The children stopped their game when Isis asked about the chest.
They had been shouting over one another. Now they looked at the lock cut short beside her face, at her mourning clothes, at the road dust on her feet.
“A great wooden chest,” she said. “Men brought it to the river.”
One child pointed. “There.”
Another caught his wrist and turned his finger farther along the bank. They began arguing about where they had stood when they saw it. Isis crouched beside them.
“Show me.”
Her husband Osiris had lain down in that chest at his brother’s feast. Seth’s companions had shut him inside and sent him out upon the Nile. Isis had followed every report she could find, asking at houses, at landings, among men unloading boats. The children were the first who had seen it with their own eyes.
They led her to the water and showed her which mouth of the river had carried him towards the sea.
She remained there after they went back to their game.
Beyond Egypt, the waves had laid the chest among the heather at Byblos. The plant grew around it, closing the wood away within a thickening trunk. A king saw the great stem and wanted it for his palace. He had it cut, and the hidden chest went with it beneath his roof.
News of that strange growth reached Isis.
She crossed the sea.
The Pillar
At a spring in Byblos, the queen’s women found a stranger sitting alone.
Isis greeted them. When one bent to fill her vessel, a loose strand of hair fell across her face. Isis lifted it aside and began to braid it. The woman grew still beneath her hands.
The others drew close.
“Mine too,” one said.
Isis worked without haste. A fragrance clung to the hair she touched, a sweetness the women carried with them when they returned to the queen. Soon a messenger came to the spring.
The stranger was wanted at the palace.
Inside, Isis saw the pillar.
It stood beneath the roof with the other supports, its cut sides smoothed by human hands. People walked past it carrying food and linen. Beside it, a child cried in his nurse’s arms.
The queen welcomed Isis. In time she trusted her with the infant himself.
By day Isis held him against her and gave him her finger to suck. Her eyes returned again and again to the wood. Osiris was nearer than he had been through all her searching, and no one in the house knew what their roof rested upon.
At night, she laid the child in a divine fire.
The flames took hold of what was mortal in him. His small body lay quiet within their brightness while Isis became a swallow and flew about the pillar. Her wings brushed the air close to the wood. Round it she went, crying for the one it concealed.
Then the queen opened the door.
She saw her son in the fire.
Her scream filled the hall.
The swallow wheeled. Before the queen stood Isis, no longer a stranger whose hands could dress hair. The work of the fire had been broken. The child remained mortal.
The queen gathered him against herself and stumbled back.
“What were you doing?”
“Giving him a life that would not end.”
The goddess looked at the frightened child in his mother’s arms. Then she turned to the pillar.
“I am Isis. I have come for what is inside that wood.”
The queen followed her gaze.
“My husband,” Isis said.
What the Wood Held
The king yielded the pillar to her.
Isis drew it from its place with a strength that made the workmen step away. She stripped the wood from around the chest. Pale pieces fell about her feet until she could see the lid, the closed seams, the shape she had followed across the sea.
She wrapped the sacred wood in linen and anointed it with perfume. This she gave into the king’s keeping.
Then she knelt beside the chest.
Her hands lay flat upon it. She had imagined finding it so often that now, with it beneath her fingers, she could scarcely move. She bent until her forehead touched the lid.
The lament broke out of her.
The king’s younger son fell where he stood. Those near him turned at the sound, but he did not rise. The queen called his name. Isis lifted her head, and her cry failed in the terrible silence that followed.
The chest was carried aboard a boat. The king’s elder son went with her when she left Byblos.
Near morning, a fierce wind came from the Phaedrus river against their passage. Isis, furious at being held there with her burden, dried up its stream. The boat went on.
At last she found a place where she could be alone.
She opened the chest.
There was Osiris.
She had touched wood for so long: the pillar, the stripped trunk, the sealed lid. Now she could lay her hand upon his face. She lowered herself beside him and pressed her cheek against his.
He was cold.
She spoke his name into the small space between them. Nothing changed. Her tears fell where no answering breath would warm them.
Behind her, a foot shifted.
The elder prince had come quietly to see. Isis turned upon him, grief flashing into anger. The boy saw her face and could not bear the terror of it. He fell and died.
She looked at the place where he lay.
Then she turned back to the open chest.
Her husband had been found. The sea no longer lay between them, and no king’s roof hid him from her. Isis reached inside and took his hand in both of hers.
She held it while the light moved across the lid.