Marai looked up into the bright and sunny sky, waiting for her child-voice to answer. Only silence punctuated by the sound of carrion animals at their duty returned to him.
Looking back at the blood and destruction that lay in the sand, Marai suddenly began to tremble so violently that he could barely breathe. It was every bit his Lady who would ask this of him...In the guise of the Children she had asked revenge for her vessel and for all women. But the Children had said they were not the Lady. Confused, he fell retching by the pond. He wanted to rave and run into the unforgiving noonday of the wasteland. He couldn’t stop shaking. Falling again by the clump of shade palms near the water, he lay back, clawing at blood-streaked arms. Tears exploded from him into horrid, nauseated sobs at all that had happened.
CHAPTER 3
THE WOMEN
The gold and red-pink dawn had become a burning blue and cloudless sky. Soulpermeating quiet hung over the wadi station. The shepherd raised his head from the dirt where he lay exhausted and stared at his surroundings for a moment. Getting up on all fours first, he wearily stood, then trudged to the center and side of the camp where the thieves had fought and died.
Grizzle faced Urzeb, the second in command of the group of men, had gone to his death with the sack of child stones still fastened to his belt. Someone’s staff, which had been used as a cudgel, lay in the dirt stained in blood with bits of hair and skin clinging to it.
Marai shooed away the birds with the staff, then stooped to get some shards of rock to hurl at the approaching carrion dogs. When the shepherd unfastened the bag of stones, just before he attached it to his own gore-splattered belt, he peered inside. No purring, warmth or light greeted him. The stones seemed to be either asleep or lifeless. He pulled some of them out, holding them and sorting them around in one hand.
How much like polished and scumbled river stone they look! Maybe there had never been anything to them but the power I dreamed in them. He shook his head, thinking about that possibility for a moment. What is this? I grieve over what I’ve done, sick almost to death and they sleep like sated beasts. What kind of demons...Marai dumped the handful of child stones back in the bag and fastened them to his belt. He didn’t want to think about it anymore. He didn’t want to look into the eyes of the dead men or see their wounds.
As he continued to scan the area, his attention rested on a large, empty burden basket, someone had dropped near the pond. It looked clean. He knew he could use that when he left the wadi station. Now that he was safe from harm, he needed to gather his wits and leave for Mis-El before anything else befell him.
Still need some things before I go... I can wait a little longer past the heat of the day. Children or not, but I can’t stay here. He made his way back to the pond and hoisted the basket into his arms, thinking about the baskets Houra made. This one wasn’t one of hers. The thought of her baskets reminded him once again of the horrific images of her abuse he had seen and fed back into the men. After thinking about how she suffered, he felt better about having killed them.
The shepherd trudged among the corpses as he thought about the men, then turned and slowly bent to strip rings, amulets, weapons and anything of good barter value that he could find. At some point, he began to close their staring eyes, wondering just what image they had seen as death came upon them. Did they see their crimes? Did they see the fury of his attack that had transformed what they thought was a gaudily dressed wanderer into a horrifying darkness?
If I polish these it’ ll be better. After I’m done with this, I’ ll check to see what I can use from the house. Marai steeled himself against the ripening stench of the rancid and sticky body fluids. Biting flies swarmed as thickly about his own body as they did over the corpses of the dead men. I’m just another vulture...taking... The shepherd fought back another wave of nausea as he studied the gaping sword and knife wounds, the purple and black evidence of massive ruptures and wounds beneath the skin, the white bones sticking from jagged openings in the flesh, the caved skulls with yellowed skull fat oozing, the eyes... He felt their last moment of fear as he looked into their staring eyes.
At last, he paused by the purple skinned dead face of the leader, N’ahab-Atall. For a moment, he thought of harvesting the chains which had magically drawn tight enough to nearly sever the man’s head from his neck, but he didn’t want to touch the golden metal ropes that were still twisted tight and buried in the man’s flesh. The eyes of the dead man, filled with bloody ruptures stared back at him. There was no expression on his face at all, just blank calm.
Marai wondered, considering the souless nature of the man, why he had even been expecting a look of remorse. He picked up the wolf knife, but refused to take the ravished goddess as the scabbard. Wrapping the knife in a rag, the shepherd placed it in the basket and moved back to the place where the bodies lay scattered. He knew what he would have to do, before he did anything else. Setting the basket of goods down near the water, he dragged the ravaged bodies by ones and twos, to the lowest outcropping of rock near the cave where he had once lived.
On the way he noticed the cook fire in the center of the encampment had gone out in the early morning scuffle. He plucked a few embers from the bottom and put them in a clay pot, then placed them here and there among the bodies. Seeing that smoke had begun to curl from the dead men’s clothing, the shepherd picked up the basket again, slung it over his shoulder and clambered hand over hand up the rock face to watch the fire burn. He thought of the image of an all-consuming flame, but only a wisp of whitish smoke issued up from the pile of bodies below. The left-over coals wouldn’t be enough to bring up the blaze. The blood, even though it was drying, had made the bodies too wet to catch fire.
When Marai reached the flat ledge outside the mouth of the cave, he took the bag of stones from his belt and sorted blindly through it again. This time, he sensed more warmth and a slight tremor. Perhaps he could find a clear crystal to catch the rays of the sun and power it down to the ailing flame below. A faceted warm stone, different from the rounded and cooler stones slipped easily into the shepherd’s hand.
Fire... He thought, without even looking at the stone in his hand Fire and air turned into stone...The children said that they were fire and air, but when they came here, they took the elements of earth and water, forming crystal stone. This is the fire of Her vengeance! It’s like a woman‘s anger, somehow. It has the passion of anger, but love... Passion and fire in it’s glory... Marai smiled faintly.
Lifting the little stone into the light, he saw it was red in color, but crystal. The stone looked like a ruby; as if it had been cut in a diamond shape with pointed ends. In its center lay a scramble of a gold spiderweb like filament that pulsed and almost breathed, when he separated this stone from the others. He held it even higher so that the sun’s rays could warm it.
I am the fire of love.
Touch me, my beloved...
A little voice whispered like a woman moaning for her lover. It was a low and sweet voice, but it was not the Ashera voice. It was gentle, direct and almost purring. It had the same soft skin-like feel of the crystalline stones inside the sleep-fig. As the sun struck the stone and warmed it, a reddish light issued from it, that swept the rock face below him and traveled down over the rocks to the bodies below.
Look how lovely...The shepherd thought, fascinated that so much grisly death could be purified by the scarlet glow silently washing over it. He wanted the evil and all of the unclean memories gone from what had been the happy place of his childhood and youth so many years ago. Making his own prayer, He sent the thought:
There...
Go into the air...
become pure and clean of the evil you have brought to this place...
Return to the sky, be vanquished…
The children’s thoughts whispered inside his own thoughts once again. Spontaneous flames licked up from the bodies below. Soon the mortal remains of the thieves charred, curled and hissed like poisonous snakes writhing in the all-co
nsuming intense heat as if the last bits of evil were being cleansed from the wadi station. Marai wished his memory of the morning could be cleansed and gone from the Earth too. As the bodies were rendered into ash, he noticed how clean and dry the wilderness around him felt. Climbing down from his cave home turned storehouse, he returned to the center of the station. He stopped for a moment to toe the smoldering remains; now just a skull fragment or two, then headed to the pond. Stripping off the sticky, sandy clothing he still wore, Marai sank into the still water at the deep reeded part of the natural pool.
Sun warmed water lapped at his broad shoulders. As he relaxed, the images of the battle played in broken segments through his thoughts, but they were fading. Afternoon sunlight filtered through the canopy of the tall date palms, breaking into brilliant stars of light that danced on the ripples of the water. For a moment, he was a boy again, shinnying up the three trees that grew of the same seeding. He was hiding among the intertwined boughs like a cunning beast, waiting to pounce on the unwary passersby below. Soon, Ahu or one of his uncles would scold him back to his chores.
The shepherd ached for the innocence of those days.
Do not regret, Man of Ai.
You would give all
In this way
That a lamb be spared
From the wolf
“I suppose so,” Marai sighed aloud, still trapped in the dismal memory of all that had taken place. In the end, he had only wanted to run away, not to kill every man standing between himself and the road to the next station. Even though Houra had cried for vengeance in his thoughts, he knew he was not the kind of man who takes satisfaction from such murderous justice.
“Auugghh...” An animal-like cry sounded from the brick dwelling where Sheb had once lived.
The thieves’ bodies had already been consumed by the fire. Afternoon breezes had wafted the horrific odor away. Marai thought he was alone, until the sound breaking the silence reminded him he was not.
The dancer...their fat little monkey woman... He sighed, soul-weary, and shut his eyes, remembering the sensual movements created by that little mountain of flesh.
She wasn’t alone, he sensed. She wasn’t even the one who cried out. There were two other women huddled with her in a dank corner of Sheb’s former house. They had watched everything from the window.
His head tingled, as he sensed their thoughts from a distance.
They were like frightened sheep, uncertain if they would now be slaughtered. At first, they were filled with giddiness at the idea of all of the men killing each other. Then, worry and confusion set in when they realized they had no protection. However cruel these men had been to them, they had at least provided a home and some measure of safety. When they saw Marai rise and burn the men’s bodies with a bolt of fire from his hand, they hid in the corner in terror, certain he was a god. The anguish of waiting for his next move finally overcame one of them and she cried out.
Marai sighed in dismay at this new development. The Children didn’t have to remind him that he was a shepherd. He had a soft place in his heart for those he perceived as helpless. The trip to Ineb Hedj would just have to wait until he was able to see the women, no matter how broken down or nasty they were, to some kind of safety. It was just the way he was.
Rising from the water, he fetched his linen under-kilt that wasn’t too covered in blood, tore a clean piece of it off and dried himself with it. While he fashioned a rough breech cloth from the tattered remains, he thought about the women again. They were hardened caravan monkey-women, not helpless slave-girls or victims. Perhaps they were even demonic, Marai thought. They might lure him to their filthy mats, ride him until he was senseless, kill him in revenge over the deaths of the men they had liked, and then live on his flesh until the next men came along. He trembled, not wanting to think about that as he approached the hut.
The rope hinges on the new cane door creaked at Marai’s touch. The women were huddled in a darkened corner in the front and to his left, just as he’d envisioned them. At first they had been shrinking tightly into that corner, trying to make themselves invisible. Now they seemed to be trembling in delicious anticipation more than fear. The shepherd stood in the doorway for a few moments. Taking a deep breath in an effort to conquer his desperate shyness, he attempted to break the silence first.
“I...I won’t hurt you...Be at peace.” A smile twitched in the corner of his mouth as he peered into the dark corner. The trio shrank further into the dark as the shepherd ducked the door frame and took a step toward them.
“Those men...They forced me to fight them.” He tried again. Each time he spoke, the shepherd tried a different dialect. First he tried Kina, his native tongue, then Shinar, then some jumbled low Kemet phrases he knew. “Anyway...you’re free now...”
The women didn’t seem to understand him. The round dancer whimpered something nondescript and tried to hide behind the other two women.
Marai turned toward them in the doorway, squatted facing them, then sat crosslegged to show he would be no harm. It was the way he had learned to charm an animal. Whenever one of the sheep strayed into the brush or caught it’s leg in a crack between rocks he would calm it, then talk to it until its fear subsided enough for him to free it. He spoke quietly, hoping one of them would understand his words and gain the courage to answer him.
Sheb and Houra’s hut had been transformed from a sparingly furnished and clean little house into a disgusting midden in his absence. Like his former cave dwelling, the hut was stacked up to the gape-holed, unrepaired roof with all sorts of plunder. It stank of unclean bodies, urine, rotten food, beer, vomit, and sex.
Thieves and their monkey women Marai thought to himself while he waited for the women to come to him. It’s a wonder all of this didn’t happen sooner. My fault I guess...We all should have left right after old Ahu died. I knew Sheb never had his heart in this kind of life. Five years... He sank deeper into despair at that thought of how remote the idea of finding his sister and her husband would be.
One of the women made a sudden move toward him. She staggered forth, reeking and totally drunk, falling prostrate, sweating and drooling a bilious vomit by Marai’s knee. She was old and she stank of urine and beer. Her face had been painted into the caricature of a younger woman. Her stiff-fingered arthritic hand parted her ruddy mass of coarse, wiry hair that had been dyed with red henna so often that it kinked and matted hopelessly.
Marai instantly recognized this creature as the once the rowdy and mannish thief he had pulled from N’ahab-Atall’s thoughts. How she had come down to this in a mere five years, he couldn’t guess and didn’t want to try. She was dying now, but she had no fear of death and even less fear of staying alive. One bleary brown and yellow eye looked up at him, sensing something.
“Wann tt…Wan of usshhh mmmm?” The noise escaped from her throat accompanied by a sweeping hand gesture. A hollow cackle of proud self-amusement emerged from her throat.
Marai silently cursed his oversight. Her words bore a familiar but unformed sound.
Want one of us, Hmmm? she had asked him.
“Deaf?” he queried, repeating her chest-to-mouth gesture.
Her eyes fixed on his mouth and her own mouth cracked in a toothless grin. A strange, almost sensual fire bounced into her hard, rat-like eyes as her hand indicated her ears and the ears of a nut-brown woman crouched nearby whose arms and legs were so frail and bent that she looked like a dusty spider. A third sweep of the deaf woman’s hands by her face and chest indicated something even more bizarre about the round woman he had seen dancing the night before.
Marai felt the older woman’s thoughts, not as words, but as a sudden knowledge of her at the same time she was trying to make him understand her hand language. He sensed that all of the women could hear some sounds but their hearing and their understanding was limited for different reasons.
The elder lost most of her hearing as a young girl, due to a severe beating and blows to her head that left her near
ly dead. The dark woman beside her lost much of her hearing and the will to use her voice because of illness and madness brought on by a high fever. Both women had taught each other hand signs. The melon-shaped dancer could hear perfectly well, but she had no more sense than a yearling lamb. Without the other two women caring for her, she would be lost. The women’s adventures in life had brought them together and made them depend on each other for survival more than depending the men. It also made them hard.
Marai saw through their blank and wizened faces and felt engulfed in pity.
Touching the arm of the woman who sagged and retched at his feet, the shepherd helped her sit upright. Grabbing a filthy rag from the floor, because it was all he could find, he offered it to her so she could wipe her lips. Her heavy-set shoulders hunched forward, weakened by disease and the weight of her sagging breasts. Yellow-tinged eyes in her wizened face bounced, feverish and unable to focus. When her eyes did meet the shepherd’s eyes, he saw her story.
Her mother walked the shore at night. She had been either a widow or a woman cast out. The man who took her in was a Keftian seaman. He put her up in a seaside hut with enough goods to survive until he returned. The girl was born soon after. The woman stayed with the girls’ father whenever he came to that village, but eventually he never returned.
The mother was with other men after that. She found them easily because she was tall and pretty. Over the years the mother’s looks faded and the girl became a beauty with dark curly hair that glinted copper in the bright sunlight. One of the men took a liking to the young daughter but when the mother made the discovery one day, she threatened, beat and drove the girl into the streets to find her own source of income. Clubbed nearly to death with a churn bat, she slipped away into the shadows to heal in the arms of sympathetic men.
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