Prologue

All that came to pass that day must have been a jest of Hathor, goddess of love. Had it not been for her mischief, I—decorous as I was—would never have lain with a man I did not even know.

Until that night I was still a virgin. I had no thought of taking any pleasure in Hathor's festival, and I stood before the waters of the Nile sunk in melancholy, never dreaming of what was about to unfold.

I had not resolved to throw myself in and die. I only could not bear to remain among those steeped in joy and rapture, and walking had brought me to the village's edge, where the Nile ran. Moonlight lay softly over everything, so that the wild ducks sporting along the bank, the reeds shivering in the breeze, and the river itself gliding past in a quiet current all seemed lovelier than they truly were.

Then it happened. Whether the bull said to dwell beneath the earth of Crete had run mad once more and shaken the world, a wave of impossible height crashed into me. Again and again I was dashed down and swept away, and before I could choose whether to swallow or not, the river climbed my throat in thick gulps and filled me. As the water claimed my body, life seemed to ebb from it in equal measure. So this is how my life ends, I thought, resigned, and I was slowly sinking when a firm hand flashed out, caught me, and lifted me high.

Cool night air touched the body that had risen as if floating toward the sky, and then I was laid upon level ground. Yet I was smothered. My mind knew I had to breathe, but my body had forgotten how. A large hand pressed steadily beneath my chin and opened a gap between lips that had been sealed shut, and a sensation I had never known came over me—warm, soft, and moist, dizzying and sweet, as if I had drunk wine.

Soft, burning lips met my own, which had lost all warmth, and through the part between them a warm breath passed into me. It moved over my tongue, gone stiff and rigid, down the throat the cold river had frozen, and spread slowly into the chest that had forgotten how to breathe and the limbs that had lost the strength to move. As if it bore the spark of life, that breath ran out through the blood of my whole body and filled again the place from which life had fled.

Each time the man's large hands desperately kneaded my arms and legs, rigid with cold, I felt as though my body were becoming an instrument. I was the strings of the sistrum, the sacred rattle of the goddess Hathor, and beneath his playing I seemed to sound the notes of life—a hazy, drifting feeling—until the numbness in my fingertips and toes was gone.

Who is he? On the border between consciousness and oblivion I managed to open my eyes, and a man was there. I saw first the long black hair spilling down, and then, in turn, a gaze heavy with presence, a straight nose, a firm-set jaw, and a frame so powerful it hardly seemed to belong to a mortal man. He was nothing like the ordinary men of the village. He looked as though he had stepped from the wondrous tales my nurse, Alida, used to tell me. This man, wrought like a statue—could he be Osiris, god of the dead? They say the underworld is a paradise. Is that why its lord is so fair?

I longed to look at him more closely, but I had not the strength to keep my eyelids raised. Even that brief glimpse had been too much. What life remained in me drained away once more, and my arms and legs went slack. The very organs of breath, as if they had forgotten their office again, ceased to work.

I lived in the artisans' village where tombs were made, and I had always believed I went through my days prepared for death. Faced with it, I was so afraid I thought the terror itself would kill me. Please, save me. I do not yet wish to pass into the eternal world. Pleading inwardly with all my heart, I gathered every shred of strength that remained and reached toward him.

When at last I caught his powerful arm, his lips met mine again. A hot force of life—a fierce vitality that made me know I was alive—passed from mouth to mouth, set my chest burning, and burst from me in a violent fit of coughing.

"Thank goodness."

Water had got into my ears as well, so the words reached me only faintly, yet the low pitch of his voice was pleasing to hear. Then a different pain arrived. I could breathe by my own power at last, but my body's heat must have plunged, for I was cold beyond cold, and every part of me ached as if knives were driving through it. My throat, clawed raw by the river, was too spent to make a sound at all. Still, if the man left me like this, I would lie worn out by the cold until I became a meal for the crocodiles.

"I'm so cold……"

When I forced my eyes open with the last strength of the dying, that, I think, was when Hathor's mischief truly began. A gentle breeze came up. The leaves of the fig trees and the palms round about rustled and danced, carrying a faint scent of flowers to my nose, waking the senses of my body and stirring young flesh. The moon—called the silver disk of Hathor, goddess of love—poured forth a light at once mysterious and bewitching. It cast its alluring brilliance over my thin, transparent linen dress, which bared my breasts entirely, and laid a strange radiance across the man's sculpted face, sharpening its cool beauty.

It was the Night of Hathor, when all the world whispers of love and tastes the pleasures of paradise. In the space of a blink my dress had fallen away. His young body came against mine, and he, like a musician long practiced at his art, led me softly wherever he desired. I surrendered everything to him, flung my arms about his neck, and clung.

When that gentle exploration was finished, a pain I could scarcely believe swept through me, and a scream escaped. The pain of learning what it was to make love soon faded, and I sank into the rapture of the flesh. The carnelian necklace at my throat danced wildly with his movements and mine, until at last the thousands upon thousands of stars set into the body of the goddess Nut glittered and burst open before my eyes.

If only, then, we had asked each other's names, or promised a place and an hour when we might meet again.

But when the moonlight vanished behind a cloud, the smarting ache he had left in me turned suddenly to shame, and I chose to step away and draw my linen dress back on. My body had possessed the boldness to join with a man I was seeing for the first time—my savior, and yet a stranger—but my spirit had not.

"It's dangerous. This way……"

Before the words were finished, river water surged to an unbelievable height and hooked me hard, dragging me in. Somewhere in the Mediterranean a volcano must have burst, or an earthquake split open a road through the sea, for the river had surely run mad. I was hauled helplessly into the Nile. He leapt in after me, caught my waist in a hard arm, and held me fast as we were swept together into the savage whirlpool the current had made.

Had he not, in that moment, summoned a terrifying strength and thrust me clear of the whirlpool, I would have been sucked without escape into the deep of the Nile and come before Osiris, god of the dead, for judgment. Flung to the outside, I waited for him to emerge, but I never saw again the man the vortex had swallowed. Can I truly be losing him like this?

Drained of all my strength, I lay sprawled upon the ground and remembered the happiest time of my life—the days when I dreamed of becoming a priestess of Hathor, and was adorned and prepared for that future.

It was the day before the rite of passage that would have made me a full member of the village guild. Everything began then.