Anubis weighs the dead before he lets them pass, and he does it without hurry. At Llanfeddar, a salt-marsh village where the reed beds meet the old burial mounds, a fisherman reported that the jackal-headed god had stopped at his net-shed one afternoon and lifted a drying eel by its tail, as though judging its heft, before setting it back exactly where it hung. I have set three accounts side by side. The first is from Kellan Dray, the net-mender who owns that shed. He says the god stood in the doorway for as long as it takes to boil a kettle, that the shadow he threw was longer than the god himself, and that nothing was taken. Kellan does not mind the visit. He minds that the eel, which he had been saving, would not dry properly afterward and went to the cats.
The second account comes from a widow at Aberglen, a hill hamlet of nine houses above the marsh. She says Anubis came to her gate the night her husband died and waited there, perfectly still, until she opened it. He did not enter. He held a small bronze scale low at his side, one pan dipping, and the pan was filled with nothing she could see. She adds, with some dignity, that he wiped his paws on her step first.
The third account is the shepherd's, and the least reliable, since he was drunk. He swears the god is taller than a doorframe and that his fur is black as pitch with a blue sheen like a crow's wing. I took my own measurement the following week. Using a knotted length of twine held against the doorpost at Kellan's shed, where the god leaned in, I marked the height of the muzzle's tip against the lintel: seven feet and two inches, give or take a thumb. The twine agrees with the shepherd on height and with nobody on the color, which in good light is closer to deep umber than black.
People near the marshes follow one rule. They never leave a full cup of water on a windowsill overnight, because it is taken as a sign that someone in the house is ready to be weighed. Empty cups are left out instead, rim down, and the practice is so common that tinkers passing through assume the villagers are careless with their crockery. Anubis leaves behind a track like a very large dog's, with a long middle toe, pressed so lightly into wet mud that it fills with water only after an hour. Trackers follow it to the edges of graveyards and lose it there. None of the three witnesses can say what the scale weighs against when no heart is present, or whether the god has ever once found the pan level.
- Classification
- Jackal-headed god of the dead
- Habitat
- Salt marshes, graveyards, thresholds
- Danger
- Moderate
- Size
- 7 ft 2 in at the muzzle
- Activity
- Always
- Realm
- The weighing hall of the dead
- Binomial
- Canis psychopompus
- Diet
- Offerings of water and dried fish
- Temperament
- Patient, exacting, unhurried