The Shut Way
Chapter 2 — The Shut Way
The shadow crosses the antechamber and chooses the passage I did not.
That passage bends toward the entrance, and hope jumps in me so fast it embarrasses me. If the sealing remains unfinished, someone outside can tell me why I’m still here. I’d welcome even a mason’s instruction. Eight days ago I carried a box of salted meat through this passage while two men behind me explained that women can’t judge distance. The box reached the burial chamber, one of the men lost a sandal in the mud, and I remember the distance perfectly.
The lamp throws my shadow ahead of me. The other shadow has gone. It may have led me toward the one useful mistake the workers could have made, so I follow anyway, faster than a careful woman would with a shallow lamp.
The passage narrows before the first portcullis slot. Burned wood lies under my feet, brittle enough to crack when I step on it, and then the limestone block fills the corridor from floor to ceiling. Mud packed behind it has pressed through the seams and dried there. I watched the steward test the supports and the workers stack the backfill. The tomb was built to hold against men with ropes and levers and several days to work, and I have one shallow lamp and an alabaster jar under my arm.
Still, I put my palm against the block.
Cold grit meets my skin. The seam lets no air through. For once in their lives, every worker on this burial did his job properly, and I want to kick the stone. I strike it with the heel of my hand instead and report to it the way I’d report to a steward, so whoever is outside will know a retainer has failed at her one task. “The drinking was completed,” I call. “One attendant remains available for correction.”
My voice comes back from the wall in pieces. Nobody answers it.
The wine turns bitter at the back of my tongue. I swallow, and for half a breath the corridor tilts toward the block. My shoulder finds the left wall before the lamp can spill, and I stand there with my palm flat on the limestone, counting what I know: three paces to the bend, seven more to the antechamber, the lion couch beyond. Counting steadies me. It always has.
When the floor holds still again, I make myself look at the block one more time. The stone will not move. No one outside heard me. I’m still here, and for the first time since I woke, I’m close to crying about it.
Behind me, linen moves.
The sound comes from the retainer corridor, far beyond the antechamber. Cloth pulls once, then smooths over cloth. I fixed the bad fold at Seshat’s shoulder, but I left the others as they were, and someone is fixing them now. I nearly drop the lamp. Perhaps another woman has woken. Perhaps she received the instruction I missed and can tell me what it was.
I turn from the sealed way and hurry. The lamp flame bows when I walk, stretching the jars and baskets into figures that lean after me, and I search among them for a woman moving ahead. Past the lion couch, the retainer passage rises toward the women.
Another small sound reaches me, a bracelet touching stone, then linen drawn tight. Someone tugs a fold straight at the shoulder. Whoever it is works the way Kesi does, slow and exact, never hurrying a fold. “Satiah’s left hand requires another fold,” I say as I enter the narrow corridor. “The third alcove after Teti.”
The movement stops at my instruction. Someone is listening, and relief makes my knees weak.
I hold the lamp higher. Its light passes over cold feet and baskets before reaching the first sealed jars, and nobody stands in the passage. “The comb beside Iset has already been moved,” I add. “She would object to anyone putting it back.”
Nothing answers. Then a voice speaks near my right ear.
“Ishenre’s servant has opened what was sealed for the princess.”
I turn too quickly, and the flame burns across my knuckles, sharp and hot. Dead or not, it stings, and I suck my knuckles.
The corridor behind me is empty.
No priest sounds like that. A living man couldn’t push his voice through the backfilled portcullis, and this voice drags like dry sand over stone. It doesn’t ring off the walls. It presses against the bone behind my ear, from inside my own skull, and I’m frightened in a way the dark never managed.
Then I understand what it has accused me of. I opened the princess’s beer. Of everything wrong in this tomb, the beer is what it wants to discuss, and indignation wins. “The princess has gone ahead,” I say. “The beer remained. I seem to have done both.”
Farther down the passage, cloth settles.
“The dead are served first.”
The voice has moved, or the corridor has thrown it back from another wall. My lamp finds only the women and the things left beside them. “I have served them since I opened my eyes,” I say. “If it pleases you, am I among them? And who has taken the next duty?”
He gives no title, and I hear no footstep. The flame shortens against the wick.
A dark figure crosses the bend ahead, tall enough to divide the small reach of light. It passes toward the antechamber without touching either wall, and I want to hear what else it has to say.
I go after it.