Work Text:
The gold is cold around your wrists. The wind drags salt across your skin. You choke on the water that leaps onto your tongue carrying the sweat of your drowned men. The rock on which you kneel is hard despite exposure to the elements, but your heart is harder. You are Egypt. You know how to suffer.
*
“Moses will return,” you tell your mother so many years ago, cocky and assured as you are in all things, despite the fact that night has fallen and still he has not come home. You and your father raged at each other in the recesses of twilight, him revealing what Moses had learned that day and you not understanding why it should matter. It never bothered you that the gods delivered your brother by river into your mother’s loving arms. He would soon realize that all of this—his parentage, the guard who had died—was nothing, and he would return. When words fall from the Pharaoh’s lips, they are heard by the gods and become truth.
But you are not Pharaoh yet, and the gods are deaf to you. As each sun rises and sets, you send search party after search party into the mounting sandstorm, never to be seen again.
“There must be more that you can do,” you entreat your father, days later, when the storm rages and Moses has not been found.
“More that I can do?” His headcloth obscures his expression—he will not even turn to look at you—but his posture is haggard, bent like a mangrove. “Why did you not stop him?”
Why hadn’t you stopped him? When your brother said goodbye and ran, why did you not chase him? Was it overconfidence in the stability of your world? You are so sheltered by these empty halls and painted walls that bear your family’s history that now they are the only place you see your baby brother. The river bore him here, and now the sand has taken him away. You run your fingertips over his flat painted face and whisper a promise to the gods that if they should bring him back, you will never let him go.
*
Your father stares with glass eyes half-hidden under salt-dried lids. You see yourself reflected as priests bustle around the periphery. Your mother stands to your left. Your wife holds your newborn son to your right. You never knew the frailty of your father’s human heart until it gave out at last and you found yourself shouting for help over his fallen form.
After those first weeks without Moses, when the sands had settled and still the search parties returned with naught but a discarded armlet and a wig, you put yourself into building: completing your father’s temple, erecting monuments, expanding the summer palace in the Delta, hoping that one day he would realize all that you have accomplished and look upon you with pride.
But the massive stone likeness in whose shadow you’d stand only ever gazed coolly over you, and those glass eyes in his supine form now do the same.
That night, bald ibises watch you from the water as your son trots at your heel, eager for your attention. He will be Pharaoh one day, and you do not know how to teach him to be strong when your father tried so hard to strengthen you and only left you feeling brittle and dull.
“It was always the weakest part of him,” your mother says, staring out at the reeds at water’s edge. She stands as straight and regal as always, her grief betrayed only by the way her jaw clenches between sentences to keep from trembling. “It was important to him that the two of you not know.”
“Did he not trust me?” you ask.
“A kingdom is only as strong as its Pharaoh.”
You know this, and so you continue to build. Your kingdom continues to grow vaster and higher than that of your father. His heart and his ambition were frailer than yours, and should his akh be called to roam these halls, he will see the baselessness of his doubt. You are the morning and the evening star, and you shine.
*
The joy that seizes you when you see him is so ferocious that it threatens to shred you to your bones and leave you quivering. He is hidden now beneath his hair and beard grown wild up his cheeks and his rags so humble like a slave’s, but you recognize his narrow shoulders and the dark earnestness of his eyes. You squeeze him, and you think of all the lost years, of your father to whom you could never give back his second son, and of your son who has not known the kindness and the humor of his uncle.
But the words he speaks sound like a foreign tongue, or a joke whose punchline you cannot fathom. You wish only to welcome your brother back into your family and give him all the glory and love that is due to him, but you do not know the man who stands before you, who would cripple your kingdom for the freedom of Hebrew slaves. You know only the ring he returns to you, cut off of the finger of a brother long gone.
You are the morning and the evening star, but your heart is as fragile a muscle as your father’s was, and it aches.
*
You are Egypt. The Nile flows inside your veins. The Pyramids rise from your spine. On your head rests the weight of your father’s crown and his father’s before him. You have built temples and cities on sand and on floodplains, carved your face and your name into monuments that brush the sky, and now you will construct an encasement for your heart such that neither scourge nor sword may injure it.
You know how to suffer.
*
Strange that when the living spark has left it, your son’s body should feel so heavy. Soon, the priests will arrive to cut him open, remove the eyes from his sleeping face, pull the organs from his tiny body, and fill his hollowed flesh with salt. He had not yet learned the harshness of the world. May Isis the throne-mother protect him from the same in the afterlife.
You are not the only parent who has said goodnight to his child for the last time. All of Egypt screams around you in the lingering dark. Good. You do not want to know that life continues as usual when every part of your body aches with grief. You prefer the discordant lamentations, the eerie cries that sing through every mudbrick and wind through every alleyway where little children played.
Your brother, were he here, would comfort you and weep. The man who wears his face comes to confirm his victory, and you are too exhausted to do anything but concede.
*
You look across the defile of dry land, filled with Hebrews and flanked by parted waters, to see Moses staring back. Anger and grief stir inside you for all that you have lost. Your prankster brother’s boisterous laugh. Your father’s stern but loving countenance. Your son’s small arms, wrapped around your neck as he says goodnight. You point your sword, you scream to the sky, and you ride as the waters come crashing down.