Another Pan (26 page)

The sisters concocted a plan. Harere would take Nailah’s place for two years, time enough to bear two healthy children. The two women were similar in size and shape. They had the same dark hair, the same sun-browned skin. Harere would cover her face at first, claiming modesty. Nailah’s husband would never notice
.

The sisters put this plan into motion immediately, giving Harere only enough time to say farewell to her lover. One winter morning, draped in her sister’s rich clothes, she kissed Seth good-bye and promised to return and to marry him after two years, if he would only wait. She did not tell him of her secret errand but bade him to trust her and be patient
.

Nailah’s husband never questioned Harere’s identity, and she became pregnant right away. The family celebrated Nailah’s good fortune and was none the wiser, since both sisters covered their faces in public
.

Halfway through Harere’s first pregnancy, their father grew suspicious of Nailah in her role as Harere. She was much less patient, her manner much more reserved, than the Harere he knew. Nailah grew alarmed as her father began to suspect her identity. So, as a precaution, the two sisters decided that the false Harere should run away. She should hide in the next village until the two years were over and the sisters could switch back to their rightful places. Then Harere, who would surely be presumed dead, could marry her lover, Seth. Nailah would return to her own house and raise Harere’s children as her own
.

And so Nailah packed her bags and set off in the night, taking Harere’s precious identity with her. For the remainder of the two years, she lived alone and free, working as a midwife, a nurse, even a cook, in the houses of the neighboring villagers. Now independent, she was happy for the first time since her marriage. Back in the merchant’s house, Harere waited. She bore a son and soon became pregnant again
.

While Harere, bloated and pining, sat counting the days until the end of her torment, her lover, Seth, grew anxious. He began to loiter around her father’s house, listening, trying to find out where Harere had gone. All he found out was that she had run away
.

One day, as he was asking about Harere in the market, a woman overheard him. “I know someone named Harere,” she said. “She’s a midwife in the next village.”

When he arrived in the next village, Seth found a veiled Nailah in Harere’s clothing. Thinking he had found his love, he begged her to end her self-imposed exile
.

From behind her veil, Nailah watched her sister’s lover beg at her feet. She was torn by jealousy, and then by hope, and then by desperate desire. And so Nailah let him believe that she was Harere. She promised to love him if he would only understand that she wished to remain veiled for a time, to mourn her separation from her family. Seth agreed
.

In the same way that Harere had convinced the merchant that she was her older sister, Nailah convinced Seth that she was Harere. Seth believed that he had found Harere, and, being lonely and eager for marriage, he gave himself to Nailah, heart and soul. They were married publicly in the village square
.

When the two years were over and Nailah did not come back, Harere began to worry. Had something happened to her sister? Nailah, too, now blissfully joined with Seth, began to fret. She wanted children. She was still unable to have her own. But weren’t the children in the merchant’s house rightly hers? Was she not the mistress of that house and therefore the children’s rightful mother? She knew that Harere had two sons. She longed to have them for herself
.

For three years, Nailah brooded
.

For three years, Harere waited, dejected and alone, except for her sons, whom she loved
.

One night, unable to wait any longer, Nailah crept back into her home village. She stole into her sister’s house under cover of night and took the children from their beds. She told Seth that she had come upon the children abandoned by the roadside
.

In the morning, when Harere discovered her loss, she fell to the floor in fits of tears. Unable to account for the loss of the children, she became raving mad. Soon, everyone in the village believed that she had murdered her own children. The villagers drove her away, all the way to the edge of the Nile. There, while they stood watching, their accusing eyes pushing her forward, Harere decided that she had no reason to live. Her children were gone. Her identity was lost under the mask of Nailah. She threw herself in the Nile and drowned with a bitter heart
.

Harere’s body floated down the Nile to the next village, where it attracted crowds of spectators. Seth, too, came to see. He hovered above her, a vague tingle of recognition stirring inside. He reached down and took off the cloth that covered the girl’s face. In an instant, he recognized her. Harere. The real Harere
.

He swept her up in his arms and took her away, deep into the desert, where his own humble tomb was kept. He sought to pay homage to his lost love. He looked for a way to honor her, to atone for his betrayal and negligence
.

There he gave her the burial rites of a queen. He mummified Harere’s body, leaving it wrapped but without a sarcophagus in his own small tomb. There she lay, without peace, without rest, until her body was stolen by the Dark Lady
.

Seth, brokenhearted, quietly left the village, choosing not to betray Nailah’s secret, for the sake of the two motherless sons in her care. Though she begged, he refused to stay. “I have married the worst kind of creature,” he said. “Worse than a snake whose bite is unconcealed, you are a worm that slithers underfoot, whose presence in the body goes undetected until all damage is done.”

Years later, Nailah died an old woman, bearing her sister’s name, mother to her sister’s sons
.

The bitterness of this injustice devoured Harere’s soul. And so, she died with her life trapped in her bones. The goddess of death took the young mother’s mummy and the bonedust with it. She shielded it with her greatest weapons, fearing that someday death might be conquered. The Dark Lady hid the mummy in a place where no one could reach it, a legendary labyrinth of the gates, guarded by powerful deities that no human could overcome
.

And so, Harere was gone, her identity lost. But she can never fully die. Her wasted life is forever trapped as grains of immortality in her bones
.

“Explain!” Wendy and Peter shouted at once as they marched from both ends of the hall toward John, who was trying very hard not to cower as they approached. John had run out of class the second Simon had stopped reading the third legend, and Wendy had followed him out. Peter was approaching from the opposite direction so that John had nowhere to escape. John decided to go with a two-part approach: passive-aggressive freeze-out combined with oblivious bystander.

“Ease up. I got class,” he said, shoving past Peter and swaggering in the other direction. His shoulder hit Peter hard, sending a satisfied chill through John.

Peter grabbed John’s arm, the newly healed one, and squeezed hard. John tried to pull away, but Peter’s grip was too firm, as if to suggest that the arm belonged to him. John hated being reminded. He tried to pull away, but it was useless. Peter was barely making an effort, that annoying smirk creasing his lips with every ineffective tug from John.

“What do you want?” asked John, turning toward them.

“Where did Simon get the bone?” Wendy asked.

John shrugged. “How should I know?”
Oh, no
. Did this count as one of those sibling betrayals? Should he have asked Wendy first?
No way! Who was she to order everyone around, anyway? Real winners do their own thing. They don’t need validation
.

“OK, kid. I don’t have
any
patience for this.” Peter took out his handheld and started texting furiously. Before he was finished typing, two LBs appeared at the end of the corridor, carelessly strutting through the hall toward them, uniforms crumpled as always, ignoring the lovesick girls who had been chasing them all semester. They were both tall. One had olive skin, long, black hair, and a backward cap. Under his Marlowe jacket he wore a T-shirt with a picture of Crazy Horse on it. His companion was the boy they had seen the other day, the banker’s son who always got away with things at Marlowe, the country-club thug with blond cornrows.

“What’s up, chief?” said Crazy Horse, slapping Peter’s hand in greeting.

Peter nodded toward John.

Crazy Horse stepped closer. He hovered over John. The more John squirmed, the more he towered. “Are you gonna talk, or do we need to adjourn to an empty classroom?” he said, his thick voice a bit more official-sounding than John had expected.

John crossed his arms tighter.

Crazy Horse picked him up by the collar.

“Hey, let him go!” said Wendy.

“Relax,” Peter whispered. Then he shook his head, as if to say nothing’s
really
going to happen.

John tried to keep a cool look on his face (not easy from three feet off the ground). “It was just a souvenir,” he said. “I found it in some desert and I gave it to Simon to shut him up. And it worked. See? He hasn’t hassled us all day.”

The LB dropped John to the ground. Rather than rushing to his side, Wendy called him out.

“You gave Simon the second batch of bonedust,” she said through gritted teeth.

“What are you talking about?” said John. “Peter stashed that. This was just a stupid piece of junk I found in the sand. Besides, it was a
new
bone . . . not even dust yet.”

“It was Garosh’s forearm, smarto,” said Peter. “I stashed it in the sand two hundred paces from the tomb where I found it. The bones don’t crumble. They’re
alive
.”

“N-no,” John stammered. “You have it all wrong. It was
in
the sand. I didn’t take if off a mummy. There was no shroud. No shrine. No marker. No hiding spot.”