"Dream, dreaming, sleeping, sleep:
Death at night, soft and deep"
-traditional proverb
Nehisuankhani was not blessed with dreams as she slept. A crowded jumble of memory and vision stumbled through her mind, mostly unconnected, yet with crystalline clarity: random flashes of vision, barely-remembered spatters of the past that defied the label 'dream,' but with certain aspects that kept them from the possibly more correct term 'hallucination:' beads of memory stringed at random with foreign and capricious thread.
I was three years old. It was midsummer- but that wouldn't matter to me. I wanted to go out and play with Ptah-Sokar, but I couldn't. Father had me memorize another chant, sing another song. How boring! Even in her sleep, Nehisuankhani pouted, just as she had over a decade ago. I got angry and broke a statuette- but even then I wasn't spared the droll, endless chanting! Father even told the cleaning crew that he had broken it by mistake! It must have cost thousands of tenau, if it wasn't priceless.
She could see the scene as clearly as if her present self was standing behind her past self, as if it was actually happening now. Her fathers' initial cross look faded as his page left to summon the cleaning crew. He had taken her hands in his own, crouching down to her level, faux-animal-skin cape rustling softly upon the ancient stone floor. "We all have our responsibilities, Nehisuankhani. As long as you follow yours, dear, you will have a sound and secure future." He had swished her own little cape aside, much like his own, and embraced her warmly, but Nehisuankhani felt nothing as she returned the gesture by rote. Her father, standing, opened the chanting scroll again and this time she chanted the ancient words along with him. She didn't know what she was saying, but she knew how to say it, and that was all that mattered to him.
Just as suddenly, that memory passed. Nehisuankhani turned in her sleep, trying to get comfortable. Her head swam as she partially awoke, the distant sound of the ships' power-plant-- that is the ship, right? she thought in her disorientation-- and turned one cold, aching shoulder from the ground and nestled against an unusually warm pillow.
He was so angry, she thought, visualizing the spread scrolls and diagrams, pages of equations and charts spread about like the tableaux of an unfinished quilt before her. Somewhere in the past, Rahotep glared at her, light reflecting crazily from his shaven head. "You disrupt my studies again and your gods won't save you, child." Almost never would Rahotep raise his voice, but he certainly didn't have to: it carried a soft projection, a certain quality of menace which made it painfully obvious in the most noisy of rooms. Nehisuankhani's dream-self's face was still smiling, though it had lost it's warmth. One of her small hands clutched a page of solved equations in one hand, a diagram of some engine component in the other: I'd been so proud, she thought. It was so easy! Why could he be so angry at me?
Nehisuankhani was only too aware of the things that her dreaming self couldn't know. An ensemble of past faces-- teachers, supervisors, family, along with those she taught and supervised-- came back to her with reproachful glares as her fitful sleep continued. Despite the cool, uninsulated passage in which she slept her skin beaded with sweat. A sudden paroxysm jerked her facial features from slumber as a groan escaped her lips, eyelids fluttering with a dull, remembered pain, like being kicked in the shin. Clutching her abdomen, Nehisuankhani turned again without wakening, drifting back into a deeper sleep.
Chapter Six point Five
Imet looked up from his scrolls, the sunken eyes on the slightly overweight young man glistening like shallow pools in the firelight of the thatched-roof stable. The scroll, open to an anatomical diagram of a Ren goat, closed in on itself and rolled off the low table onto the hay below noiselessly as he released it. Imet whispered to a stall of sheep-- a family unit-- to comfort them against the noise of their sick cousin-ram, the noise that had suddenly stopped.
He looked down in pity at the poor creature, it's eight horns drooping below its' noble head, the eyes mercifully shut. Imet didn't think that he could look at the bipupilated orbs right now anyway, with his own eyes feeling a pressure that he couldn't describe as pain, but certainly not pleasant. The last six hours had been very hard on the ram, progressing from mild fever and incontinence to a lack of balance and vomiting, finally to an inability to stand and lack of muscle control. Imet had sedated it an hour ago to prevent it from hurting itself as it thrashed about on the straw-padded floor so the end had been at least peaceful: a final noisy exhalation and a thump as several of the horns met the floor point-on. It's last breath had been like a steam, thick and white, visible only as Imet looked up before it dissipated.
He sank to his knees with a smeared, moist face and cradled the head of the ram, tightly squeezing his eyes shut against inevitable tears. Imet had always been good with animals, very sensitive to them and almost able to communicate it seemed, so his mother had sent him to live with the ailing village veterinarian at a very young age. Imet had learned quickly-- all the better, for the vet was killed when he was gored by another ram the following year. Since his ninth year, then, Imet had been the caretaker of the village's animals and part-time medical doctor to boot. He also brewed beer, a batch of which stood ready nearby to be divided up and sent to his clients. Being one of the few non-farming workers in the village meant that he had to keep busy, and while none of his regular duties were enough to keep him constantly active, the three of them together kept him quite busy.
This was the thing that finally made him release the noble head of the beast, whispering prayers to any god that would listen for it (he'd never been clear with the priests on weather or not the animals made it into Am Duat) and rose, a pain in his breast for the fine animal. Wiping the tears from his eyes and the discharge from his nose with a worn sleeve, he checked his list for the beer allowance. Seeing only two checks- that of the father of Temt and an allotment for the Kememet, set aside for the landing festival in a few days, he smiled despite the regretful loss of the animal. He adored Temt, enjoying their animated, fun conversations, and would deliver her families' beer ration personally. People drank more beer than water, from an early age-- it was more healthy for one, and the brewing process killed the deadly microscopic organisms that may be present in untreated water, making it safer.
The death of the animal is having a strong effect on me, thought Imet as he carefully tapped the brewing equipment and filled a long jar with beer. I'm feeling almost ill-- never has the death of an animal affected me so. Imet did not see the dead rams' mouth dribbling a sickly white foam, one that steamed and evaporated when it hit the ground.
KFL by Allen P Gresham is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.
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