Out of the Black Land - By Kerry Greenwood Page 0,65

the third day of the holiday, which is twelve days long. Amen-Re lies in the arms of his wife Mut. No one else is working. The commoners are all sleeping to store up energy for tonight’s feasts. Why are you working?’

‘As a favour to your mother, to keep you occupied while she arranges the move to the palace on the lake. You will have visitors today, my pupils, and she wants to keep you occupied. But we can tell stories if you would like.’

‘Take us for a walk?’ we coaxed.

‘Where would you like to go?’

‘Down into the village,’ suggested my sister.

‘Out onto the water,’ I asked. I had never got over my fascination with the river, even though it had tried to eat me.

‘Sorry,’ said Khons. ‘Neither. The village is full of drunken people and the river is rising fast. You remember what happened to you on the day that the river was rising, Mutnodjme.’

‘Then to a temple,’ we said.

‘Which one?’ asked Khons warily.

‘Basht,’ said Merope. Basht the cat came to her name and walked delicately over the tiled floor and onto Merope’s lap.

‘That is in the village, and we cannot go to the village.’

‘Story, then,’ I said, for we were clearly not going to join the interesting crowds and noises which we could hear outside the walls. At least we were not going back to the Satire of Trades.

Khons nodded and began:

Isis and Osiris were brother and sister and loved each other with a love greater than death.

Isis was the most wise of all the daughters of Geb and Nut, and she said to Osiris, ‘Be my lover, oh most beautiful of all men, and I will lie in your arms and I will never leave you.’

And Osiris beheld her and replied, ‘Most lovely of all women, I will lie with you, and love you, and I will never leave you.’

But Set their brother was jealous and said, ‘Why did she not choose me? I am as strong as Osiris, and I am good at lovemaking, yet she has chosen my brother and not me.’

Therefore he decided to kill Osiris, hoping that Isis would love him after her husband was dead. So he had a sarcophagus made, exact to the measurements of his brother, taken from the print he had left sleeping in the sand, and he challenged the gods, that whoever fitted into the valuable goldwork should have it for his own.

Osiris climbed in, and lo! Set clapped the lid down, and welded it shut. He flung Osiris into the Nile, and so he perished miserably, suffocating in the dark.

And Set said to Isis, smiling,‘You shall be my wife.’

‘Wicked!’ cried my sister Merope. ‘What happened? Did Isis take Set as her husband?’

‘Of course not,’ I argued. ‘Isis is the lady of wisdom, she wouldn’t do something so stupid.’

Khons raised a finger for silence, and I subsided.

Not only did Set fail with Isis, who scorned him saying he was a scorpion among brothers, but his own wife Nepthys, disgusted by this murder, left him also, taking with her their son Anubis.

Isis and her sisters lamented for Osiris, then turned themselves into birds; and Isis and Nepthys and the Divine Huntress Neith flew low over the Nile, seeking the coffin, crying to lost Osiris, ‘Come to thy house!’

And many people saw the birds and wondered, for they called with human voices to the dead man, ‘Come to thy lover!’

But they could not find him, until a bird told them that the tamarisk tree had found the coffin and grown lovingly around it to preserve it from destruction, and that the tree had been cut down and made into the pillar of a King’s house. That tree has ever since been sacred to Osiris.

Isis came in the form of a woman to the King’s house and offered to suckle his child if she could ask for anything in his house. The baby was sickly and not likely to live, and they had no other children. So she nursed the child, dipping him each day into the fire to make him immortal, and at night changing herself into a swallow which mourned around the pillar, crying for lost Osiris.

Thus it went, until one night the Queen found the woman putting her child on the fire, and cried out, so that the child lost his chance of immortality, and the nurse was transformed into a mourning swallow.

The swallow then spoke with human voice, saying, ‘Take your child, he is strong though now he