“Sorcerer, son of sorcerer, on this day you are a man. Your father did not raise you to manhood before he left you. Therefore I must perform the rite.”
The serpent thing vanished into her clothing. She rose, her movement fluid as smoke. I could only see her face and hands, like lanterns themselves floating in the half-light. She took a silver band and bound my hair as the men of the city bind it. She gave me a pair of baggy trousers such as the men of the city wear. I put them on. They were much too long. I rolled them up to my knees.
“They used to belong to a pirate,” she said. “He won’t be needing them now.”
She rummaged around among the debris and produced a single boot. I tried to put it on. It was nearly twice the size of my foot.
She sighed. “Always the pattern changes. I’m sure it’s portentous. Never mind.”
She took the boot from me and threw it aside.
Then she leaned down and kissed me on the forehead. The touch of her lips was so cold it burned.
“Now you are marked by the Sybil, sorcerer, son of sorcerer, and by that mark men will know you. Because you are marked, you may call on me three times, and I shall hear you and reply. But beware. If you ask my favor more than that, I shall own you, like all the things in my house. That is the price I ask of you.”
She gave me a water bottle and a leather bag with food in it—cheese, bread, and dried fish—and told me to put the grave coins in the bag too so I wouldn’t lose them.
The bag had a long cord. I slipped it over my neck. I hung the bottle from the loose belt I wore outside my robe.
My forehead was numb where she had kissed me. I reached up and felt the spot. It was cold as ice.
“Now go, sorcerer, son of sorcerer, into the very jaws of the Devourer, of your own will. Go, as the Sybil has prophesied, right now—”
She stamped her foot once. I screamed as the floor swung away beneath me like a trapdoor and I was falling endlessly down amid glowing white bones and debris and the Sybil’s tumbling lamps. I saw her face once, far above, streaking away in the darkness like a shooting star.
I hit the water hard and sank deep, but somehow reached the surface again, lungs bursting. I started to swim. The sword cut my legs. The bag choked me. I almost threw them both away, but did not, and slowly, clumsily made my back to where I thought my boat waited. I looked around fearfully for the evatim, which surely haunted this place.
Above, the house of the Sybil was silent and dark.
At last my feet touched soft mud and I stood up in the gloom. Faint light filtered among the ten thousand wooden legs of the city.
I waded through thick mud, then into open water and fell in over my head and swam a short distance, struggling toward the light. Then my feet found a sand bank, and I climbed out of the water and rested.
A whole night must have passed then, for I slept through terrible dreams of my father in his sorcerer’s robe, stalking back and forth at the water’s edge, his face so twisted with rage that he hardly seemed to be my father at all. He would lean over, raise his hand to strike, then pause, startled, even afraid, as if he had seen something in my face he had never seen there before.
I tried to call out to him.
Suddenly I was awake, in total darkness. A footstep splashed nearby. Far away, the birds of the marshes sang to announce the dawn.
And my father’s voice spoke.
“Sekenre…do you still love me?”
I could not answer. I only sat terribly still, shivering in the cold air, my knees drawn up to my chest, hands clasped tight to my wrists.
Daylight came as a gray blur. I saw a boat nearby, beached on the same sandbank. It was not my own, but a funeral boat, made of bound reeds.
For an instant I thought I understood fully what the Sybil had prophesied and I froze in terror, but I had known so much of terror in my life already that I had grown indifferent to it. I couldn’t bring myself to care. I couldn’t think coherently.
Like one bewitched, when the body acts of its own accord without the will of the mind, I pushed the boat out into open water, then climbed in and lay still among the scented corpse-wrappings.
I felt only resignation now. So it had been prophesied.
Almost on a whim, I reached into the leather bag and took out the two grave coins. I placed them over my eyes.
III
For a long time I lay still and listened to the water lapping against the side of the boat. Then even that sound faded, and I felt, very distinctly, the boat reverse direction, and I knew I was drifting with the black current now, out of the world of the living, into the land of the dead. The water was silent, as if the boat were gliding along a river of oil. I could hear the pounding of my own heart.
I lay awake and tried to make sense out of my adventure with the Sybil, reviewing every detail in search of some central thread by which all the parts would be connected, like beads on a necklace, assuming form and meaning. But there was nothing. I had expected as much. It is the way of prophecies: you don’t understand them until they’re about to come true, and then, suddenly, the whole pattern is revealed.
Even the silence of the river and the thunder of my heart were part of the pattern.
Even my sister’s voice.
I thought it was just a ringing in my ears at first, but it formed words, very weak, very far away, at the very threshold of hearing.
“Sekenre,” she said. “Help me. I’m lost.”
I called back to her, either with my voice or my mind.
“I am coming, little one. Wait for me.”
She sobbed hoarsely, sucking in breath as if she had been crying for a long time.
“It’s dark here.”
“It’s dark here, too,” I said gently.
She was too brave to say she was afraid.
“Hamakina—is Father with you?”
Something splashed in the water right next to the boat, and my father’s voice whispered, inches from my ear.
“Sekenre, if you love me, go back. I command you to go back! Do not come here!”
I let out a yell and sat up. The grave coins fell into my lap. I twisted about, looking all around.
The boat slid past huge, black reeds. In the silent darkness, white herons stood in rows along the river’s edge, faintly glowing as the Sybil’s face had glowed. And in the water, the evatim watched me, rank upon rank of them like dead-white, naked men with crocodile heads, lying motionless in the shallows. But there was no sign of Father.
Above me, the sky was dark and clear, and the stars were not the stars of Earth, but fewer, paler, almost gray, arranged in the constellations of the dead, which are described in the Books of the Dead: the Hand, the Harp, the Jar of Forgetting, the Eye of Surat-Kemad.
Very carefully, I picked up the grave coins and put them back in my bag. I was thirsty and drank a sip from the water bottle. I could not drink river water here, for only the dead may drink of the water of the dead, and only the dead may eat the fruits of the land of the dead. That too is written in the Books of the Dead.
And so I gazed with mortal, uncovered eyes into the darkness that never ends. Far behind me, along the way I had come, there was a faint suggestion of light, a mere paling of the sky, as if way back there was an opening through which I had already passed. The living world drew farther and farther away with each passing instant.
The white herons rose as one and for a moment the air was filled with the utterly silent passage of their wings. Then they were gone. They too, like the evatim, were messengers of the God of the Dark