Chapter One, as it stands in the current draft. Menkhef’s night begins at the second bell, in the vault under the ice.
Every city stands upon its dead. Sekhemhut kept them.
They brought Nakhtmin down, and Menkhef carried the ink.
The stair ran eighty steps into the glacier, and the air sharpened at every turning. At the door bound in iron a young priest of the Hem Ka, the Ka’s own servants, barred the way with his staff.
“The rite is closed,” he said. “Priests and bearers.”
“He’s my hands,” Khahor said. “I’m an old man. My hands write badly in the cold.”
The priest looked at the ink case, then at Menkhef. He lowered his staff.
“You lie well,” Menkhef said on the next turning.
“I didn’t lie. You’re the best hands I’ve had.” Khahor came down with both feet to every step. “She said as much to me once. She’d never have said it to you.”
“No,” Menkhef said. “She wouldn’t.”
Somewhere below them the glacier groaned, long and low, and the sound climbed the stair to meet them.
“The Pillar’s restless tonight,” Khahor said. “My grandmother would’ve thrown salt.”
“Do you believe it? That the Pillar lies down there?”
“I believe the ice moves.”
The oldest songs held that the spine of the world lay broken under Sekhemhut, and the cold was the world keeping still around the wound. Menkhef had copied those songs out a dozen times and thought only of his strokes.
The vault opened below them, a round room cut from the living ice, and the lamplight went down into it and did not come back. The cold there was not the city’s. What blew off the harbor came with the wind and left with it, and a man could quarrel with it. This one never moved. It had held its place since before the first king raised the first spire.
They had started down on the second bell. “Do the kept hear the bell?” Menkhef said.
Khahor went three steps lower before he answered. “Ask me a smaller question.”
The Hem Ka worked with bare arms at the table, six of them, slick to the wrist, and they sang over her.
“What is kept is not lost,” sang the eldest, whose hands were inside her.
“What the cold holds, the cold holds whole.” The five gave the answer back, their breath going up white with the words.
The body on the table had a face, and the face had taught Menkhef his letters. He set his board under the nearest of the lamps and fixed his eyes upon the ink going black in the water. An apprentice did not touch the dead. He ground his ink and waited.
She had a callus on her right middle finger, where the reed had ridden for sixty years. He knew it without looking. When he was seven she had closed his fist around a reed and pushed it through the water sign until his wrist learned the shape without him, her callus scraping his knuckle at every pass. She had had a cedar box of honey cakes for any boy who wrote a clean line, and her room had smelled of beeswax and reed shavings, and he had loved her as boys loved whoever first showed them they could make something.
The man with the hooks was at her lungs now.
The ink skinned with ice before the weighing began. Djeser crossed from among her people, took the pot from beside the board, and held it between both palms until the black ran free, and set it back, and returned to the wall. Menkhef did not thank him. Thanks was for strangers.
Four jars waited at the scale for the soft parts a body set down, and the eldest weighed to each in turn.
“To Imsety,” the eldest said at the scale, “one deben, four kite. Write it.”
“One deben, four kite,” Menkhef said, and wrote it.
“To Hapi, one deben, one kite. Write it.”
“One deben, one kite,” Menkhef said.
“To Duamutef, one deben even. Write it. Slower with the reed, scribe. The roll outlives us both.”
So it went, jar by jar, through the four. The hooks made a sound he knew from the fish docks and had not minded there. The lids went on, carved with the faces of guardian sons, and the roll filled with numbers, and his hand stayed steady, because a scribe’s hand was steady or it was nothing. That was her first lesson. She had rapped his knuckles teaching it.
The Ib they left where it lay. The Ib was wanted.
They bound her hands at her sides with linen bands, and Khahor came to stand at his shoulder. The old man smelled of wool and older ink.
“The weights,” he said, under the song. “Nothing else belongs on that roll tonight.”
Menkhef bent to the roll.
Her people lined the south wall and were glad. That was what they had come to be. By the time the wrapping had climbed to her throat, Djeser was at Menkhef’s left, in the place that had been his since they were seven, her two boys with one lamp between two boards. Neither had ever chosen the place.
“Look how the frost favors her,” he said.
“You were her student too.”
“Her worst. She told my mother you were her best, the year of the long dark.” He gripped Menkhef’s arm. “Not one hair of her is lost. We should be glad.”
“Not one hair,” Menkhef said.
Djeser heard what he had brought with him to hear, pressed his arm, and went back to the wall.
The eldest spoke the seal when the wrapping reached her chin, and last came the little adze. He laid its iron edge upon her bound mouth and said the words of opening, so that hearing would stay with her, and sight, and the use of her tongue in the world beyond the glass. It was a mercy. Every soul in that vault believed it, and had believed it from the cradle, and would carry the belief to their own tables in their turn.
They did not close her eyes. The kept are not sleeping.
Somewhere along the south wall a woman’s throat opened on one note of the old keening, high and torn, the cry the oldest rolls said women made over their dead, and it was not gladness. Hands closed over her mouth, her own family’s hands, four and then five, and the sound went back down whatever it had climbed out of, and the priests were careful not to have heard it. Djeser’s face had gone the color of tallow.
Then the Pillar turned.
The sound came up from under the world. Not the crack of pond ice under a boy’s heel. The mountain changed its mind. The floor rose the breadth of a finger, and of the nine lamps, seven went out.
The song stopped.
In nineteen years he had never heard the Hem Ka stop. Dark, but for two flames, and the dead woman’s open eyes catching what light was left.
Menkhef put out his left hand to steady himself, palm flat upon the ice wall behind him.
The wall took his hand and held it.
White. Not pain first. Light, behind the eyes. The pain arrived later, and from much further off. He pulled. His hand did not come. Something had gone in through his palm, and for the length of a heartbeat the wall of the world held him fast, and the cold came up his arm to look at him.
Then the wall let him go.
He went down on one knee. He had bitten through the inside of his cheek. His throat made no sound. He never learned whether that was discipline or refusal. Around him the priests called to one another, and someone relit the lamps, and the song took itself up at the exact word it had dropped. The world had moved. The song declined to notice.
No rite in Sekhemhut broke for a living hurt. The Hem Ka bent over the body and the seal and turned from them for nothing else, and the room was meant to do the same. A scribe who bled at a rite bled on his own account and carried it out with the ink. Tonight the rule would hide him.
One bead of blood stood out of his palm and froze before it could fall. Red, then stone.
Under it, in the meat of his hand, lay a sliver that had not been there. Thin. Silver. It did not catch the light. The light failed around it. The thought came to him whole and needed no working out. That is not ice.
He looked up. Across the vault, over the body of his teacher, the sockets of the jackal skull faced him.
He blinked, and Anubis faced the table, as he had faced it since they brought her down, and nothing in the room confessed that anything had moved.
And up through the ice, from the deep vaults and the dead in their rows, came one small sound. A tap. A fingernail against glass. Once.
Ask me a smaller question.
He chose not to have heard it.
Djeser was watching Menkhef. He had watched since the dark, the knee that went down, the hand that came up marked, and the gladness had left him. He glanced once at the eldest’s back.
“Scribe.” The eldest, not turning from the table. “Read back the weights.”
He stood, drew his left hand into his sleeve, and read the roll aloud in the flat voice of the record. The papyrus never rattled in his right hand. His left lay in the sleeve, some other man’s hand.
Six bearers took her down to the deep vaults, Menkhef sixth at the left rear pole. Khahor had arranged that too. The weight came down the pole into his wounded hand and blew it alight. He counted steps. Forty to the first landing. He carried her with the care she had spent sixty years putting into his hand. Whole strokes. No trembling.
They stood her upright in the glass, hands bound, eyes open. The meltwater ran into the seam and froze as it ran, until the case sealed itself, and no door remained where a door had been.
Menkhef would have sworn she was listening.
He turned when the others turned. He did not look back.
Djeser caught him at the first landing, an old friend’s grip on his shoulder, warm even there. “She is safe now,” he said. “Be glad for her.”
“I was her student,” Menkhef said.
Djeser looked down at the sleeve, at the hand that had not come out of it. The question waited in his face.
“The board’s edge caught me when the floor rose,” Menkhef said. “A scratch, nothing to write.”
Djeser’s color came back, and his gladness with it. He pressed Menkhef’s shoulder and went up ahead of him, light on the steps.
Khahor climbed one landing at a time, and Menkhef waited without being asked. At the third landing the old man stopped and breathed. “Build your nest upon no tree here, for you see the forest is sold to death, and every tree whereupon we would rest is ready to be cut down.”
“She corrected my letters too,” Khahor said. “Fifty years past. I still make the owl badly.”
The joke had worn smooth with handling, an amulet by now, and did the same work. Menkhef laughed, a small laugh, mostly breath. On the stairs of a tomb it is the only kind there is.
They climbed. Near the top, in the torchlight that came down from the temple yard, Khahor said, “Menkhef. When a thing asks to be written, you’ll bring it to me? Whatever the thing.”
“Even a question you won’t answer?”
“Those first.” Khahor took the next step. “You wrote well tonight. Your hand didn’t shake.”
“No,” Menkhef said. “It didn’t.”
There is more from this world. Subscribe and read Salt for the Dead immediately, free and published nowhere else.