But Icouldn’t. In any other situation, I absolutely would have come by now, but I couldn’t. Somehow, I was being held captive right at the precipice.
“With access to everyone’s secrets,” Thoth continued, voice barely breaking or betraying fatigue despite the sustained rhythm of his hips and hand, rocking me forward and back again on trembling legs, “no one could ever act against you. You would be more powerful than even Pharaoh, blessed by a god.”
“B-but Pharaoh…isa god. Isn’t he?” Sometimes I thought I could read the words that glowed, fading in and out of view with my euphoria, but just as quickly, recognition faded the moment I thought I had it. “He is already your avatar on earth.”
Thoth’s left hand brushed over a line of hieroglyphics on my chest, while his right continued to pump my length, ever hardening me,maddeningme, but not letting me come. His eyes met mine in the glass as he whispered, “Is he?”
When the words he had touched glowed and looked readable to me, they remained that way, and their meaning remained in my mind as well.
Pharaohs lie.
Pharaohs are mortal.
All the heat in me oscillated to a sudden chill. That had to be the truth, but then… there were no gods on earth. Pharaoh did not deny bringing back the dead out of some duty to preserve balance. He refused because, in truth, he did not have the power to do so.
Thoth snapped his hips again, forcing my elbows to buckle and bringing me closer to the glass. He was increasing his rhythm, and every phrase that lit up now without translation taunted me, while also making me feel more and more like I should already be coming, but I couldn’t—I couldn’t! It was like the brands of the phrases that glowed also sent pulses directly to my core in tandem with Thoth’s relentless thrusts.
“Do you want to know more?” he demanded. “Do you want to knoweverything? Including the truth of your parents?”
A new phrase glowed across my heart and held its brilliance rather than fading. I couldn’t read it, but I knew it must be the answer to that question that I had so longed to learn.
I didn’t care that the other children had teased me, like in Meryt’s relived memory. Most of them knew only a single parent’s identity, and it was easy to act out against each other when we were young for the most foolish of differences. I cared who they might be, however, because not knowing had always made me wonder if I could ever really know myself.
I knew my mother had been the slave of a high-ranking commander in Pharaoh’s army who had died in battle. He was supposedly responsible for the loss of an entire unit, his choices condemned as cowardly, and therefore, his name had been stricken from the records. Without a master to serve, cast out into the streets, she knew my birth would kill her, so after I breathed my first breath from Ptah, she trekked, bleeding the entire journey, to the steps of Pharaoh’s palace to offer me to his service. She collapsed and died almost as soon as I was passed into the arms of a guard, so no one ever learned her name.
Whether any of that was true, I couldn’t even say. I didn’t know if her master was my father either. I wasn’t allowed to ask. I wasn’t allowed toknow. Because with slaves, all that mattered was who you served.
I had often wondered what she might have been like. Stern yet compassionate like Meryt's mother? And what of my father? Was he that disgraced commander or just another slave, one who had dallied with a fellow slave in dark corners? Who would I have been if they had raised me instead of the palace kitchen staff, and later, Meryt's mother and the other dancers?
I wouldn't be me. Not this version of me. Just like if I had allowed Geb to change my outer self, I would be a stranger if I saw in my reflection the version of me who had always known his parentage. It was unfair that I hadn't been allowed to know, but to change that now would be to admit that lacking such knowledge meant I didn't feel whole.
And if I needed to know every secret to feel whole, how empty must I be?
I knew my answer, yet I also recognized that if my prize at the end of these trials had been anything other than having Meryt returned to me, I might have been tempted to tell Thothyes. But I knew who I was, and I didn’t need to know where I came from to continue believing it.
So I told him, “No. I know enough as I am.”
An archway appeared in the reflection behind us and framed within it wasMeryt.
Thoth rocked inside me harder, faster, deeper at the arrival of our audience, but I still glanced as best I could over my shoulder, over Thoth’s shoulder too, to meet the real Meryt’s gaze.
He wasn’t there.
I whipped my head forward again, and the reflection persisted. Like in Geb’s pool, only there could I see my Meryt clearly.
Thoth molded himself across my back and bent to lick my neck, up to my earlobe, tonguing the tinkle of gold that hung from it. But although his hips continued to snap faster and faster, the pumps of his hand on me suddenly slowed. “No? Even if I could offer youMeryt’ssecrets?”
Several of the unreadable phrases on my skin glowed, this time with mocking pulses, but the offer only made me snarl, “Especially then,” while keeping my eyes on my beloved’s face. “They are not your secrets to tell… nor mine to steal. I could accept any of Meryt’s secrets ifhewished to tell them. But only from him.”
Again, Thoth licked my ear, up along the curve of its rim, making me shiver and stutter my hips into his hold. He kept his mouth right there to whisper, while slowly, sofuckingslowly, running the flat nail of his thumb through my slit. “Then I guess you win.”
I came—finally,finally—and my hot release stained the glass.
My legs immediately failed me, but Thoth kept me upright, while he pumped, pumped,pumpeduntil he spilled within me, and with that wash of heat, all the unlearned secrets faded like the ones before.
I kept my gaze on Meryt, watching him fade to nothing too, but just before he was gone, I saw him mouth:
I love—
