Akhet, Akhet, het, het—

"Aiii," she cried in this blindness, when the eye of God had left her, and in the shadow-world she suspected God's mirth, and delusion.

Aiii, ii, ti! the cliffs gave back. She walked, and the delusion of a river became moisture under her feet, and the pain and the moisture grew— it was a river of blood in the dying of the light; and the cliffs were stained with it; and the shadows multiplied and moved.

"God!" she cried. (And God—god—god—, the stones.)

A jackal came to meet her, beside the riverbed. This was God's brother, and she was uneasy, for the brothers of God were his enemies, and this one was sly. He knew how to steal a soul away in his jaws, and take it down among his shadows before his brother saw. He laughed, and she walked on the blood, sure that she knew the river now, that it was the Dark River she had found; and the jackal-god would wish to lead her if he could.

She bent and gathered up a stone.

"Go away!" she cried. ( Go away-way-way, the cliffs gave back.) She hurled it, and the god jumped aside, then trotted off a few paces and stood in recovered solemnity, his great ears pricked up, with which he hears his brother's thoughts and every counsel in the world. He smiled, and his jackal's teeth were sharp.

She threw another stone, and it became a spear in mid-flight; it became a spear in her mind, and flew with the noise of voices and the sound of waters. She wept when she had cast it, and stood still and shocked, in a place of rocks, in the blindness of God.

A stone turned and clicked. Another moved. She spun about to see, and the stones betrayed her, and she crashed down to her knees, blinking at this stranger the shadows made, this pale shape on whose breast a pectoral glittered in the wan last light: and on whose wrists the sheen of night-wrapped gold. Gold lapped her waist and spilled like flood on her thighs, and the linen of her robe was night-bound white; and the smell of her was like the smell of myrrh and smoke.

"Goddess," said Akhet, in the blindness of God, when he searched the worlds for his brothers and sisters, their doings. But one of the gods was surely here; and another was there, the jackal in the shadows; and Akhet forgot the stone on which her hand had fallen. Her knees quaked under her, for the goddess walked the trail of her blood and her face was the hollow-cheeked face of the queens of the dust. Her eyes were the pits of their eyes; and her mouth held the sere, fixed pleasure of their mouths, which hold secrets and do not share.

"What is your name?" that mouth asked.

"Akhet," said Akhet.

"And again: what name?"

"Akhet."

"Again: what name?"

It was a spell, Akhet was sure, and her bowels went to water and the wounds of her feet stung. She stank of sweat and trembled, and remembered the stone in her hand, so that her hand began to shake. She wished to throw that stone. But her own name froze in her mouth and stopped in her throat and barred her breath, or her soul would have come out into the night that moment, into the goddess' hands.

"It is not your name," the goddess said, and it was not. She was robbed and desolate and shivered in the cold. She had no hope then, that God would look and drive her Death away. God would open his silver eye but she would have no more name than the other secrets of this plain, and she would be no more than that to him.

"Mine is Neit," the goddess said.

It was a Death. There were many. This was hers; and she became calm then, and put her stone neatly back among the other stones. She remembered she carried things. One was an empty waterskin. One was a sheathed sword. One was a quiver of arrows, but she had lost the bow. She gathered these things into her lap, against her knees, and held to them as hers. But the goddess sat down before her, her fine linen and her gold glimmering in God's blindness. Her smell was sweet attar and lotus amid the myrrh. "Why have you come here?" the goddess asked.

She tried to recall. She hunted this memory through her wits and it turned and leapt on her, black and sudden, so that she shook and hugged the remnants of herself.

"I came to die," she said; and a portion of herself came back to her, so that she winced and rocked with the grief of it, clutching at the sword. Red blood ran on sand and swirled in river currents, scarlet thread in brown. Cities burned. Tombs stood desolate. "Where have I come?" She blinked and lifted her eyes and gazed about the cliffs. There was no river, only a dry bed of stones between dead banks. "Goddess, where have I come?"

"Where you are. Lift up the sword. Lift up the sword, child." She blinked, clenched the hilt to draw it closer. It was her defense. This alone she had. But the hilt slid from the sheath and the blade was broken.

— had broken, in her hand. The children wailed, wailed in the fire and smoke; the chariots swept down on the morning gates—

She shook and trembled. The quiver spilled arrows of spoiled fletch-ings and dulled points. The sheath fell empty at her knees. She cast the blade after it and bowed her head and wept.

"What happened, daughter?" The voice came gently from those sere, awful jaws. "What became of the children?"

"O Neit, the chariots, the bitter swords—"

"Iron," the goddess named them. "The swords are iron." And the word went through her bones.

"No," she cried, and pressed her hands against her eyes. "O goddess, my children—"

"You fought."

"They killed my children!"

"They burned your cities."

"My cities. . . ."

She shuddered and wiped her eyes. There were bracelets on her wrists. They were an archer's bracelets. Her right hand had an archer's calluses. And some of herself came back. Her back went straighten She stared at her death with her chin lifted and her heart beat stronger. "Can we not be done with what you have to do?"

"What is your name?"

A pain struck her heart, bleak and terrible.

— the jaws of crocodiles, the dead devoured, the mummies of kings hurled into the waters with the lately dead, stripped of all their gold—

"I lost," she said to the goddess. "I lost. Is there more name than that?"

"Bronze swords," the goddess said, "are no match for iron. Weak metal breaks."

"We had no iron."

"They gave your children to the crocodiles."

" We fought!"

(— fought, fought, the echoes said.)

"You fought. You fled. This is the unshadowed land. God burns it with his left eye and his right scours its secrets to the surface. Here is the resting place."

" This? This is paradise?"

"For the railed, the lost, those who forget their names. Those who give them up."

"I gave nothing up!"

"Would you do battle here?"

"For what? My soul?"

"Your name."

She drew a breath that ached with myrrh and lotus. With the smell of eternity. She let it go and laughed a weak, tearful laugh. Something broke then, like a scar tearing in her heart; but torn, it let the breath gust from her and come in again greater than before. She thought of her dead and her cities, of the thunder of the chariots like the wings of God. She rose to her feet with the sword hilt in her hand, and its pitiful small blade. The goddess rose, and the wind stirred her robes with the scent of dried leaves and sunbaked death.

"And if I lose, O Neit?"