What the Nile Keeps
It was more than her body could take. Shocked by the sheer size of him, she thrashed — and in that same instant a massive wedge began to part living flesh with a heavy, inexorable pressure.
“Ah…….”
“Nngh…….”
A sharp cry tore from Pesejet’s lips at the pain of being opened, and a low groan slipped from the man’s. She twisted at the waist, moaning, but the hands clamped over her hips as if to pin them in place left her no room to move. He spread her as wide as she would go and worked himself in by degrees. That great mass of flesh drove deeper, little by little.
“It hurts too much.”
“Just a little more…….”
His words — that it was not finished yet — turned her mind white. She tried to lift her head to see how much of him remained, and in that instant he sank deeper still.
“Ah! It hurts! Aah…….”
The alien sensation of him driving in without pause set every nerve in her body crying out, yet he kept pushing — deeper, into a place that seemed impossible to bear. The man’s hard, burning flesh invaded her to the very root.
“Hhk…….”
Impaled on that enormous pillar, her body pleaded as if it were being split apart. She shook her hips, desperate to escape, but the man buried so deep only throbbed and seemed to swell larger still. Wrapped wholly in tight, hot flesh, his length pulsed with a hammering beat. In truth she could not tell whose pulse it was. The boundary between them had grown that indistinct.
When the pain below, like the raking of a beast’s claws, began at last to ease, he drew his hips slowly back. What had filled her seemed to scrape every inner wall on its way out. Relief flickered through her at the feeling of him leaving her lower belly — and then he withdrew nearly to the end and drove back in to the root in a single stroke. She screamed. The unfamiliar shock dizzied her, but this was only the beginning.
The joining of man and woman was never merely a matter of fitting the essential parts together. Just when he seemed about to slip free he plunged deep again; just when he seemed to have withdrawn entirely he drove in deeper still. The force of those thrusts was so great she feared she would be shoved far away if he did not hold her, and so Pesejet wound her arms about his neck. He groaned and began to move faster, back and forth.
“Ahh, ah! Ah!”
Each time their bodies collided, her breasts jolted in wild disorder. The man seized the heavily swaying flesh and drove his sex harder into her. It felt as though she were pierced not only through the belly but clear to the crown of her head. Unable to believe the sensation, she looked down — and saw the thick shaft bury itself in the smooth cleft of her sex until it vanished, then draw out again in its long shape.
To think she would spend the night with a man in a body she had groomed so chastely before a sacred rite. Shame made Pesejet squeeze her eyes shut, and the man gripping her pelvis drove his hips up ever more fiercely. Unlike the beginning, when embarrassment had made her try to close her legs, they now swayed helplessly in the air beneath the wet, pounding force of him.
In the midst of it the pain slowly faded. A heated moan spilled from her mouth — so wanton she could hardly believe it was her own. The flesh that raked through her was no longer only pain. It was a strange feeling. The man who had come deep inside and sent that uncanny sensation through her pulled out in a rush, scraping secret inner flesh, then sank in all at once, pricking nerves drawn taut and sensitive, and withdrew again.
A sense she had not known she possessed began to bloom. Heat rose slowly through the body that had never known a man, spreading across every inch of skin as he moved. Only then did she see his face, faintly furrowed. The ripple of his muscle, the rough and irregular breath, the hot sighs that slipped now and then between his lips — all of it was beautiful.
She heard the river flowing. She heard insects crying in the grass. She heard the stifled moans escaping between mouths locked together, tongues tangled — she did not know when that had begun. She heard the wet friction each time slick flesh met. She thought she might lose her mind. The tree above her swayed; her body swayed; the man’s hair swayed. The world seemed to melt until nothing could be told apart.
The carnelian necklace at her throat danced wildly with the violence of Pesejet’s movement. At the first explosive sensation of her life, strength gathered in her toes. And at last the tens of thousands of stars set throughout the body of the goddess Nut glittered and spread before her eyes.
The man, too, drove deep, pressed her body down beneath him, and shuddered inside her. Then, from the body that still held his undiminished bulk, hot fluid spilled in a rush.
A moment later he withdrew. At the hollow feeling of the flesh leaving from between her legs, she flushed and drew her wide-open thighs together. If, then, they had asked each other’s names, or promised a place and an hour to meet again, it would have been better. But though her body had been bold enough to lie with a man she was seeing for the first time — the savior of her life, and yet a stranger — her mind was not.
When the moonlight that had served as their soft lamp vanished behind a cloud, Pesejet, suddenly ashamed of the throbbing ache he had left behind, chose not words but a step away, and put on her linen dress.
“It’s dangerous. This way…….”
Before the man could finish, the river — risen to an unbelievable height — hooked Pesejet like a claw and dragged her hard. Somewhere in the Mediterranean a volcano must have erupted, or an earthquake split open the sea-road, and the river had gone mad. She was pulled helplessly into the Nile. He leapt in after her, locked a hard arm around her waist, and they were swept together into the savage whirl the current had made.
If he had not then summoned a terrible strength and shoved Pesejet out beyond the whirlpool, she would have been sucked deep into the Nile and faced the judgment of Osiris, god of the dead. Flung outward by that immense force, she waited for him to emerge — but whether the vortex had taken him and carried him far downstream, he did not appear again.
Surely she could not lose him like this.
Drained of every ounce of strength, lying on the ground, Pesejet remembered the happiest time of her life: the days when she had adorned herself, dreaming of becoming a priestess of Hathor’s temple.
“Oh, no…….”
At the familiar male voice she slowly opened her eyes. A snow-white hand wearing a scarab ring wavered before her. The owner of the scarab cut from rose feldspar was Kian — the nag she least wanted to face in a state like this.
“Didn’t I tell you to break that habit of running off to the Nile every time your temper flares? Why should I spend my time and my medicines looking after you when I ought to be treating patients who actually need it? Don’t you think that’s a waste to the whole kingdom? Were you so worried the crocodiles and hippos might go hungry in this filthy weather that you decided to volunteer as their meal? Or else…….”
Against the endless stream of Kian’s scolding, Pesejet shut her eyes tight.
In a strange sea where this world and the next could not be told apart, rotting spirits that had lost all shape drifted and flailed their arms, straining to seize Pesejet. Certain that to be caught would mean becoming their companion on the road, she fled with all her strength toward wherever they were not — but no way out appeared. A monster with a human head on a crocodile’s body, a monster with a mullet’s head on an eel’s body, a monster with a hippopotamus’s head on a pair of human legs: every manner of grotesque thing came swimming swiftly toward her.
Legend said that those who drowned in the Nile might yet win the gods’ mercy at Osiris’s judgment, where the sins of a life were weighed. The great quantity of Nile water swallowed before death purified the dead. To have drowned in the river and still find herself in a place seething with evil spirits — did that mean she had committed a sin even the Nile could not wash clean?
Then a single blurred shadow appeared in the water where the spirits swarmed. Thinking it another monster, she stared — and the shadow gradually took the shape of someone she knew. It was the man who had saved her from the Nile, the man with whom she had shared that hour of rapture. He, too, caught in the whirlpool, seemed to have arrived in the underworld. Fully formed now, he stepped in front of Pesejet, who had been desperate only to flee the spirits. His back was as steadfast as a statue carved from the red granite quarried at Aswan.
My eyes are open. That’s why I can see you. She meant to answer him so, but the words never left her mouth; they only circled on her tongue. While he spoke, looking at her, a monster with a mullet’s head and an eel’s body — she had not seen it approach — whipped around him and bound his body fast.
A crackle of wicked light burst from the creature’s attack, and to her astonishment his body grew faint. Thinned to something like transparent linen, he wore a face of pain and still choked the eel-monster’s throat with all his strength. Thinking she had to help him, Pesejet reached for the dagger hidden at her thigh — but strangely, there was nothing there. She looked about for anything that might serve as a weapon, and discovered a crocodile of unbelievable size drawing near.
At its approach she turned her head toward the man, and saw the shadow that had been nearly transparent vanish altogether. She had lost him again. When would she see him once more?
The regret lasted only a moment. Fearing the crocodile would devour her, she tried to flee the other way — but it came on swiftly and gaped its enormous maw wide before her. Then, as water plants are sucked into a great whirlpool, the spirits around her were drawn in a rush into the crocodile’s mouth. While Pesejet wondered whether she ought to offer thanks to the beast that had rid her of the spirits attacking her, the crocodile opened first the jaws bristling with sharp teeth.
The crocodile spoke in the language of humans. And with perfect courtesy.
This can’t be. This isn’t a dream……. Is it truly not a dream? Or is this the dream?