PAIRING

The bundles had to be rolled tight, or they burned too fast and the essence went up the chimney before it had time to become anything.

Iret rolled them on the low stone shelf beside the altar, three of them, lavender and sage laid in along the length and the ambergris oil worked through with her thumb until the whole bundle darkened and held together without a binding. Her mother had bound hers with thread. Iret had stopped doing that in her Measures years, after she worked out that the thread burned first and opened the bundle before the oil had heated, which meant that every bundle her mother had ever made had been slightly wrong, and that her mother had made hundreds of them, and had gone to the temples anyway.

She set the three on the shelf to rest and combine.

The altar stood in the corner of the sitting room and ran from the floor to the ceiling, carved in the shape of a jackal holding a vessel, and in the vessel there was a flame. The flame was never out. It was fed by the gas that ran under the whole city like veins under a skin, for warmth and light and utility and this, and Iret had never once in her life seen it gutter, though she had watched it long enough on certain nights to find out.

She lit three candles at its base. One for mother. One for father. One for dear baby brother, who had been small enough that the funerary registrar had asked her twice whether she wanted a full rite.

The bundles went into the flame together. That mattered. Separately they burned clean and quick and the smoke went thin. Together they caught slowly and smoldered, and the essence came off heavy and stayed low in the room before it climbed.

“I love you. I miss you. I hope your spirits are well.”

The smoke gathered, turned, and went up into the chimney, where it would be drawn into the winding pipes and carried across the district to the funerary temples where the dead rest. She watched it go, as she did every night.

The ash fell through the fine grates into the stone bowl hidden in the jackal’s belly. The ritual was complete.

Cizet arrived at her ankles the moment it was, having learned somewhere in kittenhood the precise instant at which her person stopped being occupied. Iret picked her up and hugged her gently and got a mouthful of seal-point fur for the trouble.

“Look. Now you’ve got me fuzzy.”

She set the little cat down on the warm stone and went to see about the evening.

The apartment was open and asymmetric and full of light for most of the day, white marble underfoot and heavy tapestry curtains tied back in bundles with gold rope, and the terrace flowed out from it in the shape of a tear, hanging above the white stone walkways of the Bastet District below. There was only good furniture in it, and only as much as was needed. Houseplants filled every corner and crowded the terrace besides. Iret was proud of her botanical stewardship. It was not, in strict truth, excellent.

In the recesses cut into the stone walls she kept statuettes and crystals and fossils and other small treasures, arranged in a specific order that would have looked arbitrary to anyone else.

She opened the cedar wardrobe with its pearl and platinum inlay and considered.

Her house tunic was soft linen the muted purple of clematis petals, loose, unbelted, unadorned. One should be comfortable above all things in a domicile. But, the evening required otherwise. She took out the shimmering white silk shawl and draped it over her shoulders, and then the belt she liked best, a long silver cat with its paws grasping its own tail as it came around the waist. Two pearl drops in silver for the ears, and the silver moon spray collar at the throat.

She appraised herself in the long mirror.

Acceptable.

Then the kohl, which took longer and mattered more, smoke grey and purple worked out from the lash line and closed in jet black, and her pale green eyes went sharp against it the way they were meant to. She turned her chin one way and then the other, verifying.

Acceptable.

The terminal by the door was flush-mounted and trimmed in copper. She touched it once with a finger and the display came alight and slid smoothly to the screen she wanted. Not yet the closing bell. Early, in fact.

She decided to leave anyway.

She swiped it away and it went dark and inert, and she put on her sandals at the end of the short hall and took her suede satchel down off its cedar hook and slung it over one arm and went out.

The terrace walkway was quiet in the low evening light. Sometimes a parrot went over, heard long before it was seen. None tonight. Only the little geckos running the plaster walls after the insects that came out ahead of the dark. The fire-fed lanterns had not been lit yet. The air was fresh and faintly warm. She went down the swooping white stairs to the sandy path that ran the length of the Bastet Quarter, between the palms and the cycads, and she was in good spirits, and the reason she was in good spirits was not complicated.

Hapu was already at the patio setting out his equipment, and so was his handsome assistant, Etu.

Etu saw her at once. He had been watching for her, which she knew, and his eyes stayed on her exactly as long as they could before returning to the crates, because he would face genuine humiliation if he were caught fraternizing at a lecture and he was fastidious about keeping his decorum tidy in front of his mentor.

Iret took the second-to-last bench on the left. This was not where the light was best and it was not where the sound carried. It was where she could see his hands.

She watched him gather the tomes and the crystal slates the archivist had brought as enrichment and citation for the wisdom he intended to share. She was interested in the wisdom. She was more interested in the line of Etu’s forearms, and the collarbone above his linens, and the hands. For this portion of the lecture, she was a rapt student.

The others trickled in. Five young women arrived last and loudly, and once they had finally settled, it began.

“Sit, now. Settle. Settle.” Hapu clucked and waved a stout hand. “Put your slates down. What I am teaching you this evening will not be carried out on a slate, if you are wise, that is.” He turned to face the twenty or so of them, and the one elder at the back who had moved here from an outside place and was being made to learn the ways of NebKheperu. “You will carry it in your hand, on paper, parchment, or leather, and you will keep it somewhere the terminals can’t read.”

Iret already had four.

She kept notebooks, inert slates, suede scrolls, and an indefensible quantity of writing accoutrements, and she called the whole collection her paper brains. The oldest of them held the Litany of Balance, copied out by hand in her Measures years from her tutor’s teaching edition, every stanza checked twice against the source, and then checked again the following week. She had never been able to explain that second checking to anyone who asked. She had been sure of it the first time. Being sure of it was exactly why it needed proving.

She was not listening. She was looking at Etu, who had gathered the sample slates and was preparing to distribute them.

“The Ledger tells the state what you have mastered,” Hapu was saying. “The wellness band tells the state what you feel. Between those two systems there is a gap, and the gap is exactly the width of a life. What falls into that gap, your errors, your confusions, your private observations, belongs to no one but you, and it will not be recorded by anything except your own hand and for your own benefit.”

Etu came down off the elevated speaker’s patio and handed out the slates one by one. Each student nodded as they took one.

“Keep it. Keep it honestly. And keep it where a terminal will never read it back to you.” Hapu fell quiet a moment, turning pages in what Iret took to be one of his own journals, looking for something.

Etu came to Iret last and turned his back to the room before he smiled at her, and gave her the slate.

She glanced at it.

She knew it was his before she had read three lines. Nothing on the slate said so. It was anonymous, as every personal archive ought to be, and the hand was not one she had ever seen him write in, and there was no reason on the surface of the thing to know.

He bowed politely and walked back to the patio with his hands behind his back. She did not let on. She was, truth be told, nervous to read it properly.

“The samples before you,” Hapu resumed, “are excerpts from various personal archives that have been graciously donated for your benefit by patrons of our great temple that willed them to us in their passing.”

Iret could no longer stand it.

I write this for no one. Let it be found when I am dust and let the finder wonder, for I will not name her, and I will not name myself.

There is a woman I see in the evenings. She arrives quietly and sits where the lamplight finds her, and every time, some part of me stops its work to watch.

Her hair is dark as deep water. It falls the way water falls. Her eyes are the pale green of new papyrus, and when they pass over a room, the room becomes worth looking at. When they pass over me, I forget what my hands were doing.

She carries herself with divine grace. Not proud, exactly. Certain. As if the ground had agreed to hold her a little more carefully than it holds the rest of us. She listens with her whole stillness, and when she speaks, it is measured and sharp and kind all at once, and I think, there it is, that is what wisdom sounds like when it is young and does not yet know its own weight.

Surely, she is a goddess set down among us. Some fragment of the divine, golden and warm. Something fiercer too, on the days her jaw sets and her eyes go bright. I have seen both and I love both and I could no more choose between them than choose between the sun and the moon.

And that is the trouble, of course. A man does not court a goddess. He tends her temple. He is grateful for the festival days. He does not ask her to come down off the wall and take his arm and walk with him in the evening, no matter how many evenings he imagines it.

So, I rejoice from my bench, and I keep my eyes gentle, and I write it here where only the dust will read it. She is radiant, and the world is better lit for her being in it, and if I never find the courage, at least I will have this page to prove I saw her clearly.

Iret stared at the slate and her own reflection stared back out of it, and the warmth came up in her cheeks all at once.

“Now. We will give a piece of wisdom we have gleaned from reading these slates as if they were our own.”

She snapped back into the room.

Etu was looking down at his hands, and she was grateful for that. It was a great deal to process at speed. She had been waiting for him to say what she could feel in her bones every time he came near her. He had only ever been very friendly. Nothing more.

“What wisdom did you glean, Kepet?” Hapu motioned to one of the women at the front.

“It is important to pay friendly debts on time, so as not to inadvertently disrespect.”

“Ah. Good. Good. Iret. You look as if you have profound wisdom to share.”

She ran her fingers along the edge of the crystal absently and reached for the plainest true thing available, which would suffice.

“A man who would court a lady must first find his tongue, for a suitor who does not speak is no suitor at all.”

A pause from Hapu.

“Bravo. Well said, Iret. Well said.” He closed his journal. “Remember that blessed life is tragically short. It is important to assess the balance of these things. But also, much is hidden from us. We must explore possibilities. All right. All right. That is enough for tonight’s considerations. Please meditate on these teachings and apply them. They must be applied to be useful.”

The others passed their slates forward to Etu. Iret slipped hers into her satchel.

He smiled at her faintly as she rose, and she took slightly longer to rise than rising required.

At the first terminal she came to she stopped and left him a message.

Much is hidden indeed. ~Iret

Sent. The screen chimed.

She went home to read it again and to wait.

The door closed behind her with the sound of a solid and precise mechanism.

Her chest was tight with it. She knew, with the same certainty she had felt with the slate in her hand and no evidence anywhere on it, that he was coming tonight and that he was going to finally say it. They had both taken their time. They had taken a truly remarkable amount of time.

She hung the satchel on its hook and read the slate through once more, standing in the hall. Definitely Etu.

Her heart was going hard, and she disapproved of that, and it went on regardless.

She needed something to do with her hands.

She settled at her craftwork table and took stock of it: the little carved sandstone bowl, the onyx decanter hollowed at the base to show the glass globe inside it with its small measure of water, the palette that held no pigment at all but fragments of semiprecious stone, colored minerals, metal foils, faceted crystals sorted by size and then by hue. And the tool, cedar, carved, with its tiny metal nib.

She took up the tool in one hand and the piece in the other. A small hollow shape of a cat with a serpent’s body, a mosaic of onyx and garnet running in a coil down the length of it. She moistened the black bed the fragments sat in, poured water into the sandstone dish, wet the nib, and lifted a single garnet chip with it, and pressed it home into the serpent cat’s back.

The knock came. Barely audible.

She put her hand to the terminal on the wall behind her and granted access without leaving the table, and the door opened, and Etu stood in it. Still in his assistant’s linens. He had traded his sandals for soft indoor slippers that he must have kept tucked away somewhere for exactly this purpose. He held nothing at all in his hands, and he had clearly walked the entire way trying to decide what to do with them, because he kept flexing his fingers as though testing whether they still worked.

“Iret.”

He said her name and then appeared surprised to have managed it, like a man who had rehearsed a whole speech and found that only the first word survived the walk over.

She set the nib down carefully so as not to disturb the garnet, still settling into its bed. “Etu. Come in, please.”

He stepped in and the door clicked shut. Cizet trotted over at once to investigate his ankles, complaining, and he crouched without hesitation to scratch behind her ears, grateful, Iret suspected, for something to do with his hands that was not standing there being looked at.

She looked at him anyway.

“I wanted to speak with you tonight,” he said to the cat. Then caught himself, straightened, cleared his throat. “That is. I wanted to speak with you. Iret. Not the cat, though she is lovely too, obviously, all cats are lovely, that is not the point I am attempting to make.”

Iret bit the inside of her cheek to keep her face solemn, as the moment required. Her eyes gave her away.

“I have been composing this for weeks,” Etu admitted, dragging a hand back through his hair. “In my head. It was very good. It had structure. It referenced the Litany, appropriately, tastefully. It did not involve me discussing your cat.”

“I liked the part about my cat.”

“You would.” A ghost of a smile pulled at his mouth in spite of him. He took a breath, gathered the wreckage of the prepared speech, and tried again more steadily. “Iret. I have watched you sit on that bench for the better part of a year, and I have found excuses to be nearer to you than my duties strictly require, and I think you have noticed, because you are not a fool, and I would be a greater one to assume otherwise.”

She set the amulet down entirely and gave him her whole attention.

“I would like to court you properly,” he said. “If you’ll permit it. Not from a bench. Not through anonymous slates smuggled into lecture examples by careless assistants who ought to have better sense.” A flush crept up his neck. “I did not intend for you to receive that particular one. I want you to know that. Of all the slates in that basket. Fate is apparently cruel, or perhaps merciful, I have not decided which.”

“Cruel,” Iret said, “would have been never receiving it at all.”

His face loosened, relief coming through the nerves, and then he laughed. A real one, sudden and bright, and it seemed to catch him as much off guard as it did her.

“Gods. I have been dying for a week. Hapu asked me twice why I kept dropping the citations.”

She was laughing too, the whole evening unspooling at once, and Cizet fled beneath the craft table with her tail puffed to twice its size, which made it worse for both of them.

“So, you accept?” he asked, hopeful, sitting down across from her and looking at the craftwork as though seeing it for the first time.

She looked up and smiled. “Of course.” A little indignant. “I’ve been waiting.”

“I know. I know.” He rubbed the back of his neck, and his voice went small and then swelled. “We must go somewhere and celebrate. Out of the city.”

“All right.” She laughed softly, her eyes going with his.

A quiet settled over the two of them while they absorbed it. Iret set an onyx fragment into the serpent cat’s back. Etu stroked Cizet, who had installed herself in the front of his tunic.

“Let’s go on a real adventure. Perhaps to the tombs.”

She had said it before she had decided to say it. It came up out of her whole and finished, the way things did, and she did not examine it, because there had never been anything inside one of them to examine.

Another fragment went in. She raised her eyes.

Etu was thinking. “We will go to a tomb, but first we must also go to the gardens.”

“The gardens will still be there after.” She held up the little serpent cat and turned it so the lamp caught the facets. “I won’t be able to focus on the garden if we go there first.”

“Ah. It begins.”

He conceded with a tilt of his head and reached for the fourth stone tray without asking, already sorting it for the deep green fragments she favored for shadow work. Two years of watching her hands had taught him that much.

“We’ll need permits for the outer district tombs,” he said.

“You could ask tonight.”

“I could ask him tonight and he would want to know why, and I am not telling Hapu anything until I have told my own mother, and I am not telling my own mother anything until it is done properly.” He set the tray down. “There is an order to things.”

“There is.”

She smiled at the amulet rather than at him, and he seemed to understand that, because he let the quiet sit instead of filling it.

Cizet uncurled from his tunic, stretched with the particular contempt cats reserve for interrupted naps, and stalked off toward the central carpet to swat at a stray scrap of foil. Etu balled up another piece and lobbed it over her, and she gave chase with an explosion of energy that lasted three strides before reverting to supreme laziness in the middle of the floor.

“Three days,” he said. “I can request the leave. Longer if Hapu is in a generous mood, which he is not, historically, but I can try. We will go at the turning of the season, when the heat is waning.”

“Three days is enough.” She pressed the last onyx piece into place and studied it in the lamplight, head tilted, the way she studied everything before deciding it was finished. “Bring the good sandals this time. Not the ones from the flood season.”

“Those sandals were fine.”

“Those sandals were missing a strap.”

“Still had one strap left.”

She laughed, and did not argue further, because she had already won and they both knew it.

Outside, the city was settling into its evening hush, terminal lights blinking softly along the avenue, and somewhere past the walls the tombs were waiting and patient.