Voices in Crystal

by Mary R Woldering

  It is me. he grinned. They really did change me. Marai posed and moved, testing the ripple and the bulge of his new sinew; showing off like a strongman in a caravan of delights. He had become like a statue of a god carved in a city temple wall.

  After a few moments of quiet amazement, he stuck his face close to the reflected image on the watery sheet. Studying the still craggy, hawkish features of his face, he understood it was still had the same face. Instead of being sun burnt to leather, his skin was an even bronze in color and shining in radiant new health.

  The Lady would be pleased. Marai smirked. Damn, I look fine... He chuckled, realizing that the djin who had created the voices of the “Children” must have reached into his dreams to discover his fantasies. They had transformed him into...

  Dumuzi... I’ve become...Dumuzi...he sighed, amazed.

  Something in his forehead felt different. Frowning, he balanced himself against the reflective sheet with his fingertips. A silver-blue fire animated the blackness of his small, deep-set eyes, making them look like roundels of polished ore.

  How strange... He mused. I’m made of flesh, but I shine like metal. These children are crystal stone they say, but they feel like flesh. An odd pulsing between his silvery brows felt like a bug crawling on his skin. The shepherd’s hand swatted at the place instinctively. His fingertips found a kernel-like bead the size of an unripe olive, lodged under the surface of his skin, just where his brows joined.

  Pinching and squeezing the lump, he tried to extrude it, but couldn’t. His thoughts swarmed. A wave of dizziness swept through his body each time he pressed that spot. Eventually, the lump flattened out as if it had never been there and his wits calmed. The shepherd shrugged, now more distracted by the glowing smoothness of his silver-gold hair. It was a kind of gray color, he decided, but it was filled with silver and gold highlights. It swept back from his face to reveal his naturally high forehead and fell from a central part at the crown of his head in soft waves, without kinks or tangled locks. Two pieces at the top looked a little like horns of a river bull. The edge of his hair stopped just below his chin. It was shaped so evenly that the bottom line of it made a continuous sweep into the line of his bluntly cut beard. His upper lip, cheeks and throat were hairless, in the meticulously barbered fashion of wealthier Kina-Ahna men.

  You are pleased? The voices affirmed

  You love beauty

  As much as we.

  The sorrow in your soul

  Blinded you

  The wish/looks of youth

  Your legend king Dumuzi

  You now possess as your own

  Sing to the Lady as a god praying

  Now you are

  A mirror of your kind soul

  “I don’t know what you mean...” Marai sighed aloud, the memory of his fruitless years of mourning for his wife were still too fresh. “The goddess never seemed to notice me before. Are you so sure this’ll work?” He stood back, amazed at the sudden naivete of his thoughts. Something wonderful had happened to him and all he could think about was seducing the loveliest of goddesses. Marai folded his arms across his newly vast chest.

  It was not for god or goddess

  You were changed,

  It was for us.

  You will need strength, wisdom and beauty

  As you carry us

  On our journey

  And as always, courage

  In your heart,

  In your head

  Marai felt for the pulsing lump in his forehead. It had emerged slightly as he contemplated the meaning of the verse that he would “carry” the children.

  “What’s this?” He asked, pointing to the place between his brows, caressing it and noticing it was the same silvery black as his eyes.

  It is a guardian for the star-ward eye.

  We have joined it to one of us,

  One so honored to be a teacher.

  Star-ward eye? He thought incredulously, noticing the pulse in the emerging lump quicken as he did. An image formed in his thoughts like a waking vision. He saw the eyes of ordinary men looking outward the way men did from day to day. Some men ascended to the sky uncovering “stars” on their brows. Most of them, however, rose only so high, They fell back to the ground, the “star eye” in each of them having grown dark and tormented.

  The Children had gifted his body. He knew instinctively it would take him longer to discover everything they had done for his will and heart. Marai already knew his perception of reality was changing. He didn’t feel tired the way he did when he had ached with sorrow in the past. He understood each thought deeply and joyously as it came to him. Every answer he discovered was followed by a strange hunger for more answers.

  He knew one of the Children had been chosen to be his special guardian and teacher. Its knowledge was etched in the tiny stone implanted in his head at this star eye, so-called because that eye understood the stars in the firmament and knew the gods. As that concept shimmered through his thoughts aided by the gentle pulsing of the child stone, Marai felt he had already become part of a thousand thoughts from the past, present, and future from the entire race of the “Children of Stone”. He stepped back from the reflective screen, stumbling a little, because he couldn’t stop shaking. Before he managed to calm himself, the screen had ascended out of sight.

  You understand well,

  O Gifted Marai.

  You are made of flesh...You hunger...

  You must nourish yourself.

  More earning will come later

  In the green place

  There is more than enough

  To nourish you

  Marai had refused the food and drink the voices offered when he arrived. Now more trusting, he obediently padded through the interior of the “star boat”. Without actually seeing through the ever present mist, the shepherd understood that the large open area where he stood was braced out by some sort of interior ribbing. It resembled the chest cavity of a giant beast’s skeleton. A tunnel-like place at one end of the main hall, where he had fallen asleep, rushed with the scent of an immense number of green growing things.

  The shepherd knew he hadn’t left the strange place of light, because he almost saw what could have been the entry portal when he turned around. He had entered a quiet paradise. It was Paradise, the first place of men and the place men wished to go to in death. Vast trunks of trees grew so closely and rose up so high that the light of the sun could only break through the dense canopy of leaves in swirling vapor-filled rays. Roots thicker than his legs reached down into languid dark water like many arms of a fantastic beast and moss grew in wild abandon up the trunks as far as he could see. All was still and silent, broken only by the fluttering down of giant white and pink flower petals, loosened by the gentle breeze.

  Is this real? He found himself asking. It can’t be... The Children’s voices answered in harmony with the one in his brow.

  All living things of Earth come from the water...All.

  In the water you will find peace.

  You will shelter from the storm as a lamb in milk.

  Your soul formed flesh in your mother’s sweet womb ocean.

  It is there you will find rest.

  Marai walked around the lush green pond just at the edge of the water, extending his toe into the shallow part. It was warm. He was about to step into it and enjoy the soothing feeling of the pond when a place just under the surface began to glow and boil with the same light that had surrounded the outside of the star-boat when if first came to the ground. A green, stone like pod rose, breaking the surface of the water. It opened to reveal a tall crystal beaker balanced on a flat, shelf-like niche inside the pod. Marai pondered it, feeling as if he was lost in a dream.

  Take and drink, beautiful Marai, new king from Ai.

  The goddess voice teased again. He was glad her voice still spoke to him apart from the growing chorus of children’s voices.

  Gently reaching down to the water he tested the beaker to see if it was real,
took it, and sniffed its golden nectar. The mellow and sweet scent reminded Marai of, warm, honeyed milk with a grain-like base made into a sweet sauce for dipping bread. After a tentative taste, the shepherd guzzled the mixture until it was gone, certain he’d never tasted anything quite as good.

  “What’s it called?” he asked, breathlessly, wondering if he dared to ask for more.

  You may call it “god-food”

  It will be for those

  You sire, those you elect.

  Marai paused. Food of the gods...those I sire? He sat gingerly on the damp shore, the beaker still in his hand, thinking about what had happened so many years ago.

  His own father, Ahu, had seen him collapse into a darkness that had failed to lift since little Ilara’s death the year before. It wasn’t manly, various uncles had said. The patriarch of the clan, being a resourceful man, bartered for one of a visiting caravan’s easy women to go to Marai’s cave to entertain him. Nothing she did aroused him. When Ahu demanded the barter back, her stunned manager snarled that his woman could true up a dead man. He snapped that Marai may as well castrate himself since he had doubtlessly brought a curse on his loins.

  The shepherd believed he was impotent after that and never sought to embarrass himself again. In his dreams, he was with the goddess. She cured him then, but as for wakeful contact with women of Earth...Marai didn’t even want to think about it.

  Love will cure you

  Love will enslave you

  Love will destroy you;

  destroy self for you

  As it was in the past

  So shall it be again

  In the fullness of its own season... the voices consoled.

  Marai felt the same rush of sensuality that he had felt in the cave, but this time it wasn’t imagined. Ghostly fingers of women he did not know but sensed he would soon meet, ran over his magnificent form. Their laughter intoxicated him. The soft, gently begging whispers, the warmth of their smoothest skin was more real than any dream of the goddess had ever been. He placed the jar on the green glassy spider web-like shelf and returned to the white room in saddened, hopeless silence.

  As he walked, he saw a golden hall leading in another direction. Just as he sensed the new area, the green room dissolved into rainbow patterns behind him as if it had never existed. Before him, an austerely furnished palace room with its golden bowls of flat bread stuffed with hummus and olives, three loaves of raised bread, a big jar of beer, wild onions, a great stuffed bird of some kind, a leg of mutton, figs, nuts and wild berries in honey materialized. This was a feast prepared for a great king, not a man of the sand.

  Marai quickly sat and ate like one starving, wondering only briefly how the Children of Stone could prepare these things and how the rooms and containers could change shape like oil on water yet be solid as stone when he touched them.

  You question?

  We understand how things of Earth

  Are constructed. They answered in his thoughts.

  We have learned through seeing, touching

  How smallest particles

  Of these things are arranged

  So that the things of Earth

  Which you desire

  May be created here.

  Marai knew what they were saying made sense but he didn’t understand everything his thoughts were telling him. Replacing the bowls on the array of luminous stands growing from the floor before him, he sat back for a moment, watching the dishes fold in upon themselves. Soon they had returned to the same rainbow patterns again, as if by magic. Had the food even existed, he wondered, or had it been another dream from which he would waken?

  His eyes tried to scan the rooms again. As soon as he shut them, he understood through the whispering and hushing mood of the stone in his brow, that he merely needed to calm himself for the knowledge to begin to streaming through him. That, they told him, was the way it would always be from now on.

  The vague warmth in his forehead told him there were still other sights to see in the “star-boat”. Getting up, he moved across the white central hall, now enticed by a corridor hued in a lovely shade of blue. It was the color of the “Lady’s Lapis”.

  This hall held baskets, similar to the ones Houra and the women of Wadi Ahu had always made. Approaching one, Marai opened it and peered inside. It contained clothing. They had told him he would have new things to replace the dirty clothes they had burned when he arrived. Marai pulled out a red wool double kilt with an intricate golden woven pattern.

  After he girded himself with it, he shivered at the feeling of the dangling golden fringe tickling the back of his legs mercilessly whenever he moved. He hoped he would get used to it and wondered why wealthy men of the Shinar had insisted on wearing what they called kaunaka. It was an attempt to imitate sheepskin; to remind city men of their roots as shepherds. He fastened a rectangle of red wool patterned with laid-on winged lions and edged in more long golden fringe. Once he put the sandals made of finest leather he found on his feet, Marai completed the image the mysterious Children of Stone had chosen for him by adding all of the golden necklaces, brooches, earrings, bracelets and pectorals he could find in the baskets. When he found the reflective screen and stepped to admire the new clothes, he could think of only one thing as he walked back to the blue area where he had found the clothes because some few things remained for him to examine.

  Little ones.... he cautioned, half aloud. You’ve made my way dangerous! If I go anywhere like this..

  The children should have clothed him humbly, he mused, given the number of thieves who made travel in the wilderness dangerous.

  He was distracted again by a final item in the basket. Picking it up, he saw it was a kidskin pouch. Before he opened it, Marai knew it contained something that wanted to burst out of the bag with such a light of love that only the brightest of days would outshine it.

  As he opened the deep brown flap. A chorus of sighing child-voiced song-whispers filled every part of his frame. Gleaming and glass like stones, each as different from the other as wildflowers bursting from the sand after rain, rushed out into his cupped hands like a crowd of excited, miniature people.

  Marai sagged to his knees by the empty basket in awe. Sitting again, he removed his cloak, placed it on the floor and spread what looked like earthly stones and gems onto it. As if he had become an oracle or fortune teller, he instinctively grouped the stones by color and vibration. Even before he completed the task, arcs of light shot up from the base of the pattern, swirling and joining in a tent like shape over the rest of the stones. The image of a distant wilderness sailed beneath him. His thoughts lifted, flying as if he had transformed into a great bird in flight. In a second instant, he saw he was still a man, and that he was seated on some kind of surface.

  The walls of the star boat had faded and become foreign images around him. The soil in the land that appeared, was redder than the tan earth at his home. A vast dark river outlined by green farms and dotted by villages spread before him. A great city of sun-dried brick buildings, some of them humble and some of them palatial, lay ahead in the flight path of his vision. He drew close to a wealthy house where an old portly gentleman in a dark draped garment, reclined on a couch. The man’s image shone in the same gold and silver light that glistened in the shepherd’s own new hair.

  Here you see

  Great Djedi lying at rest

  Thinking of us

  Dreaming of you.

  Marai sensed the man was listening to the Children of Stone as they moved about in their far off place. This was a vision of something which had happened long ago.

  As the shepherd watched, the man’s shape was fluid, switching between two images: one a plump old man old and another image of a young man, as if time was bent back upon itself. Marai knew this either by instinct or by something the Children had already inscribed in his thoughts while he slept, that he was seeing a man moving through all of his ages.

  The passage of time was not the same for the Children
as it was for men of Earth. This man’s life of study was passing before him as he watched the young then old man wake from contemplative sleep numerous times as the sun rose and set around him. He saw the man grow old and halt of step, but saw how he would always go up to the freshly scrubbed roof kitchen to scan the heavens. The vessel, aloft in the sky, but too far away to be seen with human eyes, flurried with activity.

  Radiant beings grew larger than men and elongated with glowing arms and legs as they attempted human form. They sported hair and features of men and women in all of the colors and sizes of men of Earth. Despite their success of getting the basic shape of humans right, something inhuman remained of their chosen forms. Either the skin or hair or eyes seemed somehow different. If they came to Earth in such a form, they would be very quickly noticed and set apart.

  Marai saw them creating golden sheets that could be laid out against the interior walls of the star boat. First, a pattern of light would form. An object would grow out of something that looked like the tiniest of seeds. Whatever they had considered would just appear.

  This must have been how they made the food and the clothing, Marai thought.

  The sheets they wrought were inscribed with some kind of cursive red writing, different from Kemet picture words. It looked a little like the Kina accountant’s scratching he had seen on rock walls near the mines. The golden sheets were rolled tightly into cylinders and put into long golden tubes.

  These were then stored in a tunnel of red light; the one hall he had not explored. When the task was complete, the vessel began to glow. The black void above the firmament of space became purple-blue, like the sky fading into night. A strange sound bubbled into that darkness like a haunted temple chant coming from beneath a great sea. It was powerful and more beautiful than anything he remembered.

  Return to me in the night

  Precious light of the sky

  Who brings warmth to my life

  See your servant

  I will to serve you

  I give you my all