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Her fingers t
witched in the rags that bound them and startled me. I laid my hand over hers to calm them and give them warmth.
Tauseret gazed at me, eyes luminous with love. “I could not betray you. You had taught my heart to soar with Horus in a few short weeks. Because of me, you would die. I could not let the last words you heard be my denial of you.”
I glanced away, humbled. I hoped the Ankhtifi I used to be understood she had condemned herself for him.
Tauseret’s plaintive voice drew my eyes back. “They cut off your head in front of my eyes. As my husband’s servants dragged me off, all I could see was your blood splattered over the garden where we’d loved.”
She fell silent. Her eyes were haunted.
I realized I was clutching a hand to my neck. I lowered it, hoping she hadn’t noticed, but Tauseret stared past me as if she saw that blood even now, and I stroked her ravaged cheek even though I felt sick. “Here I am, safe and sound,” I said, as much to reassure me as her, but she had gone beyond my touch, deep inside the terror of her past.
“They took me into the bowels of the temple of Set,” she told me. “To a chamber that stank of khemi. ‘Where is my trial?’ I cried. ‘Where is the judge?’
“‘I am your judge,’ my husband growled. ‘You have shamed a priest of Set.’
“‘My parents will demand to know where I am.’
“‘They will think you eloped with that adulterer,’ he told me.
“‘Will you kill me?’ I wailed. ‘That is more than the law allows. I should be banished.’
“‘I will not kill you,’ he said. ‘I will deny you death.’ Madness lit his eyes. His servants held me tight while he pinched my nose and poured a noxious fluid down my throat that sapped the strength from my limbs. He then stuffed my mouth with foul powders.”
I grimaced and wondered if that was the tar I’d wiped from her lips.
“He wrapped me in the linens of the dead, my body whole and sound and alive, and I thought I’d go mad before he finished—nay, I prayed I would. No protective amulets were bound inside my wrappings, no spells to open the door of my mouth. No food or drink was left for my ka. None of the proper words were said, although he did indeed speak words of power over me—words to give me life eternal. He lifted me like meat and put me in a rough sarcophagus. He left my eyes uncovered so I could see a spell text on the inside of the coffin lid as he low-ered it upon my living face—a spell written to bar me from the afterlife. If I could have screamed, the walls would have shook with the sound.”
I could almost smell and taste her horror.
“He left me deep in the underground passages of the temple of Set where no one would ever find me. I was buried alive.”
I gasped for breath, as if I, too, lay in the stifling dark.
Her voice hardened with bitter anger. “I hope Ammit ate his heart when it revealed his sacrilege at the judgment.”
“Its all right,” I whispered. “You are safe now. It’s over.” Such senseless words, for I didn’t know if she was saved at all. I lifted a shred of fabric at her neck and began to peel it back. It made me itch to see her in those filthy rags.
“No. Do not do that,” she said. “Not yet. I do not know what is under these wrappings.” My stomach lurched and I dropped the cloth. I wanted to comfort her, yet I didn’t truly know what she was.
“How did you survive all those centuries and not go mad?” I asked.
“I lay in darkness so long that I saw colors where none existed, so long that the shadows whispered lies to me,” she said. “I thought I had been assigned to hell and removed from the memory of mankind. After immeasurable time a blinding light flared. I steeled myself for pain, but instead a powerful sweet-ness came over me. I beheld the great ladies, Hathor and Isis, as if through a curtain of water and sunlight. Their voices burbled like liquid. ‘You are here for love, faithful servant,’ said Hathor. ‘I, too, had my lover torn from me,’ said Isis. ‘We will ensure that you will be reunited,’ said Hathor. ‘Till that time let your ka see and hear for you,’ said Isis as she gave my double the gift to travel outside my tomb and view the sky. ‘Let your ka be your messenger in dreams.’ Her gifts saved me.”
Those dreams—they had truly been her, then? “How did you end up here?” I asked.
“When my scholar died, his wife, always jealous of his love of study, sold his belongings and arranged for my return to the university that employed him. She put my humble sarcophagus outside on a public highway to await transportation. That skele-ton thief noticed me there and took me when I lay unattended.”
Her flesh had filled out and her cheekbones no longer threatened to cut through her skin. When had her nose regrown? There were echoes of beauty on her face, and I caught my breath.
I knew her.
“But how did we come together again?” I asked, tears prickling my eyes. “It defies logic.”
“Didn’t you feel me calling you?” she asked. “And who told those boys to throw you from the train, lest you would leave me behind? Who took hold of the courtesan’s hair to rip the truth from her?”
The night we walked side by side down the railroad tracks, she had told me she could reach out to people through the ring. I remembered the change in Lillie’s heart when her hair tangled with the chain that held the scarab ring, and the blank look on the young clown’s face before he suggested they throw me off the train—he’d seized the ring in the folds of my shirt when he grabbed me. Then there were the dreams and the way I’d yearned to leave home—after I wore the ring.
