Voices in Crystal

by Mary R Woldering

  For the young woman’s part, her flirtatious, bright nature insured her career despite her ruined hearing. Her desire of freedom meant she would sooner die than become a woman to just one man. She called herself a name that sounded like Weht Awi-enoo. No one knew what it meant.

  Wealthy men saw her and took her in. She was even pampered with riches and cared for by eunuchs in a noble household at one time. She served in a temple as a potential kuna, or servant of the goddess learning medicine and the arts of healing women’s ailments

  Thrust into the street again after that failed, she existed as a tramp, a spy, and a thief. Soon she took up with a youth named N’ahab-Atall, enjoying him and all of the men who roamed with him as a kind of group concubine. She even cut her hair short so she would seem to be a boy.

  Not long after N’ahab-Atall and his gang of thieves took the wadi station, they too had tired of her bed. Once tall and stately, she was bent in an illness that filled her belly so full of tumors that she looked great with child. One day soon, she hoped, death would come in the form of a charitable knife across her throat. It would be one of the few kindnesses done to her in an otherwise thankless life. Maybe her own sense of finality, or the drink she used to dull her pain had made her bold enough to be the first to come to him.

  Bone Woman, the second woman Marai saw, hadn’t heard the name Deka in so many years she wondered if it was really her name at all. At first she didn’t remember her name. Then, when her memory returned, she didn’t want anyone to know about it because she couldn’t hear clearly. She had stopped speaking long ago. She would try to make her throat say the word when she was alone. She tried to remember how her voice had sounded once in her other life before the fever took everything away.

  The dream of the rushing and falling river churning fiercely through the rock, masked everything except the singular image of herself. She had been beautiful! Deka saw herself walking and dancing bare breasted and clothed in a red colored full skirt, a broad, round collar over her neck and shoulders. She was singing and as she sang, she rose up like a bird in flight. Oh yes! She could fly! She could fight! She could be a hawk in the air, a lion on the ground, but she always fierce.

  The killing storm made of wind and sand had changed all of that reality in her life. When she picked herself up, she knew she had given birth to a child, but it must have died. She had wandered by the river, living on grasses and dry shoots for a while, then burned with fever. Her beautiful black mane of abundant, tight hair that could be dressed in so many wonderful ways or even partly braided back and worn loose, was gone. It had been her pride, but it had fallen out and had grown back in wooly, uneven tufts. Her bones grew soft on one side and her teeth fell out. Her features drooped and her left arm and leg grew lame with a palsy.

  Decadent men fed and clothed her in odd reparation for the sex they forced upon her. She prided herself, for a while, in the thought that she hadn’t been a willing partner until she lost count of how many men had come to her. She didn’t fight them anymore. No longer able to fly, she became an expert at “going away” from the body, in those moments, and letting her animal self reign. It was important for her to remember that her life had not always been like this.

  Four years ago, N’ahab-Atall’s thieves had welcomed her owner, Chibale. They had been in need of an enforcer. The fact that the Kushite came with a woman in tow was a bonus for the band of men. When they came, the man from Kush didn’t try to keep her for himself. He used her as bait. That she was mute meant she was docile and already broken in. She would be no trouble.

  Deka met the older woman who was now relegated to the position of medicine worker. She knew, the moment they met that the old woman’s days were going to be few. Eventually, because of their curious bond, she now cared for the dying woman who stayed drunk or sick most of the time. Deka seemed equally defenseless, so they protected each other from the worst abuse of the men.

  Bone Woman named everyone in her thoughts. These were the names Marai heard whispering through him as he squatted in their doorway: Wise Mama for the elder, Bone Woman for herself. The third woman, the dancing girl had come to the camp only the year before. Deka called her Brown Eyes or Little Lady.

  Brown Eyes was still a girl when she had been unceremoniously dropped at the camp, traded for some fake lapis stones N’ahab-Atall had been trafficking. She was obviously an idiot and little better than a fat collection of greedy holes. Her rolling, gold-brown, bulging eyes, drooling mouth, and lascivious dances set her apart from the other women. She welcomed the men, approached them and craved sex with them, even if it was violent. She was insatiable and raucous, but truly the most pathetic of the three women.

  Wise Mama had taught the other women to speak with their hands and with their thoughts. It was an easier way for them than trying to speak with the mouth or learn each other’s languages. She also taught them to never trust the mouths of men for the knowledge of their thoughts, because men lie in order to get sex.

  Bone Woman knew life would be hard for her and Brown-Eye-Lady when the yellow disease took Wise Mama away. At this moment, with this big man before them, hope had returned. Deka thought the man looked like the sun in the form of a man. Man Sun. Even in the semi-dark of the hut, the light filtering in through the open reed door made his skin and hair shine like silver and copper. The way he looked standing before them for the instant before he sat, stirred a ghostly memory of the time before the storm when she had been whole and beautiful. She supposed he was telling the three of them what he had done. His lips moved in those words, but there wasn’t any need for him to say it. They had watched everything from the tiny window in their single-room brick hut. She had even seen him brought into the camp. At first, she had wanted to turn away. The men would have their cruel sport with him. At some point they would tire of that game and cart him out to the hills to suffer or die.

  Something had happened. She felt a familiar presence, almost like a phantom, before she saw it. Something either came into the man as he talked with N’ahab-Atall, or it manifested at that killing moment, because it was already inside him. Power and light. The men died by their own hands just the way it had always been done to their enemies long ago.

  She had cried out, clinging to her sisters in fate. She hadn’t been afraid of the man. She had thought of him as the answer to her endless prayers and incantations.

  The word “free” rang into her silence like the voice of a whirlwind when the man spoke it. A terrifying, but beautiful image of a man who could become the wind and make himself as great as the sky, haunted her from long ago. “Free” meant they were free of those men who lay dead, but would they be free of him? Would she be free? Would she want to be free?

  He would want sex, no doubt. All men, especially powerful ones, expected it. Any man who ever took her away from her one fate, introduced her to another. There was no real freedom, except death, for a destitute woman. The bent-shouldered woman studied his body, its muscles and its bright color. He was so big and lovely. No captor before him had been so achingly handsome. He was so much like someone else she had dreamed about from long ago. Had her once beloved come back? Her head ached. She couldn’t remember. The brilliance of sun’s rays creeping in the sides of the door behind him temporarily dazzled tears from her eyes. She hid her face in Brown Eyes shift.

  Brown Eyes flushed with the warmth of new lust when she saw Marai seated there..

  Take me. I want you... Other men ...all gone...I will be with you... she giggled impishly.

  Marai startled when he realized he was hearing the little dancer’s slow and faltering thoughts. He took a closer, pitying look at her. Her chin was so small and receding that the brown-stained teeth in her lower jaw didn’t even pretend to meet her upper teeth. That slightly gaping mouth made clicking, sucking noises from time to time whenever the girl noticed she was drooling. The shepherd guessed she wouldn’t even be able to chew her food well. Her eyes were an odd shade of light brown...almost golden. They we
re set too wide on her face, bulging out of her staring, sweet-child face, like a cow’s eyes. A lamb born with such flaws would have been destroyed. She gave him no memory to read, but a story about her life flitted into his thoughts without it.

  She had been the oddly cursed offspring of some ritual coupling in one of the Ashera or Inanna temples, perhaps even in Hazor. The women tending her mother had viewed the deformed child as an omen of some future event rather than as a curse, so they had not drowned her at her first bath and had decided to see if she would learn to speak or prophesy. With her mis-shapen mouth they knew she could not suckle, so they dripped milk into her mouth from a sponge.

  Even though she was expected to fail and die within days, they continued to nurture her. She lived on and began to thrive, for whatever peculiar reason. The women kept her as a plaything until her mother left her at the temple to return home from her tour as what was similar in Kina to a divine Asheratu. She was a toddler by that time and had been nurtured by one priestess or another. She had been shown how to tend to them.

  One moonless night, she was carried off by persons unknown. Hands groped and fondled. Leering, grunting faces of men lowered themselves over her in endless bouts of sex. Eventually, the thieves traded for her when her owner ventured into the Shur. Still a child, she danced for them, without any sense of loss or regret, and gladly shared their filthy beds. She had been the third female they chose to keep.

  I’ve eaten N’ahab-atall’s soul. Marai turned his face away from the women’s eyes. He, wished their stories would stop rolling through him. The fool lost his life going for me. Now I have his women to worry about. The shepherd stared at the midden of stinking garbage in the corner, mostly spoiled food and foul rags. He didn’t want to know about their miserable lives any more. It was just too heartbreaking.

  The small, fat one with gold-brown eyes snickered. She knelt near him, bouncing up and down until her massive flesh jiggled in a disgusting display. Seeing that the big man hadn’t harmed the elder woman, she decided to crawl toward him on her stubby hands and knees.

  Blameless as a sheep. Marai studied her simple-sweet face again, feeling the urge to hug and console her for having come to such a helpless point in life. Can’t see they’ve much food put by.

  He wondered what would become of these women when he took the gear he wanted and departed for Ineb Hedj, alone. No one ever came by the wadi station on a schedule. Sometimes weeks passed between caravans. If there was anything growing in the hills, the shepherd doubted the women were in any condition to harvest it or tend to it. They wouldn’t be able to hunt or even set a trap for a small animal. The next group coming through, or the Kemet men, would either entrap them or kill them if they hadn’t already starved to death.

  The frail, dark, humpbacked woman had begun furrowing in a basket the way a dog digs for a bone. She flung bunches of clothing out to her right and left. When the toadeyed dancer saw what the woman was doing out of the corner of her wandering eyes, she bounced up and down again and again on her fleshy heels, making croaky ‘ya-ya-ya’ noises.

  Soon she eyed Marai back and forth, humming and making endearing little clicking noises of approval as she lay out pieces of clothing the “Bone Woman” had thrown out on the available floor space between them. In a moment, there were several tunics, kilts, fringed coats, sashes, turban cloth, braided woolen wigs and jewelry for him to sort through.

  Sweet Goddess...awww….His heart wanted to melt They’re trying to care for me, even though... The shepherd thought, trying to think of some kind of plan that also would see these unfortunate women protected. I could at start out to Kemet with them. Maybe I could put them in a better situation down the Copper Road a few days...Maybe even to Kemet...Maybe they could find work as servants.

  It wouldn’t work. The old woman was ill. She might not even make it to the next wadi. The dark-skinned woman was bent and misshapen. She might cook or clean, Marai thought, if she didn’t look so tired and remote. At some point she would inspire rage and encourage a beating instead of finding a good employer. The little fat one needed a keeper.

  Marai felt them trying to win his approval as they moved about. They had no anger over the fact that their men and N’ahab-Atall had been slain by him. Anything they felt for the men had already converted itself into desperation. The enormity of everything this morning made the shepherd want to run out of the hut without any provisions and be on his way, empty-handed.

  “Don’t do this....I ...Thank you...” he stammered “All of you...” a crooked half-smile worked out of the corner of his mouth.

  Picking up a few ill-matched garments, he darted outside of the hut, where the women wouldn’t be able to see him, found the bag of child stones in his discarded clothing and dressed quickly, fixing the bag to a new sash.

  By the time he re-entered the hut, the elder woman was heaving herself around the room on her swollen legs and bloated ankles. She gestured, poked and pushed her charges around in some gross parody of an elder wife training two bumbling newcomers to the arts of meal service.

  Eventually, the three women set out some dried food and stale beer. It was a cold bean and porridge stew, so highly spiced one would not be able to taste if it was rancid. They served it with some greasy, hard old cheese and some uncommonly good honeyed dates. The humble but almost nauseating repast was laid out in clay bowls with a hard crumbly crust of some kind of grain cake, already turning green on the corner. Everything was placed on a prettily woven mat by the door wall.

  Hesitantly, he sat with them and began to eat the bread and the dates while they, in well-trained courtesy, watched, ready to fetch anything else he might require.

  Don’t stare at him, Little Lady... Marai felt the dark woman’s thoughts going to the dancer in the same way the children spoke to him. The dancer never considered decency, manners, or anything else. She beamed at him with only one thought in mind. The shepherd knew it was probably what all of the poor wretches were thinking, but the elder woman said it first.

  Wau! What a honey man he is... The elder grinned an odd, lustful smirk, then turned her eyes away in mock coyness as if she were a bride. She swayed a little, then, exhausted from just that much effort, she sagged back against a woven basket, almost toppling it.

  Marai knew she was almost too ill to sit upright. Seeing her struggle made him increasingly uncomfortable. For his entire journey up to this point, from the time the shepherd saw the shining vessel in the sky, the Children had whispered to him in human voices. Sometimes he recognized them as Sheb’s voice or Ilara’s voice or the voice of Houra. Other times he did not know the voices he heard. Now the thoughts from the three women took the form of some of these unknown voices of the Children of Stone.

  The women’s eyes continued probing him while he ate.

  I wonder...

  Marai sensed the elder Wise MaMa’s elbow poking at the round woman, who then broke into snorting snickers at some unvoiced suggestion.

  See it! See it! Her thoughts whispered. “Ya...ya...” her inner voice howled in her delight. Her eyes brightened in eagerness big and hard all over... Brown Eyes sees it... Brown Eyes knows... Brown Eyes needs that one in her belly...make her so-o-o- happy She scooted forward, extending an over-friendly hand toward the hem of his makeshift kilt. She would have grabbed underneath it if the “Bone Woman” hadn’t scowled and chided her.

  You are wanting to touch a god! Leave him alone and let him eat, before he blasts you into dust! She scowled, emitting a noise that sounded almost like the hiss of an angry cat.

  The young girl shrugged a little, not even truly disappointed and moved back. She clearly did not understand what Bone Woman’s objection was.

  The elder knew, but didn’t venture an opinion.

  Marai blushed, more embarrassed by their idle thoughts than he wanted to be, and offered them the remaining food.

  Wretched devil women they are, indeed, Asher-Anu! He grumbled silently. They who would let any manner of man or beast p
artake of them! I have prayed for your forgiveness, but the day I presume to ask for your love, you set out to send me no noble vessel of yourself...just these... Queen of all women, you’re too cruel!

  The elder woman glanced up at him once, pausing in sudden horror, as if she heard him. She knew, more importantly, that he could hear their thoughts. Then, as if the idea amused her, she smirked again.

  You know our thoughts... Her mouth grinned again. Strange...scary strange...Are you a god? She gestured her findings quietly to the others, but neither seemed to care at that moment.

  After the women finished eating, in painful silence, Wise MaMa struggled up to drag the bowls outside the hut. She scraped them with her hands, dished some red, gritty sand into them to scour them, then handed them to the Bone Woman who had followed her outside. The dark woman took them to the pond to rinse them.

  During all of this procedure Marai stretched out with his back against the interior wall, relaxing. Almost immediately, he found the dark woman returning from her task. She tucked herself into one of his arms. Now it seemed to him that all of her scolding the dancer about proper behavior in the face of a “god” had been nothing more than a way to get the simple-minded dancer to move aside so she could to help herself.

  Deka is a name that means ‘pleasing’ in the language of my birth. I am ugly, but I am skilled in the art of pleasure. You will like what I can do. Her thought words spoke.

  Marai froze. Her voice wasn’t thready and tentative as if it experimented with human tonality the way the voices of most deaf/mutes sounded. From what he had seen of her life in her eyes, he knew she had been able to hear at one time and that she was mute by choice from the horrors she had endured.

  The sound of her voice memory that left him stunned because one of the Children’s voices that had lured him along and into the fallen star boat years ago had sounded like her voice. It wasn’t the Ashera voice. Her voice was the one he’d heard inside the little red ruby stone that sent the fire to consume the bodies of the dead thieves.