The Vessel of Ra

Chapter 16: The Awakening

Underneath her was smooth stone. Her hands were crossed and bound with bandages over her chest, each holding a stick. Her eyes were covered with cloth strips. The darkness was inky and she guessed where she was. Beyond the blindfold was a dark that smacked of the shadows at Mistraldol. She was one solid lump, a gift wrapped in bandages.

She did not know who she was. There was memory, pain and rending, tearing and piercing. She didn't seem to care, like she was hearing about the pain, not remembering it. There were other memories, flashes of life, flashes of being reassembled with a painstaking precision. It made her tired just thinking about the eternity it took to find the pieces of her. She was a magic box, a jigsaw puzzle, and every piece had to fit just so. It had been odd how she had felt alive in every morsel of herself as they were pulled back together into one her. Most of her, she thought. Parts were missing, which nagged at her. She was trying to find a part in a favorite book and someone had ripped those pages out.

From the darkness, a woman's voice: "I have done more with less."

"This was not our plan." The second voice was muffled, a man's.

She could hear the woman like a bell ringing. "This was not your plan. This is the best we could do. It is our best chance."

"No," said yet another voice. "I see all contingencies. You guess as to how this will turn out."

The voices were with her in the room, but the voices were miles away. The bandages touched her, but she was apart from them. She knew it shouldn't be like this. Things were muffled, second hand. It might be enough she was here, given a second chance, however it had happened.

What was this second chance for? Was she alive?

The aromatic bandages were stiff with herbs and perfumes. A knife tore through them, cutting them away, and they separated into a husk around her. She emerged from a cocoon. Her vision cleared and a bronze knife, glinting in torchlight, hovered above her neck, slicing more rigid cloth away from her new self. Tiny charms rattled off the table to the stone floor.

She lay on an altar in the middle of a room. On the ceiling above her floated a picture of a winged woman and a dark god. Isis and Osiris. The woman cutting her bandages was dressed in a gold-threaded sheath, her eyes lined with heavy kohl, the line slanting from the inside corner and tapering to an end at her temples. Her hair spilled down her back, cut straight at the sides and the bottom, straight across her forehead. Long, golden nails made her look feline. Light reflected off skin the color of fertile Nile soil.

Underneath the bandages she wore no clothes, but she didn't care. She dropped the sticks, a staff and flail, and pushed her way from the musky bandage shell.

"Welcome," said the woman. "You have journeyed far. I am Isis, your savior."

Modest, this Isis.

She studied the self-proclaimed goddess. Some softer bandages dangled from her arms and shoulders. The room was stone, decorated with golden statues on pedestals and painted sandstone walls of half-animal, half-human figures. Near the table was an old man dressed in a more familiar style of clothing, pants and a shirt covered in muck. His name picked at the scab of her memory. She knew she should be furious with the old man, but there was no anger in her at all. Emptiness and questions, but not anger. Fear was gone too, even when she saw the bird's talons in her mind. All factual, clinical, unfortunate, but she wasn't afraid.

The third voice belonged to a baboon as large as the man. Its tongue wagged in and out, making it look like a panting dog-monkey. Its fur was beaded and it wore an ornate collar decorated with beetles and letters. Hieroglyphs. She knew hieroglyphs. So then, this had been her burial chamber?