Chapter 2 The Maker
Chapter two
The Maker
MERYT
“M-Meryt…?” Nakht asked, weak and pitiful sounding, which reminded me where I was.
Or should be? Was I somewhere else just now, wearing lotus flowers and new attire?
“Mer?”
“Hm?” I returned my attention to him, instantly wracked with guilt that I could be distracted at all when my beloved was lying so ill and fragile before me. I took his hand and moved my chair closer to his bedside.
We weren’t in our room but a private alcove reserved for the sick and dying.
It had its own small bathing area to make it easier to clean them.
The steam in the room was also helpful for sweating out fevers.
All the usual remedies had been attempted: herbs, honey, the mold of old bread that helped with infections.
Still, Nakht’s fever refused to break, he wasn’t recovering, and if he didn’t show a turn for the better soon…
I squeezed his hand tighter, refusing to imagine such an outcome.
“I-I thought I… was the hazy one,” Nakht said, cracking a weak smile.
“You are.” His attempt at levity brought a smile to my face too, but it couldn’t last. “You shouldn’t be talking. You need to rest.”
“So do you. You haven’t been sleeping. Just watching over me.”
“I’ve slept plenty.” I moved my other hand to his forehead. He was so warm, skin clammy and wrong. “We should try a cold cloth again. Maybe the steam is spiking your fever too much instead of breaking it.”
“The priest said—”
“Oh what does that priest know!” I snapped, and though my outburst roused Nakht a little more vividly awake, I hated that I’d raised my voice when he needed me to be strong.
“He is the physician and religious head for Pharaoh. For all of us,” Nakht said. “He knows more than anyone.”
“But it’s not enough.” I shook my head, almost gripping Nakht’s hand too tight in my frustration. Instead, I brought my other hand down, cradling his in both of mine in prayer. “Praises be to Sekhmet—”
“Mer, please.” Nakht rested his other hand over mine. “Relax for a moment. You would tell me the same if our positions were reversed.”
“I know, but I need to care for you.”
“You are. Just rest a while and be here with me. That's all I need from you.”
I couldn’t look at him. How dare he be so confident and calm when he was fading right in front of me? I pulled my hands from his. “I’m just bending to grab that cold cloth.”
I had placed the damp cloth in a zeer pot, a layered smaller pot in a larger one with damp sand packed between the two. The cloth was as cold as I could make it, and seemed more so when placed upon Nakht’s burning skin.
He closed his eyes, sighing and smiling blissfully.
“That’s nice…”
Awake as he had been a moment ago, he was fading quickly again.
He needed the rest, he did, but every time he slept with this fever persisting, I feared he would never wake up.
I had to remind myself constantly that as long as his chest rose and fell with even, stable breaths, he would, he would, and I could breathe easier too.
But if priests truly knew enough to save people, we would never lose anyone. It was only the will of the gods that decided who recovered and who perished. They gave us the tools to try to save ourselves, but they still decided when someone’s time was up.
Like they had with my mother.
“Please get better,” I whispered, kissing his cheek beneath the fall of the cool cloth. “Don't leave me, my love. Please. I can't lose you too.”
Nakht surprised me when his eyes fluttered open.
“You won’t,” he said, and blindly lifted a hand, waiting for me to grab it once more.
When I grasped it, he squeezed, and weak as he was, there was strength there, like a promise.
“I will do everything in my power to always stay with you, Meryt… through these miserable days… to the next bright one.”
I dropped my forehead to his—or at least to the damp cloth. “You better.”
Motion out of the corner of my eye drew my attention to the nearby door.
Where another Nakht stood in a more incredible dancer’s attire than I had ever seen him in, sparkling as though the gods had woven it with stars.
“Nakht—”
But before I could get up to question this echo, light engulfed me.
NAKHT
“Mer?!” I called wildly into the bright expanse, rushing ahead to break through it.
I had seen him again, I was certain of it.
A brief flash of Meryt at my bedside some years back, when I was close enough to death’s door that I might have been among the gods a very different way if Meryt’s constant attention and urgent prayers hadn’t pulled me back from the brink.
He had said it was the will of the gods, but it was my will, and his, unable to accept being parted.
Meryt was reliving his life, the gods had told me, and I was seeing glimpses as I neared him with each trial won. I assumed that meant he would watch my next progress too. I longed for that, for his eyes on me again, whatever may come. But it was not him I found at the end of the light.
The doorway I passed beneath was not the one I had stepped through to follow Pasht, or the one I had been standing in when I’d seen Meryt beside that slightly younger me. This was a workshop of sorts, somewhere else entirely.
The room was a good size, twice as large as Anubis’s funerary chamber, perhaps even larger than I could see beyond the shelves covered in various tools and contraptions.
In the center of the room was a table just as littered with objects, many I had never seen before—or if I had, I didn’t know how to use them.
To the left of the table was something as tall as I was, covered in a linen sheet.
It was large enough to unnerve me, like some creature hidden, but what frightened me more and drew me to it was the window to the table’s right.
It was open, but beyond it was no usual view of the night sky.
The sheer magnitude of what I was seeing lured me forward even while it filled me with dread.
There were stars, but as if they were swirling together, creating new ones, while others burnt out.
Among them were large floating orbs of varying colors, some I didn’t think I had ever perceived before.
They too swirled from new life to inevitable destruction, snuffing out one way, exploding another, colliding with each other.
It was nonsense to my eyes, madness, and yet the reality of what I was seeing, what I must be seeing seeped into my mind.
The cycle of creation. The primordial sea where the gods created us, and we were but one ship rocking upon its waves, headed toward the same end as all the rest, for new life to spring forth in our death knell wake.
How small and insignificant we were, but specks of dust in that ocean, far smaller than the stars that just as pointlessly came into being and were later erased like they had never been.
It was beautiful and yet terrible in its simplicity, all happening right before my—
The window was shuttered with a clatter, causing me to gasp as the view was suddenly blocked.
The dread that had been settling in me calmed just as instantly.
It seemed the view alone, even with me so far removed from those tumultuous tides being where I was among the gods in the sky, had nearly swallowed me whole.
“Mortal eyes are not meant to see such things,” a calm voice said.
I turned, and beside me, having shut the window with a swift hand… was Ptah, architect of all, creator god, and patron of all makers. He could be no one else, for the color of his skin was as green as Pharaoh’s gardens.
Never in my life had I seen someone with such flawless features, but of course he was immaculate, for he had breathed life into all who came after him, all ranges of mortals and gods, in every shape and feature imaginable, and so, somehow, he was all and none at once and exceptionally beautiful for it.
The more I looked at his face, the more I realized his skin was also…
moving. Within that lovely green hue were carved lines, outlining and accentuating his sharp features, handsome and perfectly symmetrical, even more so with how the lines were in constant motion, just like the primordial sea beyond the window.
His eyes were an equally iridescent green, swirling with clashing shades that hypnotized and thrilled me, especially with how they were rimmed in gold so evenly applied that I could not be certain if it was simple pigment or gold leaf like what adorned Anubis’s eyes.
He wore a blue and gold collar similar to Anubis’s but more delicate, and upon his head was a matching blue and gold skull cap that also seemed as though the designs upon it were alive and moving, like rivers lapping at their banks.
From his chin jutted a false beard braided with blue and gold but also green like some culmination of the life he represented, but I saw no visible strap or other explanation for how the beard stayed in place.
At first glance down Ptah’s body, he seemed wrapped in linen like one of the dead, but it was not strips that covered him.
He wore a sheer white linen robe that clung to him like a second skin.
It stretched when he moved, emphasizing his body like the lines on his skin.
He wore a small, wrapped loincloth beneath the sheer robe but nothing else, no belt nor embellishments save gold bangles on his wrists.
He was striking, elegant, and made me feel as insignificant as I had while watching worlds being birthed and eradicated in the span of moments.
Perhaps mostly because of how Ptah looked at me.
“Such craftsmanship,” he said, reaching with one of his green-skinned hands to grasp my chin.
There were lines on its surface too, on all of him.
I could feel them moving as he touched me, tilting my face from side to side.
“Anubis dressed and decorated you well, but I would paint you too, and emphasize even more of this fine face.”