their priests wander the roads and their fires are cold,’ I added.
And then the lady Mutnodjme said, almost inaudibly, ‘But tonight is the marriage of Isis and Osiris.’
Then I knew why she had come to me.
The marriage of Isis and Osiris is—was—celebrated with a feast, after which a priest and priestess re-enact the mystic marriage in the light of the star Sothis, which is Isis and Orionis which is Osiris. This is done when the lights of both stars are in the sky, as they were tonight, before midnight when the stars move in the great wheel which takes them, during daylight, below the earth to the Tuat.
After the marriage of the gods is consummated, all people lie down with their lovers and dedicate their love to the festival, and that which is done this night is pleasing to the god and the goddess.
I allowed my mouth to meet her mouth. Meryt had taught me about women. I breathed in the scent of her skin and her hair, sour, not sweet, a biting sourness like persimmon or the golden apples of Nubia. Her mouth tasted of wine and honey and herbs, and she held out her arms to me.
I felt her hands slide surely across my chest and down to find the phallus, but she did not immediately clasp it, but with her nails and a touch as weightless as a butterfly alighting on a petal she stroked and teased my loins, until I was shivering. I reflected her caress, finding the cleft and touching it as gently as I could, a repeated tapping until I felt her thighs loosen and open, parting easily to allow me to find the pearl which is the centre of all female mysteries.
I felt my skin flush with heat. Beside me, my lover burned. I slid down beside her, finding first the nipple as hard as a metal bead in my mouth, then as her thighs wrapped my shoulders I found myself lapping at the waters of the womb which gave all men life.
Something took me then. Something flowed into my receptive body, some great force which had roamed the night, seeking an outlet. My hands were magnetised like the wise iron and everywhere I touched gave pleasure. Three times I felt the womb convulse under my tongue, heard a moan of delight, not from my lady Mutnodjme but from woman herself, all women, and I was making love to her as all men.
She reclaimed my mouth, sweet with her waters, drawing me into her embrace, her breasts soft under my weight and on that kiss I entered her with a shock like being struck by lightning. We were fused together. Thus must metal feel in the welding. I cried out; so did she. We moved slowly to begin with in a sacramental dance of female and male, of Isis reclaiming her dead husband, of life making love to life.
I abandoned thought; I was no longer Ptah-hotep. She was no longer the dark woman Mutnodjme who came to me in the night whom I had known as a little maiden. We had no history but the god’s, no story but the legend. The phallus that moved in and out of the sheath in slow strokes that made the woman cry out like a bird was not mine; the sheath was not hers.
We were one entity; one perfect union of god and goddess, earth and sky, fire and water. We were elemental, strong, unimaginably pure. I saw her face in starlight and she was transfigured, the goddess Isis under my hand, enfolding me, embracing me, so beautiful that my eyes dazzled.
There seemed to be no time. I was in her body, feeling the phallus inside me, the soft flesh close tightly about it, and every movement brought me such delight that my bones were filled with honey. She was me, feeling the penetration of the woman, the skin of my belly on her belly, the union of opposites which were the same.
We reached a climax. Lights exploded in front of my eyes. The rush of fire along my bones was close to pain, beyond pain. Still part of her, I felt her convulse as the womb grasped and sucked at the fluid of generation as though the womb was mine. We bled inside each other, shared veins and heart beating wildly, breath panting. We were one in the triumph of the consummation of the mystic marriage of Isis and Osiris.
I lay beside her, my phallus