She had grasped, nally, the nature of the thing that had to be undone. Militant monotheism. The Bible had it backward, it seemed.

The rst crime was not disobedience to the absolute, but the absolute itself. Man had not sinned against God; Almighty God had sinned against life. And life-in all its forms-would not be whole, or safe, again until it once more had its names and voices.

Jehuti would be pleased, for she would tell the story that he told her, the one in which she lived and acted. The others-Derek, Auset, Yussif-all had their stories too, but she was the scribe. She would sit down with them in the coming days and months and weave in their accounts.

Only Vanderschmitt remained opaque. What drove him to pursue her with such zeal was still a mystery. How could a man who was merely irksome, who in his tenacity was not unlike her, become her murderer? And why had the gods not saved her?

And then there was Nekhbet, whom she had begun to love and who still stood among the columns of the great hypostyle hall. Valerie approached the goddess, hesitant, wondering if anything was left of the woman who had kissed her. Who had twice pressed warm human lips upon hers.

The hall was somber but the goddess seemed to contain her own light, for Valerie sensed every detail of her. How stunning she was, a woman's form harboring ferocious power. The simple sheath clung to her from midbreast to midcalf, and Valerie could see now that it was no dress but a coating of tiny feathers, iridescent black, like a crow's breast. The ageless eyes of Nekhbet turned toward her, then to the paper in her hand. "You have begun?"

"Yes. A few thoughts. But I'll have to talk to the others as well.

There are so many questions." Valerie glanced toward the front of the hall. In the transparent darkness she could just make out the forms of * 270 *

her friends who waited. "A curious holy family, isn't it? One child with three parents."

"An adjustment to the original plan," the goddess replied coolly.

"We had not reckoned with human emotions. Always so troublesome."

She looked out at the dawn gray, which had sent a strip of dull light along the stone walk at the center of the hall. The morning breeze oated through the columns, lifting a few strands of her pitch-black hair. "But see, the New Year begins. You must leave now."

"I thought we would have more to talk about." Valerie tried to discern emotion in the majestic face but could not. "I mean...that night, in the Bedouin camp. You kissed me..."

The goddess looked away. Her voice was velvet, but toneless.

"Enlightenment. Such was given to every Pharaoh."

Valerie's face grew warm. "The Kiss of the Gods, as on the tomb wall." She closed her eyes in disbelief. "Of course. How could I be so stupid? It just seemed so...personal."

"We meant it so, to win your devotion." Nekhbet still did not look at her.

"My devotion?" Valerie was aghast. "You mean so that I would go to my death for you? So that I would descend to the Duat and be given my assignment?"

The goddess shook her head. "It was not so simple as that. We were in a struggle with Seth. As he moved Vanderschmitt, so we had to move you. He had also to be taken out."

"Vanderschmitt was part of the scheme too?" Valerie laid her hand on her forehead. "Oh, this just gets better and better. You manipulated my affections, my fears. And you assumed that once I was in the Duat, I would forget all feelings."

Nekhbet looked out toward the courtyard at the waiting family.

"Feelings. I have had quite enough of mortal feelings. They have been a plague on the great plan for centuries."

"Centuries? What are you talking about?"

"About your lineage, which we chose for Jehuti's noble story and yet has failed in one way or another in every generation. Your mother nearly ruined it, and now you might do it as well. Will you never control your desires?"

"My mother?" Valerie's voice became a whisper. "What has my mother got to do with this?" She searched her memory of a woman who * 271 *

no longer had face or voice, and found nothing.

The goddess gazed back at her, compelling black eyes holding her in place.

"Monique Foret was much like you. She was our chosen one, in her day, but she failed us. You provoked Seth, and we could manage that, but she surrendered to him."

"My mother 'surrendered' to the god Seth? What does that mean, exactly?"

"Not to the god. But to his chosen one, Vanderschmitt, from the lineage of his priest Sethnakht. He knew your mother and got her with child. But if you give the world our story, Seth can be defeated after all."

Valerie shook her head as if forcing herself to wakefulness. "Wait.

You're telling me my mother knew Volker Vanderschmitt? That she...

was pregnant by him?"

"That's what I am telling you. This man was your father."

Valerie staggered back as if struck. Leaning on her hand against the stone pillar, she shook her head again. "It's not possible. Jehuti himself said I was a child of Rekemheb."

"And so you are. By your lineage you are the child of Hathor's priest, but also, and more recently, of a man of Seth. The two bloods mingle in you. His visions of us were much like yours, but tainted by the zeal of a follower of the Aton. In your quiet hours you can witness the troubled workings of his soul. They will be familiar, for you live in the Aton world. But now you have seen our world as well, and you must choose between the two."

Valerie walked close again. "Look, you keep springing new information on me, revealing these mind-shattering secrets. But when will I know all the secrets? At what point will I know enough to make this choice, between my world and yours? All I can be sure of is what I knew before I met you, and that's quite a bit. I am not a blank slate that you can write on. I have a story too."

Impulsively, Valerie stepped across the distance between them and took the majestic head in her free hand. Surprise registered on the goddess's face, as it had once on Valerie's own. The divine lips of the Mistress of the Desert, Goddess of the White Crown, opened slightly in astonishment; then mortal lips covered them.

The goddess inched and her empty hand rose in the air. Valerie pressed the kiss, warming with excitement, as if the body she leaned * 272 *

against could be excited in return, as if the nubile mouth, tasting still of cardamom, were not of unfathomable age.

Memory of their last kiss, when the Bedouin Nekhbet had thrown her down and answered her passion with pedagogy, returned to her. It angered her to have the kiss explained away, the passion nulli ed. This now was her response, and she was the one who threw the other woman down and answered smug instruction with unashamed desire.

She pressed the feather-clad goddess up against a pillar, felt a woman's thighs against her own thighs and the panting breath ow from human nostrils across her cheek. Her hand that had reached ardently for the Bedouin breast searched now again, with more insistence. And when she found it, rm and womanly, she caressed it once as she invaded the moist interior of the goddess's mouth.

A familiar vision ignited then between them like an explosion, and she soared again above the Nile. But now two entities, not one, spun together in the timeless air, and two wills contested. The ancient predator dominated rst, pulling the young spirit back into murky memories of the beginning. Steaming swamps alive with prey appeared beneath them, reeking of nourishment and blood, of fecundation and decay.

Then youthful wings beat against the weight of centuries and forced the turning, so that the two of them rose upward. The land below them dropped away to savanna and then to desert fed by a single twisting vein of water owing northward on the broken shoulder of a continent. The landmass shrank away, revealing dark blue waters on both sides and a gauze of white clouds that swirled across its center.

Still the ground receded, the eastern and western horizons curving in to join at the north and south. Finally the earth appeared in its entirety, a frothy blue-beige-green sphere suspended in black space.

Their commingled being that hovered over it broke apart again; the youthful one gave forth the image while the ancient one beheld it, awestruck, dazzled.

"Rekhi renusen. Djedi medjatsen," reverberated throughout space and time, and the voice of the Vulture-goddess gave it back in the new language, laughing. "I know their names and I will tell their story."

"Val, honey, what's taking so long?" A familiar sound broke the vision. The euphoria ebbed away to the sense of solid ground, decayed stone columns, and the smell of mold from under the high temple ceiling.

* 273 *

Valerie opened her eyes to see she still held the goddess as a woman in her arms.

Nekhbet was quiescent, and for the briefest moment tenderness ickered across her face. Then she drew away. "Let me go." She twisted sideways, and the dark feather covering began to grow up over her shoulders.

"No, wait. Not yet," Valerie pleaded. "Look at me." She held the goddess a moment longer. "You do care for me. Say it, please, before you go."

Fathomless black eyes looked away. "You do not know what you do," she said, and twisted away again into empty air. Nothing remained of her but the utter of invisible wings.

"Valerie, hurry. We've got to get out of here before the tourists come!" Derek's voice summoned her again, now molto agitato.

She hurried forward from the shadows of the hypostyle hall into the sacred court, where the new family waited. "Happy Egyptian New Year," Derek said and started forward.

"Happy New Year," she greeted back and followed a step behind him.

"So, is this prophecy done?" Auset looked back over her shoulder.

"Can our lives go back to normal now?"

Derek draped his arm over Valerie's shoulders. "Well, my friend's got a book to write, and we still don't know what that sun-rising-in-the-west thing is all about."

Auset shifted the sleeping infant from the crook of her arm to her shoulder. "I wouldn't worry about that, after everything else we've been through. Whatever it means, I doubt it has anything to do with us."

Walking behind the family, Valerie took a long last look around the temple precinct, trying to memorize it. On the eastern side the ruined boundary opened to the plain, offering a long vista to the horizon.

Directly ahead of them the entrance gate-amazingly-was still unguarded. Finally, to her left, a row of glass panels leaned against the western wall. Bathed in the comforting, hopeful light of dawn, every object seemed to warm with anticipation.

Overhead two military jets ripped northeastward across the modern sky. She wondered vaguely where they headed: Saudi Arabia?

Israel? It did not bode well.

* 274 *

Then, with sudden violence, the sun itself burst up from the horizon. Its rst bright light that scorched the eastern sky sparkled also in the glass panels leaning toward the west. Staring horri ed at the glass, Valerie halted as if struck.

"A e sun disk, rising in the west, in the hundredth generation."

Ahead of her, the family walked across the beam of warm re ected light. Valerie watched, appalled, as the ominous western sunrise illuminated rst the sleeping infant's face and then the others, one by one.

* 275 *

About the Author.

Justine Saracen was a college professor for fteen years before leaving academic life for the arts. Her scholarly book, Salvation in the Secular, addressed themes that persisted into later ction: the role of religion in history, the leitmotifs of fanaticism, and the power of language. Her second "career" in opera management provided another favorite theme: the power of music. In the 1990s she leapt onto the freight train of Internet fan ction with "The Pappas Journals," "In the Reich," and "Lao Ma's Kiss." More important was a trip to Egypt with her Egyptologist partner to study the Ptolemaic temples. The experience gave rise to the Ibis Prophecy, a series that follows a lesbian archeologist through modern, medieval, and ancient Egypt. The rst novel of the series, The 100th Generation, was a nalist in the Queerlit 2005 contest. Her upcoming work is the sequel, The Vulture's Kiss (2007). Justine is a member of the Publishing Triangle in New York City and is currently studying Arabic, Islamic history-and parrots.

You can visit her at her Web site at http://justine-saracen.tripod.

com.

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THE IBIS PROPHECY: BOOK TWO.

by Justine Saracen 2007.

VULTURE'S KISS THE IBIS PROPHECY: BOOK TWO.

2007 BY JUSTINE SARACEN. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

ISBN10: 1-933110-87-2.