Ra awakened in the east and rose as Khepera, the scarab beetle.

By late morning he’d shed his mighty carapace, allowing the full glory of his personage to fall upon the earth. Several hours later, as he sank low toward the western horizon, he assumed the crown and wrappings of Osiris, in which guise he would descend into the Underworld. Far below, holding a cracked clay pot in one hand and towing his four-year-old daughter with the other, Bib-useka barely registered the approach of evening.

“Pardon me, ladies,” he said, apologetically shouldering his way through a small knot of women idly chatting in the dusty lane. “I need water.”

The village’s main street was really a path, or perhaps more correctly an alley, albeit one with the olfactory aspect of a sewer, winding through the middle of Bibleb-Akhet’s two-score mud huts. A child of 10 could, at any point along its length, easily stretch out their hands and touch the crumbling walls on either side. Besides the bevy of biddies, traffic was further impeded by a smattering of dogs, roving squadrons of chickens and the occasional donkey that had inadvertently wandered into the reeking maze and had yet to find its way out.

“Blessings on you, Bib-useka,” the women cried, shuffling aside and touching the man and child with their hands as they hurried past. “And may Bibleb’s strength be upon Tinet this night!”

Tossing distracted thanks back over his shoulder, Bib-useka raised the pot before him like a warship’s ram and plowed on, shortly emerging into the orange-painted late-afternoon desert and tacking south along a well-beaten track thickly littered with shards of broken pottery. A cat missing one ear and about half of its fur tailed them a short distance into the waste, then grew suddenly and crushingly bored and lay down where it was. The air was perfectly still, and the dust disturbed by his daughter’s racing feet hung in the air behind her like a rare morning fog. That would have struck Bib-useka as ominous if he’d been inclined to notice.

“Slow down!” Asha-shen complained. His only child was named “Abundant Hair” because she’d been born with a full six inches of dark, gossamer tresses falling down over her still-unopened eyes, which tresses were now bound together in a thick braid that stretched down to her heels and swung wildly behind her as she galloped along. “Why do we have to run?”

“Because mommy needs water, sweetie.”

Bibleb-Akhet’s only source of water was a muddy well at the bottom of a deep wadi a good half-mile distant. Lined with nothing more substantial than native dirt and endless toil, the well was forever falling in upon itself and the men of the village were forever digging it out again. North and south of the well, winding between high crumbling banks for a hundred yards in either direction, the wadi’s floor resembled an unlikely green river of vines and trees and grasses. It was there, 50 feet below the Red Land’s scorching face, that the Kher-Bibleb cultivated what fruits and vegetables and animal greens as could be coaxed from the stubborn stream-bed to sustain the meager life/health/strength of Bibleb’s Horizon. A sturdy stone basin perpetually full of sparkling sy-Sobek product ranneth over a short walk east of the village, but that liquid treasure was quite expressly not intended to refresh the Children of Bibleb. As he and Asha made their careful way down the steep, narrow defile leading to the gully’s bottom, Bib-useka silently prayed that he would, just this once, find the troublesome hole intact. To his surprise, it was. He set down his jug and dropped to his knees, bending low and gently striking his forehead on the well’s uneven rim.  

“Hapi will open his mouth and water will pour forth,” he murmured, eyes closed. “Blessed is the gift of Hapi, may his breasts never wither.” He kissed the dirt, shifted ninety degrees and repeated the ritual, then again, then again, until he was certain that Hapi had no valid procedural reason to withhold his benediction. “Hapi is satisfied,” he said, rising to his feet. “Behold his bounty.”

He ordered Asha to stay put. She was happy to, contentedly squatting down and drawing pictures of birds in the packed earth with her tiny finger and softly humming to herself.  Bib-useka quickly lowered the well’s ragged goat-skin basket hand-over-hand into its dark mouth until, perhaps 30 feet down and just beyond the reach of the dying light, he heard it strike water with a muted splash.

“Well, thank Bibleb for small favors,” he muttered, hauling up the rough, fish-grass rope. He was rewarded with a half-gallon of milky brown water. It took about 10 minutes to fill the pot. As anxious as he was, Bib-useka carefully coiled the rope next to the well’s mouth and fortified it with a brief protection spell for good measure. Water and the rituals associated with it were matters of considerable gravity to the people of Bibleb-Akhet.

“The birds are red,” Asha said, regarding her artworks with curiosity.

“Yes, Asha. Red birds.”

Bib-useka hoisted the jar in both hands and started back up the path.

“Stay right behind me. Hurry up, Asha.”

They climbed back onto even ground and retraced their steps toward Bibleb-Akhet, the father’s eyes staring blankly at the beaten earth, his attention already far ahead. Despite the heavy burden in his arms and the even heavier one on his mind, Asha-shen’s father was nevertheless instantly aware when the rapid patter of her footsteps behind him suddenly stopped. He turned impatiently, silently cursing even that momentary delay, but the admonishment that rose in his throat never made it to his lips.

His daughter’s face, ordinarily rather pale for an Egyptian, was the color of boiled beets and facing directly west.

“It’s red, like the birds.”

The tiny square teeth peeping through her smile looked as though they’d been tearing at a fresh kill. Her eyes glinted like polished onyx set down in blood-red pools. Erratic gusts of wind softly played with the loose hair around her temples, blowing them first forward, then back. Bib-useka cursed himself as he realized the whole barren expanse within his field of vision was awash in crimson light. Somehow in his preoccupation he’d failed to receive the warning sent up by the spirits of Asha-shen’s crude representations, and managed not to notice that the world was on fire. He spun around to face the setting sun. Where one would expect to see Osiris shining like burnished copper, the King of the Underworld had instead donned a scarlet cloak and the black underworld seemed to be boiling up through the dim heat-haze to meet him.

“Damn,” he said, instantly chilled to the bone. Bib-useka knew the desert, depended on it for his livelihood and lived at its mercy. “Damn.”