The two
gods were perfectly in sync even as their hand claps grew ever faster and
lightning began arcing between their hands.
The sound of it was a continuous roar that even pushed Wadjet and Bodhi
back.
The sky
immediately over them had gone black and the Goddess’s Belt shone clear and
hard edged as a sword blade against the stars. The pressure of wind and sun
spinning against one another grew and grew, gradually expanding until even
Wadjet couldn’t hold against the stone and was blown backwards, rolling, with
Bast dug into the rock with all claws, eyes slitted, all her finery blown to
shreds, her tail lashing and fluffed into a club. The lotus actually rocked and
Asteri, wings folded tight, reached out with a serpent’s tail and with Wadjet
wrapped it and held it down.
Wadjet’s
hood was spread wide to intervene between the boy gods and their hapless
followers. “Bodhi… did Asteri just grow a serpent’s tail?”
“Yes, he
did. He’s almost grown again.”
“Really?” Naida buried her face in Kurama’s fur. “His
goat head and his lion head are arguing… a snake will just make things worse.”
“No, no. It
will be fine,” Bodhi said. “Look… the
boys have almost finished.”
Her heart
was pounding and Naida squinted into the crackling, roaring funnel into the
sky, and only saw one figure, dancing. Re’s face, Amun’s face, Re’s face
flickering, gold, blue, gold, blue. “playmate,
enemy, frenemy, playmate, friend, enemy, playmate…”
Bast, in her leopard form,
circled around the edge of the conflagration, stroking up against it, bunting
her head into it like a house cat greeting people. Her golden fur stood up in
electrical spikes and every time she purred and stropped the Gods’ fire it
eased a little, it calmed a little. She
drew off the wildest sky fires and drained the energy into the stone under all
four paws.
Wadjet reared up, hood spread,
but her green scales washed darker and Sybaris’s magical voice soared up to the
sky, spreading like ungent over a wound. She sang of peace, and an end to rage.
She sang of glorious sunsets with the wind tossing palm leaves across it,
clacking. She sang of the cooling wind out of the night desert riffling over
the Nile in the dark when Re rested in his boat, rocking as though in His
mother’s arms.
Naida found
herself crooning with her, Kurama sitting up pretty on the edge of Bohdi’s
lotus, her white fur reflecting blue, her voice high and wild, answered by
Anubis out in the sand somewhere.
Finally,
finally the fires and the lightning around the Gods subsided and there was only
one figure there. One avatar. A terrified silence held the Temple in its
fist as everyone waited to hear the pronouncement of God. He diminished from
twice manheight to a short little boy, still under scalp-lock. He shimmered all over his skin, golden but
shone blue as the edge of a white-hot fire. His face was solemn but his eyes
glinted as if from the excitement of play and a slow smile spread across his
face. The stone at His feet healed itself, and the green palms and gardens that
had been damaged grew as if under a gentle sun.
The fountains flowed clean and clear. “We are now reconciled. We are Amun-Re. And we will speak to Our High
Priest.”
Bodhi smiled as Naida buried her
face in Kurama’s fur, fingers buried in her ruff. Kurama snuffled in her ear and made her yip
and sit up when her cold nose and licking tongue tickled her there. “Hey!”
Bast
bounded up into the lotus and flopped down across Bodhi’s lap, demanding to be
petted, still crackling from every hair of her pelt. “All better.
I want to chase that meddling Priest all the way to the First cataract
and play ‘dead mousie’.”
Bodhi
petted her fur flat, sparks flying up into the blue sky, barely visible. “You’re such a cat.”
“Aren’t I
though?” She started purring and flattened Naida under one velvet paw, though
gently, and started washing her as though she were a kitten with a dirty head.
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