Daughter of the Duat

Chapter One:

The sun had never once failed to rise for Tamit.

For two years she had climbed the stairs to the temple roof at Karnak while the stars were still out, taken her place at the eastern edge, and sung. And for two years, every single morning, the sun had come.

The priests said it came because of the hymn. Tamit suspected it came because it wouldn’t dare do otherwise.

This morning the roof was crowded. It was the first day of the Opet Festival, and half the priesthood of Amun had found some excuse to stand in the cold and watch.

Shaven heads gleamed pale in the starlight. Below the temple walls, Thebes was already awake. She could hear it, a low, restless murmur of thousands of people waiting for the god to come out.

Tamit rolled the silver sistrum between her palms to warm it. Behind her, the other chantresses whispered and shifted. Six of them, in pleated linen, menat necklaces heavy on their chests. Six women who sang the response.

Only one sang the dawn.

There had been seven of them once.

She didn’t let herself think about that. Not today.

The eastern sky began to grey over the hills beyond the river. Tamit lifted her chin, drew breath down into the bottom of her ribs the way old Henut had drilled into her as a girl, and sang.

“Awake in peace, Amun-Ra, awake in peace—”

Her voice went out over the roof, over the walls, over the city. It always surprised her a little, how far it carried. She was not a large woman.

She came from a family of potters on the west bank who had never owned more than one good dress between them. But when she sang the dawn, the sound left her like a bird let out of a cage, and all of Thebes went quiet to listen.

“—you who rise in the horizon, you who drive back the night—”

The sistra answered behind her, a dry, shimmering rattle. The light thickened. The first edge of the sun broke over the eastern hills, red as a coal, and turned the river to copper.

Tamit held the last note until her lungs burned, then let it go.

Silence. Then, from the city below, a roar.

Thousands of voices at once, cheering the sun, cheering the festival, cheering the god who would soon be carried out to them.

She lowered her sistrum and let herself smile. Just a small one. Just for herself.

“Every morning,” said a warm voice at her elbow, “I think it cannot possibly be better than the morning before. And every morning, you prove me wrong.”

Tamit turned and bowed low. “Second Prophet.”

Amenmose waved the title away.

He was past fifty, broad-shouldered and soft in the middle, his linen whiter than anyone else’s, his eyes creased with laugh lines. He had heard her sing at a neighbor’s funeral when she was fourteen and brought her into the temple the same week. Everything she had, she had because of him.

“They speak of you in the palace now,” he said. “The King’s household asked who sings the dawn at Karnak. I told them the truth. A potter’s daughter with the voice of Hathor.”

Heat climbed Tamit’s neck.

“You’re too kind.”

“I’m too honest. It’s a failing.” He looked east, at the risen sun, and something passed over his face. Something tired, or sad. It was gone before she could name it. “Seventy days,” he murmured.

“Second Prophet?”

“Until the jubilee.

His Majesty’s thirty years on the throne. Imagine it, Tamit.

All of Egypt waiting on one sunrise.” He patted her shoulder. “Rest your voice today.

Tonight I’ll need you at Luxor when the god arrives. A few hymns at the river shrine. A small honor.”

It was not small. It was enormous. Tamit bowed again so he wouldn’t see her face.

When she straightened, he was already walking away, and one of the other chantresses was staring at her. Not with envy. With something closer to pity.

Tamit looked away first.

The god came out at midday.

Tamit had watched it every year of her life, but from inside the procession it was a different thing entirely.

The great doors swung open, and the priests emerged bearing the barque of Amun on their shoulders: a golden boat on long poles, its shrine veiled, the ram’s heads at prow and stern blazing in the sun. Behind it came the smaller barques of Mut and Khonsu, the god’s wife and son. And behind them, the musicians.

The noise hit her like a wall.

Drums. Clapping.

Thousands of people packed along the avenue of sphinxes, shouting the god’s name, lifting children onto their shoulders, throwing flowers.

Dancers leapt and spun at the edge of the road. Somewhere a man was selling roast duck and shouting louder than the drums. The air smelled of incense and river mud and sweat and blue lotus.

Tamit walked with the chantresses, shaking her sistrum, singing the long processional hymns until her throat ached. And she watched.

That was the thing about Opet. Everyone came. Farmers in from fields drowned under the flood. Old soldiers who had fought the Hittites at Kadesh, some of them missing hands.

Scribes, fishermen, ladies in pleated gowns from the great houses.

They pressed toward the barque, calling out questions to the god.

Should I marry? Will my son live? Did my neighbor steal my goat? Sometimes the priests carrying the boat would lurch forward or back, and the crowd would gasp, because that was the god answering.

Near a shrine to Osiris, a cluster of women in blue mourning linen beat their breasts and wailed. Professional mourners.

Tamit caught a flash of a familiar face among them: her sister Neferet, hired for some rich man’s funeral, hair loose and dusted with ash, wailing a stranger’s name with real tears on her cheeks.

Neferet saw her and broke character long enough to grin and wave.

Tamit laughed out loud and waved back with her sistrum, and for a moment everything was perfect.

Then the procession turned toward the river, and she saw the woman by the water.

Just a woman. Thin, in a cheap dress, standing alone on the bank and staring at the chantresses as they passed. Tamit’s heart stumbled. For one terrible heartbeat, she was certain it was Iset.

It wasn’t.

Of course it wasn’t. Iset was dead, drowned in last year’s flood, three months after she’d been whipped and thrown out of the temple for stealing linen.

Linen that Tamit had sworn she saw her take.

She had seen Iset carrying it.

That much was true.

She had not seen where Iset was taking it, and she had not asked. The dawn solo had been Iset’s then, and Tamit had wanted it so badly she could taste it. The words had simply come out of her mouth in front of the Second Prophet, and then it was done.

Tamit fixed her eyes on the golden barque and sang louder.

The night was warm and thick with torchlight.

The god had been towed upstream to Luxor on his river barge, teams of men hauling ropes along the bank while all of Thebes followed with drums and singing.

Now the barques rested in the sanctuary, and the festival had spilled into every street. Beer flowed. Someone was singing a song about a hippopotamus that would have gotten them flogged inside a temple.

Tamit found the river shrine where Amenmose had told her: a small chapel at the water’s edge, south of the great temple, half-hidden among palms.

The festival noise faded as she approached.

Inside, a single lamp burned in a niche. The painted walls showed the sun boat sailing through the night.

Amenmose was waiting.

“There you are,” he said. “Come in, child.”

She stepped inside.

He took her hand, the way he had when she was fourteen and frightened in the great hall of Karnak, and led her to the far wall, where the paint showed a vast serpent coiled beneath the sun boat.

“Do you know who this is?”

“Apep,” Tamit said.

“The enemy of Ra. He attacks the sun boat every night, and every night he’s defeated.”

“Every night.” Amenmose studied the serpent with an expression she had never seen on him before.

Something hungry.

“When I was a boy, my father told me what happened in the old days. When the heretic king forbade Amun’s name.

When men with chisels walked through our temples and hacked our god out of the walls.” His voice stayed soft. “Amun did nothing.

He did not strike them down. He simply let it happen. I have spent forty years wondering why we sing to a god who would not save himself.”

Tamit’s mouth had gone dry. “Second Prophet, I don’t—”

“Yours is the finest voice in Egypt.” He said it as if it grieved him. “When the sun rises on the King’s jubilee, the people will listen for it. And it will not be there.”

She saw the knife a moment before it moved.

A small bronze blade, the kind priests used to cut offerings.

She didn’t have time to scream.

That was the cruelest part. The finest voice in Egypt, and it did not make a sound.

Heat across her throat.

Then cold.

Then the floor, the lamp tipping, his face above her, calm and kind and patient, like a teacher waiting for a slow pupil to understand.

“I’m sorry, child,” Amenmose whispered. “But the dawn must not be greeted.”

The lamp went out.

And in the dark, at the very edge of her vision, something glowed: a single golden hieroglyph hanging in the air where nothing should be.

The ibis of Thoth.

Watching. Writing.

Then nothing at all.

Historical Note:

The Opet Festival was real, and one of the grandest religious celebrations of ancient Egypt. Every year during the flood season, the statues of the god Amun, his wife Mut, and their son Khonsu were carried out of Karnak Temple in golden boats and brought about two miles south to Luxor Temple. Sometimes they traveled overland along the avenue of sphinxes, and sometimes by river, with the god’s barge towed upstream by crowds of men hauling ropes along the bank.

The festival renewed the pharaoh’s divine power through his bond with Amun. It also gave ordinary Egyptians a rare chance to come near their god. Crowds gathered with music, dancing, food, and drink, and people called out questions to the god’s shrine, which priests answered by moving the sacred boat.