Voices in Crystal

by Mary R Woldering

  When she felt his sad story move through her, she assumed that his seed would spring too quickly if she seduced him. He’d said he hadn’t been with a woman in such a long time, She just didn’t consider any other outcome. Naibe-Ellit had already planned out how she would console his pitiful effort and coax him to try again.

  This...this...She shook with the memory of it.

  Deka’s head tilted curiously to one side. Her knees tucked up at her chin again. She almost reached down to touch the younger woman’s shoulder.

  “Oh I’m not cold at all...” Naibe-Ellit’s eyes glazed faraway. She stroked her arms and breasts, pretending her hands were Marai’s hands. “Oohhh I can’t stand it...Oh my sweetest Ashera-self, he is what he looks like...not a man at all...How like a storm he overtook me...how like a god...” she sighed, dreaming.

  Deka’s eyes widened, flashing a silver and red spark. She withdrew her hand from the young woman’s arm, disgusted.

  “And, of course, I know how much you will want that storm again...” Deka’s gaze withered the woman on the pallet. “Do take care, sister. If he is truly the fire you think he is, don’t let it consume you. Don’t be like the boy across the way, touching what you shouldn’t touch knowing what you shouldn’t know. If you take on a true god, it may be more than you can bear.” Deka quipped, just beneath her teasing laugh.

  Naibe-Ellit paused in her sensual reverie to stare up into the olive green, beautiful, but haunted eyes of the woman who had always been such a compelling mystery. Deka and Ariennu had always been like mothers or older sisters, just like the women at the temple from Naibe’s childhood. When Wise MaMa got sicker and was so near death, Deka had been the one who washed her and dressed her. She even fed her and cleaned up after both of them.

  When Marai entered their lives, that changed again. Naibe no longer needed help with day to day living. She had been healed and made whole by the Children of Stone. She had been given other strengths she was just discovering. Marai had said it would be like that for all of them. They would be living their lives as a normal people, when suddenly some need would arise and each would mysteriously be able to meet it in a new and unearthly way.

  Most of the time as they journeyed, the young woman had contemplated everything, because the intelligence to understand all of it was so very new. She wanted to learn and know so much that her head often ached and her sleep suffered. That had caused the nightmares. At the celebration fire three weeks earlier, she had seen something of Deka’s hidden past and knew at once the dark-skinned woman was no longer the same as the wiry and twisted Woman-like-a-brown-spider N’ahab-Atall had kept. Deka had become temperance to her and Ariennu’s passion: cold where they were hot, dry where they were moist. Even as she thought of her that way, Naibe sensed her sister’s inner tension and struggle. Naibe felt a secret trying to surface again because of the way she had said:

  Do take care, sister. If he is truly the fire you think he is, don’t let it consume you. Don’t be like the boy across the way, touching what you shouldn’t touch knowing what you shouldn’t know. If you truly take on a god, it may be more than you can bear.

  Rays of something so sunny and wonderful, like a long ago innocence, were being enveloped by the shadow of darkness and secret hurt. It was too intense for the young woman to think about. For now, she didn’t really want to look into the woman’s secrets. She lolled on the pillowed mat, dreamily tracing her fingers in the air as if they still touched Marai’s softly glowing face and the way it became part of her sighs. She tried to blot out the thoughts of Deka’s mysteries, which she had instinctively begun to draw into her thoughts.

  “Fire?” she quipped. “If that’s what you want to call his heat, it certainly is! And I can bear as much of that as he might like to give me…” She grinned, engulfed in one more pleasant memory “He’s astounding...” She sighed. “And he knows...” Naibe-Ellit reflected as if she was living each moment again…“The instant I felt the full length of him in me, there was this quiet moment...like ...he was learning me from the inside out. He knew everything I ever could need or might want of a man and matched all of it tenfold...” Naibe-Ellit prattled. “Oh Goddess yes, let him burn right through me, if he can keep my thunder coming that way until I have no other thought than to die of it.” The young woman’s eyes shone and misted, lost in the memory of how the pleasure had begun to roll through her. The sensations of pleasure had not been sweet or even tormented releases, as she expected. Each moment of ecstasy had been one breathless vaulting to the next incredible onslaught of even deeper and more intense pleasure multiplied on the last. Each time he matched her, too, as if the pleasure had been only his.

  Deka shifted, fidgeting and bored.

  Naibe-Ellit paused, boosting herself up on her elbows.

  “I’m sorry...I shouldn’t be...He’s just...oh goddess…” Naibe flopped back down, wanting Marai to hurry back to her to share more sweetness.

  “The Man-Sun and I have a different journey to make than you have with him...” Deka’s voice spoke just above a whisper.

  “What do you mean?” Naibe-Ellit stared backward at the impassably serene face atop the lithe body seated slightly behind her. Something in Deka’s calm glance made her feel ugly again, like the grunting, half-minded, bloated little monkey-girl she had once been. Deka was certainly on fire with jealousy, she decided. Naibe knew that had to be the only explanation for the hurt eeriness radiating from her companion like the rays of a dark sun.

  “You could come to him as I have.” She sat fully, a chill stealing over her. At that moment she wasn’t inclined to share him with anyone, but knew she had to at least extend the courtesy by suggesting it to the two other women.

  “I might fight you for him, though. The Lady knows it could easily take all three of us to satisfy the hunger he has, now that he knows of it.”

  She realized, however, that Marai the shepherd, turned for one night into a dream of King Dumuzi of legend, wasn’t that easily conquered. His needs, she discovered, were far more complicated.

  Tonight had just been dumb luck and maybe the shining down of a certain star. Ariennu should have been mad with jealousy, not cheering them. Ari had been complaining for the entire journey about how resistant he was to even an outright sexual stakeout. Maybe Deka’s attitude was one of wariness, trying to tell her she could be making a serious mistake.

  Naibe-Ellit thought about how different Bone Woman had become since they had been changed. In the old days, before Marai came to them, they had all been more or less predatory over the men in their lives. The young woman remembered this through the fog of her own half-witted memory. Before Marai, she had been like a child, amused by trinkets and shiny things some of the men gave and eager to please them in return. Deka was always the first to offer herself to any men who came into the camp. Both Ari and Deka would compete for them until the elder got too sick to try. All three knew in those days, that she who succeeded in the bed was apt to be treated better, if only for a little while. But Deka despised mistreatment at the hands of the men more than she or Ari. They all put up with it, understanding it was just part of the men’s nature. Naibe closed her shimmering golden-brown eyes and tensed. The more she thought about Deka, the more a different feeling overtook her. She felt as if something was looking for her with the intent to hurt her or to take something of hers. The awful, lowing sound of a bull mingled with the howling wind of a storm filled her ears. The lapis-blue stone in her brow leapt forth to defend her against that noise as if it knew a demon spirit traveled on it. It was the same sound that had come to her during the wind storm.

  A shining, luminous halo of that horrid, devouring sound formed around Deka’s beautiful, dark face as if she had suddenly become the controlling center of that wind, drawing it to her. The young woman knew at once, that the sound of the wind was seeking both of them. She had shown her fear of that sound but Deka welcomed it as if it was an old friend.

  “No!!!” Naibe-Ellit gripped her ea
rs and cried out “Stop...What are you doing to me?!!” she drew her own knees up under her chin in ghastly horror, rocking back and forth to calm herself.

  Deka, who seemed oblivious to the terror the younger woman felt, touched Naibe’s arm as she spoke.

  “There’s so much I don’t know about the before time...but you can see it hiding there, can’t you? You’ve pulled it out of me again.” The woman whispered poignantly, her head tilting even more inquisitively. “You are looking at my life now. I know you are! So you see how I was so beautiful?” The woman impulsively seized Naibe’s arms. “Perhaps I was a queen, a priest, even a god?” she suggested, continuing to question the younger woman.

  Naibe started to struggle in her grip.

  “I know I had my beauty then...every bit as much as now, but that is all I can remember.” her voice rose a little. “When Man-Sun was together with me in the vessel, he wakened my heart to everything like no one has before, but I remembered one more thing. That this, the beauty I have now and all the power was part of me before. I was so small and loved in his mighty arms so long ago. I think my Ta-Te has come back to me and he is walking in the body of Man Sun...Marai the shepherd is no more and you have opened him. Soon, oh very soon he will come to me as my lost Ta-Te...” Deka sighed. She paused again, seeing the terror she was inspiring in the young woman. This time, though Naibe quivered in misery, the woman felt no pity or compassion.

  “You said ‘like a storm he takes you!’ Let me tell you this, my sister! There is already a storm raging in me that never dies. I cannot say if it is a memory, or a dream of what will happen to me...” her eyes shut, lost in ecstatic drift until the noise from the younger woman’s struggle with terror signaled her.

  “Enlil’s storm...tearing my head...” she gasped “Goddess please, make it stop...” Naibe-Ellit moaned in high-pitched misery.

  Deka blinked, not exactly understanding why Naibe said that, then drew closer, to hold the shivering woman.

  Naibe broke into wretched sobs and trembling. The bad dreams of the weeks since the incident at the campfire had found a dreadful author. The younger woman struggled to free herself. The thought that her own sister-companion had caused these dreams and miseries with her newly realized power was more than she could bear to think about, even though she sensed the truth in Deka’s touch.

  It was as old as the power of the Lady in herself! Had Deka unwittingly placed a curse on her for tasting that beautiful aspect of Marai first? Her heart rushed with the awful dizziness of exhaustion and a sick horror that had no vent. She slumped forward into Deka’s arms.

  Deka jumped a little, shocked that Naibe had actually fainted against her. She gently lowered the woman to Marai’s pallet. With a keen, but quiet fascination, she touched the blue, smoldering stone pulsing under the skin of Naibe’s forehead, then watched her body seize in a tremor as if the stone itself rebelled at the dark woman’s touch. Deka knew what Naibe-Ellit felt now, as if a veiled memory had suddenly opened her thoughts. She wanted to hold the younger woman, then. Perhaps she could beg Naibe to take notice of the power building in each of them when the younger woman came to her senses. If she hurried Naibe might still have a chance to escape that power.

  Deka bowed her head. For as long as she could remember, she had been running to find this mysterious memory of Ta-Te who had loved her once. There hadn’t been any escape for her, then. Long ago, that passion between woman and one not of Earth, turned her from a god into a slave. Why was she even thinking it would be different for Naibe? And why did she still want to re-join him? Did she think she would win this time?

  You’ve always been so blameless, Brown-Eyes. Deka’s thoughts whispered. You shouldn’t be the one he chooses to hurt this time. But, you opened the gate for him. You built the bridge. You invited him, poor thing...and he will use you up...and next Wise MaMa...and then he will come for me again to finish me unless... Deka smoothed Naibe-Ellit’s brow and stilled her slightly jerking arms and legs until the mild seizure became deep slumber. She kissed the place where the bluish stone cooled and subsided.

  Touching her own imbedded blood ruby, in a gentle, but mystical gesture that came like a ghost into her hands, she covered the younger woman warmly before retreating to her side of the tent. That was the moment she saw Marai coming back alone.

  Ariennu had decided to stay a little longer with the parents of the injured boy.

  Deka’s heart raced.

  Stand up to him! Let him know he will not do this again! her thoughts cried out. She met Marai at the drape in the middle of the tent, between the sides, and almost stumbled.

  Marai grabbed her instinctively and drew her up firmly. There was no warmth in his eyes now, just a kind of betrayed iciness. He had sensed her thoughts.

  “Deka …why?” He asked her. “Why?” He shrugged her away when he felt the vague protest and went to curl his lady up in his arms. Soon the toll of energy spent throughout the night engulfed him and he slept.

  In the fading darkness, Deka’s agony descended on her. Gripping her own arms until her nails drew blood and her eyes rolled back, she let the roaring sound build once again inside her thoughts. The darkened image of a man, so raw in his power, formed in that sound. Was it, after all, any part of Marai? A tear fell quietly from one eye, because she so very much wanted it to be.

  CHAPTER 5

  INEB HEDJ

  In the early morning, Ariennu stumbled wearily from Madu’s family tent with the news that Aruat, the leader of the larger family with whom Marai’s group had been traveling, had also decided to turn south to avoid the infamous East Gate garrison of A-bt. His clan would take their chances along the east side of the great River Asar. The two patriarchs agreed to stay together east of the Asar until the harvest. At that time they would work their way closer to the cities, migrating from field to field as hired workers. Eventually everyone hoped to find a settling place and a secure line of work.

  Marai knew Madu’s decision was partly his wife’s choice and partly about his son, Salim, the youth who was recovering from his wounds. The boy’s left hand, having borne the brunt of a flash fire from the satchel should have been taken off at the wrist in order to prevent blood poisoning, but Marai and Ariennu used mosses, mud and contemplation. They cooled the burn so that young Salim lost only his little finger and part of the one next to it. His other hand was growing webbed and rather ugly deep pink skin. It was skin, nonetheless. He would be able to work by harvest time.

  Not one of the travelers faulted Marai or the women for the youth’s injury. They knew the shepherd had the right to cut off both hands and make the boy a cripple for life. The boy was guilty for certain, by his own admission. His agony that night had driven him to confess his crime and beg forgiveness even as Marai and Ariennu had worked on his wounds.

  Salim wailed that he had come into the tent as soon as Marai and Naibe left. Quietly, he took the satchel from the little woven basket and went out with the others to watch the goings on at the well. His family was poor and the stones looked as if they might be polished into pretty jewelry. He had sensed the magic in the air and had even begun to think the stones were enchanted. Magic stones, he knew, might be even more help for his family. He had the idea to take only a few of them and return the others before any were missed.

  Ariennu re-counted all of the stones once more as she put them back into the bag. There were seventy-four. Marai reminded her that there had once been seventyseven, so both assumed the original count had been seventy-eight. The shepherd had explained almost truthfully to Madu, the boy’s father, that the “magical” stones were not to be touched by anyone but his family until they were safe at the temples in Ineb Hedj.

  Inwardly, it still worried Marai that he had never desired the youth’s injury. He hadn’t even known some of the Children of Stone had been stolen until young Salim cried out in pain. By day, just as the day after the slaying of the thieves, the children had become annoyingly quiet again. Despite his asking and quiet
contemplation, they never explained themselves. Deka’s coldness that early morning, when he confronted her in the tent, and her dispassion toward the boy, Ariennu, Naibe and himself, led him to consider that perhaps she and not the Children, had been behind the attack on the boy. He knew he needed to sort out whatever was troubling her before she turned on others, once they were settled in the city.

  Because Marai had been told to go to Ineb Hedj, he and the women ended up being the only ones who went through the East Gate garrison. They went on record as being merchants of spice and cedar incense from Kina who were bound for the royal temple district. Ineb Hedj. Their destination, was simply known as “White Wall” to the thousands who lived outside the gleaming royal district.

  Ineb Hedj was a glorious city under the protection of the god Ptah, the craftsman. White Wall was just the portion of the city where the royalty and the nobility lived. The rest, the Nome of Ineb Hedj, was home to everyone of common blood who worked the estates and farmed the land. Marai and the women quickly learned, King Menkaure, the Lord of the Two Lands, had built his estate here so he could see his Eternal House, his vehicle to the sun, rising up amid the serene interior canals, gardens and lakes that lay nearby.

  The shepherd and his “wives” traveled another week by themselves.

  The first night, Deka and Ariennu made a little sauce for some bread they had baked at the last station. It was going stale and needed a sweet sop to make it edible. Marai traded some sap crystal incense, just a grain or two, for dried fish and a jar of beer. These things they offered to the steward in charge of a wealthy man’s field so he might permit them to tent there overnight.