“I gave grain afterward.”

He spoke quickly now. There had been gifts at festivals. A neighbour’s roof repaired. Bread sent to the burial of a man who had no sons. These were real things. He named them, counting on his fingers until he noticed that Ammit had begun to stand.

Her hindquarters lifted heavily. The lion paws remained almost soundless. With one step she put the bulk of her body beneath the lower end of the beam.

Hori moved between her and the heart.

“I can give more.”

Anubis looked at him.

The promise hung there. No storeroom stood behind Hori now. No attendant waited for his order. He had brought the necklace his daughter tied and the words he had learned; everything he had once been able to give was on the other side of death.

“Let me return.”

No door opened.

“One day.”

Ammit waited. Her head tilted just enough to keep the heart in view around his body.

Hori lifted the scarab. Green stone, a rim of gold, letters cut so carefully that he could feel them with his thumb. He began the appeal he had practised, asking his heart to remain his ally, to withhold its accusation.

The first lines came readily. Then he heard his own voice in the granary, telling the woman that the written amount was correct.

He tried to start again.

His heart struck the side of the pan.

The small sound broke the rhythm. For an instant his tongue could find neither the next word nor the one before it. The beam settled, heart below feather.

Anubis took his hand away from the balance.

Hori snatched the heart out.

It beat against both his palms. He staggered back down the step, holding it to his chest. The empty pan swung high. Ammit turned, following him, but did not spring.

He retreated another pace.

Behind him lay the passage by which he had entered. Somewhere beyond the judgment, he had been told, were waterways, fields, people calling to one another across the growing grain. He had pictured his wife there, impatient at his late arrival. Now he could see only the dark mouth of the passage.

He took one step toward it. His heart tightened so sharply that he bent over.

At the granary, when the attendant came, the boy had reached for his mother’s sack. It was too large for him to carry properly. He gathered the loose cloth into both hands and dragged its bottom over the threshold.

Hori had watched to make certain they took nothing else.

He stayed bent over until the contraction passed. There was nowhere he could put the heart that would make it belong to someone else.

The Waiting Mouth

When Hori climbed the step again, Ammit was beside the empty pan.

Up close, her jaws were broader than his two hands together. The lion fur along her throat moved with each breath. He searched the yellow eye for anger, for eagerness, for some sign that she could be pleased with him instead.

The eye followed his hands.

His daughter had paid for the scarab. He remembered her sitting beside the bed, insisting the carver had made no mistake, tracing each sign for him though she could not read them all. He had let her believe there was nothing left to fear.

For a moment he wanted to tell Anubis about her. To describe how gently she had lifted his head to tie the cord. Surely that should count for something.

He opened his mouth, then closed it.

He set the scarab on the step, away from the swinging pan. He turned it upright, beetle back toward the light.

His heart was still warm. He held it a moment longer.

“The woman asked me twice,” he said.

Thoth’s reed stopped.

“I have always said she asked once.”

Then he lowered the heart into the pan and withdrew his fingers.

The beam fell. The feather rose. Ammit brought her crocodile muzzle over the rim, and Hori heard one tooth touch the metal.

He had thought there would be time to scream. There was only time to see the heart between her jaws, impossibly small, still moving.

His hand opened toward it. In the last instant he remembered the boy at the threshold and tried to put back the grain he had kept from him.

The jaws closed.