Issue #321 • Jan. 14, 2021

“Bast and Her Young,” by Tegan Moore

“Daughters with Bloody Teeth,” by Marika Bailey

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BAST AND HER YOUNG

by Tegan Moore

        The ritual had become intolerable: the priests droning outside the solar chapel, the sweltering braziers piled with flame, the incense coating the inside of her mouth as she gasped through the sacred movements—again, again—her limbs heavy, mind thick with exhaustion, thick with the sound of the ritual chants, thick with so much consecrated wine ceremonially swallowed. Again, again. At the end of each repetition she was empty, hollowed out by the long night, the endless choreography, the liturgy she’d intoned so many times that it too was empty; as meaningless as the constant murmuring of the Nile against its banks. Then there came another beginning, and she continued. Again. Again. Until all that remained was the ritual and her aching desire to see her father once more, growing to desperation with each repetition of the dance.

        Any moment now the sun-disk would break the horizon and Amun would climax, the spirit would take her, and her father—her father the god, Amun, but also her father the great pharaoh Aakheperkara Thutmose—would appear before her, her dynasty incarnate, embodying an unbroken line between the gods and man like a column of light reaching from the earth to the heavens. The Spirit of Kingship would greet her, would whisper to her the secrets of pharaohs past, and she would be imbued with the all wisdom of her god-king-father.

        At least, she thought that’s how it was supposed work.

        She hadn’t thought to ask her father, when he was alive. One thing among a million things: what’s it actually like to be pharaoh? To be a god? She wouldn’t have bothered to ask the next Thutmose, the Younger Thutmose, her brother-husband, who’d never had anything useful to say anyway. He was dead too now, so too late for that. The current Thutmose, Little Thutmose, pharaoh-to-be, was useless; a child frequently a stone’s throw from death. He was ill again today, feverish and thrashing in his insipid mother’s lap. He had most certainly never been visited by the Spirit of Kingship. She couldn’t imagine the gods tolerating his whining.

        Her father’s great dynasty, sacred to Amun and guided by the hand of the gods, stood shakily on those scrawny legs. Nobody wanted a child-king, though her Theban court wanted the violence and upheaval of a new dynasty even less.

        So they would have to settle for her.

        She was different. She was distinguished by the oracles. She spoke to the gods, who descended on her in disorienting, frightening fits that made her vision blank out and caused her to fall down. As God’s Wife of Amun she had been closer to the gods than any man on earth. Except for the pharaoh. Now she would be that, too.

        Behind her, Nefrure, her daughter, the new God’s Wife of Amun, shook her sistrum like she might also have a fit. Just as she’d been taught. She remembered teaching that skill to Nefrure, so young then that she needed both hands to hold the instrument; showing her how to spasm her little body to make Amun reach his climax.

        The barest bright sliver leaked into the solar chapel to slide across the stone wall. The Spirit was approaching; she could feel it. Her limbs quivered with exhaustion and her vision blurred. She collapsed before the figure of Amun in his shrine. Her sweaty forehead plastered against the cold stone floor, rocking as her lungs heaved. But she was not going to faint. Good. Around her the priest’s chanting and the banging of sistrums got louder and louder.

        Yes: now.

        She rose from the floor before the shrine of her father, the great god Amun; raised her arms and turned to face the sun-disc as it rose over the Pylon of Djoserkara Amenhotep. She saw something flicker, backlit against the sun: some shadowy creature, birdlike, gathering itself on broad wings to hover above the chapel. Her pulse stuttered in her throat. Was this her father, the Great Thutmose, arriving in the barge of the sun?

        Light slipped down the chapel columns toward her. The priests prostrated themselves, chanting with renewed vigor at the mystic sight of the sun-god descending to bestow the name upon the new pharaoh, or perhaps at the glimpse of the end of their long night of toil. Behind them, on the far side of the courtyard, the dark shape she’d spotted clattered down onto the roof of the hypostyle hall. It gave the impression of great claws, powerful wings. The hint of a human face in profile. She tried not to turn her head toward it. Her father, the Spirit of Kingship, come as a hawk? He’d arrived just in time to see her transform. She was hot with pride.

        Then the sunlight was full in her eyes, and she was Pharaoh: she of the Sedge and the Bee, King of the Black Land and the Red, Flourishing of Years, Divine of Appearance, Maatkara Hatshepsut. Transformed by the sun and the Spirit of Kingship, which was sitting there in person on the roof across the courtyard. Nefrure banged the sistrum hard and harder and then dropped it and collapsed to her knees.

        Now Hatshepsut was king. She didn’t feel any different.

        The solar chapel was silent. The chief priest rose from the stones with his arms lifted in veneration and proclaimed all her names. Get on with it, get on with it. He began another hymn. Hatshepsut kept her eyes raised to the sky, trying not to squint. The bird shifted on the roof, a dark shape among the morning shadows. Maybe her father would speak now, to all of them. Maybe he would wait until the end of all the interminable rituals. Too long, too far away.

        She needed some fucking answers.

        It wasn’t really one specific question she had. More a general sense of unease, the presence of potential calamity far-off and waiting; a feeling of something lacking. That she was not enough. She needed the Spirit of Kingship to tell her what the fuck it was that would make her the king her father’s dynasty needed; what she was missing. Besides a penis.

        The bird-creature spread its wings and flew to the pylon gate. It landed heavily, in full sunlight. Hatshepsut had been thrumming with godhood and ceremonial wine, but her body went suddenly, carefully still. Her stomach clenched. She was going to vomit. No, not now.

        It wasn’t a hawk or eagle or vulture. It was a ba-bird. And not Great Thutmose’s ba-bird. Not even Younger Thutmose’s. It wore the face of some woman she didn’t even recognize. It was not the Spirit of Kingship at all; no messenger come to her aid. Just some errant ghost. She could have wailed, or screamed. Except she absolutely couldn’t.

        The priests rose, chanting, to proceed out from the chapel. Hatshepsut followed automatically. She felt numb, slapped stupid. Nefrure recovered from her swoon and fell in behind, again banging her sistrum. As Hatshepsut neared the pylon gate she watched the bird without turning her face. From the dark mass of its body it grew a pair of arms, which extended toward her with flattened hands. In veneration? Or just a greeting?

        Maybe the Spirit of Kingship would still come. Maybe he was waiting just around the corner, in the form of a falcon, in the form of her father.

        She followed the procession of priests proclaiming her king-names beneath the pylon gate, cutting off her view of the ba-bird.

        Hatshepsut, Pharaoh, walked forward into the first sunrise of her kingship, heartsick and alone.

* * *

        You are God’s Wife of Amun. You are King’s Daughter, King’s Sister, you are Great Royal Wife. You are King Regent.

        The fucking ba-bird was still following her. It had trailed her from Karnak all the way back to the palace’s great banqueting hall. Nobody else seemed to notice it. She got the impression that it was only visible to her.

        Now the tables were laden for her naming feast. Roast oryx and gazelle, fish and goose and dates and melons and cakes and breads. All the dishes elaborately dressed, all going down the gullets of elaborately-dressed courtiers. Administrators and bureaucrats and the very wealthy or very important, draped in linen and hammered gold, lapis and turquoise and silver. They cackled and preened and simpered and babbled like ducks among reeds. Hatshepsut stared out over their heads, controlling her expression.

        You are Pharaoh. Comport yourself like the near-god you are.

        She did not look to where the ba-bird sat just inside the great court’s gate, sulking like a dog. Every time her gaze wandered toward it she felt her composure waver.

        A small cat with a very large belly trotted between the banquet table and Hatshepsut’s dais. Pregnant, full of kittens. Hatshepsut glanced down long enough to toss a piece of fish into its path: an offering to the goddess Bast, Lady Devourer. The cat darted away from the missile, then paused as the smell caught up with it. It dashed back to snatch the food away to somewhere less conspicuous for eating.

        All these people, their perfumes and wigs and jewelry. Most of them Hatshepsut had known since she was a child. She’d taken a king’s name because they wanted it; Useramen wanted it and the wealthy families of the court wanted it. Great and powerful men wanted to stay great and powerful. Little Thutmose couldn’t keep them there; he could hardly lift his fevered head off his pillow. If he died there would be no king, no heir. Only Hatshepsut, King’s Regent, now king, and a woman. It was important no one doubt that she possessed the Spirit of Kingship. Kings did not second-guess or worry. When she had the Spirit of Kingship upon her, she wouldn’t either. She thought of her father Thutmose’s sarcophagus. Regal, timeless. Look like that.

        A woman king: who knew what the gods would think of that? They might turn their back. Useramen had decided it was worth the risk. Despite their recent arguments, Hatshepsut had still trusted his judgment enough to let him push her toward the throne.

        Then some rich merchant in Memphis—a rope merchant, of all things—started calling himself Horus Incarnate. He’d given out enough pots of beer that he’d gotten some people, some whole guilds even, to call him that too, and then gangs of men wearing his falcon badge had raided the storehouses of some northern mines. That’s what had done it. Better to slip Hatshepsut into place as co-king now, in case Little Thutmose died and more people got ideas.

        Useramen had a thousand soldiers ready and waiting to travel down the Nile, find the rope merchant would-be usurper, and cut him into food for jackals. But he’d stayed to make sure Hatshepsut took the throne without trouble. He was watching her now from the far side of the courtyard, eyes dark as bitumen, as though she might accidentally slip and tumble from the dais and back into the regency. As if his gaze were the only thing keeping her there.

        She pretended she didn’t see him watching, pretended didn’t see the sullen ba-bird, pretended to enjoy the harpists and drums and acrobats and honeyed cakes and roast ox and the wine, as though she wasn’t still numb with wine from the night’s feverish ritual. As she rose to speak she imagined the moment cut bas-relief into stone: some upstart proclaiming before the court that she was the Horus falcon, she was the Great Bull of Heaven, she was the so on and so on.

        The ba-bird disappeared as the interminable celebrations went on and day faded to evening, but when Hatshepsut retired for the night it landed in the arcade outside her bedchamber. What did it want? She glared at its silhouette on the loose linen curtains as her women scraped dusty oil from her skin and bathed her feet, rubbed fresh oil into her arms and legs, draped a shift around her and combed out and perfumed her hair. Glared as she lay against the headrest and waited for the thrumming in her skin to fade.

        Why the fuck was it following her?

        After time had passed and her household was settled silent around her, she whispered to the silhouette of the bird-ghost in the alcove. “Well? Why are you following me?” Silence. Without hope, but because she had to try, she invoked: “Aakheperkara Thutmose, I beg you speak.”

        But it was not her father Aakheperkara Thutmose, and it offered her no reply. She wasn’t sure if it was even able to speak. If she knew its name she could invoke it, and then it would have to talk, but she didn’t know its name and wasn’t sure she cared to learn it. In the dark, Hatshepsut could feel the stare of its big, judging, kohl-blackened eyes.

        Donkey fuck that ba-bird. Where was Great Thutmose, her venerable father? Where was this Spirit of Kingship that was supposed to tell her what to do to make herself truly king? Were the texts wrong? Had Useramen misled her?

        She did not sleep, sensing the ba-bird in her arcade, listening to night insects and feeling the breeze brush her skin. Anger turned in her like a shaduf, dumping bucket after bucket into the thirsty soil of her mind. And then she did sleep, though little good it did.

        The morning came without any wailing proclamation of Little Thutmose’s death, and so it was business as usual, for one more day at least. Pharaoh or not, Hatshepsut had been wearing the vulture crown for over a year and had managed the king’s business—two kings, first her brother-husband’s and now the child Little Thutmose’s—since she was sixteen. Half her life she’d been regent of the king. All that yesterday had changed was her name.

        The ba-bird waddled after her procession, its stubby feet scraping the floors. Why, why was it still following her? It wasn’t the Spirit of Kingship, so what the fuck did it want with her?

        Useramen was waiting outside the audience chamber. He followed her procession through the dim rows of enormous papyrus- and sedge-stem columns lit by smoky torches. His lips worked like he was chewing something, like a horse working its bit, though all that was in his mouth was his own impatience.

        Senenmut trailed Useramen, demure next to him. Ugly, too, with duck-bill lips and too-long nose, like a statue that had been overworked. He was always there, ostentatiously humble, always deferential to the men around him who had been born to their places rather than clawed there through the mud. Hatshepsut knew him better. He hoarded their moments alone, when secrets were whispered, when she leaned on his practical and canny mind. His pride was secret, though not to her.

        Hatshepsut knew her advisors conspired against each other, even while working together. She preferred it this way.

        No-one in her coterie turned their heads to the dark space beyond the columns where the ba-bird settled to brood. Eventually it would either speak or go away. She wished it would hurry up and decide, so she could be rid of it.

        She reached the dais where her new, taller, gilded throne sat, next to Little Thutmose’s empty one. She sat. Useramen bent to his aging knees. Square-jawed, flat-skulled, head like a block of granite beneath his elaborate wig. He’d served Hatshepsut’s father, and in many ways he still served Great Thutmose, or his memory. Senenmut dropped lightly to the ground beside him. They bowed low.

        “Beneficent pharaoh,” Useramen said in his deep monotone, one hand bracing himself on the stones. “Oh lawgiver who judges deeds, she of the falcon who—”

        “Don’t,” Hatshepsut said, raising a hand. “I had enough of that yesterday.”

        Useramen pushed himself to his feet, too dignified to smooth one loose black braid into place. Senenmut waited until he was upright and then rose as well.

        “Well,” Useramen said. “What wisdom has your father brought you from the gods?”

        She had to tell him something. She thought of her father’s sarcophagus again, those empty far-seeing eyes. She stopped herself from clearing her throat. “The gods speak only to the ears of the divine.”

        I can’t tell you wasn’t going to cut it. Of course he would push back.

        Useramen looked appalled. Stone-faced, Hatshepsut tried to look down on him as though he were any common man. Not her vizier. Not financier, governor, most powerful man in the land. Not the reason she was up here in the first place.

        His already-flat lips pressed together into a tight little frown. “Of course, great lord. We, your servants, await your commands.” The way he said it made it clear that they, her servants, weren’t going to wait very long. When Hatshepsut didn’t respond, Useramen said, “Regarding rewarding the loyal families of your noble court with temple lands. The Spirit of Kingship—”

        “I still don’t like that plan.”

        Useramen startled. “Well,” he said, “what did your father say about it?”

        Great Thutmose had been dead for fifteen years. They had all survived fine without him. But now, through her, Useramen had access to the Spirit of Kingship, or thought he did. She couldn’t blame him; she wanted her father’s advice as much as Useramen did.

        Ten years ago Hatshepsut would have told both of them the truth. “I’ll tell you,” she said. “When I can. I’m still... parsing it out.”

        Useramen and Senenmut exchanged a glance. “We have much to plan,” he said. “If you share the guidance—”

        She raised a hand. “The will of Amun, my divine father, begetter of the Bull of Egypt, sire of Thutmose and all royal sons and daughters, is shrouded to those without divinity.”

        It shut him up, but Useramen’s expression darkened. The obvious dismissal made him suspicious. Senenmut watched both of them like he was watching a wrestling match.

        “As you say,” she said, “we have much to plan. When do you sail to Memphis?”

        Reluctantly, Useramen replied. “This afternoon, great lord.”

        “Which granary supplies your soldiers?”

        He followed the topic change reluctantly. They discussed the retaliatory campaign against the upstart rope merchant and the security of the northern copper mines. “The northern mines will be safe once I have destroyed this usurper. But what of the mine at the fourth cataract? Kush spilled the foreman’s entrails and took all our workers slaves.” As nominally Vizier of the South—though in practice he was vizier of everything—Useramen took slights by the Kushites somewhat personally. Fury danced in his dark eyes. “We must pierce Kush with our arrows. They harass our fort at Napata and stir unrest in the streets of Meroe. As your father knew many times over, Kush must be reminded to whom the gods speak.”

        Another idea she wasn’t keen on. The Great Thutmose had always been riding off to shoot arrows into Kushites, smiting left and right. It was a pastime he seemed to derive pleasure from. Hatshepsut didn’t see any joy in it. Plus, she had little trust for martial spirit, especially if Useramen was at the head of it.

        “I must speak with Senenmut,” she said. “We will not discuss Kush today. Go well, Useramen. Smite our enemy.”

        He bowed out of the room with a look on his face like he’d broken a tooth. Senenmut waited until Useramen was gone before he spoke. “My king. What’s wrong?”

        Hatshepsut shook her head. As much as she wanted to tell, if just to unload some of her own anxiety, the danger in admitting that the Spirit had not come to her was simply too great. She needed time to think.

        She asked, “How’s Little Thutmose?”

        Senenmut averted his gaze, though Hatshepsut could see his pleasure. She knew he liked being asked about the royal family. It reminded both of them how indispensable he was, how close. Hatshepsut wished it was as easy to please her other courtiers.

        Senenmut had grown up in a mudbrick hut below the Nile’s inundation line, where everything his family managed to scrape together was swept away yearly with the floods. He still spoke with a hint of his lazy-voweled boyhood accent. Pruned, but always there. “He is still feverish, but well enough to begin demanding honey in his milk. Just yesterday they could barely get him to swallow. The coughing isn’t as bad.”

        “Hmm,” Hatshepsut said. Then added, “good.” She thought for a moment; caught her gaze wandering towards the bird-ghost, which was watching her from the shadows. “If he’s well enough, he will have to attend the temple rites tomorrow morning.”

        Senenmut saw her hint. “We should safeguard his health,” he said. “He should stay inside the palace walls. If you would like, my king, I could have the oracle consulted regarding his health. The gods may advise that Thutmose remain in the care of his nurses and mother for many days.”

        That would be convenient. “If the gods so will it,” she said, trusting he’d understand. “Have a sacrifice made. And send someone to the priests in the temple of Mut with beer from my brewers.”

        There was one additional matter. One perhaps too dangerous to command, though Senenmut would obey. She had not decided if she would ask it until that moment, when she was already asking, the words already out of her mouth.

        “You must make another errand for me. This afternoon, when the court withdraws to rest, you must bring an offering to the tomb of Aakheperkara Thutmose.” It was already a strange request, since offerings were usually made at the mortuary temple. The king’s grave itself was rarely visited; better not to remind people where all those expensive grave goods were hidden. She slid a rolled slip of papyrus into his hand. “I have written for you the letter to inscribe into the offering-bowl. Do it with your own hand and show no-one. You must go yourself. Go alone.”

        A more suspicious set of instructions could hardly be given. Senenmut glanced at the coil of papyrus and then looked Hatshepsut in the eye. An indiscretion; he quickly looked away. An offering at her father’s grave, a letter in the offering-bowl: she had as good as told him that her father had not come to her. But she had not said it, and would not say it; he could suspect but not confirm. Hatshepsut’s insides coiled and knotted like a nest of cobras. You couldn’t unspeak words, even if you were king.

        She trusted Senenmut. Mostly. These men, Senenmut the High Steward of the King, Useramen the Vizier of the South, they belonged to her. But people only ever belonged to her the way a cat might belong to her: obliquely, and with no guarantees.

        She needed the guidance of her father; someone to tell her what it was that she lacked. Perhaps he had not sensed that he was needed. If she appealed to his spirit directly, he might come to her in her dreams and give her kingship his blessing there.

        Outside the hall there was a flash of white robes: the Amun cultists come to escort her to the day’s temple rites. There was still much to do in order to become Pharaoh. The rituals would continue for months.

        She waved Senenmut to his feet. He stood, his head bowed, and offered his hand to help Hatshepsut from her throne. In the shadows she saw the ba-bird shift, preparing to follow.

        “It will be done, Beneficent One,” Senenmut said.

        “And let me know what the oracle says.” She hurried to join the priests, hoping the slow-waddling ba-bird would give up trying to follow.

* * *

        The sun was brutal. Not everyday-brutal, but the special kind reserved for certain days before the equinox when the birds fell silent and no breeze touched the heavy-headed barley. The kind of day that crept past like the ticking of scorpion feet. When even the cattle in their miserable byres ceased flicking the flies from their backs.

        Of course it would be that kind of day. She was halfway through her final circuit around the white walls of Memphis. Sweat ran freely from her, not from any particular place but from all of her, as though she were the Nile headwater. Two and a half city circuits were behind her. She was almost done.

        Her father had done this. Younger Thutmose, her late brother-husband, had done it at a stately walk, skipping the second and third laps. Little Thutmose had been a child at his naming, so Hatshepsut hadn’t made him do it. Nothing inspiring about a little boy hissy-fitting his way around the Memphis walls.

        At twelve he was old enough to do it now, but a steady supply of good beer to the priests of Mut kept the oracle’s recommendations bent toward a life of retirement for the boy, at least until his health improved. Wait until Thutmose is in more perfect health, the oracles said, which Hatshepsut read as completely perfect health. Almost immediately after the fever that had nearly killed him, Thutmose grew a stye in one eye which left him part-blind, and then the fever relapsed again. Hatshepsut had sent his useless mother to Senenmut when she came fretting.

        Hatshepsut approached the blinding streak of white stone road that led to the city gate, propelled by the calls of people gathered on the walls above. The crook and flail she carried, heavy with faience and silver inlay, kept slipping down in her sweaty grip. Her lungs burned. Her legs burned. Her skin was fire. Even the worst temple rites were better than this.

        It was worth it. All great and memorable kings ran the Memphis circuit. Hatshepsut would be a great and memorable king.

        It was Senenmut’s idea. He had many ideas to shore up his king; being utterly indebted to someone was strong motivation to make sure they succeeded. Useramen did not know about the Memphis circuit. He was busy pursuing the rope-merchant usurper and his band of supporters—really just his sons and the men who thought it likely they’d be executed alongside him—southward through the desert. Hatshepsut was running the circuit in his absence because she worried he might not like it. In the two weeks since Hatshepsut’s naming, ever since she’d refused to say what the Spirit of Kingship had shared, Useramen had been distant. Suspicious. Senenmut’s spies reported that Useramen had visited Little Thutmose several times. Not completely outside the realm of likely behavior, but if he was perhaps reconsidering what of the dynasty’s remaining blood to put his energy behind...

        He might shift his loyalty to the boy. Hatshepsut was and would always be the better king. But if Little Thutmose survived, he would become a man. The king had always been a man.

        That was the whole problem.

        The ba-bird’s fat shadow glided over Hatshepsut’s path. She didn’t look up. The bird was a constant reminder that the Spirit of Kingship—that her father—had slighted her. Her appeal to his grave had gone ignored. The Great Thutmose was too busy to answer.

        Pharaoh ran three times around the white walls of Memphis while the onlooking crowd brayed her name. She didn’t even like Memphis. Thebes was her home; Memphis was a place she went to remind the Memphans that they had a Pharaoh.

        Hatshepsut followed the sun-seared road beneath the city gates and through hot streets. Almost done. The Great Temple of Ptah rose unlovely over mudbrick walls. She ran through the temple gate and heard the clapping of her own footfalls echo in the hypostyle courtyard. A moment of shade, then light again. Her muscles trembled. She saw the shadow of the ba-bird still following. Up the few steps and into the court of the sun, her breath scorching her throat. Through another gate, this one lower, and into the sanctuary—finally, thanks be to Montu. The priests had filled the chapel with wine and bread and incense and so all Hatshepsut had to do was fall to her knees—happily, though even the stone floor was too hot—and drink the wine and sing the hymn to Ptah.

        The wine was too sweet, unmixed, and it stoked the furnace of her belly. Her voice as she sang the hymn felt like it came from elsewhere, not her own throat. She was dizzy and her skin twitched as sweat dried. Her vision clouded with an absence of thoughts. The gods were nearing. Soon they would speak.

        In the courtyard behind her, voices of courtiers joined the priests as they sang the words that pleased Ptah. Hatshepsut rubbed her blurry eyes with both hot palms, swaying, then lowered her cheek to the stone floor proactively. The danger, when the gods came to her, was that she might fall, as she’d done many times before.

        How could her kingship be anything but legitimate when the gods strode through her very body like this?

        The chanting behind her faded, and she was gone into the other realm.

        The next thing she was aware of was the strong scent of myrrh. Something clammy lay against her neck. She had a hazy memory of a dark hole, a corner of a storage pit maybe, stinking of soil and the sour smell of rent flesh; not offal, a familiar smell though, something Hatshepsut couldn’t place but that lanced through her with its unforgettableness. Warm, wet furry bodies mewling together in a heap. A turn of a head in the dark, and the shine of a cat’s eye reflecting. The vision there and then gone. Hatshepsut smacked her mouth open, working her tongue against her teeth, and rolled to one side. Priests were still singing nearby, so she hadn’t been gone long. Her head felt beer-thick and muzzy.

        One of her women servants whispered to her, and she felt cool hands on her shoulders. The cloth on her neck was readjusted. She opened her eyes.

        There was an inscription on the wall before her, right in her field of vision. A king offering beer to the gods. The image heaved as she breathed. Small, round, familiar face, feminine despite all the signs and signals of manhood. A portly king with a hint of breasts beneath the pharaoh’s robes.

        Donkey fuck that ba-bird. She knew now who she was.

* * *

        They’d have to sail past Hawara on the way back to Thebes anyway. If she couldn’t indulge a sudden desire to see a barely maintained palace in a backwater of her kingdom, then what was the point of being Pharaoh?

        The eyes of the court were on her. Useramen wasn’t the only person speculating about the legitimacy of a female king. Surprised that the Spirit of the Kingship had spoken to her, curious what it had said—if they believed it would come to a woman in the first place. Everyone pretended not to remember that Great Thutmose hadn’t been born a king. He’d taken the throne by strength, not by precedent. Precedent said it could be done again, no matter how ferociously Useramen pursued the usurper’s band of idiots through the sand.

        She told her steward, Idi, that she would stay in the Faiyum for several days. She did not tell him anything else. If her courtiers wanted to complain and hypothesize, it wasn’t Pharaoh’s place to care. And if any servants found this stopover too trying, then the steward could beat them with his stick until the king’s request no longer seemed quite so onerous.

        No one had ever dared question her father. If he wanted something, people died to make it happen. Even the more recent and lesser Thutmoses had been indulged, if not obeyed. None of the men of her line seemed at all concerned what others thought of them, but Hatshepsut had to be the claws of the cat. No room for rolled eyes. Over the last years she had ordered many of her attendants’ questions answered with sticks. They were learning to stop asking.

        So: the Faiyum. A desolate place, and neglected, though sun-darkened men still tended the waterworks there. An oasis, though not much grew green here at the end of summer. The palace court here still had dust heaped in its corners despite her household scrambling around with brooms. It was small, not much more than a camp, the walls showing the yellow of sun-bleached mudbrick beneath flaking paint. Well, too late to change her mind now.

        If she went straight to the temple her purpose would be too clearly broadcast, so she inspected the waterworks and the papyrus marshes and had a tent set up so she could watch her royal huntsmen shoot ducks for her dinner. The few courtiers who had followed her to the Faiyum sat in the shade and gossiped. She didn’t see the ba-bird at all. Perhaps it was busy, happy to be home.

        Early the next morning the priest of Nemaatra Amenemhat’s cult, a dusty-sandaled and startled-looking young man, toured her through Amenemhat’s labyrinth. She remembered the close walls and shadows of the place from when she was a girl, still God’s Wife of Amun, still the favorite daughter of a powerful king. Back then this place had entranced her as much as it frightened her. Fifteen years later, she saw how the paint was faded, the sand piled against the walls. The labyrinth was a treasure, a monument unique throughout the Black Land. Amenemhat’s kingdom was only a hundred years older than her own. And only this young man with his rodent eyes, to tend to the great cult of kings. How quickly the great were forgotten.

        They would not forget her.

        Deep in the labyrinth was a colonnaded courtyard illustrated with the king’s life. Here Hatshepsut dismissed the priest and servants. Once she was alone she passed into the dim porch where she remembered seeing the stele.

        It was a few columns down from where she remembered it. Portrait of the king’s daughter: a small, round, familiar face. She traced a finger over the cartouche enclosing the girl’s name.

        The cobras in her guts tightened. Some part of her had held out hope that the ba-bird might still somehow transform into the Spirit of Kingship or somehow portend her father’s appearance. It wasn’t just the legitimacy and answers he might bring. Beneath all the political reasons, she’d just so very much wanted to see her father’s face again.

        Hatshepsut heard a thump in the courtyard behind her. Without turning she entered a small mortuary chapel that lay beyond the colonnade. She heard the ba-bird’s nails scraping stone as it followed.

        She knelt before the altar. The offerings were few: a bowl of flat beer, some dusty bread, incense smoking in the palm of a burner. She slipped a precious band off her upper arm, another off her wrist, and laid them on the altar.

        “Oh Great One,” Hatshepsut said. She kept her voice low; this was a conversation, not an invocation. “I acknowledge you, King’s Daughter of Amenemhat, Sobekneferu. I bring offerings in gold and silver to the altar of your father’s father to beg you speak, and plague me no longer.”

        “Praise Hathor and Mut.” The croaking voice behind her sounded like a great block of granite sliding into place in the wall of a tomb. “That took you forever.”

        How did one address a ghost? The information was in Hatshepsut’s mind somewhere. She continued to stare at the wisp of smoke rising from the altar incense and wet her lips. “I did not know how to invoke you. I did not remember your name.”

        The ba-bird strutted to the altar and hopped onto it, lofting itself up with green-and-gilt wings. It peered at Hatshepsut with its human eyes. “That’s exactly why I came,” it said. “You, of all people. You didn’t know my name.”

        Hatshepsut averted her gaze. “I couldn’t figure out who you were. Then I saw an image of your father, and thought I remembered your image in this place. And then,” she admitted, “yes, I couldn’t remember your name to invoke you.”

        “It doesn’t matter,” said the ba-bird. It toddled into her view again. It was incongruous: a woman’s head on the body of a massive, shimmering bird. The grit was going from its voice now, lubricated by use and becoming pleasantly rich and feminine. “Here you are now. And my message has effectively delivered itself. I’ll say it anyway: they will forget.”

        “Me?” Hatshepsut scoffed. “Let them try. People won’t notice my obelisks at Dier el-Bahri? My name is all over them.”

        “My name was everywhere, too,” the ba-bird said. “Lord of the Red Land and the Black, She of the Sedge and the Bee, the Great Bull of the Heavens, Beloved of Ra—”

        Hatshepsut sat back on her heels. “Pharaoh’s names.”

        “Yes. That’s my point. Do you see them anywhere? You had to come all the way here, into the house of my father, to even find my face undisguised.”

        “Wait—”

        “Oh, I’ve waited long enough,” said the ba-bird. “That Pharaoh’s image you gazed upon at the house of Ptah in Memphis is me, oh daughter of Amun. Those images are mine, not my father wearing my breasts. I was Pharaoh. I am Pharaoh. As much as you are now.” The ba-bird stretched its wings. “Sorry to drown your expectations. I know you think you’re the first.”

        “A woman king.” Hatshepsut scowled. “Why do I not know of you?”

        “You don’t know half of what you don’t know,” the ba-bird said.

        Hatshepsut quelled a flare of anger. She hated this stupid bird. “Tell me what you want of me.”

        “I want what every king wants,” the ba-bird said. “I want my name carven on great pillars, as it was before. I want my spirit fed. I want to wear the atef crown in stone and paint upon the walls of the house of the gods. I want to be remembered.”

        A female king. Hatshepsut felt jerky, ragged-edged. She rose to her feet. “I need to think,” she said.

        “It’s not just for me,” the ba-bird called, shuffling after. “My kingship gives credence to yours. The people love precedent.”

        “I need to think,” Hatshepsut repeated. She left the ba-bird behind in the chapel at the center of the labyrinth.

* * *

        Her mind was too busy, full of bees, to return to the crocodile’s mouth of the court in Thebes. Her official Pharaonic procession down the Nile was over, one more in the endless list of rituals she’d complete over the next year—everything as traditional as possible; precedent, precedent, precedent—and she was due back in the capitol. Instead she stopped again at the quiet, pleasant palace at the Lake of Two Knives in Hermopolis and sent for her daughter Nefrure. The temple to Amun at Heliopolis was small but large enough for Nefrure to awaken him with her daily rites. Hatshepsut might even assist; it would be good to move through the old patterns again. Something familiar after all her coronation’s novelty.

        The palace was cool and low and open, without the vertiginous, imposing pylons and gates of Memphis or Thebes. There were little sunken gardens echoing with water-sound, and somehow the lake always managed to generate just enough breeze to cool it all. She shouldn’t be there, shouldn’t need or want the time out of sight—Pharaoh belonged to the land and its gods, you couldn’t just duck out when you felt like it—and yet there she was. It was three days before a servant appeared to announce that Nefrure’s barge had been spotted upriver.

        Hatshepsut waited in the shade of a tent as the rowers scrambled to dock the boat. The wharf crawled with cats, like ants beneath a log. One brushed against the corner of her sedan chair, tickling the wood with its tail: Bast’s indifferent benediction.

        Senenmut stood at the rail of the incoming barge. Hatshepsut wasn’t surprised. Senenmut and Nefrure were often together. Years ago she’d named him Nefrure’s tutor, a symbolic role, another way to tie him to her. But Senenmut took it seriously. He’d brought Nefrure gifts and told her stories. When small, Nefrure would sometimes forego her mother’s lap for her tutor’s. Hatshepsut had hidden her jealousy. This had, after all, been her idea, and the more Senenmut doted on Nefrure, the more he belonged to Hatshepsut.

        Nefrure was as old now as Hatshepsut had been when her brother-husband died. Other girls that age spent their days giggling about men and brushing each other’s hair, or drinking and playing senet for rings and promises, but Nefrure carried herself with a solemnity and grace that made Hatshepsut’s heart ache. So little room for frivolity in the life of a God’s Wife, in a future queen.

        Or future king.

        Hatshepsut felt the ba-bird’s uncanny eyes on her. When she looked among the palms and roofs of the wharf it wasn’t there. Just more cats, slinking along rooftops.

        Senenmut stepped off the boat to hand Nefrure down—a servant’s job, but there Senenmut was, and nobody was going to argue with him. Nefrure came straight to Hatshepsut’s shady tent. Hatshepsut rose.

        “Beneficent One,” Nefrure said, hands extended in veneration. Then she carefully, gravely slipped into her mother’s arms.

        “My girl,” Hatshepsut whispered into her daughter’s perfumed wig. Then she pushed her to arm’s length. “That eye blight looks much better,” she said. “The physician I gave you is doing well.” Nefrure looked askance, embarrassed. Hatshepsut was momentarily transported to a similar moment, herself and her own mother, some similar embarrassment. All mothers, all daughters, all so alike. She sighed, not unhappy. “Dinner awaits. And there is a man at the palace who has taught some monkeys to twirl and clap like dancing girls. You’ll love it.”

        That made Nefrure laugh. “I’m not a child, mother. You can’t ply me with baby monkeys anymore.”

        “We’ll see,” Hatshepsut said. “They’re very cute.” She smiled and shooed Nefrure towards one of the waiting litters. “I’ll be right behind you. I must speak to this strange beggar who’s followed you here.”

        Senenmut took his cue to approach with head bowed and hands extended. Hatshepsut gestured to the servants to bring around their sedans.

        “How is he?” she asked quietly. One of the bearers helped her into the seat of a chair; Senenmut mounted his own.

        “It’s hard to say,” Senemut said in the same low tone. He shot a look at the servants gathered around them. The bearers would be beaten if they repeated anything and were kept happy enough with beer and good food; the conversation was as safe as any. “Last week he seemed almost normal, but now...” Senenmut leaned back in his chair and rubbed dust from one eye. “Now, he’s complaining that his head aches all the time, and the cough returns at night. Fever comes and goes. I have been told that he often makes his mother cry with his temper.”

        “It doesn’t take much to make her cry.” Hatshepsut leaned to balance as the bearers lifted her chair.

        “Well,” Senenmut said, “at least her lamentations keep her busy.”

        Hatshepsut snorted. “Poor creature.”

        Senenmut opened his mouth, closed it, tried again. “Great One, I hope that you will return to Thebes soon. With the king—the younger king—unwell, and Useramen away, it might be wisest for you to be present. To be seen.”

        She’d always appreciated his directness. Useramun relied too heavily on formality; often you couldn’t tell what he was getting at until you’d been in the conversation for far too long. Senenmut was so much easier. Maybe it was his common birth; less training in the formality of the court. It irritated some, but not her.

        “Is he that ill?”

        “No.” Senenmut swayed with the movement of his chair-bearers. “No, by Sekhmet and Heka. He’s not mortally ill, I don’t think.”

        “What, then? Who should I be worried about?”

        Senenmut would not name names, not in front of the servants. “It is nothing, my king. Just your humble servant’s wish to be nearer his lord.”

        “Well. You’re near enough now.” A shadow swept overhead, and Hatshepsut snapped around, but it was only an osprey. When she turned back Senenmut was watching her curiously. His flat forehead and beaky nose made him look owlish. Those same flat, all-seeing eyes. “A few more days,” she said, and left it at that.

        She tried to enjoy the dinner, the open courtyard in the shade of potted date palms, the evening breeze fragrant and cooling. Nefrure did like the dancing monkeys and giggled like the girl she was when one of them climbed her arm to tangle its tiny hands in her wig and ornaments. It was heartening to see Nefrure laugh, to see her at peace. She always had a hunted look about her in the presence of her priests and acolytes, as though she were terrified of mis-stepping; hard not to be, when you were charged with the daily rites that kept all cosmic order. Hatshepsut knew the feeling well, from her own decade as God’s Wife. Miss one ritual, say the wrong thing, shake the sistrum without truly meaning it, and the world might simply... crumble away.

        Here, with her mother and only the small chapel of Amun to tend to, Nefrure seemed younger. Hatshepsut wished she hadn’t already promised Senenmut they’d sail home in a few days.

        She was half lost in thought as her servants undressed her for the night when she heard a familiar soft impact in the closed courtyard off her bedroom. She dismissed her body servants. The breeze lifted the gauze curtains. She pushed them aside, soft touch of linen against her bare arms, and walked to the pool in the middle of the court. She sat and dipped her feet in the moon-cooled water. “I tried to find you,” she said. “Where did you go?”

        The ba-bird hobbled out of a shadow. It wasn’t alone; there was another one behind it. “King cannot command king,” the bird said in its soft, masterful voice. “And none command the gods. I was tired after your many weeks of stubbornness. I returned home to rest.”

        Hatshepsut tried not to stare at the second bird, whose face she couldn’t make out. Female, unfamiliar. “Well, king,” she said, “I have questions, if you would hear them.”

        The bird waddled to the far side of the little pool and settled over its feet like a brooding duck. “Finally. Let’s have it. Go on.”

        “Sobekneferu,” Hatshepsut said thoughtfully. “Why did I not know your name? Were you King’s Mother or a regent or—”

        Feathers on the ba-bird’s back and throat lifted. “I was Pharaoh. I told you.”

        “Then why are you missing from my king lists?”

        The ba-bird snorted. “Why do you think? Not many males of the king’s dynasty get named ‘the beauty of Sobek,’ do they? Wear dresses?” It spread its wings, then folded them again.

        “But if the Spirit of Kingship truly came to you, then... “

        The bird stared at her. The second bird, still in the shadows, shifted forward a bit.

        “Did the Spirit not come to you?” Either, she did not add.

        “It did,” the ba-bird said, “in its way. It is not as you expect it to be.”

        “But the Spirit comes to whoever the gods—”

        “Attend, oh woman king,” said the ba-bird, “how was the world created? Frogs and snakes? Or did Atum beat the world forth from his member? Or, wait, was it Amun’s member? Or both of theirs at once, perhaps? Dueling cobras? Or did Ptah think us all into existence in his heart? Which of those is true, oh Maatkara Hatshepsut, King’s Daughter, God’s Wife?”

        “Well... It’s—they’re all true. It depends on—”

        “Right,” said the ba-bird. “It’s all true, but not exactly true. The Spirit of Kingship comes to the preordained Pharaoh upon his naming; he is known from birth by the gods; he is the earthly manifestation of their power, except when the Spirit accidentally comes to, say, a boy who dies young and then, oops, it turns out it should have been someone else all along. Or when the kingship changes dynasties entirely. Surprise, then the Sprit of Kingship shows up, why, all the way over there in Memphis, when we thought it lived in Thebes! Sound familiar?”

        Hatshepsut tensed. “I am Pharaoh by divine—”

        “I’m not arguing with your divine right,” the ba-bird said. “It is yours. It just doesn’t come with the exact endorsement you thought it would. I made the same mistake. I thought it would be a tangible thing. It wasn’t.”

        She was unable to look at the ba-bird’s haughty face, fearful she would disclose the betrayal she wore like kohl and malachite. Instead she searched out the second bird, watching it shift, the occasional shaft of moonlight glinting off its feathered back, a soft bulk in the darkness. She’d so hoped to see her father. She’d hoped the Spirit would come to her with his smile and his guidance and his absolute authority. And if that wasn’t how it really worked, then why wouldn’t his ba-bird come instead? Why were these women’s spirits here, and her father nowhere to be found?

        Thutmose had been buried with beer, wine, food. Tiny breweries and bakeries and courtyards and barns. Servants, horses, and a harem in paint on the walls. All of that, come alive with him now in the afterlife. Maybe his thoughts were on other things.

        “Who’s your friend?” Hatshepsut asked, lifting her chin towards the second bird-spirit.

        The Sobekneferu ba-bird turned its head and regarded the dark shape. “I can’t bring her to speak,” the bird said. “I don’t know her name to invoke her. Seems silly, but I guess the same rules apply.”

        “So why is it here?”

        The first ba-bird stood, moved a little to one side, then settled again. “Don’t know,” it said. “She just showed up. My guess is she wants what I want.” The bird’s eyes met Hatshepsut’s, dead and hard and black, and Hatshepsut’s shoulders and throat went suddenly cold. “I want my immortality.”

        “You have that,” Hatshepsut said. “The afterlife—”

        “Don’t,” the ba-bird snapped, “argue with me about the afterlife. I know better than you what it’s like to be dead.”

        The chill spread down Hatshepsut’s back. She imagined her father in his tomb, all the paintings and sculptures alive with him, the gods in his presence. She thought of his face on his sarcophagus, distant and timeless as a corpse. She lowered her gaze to the shifting water around her feet, moonlight and lamplight glossing its surface to hammered metal. Pit of cobras in her gut.

        “I will not say to you what happens to your body after death. All I come to speak of is my name, Sobekkara Sobekneferu, and your name, Maatkara Hatshepsut. We are tied, oh woman king, and—” The ba-bird looked at the second bird, which stepped out of the shadows now and locked eyes with the first. “And I suspect this one is, too.”

        They sat in silence for a moment. Wind brushed through the potted palms. Somewhere distant a dog barked, and another bark answered it, and then the night fell still again.

        Her father would not come to her. Busy with the feasts and orgies and campaigns of his afterlife, he had forgotten his beloved daughter. He’d always been easily diverted. And he was Aakheperkare Thutmose, after all. She was just a female child.

        “Please just leave me alone,” Hatshepsut covered her face with her hands, then dropped them to her sides. “What do I have to do to get you to leave me alone?”

        “I want my name back. I want the places where it was carved out to be carved in again. ‘Sobekkara Sobekneferu, She of the Sedge and the Bee, King of Upper and Lower Egypt.’ Bring my name back to me. And this one,” it gestured to the other bird. “Bring her name back too.” The second ba-bird hopped forward once: agreeing, it seemed.

        “We don’t even know what that other one is called.”

        “You’re the king,” the ba-bird said. “You’ve got plenty of help.”

* * *

        She did not make any decisions while they stayed in the Hermopolis lake palace. Instead, she pretended she was a mother and that was all. She watched the herons fish among the lakeshore reeds and watched Nefrure twirl a string for some kittens to chase while musicians plucked harps. It felt, for a moment, like a good-enough life; the two of them attended by their women, eating fruit and drinking cool wine in the shade, Senenmut there if he was needed but never interrupting and certainly never demanding. It was a temptation, this quiet life. She wondered how long she could make it last.

        They stayed only two more days. Her power was in Thebes.

        There were men she must speak to. And, for once, plans of her own to pursue.

        There was little privacy on the royal barge, the boat crowded with anxious servants waiting for the king to decide she wanted to build a monument, or wanted her hair combed, or for someone to catch her a fish. Hatshepsut dithered during as much of the trip she could, watching the country pass beyond the banks of the Nile while court entertainers attempted one after the next to break her from her reverie.

        When they were still a day’s journey from Thebes, the last of her patience drained, running dry like irrigation ditches in the month before the inundation, and she kicked her retinue off the barge.

        They traveled with an escort of little punts and skiffs. It wasn’t like she was making them swim, though one of her body-servants squealed as though she were being thrown overboard to the hippos as she was handed down into a little fishing boat. Senenmut stayed behind. An honor that usually brought him pride, today, made him wary. They were alone save for two oarsmen, a pair of identical twins both born deaf and therefore endlessly useful to a king.

        “Beneficent One,” Senenmut said, and waited. Small, clever eyes; beak of a nose.

        “I need copies of every king list we know of. More, if we can find them. Send scribes and runners throughout the country as soon as we arrive in Thebes.”

        This wasn’t a particularly unseemly request, certainly not worth kicking the court off the barge. Senenmut bowed his head obediently.

        “And I want to see the high priest of Ptah in Memphis. Send someone back for him now. He will come to me in Thebes.”

        Another bow, but Senenmut’s brow wrinkled. “It will be done. May I ask—”

        “Not yet.” Hatshepsut looked out over the far bank of the Nile where a boy was turning a shaduf, filling his buckets. “Just an idea.” Low, dusty land rumpled with green. The Nile reaching both directions for forever, flat and blue. The sky, overhead, also endless, the same color as the river. “How quickly we forget.”

        Senenmut had nothing to say to that.

        The little flotilla carrying her attendants had flanked out across the water. Some of the younger women were splashing each other from rival boats. Their voices carried, though not their words. Hatshepsut took a deep breath. “My Aswan obelisks. You’re modifying them?”

        “Yes, my king. Workmen are adding your throne name to the images there.”

        Hatshepsut nodded. “Excise any reference to Little Thutmose from them. Remove the Younger Thutmose as well. If they cannot be excised, modify them to speak instead of my father, Great Thutmose. Highlight my noble and divine descent from a great king.” Senenmut’s eyes were averted but fixed; he was listening for orders between the orders. But she wasn’t going to be coy about this. “You will cut the two lesser Thutmoses from the records. Subtly at first. Aswan is a safe place to begin. Then perhaps in the North. Thebes later, when we are ready.”

        The humble head bowed again. She felt a bud of gratefulness flower in her chest for this man and his obedience. She hoped he would not disappoint her.

        They reached Thebes the next day, and Hatshepsut’s heart rang with home. This was her city, where she belonged.

        Useramen had arrived the day before. He’d fallen from his horse during his pursuit of the rope merchant, but the injury did nothing to dispel his gravitas. Hatshepsut couldn’t imagine him being thrown from a horse without the horse immediately returning to apologize. Despite one arm bound up in bandages, he had immediately set about levying more men to bring south against Kush.

        The would-be usurper was dead; they’d brought her his head. Useramen greeted her with it in her audience chamber, dropping the dark-brown, muddy lump out of a grubby sack and onto the floor before her throne. The head lay on its cheek; open eyeballs stared at the floor through a cake of dust. From the corner of her eye she saw Senenmut purse his lips and turn away in distaste.

        Sinking to his knees next to the lump of meat that had once been a man’s head, Useramen began. “Beneficent pharaoh, oh lawgiver who judges deeds...”

        Usually she interrupted him before he could finish the royal address. Today she let him say it all, and stay on his knees for it too. And even longer, as instead of waving him to his feet afterward, she counted one breath, two breaths. Glanced into the shadows to find the shape of the ba-birds there, morose and hidden. Knowing now who they were, she couldn’t help feeling a bit judged by them.

        She gestured Useramen up from his bow. “I hope you are not badly injured?”

        “No, by Heka,” Useramen said. He moved his bandaged arm a little. “Not too badly.”

        “Though I gather it hasn’t tempered your appetite for battle.”

        Useramen inclined his flat head. She wondered if he was surprised that she would intentionally bring up a topic she so often avoided speaking. “My king. Your father the Great Thutmose crushed Kush beneath his sandals and took the land from them. Kush scorns your magnificence with these raids. We must destroy them, and grind their bones to sand. If your father were alive he would—”

        “The spirit of Aakheperkara Thutmose is not yours to command,” Hatshepsut interrupted. She kept her eyes on Useramen’s, though she saw nothing in them. No surprise, but not offense either. She was not the first king he had served, after all. “The Spirit of Kingship has come unto me,” she said. “And it spoke to me, and I took counsel with it. For I am Pharaoh, daughter of Thutmose and beloved of Amun, king of the Red Land and the Black.”

        Both men stared up at her on her dais. “What...” Useramen said. “What did your father say?”

        “Did I say it was my father?” she snapped. “The Spirit of Kingship is not as you imagine, nor as you counseled it to be. I am divine; I keep its counsel.” At the far end of the hall, the guards had ceased playing senet in the doorway to listen. She did not mind. It wasn’t often she spoke like this; no less to Useramen. “You wish to fight Kush for the offense they have shown me. But I say, I am a mother to Egypt, and like a mother I will see to my child’s well-being before I destroy the jackals beyond my walls. We will fight Kush, but only when I desire to. And when I desire it, we shall smite them, and grind their bones to sand.”

        Useramen opened his mouth, and his tongue clicked away from his teeth. Then he closed it again and bowed deeply.

        She sent him home to recover from his travels. She sent Senenmut after him in a flock of scribes with more errands for each of them. And then she attended the rest of the business of the king.

        The ba-birds landed in her arcade that night after she’d sent her attendants away, as well as the musicians and acrobats. She would have sent the palace cats away as well, if she could have commanded them. She went outside to where the ba-birds sat on the edge of her shallow pool.

        “You spoke well today,” the Sobekneferu ba-bird said. “But none of those scribes went to Memphis to write my names back into the temples there. Are you deaf to me, oh king?”

        “Not deaf,” Hatshepsut said. “But as you said yourself, king does not command king.”

        The bird’s woman-face scowled. “I did not return here from the land of the dead to—”

        “Peace,” Hatshepsut said, raising her hands in deference. “You’re angry at me. I understand. But I propose a compromise. Will you hear it?”

        The named ba-bird looked at its unnamed twin. The mute spirit took a step forward: it was willing to listen. The Sobekneferu ba-bird turned its baleful gaze back on Hatshepsut.

        “I will restore your name,” she said to the Sobekneferu ba-bird. To the other one she said, “and I will find and restore yours. But.” She drew one foot through the moonlit pool. “You must remain here with me. To give me counsel when I wish it. You will...” She smiled a small smile. “You’ll be the Spirit of the Kingship, I suppose.”

        The ba-birds regarded each other, some silent exchange that Hatshepsut was not privy to. Finally the Sobekneferu ba-bird said, “You will restore us, and with us will come the precedent of female kingship. That will shore up your own rule. It’s as good for you as it is for us.”

        “Precedent may only be enough for now,” Hatshepsut said. “I have plans that you don’t know of, yet.”

        The bird-spirits exchanged dubious looks. “How long must we remain? How long until our names are again known?”

        Pharaoh looked up at the moon. In the palms at the edge of the garden, a cat led her kittens rustling through the leaves. “As long as it takes,” she said. “It’s not like you’ll run out of time.”

        “Fine,” the Sobekneferu ba-bird said. “A compromise. We will counsel you, or I will at least, until you find this one’s name. And we will guide you until—”

        “Until my daughter becomes king,” Hatshepsut said.

        Another dubious look between the ghosts.

        Hatshepsut felt a welling-up of hope, like the Nile rising against its banks, ready to spill over into thirsty fields. That she could do this; she could be the great Thutmosid king. That these women—or their ghosts—might help her. It would be her own high cheekbones and soft eyes looking out over the Nile, timeless, regal and composed. And after death, her daughter to carry the dynasty.

        After a moment, the Sobekneferu ba-bird said, slowly, “Well. It’s happened before.”

Copyright © 2021 Tegan Moore

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Tegan Moore is a professional dog trainer and aspirational farmer living in the Pacific Northwest. She enjoys eating noodles, hiking in the rain, and reading scary stories. She has published work in many speculative fiction magazines including Asimov’s, Tor.com, and Clarkesworld. You can read more of her work at www.alarmhat.com and follow her obscenely charismatic dogs @temerity.dogs on Instagram.

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DAUGHTERS WITH BLOODY TEETH

by Marika Bailey

        The sun fell in love. My maman always told it that way. The sun fell in love with the goddess of the mountain and he wanted her. In the end he ate her right up. Snap snap snap.

        I’d always wondered what that felt like. To be eaten. To know that you are being devoured. That’s the problem with wondering, maman told me when I was little. You put small thoughts out into the world, and they are sure to come back and bite you.

        Now, it’s not the dog’s fault she ate me. Not really. And I’m not mad at her about it. Everyone knows the mountain belongs to the laughing dogs. Things are just not going the way either of us expected it to, I think.

        I can hear her whimper. Sometimes we cry together, me and her. In this dark place that has no bodies but all our pain.

        Small flesh. Sweet flesh. Sweeter bone.

        Strange pain. Pain teeth cannot reach.

        My thoughts or hers? I think it is a she, but I am not sure. Is this death? I expected death. No one comes back from the deep mountain woods. Not since the mothers left us. And since the towers in the mountains fell. Moss growing over stone. Our bones beneath all.

        Sweet bone, strange bone. Pain no claw can touch. Mothers... mothers I am lost...

        I’d lain down beneath a black sycamore tree, unable to move another step. With my bare feet bloodied and torn from running through the night; the baying bloodhounds of the Raq lord at my back. I meant to rest, was all. For a minute or two. Enough to catch my breath.

        Teeth and bone. Cracked ragged pain.

        The pain pulls me down, wrapping around every thought taut as a silk shroud. My body is gone, my mind is aware only of boundaries of the pain. Where my hands and feet, mouth and eyes should be, there is instead another voice, a sound of whimpering in the darkness.

        Hers. Mine. Ours.

* * *

        Flayed breath. Part skin like holy waters. Bones split open in prayer. Blood speaks. Blood remembers.

* * *

        The pain runs low, like a riverbed in high summer, trickling away as the sun rises higher and higher. I can feel wind and warmth; hear the calling of nervous birds and the bare rustling of something—a beetle perhaps—by my ear.

        But when I open my eyes, it’s as if I am staring into the ink watercolors that hung on the walls of the Raq holding. A wash of grey and black. Over that, rushing like a stormwind, are the smells. There, a musty and old trail. Spoor of a something... what is the word? Two broken memories slot together to bring a picture. Like the torn remains of different books, scrambled and rearranged. The scents cross and overlap.

        I shake my head; too heavy, too close to the ground.

        Why are you inside me? A voice rises from the darkness behind my eyes. Weak, but gaining strength with rage and confusion.

        Oh, this is my fault.

        My prayers have been met with something stranger than death.

* * *

        I... no, we walk—though truth would say stumble—through the forest. We are crowded in this body and made clumsy. And the whispering voice that drives me, that makes us we, has only disdain for my efforts. I was a soft belly waiting for teeth before, and that is what I still am, sharing sharp white teeth or no.

        I let myself be pulled on, further into the forest, the black soil cool under my paws. The light dappled and shifting. We pause to drink from a stream, lapping it up clumsily, but it is cold and helps to clear my head of the sounds and smells that drown out my thoughts.

        By the time the sun sets on the forest, I am tired and hungry. There are lingering patches of snow in the shadows. I wedge myself into a small space between a stone outcropping. Just big enough to fit me, shelter from the icy wind that arrived with the dark.

        It’s still cold.

        We would be warmer and full if you weren’t so clumsy, the voice says.

        I suppose you’re right, I admit.

        I can feel her sulking in my head. Our head?

        I did not mean this to happen.

        Nothing.

        My name is Ikiro, I offer.

        A sound like a soft whuffing.

        I am Kuleika, soft-belly human. Go to sleep.

        I want to sleep. This body is tired and hungry. But the beating of a strange heart keeps me awake. I am more afraid than I was when I lay down to die under the old black tree.

        The moon has set below the height of the trees when I hear it and we startle awake. There is laughter on the night wind. High and keening.

        The other, Kuleika, leans towards it in recognition and yearning. If I could pull us into the very rock to hide, I would. That sound, that laughter, rings like funerary bells. The forest goes still and quiet in its wake. Knowing that an ender of things stalks under the stars.

        I find myself moving slowly out from under our shelter, Kuleika’s dog spirit pulling us both forward. It is only the raw vibrating thread of my fear stopping her from throwing us into the night. But it’s already too late.

        They’ve found us.

        You are being a foolish soft-belly! Hiding will get us killed. She snarls at me.

        I growl right back at her. I was supposed to already be dead and you couldn’t even do that!

        As we argue, whatever is in the woods comes closer, starlight glinting from their eyes. Red as the dawnstar in the night sky.

        Sisters, Kuleika calls them.

        We... I, am shivering. Will they hear us? Will I hear them, as I hear the spirit in this body I share?

        They melt out of the darkness, our hunters. Deep dappled fur and grinning moon-white teeth. Their laughter raises the fur on our back like meadow grass under a breeze.

        “What have we here, sister?” I can understand the sounds she makes as if she was speaking my mother-tongue.

        “A seeker?” the second, smaller dog asks. It eyes us, seemingly curious.

        The larger pads closer, no fear of whatever-we-are in her tread. Sniffing the air close to us, testing and tasting.

        “More like a mystery,” she replies.

        Our noses are close enough to touch when she says to us, “You smell like old magic, not-cousin. Could be trouble. Should be dead.”

        Kuleika’s control is the only thing that stops our body from whimpering. But I think I see something like pity in the smaller dog’s eyes.

        She comes forward, nudging the larger dog’s muzzle gently. “If it is magic, Kahu, then we must take it to the grandmothers.”

        Kahu snorts but says nothing else. She turns back towards the brush and says to us, “Come.”

        Kuleika moves us forward, and I can’t stop her. Whatever the darkness has for us, not even the quivering string of my fear can hold her back from it.

* * *

        Before the Raq came, these mountains belonged to our mothers. The goddess whose body was light. She who holds the pillars of the earth.

        Their names are forbidden now. Not even to be whispered alone in the dark, maman said.

        This was their land. Until Raqi, the lion of the east, fell in love with the light that warmed the sky, and claimed her for his own.

        And now the Raq claim the mountains, and the dark sycamore forests, and the fruit that was old when the world was new. They have pulled down the old temples and scraped the murals from our walls. Over their hearths hang painted silk tapestries, showing the sun’s victory over the world.

        But there are places in the mountains that have not yet yielded to their swords.

        The laughing dogs named Kahu and Tanaga take us farther into the forest than I ever thought possible. No axe has ever kissed the ancient trees that rise above us. Their bark is as dark as the night itself, and under their boughs it is an eternal twilight.

        In the age before Time was born, the Goddess We Have Lost reigned in eternal dusk. As I clumsily follow behind Kahu, it feels like walking into a dream.

        Kahu stops suddenly and I tumble into her, earning a soft growl. I can smell others in the cover, and soon enough they step forward. Six more laughing dogs, only a few bigger than my guide.

        One comes toward us. I can feel Kuleika perk up.

        A male. Strong-looking one too, she says.

        I cannot even imagine being interested in what is going on between the legs of any of the creatures, who I am sure are going to kill us.

        Didn’t you want to die? she asks

        I’ve changed my mind!

        Softbelly, you are a trial to my spirit.

        Kahu and the other must have come to some sort of agreement because she sits back on her haunches and waits as he trots off.

        What is going to happen? I ask Kuleika.

        They will probably bring the Grandmothers.

        Soon enough, I see what she means. Behind the lead dog are four huge shadows. Their fur is so dark that the black spots almost blend into the dark brown, they are twilight made flesh. Their smiling teeth are slivers of white, sharper than any crescent moon.

        I shiver as a half-recovered memory overwhelms me. Wooden corridors, their ancient carvings sanded and painted over. In one hidden corner where a despoiler’s hand could not reach: amber eyes, night-black spots.

        These eldermothers are nearly twice the size of the others, looking as if the very mountain had birthed them; boulders given life would be less solid. Massive shoulders, long graceful legs, jaws heavy with upturned ivory fangs.

        As the largest approaches us, close enough that I can feel the passage of her breath against my fur, I close my eyes and wait for those teeth to snap around my neck.

        She licks the top of my head. Once. Twice.

        “Do you have a name, girl?” she asks. Her voice tastes of burnt sugar and rain.

        “Iriko,” I reply. “And Kuleika. Maybe.”

        Confused. My head hurts so much. I just want to sleep and forget and feel safe.

        Kuleika whuffs in agreement. Safe.

        We, neither of us, have felt that way in a very long time. I put my head between my paws and try not to whine.

        The Grandmother’s body language says that she is curious. She huffs quietly. Touches the tip of her nose to mine.

        Grandmother huffs again, and I try not to whimper.

        She is laughing, softbelly.

        “Well, Ikiro and Kuleika. Smelling of so much magic, you must be as confused as a north-flying bird in the bitter season. But you do not smell bad.” She turns to look at her sisters, and then turns back to us.

        “Would you live among us?” she asks.

        “Yes. Please. I... we need a home.”

        Pack, Kuleika corrects me. Sounding happy and content for the first time.

        “That we can give you,” says the Grandmother. “And you’ll need it when your pups drop.”

* * *

        Some seasons, maman said, were for letting go. We give to them the things we have no use for. Old things. Old words. Old memories.

        I let the rain carry away my life. The edges of what had been before the night I..., we, were eaten had already blurred. What was Kuleika? What was me? We could no longer tell. Our thoughts and words slipped into each other naturally as two streams merging into a river.

        We became more comfortable in our body, eventually going hunting with Kahu until the weight of our growing belly kept us close to the sleeping den.

        Kuleika had not been pregnant when she came upon me.

        That was the whole point, she said. You leave your pack to go find one with strong males who aren’t your milk cousins. What do the soft-bellied do? Mate their kin?

        I could not argue because I could no longer remember. The entirety of my life began at the edges of her teeth, my blood in her mouth. There were scraps of something. Like meat caught between back teeth. Worrying at us.

        In time, the rain took even that.

        When it ended, and the new year rose green in the sap of the towering trees and in the squeaking burrows, our body was ripe enough to pop.

        Pain wakes me. Strong and familiar. Sister to the flaying knives that birthed me into this new life.

        Grandmother Aatah lays next to me, her head heavy and comforting. The other mothers come too. Toroh with the broken front fang, and Uhma who limps slightly when it’s about to rain. Jora, Tanaga, and Hinga. A circle of bodies, pressing me with their warmth, lulling the pain with combined song of their beating hearts.

        When the moon sets, our pups take their first sips of air.

        Yes, ours, Kuleika snorts. Even if you were the only one who had the fun.

        We lick them clean, and name them: Ahmina, Giyira.

        Names I chose, although I don’t remember why.

* * *

        Tanaga says that all pups are trouble, but I don’t believe her. Ours are determined to dig to the mountain root itself and wrestle with the devil. They run ahead of us, tumbling head over paws, both halves of our heart. Kuleika thinks I make them weak with my worrying.

        Let them fall and get hurt. How else will they grow to be any tougher than a softbelly?

        They are soft—human people!

        Kuleika sniffs. Softbelly nonsense. They are as much my pups as yours. One day we will not be here and then who will be strong for them if not themselves?

        I cannot argue with her about it. On this she is firm as the bones of the mountain. But she dotes on them in her own way. Making us hunt for their favorite foods and grooming them for long afternoons.

        It was one of those golden days when our bellies were full and the pack napped in lazy piles under the waving shadows of sycamores and water pear, that it first happened.

        The air was warm and sweet as honey, the marrow cracked from the bones of a too-slow mbuzi still savory on the back of my tongue. Our eyes drifted close, watching the dancing shadows of leaves and fruit: sweet pear, heavy and ripe on the branch, purple as a distant mountain and rosy as a sunset.

        We stand up and reach for a fruit, snap it from its stem and bite hard into the white flesh until the juice runs down our chin. Standing on two legs. Reaching with hands. Eating with human teeth and tongue.

        The forest is silent for one caught breath.

        Softbelly. What the shit are we doing?

        I don’t know. When do I ever know?

        Behind us, a sound that makes us turn on our new legs. Wobble, unbalance, and fall. I’ve forgotten how much it hurts to land on your ass. But the sound is Grandmother.

        Her laughing whuff turns to a cackle as she rears back on to her back legs and shucks off her dog body. Her smile is bright as she hugs her soft round belly, laughing.

        “Oh child, I was wondering if you would ever figure it out,” she says.

* * *

        It happened again as we were crossing a shallow stream grown fat on winter runoff. Toroh slipped, falling under the water. We dive for them, ready to pull them to safety by their scruff. But it is two hands that wrap around the barrel of her chest and two legs that carry all of her to the shore. Unspent and unhurried, as if that body could carry an elder dogmother all day any day.

        The day when Aminah fell from a ledge she had no business being on, we jump down after her and land on two feet, from a height taller than four men and none the worse for it.

        Kuleika takes these changes in stride.

        Thumbs are interesting, softbelly. I like them. Wish they were clawed though.

        If I still had my own body, I would roll my eyes at her.

        You are the most whiny person to share a body with ever. Worse than a male with a sore paw. Honestly, you people could use some suggestions about the thumbs.

        We don’t like the dreams that come after every change. Waking at night, shivering from skin to fur and back again, haunted by the ragged edges of dreams. Like a lingering touch between our legs from someone we can no longer remember, it captures us from within. We remember the feeling of eyelashes against our skin. Warm cries in the night.

        But we know no such things. There is more.

        A human woman with skin the color of red clay earth, leaning over a body weeping. In shallow water, fields of grain grow tall, their roots twisted with snakes. A night without a moon is lit by rows of torches, the air scented with blood.

        It makes our jaws ache when we shake out of the dream. Blood in the night, blood in the water. There is something we should be chasing, tearing, killing. We and our sisters should hunt. Kuleika and I gnaw at our own claws like teething puppies. Our own babies, whimpering in disturbed sleep.

        Softbelly, something is coming, Kuleika tells me.

        I can feel it too. In the ache in our bones. Hear it, in the breath of our sleeping babies.

        Those nights, Grandmother comes to sleep next to us; lulls us to bed with stories. Her voice, guiding us through the night and into peace.

* * *

        Long ago—after the twins Death and Time were born but before there were any people of skin or scale or feather— the universe gave birth to a star.

        A restless child, as soon as she could she kissed her mother’s soft cheek, packed a bag of silence for her supper, and left the hearth of her birth. As all daughters must.

        She traveled far beyond the familiar darkness of her home, following the rivers of the star people to places where the light tasted of spices she had no words for.

        It was many years (such as stars count them, which is far different from you or I) into her journey when she fell in love. The world was beautiful and dark, marbled with deep seas and rich forests.

        Oh! said the star.

        Oh! said the world.

        The star was very beautiful, could spin stories as fast as the spider who wove creation, and had very kind eyes. But some stars are made to wander.

        Will you leave? asked the world.

        Never, said the star. And to prove it she turned herself into a moon, wrapped in the circle of a dance with her world.

* * *

        The summer waxes ripe until the forest bursts, sweet and fat and rotting. Food runs out of every burrow and crevice, hopping, running, falling from trees. It is so easy that we bring the pups, almost grown out of their baby fur and patchy as old blankets, out to farther hunts. They need the practice, we agree.

        Neither has shown signs of changing from fur to skin. They must learn how to live with claws. The strange part of my heart, where I suspect our dreams come from, is relieved. I suspect life was not good for a girl child in the world I ran away from.

        We are joined by Kahu and two of her brothers, Hirui and Ilota. They are the largest males in the clan but still smaller than their sister. Much smaller than we have grown since our time in the pack. Only grandmother is bigger than we are.

        The hunting is easy. Our mouths are dyed red and our bellies full as the sun begins to fall behind the trees, dragging their shadows longer and longer.

        Kahu is upwind and smells it first. There are humans in the forest.

        Too deep. Too far.

        We growl to the males to take the pups and run back to the den. They catch one each by the scruff and leap for the forest deeps. Kahu joins us as we run silently towards the smell of human sweat and blood.

        Time has made us bigger and faster; we outpace Oahu, and we are the only ones in the forest to witness the hunt.

        A man is fighting off a dog; his knife is short but sharp and carved with dark blood. It is the last sinking rays of the sun that filter through the canopy and light his face.

        I know him. Not we. I.

        Softbelly... Kuleika warns.

        The dog is fight-mad and we are upwind. It does not know we are there until our jaws wrap around its throat and shake. It goes down with a whimper and a snap of bone.

        A human hunter has caught up with the man I know, and by the time I turn to their struggle, the hunter’s knife is slick with blood. The man is bleeding and weakening, down on his knees in front of the hunter, who is poised to bring the knife down on his throat.

        Like his dog, the hunter does not see me coming either. His throat is even easier to tear and crush.

        Quick, quick! We must drag the body out of sight.

        Softbelly! What are we doing?!

        Please Kuleika. Please! I knew this man. We have to help.

        Help what?! This is nothing to do with us. Let them kill each other!

        He was their father, I whimper.

        She sighs. It would tickle the back of my mind if I wasn’t so used to it.

        Fine.

        We slip back into our hands-and-feet body, standing over the man I’d known. He is panting with pain, eyes glassy and unfocused. We lift him up, over our shoulders, and began to run.

        I drag him through the forest. His breathing in my ear, getting only more pained and quiet. Up and up until we leave the shallow woods and the sound of the hunters fades. Through water, to clear our scent from even the most driven of pursuers. Until we reach the stone clearing where the sky had sung to me, and there I lay him down.

        He is gray, half his blood spilled on the ground between here and the copse where his murderer lies. For I knew when I first carried him, and I know now, that he will die. But I wanted him to die free. Because I knew him. As well as I knew the faces of Kahu and Grandmother.

        I cup the face of the man I’ve loved and press one kiss against each cheek.

        “Am I dead, Ikoro?” he asks. “I knew I’d see you when I died.”

        I gather him up in my lap, holding his head against my breast. And I cry.

        “I loved you so much, Ko.” He tries to raise one hand but can’t. I hold it for him and bring it to my lips.

        The words in my throat are crowded out by a burning, like drowning out of water.

        “You... you’re just as pretty as the day I wove your hair into my braid. You remember?”

        I nod wildly around my tears. Clutching him closer. Praying. Cursing.

        “And your maman said she didn’t know why you married such a big up-country boy? A-an...” His eyes flutter like the last flight of a bird. A stream of blood runs from the side of his mouth, staining my skin.

        “I said to my maman, I said ‘He’s my world.’”

        He smiles, remembering. Opens his eyes again to look up at me. “I missed you, love.”

        And then he doesn’t look at anything anymore. Or ever again.

        We bury him underneath the white flowers. We weep by his grave through the night, and we remember who we once were.

* * *

        Grandmother meets us at the edge of our territory when we return. She lies on the top of a stone, head resting delicately on her front paws, and the sunlight gilds her fur. She looks peaceful and sleeping.

        “You smell like blood, found-daughters,” she says. Her eyes open slightly, amber slivers.

        “It is not ours, Grandmother. It belonged to the man we loved before we became we. When it was only Ikoro, human daughter of Mikara, daughter of Sokka, daughter of Jimao. Before you called Kuleika-and-Ikoro-now-us, found-daughter.”

        She jumps down in one fluid movement and pads over. Gently, she licks the tears from our muzzle.

        “And what else, child?” she asks.

        “He was the father of our pups. Conceived in love, and he is dead. And we... I-that-was-Ikoro have remembered everything.”

        “Well, daughters. The night rain is washing the blood from you. But you are now both fully yourselves-as-one. So the time has come for you to follow me.”

        We do, and I tell them both of my life before Kuleika’s teeth remade us:

        A storyteller came to the mountains once. He traded his stories for the raw watersilk we grew, to sell on his travels. He was the one who told me about quicksand. About the way it sucks you down, until you can’t breathe and it flows up into your mouth and nose. Choking you to death.

        There was a man like that.

        “Like poison,” Grandmother says.

        “Yes. Exactly like that.”

        Lord Faroun Ikemenoyari had many sons, but it was his eldest who watched me. Since I was barely old enough to braid my hair into fours instead of two. He watched me like a skink watches a nest of eggs. After I handfasted with Amare, the eldest’s watching burned hot as the fever-sun of drought days.

        He hurt you, Kuleika growls.

        My—our body, is no longer what it was. Gone somewhere between Kuleika’s stomach and wherever the stars sleep during the day. But it remembers. Bruises like a necklace. A chain of bite marks.

        In our shared mind, Kuleika brushes against me softly, in comfort. I nuzzle her back, spirit to spirit.

        His mother called me to her one day. Lady of the manor that had once belonged to our people. Murals sanded away, tapestries burned, in their place portraits of Raq nobility. I walked past the staring eyes of the colonizers and saw the same superiority in his mother’s.

        Her son would ruin himself on me, she said. So I would have to be sold. Far enough away that he would forget me and bend to the milk-faced bride she’d chosen for him. There would be no pig-black bastards in her house.

        I ran that same night. Belly full of baby, and nothing but what my mother could spare to keep me strong. But I was not strong enough.

        Then I found you, Kuleika says, ending my story for me. Hungry, like you, and with no pack.

        Yes. But I have wondered, Do you regret it?

        Not... not much anymore. She gives a huffing dog laugh. You are always interesting, softbelly. Strange as a day-loving owl, but I have come to enjoy it.

        And besides, she adds, you made excellent pups.

* * *

        Grandmother takes us farther into the forest than we have ever been.

        But instead of the ground becoming wilder, the earth begins to be pockmarked with flat stone, until we walk what had once been a road. The slabs are carved with the faces of moons, from full to new and back again. Pedestals with broken statues are covered in swaying vines, the runes on their bases defaced beyond reading. It was so quiet and still. Even the restless wind, endlessly dancing around the mountain, seems muted here. Almost as if in respect for what had been here. With every step we can feel it, the resonance of a great emptiness where something once was. A cavity of grief.

        Grandmother walks confidently on, as unflappable as ever. We follow behind her, almost afraid to disrupt the blanketing silence.

        Ikoro? I don’t know what that smell is.

        We have walked into what once must have been a huge vaulted hall. The dome above is cracked. Moonlight and curling vines cascade down from its ragged edges. Grandmother stands under a beam of light, haloed by the waxing moon.

        “This is where I was born,” she says. Her eyes are sad as she steps from four legs to two. The moonlight gilds her skin, but she looks so alone.

        “Kuku’u Mbattia, where the world kisses the moon. My sisters and I were the last children born here, before it was destroyed. The last daughters of a priestess of the Embrace. Priestesses who, like you, bore two spirits in one body. Made, in the same way you were. Eaten. Choosing to be so. Choosing to become we instead of I.”

        Grandmother walks the perimeter of the room, touching the silver ferns that sprout from the mouths of crushed statues, pausing briefly to drink from a well fed from below and the open air above. We follow behind her, transfixed. By the story she tells, which belongs to all of us; different lives converging like paths in the wood, leading us to this night, this moon, and these revelations.

        “I would have been like you,” she continues. “Two as one. I’d chosen and been chosen in return by a girl. We would be sisters and bound together in eternity. Instead, the Raq came, and put our people to the sword and our history into their holy fires.

        “They called us abominations. Monsters who fed women to beasts.” She sighs, sits down with her back leaning against a broken altar. The half-destroyed reliefs show laughing dogs and women singing to a full moon.

        “We are so few now. Those of us that remember.” We sit down at her side, relishing the warmth of her body next to ours, the feeling of her hands in our fur.

        “Most of the dogs of the mountain no longer even know what we once were. Pack-sisters in the mothers’ embrace. Our two-legged cousins fear us, hunt us, and have forgotten the name of the embrace. The name of who we are. The strength of our priestesses, the sisters of the mountain, is gone. Except, for you, my dears.

        “And it must be you who decides what to do with it.”

* * *

        I have not seen this house for a year except in our dreams. It has not improved. Ikemenoyari cares very little for the living accommodations of his serfs.

        It is the time just before dawn. The fields are mist and shadow, the sound of water running shallow across deep roots. We knock quietly, three times, and wait as we hear someone come to the door. We will not step over this threshold today if we are not invited. I pray that we will be, and Kuleika offers comfort for my fear.

        The door opens.

        “Hello maman,” we say.

* * *

        The moon fell in love with the world and gave her a gift. A people of quick hands, quick eyes, charmed tongues. The world fell in love with the moon and gave her a gift. A people of thick fur, jaws strong enough to shatter bone to dust, and claws sharper than obsidian. The people were the living embrace of their mothers. Taking their bodies into each other in reverence.

        Thank you for this gift.

        Thank you.

* * *

        The sun fell in love with the moon and ate her all up. And gave nothing back. Snap snap snap.

* * *

        At the threshold of any Raq home, a symbol of their holy fire is laid to protect the family within. Perhaps a scrap of yellow paper nailed on the door, inscribed with the words of prophets. A carved lintel, reliefs picked out in marigold enamel. The lord Ikemenoyari hangs banners to the sides of his great wooden door: turmeric-dyed silk embroidered with bright gold. My mother spun that same watersilk, grown by her sisters who tended the terraced pools. Her cousins gave their sight to stitch the scrolling embroidery.

        The Lord protect us from evil.

        We trail our hands across the heavy silk as we wait for the Lord’s seneschal to answer our summons at the door. Behind us, Kahu and Tanaga wear their borrowed silk with a mixture of sullen acceptance and excitement. Their human bodies they wear with more grace, quick to learn once Grandmother showed them how. Tonight, they are my ladies in waiting.

        We have gotten lost, you see, on our way to visit Grandmother’s house.

        “Ahahaha, lost cousin, yes! We are so frightened.” Taga giggles, until Kahu nudges her with a sharp elbow to hush her.

        We fall upon the mercy of the great lord Ikemenoyari for shelter this night.

        Very great lord. Much greatness. Let us in. Let us in. Kuleika laughs.

        He does. The seneschal bows to us, we who look like a lady and travel with fine ladies, and who certainly does not hide anything.

        Big big teeth, oh! Sky sharp claws, oh!

        There is nothing in the dark behind us. Are we not pretty? Are our smiling teeth not white and strong? Our faces are powdered to a Raq pale sheen, and our hair dressed with the gold of our foremothers.

        We are brought before the Lord and his family at their evening meal. A small surprise—the old Ikemenoyari is dead. At the head table is his eldest son. To his right, his mother. She watches our advance warily.

        Hello, woman who would have sold us. Hello, man who tried to break us.

        You do not remember me. But I remember you. We both do.

        Ah hahahahaha softbelly, this hunt is fun.

        His hunger is the same, little Lord Ikemenoyari. His eyes are hotter than the fire in the central room, and they follow us as we shimmer delicately in stolen silk and jewels dug up from ancient graves.

        Sweet Lord Ikemenoyari, yes we would love to dine at your side. Your Lordship is gracious and kind as Raqi himself. May he shine down on your lands. May we have the honor of pouring your tea, fixing your plate?

        Mercy. Sanctuary. We are so very grateful. Who knows what could have beset us on the road? In such darkness. In an unforgiving land.

        We have heard tales of monsters in these mountains; scythe-toothed beasts that laugh as they run you to earth. But we feel safe here, with you.

        When we told Grandmother of our intention, she gave us her blessing and her advice. “Your prey should be so blinded by what they want to see that they do not notice your teeth until your jaws are already around their neck,” she said.

        Maman agreed.

        All of the aunties, grandmothers, and cousins have been most helpful. They sleep soundly tonight. Not as deeply as the Raq, whose food was specially flavored for the occasion. Who even now, slump at their guardposts and priest holes.

        A sleep so deep they do not hear the approaching laughter from the dark. Closer now, inside the hold.

        It is very quiet here, in the Lord’s chambers. He is awake and almost drunk with anticipation. He laughs when our strength pushes him down. Sneers as we wrap his body between our legs. Is surprised when he cannot move, that his cries bring no one to his door.

        Tonight, there is laughter on the mountain.

Copyright © 2021 Marika Bailey

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Marika Bailey is an Afro-Caribbean author and illustrator. Her work has previously appeared in FIYAH and Strange Horizons. A childhood obsession with mythology led to her current habit of writing stories that try to explain “where do people end and gods begin?” She lives in Brooklyn, NY with her husband and the softest cat in the world. You can find her tweeting about drawing and 80’s sitcoms as @Marika_Writes_.

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COVER ART

“Spirit Village,” by Tyler Edlin

Tyler Edlin is a freelance illustrator and concept artist for the entertainment industry, creating epic fantasy and science fiction worlds. He gives back to the community providing regular classes and tutorials on such popular subjects as the fundamentals of character and environment design. View more of his work online at tyleredlinart.com.

Beneath Ceaseless Skies

ISSN: 1946-1076

Published by Firkin Press,

a 501(c)3 Non-Profit Literary Organization

Compilation Copyright © 2021 Firkin Press

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