country, and she head a chorus of ancient and thriving creatures that she had never known before.
There was a time when I lived for this. Just this. Experiencing new places, new plants, new animals. Spending days in one place to dig in the soil, to sniff the roots, to taste the flowers, to study the beetles and butterflies.
It seems like another life now. Someone else’s life.
She knelt at the side of the road and plucked a small red flower. As she stared into it, she wondered what oils or seeds she might take from it, what medicines or foods might be made from it. She wondered what it was called. But she didn’t wonder long.
I have to find Bastet.
She slipped the flower away into her bag and walked on.
Her dragon’s ear went on cataloging and sifting through the soul-sounds around her. Grasses, trees, and flies were common. People and pack animals were fewer and farther between. But none of them resembled the doubled humming of an immortal and her sun-steel heart.
Closing her eyes to the glare of the bright sliver of sunlight blazing on the edge of the world, Asha wandered off the dirt road into the tall grass, angling southward across a trickle of cold water in a ditch and over a small rise toward a copse of sycamores. From there she turned a bit more to the south, her eyes still closed and her golden ear searching for something, anything, that might be Bastet.
Eventually she found the sound. Under the creaking of the locusts and the shivering of the tall grass, and between the cries of the shearwaters and storm-petrels in their nests by the distant sea, Asha heard the sweet duet of a young soul singing with itself. But that soul was singing a dirge, a mournful cry of aching loss and despair.
At the top of a steep hill, she found the Aegyptian girl sitting in a circle of trampled grass. Bastet’s black and red dress lay wrinkled and twisted around her legs, and the little embroidered cats were tumbled upon each other in the folds. Her black cat’s mask had slipped off her head and fallen to the ground, where three lean and tawny little wildcats sat licking their whiskers and flicking their tails in silence.
Asha stepped into the bed of flattened grass and saw the body lying beside the girl. The youth’s head rested in her lap where she was gently stroking his brow, and the rest of his long limbs were stretched out across the ground in peaceful repose, except for the ragged and bloody hole in the center of his chest.
The stillness of the body felt wrong, even unnatural. In a rush, Asha recalled her handful of conversations with Anubis, the commanding sound of his voice, the arrogant mettle of his every gesture, the brooding look in his eyes, and even the sharp manner in which he struck his staff on the ground before he vanished into the aether. For a moment, she couldn’t reconcile her memory of that proud and straight-backed youth with the corpse resting on a bed of bloody grass and wrinkled skirts.
“Bastet?” Asha whispered. She reached out and gently touched the girl’s shoulder.
Slowly, painfully slowly, Bastet turned and looked at her. The girl’s face was pale, her eyes rimmed in red, her lips thin and colorless. “Asha.”
“What happened?” Asha sat down beside her and let the girl lean against her body.
Bastet sighed a weak and ragged sigh. “I think he fought with Horus. I found him lying here with his own staff through his chest. I pulled it out. He should have been fine. It should have only taken a moment. He should have… but he didn’t heal. He just… he just died.”
“I’m sorry.” Asha put her arms around the girl, but the girl didn’t cry. She just sat very still and stiff, gently petting her cousin’s face and staring out over the plain as the rising sun streaked the land with bright golds and greens. Asha peered over Bastet’s shoulder at the body, trying to see it without the lens of memory or sorrow. She studied the wound and the dried blood, and her gaze traveled up to the youth’s neck.
“His pendant?”
“Gone.”
Asha nodded. “I could tell how close you were. The way you spoke and acted toward each other. I could see how much you cared for each other. He knew that.”
“I think I loved him,” Bastet whispered.
“Of course you did.”
She turned and looked up at Asha. “I mean, I really loved him. I never said anything. I didn’t know how. We’re not actually family, you know. Grandfather isn’t my real grandfather, and he isn’t related to Anubis’s family either. But still, we’ve spent our whole lives acting like family. And then there’s this.” She gestured to her face and body. “For four thousand years, I’ve been this little girl, even to Anubis. And it’s true, some part of me will always be twelve and silly and confused, but a part of me isn’t. A part of me is four thousand years old, and lonely. That part of me wonders what I would look like if I ever grew up, and wonders what my children would look like.”
“Immortals can’t have children?”
“They can, but I can’t. I became immortal before my body changed, before my cycles could begin. And since immortality brings changelessness, I will never know what it means to be a mother.” Bastet shivered.
“I’m sorry, I never thought…” Asha cleared her throat. “When we met, I…”
“You saw me as a twelve-year-old girl,” Bastet said. She smiled sadly. “It’s all right. I am a twelve-year-old girl. I’m both, I guess. Young and old. Trapped in between. And most of the time, it’s fine. But sometimes I start to wonder what I lost, what I gave up, what I could have been. What we could have been. But it was too hard to say anything, so I didn’t say anything. I guess…” She hesitated, her smile wavering. “I guess the time was never right. On a bad day, I would never even think about telling him how I felt, or how I thought I felt.”
“And on a good day?”
Bastet shrugged. “Why spoil a good day with an argument you can always have later?”
Asha nodded.
“What should we do now?” the girl asked softly.
“We should see to the body,” Asha said.
Bastet laughed through the sniffs and breathless gasps. “He was the God of Death. I suppose we could preserve his body as the ancient kings did.”
“How do we do that?”
Bastet sniffed and sat up straighter. “Well, we remove the organs and seal them in jars, and then fill the body with embalming fluid and wrap it in cloth, and then place it in a golden sarcophagus and seal it away in a tomb built by fifty thousand slaves.”
Asha blinked. “Oh.”
“Or maybe not,” Bastet whispered. “We’ll send him to his mother in the old way.”
Together they gathered armfuls of dry branches and grasses and piled them on the warm earth with the sun rising brighter and warmer by the moment. Asha placed the body on the pyre, and Bastet kissed her cousin’s cheek.
Then Asha lit the kindling with Bastet’s flint and they both stood back and watched the flames flicker and grow, and consume the body of the God of Death.
When the fires had died down to glowing embers and smoking ashes, the two women turned and began wading back through the tall grasses toward the dusty road and the distant outline of Alexandria.
“If it could be done, would you choose to be mortal again?” Asha asked.
“Yes,” Bastet said without a moment’s pause to consider the question. “I’ve had more than enough time to learn what it means to be twelve. But I know I can never go back, and it’s all right. A long time ago, I asked Grandfather whether he could undo it, and he said he couldn’t, so I’ve had a long time to live with the idea that this will never change. That I will never change.”
“Why couldn’t he undo it?”
“Because only a seireiken could destroy the pendant, and then the sword would swallow that piece of my soul inside the sun-steel heart.”
“And then that piece of your soul would just be trapped in another piece of sun-steel,” Asha realized.
“Yes.”
“But what if you could destroy the pendant another way? With something that wasn’t made of sun-steel? Something that would let that piece of your soul go back to you?”
Bastet pouted as she considered it. “Then I suppose I might be mortal again.”
Asha nodded and together they walked back to the city.
