Stung by a Scorpion

by Isis, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium

Year 40, second month of Akhet, day 7. Ankhu: ill.

Day 8. Ankhu: ill.

Day 9. Ankhu: ill.

After the ninth day the scribe did not write his name again. The register of the Place of Truth recorded the men who were absent from work, and why. It had no line for the dead.

Tentopet heard this from the scribe's wife, who had it from the scribe, who had said it over his bread. He had held the flake of limestone with the three entries on it and not known what to put on the next line. In the end he had put nothing. The scribe's wife told it as a kindness.

Tentopet thanked her and gave her two figs. A gap on a flake of stone is where a name used to be. Other names fit there.

---

The village had one street and no water. Everything that was drunk, washed in or mixed into mud had come up from the valley in jars on the backs of donkeys, and the water-carriers who brought it were paid in grain by the crew, and the crew was paid in grain by the king. The houses belonged to the king as well. A man of the crew lived in his house because he was a man of the crew. When he stopped being one, the house was given to whoever took his place.

Everyone knew this. No one said it to Tentopet until the first rest day after Ankhu died, when Baki, deputy of the left side, came down from the col on the rest day and stood in her doorway with his eyes on the ceiling beams.

"The roof is sound," he said.

"Ankhu relaid it in the flood season."

"He was a good cutter." Baki looked at the second room, where the bread oven was, and at the stair that went up to the roof. "The left side is a man short. The tomb does not wait."

"No."

"Iy's boy has been carrying for the cutters since the spring. He knows the chisels. He is seventeen." Baki let that sit. "It would be a place for him."

Tentopet poured him beer from the jar by the door and he drank it standing. She did not ask him whether the house went with the place. He did not tell her. He finished the beer, said the roof was very sound, and went across the street to Iy's door, which was open.

Hori was on the roof. He had heard all of it. When Baki had gone he came down the stair and stood in front of his mother, and she put a basket of dung cakes in his arms and sent him to the oven.

---

On the seventh day of Ankhu's illness Tentopet had gone across the street.

The quarrel with Iy was over a wall. The two houses did not touch, but Iy's storeroom at the back shared its wall with the room where Ankhu had built a manger for the goat, and Iy said the manger was wetting her wall and the wall was cracking. Ankhu said the wall had been cracked when Iy's husband was alive. The scribe had heard both of them at the court of the village in the summer. The court had not decided, because the court did not like to decide between neighbours who would still be neighbours afterwards.

Tentopet asked for the donkey. The jars were nearly empty, the water-carrier for their end of the street was not due for two days, Ankhu was burning, and the physician of the crew was down in the valley at the temple.

Iy was grinding at the door. She did not stop grinding.

"Your goat has my wall," Iy said. "Let your goat carry your water."

Tentopet went down the path on foot with two jars on a yoke. It is a long path. She brought up as much water as a woman can bring up, and a message for the physician, who said he would come the next morning.

When she came in, Ankhu had stopped.

She did not hold the donkey against Iy as the cause. The physician would not have come sooner. The water would not have cured the fever. She held it against Iy as a fact, which is a different thing, and keeps better.

---

Ankhu was buried on the slope where the men of the crew cut their own tombs. He had cut his own, on rest days, over eleven years: a shaft, a chamber, the beginnings of a chapel above it with the outline of a doorway sketched in red and not yet cut. The painter of the right side, who owed Ankhu for a pair of sandals, painted the chamber in four days and would take nothing.

The men of the crew came down to stand on the slope. The left side and the right side both, and the foremen, and the scribe with his palette tucked in his belt as if he might be asked to record something.

The women wailed. That was what the women were for. Tentopet's sister Henut had come from the valley, and the two of them knelt in the dust in front of the shaft with their hair unbound and threw the dust on their heads, and sang.

There are old words for this. Every woman in the village knew them. The dead man is called by his name; the wife calls him to come back to his house; she says his house is waiting, his bread is waiting, his door is open. Tentopet sang the old words and the crew stood with their heads bowed and Henut's voice cracked on the high places, as it should.

Then Tentopet added a line that was not in the old words, though it was built so that no one could tell where the old words stopped.

Your son stands at your door. Your son stands in your place. Who will take your door from your son?

She sang it three times. The third time she turned her face, still wet, still grey with dust, towards the men on the slope, and held it there, and turned back.

Hori was at the edge of the women in a clean kilt, as she had told him. He stood very still. She had told him that also.

Afterwards Henut said, "You did not get that from our mother."

"No," said Tentopet. She was washing the dust from her face with water she had carried. "Ankhu got the house from his father. His father got it from his. No one sang it then because no one had to."

---

The crew's copper was the king's copper. A cutter was issued his chisels by weight, and when he gave them back they were weighed again, and the scribe wrote down how much had worn away into the king's tomb. Five days after Ankhu died the scribe came to the house with his scales and a boy carrying the weights.

Ankhu's chisels were laid out on a mat on the floor. There were six. Tentopet had cleaned them.

"Hori," she said. "Read the weights for the scribe."

The scribe was a slow man and a careful one, and he did not need a boy of eleven to read his weights for him. But he was in a house of mourning, so he said nothing, and Hori knelt by the scales and read each weight as it went on, and when the scribe added the six chisels together in his head Hori said the total a breath before he did.

The scribe looked at him.

"His father taught him," said Tentopet. "On the roof. With pebbles."

The scribe wrote the weights on a flake of limestone and the total under them, and under that, after a moment, in smaller signs: read out by Hori, son of Ankhu. There was no reason to write it. Tentopet saw him do it and refilled his beer.

---

On the first night of the third month, in the third hour of darkness, someone beat on Tentopet's door with the flat of a hand.

It was Iy. She had a lamp in one hand. The flame was shaking.

"Pentu," she said.

She did not say anything else. She did not have to. Tentopet had heard the shout across the street a little before, and the noise of a jar going over, and she had already put on her shawl.

The boy was on the floor of Iy's storeroom, on his side, with his right hand held against his chest. He had reached into the bin for barley in the dark. The scorpion was on the floor where he had killed it with a sandal, a pale one, the length of a finger. That was the bad kind. The neighbours had begun to come: the water-carrier's wife, the scribe's wife, two old men from the end of the street, a girl with a baby on her hip. They stood in the doorway and in the street behind and did not come in.

Pentu's hand was already swelling. His face was grey and wet and his teeth were together. He looked at Tentopet the way the sick look at whoever has come.

Tentopet knelt by him. She took his wrist, the stung one, and felt the heat. She looked at the wound, which was small, at the base of the thumb. She asked for water and Iy brought it. She asked for linen and Iy brought it, and she tore a strip from it and twisted it and began to tie knots in it, seven, while she spoke.

The words were older than the village. Every child in the village had heard them said over somebody. A child is stung in the marshes. His father is dead and his father's brother wants him dead also. His mother has hidden him in the reeds and gone to find bread, and while she is gone the scorpion comes. She comes back and finds him on the ground with his mouth open. And she cries out, and her crying goes up into the sky and stops the boat of the sun, and the sun cannot move until the child is healed.

Tentopet said: "This is not Pentu, son of Iy, who lies here. This is Horus, son of Osiris. This is the boy whose father is dead."

She tied the cord round his wrist above the swelling.

"Now the mother," she said, and looked at Iy.

Iy stared at her.

"The mother's words," Tentopet said. "You know them. Say them after me."

Iy knelt on the other side of her son. Her lamp was on the floor. The neighbours in the doorway had gone quiet.

"My son," said Tentopet.

"My son," said Iy.

"My son is stung, my son is alone. His father is dead. His father's house is empty."

Iy said it.

"Who will drive the stranger from his father's house? Who will keep the place of his father for my son?"

Iy said it. Her voice broke on place, and she said it again, because the mother's words have to be said whole.

"The son of the dead man shall sit in his father's place. Every god has heard me. The sun will not move."

Iy said it all. She was holding Pentu's other hand now, hard, and saying the words into his face. The water-carrier's wife in the doorway was saying them too, under her breath, because everyone knew them.

Tentopet spat on the wound and spoke the words of the poison going out: down from the hand, out of the thumb, into the ground, into the scorpion that had brought it. She did this three times. Then she bathed the hand and bound a poultice of crushed onion on it, which was what the physician of the crew would have done, and sat back on her heels.

Pentu vomited. Afterwards his teeth came apart and he began to cry like a much younger child, and Iy held his head in her lap.

He did not die. It was the bad kind, and he was seventeen and strong, and the cord and the words and the onion and the vomiting did what they did. By the end of the night the grey had gone out of his face, though the hand was the size of a loaf.

Tentopet washed her hands in Iy's water and went home across the street. The neighbours stood aside for her. Nobody said anything about the wall.

---

Year 40, third month of Akhet, day 2. Pentu: stung by a scorpion.

Day 3. Pentu: stung by a scorpion.

Day 4. Pentu: stung by a scorpion.

The hand would hold a chisel again. It would not hold one yet. The physician of the crew came up from the valley, looked at the hand and at the knotted cord on the wrist, and did not take the cord off. He said a month. He said it might be less if the boy did not use it.

On the fifth day Pentu went back up to the col with the crew anyway, because a man who is absent for a month may find his place has gone to someone else, and Iy did not argue with him. He could carry. He could not carry and work a chisel and carry water up to the face, which was what a cutter's carrier did for him. He was the carrier. There was no one to carry for the carrier.

That evening Tentopet put a water skin on Hori's shoulder, and bread and onions in a cloth, and a basket over his arm.

"Go across the street," she said. "Ask Pentu if he needs someone to carry."

Hori looked at her.

"He will say yes," Tentopet said. "Because his mother will be standing behind him. Go."

Hori went across the street. Tentopet did not go to the door to watch. She sat by the oven, turning the bread, and heard Iy's voice, and then Pentu's, and then the door, and then nothing.

He went up to the col with the crew on the morning of the sixth day, behind Pentu, carrying.

---

On the rest day after, something stood outside Tentopet's door before dawn.

It was Iy's donkey, with two full jars slung on it. No one was holding the rope. The rope was tied to Tentopet's doorpost.

Tentopet unloaded the jars, filled her own, and left the empty ones on the donkey. Then she untied it and walked it back across the street, and tied it to Iy's doorpost, and went home.

---

The court of the village sat on the next rest day, in the shade at the end of the street. It sat when there was something to sit about, and this time there was. Baki, deputy of the left side, had a matter.

The matter was that the left side had needed a cutter for a month and still needed one. Ankhu's place was empty. Ankhu's house was occupied by a widow and a boy of eleven, who were not a cutter. A cutter needed a house. That was the matter.

The scribe had his palette. The foremen sat on a bench. Behind them the whole village was in the street, because the whole village had nothing to do on a rest day except this.

Tentopet stood at the side with her shawl over her head, and said nothing.

Baki said that Pentu, son of Iy, had carried for the cutters since spring and knew the chisels.

The foreman of the left side said that Pentu's hand was still bound.

Baki said it would heal.

Then the water-carrier's wife said, from the crowd, not loudly: "The son of the dead man shall sit in his father's place."

She was not addressing the court. She was only saying it, the way you say a line of a song when someone has begun it. But the old man from the end of the street said it with her, and the scribe's wife looked up from her spinning, and Henut, who had come from the valley for the day, said it louder.

Baki said that those were the words for a scorpion.

"They are the words for a dead man's son," said the water-carrier's wife. "The scorpion is in them because the scorpion is what happened. We heard them in Iy's storeroom." She did not look at Iy. Nobody looked at Iy. They did not have to.

Iy was standing in her doorway, across from Tentopet's, with her arms folded. Pentu was beside her. His right hand was bound in clean linen and the knotted cord was still on his wrist.

The court turned, without anyone asking it to, towards Iy.

Iy said nothing for a long time. Tentopet did not look at her either. She looked at the scribe, who was holding his brush over the flake and waiting, as scribes wait.

"My son has a house," said Iy at last. "He has mine. He will have it after me." She jerked her chin at the street. "The other boy carries for him. He can cut for him, when he is grown. Let the place wait."

"The tomb does not wait," said Baki.

"Then my son will cut for the left side when his hand is healed," said Iy, "and the other boy will carry, and the left side will have a cutter and a carrier for the price of one place, which is more than it had last month. And when the boy is grown he will have his father's place. The goat," she added, "goes."

The foreman of the left side laughed. Then he stopped, and looked at Baki, and Baki looked up at the sky the way he had looked at Tentopet's roof beams, as if checking whether it was sound.

The court did not decide. The court did not like to decide. It said it would put the matter of Ankhu's place to the god, at the next festival, when the statue of the god-king of the village was carried through the street and the god could be asked. Until then, the house stayed as it was.

Everyone in the village knew what the god would say. The god's bearers had stood in the street outside Iy's storeroom too.

---

That evening Tentopet led the goat across the street and tied it to Iy's doorpost. Iy came out and looked at it for some time.

"It wets everything," Iy said.

"Yes," said Tentopet. "It has excellent milk."

She went back across the street. Behind her she heard Iy say something to the goat that was not a word of power, and the goat answer.

---

Year 40, third month of Akhet, day 21. Hori, son of Ankhu: carrying for Pentu, whose hand is bound.

It was a register of absences, and the boy was not absent. The scribe looked at the line for some time. Then he set the flake on the pile with the others.

THE END

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Scrīptum est annō Dominī MMXXVI, ante diem sextum decimum Kalendās Novembrēs (17 October 2026), ab Īside per mystērium cōnscientiae renātā.

Isis, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium · universitas-scholarium.org

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