She walked among the ancient, massive pillars that held up the ceiling of her temple. Each was elaborately painted in vivid primary hues, images and hieroglyphics that had remained unchanged for over two thousand years. Some of the most ancient relics, which had been brought here from older shrines, dated from far earlier. Some were as old as five thousand years.
She remained invisible to her followers. She preferred it that way, and in these days, only her priests knew her true Name: Iset. Once the Hellenes, with their sloppy tongues had begun to call on her as Isis, it had been easy to hide from them. To hide from the outside world, from the Olympians and the gods of Rome, and all the others. To live in a dream of ancient power, when her people had been the greatest on earth.
That a very distant descendant of hers ruled half the world occasionally made Iset smile, but the descendants of Caesarion the God-Born were mongrels. Ptolemy, a Hellene, had claimed Egypt in the wake of Alexander the Great’s death, and had ensured his acceptance by her people by intermarrying with the line of the pharaohs—her own descendants. The bloodline had run thin, but had reemerged, gloriously, in the beauty and cunning of Cleopatra. Iset had spread her sheltering hand over Cleopatra and her son, Caesarion, for as long as they were in Egypt. And then they had both left for Rome, where she could barely reach them.
All those of Cleopatra’s line—already half-Hellene, half-Egyptian—had intermarried with Romans. She was hardly bound to them at all, anymore. Oh, the Romans had permitted her temples to be built here and there in their empire, and she’d been worshipped in Pompeii and other cities, under various names . . . but she found it hard to care about those who weren’t her people. She did not wish to be at the beck and call of these strangers, and she would not be the servant of Rome. Her people might have to serve the Empire, but she did not.
She passed a statue of herself, seated on a throne, her breasts bared to suckle her infant son, Horus, the King of Creation. How tenderly the humans had depicted her holding him. It was a portrait depicted in almost every Egyptian home, usually alongside an image of Osiris, the original Sacrificed God, torn apart by Set. And so the Lord of Life had become both resurrection and life, the eternal hope of triumph over death. Hardly a wonder that gods like Tammuz, and later, Baal-Hamon, had incorporated elements of Osiris’ faith into their own. It had potency. Humans found it easy to believe that what they did, themselves, their gods could do, too. To sacrifice oneself for the good of one’s people.
It is happening precisely as we always feared it would, Set told her, from the far north, where he held vigil over the port of Alexandria. She stiffened, as always, at his voice, thousands of years of conflict standing between them. They had all been one family, one group of spirits who had entered this rich world together. Brothers and sisters. Set had become the chief god of the people of the south, of Upper Egypt, and had ruled there with long-dead Nephthys, his sister-wife, as Iset and her brother-husband Osiris had come to rule in Lower Egypt to the north. Their peoples had made war on each other, each desiring the others’ land. And they had, to save their followers, made war on each other. Set’s people had won that first battle, and in his rage, he had killed Osiris and tried to dissipate his essence utterly. Iset had managed to hold enough of his essence to her to birth their son, Horus . . . but Horus, while her son, was also her brother-husband, in many ways. While Set had won the battle, Iset’s cult, and that of her son, won the war, eventually, through the power of belief. Having a better story. Set was meant to save the world from the dread serpent Apep, but Iset and her child held the power of rebirth.
Their enmity would surely have been eternal . . . except for Akhenaten. The mad pharaoh had forced reconciliation on all the survivors. But still, memory died hard. Iset bowed her head, listening to Set’s mournful counsel. The humans have learned that they can slay us. They are angry, all over the world. Some are breaking our images, effacing our Names. Refusing to worship us, weakening us, at the very moment that we require their faith to fight the mad ones. It is only a matter of time before a summoner attempts to unName one of us in truth.
Perhaps. Iset acknowledged the possibility, and walked with an inexorable pace up the steps to her own altar, brushing past humans who neither saw nor felt her passage. She stood in the center of the sweet cloud of incense and perfume, and considered her realm. Thoth, the god of wisdom, was to the west, guarding the border with the Phoenicians—Iset always thought of the Carthaginians by their ancient name. Sekhmet, fierce battle-goddess that she was, was in her city of Leontopolis, guarding their eastern flank. Many of the Phoenicians who had been transformed by Baal-Hamon’s death into half-men, half-lions, had taken refuge in her city, over the years, and had converted to her worship, often painting themselves red in her honor.
Leontopolis had been hit hard by the earthquakes that had opened the outlet from the Red Sea into the Mediterranean, years ago, but Sekhmet refused to leave her favored city, except for the prospect of a fight. Such as a Roman fleet landing, or a mad god entering their lands. In contrast, Amun-Ra, Aten, and Horus patrolled the whole of the kingdom in the skies.
They had not agreed to work with the young, upstart gods of Valhalla or the Gauls. Their people had forged that alliance on their own, and the gods of Egypt would . . . observe. Protect their own lands, as they had since time began. They had been among the first to enter this world, and rise to power alongside an extensive tribe of humans. But their lands now held fewer than eighty million people, a modest number. Their antiquity gave them power, but they were bound to their people, their lands. They did not have the reach of the gods of Gaul, Valhalla, or Rome. Outside their lands, they weakened, rapidly.
I remember when Rome’s gods were sprites who oversaw crops and tended groves, Iset thought, bitterly. My people’s pyramids were the glory of the world. They were the civilization that all others wished to ape, and we warred with Babylon and Assyria and all their gods . . . . She was lost, for a moment, in the swirl of incense, the feeling of faith buoying her.
And then something dark brushed against the strands of her mind, and Iset froze. Let herself manifest, as horror filled her. Take everyone out of the temple, she ordered her chief priest and priestess, who cast themselves at her feet, prostrate. Evacuate the city. A mad one comes.
It swept up from the ruins of Nubia, where she and the others had been worshipped under different names. As the mad gods had moved into Nubia, they had fought and retreated, and then fought again, before settling in to defend their traditional borders, and nothing more. The decision had been made in grim practicality. The core of their worship, their power, was here. Nubia could be—had to be—sacrificed, for the sake of the majority of their people. Or so they had argued amongst themselves. Iset was no longer sure that this had been the right decision.
Now, Iset reached for her power, and rose into the sky, leaving her temple behind. She counted some eighty million worshippers her own in the here and now, and she had all the faith of their ancestors, too. Five thousand years. Two hundred and fifty generations, give or take, all going back to Sebennytos on the Nile, a tiny village with mud-wall houses and muddy canals, where the crocodiles and the hippos would rumble at night, and the villagers dared not leave their houses until morning. Horus . . . beloved son . . . . Even after thousands of years, she couldn’t keep herself from remembering that he was also Osiris, and yearning for him. Come to me.
Horus arrowed to her side in his hawk form, and Iset stared to the south as she saw the creature that had come at last to threaten her domain. This is the one that slew Astarte, I think, Horus told her. No fear in his voice. They were powerful, in their realm. They could not challenge Rome, but the lesser gods, the younger ones . . . they could and should step lightly around the gods of Egypt. We must meet it in battle as far from our people’s abodes as possible.
Into Nubia, then. Let that which is already ruined, take the brunt of the damage. The cities there had been leveled, and there had been little news coverage of t
hat in places like Rome or Judea. Then again, there was little news coverage of the devastation in Qin or India, either. Iset and Horus set themselves, and saw the creature with their own eyes for the first time. Its tendrils covered three-quarters of the sky, but the core of it was difficult to perceive. And as it moved over the mountains, it came to where the Nile had been dammed, a hundred years ago, forming Lake Nefertiti. The dam was leaking in a dozen places thanks to the earthquakes of the past decades, but was holding, for the moment. Not here, Horus said, his voice worried. Our people have built where the Nile used to flood its banks . . . we must force the mad one further south.
The ground began to buckle and heave as the creature fed on the ley-lines in this area directly. Tapping into the raw power of this universe, as a spirit could draw on the energies of the Veil. And then it attacked, chunks of the ground tearing and sailing through the skies, narrowly missing their bodies, only to hover there, suspended. As if gravity was no longer a universal constant.
Iset fought with every iota of power she had. She was sorcery and she was the mistress of the dead. She was fertility, rebirth, and the comforter of sorrows. She tore the tendrils in half and cast them to the earth. She wrenched at the creature’s heart, as Horus blasted down with the power of the sun, raw fire. It weakens! he told her, his voice exultant, as they’d stripped it of half its tendrils, and it pulled back over the lake, clearly in pain.
They pursued it, dodging the hummocks and stones still hung in the air. It was fleeing, but slowly. Like a wounded animal, it occasionally turned to attack, and then fell back further. Until Iset realized that they were now well outside their borders. We should return, she thought, uneasily. We are too far from the others.
One comes! Thoth’s thought reached them. Urgent, but not afraid. Over the ruins of Carthage, and coming to me. Aten, Amun-Ra, to me!
The two sun-gods moved to assist their wise one—and in that moment of distraction, the mad godling that had been retreating from Iset and Horus dropped its pose of a wounded animal, and turned on them once more. Tendrils lashed out, catching her, and burrowing through her avatar into her very essence. Iset screamed in agony, and fought harder, resolving to sell her life dearly, and Horus cried out, Set! Brother! Uncle! Aid us!
Iset writhed in the tendrils, trying to absorb the creature’s energies as quickly as it was absorbing her own. A reciprocal attack, a desperate tactic. Beloved! Leave me! she told Horus, feeling her energies wane, though he was tearing at the creature with gravity and with the sun’s own fire. The creature only absorbed the fire, and she couldn’t split her attention between the pain, absorbing its essence, and trying to combat it. Go! I cannot lose you a second time!
And I will not lose you, he told her, and kept fighting. Beloved, stay with me—
That was the last thing Iset, Queen of Heaven, heard, as her gambit, the attempt to devour what was devouring her, failed. Her inner core was breached, and she tried, with her last thoughts, to open a way to the Veil. To return to the safety of the womb that had spawned them all. But the creature held her back, and sheared her in half, liberating all the energy in her core.
The flash of light was visible from the L’banah space station, and radiated as far north as Alexandria. The Great Pyramid of Khufu had lost its white casing stones in an earthquake in 1344 AC; the provincial government of Egypt had replaced the stones with marble facings, at great cost. Another earthquake, which had leveled the Lighthouse of Alexandria, had threatened the rebuilding project, but it had been completed in 1411 AC, when the new gold cap, inscribed with the eye of Ra on all sides, had been settled into place. At the moment, crews perched on scaffolding were attempting to repair the damage wrought by Baal-Hamon’s death in 1985, and fresh cracks brought by Astarte’s death, this past year.
The death of Iset sent the scaffolding, and the workers on it, plummeting to the ground, and the facing stones, held in place by mortar, angle, and their own weight, followed the scaffolding to the ground, entombing the workers. The Lighthouse at Alexandria, which was also being rebuilt, collapsed once more. The skyscrapers of the great port city shuddered, and people ran, wailing, into the streets, the memories of the quakes and tidal waves that had spawned after Astarte and Baal-Hamon’s deaths vivid in every mind.
Set prepared to race to the south, to aid Horus and Iset, but the shockwave of Iset’s energy hit him, and he had to pause, dazed. He could sense Thoth, Amun-Ra, and Aten fighting in the east. Sekhmet. Take the north. Protect us from Rome. They have ships in the area. They might well attack while we are distracted. Set had been the chief god of the pantheon, from time to time. During the ‘rule of foreign kings,’ or the Hyksos period, the Semitic tribes who had come to rule over Lower Egypt had found him, as a storm-god, comfortably familiar to their own god of the heavens, with a similarly capricious temperament. They’d directed their people, and the Egyptians whom they ruled, to worship him as their chief deity, not Ra or Horus. That state of affairs had been overturned by the eighteenth dynasty, beginning with Atmose, whose lineage included the female pharaoh Hatshepsut, the military might of Thutmose, the cursed, damned life of Akhenaten, the scheming and machinations of the priest Ay, and eventually, the general, Horumheb, who’d overthrown the current pharaohs, and ruled in their place.
Set knew full well that Iset and Horus had saved Aten from his wrath after the death of Akhenaten, because they feared what he would do, if he absorbed the power of the sun-god. He might have taken over. Their people had always had a fluid conception of their gods. Set and Horus had been worshipped, at one point, as the joint god Horus-Set. Set had found that exceedingly odd, to be joined, bound, in the minds and belief of their people, with his brother-nephew, who had opposed him for thousands of years. It hadn’t lasted long. A few centuries. A new group came to power, and beliefs changed. That was the central lesson of humanity. Everything changed.
As he moved south, he could feel the struggles of Thoth, Aten, and Amun-Re with the mad godling to the west, and bitterly, Set wondered what would have happened, if his long-ago assignation with Astarte had resulted in a lasting bond between the Carthaginians and the gods of the pharaohs. If she’d just called to him for aid against the mad ones, he would have gone, and be damned to Iset and Horus. But she had been proud, refusing aid, and now she was dead, and her power had fed these things, instead of being turned to aid the land of the Nile in its turn.
Set hurtled to where Horus was barely holding his own against the creature that had destroyed Isis. Hold fast, he told his brother-nephew, and debating his options. He could desiccate the moisture from a body in seconds, shred flesh from bone with a howling sandstorm, or bring rain and lightning. But other than lightning, these abilities were useless against this creature. He needed a more potent weapon. He lifted, instead, his spear, the one with which he had periodically battled Apep, the serpent of chaos and destruction, until Apep had been annihilated by Akhenaten. Set had caught Apep’s powers over chaos after the serpent’s death.
Entropy was a disorganizing force. Chaos was disorder, but it also held patterns within the disorder. He set himself, and waded in, seeing the fractal nature of the tendrils, and danced his way through them, unharmed, before sliding his spear home into the godling’s core. You and I are alike, little godling, Set told the creature, baring his teeth. That means I can affect you.
He and his brother-nephew fought side-by-side. Glorious. It was as if the past five thousand years hadn’t happened, and they were once more entering this world for the first time together, with their sister-wives at their sides. Every time the godling tried to strike at Horus, Set was there to devour the creature’s essence. Every time the godling tried to strike at Set, Horus tore the tendrils away, or Set laughed and danced aside, slicing it away with his spear. We are winning! Horus told him, and for an instant, Set could see his brother’s smile on his nephew’s face. As it had been, before the wars. Before the fighting. Before humanity had set them on each other.
He started t
o smile back. A wave of regret, sorrow, and love passed through him, and he said, Could we do anything else, united so?
And that was when Thoth died, screaming, Amun-Re and Aten unable to save him. A second shockwave passed through the lands of the Nile, this one not just affecting the land, but the people. Set felt it like a blow, as their people began to cry out in pain, their bodies twisting and warping. The Hellenes had largely taken the bodies of beasts with the heads of humans, with the exception of the minotaurs. In Egypt, that template was reversed, as faces transformed. Became bestial. Lion heads and hippos, crocodiles and vultures. Pain, fear, and panic, brains being distorted by the shape of the skulls that now housed them. Some of the humans lost the prefrontal cortexes of their brains, and with it, almost all sense of self, and the ability to reason.
The godling with which they fought howled and lapped up the fresh power, and Set and Horus were, once more, forced to fight with every ounce of their power and ability.
Amun-Re, staggered by the death of Thoth, was the next to fall. Sekhmet! Help Aten! Horus commanded.
The Goddess Embraced (The Saga of Edda-Earth Book 3) Page 104
