Narmer

Narmer was a young man who supported himself and his parents by working on the construction of a pyramid.

His parents, too, had once worked on another pyramid—one whose construction had already been completed. Entering it, or even approaching it, was strictly forbidden, which raised countless questions in the mind of the curious young man, whose greatest desire was to study things that remained unexplained.

Yet the purpose of the enormous structure was supposedly well known and openly proclaimed: it was meant to immortalize the name of the immortal Pharaoh, who would soon turn 167 years old.

That explanation did not satisfy Narmer.

Something did not fit.

Nothing could immortalize the Pharaoh more than the simple fact that he was already immortal.

The pyramid serves some other purpose, he thought.

As time passed, Narmer tried more and more often to bring up the subject in conversation, both at home and at work. Yet no one seemed interested—not even his closest friend, who appeared fascinated by almost everything except pyramids.

That irritated Narmer more than he cared to admit.

One evening, as usual, he sat beside a fire on the elevated slope where he spent nearly every night after work, alone with his thoughts.

At some point, he fell asleep.

This was nothing unusual. In fact, his mother or father would often come looking for him when he failed to return home, only to find him asleep in that same place. Once it became a regular occurrence, even they eventually gave up trying to bring him back.

But there was something unusual about that particular night.

A roar woke him.

The fire had gone out. It must have been around midnight.

The sound stirred an unfamiliar, instinctive fear in him.

It resembled neither the cry of a man nor the roar of any beast he knew.

It came from the forest near the river.

For a moment, fear overcame Narmer's curiosity.

Only for a moment.

He sprang to his feet and ran toward the forest.

Pharaoh's armed soldiers were already rushing in the same direction.

There must have been around thirty of them.

Narmer moved into the forest with his head low.

He no longer needed a reason to be afraid. The soldiers running ahead of him were reason enough.

Something serious was happening. He understood that much, even if nothing else.

He followed the path toward the river, keeping his distance from the last of the running men. Branches marked his arms. He did not stop to look at them.

The trees thinned.

The river came into view, dark and moving, indifferent to everything happening on its banks.

There was no trace of the beast.

Narmer crouched behind a tree, low enough that the bark scraped his shoulder, and waited.

He did not have to wait long.

It came out of the forest on the far side of the clearing, walking upright on two legs, and it kept coming, and it did not stop being large the way a man is large. It was closer to three meters than to anything Narmer had a word for.

The soldiers closed around it in a half-circle.

They attacked.

The beast fought.

It was only then, over the clatter of spears and the soldiers' shouting, that Narmer realized the thing was speaking.

It was begging.

Don't kill me. Let me go.

The words did not fit the size of the creature that spoke them. Narmer had imagined, without meaning to, that something so large would have no need of words at all.

It crushed two soldiers against the ground with a single motion, almost careless, the way a man might swat something smaller than himself without looking. The others fell back.

The beast turned for the river. It meant to disappear into the water and be gone.

It never reached it.

Something came down out of the sky.

Narmer looked up before he understood why, and there was a shape falling, as if it had stepped off a mountain no one else could see. It struck the river in a single black line and the water opened to take it.

The splash reached Narmer even where he crouched, far back among the trees. He felt it on his face and did not move to wipe it away.

For a moment the river held both of them, the beast and the thing that had fallen from nowhere, and gave nothing back.

Then the water broke a second time.

The figure rose out of the river with the beast already dead in its hand, gripped by the throat, and threw the body onto the bank before its own feet had touched ground.

Narmer saw it clearly now.

It looked less born than made. Tall, and lean in a way that seemed deliberate, like something shaped rather than grown. The skin was pale, almost without color. A black line ran down the face, splitting it cleanly into two halves, and behind that line the eyes burned white, with no pupil, no iris, nothing that made them look like eyes at all.

It turned to the soldiers.

"Make sure this never happens again," it said. "Or you will be next."

Then it was gone, and the soldiers were gone with it, and Narmer was alone.

He stayed where he was.

He could not have said, afterward, how long. His legs had gone numb beneath him and he had not noticed. He kept his eyes on the place where the body had been thrown down, though there was nothing left to see, and he kept thinking the same thought over and over without arriving anywhere with it.

He waited until he was certain no one remained.

By the time he trusted his legs to carry him, the sky had begun to lighten at its edge. Almost morning.

He stood. He began to walk home.

He had gone only a few steps when something made him turn.

Another shape stood in front of him.

Smaller than the first. Wrong in its own way—the limbs did not sit right, the shoulders did not sit right, as though whoever had made it had been in less of a hurry to get it right the second time.

Narmer's mouth opened to scream.

A hand closed over it before the sound could leave him, closed so hard he felt his skull bend under the pressure of it.

"Please don't scream," the creature said. "I won't hurt you."

Narmer could not have screamed now even if the hand had let him. He made himself nod instead, once, very small.

"If you scream," it said, quieter, "I will tear your head off before they arrive."

Narmer's eyes went wide. He nodded again, faster this time, and kept nodding, as if the motion itself might be enough to keep him alive until morning.