The Golden Vulture

The man's words came back to her — that she must open her eyes and look at what was real — and Pesejet blinked hard, only to stare in bewilderment at the scene before her. There was no sea seething with evil spirits. In its place she found papyrus and lotus painted across white walls, a cushioned armchair, glass bottles filled with medicines, and an alabaster jar of scented oil. This was the house of Kian, the village physician.

"I was worried you wouldn't wake. How long am I supposed to keep cleaning up after you?"

The nagging began the instant her eyes opened. Pesejet shut them again and pretended to sleep, but he pried her tightly closed lids apart with thumb and forefinger.

"Open your eyes and answer me. Do you remember who I am?"

"…A golden bald vulture."

At the mention of baldness Kian's manner turned ice-cold, and he glared at her.

When he had gone to the House of Life attached to the Temple of Neith at Sais, declaring he would train in medicine, countless village maidens had dreamed of a future with him and waited only for his return. Until then Kian — pale-skinned and crowned with shining gold hair, the very image of his Cypriot father, Djau — had enjoyed no small measure of popularity. On the day he finally came home, posted as physician to the Place of Truth, the village entrance had even thronged with women gathered to welcome him. Palm fronds in hand, they stood ready to cheer, and the air was such that if Kian had asked any one of them to marry him, she might have moved in that very hour. Then he appeared with every hair on his body shaved clean at the temple, no wig upon his head, a perfect bald pate — and that fine mood shattered to pieces.

The bare scalp that had shocked them all was, of course, soon covered again in brightly gleaming golden hair. His old popularity, though, he never recovered.

"If you'd come back in a wig, or with even a little hair grown in, you'd have three children by now…"

"Enough. Treatment's over. Get up and get out."

At his words Pesejet tried to sit up, but her body would not obey. Even between her legs she felt as if she might tear. She had struck rock, kissed a man, and tasted the fleshly rapture permitted on the Night of Hathor, goddess of love…

I've lost my mind! I wasn't in my right senses!

The memory of what she had done on the festival night — drunk on the mood, spellbound by the man — set her head spinning all over again.

"You know, I got dizzy trying to sit up all at once. Let me lie down a moment."

When she offered the excuse and tried to sink back onto the bed, Kian, who had been fiddling with his medicines, was at her side in a breath and braced her back. His temper was foul, but the hand that eased her down was, as befitted a seasoned physician, exceedingly gentle.

"You know why the cobra goddess struck you. While you should have been practicing the sistrum and learning dance and song, you were doing other things. Sitting there with a bronze needle, embroidering, or planted in front of a loom."

His words found the tender spot as surely as a long bronze needle driven into the nape of her neck, and they stung.

"So that's why I drew the goddess's wrath?"

"It might also mean you're meant to marry and make a household. Marry a guild member, and you can be buried in your spouse's tomb."

Why did every conclusion end in marrying some man of the village? An Egyptian woman's rightful freedom — to choose a husband of her own will, and to divorce — never seemed to hold much weight in this place.

"Pesejet, think carefully. Isn't there a single village man who pleases you?"

"There isn't. Not one. I wasn't fated to be buried in a village tomb."

"Then your tomb…"

"If there are plenty of people around, I won't be bored in the afterlife either, will I?"

"Yes. How lovely, to have so many neighbors even after you're dead."

Commoners without tombs of their own were given cheap embalming and buried in a mass, there to wait for the day of resurrection — and so came into hundreds, thousands of neighbors.

Whether her answer displeased him or not, Kian sighed, rummaged along the shelf, and a moment later brought a decoction in a bowl of pure white alabaster.

"It's a brew of willow bark. Bitter or not, drink it straight down. It'll ease the inflammation in your body."

Once he saw the willow brew vanish between her lips, he mixed terebinth resin, honey, natron, and powdered calendula on a white marble dish until he had a sticky ointment.

"Listen. I wanted to see for myself the places in Lady Alida's stories, but now there's no way for me to leave here."

She had not even dared hope for Kush, land of warriors who rode elephants; or Punt, the legendary country Queen Hatshepsut's expedition had found; or Crete, with its labyrinth that caged a bull-headed monster. Hers had been a modest dream — only to set her own feet upon the fertile earth the Nile watered — and the goddess had refused it. Surely nothing so shocking would ever happen again.

"Then will you marry me?"

"What?"

A shock to rival the goddess's refusal, and it came at once! Kian's sudden proposal startled her so badly she thought her eyes might pop clean out of her head.

"If you don't want to, don't."

He sat the gaping, stunned Pesejet upright and handed her a small glass bottle of the ointment.

"It eases pain. You seem to have knocked yourself about in more than one place. When it hurts, spread it on thin."

"Were you serious about marriage? You and me?"

"We're not even blood siblings. And blood siblings can marry, too."

True enough: Tutankhamun's queen, Ankhesenamun, had first been married to her father, Akhenaten, and after Tutankhamun's death she had married Ay, her own maternal grandfather. Those unions were called symbolic, meant to secure the legitimacy of the throne — yet by their example, even if Kian had been her brother by blood, marriage would have posed no problem. Even so, marrying him felt to Pesejet as grotesque as a puppy and a monkey falling in love and taking vows.

At the gravity of her face, Kian burst out laughing.

"Don't misunderstand. If I apply for a transfer as physician to another district, I can leave this place. If getting out of the village is such a wish of yours, marry me, and once I'm posted elsewhere I'll divorce you."

"You don't have to go that far. I know your heart well enough…"

"My heart?"

"I saw you with Nenefer."

She remembered with perfect clarity how he had pressed Nenefer — was a vow of consecration truly unbreakable, and if so, what was he to do now? Newly initiated into the mysteries of Hathor and preparing her own vow of consecration alongside Nenefer, Pesejet had been deeply startled by a passion in Kian she had never seen before. The next day, when he left for the Temple of Neith on the pretext of studying medicine, she understood just how deep that heart ran.

"Don't be too disappointed that you can't marry Nenefer. Even a priestess bound to the temple by a vow of consecration is perfectly free to love as she chooses."

"That's not what this is."

Embarrassed, perhaps, at having his heart laid bare, Kian fiddled needlessly with the neatly arranged bottles of medicine.

"But tell me — could there be someone who can enter another person's dream?"

"I've heard of a mystery rite in which the immortal essence leaves the body, but I don't know. It's so dangerous that only priests of the highest rank are said to attempt it."

The man who had shimmered, translucent, in water thick with evil spirits might, just as Kian said, have come in the form of that deathless essence.

"Patients put under with poppy juice tell similar stories when they wake. That they saw their own body lying there, or that they went somewhere else. The mystery rites probably use herbs that bring on visions, too."

"Poppy…"

Poppy, used for great surgeries under full anesthesia and for patients waiting on death, was a medicine the temple kept under special guard.

"Mystery rites and poppies don't matter to you in the least right now. How are you going to live? Start by thinking seriously about the direction of your life. Will you go work in a workshop? Or are you thinking of working as my assistant? If you want to learn medicine even now, I can write you a letter of recommendation to the House of Life. Don't sit around with your hands idle — take your path seriously…"

Under the nagging that showed no sign of ending, Pesejet forced her throbbing body upright.

"Wait. That mark on your chest…"

Kian was the only young man in the village who did not steal glances at a woman's breasts. If he was looking at hers on purpose in order to speak of them, there had to be a reason. She dropped her gaze in a hurry to the breast laid bare. Across the swell of it, rose-colored marks had bloomed here and there, a fierce red.

"It's nothing!"

So he would not see the flush climbing her face, Pesejet fled his house.

"That, on your arms!"

Startled by the accusation, she had been about to cover both arms — then decided the mottled marks left on her breast were the more urgent matter, and clapped both hands over her chest first. There were simply too many places to hide.

"Pesejet! Don't tell me — on the Night of Hathor!"

"Don't ask."

"Who was it! Who!"

Kian came shouting after her, only to frown at the appearance of a leatherworker clutching a sore belly, his face a mask of agony.

"Master Kian! My belly hurts as if my guts were twisted."

"…Please come this way."

Pesejet was nearly jumping for joy at the leatherworker's arrival. Without him she would have had to endure Kian's scolding until the sun god — transforming from Khepri of the morning to Ra of noon to Atum of evening — completed his night journey through the Duat, the land of the underworld, and rose reborn into a new morning.

Once she saw Kian go inside with the leatherworker, she gazed quietly at the rocky hill that overlooked the village. Everything else was uncertain, but one thing was clear. Better to quarry stone than to enter Kian's service and suffer his nagging all day long.

Before the excitement of Hathor's festival had even cooled, word came that set the villagers ablaze. The pharaoh — living god, and master of the tomb the village labored over more carefully than any other — was coming to visit! A king's visit was as good as a prophecy: upon a village that dug the tombs of king and queen and fashioned their grave goods, immense royal gifts would surely descend.