The Weighing of the Heart

Neferu sat straight in her boat, waiting. She had passed all the gates of Duat so far: she had spoken the spells correctly, as advised by the priests when she was alive. The guardians at the gates had been invariably terrible at first sight, but as soon as she had uttered the words, they had let her pass unharmed, and had even granted her their blessings.

Now Neferu looked ahead as her boat glided on, no sound reaching her ears. Come to think of it, so far she had only heard herself recite the successive spells; the guardians’ voices she had heard in her head. Neferu strained to hear something, but instead she discerned a light ahead. A vertical line that became slowly wider like yet another set of gates opening, and something -no, someone- standing there.

The jackal head looked at her with glittering red eyes, and Neferu cringed. This was Anubis, the God of Death himself. That meant she had finally arrived in the Hall of Two Truths, where her soul was going to be weighed. Neferu could not believe that a soul could be afraid, but she felt terrified. As alarming as the guardians had been, they were not comparable to the presence of Anubis. Twice as large as a man, his eyes pierced her, and he radiated a power that she could feel in her stomach: the power to grant her a timeless afterlife.

Her boat came to a halt, and Neferu raised, her gaze fixed on Anubis. She stepped off the boat, and the Death God moved aside. Only then did she notice that somehow his presence had hidden the rest of the chamber, which she now could see. The Hall of Two Truths was a simple room, its limestone walls covered in hieroglyphics. Neferu could read, but she found it difficult to read these: the words moved, the hieroglyphics becoming alive and visiting each other. She could have sworn that an ibis and an eagle took flight and left the hall altogether.

In the centre of the room lied the Scales of Maat, as large as a man, and Neferu saw two more beings there. Immediately by the Scales was Thoth, God of Knowledge and Scribe of the Gods, a papyrus in his hand, waiting to record the result of her ordeal. And behind Thoth…

If Neferu had felt doubt before Anubis, now she knew certain terror, for here was Ammit, Great of Death, the Devourer of the Dead, the Eater of Hearts, waiting for her to fail her test. The great beast was lying on the ground, her powerful hind legs on one side and her forepaws extended in front of her, as relaxed as a cat basking in the sun by a window watching the Nile. But what made Neferu panic was that in her long, flat snout, Ammit was happily gnawing on a human hand. The great beast winked at Neferu sarcastically, and inside her head she felt Ammit’s hunger, making her recoil in terror.

Anubis made a compelling gesture towards the Scales. Neferu flinched and started reciting her negative confession, the list of the forty-two sins she had not committed. Then Anubis showed her his two fists. He opened his left hand, and Neferu’s heart was in it. Anubis placed the heart on the left dish and turned to stare at her. Then he opened his right hand: it was empty, but he pointed up, and down fluttered Maat’s feather, the weight of truth, to rest on the right dish.

Ammit stirred. Neferu gasped.

***

This is my entry for the Weekly Writing Exercise: March 15–22, 2015 at the Writer’s Discussion Group in Google+.

The prompt this week was to write a story inspired by the picture above, which shows a great crocodile happily chomping on a human hand. But the challenge was that we could not use the word crocodile or alligator… A Wikipedia check tells me I could have used Indian ghavials, but that would have been cheating a lot, since I really didn’t know the animal in the first place.

What I did remember, however, was the Weighing of the Heart ritual in ancient Egypt, and that the beast Ammit was there, waiting to devour the heart of those souls who failed their test. The trick is that Ammit’s body was composed of parts of the three largest men-devourers the ancient Egyptians knew, as the Wikipedia points out: she had the hind quarters of a hippo, the forelegs of a lion, and the head of a crocodile. And it just clicked into place.

This is the result.