When Ashayt woke with a gasp and a start to find herself lying in a thatch of reeds, the lower half of her body submerged in tepid, murky water, she could not remember how she had come to be in the place, or what had happened to her after falling asleep in the fisherman’s hut. Groaning, she pulled herself to a sitting position, fingers digging into the thick, stinking mud, and set about removing the leeches that clung to her legs and feet.
They’re drinking my blood, she thought to herself, and a shudder tore through her body, twisting and knotting her muscles as if she had come down with a fever. She coughed once, gagged, moaned. Her entire body hurt, and the sun pressed down upon her like a heated weight.
That hateful sun was far too high in the sky. Morning had long passed and she thought – though it was hard to think with her head pulsing so – that the time was now closer to dusk than to noon. Her foster parents would be either fearful or furious, or both. She needed to get home. Ashayt pushed her own questions about what had brought her to lie unconscious in the swamp to the back of her mind and focused instead on summoning the strength she needed to stand up.
Her first effort was a dismal failure and resulted only in her crashing back into the bog, releasing another wave of noxious air that reeked with the scent of decay. Again her body heaved, trying to vomit, but there was nothing inside of her and after a time it gave up. Ashayt lay on her side in the muck, gasping for breath, exhausted by even the simple attempt to get to her feet. Around her, the chorus of chirruping frogs and buzzing insects seemed to be laughing at her plight.
Her next attempt was more of a success, in that she did not immediately topple over upon standing up, but neither could she seem to summon the energy to move. She stood instead with her back bent, hands on her thighs, breathing the deep gasps of someone who has performed a feat of incredible physical exertion. At least up here, away from the mud, the air was clearer and stank less. It was a small change, but it seemed to help. Ashayt thought that soon, she might even be able to take a step or two.
Time passed. Ashayt was unsure how long it was that she stood there, gasping, willing her strength to return, but she thought that the sun’s progress in the sky marked it as at least a quarter of an hour. Finally she felt prepared to move, and with a deep breath took her first aching step forward. Her entire body seemed to complain about this course of action, and she thought the pain and weakness she was feeling very similar to a fever that had taken her a few years before, and from which she had been very lucky to return at all. She knew she would soon collapse again, and thought that if she did so among these reeds, where few ever ventured, she would likely die in this place.
She made a creeping sort of progress, angling her way out of the bog, and at last came to its edge. Here there was a dirt road, the side of it lined with a stone wall to prevent people and carts from falling into the very swamp from which she had just emerged. Ashayt leaned against this wall for a time, breathing deeply, ignoring passersby as they stared at this disheveled, muddy girl with the dark skin and darker tattoos. Right now she was more concerned with summoning the strength to get home than she was with the effect of her appearance on those coming in and out of the city.
At last she thought she had the strength to continue, and Ashayt began her slow, shuffling walk along the wall, using her left hand against it for support as she went. Without the wall she would not have made it very far at all, and even with it a journey that should have taken no more than twenty minutes took her more than an hour and a half. No one stopped to offer any help. No one had ever stopped to offer her help, not once in her life – except for Amun Sa, and he was not there. Ashayt pressed on regardless, as she had so many times before.
At last she came to the outskirts of her family’s fields and there saw a slave whose name she could not remember, hunkered down and pulling weeds. He glanced over at her briefly and then turned to stare, rising to his feet. Ashayt opened her mouth to say something, though she did not know what, and at that moment it seemed that a white-hot blade stabbed deeply into her left eye. She made a cracked, dry noise – not a scream, she couldn’t have managed a scream – and pitched forward into the dirt, and closed her eyes, and remembered nothing more for some time.
When she woke again, she was lying naked and clean on her simple cot of wood and stretched hide, covered with a single sheet of linen. Her foster mother, Nephthys, was leaning over her, pressing a cool, damp cloth to her forehead. The only source of light in the room was a single tallow candle, and yet it seemed to Ashayt as if the room were brightly illuminated.
“How are you feeling, little mau?” the woman asked, favoring Ashayt with a smile that managed to look both relieved and concerned at once.
“I … I feel better, I think,” Ashayt said. Her voice was hoarse, and she felt as if every last ounce of water in her body had been burned away. “But I am so thirsty.”
“That is no surprise. When the slave brought you to us, your skin was so hot to the touch that I feared you would die right there. I gave you a little water, but it was making you choke, so I had to stop. Here …”
Nephthys handed her a clay mug filled with water, and Ashayt drank from it gratefully. She could feel the cool liquid running down and through her, but it did not seem to slake her thirst, and after a time she lay back, breathing deeply and trying to will away the awful demons that must surely be infesting her.
“Ashayt, my Ashayt … where did you go?” Nephthys asked. “We feared you abducted, and when you returned you were filthy! Covered in mud and grime.”
“I awoke in a swamp by the river’s edge,” Ashayt said, staring up at the ceiling and trying to remember. “I don’t know how I got there. I don’t remember anything after … after …”
But of course, she could not tell her foster mother the last thing she remembered, which was falling asleep in Amun Sa’s arms as she lay with her head on his chest and listened to his breathing. After that there was nothing, just a great black span until her awakening in the reeds at the river’s edge, long after the day had begun. What had happened? When had she and Amun Sa parted and how had she come to be in that place?
“After what?” Nephthys prompted, and Ashayt shook her head.
“After beginning the return from my evening walk,” she said. “I walked to the temple, and listened for a time to the chanting, and then I left that place.”
This, at least, was true. She had been early for her rendezvous with Amun Sa and so had walked first to the temple and listened to the monks therein, singing to the Gods. Then she had turned and headed not south, where her family’s farm lay, but instead northeast, to the little fisherman’s shack that had become their place of consummation. She’d waited for him there, naked and glistening with sweet balsam oil, and when he’d entered and stopped, stunned by her appearance, she had spoken not a word but had instead gone to her knees–
“You remember nothing more?” Nephthys asked, interrupting her reverie, and Ashayt felt her cheeks warming. She shook her head.
“Nothing, until I woke in the reeds. I … It must be the fever, again.”
Nephthys nodded, frowned, and glanced out through the small window opening on the west wall, as if she might find the answers to her questions written in the stars.
“I had hoped it would not return so soon,” she said. “But these are ill days, and the Gods are disturbed. Irrational. They strike down those who have done nothing to deserve it. First droughts and now sickness.”
Ashayt, who felt she had done much to deserve the wrath of the Gods, said nothing. She closed her eyes, and the world seemed to swing suddenly sideways. When she opened them again, some greater length of time had passed than she had expected. Nephthys was now slumped in her chair, leaning against the wall and snoring, and the sky had gone a beautiful royal blue that foretold dawn’s imminent arrival. The thirst raged still within her, and though she drank again from the ceramic cup, it seemed that no amount of water would satisfy it.
“Please,” she said then to the
Gods, her voice cracked and broken and nothing more than the faintest whisper. “I am not ready to die. There might still be a chance for me, and for him, to make this thing between us right. We might be wed, if only he can convince the King, and then there could be children, and a life outside of the fields for these good people who have raised me. There might still be a chance for love, and life, and happiness, and I beg only that you let me live to see it.”
The Gods had never answered her before. Though she prayed now with as much fervor as she ever had – even as a girl, hiding in the bushes outside of her home and listening as her family was butchered – still they refused to give her the slightest sign that they had heard. Ashayt, exhausted again and unable to summon the strength even to keep her eyelids open, gave in to the sickness that assaulted her, and she slept.