Xena ran the linen strips through her fingers; the cool fabric’s slide across her skin reminded her of how much she loved to do exactly the same with her lover’s hair. The motion itself had become soothing to her. The warrior smiled, until she remembered that she would not be able to report this moment back to Gabrielle, to make the bard smile with how completely she’d invaded Xena’s thoughts. The linen was tossed, with finality, into the coffin.
The walls in her heart had to be rebuilt. Pure stone, harder than diorite, too hard to be carved or shaped, mortared in place with a river of blood. Torn down by the touch of a young woman’s hand. No, that wasn’t true- the girl had slaughtered her well before they’d touched.
Being around her in the grip of hunger, day by day, had done it. Hunger not only for the flesh, but hunger for the flesh because it was hers. By touching this body, she might touch the soul that had reshaped hers. There were other women. But none was her.
Xena well knew what it was like to have her soul given water by a single look from Gabrielle’s eyes. Knew what it was like to sit, silent, and watch the storyteller in the middle of a tale, and say I love you with only her eyes. To keep perfect calm, polished as a mirror, but burn beneath. Reflect back the love that was so obvious, when Gabrielle looked at her. Strangers could see it between them, like a living thing, even as they denied it. It made Xena crazy, denying it. Of course I love her. Look at her. Spend a moment in her company. She is fully alive. She believes. Believes, in me. How could any sane person not get on their knees and beg for her? Her attention, her touch?
A myriad of times she had thrown down her caution in her mind and simply grabbed the storyteller. The thing that held her back, the qualm that stayed her hands from the girl, was only this- bloodstains. Her hands were stained beyond cleansing. She would do anything to have the girl, save destroy her. So she must rebuild the walls.
”He wasn’t a rich man, to be buried in a wooden coffin in a cave tomb.” Xena said, looking down at her sepulchral mate.
Setnakhte crouched above the body, washing it with palm wine and crooning spells. He interrupted his work to give the warrior a glance.
”Phoenician workman. They are geniuses with wood. Fitting that he be buried in cypress. His Egyptian wife is pleased that I am giving him any of the funeral rites, as he did not follow the gods. “
”Better not to.” Xena said, darkly.
Setnakhte reached for the linen and started wrapping the corpse’s feet. “The gods of the Two Lands. He followed his own gods. Everyone follows their own gods.” Setnakhte amended.
“I have no use for them.”
Setnakhte selected a scarab of tin and cheap glass paste from a clay dish. He slid it between the wrapping as he moved up the body’s legs. “The gods are real.”
”I know.”
”They must be propitiated,” The necromancer said.
”They need new hobbies, other than messing about in mortal’s lives.”
Setnakhte, much to the warrior’s surprise, ignored this. She raised an eyebrow. He wasn’t as pious as he seemed.
The Phoenician was wrapped. The necromancer worked swiftly.
”Lie down on the stone,” Setnakhte said. “I will wrap you, then place you in the coffin.”
”Good thing Egyptians are fond of large sarcophagi,” Xena said.
Her blood ran cold at the thought of bedding down with a corpse. This was for a reason, she told herself. It would end the possession. It was hard to think, to follow one thought to its cold conclusion. Easier not to question. The necromancer knew what he was about. Xena went to recline, and Setnakhte looked up at her.
”No. Strip.” He waved at her leathers, her bracers and armbands. Her boots stood by the tomb mouth.
The black haired woman shrugged. Her body was an instrument and she’d long used it as such. A tool. A weapon. Now that pleasure was an enemy, what harm in reverting to this state? The detachment from her own flesh had advantages. Pain was easier to block, wounds easier to ignore, endurance easier to push beyond mortal limits. It required habits of thought to maintain, habits that would help her to keep an icy hand on her will. So the warrior did as she was bid, and stretched out naked on the floor of the tomb.
The necromancer went right to work, washing her with palm wine as he had the Phoenician. It was with curious detachment that he handled the task, an impatience. In a proper Egyptian burial the mummification process took more than a month. The body would be washed with palm wine and spices, the brain and organs removed and set aside. Only the heart would remain in the body, as the Egyptians considered the heart the locus of thought and emotion.
Strange to be alive and be prepared for burial. Strange to be a Greek under an Egyptian necromancer’s hands. Strange, to have the heart so highly regarded, when she wished to be quit of hers.
Setnakhte began wrapping her feet.
It was like meditation. The body was perfectly still; the mind free. Control. All a matter of control. The one hot splinter of anger that flared was easy to separate from the flow of thought and crush. No worry, no fear. This is only linen. She could tear through it at any point, and kick free of the wooden coffin. The tomb would be sealed, but roughly, with stones and mortar not yet set. That, too, she could smash through. Xena reassured herself of her own physical prowess, even as Setnakhte slid a scarab between the wrappings of her legs.
Bent over, gilded with sweat and spotted with dust, the necromancer worked swiftly. The warrior’s torso was covered; her arms placed, folded, on her chest. Like the mummy next to her, in his sarcophagus, waiting for her to come to bed.
“Recall your breathing. Begin to slow it. The wine I gave you will help. I will wrap your head now. Do you wish to say any last thing?”
Xena merely arched an eyebrow. The necromancer had never looked at her as a person, nor shown any recognizable human emotion. Perhaps he was more comfortable with the silence of the dead.
He nodded, as if not expecting her to speak.
The wrappings closing on her face caused her a moment of distress. She closed her eyes, ruthless with herself. Panic, but don’t move. Her body was bronze.
He lifted her with ease, which surprised her enough that the panic receded. Where did the small Egyptian hide such strength?
Xena felt the unmoving body of the Phoenician, already moving into the substance of eternity. She felt ridiculously alive, even wrapped and placed in the sarcophagus with him, and anything that lives fights against Death. There was a scraping sound; the stone lid was being lowered into place on cedar levers. The red granite lid was a mouth closing on the remaining light that filtered through the linen. She heard Setnakhte’s voice, whispering.
“Hail to thee Osiris, Lord of Eternity! Thou that were dead and never dies, thou Lord of road to the Field of Reeds, thou whose Ka rises like the hawk, thou restored by thy sister, thou hast set light over the darkness, welcome home Resef-Melkart. This is the opening of the mouth, the wakening; the coming forth by day. Follow him where he goes, Greek. “
This last was directed to her, she realized, after the lid had closed with a crash.
She was alone in the dark with the dead.
Agon. Agon. The word echoed in her head before her sight cleared, before her eyes, weak as a kitten’s, opened to the life after life. No sun. Agon. She was thinking in Greek, a good sign, as she was thus herself. Struggle. Contest. And the precursor to agony.
Katabasis...descent into the underworld. Her mind, in the Stygian darkness, seized on a thought as a focus touchstone. Xenophon, gentleman warrior of Athens during the Great War, had written his Anabasis to chronicle the heroic journey of his Ten Thousand from the inland of Persia back to Greece. Anabasis- the journey. Katabasis- the descent into the Underworld. Does this mean I have to retire from war and write my memoirs of Hades? –Xena thought.
The Katabasis of Xena of Amphipolis. There, in the pure darkness, she smiled. I will never retire from war, and I will never write my memoirs. I had, once, a bard who chronicled my adventures. Perhaps she will remember me now that I am gone.
Being dead played strange tricks on the mind, like being drunk. Not dead, Xena amended. In the halls of Death, without dying. Am I then still alive? Perhaps not, perhaps between both states, in the unlit passages of the underworld. The walls rang with the sobbing echo of Orpheus’ lyre, when he’d made the Furies weep. Zeus, after all the places I’ve been, all the cultures I’ve seen, at the end I’m a Greek. Was it this way for everyone? Into the maw of darkness and we are children again, praying to the gods from our first household altar.
Focus.
Blind as Oedipus; gather information from all other senses. She was lying down, unfettered by linen wrappings, naked on a cold stone floor. No sarcophagus. No Phoenician. Her fingers flexed against the glassy floor- marble. Fashioned, not natural. There was a faint sound of water flowing in the east. No hint of light anywhere, even with her uncanny sight.
Xena’s muscles responded to her command, fluid and exact, snapping her to a fighting crouch. A quick search of the surrounding area by feel confirmed her suspicion that nothing was useful as a weapon. She reviewed the information, seeking to turn it to her advantage. Pure darkness. No weapons, no armor. No dead workman. If his awakening was different, as she suspected, she would have to hurry to find him and follow him, as the necromancer had instructed. Head for the water.
She moved in a crouch, sliding her feet along the marble floor. No change in gradation, no sudden drop into a pit. Her fingertips brushed a wall. Instantly her back was to it, one side protected. This was a chamber of some sort, with a curve to the wall. Xena followed the curve of the wall, keeping her back to it, until it opened abruptly into a doorway.
The sound of water was at hand, flowing. No breeze moved the air, no scent from the water of growing things. No impression of green. The sound itself carried the taste of metal.
Death came, quiet as a whisper of scales across polished marble. Xena reacted without thought, flinging herself to the right as her hand caught the living arrow. The serpent’s fangs grazed her throat, the venom left a trail of fire on her skin. Another heartbeat and it would have been filling her veins with agony. The snake whipped around her arm in protest, a living whip of angry muscle three feet in length. She snapped its neck efficiently just below the skull. Her fingers analyzed the shape of the head- a hooded cobra. Why had there been no warning of the strike?
Light glowed up from the water like a lotus unfolding, white as alabaster, opening to reveal a man standing on the surface of the river. The light bounced off the walls of the cavern, off the single boat waiting by the lip of the wall, off the single oar waiting for it’s master’s hand.
“You killed the Guardian.”
The man said, turning from profile in the light to a three quarter view. Like waves, the lotus radiance washed over the warrior, making her squint against it.
“Charon?” Xena asked, watching the man stand on the surface of the river.
The man was tall and slender, with a waist like a Cretan bull-dancer and shoulders broad as Heracles. He wore a kilt of fine linen and sandals strapped high on his calves, a pectoral and arm bands of lapis lazuli and turquoise. The royal nemes cloth framed his head. His expression was wise and calm, despite the fact that he had the head of a black jackal. Kohl outlined his eyes, and gold adorned his great upright ears.
He turned his head in an expression of amusement. “Really, now, my dear Greek. Do I look like a boatman on the Styx?”
“You look like a dog walking on water.”
“Learn from dogs. They live closer to the divine world every moment of their lives. They have purpose, they take joy in their work and they love without holding back. Can you say the same?”
“Where is the Phoenician?” Annoyance threatened Xena’s surface; she quelled it.
“They warned me you wouldn’t be much of a talker. ‘Non-conventional’, ‘confrontative’, oh, they warned me. But I said, can a mortal be as surly as that? Even a Greek? You met the Guardian, and you slew him. That isn’t polite.” The jackal’s eyes glowed red as sunset.
“Sorry about that. It was a threat. I just reacted.” Xena said.
The jackal headed man stepped from the surface of the water onto the marble floor. “Hmn. Very well. You’ve chosen your road. You have a long way to go if you want to catch the Phoenician. He’s being escorted into the Hall of Truth. Just woke up, said hello, identified himself, knew the words and the spells and there you go, an easy walk. Didn’t occur to him to kill his hosts.”
“Look, the snake attacked me!” Xena snapped.
“Ever wonder why some people just seem to attract trouble? They can walk into a temple and start a bar fight. Violence radiates from them. “ He said, companionably.
“I don’t need a lecture on how I live.”
“That is open for debate. But very well. You’re not Egyptian, you don’t have to listen to me. You’re not even dead. ” The man picked up the oar, causing the boat to rock at its tether.
Xena stepped forward, following him into the boat.
He threw his long arm out, blocking her path. “Where do you think you are going?”
“In the boat with you. I have to catch up with the Phoenician.”
“No. You have a road, Greek. This isn’t it.”
Xena felt a sulfurous rage rise in her chest. “You mean to stop me?” She asked, murderously.
“Oh for My Mother’s sake. No. I’m just telling you the truth. Truth is very important here, you’ll find. You can’t travel this way; you’re not a believer from Kemet. Go ahead, try to get in the boat.” He moved his arm away.
Xena cast a wary glance at him, waiting to see if he would strike her, but his hands were empty. He saw her calculating look and dropped his lower jaw in the impression of a smile.
She set one foot in the boat. It rocked a bit, but nothing more. Encouraged, she stepped fully down into the boat.
It sank.
Black water closed over her head. She sank like a Babylonian merchant’s lead weight, swallowed whole into the wet darkness. Life was too heavy for this river; living flesh suffused with blood too dense to be borne aloft. Xena felt the panic rise, but could not move her limbs. She was in the sepulcher again, only now she would never wake. Finished, it is finished- she thought, in despair.
A hand seized the back of her neck and hauled her up, breaking the surface. Gasping like a fish, she sprawled on the lip of the stone wall.
“Satisfied?” The dog’s voice rumbled.
She couldn’t gather her breath to snarl a reply.
The dog-man continued, a certain sadness in his words. “The living cannot go this way. I would escort you, Greek, but I am a god of Kemet. You need to find a Greek to escort you through the underworld. Hermes is the Psychopomp for you people, but Hermes is the escort of souls. You’re not dead, and I heard that he’s off in Sardis anyway, drinking with Candaules. Sorry. I don’t know what to tell you.”
“Can- Candaules?” Xena gasped. “The Lydian king, of long ago?”
“Right, he did have that name. Its also a title, ‘dog-strangler’. The Lydians call their Hermes by that. I have no idea why, seems a horrible thing to call a god. But Lydians are Asiatic Greeks, why would they make sense to an old Egyptian like me?”
Xena clawed her way to a kneeling position. “You can’t help me.”
”Not with the road,” It was not without sadness that the dog-man admitted this.
“Give me a weapon,” Xena said.
His head went up, muzzle lifting in what could only be surprise. “A weapon? here?”
Xena gathered herself and stood to her full height. The dog-god had to look up to meet her eyes, fierce and cold as sapphires. “Yes.”
He retreated in thought, his lip catching between his canine teeth. “Very well, this is the world to you, how you understand it. There is a door, to the North. Put your back to the river. Through the door is a maze, a labyrinth. At the center of the labyrinth is an Apis- a bull. Slay him and take the axe from him.”
“A Minotaur?”
The dog-god shook his head, setting his gold earrings clicking against one another. “Not a man-bull. A bull, the fair and beautiful soul of my father Osiris. He consents to this contest. He always did have a soft spot for Greeks, of all the barbarians. “
“I’m ready.” Xena set her back to the river and searched the outer darkness for a doorway. She glanced at the dog-god, who was watching her with a comical expression, his tongue hanging out like a dog run in the heat of the day.
“This is what happens when religions collide. The Underworld cannot map itself from the soul. A path must be forged.”
“Would you have only one god, then?” Xena asked him.
A great shudder ran through all his frame. “Monotheism? Akhenaten tried that, once. To have only one god, you must slay all the other myriads. Then, in the puddle of blood left as the mortal world, lift your stained hands and praise the last of the deicide. See how long the human soul can live, having slain the gods.”
He pointed into the night. “There is your doorway. Good luck, Greek. Try not to kill everything you encounter.”
The door was carved of darkness and born of Night, pure and Stygian. It looked, to her keen eyes, like an unbroken slab of obsidian. After the flashing radiance of the lotus, it burned her eyes with its finality. She wanted to touch it with her hand, but some qualm stayed her. Hesitancy was not the virtue of the warrior. So she exploded into a dead run and met the door with her head.
It was like being born. The chamber was narrow; the scarified walls drew blood from a thousand lacerations on her skin. A cut on her brow dripped into her eyes, making all the darkness swim red. The walls closed, then- light.
The air changed, moved across her face. She shook her head violently, sending off a shower of crimson.
The corridor stretched away in front of her spotted vision, into mystery. It was a mortal darkness, one that her keen eyes adjusted to rapidly. She set off like a wolf at a steady lope, feeling more alive at each step. This was what her brain responded to; a challenge, with a violent conflict at the end. This was where she was vital, skilled, expert. Masterful. She ran with an economy of movement that, had a sculptor been able to observe her, would have revolutionized the knowledge of human art.
She knew the tricks of the Labyrinth, how seven circuits led to the center, how the way in was also the way out. How Theseus used a cord to mark his path. The lazy way. You could, when faced with a maze, use a torch and smudge the corners with pitch, or use a knife to scratch a sigil. All these methods relied on outside tools. Hers was simpler and more rigorous. She remembered every turn and every choice she made, clear as if incised on a cuneiform tablet. More, the level of her senses was attuned to the shift in the wind as it bent around corners, to the drifting scent of cattle, mud and hay. Finding the bull would not be the problem.
The path of the labyrinth was designed to cut the mind away from pure intent, and move it into a more peaceful or receptive state. Xena snorted in derision, thinking of this. Turning me away from the direct path to my enemy will not dissuade me, she thought. There was a time when it would have, back when she rode with the warrior nomads in Asia, before she’d been schooled in the elegance of war. That was a decade ago and more; she was a commander now, a general, a conqueror. She understood how to think in the labyrinth and keep her warrior’s mind. The path for a commander is never unbent.
Seven turns to the left, seven paths as one path to the central hall. She ran, comforted by the measured tread of her own bare feet. The touch of the combed sand floor was smooth as Corinthian leather. Egyptians liked their comfort, even dead.
The scent told her before she turned the corner; there, the bull. Handsome and proud, glossy black with a white diamond on his forehead, set between his liquid intelligent eyes. On his back she could make out the image of an eagle. His horns were gilded and his neck graced with a full Horus pectoral, the winged falcon embracing the sun disk. The Apis bull, the living soul of Osiris. Fresh hay surrounded his hooves, that he lifted delicately as he walked toward her with the carriage of a king. He knew. He knew her purpose, and he knew his sacrifice. He accepted his fate, and walked calmly toward her of his own will, making a parody of the drugged processional to the altar of Zeus of a hecatomb of oxen for the Olympian’s sacrifice.
Her fury bled away, met with nothing but acceptance. Where was the fight she needed, the struggle? She had to kill this bull and wrest from him the axe. Yet he came gracefully toward her, even as she smelled of murder. The soul behind those eyes was not a bull’s soul.
“Fight me, bull-god.” Xena said, reaching for the tatters of her anger.
He turned his passive gaze on her and waited.
Xena tried to work her anger back to a fighting rage. She flexed her long fingers and slid into a fighting stance.
“Right, I have to do all the work. I forgot. You’re the Egyptian god too stupid to fight back. You let Set entomb you in the coffin, then hew your corpse to pieces. Made Isis comb the nation for your limbs, so she could put you back together. “
It didn’t work. All that came from the bull was a voice of calm acceptance, as palpable as the flow of the Nile.
“From time immemorial I have made manifest all good things, beauty, life, the green of growing and renewal. If you must have my blood on your hands, then take it, daughter of war. But do not mock what you cannot yet understand.”
“I...have nothing to cut you with.” Xena stammered.
“You are able to kill with your hands. Do so, then take the axe there and strike off my head.” The Apis said, his voice sonorous.
“You don’t want to fight me. Why not just give me the axe?”
“This is the sacrifice as it must be. Follow through with it.”
Xena reached out her arm and wrapped it around the bull’s throat. Far from resisting, he adjusted his stance so she could grip him firmly. Left hand joined with right; corded muscles stood out like cables on a sail catching the wind.
It took all of her strength combined; arms, back, legs, torso, to wring the neck of the great bull. His head lifted, once, and a sigh blew out through his nostrils, but he did not struggle. Tears rolled down Xena’s face as she strangled the god.