The Sacred Scarab Read Online Free PDF Page A

tug of war. ‘Does she know it’s broken?’
    Guilt spread over the boys’ faces, and they rushed to pick up the toy. Isis bent over her work again, half-heartedly grinding a batch of grain. Mut watched her for a moment, looking bored, then struggled to her feet and hopped to the courtyard door.
    ‘Careful, Mut!’ exclaimed Isis. ‘Don’t you dare hurt your ankle again. You’ve got to get better quickly.’
    Mut wasn’t listening to her. She was craning her neck, trying to hear what was going on inside. ‘I haven’t even seen him,’ she complained. ‘All this fuss about someone I haven’t even met!’
    ‘He’s just a peasant,’ said Isis. ‘I’ve got to dance alone, thanks to him.’
    Mut hopped back across the courtyard and flopped down. ‘I bet Father would have made you dance anyway, even if he hadn’t shown up.’
    Isis shook her head, pushing the grain back and forth on the grinding stone. ‘I’m not so sure. We have enough work at the moment.’ Then she looked at her dance partner curiously. ‘Do you know where your father came from?’
    ‘What d’you mean?’ Mut’s face was sharp.
    Isis hesitated. She had always taken Mut’s family for granted. She and Hopi were the ones with all the problems: their parents had died a horrible death, pulled underwater by crocodiles, and then they had begged on the streets until Paneb had taken them in. It had never occurred to her that Mut’s family might have its own stories to tell.
    ‘Well, Nefert and Sheri and Kia . . . they grew up as dancers, didn’t they?’ she said slowly. ‘Their mother taught them to play music.’
    ‘Yes. My grandmother taught them everything,’ said Mut proudly. ‘It runs in the family.’
    ‘But not in your father’s family,’ suggested Isis. ‘Paneb doesn’t play music, does he? Well, he only keeps time, with the clappers.’
    Mut clearly didn’t like this line of thinking. ‘So what?’ she snapped. ‘You don’t have a father at all.’
    ‘I know that. I wasn’t saying –’
    ‘What are you saying?’
    Isis knew better than to push it. ‘Nothing,’ she sighed, and scooped up a handful of flour from the grinder. ‘Come and look at this flour. Do you think it’s fine enough yet?’
    .
    Hopi limped through the outskirts of Waset to the south, passing donkeys carrying vast bales of straw and others heavily loaded with grain. The harvest was almost at an end. Hopi listened to the thwack of boys’ sticks on the donkeys’ backs and gazed out over the fields, which were mostly just stubble now. It was easy to see the rich, black earth, made up of the silt that the River Nile left behind each year.
    Hopi wandered on to a bare field and made his way along the edge with his eyes trained on the ground. Then he spotted what he was looking for and stopped. It was a little mound of donkey dung. He poked at it with his stick. Nothing. It was fresh; perhaps the scarabs hadn’t found it yet.
    He kept walking. A little further on there was another pile of dung – and, this time, it looked almost alive. Crawling all over it were about fifteen scarabs, their shiny black wings glinting in the sun. Hopi squatted down on his haunches and watched.
    The beetles were working furiously. They were using the donkey dung to create perfectly round balls, each one several times the size of the beetles themselves. Hopi realised he’d never watched them closely before. It was incredible. How did they manage to make their dung balls so round? And so big? Some of them had finished making the balls and were beginning to push them away. That was amazing, too. They more or less stood on their heads and rolled their dung balls along with their hind legs. It made Hopi smile.
    The pile of donkey dung was soon demolished. Some of the beetles fought, trying to claim another’s hard work. But most of them kept on pushing their balls away, away, up and over ruts of earth and between stalks of corn. Hopi wondered how they knew where they were