Chapter 8 The Many
Chapter eight
The Many
MERYT
“Meryt, my darling, aren’t you a little too old to be sulking so stubbornly?”
I looked over my shoulder from where I lay huddled on my bed.
I already shared my room with two others, but now, we would be four.
I didn’t want another in my space, another chosen for his beauty to join the dancers.
He had been a mere kitchen whelp, and now, he might vie for my destined position as Pharaoh’s favorite, like Mother was his favorite.
He would ruin everything.
Mother sat on the edge of my bed, unwilling to let me lie in silence, and so she pulled me into her lap and cradled me close.
“You cannot change this path, my child.”
I turned my head, hiding my face in the folds of her dress.
“It needn’t be a bad thing.”
“How could it not be?” I pouted. “He will steal my place. He will take what is rightfully mine!”
“Steal? Take?” She repeated my words with clipped consonants.
“Oh that the gods do not hear you speak so. Such arrogance from my son to assume he deserves something he has yet to earn. If this new blood works harder and earns a place above you, he deserves it. If you believe you deserve it, you must prove so by working just as hard, harder than anyone else. Even then, only the gods decide where fate takes us.”
I buried my face deeper into her soft linen. “It’s not fair.” I sniffled, pitiful as I knew I sounded.
“Perhaps not, but consider how he must be feeling. He was not destined for his life, as far as he knew. He will be entering unfamiliar terrain and requires a friend to guide him.”
“Friend—” I spat, but Mother hushed me.
I looked up at her, ready to angrily spout more, but I couldn’t.
Had she always been so beautiful?
She tousled the coils of my hair. Hers was so similar, but long and lovely in perfect spirals. It was no wonder she was Pharaoh’s favorite. Her full lips, her sparkling dark eyes, her smooth and flawless dark skin…
It had all looked so dim and dull before she died, her beauty unfairly stolen with the onset of illness.
“Imagine how you would feel if your roles were reversed and you were the stranger entering a new home in this palace, with new peers, new challenges. If we make enemies of strangers instead of friends, we will see enemies everywhere, and ultimately only hurt ourselves.” She petted my hair again and then gently stroked my cheek.
How I missed her touch and kind wisdom, the perfect balance with how strictly she taught us.
I hadn’t yet known then—now, then—how important it was to cling to these moments, to remember her as she was, but there would come a day when she would be nothing but memories, soured by the loss of her and her last days spent withering in pain.
Perhaps I was the lucky one to have perished quickly.
“And this, young Nakht,” a voice reached us from my bedchamber door, “is one of the dancers’ quarters for those in training.”
I turned my head to see the young boy being dropped on my doorstep.
“What would you want if it was you who needed help?” Mother whispered, as I took in the small bronze boy wearing as impressive a scowl as any I could have managed myself. “But in the end, it is your choice. You can help him flourish or let him flounder.”
How easily back then I could have gone either way, but the choice I did make changed the entire course of my life. Of both our lives.
I crawled out of Mother’s lap and went to join Nakht at the door, who was subtly pushed forward at my approach by the adult dancer who had brought him.
“I am Meryt,” I introduced myself. “You will be living in this room with me and two others. We are also future dancers. Might I show you around our area of the palace?”
Nakht’s scowl did not change as he muttered, “If you must.”
There was so much fire in his eyes. This was not the life he had wanted because it wasn’t one he had chosen.
It had been forced upon him because he had proven too pretty to not be among our numbers.
But we didn’t get to choose much of anything, being slaves, which was why the choices we did make were so important.
At the time, I hadn’t yet been sold on befriending Nakht, but I took his hand anyway. Although he stiffened at my touch, he allowed me to drag him around the room, and later, to the various practice rooms, our private baths, and other places we dancers called home.
Like a dream, in that moment, I was suddenly outside of myself, an adult again, watching those young children instead of being one of them.
“There is more of your life to see beyond these encounters with the same man.” The voice that spoke was the one who had told me, “Not yet,” when I’d tried to touch Nakht in my haste to be with him again.
I shook my head, eyes glued to the children making their way down the corridor as I followed them out of my old bedroom. “No. Meeting Nakht was the day my life began, and every day with him made it more worth living. I need to see no more to know that is the truth.”
A gentle hand rested upon my shoulder, and when I looked at it, I saw the wrappings of a mummy and bare fingers the color of pale foliage or malachite stones.
Osiris was finally here to take me.
“You needn’t fear, Meryt,” Osiris said, and more than any voice I had heard, save perhaps Nakht’s, it soothed me like only my mother’s once could.
“I know,” I said. “You are rebirth, in essence the defeat of death, because your beloved brought you back after she lost you.”
“She did. She did indeed.” He tugged on my shoulder, coaxing me to turn around.
When I did, my childhood bedroom was gone and all around me was darkness.
But ahead, through an archway of blinding light, was whatever my future held next.
“Come,” he said, but though I had turned, he was somehow behind me again. “The final trial awaits.”
“Trial?”
“You are worthy, Meryt. We knew that much from the start. But as you have seen through the reliving of the memories you most cherished, you are not alone.”
Though I could not see what lay beyond that light, I did not fear it. I couldn’t. Because I knew that finally, finally, my Nakht was truly within reach.
And so I walked forward, as ready as I could ever be to reunite with him.
NAKHT
The light had turned to darkness, reminding me of when the gods first appeared to me. I walked on nothing, and yet my feet touched solid ground. I had no focal point to follow, and yet I knew to simply keep moving forward, maybe because Pasht remained purring in my arms.
Where was Meryt? I usually saw one of his memories by now. Last time, we… we had those precious moments together. I thought perhaps, this time, we might be allowed more than words.
Patience had rarely been my virtue, but never before had it been so tested.
A sliver of light erupted from out of the black ahead of me. Like the billow of curtains from a gentle wind, the darkness parted, leading me to… a balcony?
At last, Pasht squirmed to be released, and I set her upon the floor that had manifested before placing my hand on the balcony’s railing, almost too amazed to breathe.
The view just as magically revealing itself beyond where I stood was nearly as impossible to comprehend as Ptah’s primordial one, because I knew the lands I looked upon were Kemet, my home.
Yet this was some grand apex where the sky in which many of the gods dwelled, the underworld and the Duat that we traverse after death, and the mortal realm met.
And I could see all of it.
The sky showed some of the primordial wonder that had paralyzed me before, and I could see Ra’s day boat, illuminating all as it neared the horizon where it would dip past the mortal realm once more into the underworld beneath with its many torchlit caverns, Seth's lonely prison among them. Even deeper was where Geb lounged in his hot spring. Somewhere amidst it all were the other gods I had encountered, and in Kemet, in Pharaoh’s palace, life continued like nothing was amiss.
I glanced behind me, and where I had come out of the darkness was now a bed chamber with an ornate bed larger than any I had ever seen, even larger than Pharaoh’s and covered in pillows and finery in the purest white linen.
There was a table beside the bed with honey cakes and wine.
Decorations accented the walls and floor, but otherwise the room was bare.
Not even Pasht remained, having trotted off on her own yet again.
I returned to the balcony and nearly stumbled back a step.
Had the view changed or merely my perception?
I could no longer see the sky nor the underworld.
I was looking more closely upon my homeland.
Pharaoh’s palace, the city’s dwellings, the gardens.
I could even see the Nile and all the lushness that bloomed and grew along its banks.
“You have done well, child.”
A chill like water dripping down my spine caused me to shiver. It was not a frightening voice. In truth, it was quite comforting, but also haunting and sorrowful. Before I could turn once more to greet the god that had joined me, another voice spoke first.
“Nakht…?”
I spun more swiftly than I had the first time.
Meryt. Not a figment. Not another doll. Not the promise of him still kept out of reach within an archway, but my Meryt stood in front of the bed.
He looked the same as he had throughout my trials, aside from in his memories. The same way he had looked on the night that he died.
Equal to my height, he stood tall and strong, broader than I was and with more definition to his sculpted muscles, bare midriff included. His broad nose, plump lips, gorgeous skin, so rich and dark, were all as alluring as ever.