Folio Two, Page Thirteen (svegra mos itzkron tal-biet)
The Narahji version of the last rites looks similar to what your people do, Nishet. We first stripped my mother of all clothing and bathed her in sweet nopàra milk. Rivulets of grayish-white water flowed from the metal table and gushed across the floor to the front steps. Two nobuarya swooped from the trees to lap up the mixture. The priestess assured me that this was a good thing; the nobuarya take away the impurities of the dead.
Kobeis helped me raise the large bucket of oil to pour over my mother’s forehead. At first, we almost lost control, and a small drop of oil spattered onto her mouth. I mouthed the words I had heard in the play, but minor children are not expected to know them as well as adults. No child can study the Book of Last Rites, even though many kids sneaked glances at the copies in their houses while the adults busied themselves with mundane life. The words pulsated in my breast like electricity. Through the thick incense, I thought I saw a hooded figure in red with exposed breasts in the doorway. My heart came hard in my chest, and my face felt hot and clammy. The vase of oil threatened to slip through my fingers.
We rested the vase on the ground just as my hands gave way. I collapsed to my knees and started to shake. Prayers to various deities flitted in and out of my head, all of them incomplete and rambling, but no one noticed that I had collapsed. The woman had disappeared. Kobeis touched my shoulder; I nearly screamed.
“Hold tight,” she said. “We’re almost done.”
She guided my hands through the remainder of the rituals. I remember speaking. The priestess struck me three times as a proxy for my mother — a way of bringing her into the underworld or back into rebirth, depending on which school of philosophy one entertains, through the suffering of a blood descendant.
My mother recalled in her journals once that she feared death almost more than facing the palatial offices each day. Each morning, she would walk by the scene where she had failed to save Deimo Akaiannyi and pick up hot flat cakes to place on the dead ruler’s memorial in the middle of the street outside. She poured glasses of nut milk over the stone offering place covered in flowers and her cakes; she drank from the cup of the dead and thought about that trollop she had fucked and teased to learn more about the conspiracy. None of what had come after — not even the appointment — had been worth it, at least not in the end. She had nightmares about dying and facing the wrath of Sehutannyi, who always teared my mother to shreds before she could escape into rebirth. Salus saw rebirth as the holy grail of the afterlife; she wanted to use it to forget everything.
Every person who had touched the dead body went to the small purification room sandwiched between Hatkranar’s temple and the crematorium to bathe and shower. Anumë lit incense by the door and prayed for what seemed like an eternity. Tears streamed down her cheeks. No one spoke to her.
At last, the crowds dispersed. More memorial parades would happen over the next few days — I can’t remember how long they lasted because almost immediately after they stopped, one of the senior members of the Progressive Movement was found dead with her assistant in the Movement’s Menarki offices.
For now, the spotlight remembered my mother. It remembered me. Until you told me that the virus destroyed almost everything, I thought that my childhood face would remain in the network archives forever. Why would people give cult to someone whose memory technology has nearly wiped away?
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