Chapter 4 The Shifter
Chapter four
The Shifter
MERYT
Ireadied to hurl the pair of snakes I had caught into the nearby palace gardens, but something stilled my hand.
They were a breed more nuisance than threat and could be helpful when they hunted rodents, but we had plenty of palace cats for that.
It wasn’t that I had been bitten, and these weren’t particularly adept at constricting, but as they hissed and squirmed in my hand, the pair inadvertently curled their tails around each other, reminding me of. .. something, but what?
Something large and thick and coiled like two snakes, with fleshy barbs all up and down it…
“Ah!”
I whipped around to look back toward the palace entrance.
Nakht…
I tossed the pair of snakes as planned, and as they slithered off in search of rats among the foliage, I darted back inside.
This was a side room of the dancer’s area, a place where we prepared ourselves, painting our faces, adorning our hair, and changing for performances.
Mother was training Nakht and I to take over someday as the heads of the troupe, the keepers of our fellows, and so we had been tasked with cleaning and preparing the room for the next night.
It was early morning and still a bit chilly from the desert cold, and so an open hearth in the center of the room had been burning. It was out now, billowing acrid smoke, while Nakht sat on the floor beside it, hissing like the snakes I’d discarded as he favored his left inner thigh.
“What happened?” I dropped down beside him.
There was a small, thumbprint-sized burn on his thigh, red and angry, and just bad enough to be slightly blistered.
I also noticed the bow drill used to start the fire last night had tipped over, one end smoking like the doused fire.
Nakht gestured to it, head ducked in shame.
“I knocked it into the fire while I was putting it out, and when I retrieved it, I lost my grip and... cursed luck like only I could manage.” Nakht turned his head farther away from me, voice breaking as if more from devastation than pain.
“What do I do now? I am marred. Ruined.”
I couldn’t help but smile. He always took things harder than most, immediately assuming the worst. But it was difficult to keep that smile, for he might not be wrong when it came to Pharaoh’s whims. “Hush,” I assured him anyway, gripping his shoulder to shake him and coax him to look at me. “You are beautiful.”
He turned somewhat but still kept his chin tucked. “We are meant to be perfect, especially tonight.”
It was an important evening for us. We had danced before Pharaoh and his elite before, but as children, more as spectacle and distraction than with any allure.
That changed tonight. It was the first time we would be presenting a sensual dance, with the promise of being chosen to join some noble or soldier’s bed.
I looked again at Nakht’s blistered wound. It would surely scar, I could see that already. Perhaps someday it would fade, but that would take years.
I grabbed the bow drill’s spindle, placed its blackened end back in the extinguished fire against the reddest remaining embers, and once I deemed it hot enough—
“Mer? What are you—?”
I pressed the end against Nakht’s other inner thigh, parallel to the first.
“Ah!” he yelped, and shot an accusing glare at me. “Why did you do that?”
I had to commend myself for replicating the first burn so perfectly. I set the spindle aside to cool. “We will keep them hidden tonight. Keep them hidden until they heal.”
“But how—”
“We are one entity, twin dancers never to be separated.
Whoever chooses one of us, chooses us both, and I will be sure to entice them to take me first and wear them out so they cannot take you too.
You can pleasure them in other ways, so adeptly as I know you are capable of, that they will be only too happy with your mouth and hands.
“Then, when your wounds are healed, we will paint them, so that if they are ever discovered, we will say they are the imprints of the gods who could not resist claiming you and wanting you for themselves.”
Nakht laughed through the pooling of tears in his eyes. “Who would ever believe that?”
With his smile smoothing away his worry and his beautiful bronze eyes on me, I wanted to tell him he was a fool for not seeing what I saw, but I had done that before.
He never believed he was as radiant as I knew him to be.
“They don’t have to believe, only to be charmed by the story.
And if even a part of them does believe they follow in the gods’ footsteps, they will want you even more. ”
I kissed him, at first sweetly upon his forehead, then his cheek, and finally his lips, pouring all my rampant desire into the deeper connection so he would believe what only words might never be enough to convey.
I would treat the wounds, soothing his pain and helping the burns to heal with honey or animal fat, and do all I had said.
Since Nakht would be too sore to have someone between his thighs, later, I would let him between mine, to reclaim what would be taken by another, but would be no other’s, not truly, except his forevermore.
It would happen just like that. I knew it would, because I had already seen it.
I had already lived it.
“Nakht...” I whispered as I pulled from our kiss.
“Yes? I'm right—”
But I didn’t mean him.
I turned my head in frantic search of him. The real him.
There! Through an archway where normally there wasn’t one stood Nakht, older and even more ravishingly beautiful, just like I knew he would be. He was so close. Closer than the other times.
Oh gods, there had been other times. There had been many times like this strange moment, where I didn’t truly know what was real.
What was happening? Why was I moving backward through life, and he...
He...
“Meryt?”
I sprang up away from the younger memory of Nakht to race toward the archway, but before I could dive through it to reunite with him, just like before... like before and before and before... everything went white.
NAKHT
“Mer—”
I readied to receive Meryt in my arms only to gasp like waking from a nightmare and blink at unfamiliar surroundings.
I was on a slab of rock, the same that had shot me up into the sky, and though I was off my feet, reclined, I was dressed and dry with everything the previous gods had bestowed upon me.
What torture this was! I had thought it the proverbial carrot for the horse, but perhaps these glimpses of Meryt were the stick.
And where was I now? This wasn’t the sky. I was aloft amid my surroundings, but although the cavernous space was larger than where I had encountered Geb, the walls and ceiling were still rocks.
I looked below over the edge of my platform.
I was dizzyingly high up, but I could see a river beneath me cutting through this hollowed mountain, as well as buildings carved into the rocky walls like tomb entrances.
There were braziers that lit up the darkness, and it was exceptionally dark here, much darker than the glittering blue of Geb’s chamber.
These rocks were a reddish hue, similar to the surface where I'd tread all my life.
Light blinded me when my eyes drifted up, and from a curve in the vastness of the cave came something even more brilliantly bright than that initial flash.
I couldn’t say if it dimmed, or if I simply adjusted, but when I blinked again and tried to look through the piercing glow, I could clearly see what approached me.
A boat floated toward where I lay, but not along the river below. It was as aloft as I was and moved through the air like a gliding bird. It had been emanating that light because the boat carried the embodiment of the sun itself and had descended into the underworld to traverse the night.
The falcon head of the solitary figure standing upon the boat’s bow was unmistakable.
It was not so striking as his depictions in art, not as if plucked from an actual bird and set upon the body of a man.
There was a human-like face within the feathered visage.
A beak-like nose, long and sharp, with a human mouth beneath, and the feathers that lined his outer face continued into a mane like the flow of dark hair.
He was blue skinned, a sky-blue like Ptah, his feathers blue-black like Geb’s, and as he drew closer, I caught the glint of metallic eyes, both gold and silver together, like the sun and stars.
He wore gold armor over his tunic, more elaborate than the outfits of the others, similar to how Pharaoh’s linens were always trimmed with gold stitching, and a thick, gold band adorned his wrist with the symbol of an eclipse, showing only half of the sun displaying its rays.
Amun-Ra.
Even if he hadn’t been visible, I would have recognized his day boat, for it was bright and colorful, painted and adorned like the gods adorned themselves, with a sun disc symbol emblazoned upon its sail.
The ship was small, maybe large enough for a half dozen crew members, but there was no crew.
There was only him, commanding the boat to move by sheer will.
As it finally reached me and came to a graceful stop in front of where I lay upon my platform, it transformed before my eyes into Ra’s night ship, with that same symbol of an eclipse on its sail where the sun had been.
The rest of the ship was midnight blue and black now, sleek and devoid of decoration to better suit the darkness of the Duat.
Ra was as eerily and oddly beautiful to me as Geb. As Anubis too. He had a calmness like Anubis, a regal stature, as he moved to the edge of the boat and offered me his hand.
“Come, Nakht, you will ride with me until the dawn.”
There wasn’t time for me to be awestruck, wondrous as each new god was to me, and so I stood, took his hand, and allowed his uncanny strength to aid me onto the boat.