Marai didn’t know why the soldiers had chosen that very time to come. Evidently, news of the mis-handling of people in the area, the protection gambits, the rapes and the murders, had come to the ears of local Kemet officials who sent out a party of “investigation” to get it under control. Something else about that detachment bothered him, but Marai pondered other things. Although the shepherd had killed the men, in doing so, he had saved the women.
Why have they been saved, he wondered again? How far will they travel with me?
Those you sire, those you choose.
The memory of the voices re-played through the shepherd’s thoughts.
We assist you...we teach you.
In White Wall you will learn of these things.
Marai paused, stunned by what he saw in the tube. Wise MaMa was sitting up, albeit wearily. Her flabby and distended form still sported gross bloating in the abdomen and in her legs but the oozing sores, the purple and yellow markings of a body in the act of death were looking much less grisly. The tube retracted. She sat, bewildered that she wasn’t in quite as much pain.
“See? Didn’t I tell you they could help?” he reminded her.
She studied his lips for a moment, reflecting on what he had said.
Deka drew closer, full of her own astonishment at the elder woman’s slight improvement.
Wise MaMa, was still far too weak to get up on her own so Marai lifted her out of the light tube and deposited her with Deka, trading her for a frightened Brown Eyes. The fat, little dancer struggled bravely to no avail.
Lady... Marai called her.
She paused, almost comforted by the sound of his inner voice. She looked once back over her round little shoulder at the shepherd. With an impish wink, she hopped into the lights and held her breath. The voices of the children continued to speak to Marai, but he stared at the girl in the glimmering light field. She was beginning to prance, because the lights tickled her, but soon she paused, open-mouthed in a strange sort of sexual ecstasy. For a moment, her eyes flashed gold.
The shepherd, looked away, touched the stone in his brow and began to trade thoughts with the entirity of the Children of Stone.
So, I went to Djedi. But you already know that, and you know what we learned of him together. Marai began again, tearing his eyes away from the ecstatic girl in the tube. He will likely seek my destruction, if I go to him. The shepherd paused, even more disquieted. Am I your avenger, because I am flesh and bone and have proven I can kill men for you? Will I be called to kill him too? After a moment of silence, the voices responded.
There are many futures.
Which you choose
We are unable to see
Until the instant before
Which you have chosen.
Then The old man was wrong...I do have control... Marai grinned nervously, still disturbed by what the supposed image of Djedi had said. Why go to Kemet at all then, and why to him? And what of the heavier old man who also seemed to be Djedi? Who was that?
There was no response.
Deka had fetched an overjoyed Brown Eyes who now sat in the floor with the other women, stroking her own skin and hair. They inspected each other entranced with the feeling of being so clean.
To Marai, the women looked like plucked fowl. The sight of them still evoked pity, or even disgust rather than desire. Lust was the only thing going through the little dancer’s thoughts at the moment. Her eyes flashed at him, forcing the shepherd to turn his glance away from her again.
The thought of any of their attempts to touch or grope him, nauseated him beyond words. Did the children really expect him to husband them? He understood and tried to convince himself that his anguish was about more than them being ugly. Beauty, he knew, was a fleeting thing in a woman’s life. Ilara had been somewhat plain, but ugliness of a different kind had filled her soul. These women seated before him, however, had nothing inside or outside them in the way of beauty. As Deka had said, they had certain skills, but...
With a curt nod that they looked much better, the shepherd took them to the sleep pod, noticing it had grown larger since he left it the day before. What had been comfortable enough for one man to lie in was now large enough for all four of them to lie in it together.
Four depressions like hollows for large seeds lined the bottom half of the crystalline structure. The number of glowing skin-like fingers had increased, and they had regained the same soft color they once had. Every bit of the inside surface, top and bottom was lined with finger-like crystals.
The elder woman, struggled to her feet to show Marai how much better she felt. Lurching forward weakly, she gripped the edge of the pod and stared inside. Extending her hand to touch the crystals she caressed them in much the same way as Marai had done when he first examined them. She watched the colors ripple through all of the glowing shades and travel up her arms. She paused, looking up at the shepherd with a toothless smile so warm it made him shudder.
“Wain...boh...” She struggled, then laughed a dry and wretched cackle.
Marai knew the Children intended for the four of them to lie together in the glittering fig naked as human babies while they slept. If they intended for him to sire children on them, perhaps they would have to transfer his seed into their wombs while they all lay dreaming. It would be for the best, considering their present states he thought.
Showing them how to lie amid the vibrant crystals and how to allow the light and sound to wash over them, he urged them to get inside the fig and wait for him. This time, the women were compliant, as if the wonders and the voices of the Children had temporarily stunned them.
Quickly, Marai shed his clothing and darted to the cleaning tube for a moment. By the time he returned to the pod, the women were already beginning to doze to the lulling sound of the sweet inner voices. They made no notice of his arrival or his nakedness Sandwiching himself between Ariennu and little, fat Naibe-Ellit, he noticed Deka, the darker woman had curled behind the Brown Eyed dancer. On impulse, Marai kissed the young round woman’s brow. Her eyes rolled open, dreamily like calf eyes. Her hands went up to the shepherd’s face to draw it down to hers. She began making eager little panting noises, flicking her tongue in and out; positioning herself.
No, no, no little one. Marai bent over her gently, trying to settle her down.
Want you... Her petulant childlike thoughts entered his brow. She was so much like a poor little girl who had been deprived of a treat. He hushed her, shaking his head “no”, but she insisted.
You, want me! I’m the Lady...I’m the Lady... She insisted, grabbing the back of his head, squirming her hips and widening her legs.
Poor little fool! Marai thought. He restrained her caresses, freeing his head and pressing her arms down by her side. You need to sleep now...We all do! Perhaps...perhaps..The shepherd hoped upon hope that if she slept, she would wake without such desperation..
How could she even know of the Goddess with wits as blown through as a hayfield in a storm? he asked himself again, amazed. He lay beside her, and then turned to face her, but her grey-blue of her lids showed him she was already asleep.
As the pod shut, he knew the women’s dreams would shape his own journey as surely as it had already been shaped by the wishes of the children. That made him feel a little better about the things Djedi had said to him.
The Children of the First Ones had descended into Marai’s corrupt world to straighten it’s down spiraling course and departure from the ways of truth. They had to learn to deal with his stubbornness and reluctance by speaking wisely to him and by calming him with their song. They had brought him so far already and now, it seemed, they had agreed to “be kind” to the three women he found.
Did he truly find them or was he walking a labyrinthine pattern already laid out for him in the annals of future history? Was there even any such thing as the randomness of nature or things not planned?. Something still seemed very wrong about the children’s complacency regarding this “Master Djedi” he ha
d met in his dream. Marai knew that if the Children of Stone had seen how his own rage could transform him into a god of destruction, what did they expect jealousy would do to a man of such lofty intellect? Master Djedi was, some said, an embodiment of Djehuti, the Kemet god of wisdom. The man Marai saw in his dream seemed less like a god and more like an enraged and jealous sorcerer.
Rage builds,
But once spent,
Dissipates most of the time.
Jealousy, we have learned,
Is more of a constant threat and a condition.
Recovery from that often fails.
The voices of the Children faded into the blackness and red pulsing of womblike sleep.
CHAPTER 4
THE JOURNEY
For a long time, Marai lay in the partially open pod listening to the voices of the Children of Stone. The pod had cracked open, like the tip of any earthly seed pod about to disgorge its contents at some point while he slept. He heard whispered tones approach and retreat. They sounded so happy, wonder-filled and excited, like earthly children exploring places near and far. Laughter chimed like golden bells. The odor of his surroundings was as fresh as a new morning.
The shepherd lazily thought of so many days at his Abu’s wadi station when he had been a boy. Late in the day, after the chores were done, his older brothers and cousins would settle around the common cook fire to do quiet work or to converse with travelers. He and the younger boys would play. They would climb trees, run amok in the fields where the sheep grazed, or play in the small greens garden, incurring the wrath of Abu Ahu and the uncles. It was Paradise returned.
A slim form nearing the sleep-pod startled the shepherd nearly out of his wits. For just a moment, Marai thought one of the Children had finally succeeded in taking a human form.
“You’re awake now, Man-Sun.” A gentle, rolling voice spoke to him in that lower pitched, purring voice his thoughts had identified as The Bone Woman. A different woman whom the Children of Stone had named Deka, stood outside the pod, looking back at him.
Propping himself on his elbows and squeezing his eyes open and shut until his vision cleared, the shepherd looked into her wide-open and shining green, brown and golden eyes.
She extended her hand, as elegantly as he expected a member of some royal family might. This woman was a young goddess who had reluctantly consented to allowing him, a mere mortal, to touch her hand if only so he could help her sit in the pod with him again.
When she shook her head a little, her hair exploded into a brilliant, dark fan that spread out over her deep red-brown shoulders and down her back as well as above her head like a sacred nimbus of dark light. They were alone in the crystal pod.
“You’re beautiful!” was all he could say. Struck otherwise dumb, he reached to touch her hair, but felt her tense and draw away from him. At once he knew the Children had repaired her face and form, but as they gave her a regained loveliness they had laid bare a different facet of her soul. She had the appearance of a god, but so much inner anguish had risen to the surface of her soul.
The shepherd keenly sensed her pain.
“You’re as bad as I am, Bone Woman Deka.” Marai chortled inwardly at the irony. “But you know I’m not the one who hurt you..this ‘Ta-te’ you cried when you called to me...” The shepherd repeated the thought he had sent to the woman when she had first offered herself to him in Sheb’s hut. He had refused, but she assumed it was because she was ugly. “I’m not him.” Marai whispered to her as she started to close off her thoughts and emotions again. “Anyone who could do that...” he reached to touch her arm but she moved it away, just out of his reach.
“I know it now, Man-Sun. Just...” Deka’s very long lashes fluttered down over her shining green-gold eyes...the color of cats eyes
Marai ached a little when he thought he heard her murmur:
But you will. They always do. The men always do...
“They told me, the little voices, told me, what only my heart knew before.” she sighed, almost sad. “I must accept joy, before I can understand how deeply I was hurt.” Deka reflected for a moment, then added impulsively. “I do know I was this beautiful once. I can feel that memory in me now, like a veil has been lifted from a shadow.” She paused again, almost struggling to put her words together. “What kind of joy have these little gods given me that must open my soulward eye to such a dreadful memory?” her eyes shone with almost shed tears.
Marai wanted to wrap her in his strong arms, but knew she didn’t want his embrace any more than she wanted an answer to her question.
“Where are the others? he asked, looking around the cloudy room and finding no evidence of either Wise MaMa or Brown Eyes.
“They are in the room with the looking place that moves like water.” Deka suggested.
The low, half-purring voice of a lioness made human, wove about him like gentle sorcery. He wanted to stay with her in the pod and listen to it for hours.
Her skin had been the color of ashy black raw cinnamon bark when they met. Now it glowed in a deep red-purple and brown color. Her small breasts were no longer airless dugs, but bouncing, upturned cones of girl flesh. Deep blue tattoos that looked like sunbursts or lotus blossoms encircled the edges of her nipples. She was still quite slim, but no longer gaunt and no longer bent. Every ill that had twisted and crippled her body was gone. When she looked into his face, a helplessness filled her eyes for just a moment before the tears came. What he first saw as ravishing beauty became dimmed in the light of her inner storms and uncured hurt.
Marai hesitantly took her hands in his and brought them up to her eyes.
“Do I worry you so?” He wondered. “Does the thought of being with me cause you such a miserable memory?” the shepherd asked, wondering if it was actually true that some women who had felt forced into a life of pleasuring men out of desperation rather than in a sacred offering might reject them entirely when they felt they were safe. In this case, with her beauty returned, it was a dreadful irony.
“Oh, but I don’t worry! I so much feel your hidden power a and your strength growing inside me as if it were my very own!” She gasped, her hands trembling inside his.
He knew she wanted to seize him and come to him fully eager, but she hesitated again, because she knew Marai was not like other men she had known.
She had despised them as they took her a thousand times before. Sex, to her, had become something she used to block out the torment and sadness in her soul. This is what the Children meant, she told him in so many words. She had to understand a dreadful truth that was part of her life before she was free to give herself fully to any man, especially to him. It wasn’t something the Children of Stone could edit out of her heart as they rebuilt her. They could reinvent the way she looked, but whatever demons slumbered inside her were brought forward intact. If her soul ached in the past, it would ache in the present, marooned in its beautiful house.
Tenderly wiping her cheek with the back of his hand, Marai silently cursed his sudden desire to hold her and to give her all of that missing tenderness and loving. He knew she would only resist it now.
Deka felt his thoughts but met his eyes with a suddenly wiser gaze. Taking both of his hands and placing his thumbs over the stone in her brow, as if by instinct, she clambered into his lap. Lithely slipping her arms through his, she folded him closer into an embrace until her own hands could repeat the pose on his own forehead.
This is something new...can you feel them say it to us Man Sun? I feel you here so strong now, reborn. she let her thoughts whisper. Her thumbs caressed his brow.
His eyes closed and he sighed as pleasant, sensual feelings filled him.
The flickering of rapture that illuminated her face, made it appear more than regal.
The shepherd’s thoughts soared up from the small of his back, through his heart and through her frame like a burst of light and warmth. His soul, swept by her thoughts, climbed into the imagined blueness of a sky above so much sand and grass.
Her soul clung to Marai’s soul like a small child clings to a father. Deka tried to place a lost memory of something that happened long ago by driving it through the shepherd and making it his own memory.
In response, his thoughts filled with a whirling of some forgotten radiant thing that neither of them could see. They were flying and diving in a dream that was all too real. It was a pure, gentle and clean feeling ecstasy, like loving constructed of air instead of flesh. Their spirits tangled about each other like the arms and legs of crazed lovers until they filtered slowly into the waking world.
Deka gasped and panted, her head resting against Marai’s chest, feeling his heart pound.
His hands tangled her hair, as he stared, more than a little puzzled, into the emptiness of the room. She had done something that tried to evoke his sexuality in same-way the children had tested him long ago, but instead of sexual release something very different with a forbidden feel to it had passed between them. For an instant, the shepherd and Deka knew each other intimately and completely. The bliss quickly dimmed and with it the memory of anything between them faded.
“What in...the name...” Marai mused, falling backward against the curve of the pod bed.
“But it was wondrous...” Deka drew away again, suddenly shutting off the brief shadow of her intimacy, as if she realized the futility of her actions. “Do you see what it is men search for from us, what a woman teaches a man but mostly it only ends in slapping her body onto his? We’re above this now, you and I. We can know the essence of passion without being debased by what the body does when it has no soul...”
Marai reflected on her words and on the way her face had been glowing with delight, trying to hold onto that sweet memory.
Debased? Is that what these have come to think of what goddess holds sacred? The shepherd asked himself. There was something else. He had sensed a dark, somber thing gliding beneath the surface of her thoughts. It balanced on her shoulders for a moment like a bat feeding on the hump of an ox. It wanted to drink her brief warmth and to suck her into it’s fathomless, hidden cold before it released her. He recognized it as the dark descending thing that had come into him when the men died and before that when the heavens had opened to admit the boat of stars.
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