Chapter 7 The Scholar #2
“I do not. Not completely. But we will be together. That is all that matters to me.” Nakht raised a hand palm outward, a subtle smile quirking his lips like it had on his younger self.
The practice room seemed dimmer around us, and all I truly saw was him, like a light in the dark or the sun cresting over the horizon. “Dusk to my dawn,” he said.
I mimicked him, aligning our palms, while wishing we could risk pressing them flush. “Dawn to my dusk,” I echoed.
“You look so beautiful.”
“You look beautiful. Unfairly so. Far more beautiful than I ever could.”
“Oh hush,” Nakht chastised, as if this were no more different an encounter than any day back home. “I could never outdo you.”
“Your limberness can.” I smirked.
He laughed, tilting just slightly forward so I could feel the heat from his just-out-of-reach hand. “I can accept that. And soon, I will show you just how limber I still am.”
An array of erotic images replayed in my mind of Nakht taking or being taken by one of the gods. “I think you have been. I might be a little jealous.”
“Of the gods? Or me?”
“Both,” I teased, tilting my head at him, wanting nothing more than to kiss him, but him this time, not a memory.
Nakht laughed again, breathy and sweet, the loveliest of sounds I had ever heard.
My desire to be with him urged me to raise my other hand, and Nakht paralleled that motion too.
“Oh please… please, gods above and below us, let me touch him,” I beseeched, but as I started to take the step forward that was needed, in that same instant, I knew the answer before a deep, resonant voice whispered at my ear:
“Not yet.”
NAKHT
I gasped as I pushed my hands forward only to make contact with the trunk of a tree.
That, I knew, had been a gift, showing what awaited us should I succeed.
I realized it was not a tree I touched, however. The surface was too smooth, too white, too large in circumference. I leaned away from it and tilted my head, finding myself looking up the length of an impossibly tall pillar. It was carved from white limestone with intricate markings etched into it.
I leaned closer again, realizing that the markings were pictographs, but so tiny, I could barely read them. Then one line jumped out at me almost as if it had begun to glow.
Was it glowing?
Keep thou not silent when evil is spoken
for Truth, like the sunlight, shines above all.
Thoth. Those were believed to be Thoth’s words from one of his records, god of knowledge, secrets, and magic.
He was also the god of writing, of poetry, and I tentatively reached forward again to touch the glowing hieroglyphics, having always felt the most affinity for this god, for I knew well the power of words.
“You needn’t strain your eyes, child.”
I snatched my hand back and spun around to seek the voice’s source.
I saw now that this pillar was one among many.
The vastness of them could have been their own forest like the one in the oasis I left, for the pillars were equally innumerable, and amidst them were tall shelves with alcoves filled to bursting with scrolls.
I was in the center of some immense library, like nothing mere mortals could ever have conceived, with a domed ceiling showing the blue sky above as if made of something completely transparent.
Glass? But never before had I seen it used for such a structure.
Near me but still several strides away was a massive table where Thoth himself sat writing. He was only using a corner of the table, with a small pile of scrolls at hand, and the rest of the large surface was bare.
“I built this place on words.” He spoke without looking at me, a higher pitched voice, light and airy, perhaps the most casual sounding of the gods, as if he had no care in the world other than what he was writing. “But scrolls are easier on the eyes.”
I almost laughed.
Casual was exactly what he was, for as I approached him at his table, I saw how human he looked too. Horus had been the most human before now, but he had wings. Thoth appeared like a quite normal-looking, albeit very handsome, young man—no, not young. He was older. Wasn’t he? But also ageless.
He had a long, thin nose, but hardly looked the same as he was often portrayed, like an ibis bird, or more seldomly, a baboon.
He had the same medium-dark skin I had seen on many of the gods, and he wore a gold wrist cuff like many of them too, but his bore no simple symbol.
It was covered in hieroglyphics, I thought perhaps saying the same phrase that I had read on the pillar.
He was the god who had invented them after all.
Thoth’s loincloth with attached wrap over one shoulder was made of pure white linen, but an elaborate gold and turquoise belt contrasted its simplicity.
His godly collar was similarly colored, and along with his wrist cuff, he wore matching armbands.
He also wore a turquoise ring with a golden ankh, a common symbol for all the gods, for it meant life and rebirth.
His black hair was especially long, twisted into a braid over one shoulder with the end pooling in his lap, mostly hidden from me, but it was beautifully woven with turquoise threads and beads.
Movement to my left drew my attention before I could finish my perusal of Thoth.
It was me. My reflection. Caught in glass as pure as the translucence above us, but this was like the stillest water, replicating everything it showed in perfect detail, as though I had been doubled and stared upon my twin.
I had never seen myself so clearly before. Meryt’s words to me during our brief meeting were not untrue. I looked ravishing, so much so that I barely noticed my flaws.
Looking back to Thoth, I continued my approach.
Atop his black hair was a coronet with a crescent moon in its center, like Horus’s eye after Thoth healed it.
He had the fur of an animal draped over his shoulder atop the linen, which may have been from a baboon, but the only thing similar to the long thin beak of an ibis bird was the reed pen Thoth was using to write.
I would think him a scribe for Pharaoh, elite, yes, but not the god of scholars. He seemed too modest compared to the other gods, almost like a lie.
Thoth looked up at that like he had snatched the words from my thoughts. His eyes were his surrealist feature, turquoise like his adornments with silver crescent moons within. “If you are a reflection of us, Nakht, can some of us not be a reflection of you?”
“My apologies, my lord, you’re just so…”
“Not a disappointment, I hope?”
“No!” I assured him, finally finishing my long trek to his table. “Maybe a relief. All of the gods I have had audiences with have been immeasurably beautiful in their own unique ways, but there is also beauty in the simplicity of man.”
“I quite agree.” Thoth’s blue-green eyes scanned over me, and the crescents in his irises glowed.
He glanced down at what he had been writing and finished it with a final pictograph, elegantly scrawled.
“There. All finished,” he said, and waved his hand before I could decipher his work, causing the parchment to roll up, and it and all of the scrolls on the table floated off on their own to shelve themselves.
Thoth stood, dismissing the chair he had been sitting in too, so it flew away from the table to rest against a pillar. He gestured to the table’s now empty surface.
“Your turn.”
The clothing and accessories I had been wearing flew from me with the same sudden dismissal as the chair and scrolls, much like Geb had disrobed me, and I was bare, left only with my jewelry and the embellishments the various gods had added to my braids.
I understood I was to lie down, but I did not expect a cleansing like what Anubis had offered.
When I sat upon the table to first lift my legs and then recline, I realized the angle of the reflecting glass was pointed in this direction to display me in it. How strange to see oneself so perfectly doubled.
I laid back, expecting the hard surface to be uncomfortable, but although there was no pillow nor angle to the table to support my neck, I felt oddly relaxed, even when Thoth stepped closer to hover above me. While standing, his long braid nearly reached his knees.
“Try not to move,” he said, ratcheting at least a little tension through me, “but if you do, fear not. You won’t spoil the work.”
Work?
With no palette to dip his reed pen into to replenish its ink, the tip of the pen bubbled with fresh pigment anyway as he brought it to the surface of my skin and began to write.
I held back a gasp, not wanting to move too much with the rise and fall of my breaths.
The pen was sharp, its scrawling upon my skin what I imagined being tattooed must feel like, bordering on painful but never quite more than I could bear.
What was strangest was that while he wrote only on the top side of me, I felt it through to my backside too, knowing an echo of the words were being painted there as well, leaving no expanse of skin.
Pain was not the only sensation his reed pen produced, however. Sometimes, where he wrote, the skin beneath felt numb, sometimes it tickled, sometimes it burned like too much time in the sun, and sometimes the way the pen moved in its elegant strokes brought indescribable pleasure.
I gasped again, as the warring sensations mingled.
What he was writing, I had no idea, for even when I tried to glance toward the reflecting glass, I could see only part of me, and the pictographs were too small from so far away.
I wanted to glance down my body but wasn’t sure if I was allowed to know the words until he was finished, and where he wrote was not always a place I could easily see without moving.