THE STRIKER OF IUNU

The Rise of Nesuhui, Servant of Ra

Three years passed in water, linen, and silence.

Nesuhui grew tall and thin.

He learned to read the temple’s rhythms the way his father had read the river.

When he turned fourteen, Ptahankh spoke for him before the elders, and the boy was chosen as a wab, a “pure one,” the lowest rank of the priesthood proper.

Becoming wab meant surrendering the body to the god’s rules.

A barber shaved Nesuhui from scalp to ankle, even the eyebrows and lashes, because hair could harbor impurity.

He chewed natron, the salt of the dry lakes, to cleanse his mouth.

He bathed in the sacred lake four times a day, twice by sunlight and twice in the dark, and the night plunges left him shaking.

He wore only white linen, never wool or leather, for those came from dead animals.

Ptahankh explained that purity was not about vanity.

The god’s image was treated as a living king, and no one approaches a king unclean.

Nesuhui was placed in the third phyle.

Priests in this age were mostly part-time, serving in monthly rotations, then returning to their homes and trades.

Each month a new phyle took up the work.

It kept the priesthood from becoming one family’s possession, and Nesuhui liked that.

His duties were many.

He carried the barque, the portable shrine in which the god traveled on festival days, bearing its gilded poles on his shoulders with a dozen other priests.

He helped prepare the daily offerings: bread, beer, cuts of beef, geese, onions, figs, and water.

The god’s statue was fed, clothed, and anointed each day as a king would be.

Nesuhui once asked Ptahankh whether Ra truly ate it all.

“The god takes the essence,” the old man said.

“Then the food is carried out and shared among the priests, and what remains goes to the poor at the gate. Nothing is wasted. That is ma’at.”

Merykhet had also been made wab.

His quiet war began on the morning of the inspection.

Before dawn, Nesuhui laid his linen out beside the lake as he always did.

When he lifted it to dress, he saw nothing wrong.

Only when the chief inspector’s eye passed over the line of priests and stopped at him did Nesuhui look down.

On the left hem, a thumb-wide smear of soot, black against the white.

“Impure,” the inspector said, and the word dropped into the court like a stone into a well.

Nesuhui was sentenced to a month scrubbing the lake steps by hand.

As he knelt and began, he saw Merykhet pass along the colonnade, his linen perfect, his smile small and private.

He could prove nothing.

Ptahankh warned him of this on the first evening.

“In this house, accusation without evidence is itself a dishonor, and the one who makes it carries the stain. Be patient. The truth does not need your shouting.”

So Nesuhui scrubbed.

Day after day, he worked the algae from the stone, and thought of the broken water jar.

On the twenty-first day, something pale caught against the lowest step, lifted by the lake’s slow current.

It was a scrap of papyrus, torn and water-stained, written in a cramped hieratic hand.

He could read only part of it: “...the barque in darkness... when the serpent... the words that must not be spoken in the house of...”

The rest had dissolved.

But Nesuhui knew a forbidden spell when he saw one.

Any other boy might have kept it, hoping to bargain.

Instead he dried it carefully in the sun and carried it to Ptahankh.

The old man read it twice and said nothing for a long while.

“Do you know what you have found?”

“No, my lord.”

“Neither do I,” said Ptahankh, and slipped the fragment into his sleeve.

“But I know what you did with it. Most men would have kept it.”

He looked at the boy with something close to respect.

“Finish your scrubbing, Nesuhui. This is not the end of it.”

NEXT CHAPTER: THE READER OF SACRED WORDS

The god’s words are alive, and Nesuhui is about to learn to speak them.

Behind the doors of the House of Life, hieroglyphs hum with power, the Pyramid Texts whisper of eternity, and one mispronounced syllable can shatter a ritual.

Nesuhui discovers a voice like thunder. So does Merykhet.

A recitation contest. The elders watching. A rival with a secret inked on his wrist.

Will Nesuhui expose the cheat, or play the longer game?

And what lies inside the locked cedar box a dying priest presses into his hands, to be opened only when the sun is eaten?

The duel of voices begins!