THE STRIKER OF IUNU: - The Rise of Nesuhui, Servant of Ra

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CHAPTER ONE: THE SWEEPER OF COURTS

The river had failed that year, and everyone in the marsh village knew what that meant.

Nesuhui was eleven when the inundation came in thin and brown and gave up halfway across the fields.

The Egyptians divided their year by the Nile: Akhet, the flood; Peret, the emergence of the land; Shemu, the harvest.

When Akhet faltered, Peret had nothing to grow and Shemu had nothing to cut.

His father, a reed-cutter whose hands were scarred by sedge, pressed a clay seal and a folded letter into the boy’s palm.

“Your mother’s cousin keeps the granaries of Ra at Iunu,” he said.

“Temples feed those who serve them. Go.”

The boy walked nine days along the river, sleeping in reed thickets and drinking from the shallows.

His mother had named him Nesuhui, “King-Striker,” because he was born the night a storm split the sycamore beside their house.

Nesu for the king of the Two Lands, and hui, to strike.

It was a big name for a boy with no sandals.

On the ninth day he saw it: the great enclosure of Iunu, which the Greeks would one day call Heliopolis, and above its walls the Benben, the sacred stone that caught the morning light like a flame.

The priests taught that the Benben marked the first mound of creation.

In the beginning there was only Nun, the dark and boundless water.

From it rose Atum-Ra, the self-made one, who stood alone on the mound and spat out Shu, the air, and Tefnut, the moisture.

From those two came Geb and Nut, earth and sky, and from them Osiris, Isis, Seth, and Nephthys.

Nine gods in all, the Ennead, born of one will.

This was the oldest house of that story, and Nesuhui had come to its door in dust-caked rags.

The cousin was dead.

A gatekeeper named Ankhaf read the letter twice, sighed, and said, “Ra’s house does not turn away children, but it does not make them comfortable either.”

He assigned the boy to the lowest work in the temple: sweeping the courts before dawn and carrying water for the purification rites.

It was there that Nesuhui met Merykhet.

Merykhet was thirteen, the son of a provincial governor, and had entered the temple as a novice because his father had paid handsomely for the place.

He was handsome, quick-witted, and cruel in the way of children who have never been told no.

On Nesuhui’s first morning he watched the new sweeper carry water across the court, stepped into his path, and let the jar fall.

It shattered on the limestone.

“A reed-cutter’s boy should stay in the reeds,” Merykhet said.

The other novices laughed.

Nesuhui knelt and gathered the pieces without a word, and he remembered the sound of it.

That night, unable to sleep, he rose before the others and crept to the edge of the great court.

In the darkness the priests assembled and faced east.

As the first thread of light crossed the horizon, they raised their voices in the morning hymn to Ra, the rising sun, the one who sails the heavens in his barque and defeats the serpent Apophis each night so that the world might begin again.

Nesuhui had never heard anything like it.

He stood in the shadow of a pillar and let the words settle into him.

He returned the next morning, and the next.

Within a month he knew every line.

One dawn, as the hymn ended, a hand fell on his shoulder.

Nesuhui froze.

The old priest Ptahankh stood behind him, bald as an egg, with eyes clouded at the edges but sharp at the center.

“You were mouthing the third verse,” the old man said.

“You have it wrong. The god rises, he is not risen. The difference matters.”

Nesuhui braced for the lash.

Instead Ptahankh gave a dry little laugh.

“A servant who learns the prayers is already half a priest. Come. You’ll sleep in the servants’ quarters tonight, and eat from the temple bread.”

The boy lowered his head so the old man would not see his face.

Across the court, half hidden behind a column, Merykhet watched them both.

NEXT CHAPTER: THE PURE ONE

Three years. One shaved head. Zero room for error.

Nesuhui steps into the spotless white linen of the wab, where a single smudge can destroy a man.

He bathes in the sacred lake four times a day, shoulders the god’s golden barque, and learns why nothing in Ra’s house is ever wasted.

But Merykhet has been waiting, and he has been patient.

A trap is sprung. A reputation is stained.

Then, in the cold water of the sacred lake, something drifts into Nesuhui’s hands that was never meant to be found: a forbidden spell, a secret as old as the temple itself.

The mystery begins here. Don’t miss it!