Seratis Daughter of the Sun

by N J Adel

  My eyes snapped wide open, stunned Drusus filling my vision.

  He gaped at me. “Holy. Mother. Of Gods.”

  Another clink.

  I put my hand on my throat, my blood warm and sticky on my hand. My gaze fell to the floor. To the blood spots there. To the red piece of blade that had just fallen from my neck.

  That my neck had spitted out of the wound as it closed.

  “I didn’t die.” I glanced up at him. “Did I?” I groped for the nonexistent opening I’d just made on my skin.

  “No, Majesty. Thank the Gods.”

  The shouting stopped.

  I looked down again at the cleaver blade that was now in two pieces. “What are you thankful for? My tissue broke a sharp blade in half and healed itself faster than my slit speed.” My voice quivered.

  Drusus swallowed. “I’m thankful for your existence. For your magic. For your immortality, Goddess Seratis.”

  With all the pain and anger and shock I had in me, I grabbed his neck and lifted him off the ground. “I’ve warned you many times, Drusus. I might have accepted my powers and embraced my full name, but I’m neither a magician nor an immortal.”

  His eyes bulged and his limbs flailed in the air. “Deny it all you want. It’s the truth.”

  Magic? Immortality?

  The things I’d been fighting and ridiculing all my life now defined me.

  And my enemy.

  No.

  I refused to believe it. I wouldn’t accept it.

  There had to be a different interpretation. And I wouldn’t rest till I found it.

  “Please…put me down,” he rattled. “You’re too…strong…for a human like me.”

  Despite my infuriation, I set him down. An innocent soul wasn’t the right field where I could let out my rage. The only person who deserved to unleash my wrath upon lay sleeping in a tomb and shared half of my blood.

  Drusus coughed, bending over, clutching at the table. I waited until he could breathe and stand again. I needed his full attention for my next question.

  He straightened. “Thank you for your mercy, Goddess.”

  “You shall see no more of it if you keep calling me that.”

  His jaws tightened. “As you say, my Queen.”

  “Now tell me.” I dropped the cleaver handle on the floor and stepped forward. “Where’s Bessen Ra buried?”

  Drusus’s blood pumped and beat as if it was trying to escape a double-headed serpent monster. “If I may ask, what’s the need to that question at the current circumstances, my Queen?”

  Alarm owned me, pushed against me like an invisible desert storm. “You may not. Answer the question.”

  Sweat trickled down his forehead and his dark face paled. His shoulders slumped with a heavy, unseen demon of dread.

  A sudden realization dawned on me, and never in my life had I felt as such a fool. “What lies in the fifth passage, Drusus?”

  His big eyes broadened to the size of porcelain plates.

  Words left me as I stared into those strange, blue eyes as if I’d seen them for the first time.

  How could I not see the answer for myself until now?

  So much for the royal intelligence. I’d proven myself to be an unwise woman blind with conceit and naivety.

  “I trusted you.” I volunteered no more than that.

  Before he could utter a defense, I pictured the passage to Bessen Ra’s burial chamber and jumped.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  I stumbled over one of the four zebaq lamps lighting the chamber, breaking it in my landing. The light dimmed a little, leaving a corner black. The rest shone by the other three lamps and the vibrant yellow on the walls. The various drawings of the usurper on the four regions. East. West. North. South. Each one with tales ranging from his death to his afterlife journey. The stories sung about him as a divine king with a divine right to rule. How the gods had blessed his blood and carved their immortality on every part of his flesh.

  My hair is Nu. My face is Ra. My eyes are Hathor. My ears are Maat. My nose is Sheks who presides over her lotus leaf. My lips are Anubis. My molars are Selkis. My arms are Isis. My breasts are Neith. My back is Seth. My phallus is Osiris…

  I shall piece that phallus into twelve, but I won’t put them back together like Isis did with Osiris.

  …my chest is greatly majestic. My belly and my spine are Sekhmet. My buttocks, thighs and calves are Nut. My feet are Ptah. My toes are Horus. There is no member of mine devoid of a god, and Thoth is the protection of all my flesh.

  The gold sarcophagus with the most obnoxious face I couldn’t wait to tear apart stared back at me. On its marble pedestal. Vulnerable and mighty at the same time.

  I touched and traced the gold spells strewn on the black granite. The silver liquid from the broken lamp spilled on the ground, and I knew it wouldn’t be long for toxic vapor to fill this chamber that already reeked with death.

  “Your protection spells and magic bane won’t hurt me now, little brother. What happens if I break your peaceful bed, wake you before your time, doom you to remain flawed through your years? Your too long years? Would Thoth still be the protection of all your flesh?”

  I took a deep breath, the bleak smell of the tomb and poison suffocating my injured soul, not my lungs. I lay on top of the sarcophagus, belly down, face to face with the golden mask. “Do you remember how we used to be when you were little? How you used to hide in my chambers when Father was too rough on you? How many lashes I’d taken for you?”

  Tears betrayed me all of a sudden, and I wiped my face quickly before they streamed down my face, as if afraid he would see them.

  “I never hated you back then. Your whore of a mother Father married right after the death of my own, yes. I hated her as one would hate blindness. Yet you, my half-blooded prince, I felt protective of you.”

  I chortled at myself. “My folly goes a long way. To think for once you were an innocent soul worthy of protection. Worthy of love.” My fingers swiped angrily at my eyes that wouldn’t stop their empathy. “You see? I might have never said it to you, Bessen Ra, but I loved you. Not the unholy, deceitful love you said you had for me when you asked me to marry you and make you king. I loved you the love only the ropes of blood could make.”

  My teeth clenched so tightly that my jaw ached. “So why didn’t you protect me back, brother? Why were you the one who betrayed me? And for what? For you to fail at ruling my kingdom and lie buried here, waiting to wake only to fail again?”

  Silence mocked me and my queries. “I would have ruled better, and perhaps, Egypt would have been our kingdom still until today. But you had to be you, and I had to be me.”

  Each instant passed on me staring at that silent mask blazed my anger. I truly wished to smash that unlively face, bore a hole in this false coffin and into his greatly majestic chest. “Do you know how much I loathe you now? How brutally I wish you dead?”

  Seething, I shut my eyes and squeezed the cold surface, almost grinding it into dust. Oh, the blissful feeling I’d have when I crushed his ribs and gnawed at his heart. When I torched him to smoke. When I heard him scream and come back only so I could repeat the ache.

  “But I won’t do it now.” I sat up and rose off the sarcophagus. “I won’t wake you just yet.” My hand stroked the golden cheek as if it had been real. “I won’t kill you just yet.”

  “Hate is an unholy path that we shall leave without a single footprint. There is no prize worth the corruption of soul; hate brings only the cycle of destruction upon us all. The temptation to walk it a platter of compelling reasons, ones that shine the vanity and frame false champions.”

  The corner of my mouth curved up. “I’m not a false champion, my brother, my nemesis. My hate for you is the manifestation of my own shame of the lack of courage to face you in the past. Now I shall let you live, grow into the immortal you yearned to be. So when I defeat you, you will have no excuse or anyone to blame but your lowly self.”

  I studied th
e chamber one more time before turning my back on the ugly figure. “Enjoy the hell I shall create for you, brother.”

  As I closed my eyes and steadied to jump out of here, another breath shared the chamber.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  It wasn’t a breath.

  A quiet gasp was more precise to describe it.

  Accompanied by a heartbeat with a clumsy rhythm.

  And a smell I’d always recognize.

  Could that be happening?

  Could he be here now?

  Slowly, I opened my eyes, my own heart not faltering like his at the menace lurking. I spun and glared at the unexpected guest. “Drusus. How did you emerge inside like that?”

  “I d-do not… M-m-a…” His body quaked on the ground. His heart brawled with a ruckus of fright and shock.

  For a friction of a moment, I hesitated to reach and help him, unsure if his state and emotions were real and not a forged mask to hide something else from me.

  My instincts overpowered my doubts, and I darted for his aid. Holding his arms, I skimmed his brain and grabbed hold of an open path. “Be calm.”

  Bathing in sweat, he relaxed in my grip, his eyes wide and unmoving.

  “Tell me what happened,” I commanded.

  “I was running in the tunnels, trying to get here to apologize and illuminate Your Majesty about the tomb. Then…it was as if I was sucked into a portal, a whirlwind that threw me out here.”

  Suspicion washed over me. “You jumped?”

  “No, Majesty. I was running…”

  I gestured for him to stop talking. “Sit up.”

  He obeyed, and I examined his neck. No marks from my fingers whatsoever were there.

  An earlier observation I’d deliberately dismissed on my first day in this house alerted me. Redamun had slapped Drusus’s hand, hurting him with the new strength. Yet by the time we had arrived, Drusus’s hand was fully restored. “What else have you been lying to me about?”

  “Majesty, I swear I—”

  “How long have been healing like us?” I raised my voice.

  His Adam’s apple dipped. “Two days. When I was cutting the cheese to serve Majesty and her companions the other day, I hurt my hand. But in a few moments, the wound vanished.”

  I remembered his anxiousness when he was serving the platter. I also remembered how he drew on his silly grin and pretended nothing was happening when I specifically asked if he was all right. “Why did you conceal it from me?”

  “I did not know what to say. Majesty was too disturbed that day, and, in all honesty, I was scared myself. I still am.”

  I might have lost my trust in Drusus but not in my power. I was compelling him, and he was telling the truth. He did not know about his transformation earlier, and he was truly terrified.

  “I’m not lying, Majesty. Please believe me.”

  My remaining hand on his arm fell back, as though it mattered. “I wish you were.”

  “Why? What’s happening to me, my Queen?”

  How was I supposed to answer? With hopeful speculations that would be proven invalid and be replaced by ominous ones only to turn out to be the abhorrent truth?

  Pains exploded within as this day hadn’t ceased to slap me in the face and kick me in the loins. Wasn’t it enough I had damned myself and the people who trusted me with their lives to an eternal hell? Wasn’t it enough that I had created an invincible monster?

  I almost killed Drusus. Then I healed him. Or thought I had. How senseless had I been to think something good could have come out of my lethal abilities?

  I didn’t heal this helpless follower. I infected him.

  “Energy can be transferred,” I managed.

  “Forgive my intellectual limitations, my Queen. I don’t understand what that means.”

  “To heal you, Drusus, I touched you. We all did. We all sent our energy, our power, to your body to revive it.”

  “And it stayed?”

  “Obviously.”

  His eyes twitched. “Can Majesty take it out of me?”

  I cocked a brow. “You don’t want it?”

  “These powers in the right hands could change the earth into heaven. In the wrong hands it will turn it into hell.”

  “Who said yours are the wrong ones?

  “I have ignorant hands, my Queen. I won’t know what to do with it.”

  Drusus had a simple mind, yet he was one of the most sensible men I’d met.

  “Regretfully, I cannot take it out of you. It had already altered you, like it did to us. For that, and for infecting you with my curse in the first place, I sincerely apologize.”

  “I’d bury myself in the mud in shame if I ever seek an apology from my Queen. It’s I that owe Majesty one. Building your domus on Bessen Ra’s tomb was my brothers’ idea. They thought it was the safest thing to do.”

  “Come to think of it, I believe it’s a brilliant idea. Hide the tomb, stay inconspicuous and remain close to the enemy and in control all the time. It’s not the notion that maddened me, Drusus. It’s the concealment of it.”

  “My brothers had told me to keep this fact from you on Awakening Day so Majesty wouldn’t reject dwelling here. I was supposed to tell you after you settled, yet that never happened.”

  “That was not your decision to make or theirs.”

  “Please forgive me, my Queen.” He grabbed my hands and kissed them fervently. “I was going to reveal it to you, Majesty, only when you were ready, I swear.”

  I removed my hands away from his lips.

  “Majesty is upset with me still?”

  “I’ve just told you you’re infected with an ailment that can’t be cured, a curse that had no expelling spell, and all your concern is whether I’m upset with you?”

  “You have cursed my heart before my flesh, my Queen.

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “My doom is not the forever you’ve given me. It’s the eternity you won’t let me have with you.”

  “Drusus…”

  “My Queen, if you shun me, I must obey. But then I’ll be living my hell on earth. Eternally.”

  Now was the time to relieve my mind from duty and listen with a warm heart. Time to hear the fear and respond with the compassion below the anger. To pardon the sinner as he repented.

  For a chance to be forgiven in return.

  Would you forgive me, too, Drusus?

  He kneeled and bowed his head to my feet. “Daughter of the Sun, I beg of you, mighty Queen, my owner, my goddess. I open my chest to your mysteries with honor and love. Beauty of holiness, through countless ages, ever renewing, I come from your body, heart and soul. Restore me to the perception of truth. The truth of your spirit. The truth of your presence. The truth of your love.”

  How many times should I tell him I am no goddess before he’d listen? To stop saying it with his heart before his tongue?

  I give up.

  “Drusus, you poor soul. You have fallen helplessly in love with a myth.”

  Keeping his knees on the floor, he gazed up at me. “Perhaps that was the truth…before I laid my eyes on the mummya representing that myth.”

  “And you fell in love with the mummya?”

  “Oh the temptation a good scare can induce in a man.”

  I laughed against my will. “You melt my heart, Drusus, with all your flaws. What shall I do with you now?”

  “Anything.” He kissed my toes one by one. “I’m all yours, if you’ll have me.”

  I lifted his chin with my index finger, and he straightened his back. Our faces and eyes leveled. “The only barrier that was stopping me from having you is gone,” I said.

  His beseeching eyes lit with a gleam of joy. He crawled closer, and our knees touched. “Majesty shall give me that honor?”

  My head tilted to the side. A memory forever carved itself in my skull haunted me as I looked at Bessen Ra’s grave. “Only if you consent to receive that honor here.”

  He cleared his throat. “H
ere?”

  My glance returned to him. “Yes, here.”

  An awkward smile twitched his lips. “Majesty, we shouldn’t be here in the first place, let alone… Regardless of the dweller, this chamber remains sacred.”

  “You can’t be afraid of the tomb curse when you have a goddess here with you, can you?” I mocked.

  “Majesty… Please don’t misunderstand me. I want nothing in this world more than the marvelous moment I become one with you in the union of love…”

  “I certainly hope it will last longer than one moment.”

  He scowled, his struggle not to be missed.

  Softly, I touched the thickness of his hair. “To ease your suffering, I shall share with you a secret.”

  “What secret, Goddess?” he asked without losing his frown.

  “Words Bessen Ra told me before the great war.”

  “What did the damned usurper say?”

  The recollection set a pang to my chest. “What shall end you is not an arrow shot by a soldier in your chest or my sword sheathed in your neck. It will be my phallus, defiling you bloody in both openings until your heart stops from screaming. Then I will defile your lifeless body again in its pitiful tomb, leaving it so unpure the Gods won’t let it in their eternal kingdoms… Except he wasn’t that polite with his choice of words.”

  The look in his eyes, I recognized. The fire seed that would grow in the pits of his stomach until it came out as blazing as Bennu or any phoenix had ever flamed, and then burn him into ash. An inferno more than his heart could stand.

  “You still believe this is a sacred place not to be desecrated?” I asked.

  With his eyes a pain untold, he cradled my face in his hands and his fleshy lips devoured mine.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  I laid my naked back on the cold stone, the curvatures and arches of Bessen Ra’s gold, sculpted figure and features stabbing my skin. Yet I didn’t complain.

  The need to humiliate my defeater was bigger than pain.

  Bare of any fabric, Drusus straddled me, his feet on the pedestal. He touched a strand of my hair cascading on the sarcophagus side, almost touching the floor. “Jewels of the night.” His fingers felt my lips. “Divine jewels of love.”