The Mythic Dream Page 6

  “I’m not poisoned,” said Het.

  “I should hope not!” exclaimed Dihaut. “No, you left your supper, or your breakfast, or whatever it was, on my flier. I couldn’t help being curious about it.” They shrugged. “There wasn’t much of that neurotoxin in the animal you left behind, but there was enough to suggest that something in that food chain was very toxic. And knowing you, you’d have changed your metabolism rather than just avoid eating whatever it was. Merur, of course, didn’t know that. So when she said she wanted you stopped, I made the suggestion. . . .” They waved one silver hand.

  “So all that business with the single-lived servant, promising her Justification if she would defend those two . . .”

  “This late in the day the Justified were already beginning to resist you—or try, anyway,” Dihaut confirmed, with equanimity. “If these had stood meekly as you slaughtered them, you might have suspected something. And you might not have drunk enough blood to feel the poison. I had to make you even more angry at the people you killed than you already were.”

  Het growled. “So you tricked me.”

  “You’re not the only one of Merur’s Eyes, sib, to find that if you truly served in the way you were meant to, you could no longer serve Merur’s aims. It’s been a long, long time since I realized that for all Merur says I’m to judge the dead with perfect, impartial wisdom, I can never do that so long as she rules here. She has always assumed that her personal good is the good of Nu. But those are not the same thing. Which I think you have recently realized.”

  “And now you’ll be Sovereign over Nu,” Het said. “Instead of Merur.”

  “I suppose so,” agreed Dihaut. “For the moment, anyway. But maybe not openly—it would be useful if Merur still called herself the One Sovereign but stayed above on Aeons and let us do our jobs without interference.” They shrugged again and gave that half smile of theirs. “Maybe she can salvage her pride by claiming credit for having tricked you into stopping your over-enthusiastic obedience, and saving everyone. In fact, it might be best if she can pretend everything’s going on as it was before. We’ll still be her Eyes at least in name, and we can make what changes we like.”

  Het would have growled at them again, but she realized she was too tired. It had been a long, long day. “I don’t want to be anyone’s Eye. I want to be out of this.” She didn’t miss the cold, but she wanted that solitude. That silence. Or the illusion of it, which was all she’d really had. “I want to be somewhere that isn’t here.”

  “Are you sure?” Dihaut asked. “You’ve become quite popular among the single-lived, today. They call you beautiful, and fierce, and full of mercy.”

  She thought of the children by the river. “It’s meaningless. Just old poetry rearranged.” Still she felt it, the gratification that Dihaut had surely meant her to feel. She was glad that she’d managed to spare those lives. That the single-lived of Hehut might remember her not for having slaughtered so many of them, but for having spared their lives. Or perhaps for both. “I want to go.”

  “Then go, sib.” Dihaut waved one silver hand. “I’ll make sure no one troubles you.”

  “And the unauthorized lives there? Or elsewhere on Nu?”

  “No one will trouble them either,” Dihaut confirmed equably. “So long as they don’t pose a threat to Hehut. They never did pose a threat to Hehut, only to Merur’s desire for power over every life on Nu.”

  “Thank you.” Her skin itched, her fur growing thicker just at the thought of the cold. “I don’t think I want you to come get me. When I die, I mean. Or at least, wait a while. A long time.” Dihaut gestured assent, and Het continued, “I suppose you’ll judge me, then. Who’ll judge you, when the time comes?”

  “That’s a good question,” replied Dihaut. “I don’t know. Maybe you, sib. Or maybe by then no one will have to pass my judgment just to be allowed to live. We’ll see.”

  That idea was so utterly alien to Het that she wasn’t sure how to respond to it. “I want some peace and quiet,” she said. “Alone. Apart.” Dihaut gestured assent.

  “Don’t leave me behind, Noble Het!” piped Great Among Millions. “Beautiful Het! Fierce Het! Het full of mercy! I don’t want them to put me in a box in a storeroom again!”

  “Come on, then,” she said, impatiently, and her standard skittered happily after her as she went to find a flier to take her away from Hehut, back to the twilit ice, and to silence without judgment.

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  * * *

  We often talk about Ancient Egypt as though it was one simple, static thing, unchanging until, maybe, the Ptolemies arrived on the scene. But “Ancient Egypt” covers some three thousand years, and while some things may have been broadly true all through those millennia, myths and religious stories changed, were consciously edited and adapted to fit the circumstances of the time, or the intentions of the writer. There was no internally consistent, static whole that myths and beliefs added up to, no one official “right” version of any story.

  So given that this is a body of (often fragmentary) myths from a huge range of time, which was always changing to fit the needs of the moment, why stay in the past? Why not move far, far into the future? And the story of the goddess Sekhmet’s destruction of mankind is so intriguing. Some older translations of the text suggest that mankind rebels against Re because he’s become old, but more recent translations don’t offer any reason at all for it. And the goddess sent to put the rebellion down is the nurturing, healing Hathor, who manifests as Sekhmet, the Powerful, the Lady of Slaughter. Who even Re himself can’t stop, once she’s let loose. She’s so dangerous you’d think the gods would be glad to be rid of her, but in other stories Sekhmet, seemingly always angry, leaves Egypt and has to be searched for and cajoled to come back. Those plentiful ambiguities and elisions are irresistible to me.

  * * *

  ANN LECKIE

  FISHER-BIRD

  BY

  * * *

  T. KINGFISHER

  FISHER-BIRD HAD A CREST LIKE iron and eyes as dark as the last scale on a blacksnake’s snout. She had a white collar and a gray band and a belt the color of dried blood.

  Fisher-Bird had a chatterjack voice that she used to cuss with, and she flew like the air had personally offended her. Her beak was long and shaped like a spearpoint, and she could see the ripples fish made when they even thought of swimming.

  Fisher-Bird knew things. Not like crows know things, or ravens—not that you can ever find a raven around these parts. Not like whip-poor-wills know the taste of your soul or thrushes know the color of music. But nothing happened in the woods or along the stream without it reaching Fisher-Bird eventually.

  There’s a story about the red belt, and why Fisher-Bird’s got one and her husband doesn’t. There’s always a story. I don’t say this one’s true.

  Time was, Fisher-Bird was perched on a branch over the stream, looking at the fish being lazy in the water. She was thinking maybe it’d be a good thing to dive down there, put the fear of god in a couple of ’em, or at least the fear of Fisher-Bird, when she heard a crack and a crash coming through the woods.

  A man came down the deer-trail, staggering like he couldn’t see. His face was swelled up and puffy, and his breath squeaked through his throat. He had blood coming out of his ears and out his nose and even oozing out from under his fingernails.

  Fisher-Bird looked at him out of her right eye. He was a big man. His arms were tree-trunk thick, and he was so shaggy it looked like he was wearing a shirt. Fisher-Bird had to look twice to see he wasn’t, just a mountain lion skin draped over his shoulders like the cat was going for a piggyback ride.

  Then she looked out of her left eye, and she saw he had god-blood in him, thick and stringy as spiderwort sap, the kind that clogs up your veins and makes you a hero even if you’d rather just be an ordinary soul.

  Poor bastard, thought Fisher-Bird.

  He fell into the stream and shoved his head into the water. All the fish rem
embered they had somewhere else to be, and Fisher-Bird was left alone on her branch, just watching the shaggy man soak his head in the stream.

  When he came up for air, his eyes were slitted open and some of the blood was gone, but his cheeks were still huge and puffed up with lumps. Fisher-Bird saw two holes in a couple of the lumps, and she knew right off what had happened. The shaggy man had pissed off Old Lady Cottonmouth. She’s not an evil snake, no matter what people say, but she wants respect and she doesn’t suffer fools.

  “Damn, hon,” said Fisher-Bird. “You look like hammered shit.”

  The shaggy man froze. “Who said that?” he asked.

  Now, this pricked up Fisher-Bird’s crest, right enough. She wasn’t used to humans who could hear the language of birds, unless they were witches or somebody walking around in human skin who couldn’t lay claim to it by birth. “You heard me?”

  “I heard you,” said the man, trying to pry his eyes open with his fingers, “but I don’t see you.”

  “Up here on the branch,” said Fisher-Bird, and she dipped her beak, polite-like. “You see me?”

  The man stared at her for a little bit, then said, “You’re a bird.”

  “You’re quick.”

  “Are you a devil sent to torment me?”

  Fisher-Bird thought this was so funny that she let out one of her long chattering laughs—“krk-krk-krk-krrrk!” And then, “Hon, you showed up at my stream and ruined my fishing. I don’t think you’ve got the right end of who’s tormenting who.” (She didn’t really mind the fish, but she wasn’t about to give up the moral high ground so fast.)

  “Oh,” said the man, after a minute. He dunked his head in the water again and swirled it around. He had long curly hair that hung down his back in wet hanks, until it ran into the cat skin coat.

  When he came up for air, he said, “Sorry about the fish.”

  Fisher-Bird was so charmed by a human apologizing for anything that she said, “Aw, nah, don’t worry yourself about it. You look like you’ve messed with worse than a fish today.”

  “Nest of cottonmouths,” he said. “Whole ball all tangled together and chasing anybody who got too close. I was s’posed to clear ’em out.”

  “Aw, that’s a shame,” said Fisher-Bird. “You gonna die now?”

  He shook his head and scooped up some mud, slapping it across his cheeks. “I don’t die easy,” he said.

  Fisher-Bird hopped a little closer on the branch. “Lotta people don’t die easy, but they take a couple bites from Old Lady Cottonmouth and they learn how pretty damn quick.”

  He grunted. “There were dozens,” he said. “I’d chop one’s head off and two more would show up. Never seen a thing like it.”

  “Shit, hon, that was a snake wedding you interrupted. No wonder they were pissed.”

  Whatever the man might have thought about that was lost as he slapped more mud on his face, then down his arms where the snakes had bit him.

  “Are you really here?” he asked after a minute.

  This was a pretty peculiar question, but humans are peculiar creatures. Fisher-Bird turned her head so she could look at him out of one eye at a time. “Are you?”

  The shaggy man groaned. “I mean, I got bit pretty bad,” he admitted. “And I think a bird’s talking to me, but maybe it’s the poison.”

  “Could be, could be,” said Fisher-Bird agreeably. “Or I could have nabbed a toad and got a beak full of moonshine, and now I think a human’s talking to me.”

  “. . . Shit,” said the shaggy man, with feeling, and flopped down on the streambank.

  Fisher-Bird waited a polite length of time, while the mosquitoes hummed to each other, then said, “You dead yet, hon?”

  “No.”

  “How ’bout now?”

  “I’m not dying. I told you.” He sat up. Fisher-Bird had to admit that he did look better. The swelling was going down, and he’d stopped bleeding from under his nails. “I don’t die. Name’s Stronger.”

  “Stronger,” said Fisher-Bird, rolling the word around in her beak. “Stronger than what?”

  “Everything.”

  “Krrk-krrk-krk-krk-krk!” She laughed at him. “Modest, ain’tcha?”

  “It’s true,” he said. He didn’t sound all that happy about it. He glanced around the stream and walked over to a big boulder half-buried in the gravel. “Look.”

  He put his hands under the boulder. His arms flexed and the veins popped out, thick and ugly as nightcrawlers, and then he scooped the boulder up and tossed it a couple yards over his shoulder with a crash.

  Water rushed into the muddy hole he’d left, and little squirmy things went running in all directions, except for the crawfish, who waved their claws and wanted a fight. Fisher-Bird dropped off her branch, scooped up a crawfish, and proceeded to beat it to pieces on another rock that hadn’t been flung quite so far away.

  “Pretty—good,” she said, between smacking the crawfish around. “Don’t—see—that—much.”

  “Yeah,” said Stronger. He sat back down. “It’s not so great. I break things.”

  “What—kind—of—things—gulp!”

  “People.”

  Fisher-Bird cleaned the last bits of shell off her beak with one gray foot. “I see that’d be a problem.”

  “Yeah. Now I got to do a bunch of jobs for my mother-in-law to make up for it.”

  “Why your mother-in-law?”

  “It was her people I broke.”

  “Ah.” Fisher-Bird cocked her head. “That why you were off fighting snakes?”

  “Yeah.” He began to pick bits of drying mud off his face. “That was one of the jobs. And the mountain lion I got here, that was one, too.”

  “Big lion.”

  “Yeah. There’s others. Had to kill a boar that was tearing up the farm.”

  Fisher-Bird nodded. Boars were bad news. They didn’t bother her much, of course, but they could take a field and turn it into a wreckage of trampled mud in less time than Fisher-Bird could open up a crayfish.

  “And a mad bull, and a bunch of mares that had a very peculiar diet, and do not talk to me about stables and . . . well, it’s been a long month.”

  “Is that all you’re doing? Putting down livestock?”

  Stronger didn’t look particularly pleased by this summation. “I caught a doe.”

  Fisher-Bird snorted. “What did you do, stand in one place for a little while? We got more does than fish around here.”

  “A specific doe.”

  “Oh, well, that’s different.”

  “My mother-in-law says go kill it, but my sister-in-law says if I do she’ll gut me like a hog, because that’s her pet deer and it got loose, and I said she shouldn’t ought to let it wander around loose, and then she got pissed at me and said she’d let her deer go where it damn well pleased.” Stronger rubbed his face. “So I finally just went out and grabbed it and carried it back over my shoulder. Which it did not like. I had hoofprints in personal places.”

  “Still, pet deer. That’s honorary livestock.”

  “I got my cousin’s girdle.”

  Fisher-Bird had been looking for more crawfish, but she stopped and turned her head real slow to look at him. “. . . You got that kinda family, do you?”

  “No!” And when Fisher-Bird gave him a steady look, “Well . . . all right. My mother-in-law’s married to her brother and they say her daddy was a cannibal.”

  “Take an old bird’s advice, son, and get the hell away from those people. Marrying kin ain’t good, but you start eating each other and all bets are off.”

  “Look, I didn’t know about that bit when I married in. Anyway, that’s what the jobs are for. I finish these, and I’m free and clear and they let me go. I’m gonna move west and never talk to these people again.” Stronger rubbed his forehead. “And it wasn’t like that with my cousin. I just went and asked politely. Wasn’t much of a job. I think my mother-in-law was hoping she’d be mad, but I explained all about it and brought her
a bottle of the good stuff, and she said my mother-in-law was always a bad one and she’d be happy to do anything to spit in her eye.”

  “Well, gettin’ away is good,” said Fisher-Bird. “I approve of that.”

  Stronger nodded gloomily. “I don’t even like most of them, and that’s leaving aside that my mother-in-law keeps trying to kill me.”

  Fisher-Bird, no stranger to family infighting, nodded wisely. “Some people come outta the egg mad.”

  Stronger finished flaking the mud off his face. “You’re still a bird,” he said, almost accusingly.

  “Yeah, I’d get used to that.”

  “If you’re a bird, then why can you talk?”

  “Shit, son,” said Fisher-Bird, and let loose a long string of curses that made Stronger sit up and take notice. “I’ve always been able to talk. Question is how you’re listening.”

  Stronger shook his head. “Dunno. Never could before.”

  Fisher-Bird scratched her beak. “Any of those snakes bite your ears?”

  The man looked puzzled for a minute, then put his finger in his ear and wiggled it around like he was cleaning earwax. He winced. “Yeah. One got me right up there by the ear.”

  “There you go,” said Fisher-Bird, pleased. “You make a friend of a snake, they’ll lick your ears, let you hear the language of birds.”

  “These snakes weren’t friendly.”

  “Yeah, but spit’s spit.”

  He thought for a few minutes. “Huh. You know, I got some birds I gotta clean out for my mother-in-law. You think this’ll help me?”

  “What kinda birds?” She hopped down a little closer.

  “Weird ones. Feathers like metal. You shoot at ’em and it bounces right off and makes a noise like you’re shaking buckshot in a tin can.”

  “Oh, them. Stimps.” She grimaced as well as one can with a beak.

  “What?”

  “Stimps. They’re herons, more or less, but their great-great-granddaddy did a favor for the Iron-Wife and got her blessing. Now they got iron feathers and think they’re better’n the rest of us.”