Heart of the Gods (20 page)

“Our Gods are not as yours,” she said. “They aren’t and weren’t distant and unknowable. They were as close as family, we took care of them as they took care of us, we loved them and counted them as friends. Known. Familiar.”

She looked at the symbols of the gods on the statues around her.

“The Gods were our mother and father as much as those who bore us. They loved us. Loved each other.”

Remembering, she rolled her eyes and laughed.

“Except for Set of course.”

She couldn’t look at him, at Ky, so she looked at Khai instead, at the statue they’d carved of him.

“You loved him,” Ky said.

Swallowing visibly, she nodded.

“As much as you thought and much, much more,” she said, her voice soft.

Memories raced through her mind of Khai at that first meeting that long ago day in the desert, looking down at her from his horse, mounted as few Egyptians were. But he hadn’t been Egyptian, he’d adopted Egypt even as Irisi had, as their borrowed homeland.

She remembered, too, the first time Khai had kissed her, that day in the King’s palace…and the last.

The day they mummified her.

“So much and so deeply. I remember… I knew when he passed…I felt it.”

It was in her to ask, the question she’d never been able to have answered. She hesitated. Grief and pain, an ancient sorrow rolled through her.

Did she truly want to know?

“How was it that he died, Ky? Do you know…?”

He’d said Khai had died in battle, but what was the manner of it? Had he suffered? The thought was agonizing. Or had it been quick?

She looked at him, her eyes bright.

It was there on her face. Her features reflected her pain, the grief that tore at her.

Then she shook her head, turned away. “No. Perhaps it’s better not to know…”

So much pain, so much heartbreak. Her hand rose, went to her breast and she bowed over with the pain of it much as she had when the bullets had struck her.

She’d loved him that intensely.

To his surprise Ky felt a pang of jealousy to know his alter-ego had been loved so deeply that love had lasted for millennia and that she grieved for the loss of him still.

It wasn’t hard to take pity on her, though, her sorrow was real.

Very gently, Ky said, “He fell in battle, we think. It was quick. That much we do know, from the archives, the texts we’ve translated.”

If you knew how to read the hints in the texts it wasn’t difficult. If they said he’d been carried from the field, then he would have been grievously wounded. If they said he’d died three days after the battle then he’d been mortally wounded and took three days to die.

However, they’d said he’d been lost on the battlefield and so it was there he’d died, likely quickly.

Tears shimmered and a look very like relief, like gratitude, washed over the expressive face he’d come to know so well.

Raissa looked up to the stone features above her. “You resemble him, you know…”

She’d never said it to him directly, but she knew she needed to say it, and he needed to hear the truth of it.

Something inside Ky went still.

“Do I?” he said, evenly.

It wasn’t exactly news, people had been comparing them almost all his life.

She smiled a little, her eyes wistful. “Yes. It’s striking. You could be brothers. It was difficult that first day. I had to remind myself you weren’t the same man. You have so many of the same qualities I loved in him. Both of you are good men, strong men, warriors each in your own right. Brave, brilliant, dedicated. Handsome…”

Oddly, something inside him began to ease.

Deliberately, Raissa turned to look at him. “You are not Khai.”

It wasn’t a denial or a comparison. Simply a fact.

“He was all warrior. You are poet and warrior both. You are your own self, a different man for a different time. He was one of the best men I have ever known. So are you.”

Looking back up into the still stone face, Raissa said in wonder, “I never knew why he loved me, it was so difficult for us. I was a farm girl who became a mercenary and then a slave when I was captured. I was so far beneath him and then there was Kamenwati, who owned me until Isis took me into her service. We had so much set against us. Despite it all, he loved me.”

Watching her it was easy to see why, he could understand how Khai had loved her so deeply, so passionately he’d displayed the empty place beside him for all to see.

It was there in the depth of her grief for the man she’d loved all those millennia ago. It was there in the woman who had thrust Komi out of the line of fire without a thought or care for herself or what she might lose… One duty had been paramount over any other―protect the innocent.

And it was there in the eyes of the woman who had come back to face him, to face them, knowing what awaited her.

“There is a carving,” he said, quietly, “of you with your hand on a lion’s head. I’ve always suspected it was his.”

She looked at him, her blue eyes stricken, and took a small shuddering breath.

He had it still. It would have cost him his job, his career, if anyone knew of it. It belonged in a museum, but it had always felt as if it were his by right.

There were questions to which he still needed answers.

“Were you ever going to tell me?” he asked.

She went so still he wasn’t certain for a moment she was breathing. Knowing what she was, did she even breathe?

He looked at her steadily.

If nothing else, Raissa knew she owed him the truth.

“Tell you I was a three thousand year old mummy?” she said ironically and laughed with wry humor, tilted her head, lifted an eyebrow and looked at him. “Would you have believed me if I had?”

“No,” Ky admitted, honestly. “Probably not.”

She sighed and nodded. “I could have proved it but it would have been difficult. Even so, I think I would have had to, sooner or later. There are some things I can’t hide, things you would know, recognize for what they are, what they would mean… Ky, I never meant to deceive you, and then it was too late. But yes, I would have told you eventually.”

“When?” he said.

Slowly, she shook her head and gave him honesty.

“I don’t know.” She sighed. “There never seemed a right time. You have every right to be angry with me and I have no right to ask your forgiveness.” She rubbed her forehead with the fingers of one hand, wearily. “And I was selfish. I just wanted a little time to be…human again… Raissa, not the Guardian of the Tomb. I had begun to forget what it was like to be real, to be human.”

She took a breath.

“With you, I remembered.”

It was hard not to let his heart go out to her. He heard the echo in her voice when she’d said she was tired. There was a weariness in it that went beyond the body and down to the depths of the soul.

Three thousand, four thousand years of waiting, of guarding…

There was one last question. In a way, it was the most important one.

“Why did you come?”

Raissa looked at him. She sighed. She owed him truth for this, too, at least.

“To stop you if I could,” she said, quietly. “And those others Tareq fears. Then I met you, spoke to and with you, and Ryan, Komi, even John…and everything changed.”

To stop him, if she could.

At least she was honest in that.

Ryan. The others. Tareq.

It was a reminder.

They were waiting for him. And for her.

It was like being doused with cold water, an dash of reality.

“We should go,” he said, “the others will be expecting us.”

It hurt, that abrupt dismissal. The distance in his voice pained her more than the bullets had.

Ky saw her wince a little, heard her breath catch, saw the bright shimmer of tears she wouldn’t allow herself to shed.

He had the power to hurt her it seemed and he had. A part of him had wanted to, but now he regretted it.

Looking at her still, lovely face, he felt the tug, the ache in his heart he’d been fighting for these last weeks but how did he come to terms with being half in love with a three thousand year old priestess who was the guardian of a tomb said to be filled with evil spirits?

Chapter Nineteen

The office went silent when they entered, the whispered conversation abruptly ending. All the eyes were on Raissa, Ryan’s, Komi’s, John standing with his arms crossed in frank disbelief, Tareq…Dr. Hawass…in front of her and Ky behind her. It felt like a tribunal and perhaps in a way it was. She was very much on trial here.

“So,” Tareq said, abruptly. “You would have us believe you are the High Priestess Irisi, who, it is said, was mummified alive.”

Without preamble he caught her wrists, turned them to expose the insides.

And reveal the neat little white scars over the veins and arteries there.

Not long slashes like a suicide but small rounded nicks.

“They used reeds of course,” she said, softly. “To keep them open to drain on the one side while the Water of Life was drawn in the other.”

She remembered it well, the pain, the warmth of her life-blood as it slipped away, the coldness that seeped through her and the weakness, the sense of draining…the burn of the herb and natron laced water as it replaced the hot blood that flowed in her veins.

Tareq looked into Raissa’s face as it paled and saw shadows in and beneath eyes that hours before had been calm, set and blazed brilliantly blue. He’d seen what had happened for himself. It still boggled his mind.

“It’s surprising how much of the anatomy they knew and understood, and how much they got wrong. Yet they didn’t…”

He mimed swirling a reed around.

Raissa knew what he meant.

It had been a common practice to insert a reed through the nose to remove the brain. It was the heart that was the seat of the soul, of reason. Some ancient Egyptians thought the brain had no significance, it was nothing but mucus as anyone with a cold could attest…so they’d removed it.

With a half smile, she sighed and shook her head.

“That was later generations. It was also important I be as intact as possible so I could recreate a living body. After all, I wasn’t going on to the afterlife.”

Tareq interrupted, his fingers going to the pulse points in her wrists.

There was nothing. No pulse, no steady thumping beneath his fingers. No heartbeat.

No heart.

It was common practice to remove the internal organs, to place them in funerary jars. All the organs, except one.

He looked up at her.

“Without a heart you couldn’t appear before Ma’at, your heart therefore couldn’t be weighed and judged and so you could not move on to the afterlife.”

The rest didn’t bear thinking. He couldn’t quite bring himself to ask how they’d taken it from her.

“Yes,” she said, softly, looking at him steadily.

For a moment their eyes met.

He couldn’t imagine it.

Ky tried not to think about it, about what they must have done to her.

What she’d allowed them to do.

He knew the process of mummification.

It was likely she’d fasted for days save for bitter herbs and the natron-laced Water of Life.

They would have stripped her to skin. She would have prostrated herself on the altar. They would have washed her body, carefully, reverently, with more of the sacred herbs, more natron, more of the Water of Life, as they would any of the dead.

Then they would have wrapped her in linen, yard after yard of it, bound her in it tightly, drenched her in the Water as the reeds in her wrists drained her life away on the one hand and filled her with the herbs and more of the Water of life on the other.

How much courage had it taken for her not to fight them, to remain still and allow them to do it?

How had Khai stood by and let them?

“There’s no pulse,” Tareq confirmed, his voice soft as he looked up into Raissa’s face.

“You’ve got no heart?” Ryan said, stunned.

Raissa glanced at him with half a smile. “Oh, I have one. It’s just not here.”

Frowning, Ryan said, “So you don’t feel anything?”

There was something of Ky’s accusation in Ryan’s voice, too. A sense of betrayal nearly as deep as the reality of who and what she was set in, and the knowledge of all she hadn’t told him.

They’d been friends.

She couldn’t entirely blame him for his anger. He also wanted something or someone to blame for what had happened and a reason why she hadn’t told him any more than she’d told Ky.

It still hurt, still pierced her sharply, both the accusation and the declaration.

“No!” she said, more forcefully than she intended.

With an effort, she gentled her voice.

“I feel just as you do. Having a heart doesn’t take away my ability to feel. It’s only that my heart doesn’t beat here in my chest. Believe me, though, I feel pain, grief, joy and sorrow, just as you do.”

John said flatly. “I don’t believe it. I don’t believe any of it.”

“I’m not asking you to,” she said, softly. “Believe as you will, that’s why the Gods gave us reason.”

For some reason Ky was finding this almost clinical discussion of what they’d done to her disturbing.

He thought about it, what she’d allowed them to do, all those years ago, the pain and the horror of it.

“What do we call you?” he asked, abruptly. “Raissa? Irisi?”

Those blue eyes shot to him and the hurt in them was clear. He didn’t know why he felt the need to do this, to lash out at her, to hurt her, but it was there.

“I was born Eres,” she said. “Banafrit, Isis’s priestess, gave me the name Irisi―made of Isis, maid of Isis―Nubiti is as much title as name. I was proud to carry both. Raissa, though, was my own choice, close enough in meaning to my own name, the one I was born with. I think of myself as Raissa. You can call me what you want.”

“Why are you here?” Tareq asked.

“Originally?” she asked and sighed as she walked to the window, looked out on the mall at the people who walked there. In a different time, a different dress, they might have been her own long dead people.