Voices in Crystal

by Mary R Woldering

  Evil turns to good;

  I have sought you for so long among the gods;

  I have offered all to you;

  Come bless me this starry night”

  Marai loved singing to his goddess. He was at least glad he’d been given a pleasing, full and round voice rather than the bellowing voice of a bull, or the braying sound of an ass.

  If heaven doesn’t take it, let it live ever in Her realm

  The vitality of his song faded in an hour. Marai sighed in the chilling darkness, letting his upraised arms fall to his sides. His pallet beckoned to him from the back of his sheltered cave, but in that same moment a chorus of childlike whispers filtered through his head

  “We are children made of stone

  Tiny voices are as grains of sand

  We are lost to time in time

  No more our pleasure, laughing

  No more eyes but the senses

  We are children made of stone

  Drifting at the end of time...”

  “Uhh?!” Marai shook his head violently, trying to shake the gentle song-sound out of his head.

  I might be going mad, like they say, for shutting myself out here, but hearing voices after years of nothing? Not that..He thought to himself.

  Sheb and his own brothers had repeatedly cautioned him that the celibate worship and the waiting for Ashera’s response should be left to temple priests or even to eunuchs with no hope of marriage at all. They told him again and again that the cure for what ailed him was to be found between a woman’s thighs. It wasn’t manly for him to mourn the loss of a wife for so long.

  Life in the Shur was hard. A man could expect to lose one or two wives and half a score of children, if he lived so long himself. One needed to produce sons to give glory to the gods, and daughters to rule home and hearth. He’d heard all of the stories and the teasing.

  Said it would come to this, if I didn’t get on the belly of something soft. The voices come first; next the visions. Then they find me mounting the sheep.

  His brothers had even begun to laugh and imply he was already doing that out in the herd, before they left for parts unknown. It didn’t even anger him. They didn’t understand that he owed sweet Ashera every devotion and his full celibacy. He needed to prove his worthiness.

  Full of new courage, Marai strode out to the stone singing place once more. A woman was easy enough to come by, if one had enough wealth. Marai looked out over the dark waste. Ass-traders and other merchants brought women to service their own numbers. Immigrants to Kemet could be persuaded to leave a not so highly prized daughter behind so their meager supplies might last longer. Marai knew he had nothing to offer a woman but a life of hard work and emptiness. Life in the sea of sand, rock, and unforgiving hills had robbed him of one wife. He couldn’t allow the cruelness of that existence to carry off another.

  “To you of all the goddesses I have turned,

  To ask…”

  He sang another phrase, but was answered by silence. The shepherd yawned, deciding the odd chorus of voices had been brought on by fatigue from the day’s work or some impurity in the gifted beer. He wanted to return to his bed, but something in the air kept him from it. His heart quickened just a little. Had the goddess finally taken pity? Was this an answer?

  His awkward frame shivered, as if excitement had fallen from the sky in a mist. Easing his day-weary body down the rocky face of the inclined slab below his singing platform, Marai stretched out on his back and looked into the heavens for her star. When he found it, the memories of his long-dead wife Ilara surfaced once again.

  The dry season will soon be with us, my husband. Marai heard her memory say. He tried to force himself to think of something less painful, but the memory of her voice circled the heavens for another onslaught. He thought of the seasons that had passed as he watched the star in the wilderness.

  Almost had a flood this year like the one three seasons after my poor Ilara– She was so young–only thirteen years old when I made a woman of her and not yet in her fourteenth year the day of her death. He thought of how she was barely as tall as his chest and ached again with momentary grief. Distant tears rolled like thunder in his head the way they always did when he thought about her.

  Sheb and Houra are right, He sighed. Ahu-wadi needs to go to some other tribe before our throats are cut in the night by bandits.

  Every time he began to think that way, his heart began to argue with him. No real man abandons his place, it would say. Sheb is a coward! Be done with him. Finally, he would convince himself. Sheb is no family-sacrificing fool to prove he is a man. I should do what he says and get away from here too– start over again, before I give her sweet ghost a demon’s life. He’ ll see… They’ ll wake up and I’ ll be ready to go, lambs gathered and all!

  Marai looked at the basket of Ilara’s things he had kept so carefully dusted and folded by his pallet bed. He’d buried her in the hearth she had once used, put up a pole to Ashera to mark it, then dug another hearth. He had wanted to be ready, in case Ilara returned from the Underworld.

  When Abu Ahu had died, Marai showed his own father no such homage. The man had been as old as Ilara had been young. Her death, he decided, had been punishment for his taking her to his bed just after her first red moon. She had not been fully prepared or made a member of their tribe. She had never known her mother, she had said, and was protected by her father, but taught nothing.

  The women of his family had only begun to accept her and teach her. They stared at him, when they knew what he had done, as if he had become a raping monster to disrespect their traditions so greatly. There were important rituals a girl enjoyed during the red moon time– offerings to the earth– Secrets to know, dances to learn. They did not welcome her. Was that the reason?

  Singing as he had, Marai knew the goddess never seemed to listen. Now, for the first time tonight, something made the sky feel sensually alive. He felt that warm heaviness welling in him as if a woman’s scent had caught his nostrils. It wanted to waken his lust. Was it she? Could he survive the furious mating, of Ashera’s hand, the Lilitu if she sent them, instead? Would he be left, a drained husk, on the wilderness floor?

  When he had been a young boy, the tribe had come to the edge of the wilderness near the mountains of Sin. It was in this place, Ahu taught, that the heaven god had built a southern fortress. In their travels, Old Ahu and his descendants had learned of so many gods and ways that it was never practical to worship them all. As a result, each tribe usually chose a particular god or goddess to favor over the rest. Marai had differed from his family and had elected Ashera, the daughter of Sin, the Moon.

  In Mari, she was the morning star and evening star. In Ai she was called Inanna and also Ashera. She was the traveler of heaven; as changeable with her lovers as with her place in heaven. His father favored Yahweh-Sin, but saw him more like an “Old Father” like Anu or El, the Bull of Heaven, the creator in the sky, whom no one could see.

  Listen to the wind again my friend.

  Don’t think of the past;

  Of how a she-child slept on your chest.

  Listen to the night.

  You can hear something.

  It is something that has come here, now.

  It never was here before.

  Yet it knows you, man of Kina-Ahna,

  Man of Ai, man of the sand.

  The faint child-voices speaking inside the shepherd’s head, sent an anguished thrill racing through his body and soul. He tugged at the goatskin cloak thrown over his broad shoulders and sat up, swaddling himself against the cooling darkness.

  Voices...again...and now they’re talking to me as if they’re part of my thoughts. He trembled, hiding his head under the cloak. His large, calloused hands pressed at his eyes and temples, as he tried to get rid of the ache the worrisome voices were giving him. Marai shook his shaggy head violently again and scrambled up, on fear softened knees, to the cleft in the rock where he slept. Gaining the upper porch, he seized a l
oose pebble lying in his path and hurled it down the slope of the cliff.

  “Let Ashera do that to the demon voice!” he spat after the stone, as if he was dashing the voices in his thoughts to bits.

  There is something here –

  One plaintive voice insisted.

  Marai shuddered as the voice continued its teasing

  Grains of sand...to be found.

  Prince Hordjedtef roused himself from his meditative trance first. Something had disturbed him this evening. Great Elder Djedi lay still and relaxed on the slightly raised lounging couch next to his own couch. Facing Nut, the night sky, and her star children, the two men had traveled in spirit in search of something “wonderful”. The old man’s wrinkled eyelids cracked open slightly so that the glassy blackness of his still clear irises glittered in the light of the twin lamp stands on either side of the couches. He would wake soon enough, the youthful prince knew, and he decided to use these moments to reflect on the thoughts that had surfaced tonight. Both men had heard and seen something new as they walked among the stars.

  Ever since the old man had settled in the prince’s home two years earlier, the two men had meditated together every night. Djedi had told his young student repeatedly that he was learning quickly and almost too eagerly, but it didn’t matter to young Hordjedtef. The learning of mysteries replaced his thwarted desires, and the old man knew it. It became the elder’s duty to keep him busy learning all of the secrets that were even teachable as small consolation for the pain and betrayal he had endured.

  Ah, great master, I must… He had urged repeatedly. You are old and the gods grow impatient for you to walk with them. How, then will we speak? How will we have sweet discourse when your body is in the eternal place and no longer reclining near mine? The pleas had been enough to convince his elder to tell him more. Now, tonight, the sky had been full of life.

  “Ah look, young Dede! See how the stars in Asar and the milk of Great Bat glow so clearly! They speak tonight like no other night in so many of my years!” The old teacher had exclaimed as the young prince guided him to his chair. He made certain the old man was comfortable, lit the incense, and began the proper invocation for deep thought. The elder grasped the young man’s hand and fell into his trance so swiftly that the prince could barely prepare himself to follow. Now, an instant later, or perhaps it was an hour, he was waking, sitting and staring at the old man.

  Children singing, just like the old man promised, when we have contemplated the gods. he thought.

  For almost a century, the prince recalled Djedi telling him, a wondrous night like this one would come. The ancient lector priest spent every day and night of his active life listening to the many voices of Earth and preparing himself. Now, he was old and in retirement; awarded the comfort of a princely palace with his protege Prince Hordjedtef. He taught the importance of this nightly ritual.

  When I was a young priest, I first discovered the gentle voices. Djedi once told the prince The elder heard them and sailed out to them, in the boat of his soul. He walked the stars where the owners of these voices dwelt many times, but such attempts left him listless and drained for a week.

  When he realized the masters who were training him couldn’t hear the voices at all, the then young Djedi withdrew from the priestly schools to live and study at his home in Djed Seneferu, south of the city of White Wall. From there he would journey by boat and by foot to the South and to the Kush rim, alone. He learned the ways of the holy women living there, and studied the lore of all the gods. He dutifully recorded every wonder and secret he witnessed until he had a veritable boatload of tablets and books. Three or four times a year, despite the risk to his health, he made a soul-journey to the far reaches of the universe to listen to and to talk to those who spoke as children. Over time, it grew easier for him to hear their beloved voices.

  Djedi told young Prince Hordjedtef that the spirits or gods behind these voices were not children. They were like spirits, but weren’t exactly spirits either. They were beings from a different place than anything of Earth. Instead of being made of flesh and bone as Khnum had made men and women of Earth on his potter’s wheel, they were made and they lived differently. Both humans and the beings who owned these voices were made of the elements of fire, earth, water, and air, but the elemental construction of the two kinds of entity were different. They dwelt, Prince Hordjedtef learned, in watchful places beyond the firmament. Long ago, they had come to Earth to take part in raising the race of humans.

  Khnum, the ram-headed god, could have even been one of them, the prince thought. Voices of children from a place and time far different from Kemet under the reign of his despised brother King Djedephre had come into his thoughts this time, too.

  Were these creatures of our race? he had asked. Were they the “First Ones” from the time when gods walked as men? All the old man had told him was that they called themselves “Children” interchangeably with “Ones who watch” and sometimes “Ta-Ntr” meaning “Those of the gods.”

  That had been enough for the youthful prince. It was settled. The ancient Djedi could speak to the gods in ways his own father and princely brothers could not. He had knowledge which even the holiest of the women and the wisest of oracles could never teach him. Every time he thought of that, Prince Hordjedtef would smile inwardly and feel a little less pain.

  From time to time, the old sage related to the prince, he would stumble across items that had a particular signature of otherworldly energy. He had gathered these things and contemplated on them, using them as tools of knowledge. He knew they were being left by the Ta-Ntr for him and for future generations to study. Sometimes these objects spoke to him. Sometimes he saw through them beyond the confines of earthly time.

  Djedi showed his charge only one of the things he had found. It was a left-facing lunar Wdjat, or Eye of Truth. Unlike most wdjat symbols, which were beaded or crafted of enameled metal, this one was exquisitely crafted on a clear disc of purest crystal. The old man wore it on a gold chain at his elderly throat. The rest of the things, he had said, would be found by a woman not yet born who would be the wife of a priest. It was the same story as the one Djedi had told King Khufu. For the prince, that was as unacceptable as his own ill fortune.

  Shortly after the prince had moved the old man into his Ineb Hedj town estate to live out his days as his teacher, the men began to study and sometimes travel together in search of more magical artifacts. Everything in the young prince’s life was going according to his own idea of the future. Then that world ended.

  His elder brother, Prince Kawab was suddenly and tragically killed in an ambush, while he led an offense against an uprising on the border of Tjemehu lands which were wedged between the vast sea of green at the lower shore and the sea of sand to the east. As Hordjedtef and his elder teacher hurried back to Ineb Hedj to console the great king over the loss of his chosen heir, the younger prince also prepared for Kawab’s widow Princess Hetepheres to name him as replacement crown prince. He fully expected to embrace his sister as his ordained queen.

  Then, just as they were days away from home, word came up the river that the king himself had died. Prince Hordjedtef would have flown home if it had been possible. Now the two lands were in desperate need of a new king.

  By the time he arrived, Kawab’s widow, already the mother of three young princes and a princess, had chosen their half-brother Djedephre to be king. She had blithely overlooked Hordjedtef, not even considering him a prospect. She chose a prince considered unlikely to ever rule, a prince from a concubine, not the queen...a prince fourth in line.

  Djedi’s young student had flown into such a rage that he had been inconsolable. He made threats. He shrieked that all history would remember how Princess Hetty and Prince Djedephre had been clandestine lovers who had plotted together and had murdered her husband. He threatened to cry out that they had even murdered the old king. He shut himself up in his suite and wouldn’t eat for days.

  Even later, Prince Hor
djedtef felt great waves of disgust when he thought of the new king and queen of Kemet. He had been thinking of a way to usurp the throne and reclaim it when the elder Djedi, who had been so very contemplative about all of these events came rapping at his door to let him know:

  The voices have started again. Louder this time your Highness. He had said.

  So, that first night had been a welcome thing to the young prince. That evening, a year ago, he had heard the children sing.

  You will seek your god Maat. The voices had whispered

  As Djehuti, you shall protect her

  So shall you

  Listen to her words of wisdom

  Spoken on the lips of children and innocents

  Hear us

  The power you seek is in the mastery of wisdom

  All else of Earthy and human crown fails

  When that very magical one-time message had been delivered, it was the only time Prince Hordjedtef had actually heard the Ta-Ntr voices. He and his teacher had searched the spirit world for more, but there had been nothing for well over a year. Tonight the men, one young, and one old clearly heard:

  We are here

  We are children made of stone

  Tiny voices are as grains of sand

  We are lost to time in time

  Look to the stars

  Listen to the east wind

  To the south wind

  You will see...

  Here? Ineb Hedj? They are coming here?

  Young Prince Hordjedtef felt his spirit slam back into his body with such a force that he gasped and sat, bathed in sweat. These gods, these creatures of high element were forming and coming to his walking and waking world? How had the old man not been startled out of his wits into a stroke of the heart and died on the spot? The young prince sat for a moment, watching his teacher and wondering what the arrival of such godly and celestial beings could mean. Had his invocations for justice been heard?

  Hordjedtef wondered if these creatures were coming to rout the usurpers who were currently enthroned? Were they going to allow him to become the greatest king the Red land and the Black land had ever known? The oracles had spoken at his birth that his name would sound on the lips of men forever. How had they not spoken the truth? The wise women’s forecasts had proven false until these “Children” spoke to Hordjedtef the year before.