The blade that cut out my tongue was chipped. It was the Nubians who did it. Afterward, they packed hot ash into the wound to stop the bleeding, threw me aboard the Sun Boat, and sold me to Pharaoh as a laundry slave.
They don't know that three years ago, my sister was carried out of this palace with a hole in her stomach.
Pharaoh suffers from headaches. On the full moon, the pain is so bad he can barely stay on his knees. He locked me in a seven-story tower and came every night to listen to me breathe. He said the breath in my lungs could quiet the scorpions in his head.
I searched beneath the floorboards for three days. Under the third stone slab, I found nineteen broken fingernails. Each one had words carved into it. The last one belonged to my sister.
Three years later, I returned wearing a veil. He was sitting in the infirmary, rubbing his temples. I reached out to take his pulse, and he suddenly grabbed my wrist.
“The rhythm of your breathing,” he said, lifting his face, “is just like that woman in the tower three years ago.”
My other hand already had a needle pressed against his Adam's apple.
“Pharaoh, that mark on your scepter is my sister's blood. You never wiped it off.”
His fingers loosened. Mine didn't.
This time, it was my turn to count his breaths.
The Nile does not shelter the mute.
But beneath the palace of Thebes, an entire nest of ghosts has made its home.
