Harsiese still held the ropes at the bow of their raft, though his thick arms weren’t bunched with effort. He was ready to draw the raft tight once more but was currently taking the opportunity to rest. If Ahhotep had kept them alive, Harsiese was the one who had kept them together. Heshtat had tried, but he wasn’t built for raw strength or endurance, and Harsiese was an adept of Khet, where Heshtat was a mere acolyte. Not to mention the man’s other aspects, which still well outweighed Heshtat’s own.

  “Thank you,” Heshtat said simply, giving him a grateful smile. “We would not have survived without you.”

  “Thank the priest,” the Tomb Guard said.

  “I will. When he wakes.”

  “And you?” Harsiese asked. “Those burns look bad.”

  Heshtat glanced down at the twisting wounds that snaked up his forearms. He could make out the shape of the rope’s braid in their pattern, and they glistened wetly in the dull afternoon glow. He flexed his arms with a wince, feeling the abused muscle and tendons complain, his wounds pulling as the skin moved.

  “I’ll survive. It is far better than I expected when I saw the wave.”

  Harsiese grunted. “Aye. I cannot believe our luck. The gods are watching over us.”

  Heshtat raised a hand to his chest where the amulet rested beneath his vest. It still pulsed in time with his heartbeat. “Perhaps,” he muttered. “Are you good here? You can rest if you need.”

  Harsiese shook his shaggy head slowly. They grey in his beard caught the light, and Heshtat was surprised to think for the first time that the man looked old. His was still in his middle years, and had always had a grizzled air about him, but he realised now that the man was likely in his fifties. His advanced cultivation of Khet kept him strong and hearty, and Heshtat had no doubt he’d live on to at least his early 100s, if he didn’t fall in battle before that.

  “Have you ever given any thought to retirement?” he found himself asking.

  The Tomb Guard looked his way in surprise, then huffed a laugh. “I have my duty, Heshtat. Dying in service of my queen is my most likely fate. I doubt I will live out the next decade, honestly, given the growing strife. There hasn’t been a major war between the provinces in Amansi for centuries, but…”

  Heshtat nodded. “It does feel as if we stand upon the precipice.”

  “You feel it too. Good to know I’m not going senile. First the Desolate overrun the Keeper’s province, and now this pandemonium with the Eye?” He gave a rueful chuckle. “I did not expect to survive this far into the mission, truth be told.”

  “And yet Queen Cleosiris commanded you to join me anyway,” Heshtat said, conflicted.

  “Not without warning. Did you think the day we met in the palace was the first the Tomb Guard heard of this mission?”

  “I…” Heshtat faltered. He had thought that, honestly. Cleo had mentioned during their initial conversation in his house something about secrets being unveiled when he had asked if she trusted her Tomb Guard. Apparently, he had misunderstood her words.

  “She well knows my desires. I suspect she also trusted you not to waste my sacrifice needlessly, though that is something I am only beginning to understand. I had thought you were…” It was Harsiese’s turn to trail off.

  Heshtat smiled grimly. He knew what the man had been thinking. “I know my reputation. The captain that killed his men and failed his charge. You expected me to be more cavalier with your life.” It stung, but he couldn’t say he was surprised to hear of the man’s opinion.

  “That is not it,” Harsiese protested. “I knew of your history—most serving in Idib’s Tomb Guard do. But I do not consider you a failure, Heshtat. Youngest captain of the Tomb Guard in a dozen generations, a foreigner, presided over the worst calamity to befall our order in living memory and kept enough of it standing to carry on into the next generation. I just…”

  He took a breath before levelling an honest look at Heshtat. “I thought you’d be more ruthless, I suppose. To have risen as far as you did so quickly, to have earned the respect of Old Seti, and to have a reputation as dire as you do at such a young age? I thought you’d be a bit of a bastard, being honest.”

  Heshtat laughed in spite of himself. “I am sorry to prove you wrong then,” he said, clapping Harsiese on the shoulder, though he winced as the wounds on his forearm pulled. “At least, I hope?”

  “I am glad to say I was wrong,” Harsiese confirmed.

  “So you thought you’d be dead,” Heshtat said, picking up the thread of the conversation. “And now you find yourself alive. Do you still have no desire to find a partner and some land and settle down?”

  “I do not. I wish for enough coin to look after my mother, and perhaps a few luxuries along the way, but my duty is sustenance enough. What about you?”

  Heshtat nodded along, understanding intimately the man’s perspective. He had worn his duty like a suit of armour, propping him up and keeping him standing even when the world cut at him again and again. But as he’d realised at the peak of the temple of Amin-Ra, his old duty and his old oaths were not enough any longer. He’d forged a new promise to himself, and he focused on that now as he sought to answer the Tomb Guard’s question.

  “I used to say all I wanted was some land and someone to share it with. I would dream of sitting on the bank of the Nikea, fishing the waters in the morning, gardening in the afternoon, and cooking for… for a wife in the evening.” He nearly tripped over his words in his sudden desire to keep Cleo’s name from spilling forth. “I used to pretend that a humble life was all I wanted, but now…”

  He sighed, looking out over the flooded fields they drifted lazily over, the rocky mountains rising in the distance in the North, and the dunes of the Endless Desert spreading to the south.

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  “I have a sister, you know? She has two children and a doting husband. My nieces are a handful, but she seems happy.” He trailed off, letting the gentle roll of the raft tease his thoughts apart. “I fear I am more like Neferu than I care to admit. I have this itching in my blood when I spend too long in a single place. This last decade has been torture.”

  “Why did you not leave?”

  Heshtat looked down at his bloodied and burned forearms. “I had my duty.”

  “We understand one another then,” Harsiese said solemnly.

  “I had my duty,” Heshtat emphasised. “I failed it, and eventually, it failed me. I came close to giving up many times, Harsiese. It is not enough on its own.”

  “With respect, captain, I disagree. Look at where we are now, what we have achieved. That is because of your duty. I was destined to be nothing more than a humble fisherman, and now here I stand beside heroes and priests, delivering a mythical artifact back to my queen, stolen from the gods beneath the notice of the agents of the True Thrones! How can you say that duty is not enough when it has brought us so far?”

  Heshtat smiled. It was quite an accomplishment, and to hear the pride so evident in Harsiese as he recounted his place in history brought Heshtat a measure of warmth. Still, he disagreed.

  “There was a final challenge in that temple. Some sort of spiritual enlightenment. A test of purity and purpose that I still do not fully understand.”

  Harsiese kept his gaze on the water slipping by beneath them, but Heshtat knew he was listening intently, memorising the words for a later retelling in a tavern, no doubt.

  “I failed. Nearly. Maatkare passed easily, and I know it had nothing to do with his desire to return the Eye, or save Idib, or earn his freedom to cultivate once more. I held on to my goal so tightly, Harsiese. I thought of the years I had spent surviving in drudgery and pain, just to succeed once more. I thought of all the good Queen Cleosiris could do with the power we will bring her; of all the wrongs we can right and all the futures we can brighten. I focused on my desperate desire to right the wrong of my past failures and the uncompromising duty I had sworn myself to…

  “All of that, and the temple found me wanting.”

  He turned to see Harsiese staring at him in confusion. “But you returned with the Eye anyway.”

  “I did,” Heshtat acknowledged. “It was not until I focused on something more important than duty, more personal and selfish, that the temple accepted my purpose as pure.”

  Harsiese paused for a while, until it became clear that Heshtat would not share what it was he had found that the temple deemed worthy. “I do not think you are selfish,” he said simply.

  Heshtat laughed. “That is not what I meant. What I am trying to say is this: I believe I have been where you now stand, and I do not wish you to make the same mistake that I did. There is much to live for, and self-sacrifice is not the only way to be useful.”

  “That is easy for one as young as you to say. I am long passed my prime now, Heshtat. I have, perhaps, another two decades left before even my cultivation won’t be able to slow the weight of age. If I can be of greater service to my queen and my province by giving my life than I can by simply existing, then I shall.”

  “A fine sentiment,” Heshtat agreed. “I would expect no less of the Tomb Guard—each and every one of them. But I know well how self-sacrifice can become a crutch when something else in life is missing.” Heshtat sighed and placed a hand on the big man’s shoulder. “I just wanted to make clear that your life has value independent of its ability to further another’s goals. Were you to die in glorious battle, there are those that would miss you.”

  Heshtat saw the tense set to the man’s shoulders and left his speech there. He wasn’t sure if he had gotten through to the man, but it was the best he could do for now. He stayed beside him for a time as the sun wheeled in the sky, blending blues with yellows, orange eventually giving way to red.

  ‘Red sky at night, shepherd’s delight’—it would be good weather tomorrow.

  ***

  He spent a few hours just sitting in companionable conversation with Harsiese, learning of the man’s past, listening to his stories of life in the guard. Tomb, Palace, City, Town… they were more alike than he had initially expected, familiar characters and comradery shared by all.

  The scenery floated past, and there was a strange timelessness as they slipped through Amansi from one province to another. Eventually though, the power of the flood began to recede, and the waters retreated from the floodplain until they were at risk of becoming snagged on particularly tall and hardy clusters of gorse.

  Heshtat woke Neferu then, seeking her judgement and advice, and she provided both expertly. Within only a few minutes, they began to see clusters of trees that had survived the initial wave, and soon enough Neferu had rigged together a lasso from the trailing ropes.

  “Spent a summer as a Shuti wrangler down near the Burning City,” she had explained afterwards while they watched in surprise as she snared a particularly sturdy-looking tree with her first throw.

  With Harsiese’s brawn in the mix, it didn’t take long before they found themselves sheltered in the lee of the thick trunk, and there they waited another hour for the waters to recede completely. Heshtat had wanted to venture out when they were only waist deep, but Neferu had warned against it. The mud and silt would be so dense that they risked getting stuck if they weren’t careful, and Heshtat had opted to trust her judgement.

  So it was that night was falling by the time they dragged themselves from the wreckage of the once-verdant floodplain alongside the river. They did their best to rid themselves of the worst of the mud, but Heshtat doubted any of them felt particularly clean as they trekked up to the low ridges that still protruded. The mountains had fallen away behind them, but their rocky bones still jutted forth from the plains in a much-diminished mimicry, and Heshtat hoped for a cave they could shelter in.

  Eventually, Maatkare pointed one out and after a quick check it was found to be suitable. Heshtat sighed as he let the ropes drop from his shoulders, the sled they had fashioned from the remains of the raft to carry Ahhotep’s limp form coming to a halt on the rocky, dirt-blasted earth at the foot of the ridge.

  The others all tried to argue when Heshtat said he would take first watch, but soon enough he was the only one awake. He looked out over the twilight landscape. It felt strangely reminiscent of the Otherworld. No black sun in the sky, no purple light dripping down from the heavens, but there was an ethereal quality to the land in the dark of night. His enhanced eyesight let him pierce the gloom, and he found himself noticing different details than he did in the light of day.

  He had never paid such close attention to the shape of the leaves on an acacia tree, normally distracted by their colour. He considered his earlier conversation with Harsiese. He hadn’t meant to give a lecture and hadn’t meant to share as much of his own struggle as he had, but the words had just slipped out of their own accord. And they had been right.

  He had wallowed in self-pity for so long, blind to the noxious lens of bitterness through which he had viewed the world. It was no surprise he had had little enough faith in Cleo when he thought of how his every thought had been warped by his view of the world. What had he missed, by focusing so heavily on the negative?

  The world had burned him, and so he had become reactive. Like a hound that had been kicked by its owner and now saw every person as a threat, he bared his fangs at everything reflexively and spared no thought for what he had pushed away in the process.

  Gods, what a fool he had been.

  Strangely, the realisation was a relief. Rather than continue the very thinking he was criticising, he was profoundly grateful for the realisation. He still had life left to live, and despite all he had been through, he was not yet spent. Heshtat smiled as something new bloomed in his chest. Not resolve, not determination. Something simpler and more powerful than either.

  Hope.