Voices in Crystal

by Mary R Woldering

  Hordjedtef knew it was against Maat to prejudge a man, to assume he was like others of his kind. If this singer in the night was brought to the holy places, the prince knew, such an act would put his outlier’s soul in grave danger. The sacred places were for the god-seed and the purified only. The man, obviously a commoner and a sojourner, would be driven mad or burnt alive by the witness of the powers of their gods. If he survived that, his thoughts would never again be a solace to him. He’d have to be cast, memory erased, into the wilderness from which he’d emerged, if not killed out of mercy for the rest of men.

  Djedi, great Djedi had finally lost his wits if he wished him to take part in this travesty. Hordjedtef finished his drink, then got up and tiptoed to signal for a servant to come to rub him with soothing oil so he might get to sleep at last.

  Marai was amazed he had been walking the better part of the night and wasn’t tired. Earlier today, he, Houra’s boys and a cousin Naim had brought the sheep down from the higher hills to the water at the settlement. As the dry season got under way, the only safer grazing areas left were closer in to the wadi station. The task after the lambing, entailed a treacherous climb down the pass in the cliff above his rocky dwelling. Two or three times, Marai doubled back to the top to coax the more hesitant animals toward the others and to bear the lambs down in his arms. With that chore done, he’d slumped all but unconscious in front of the guests of the wadi. He nodded through Sheb’s eternal arguing and, later, sang his prayers with only slightly increased vitality.

  The voices had frightened him nearly witless. They invaded him. They reassured him, and finally, they had sent him walking for what seemed most of the night. A walk of this distance should have taken him far longer. It should have also worn him to his knees after such a day. Instead of feeling tired, he felt oddly refreshed.

  When the last of the lights from the wadi faded into starlit but complete black, the spots of light became soft glowing balls that bounced high and then splattered joyously into lit ovals on the ground, that pointed out the way before him. They moved and hopped like windblown underbrush. When he worked up the courage to grab at one, or chase it, the light leapt up, circled his shaggy head and dove down, like a cave bat, nipping playfully at Marai’s braided grass sandals. Filled with a strange joy and an exuberance he couldn’t explain, he began to run as he grew closer to the glow. Soon, the last sand hill loomed before him.

  Grains of sand...

  The voices hushed in their own sense of wild excitement, like a bride awaiting her husband. At Marai’s arrival, each grain of sand beneath his feet seemed to burst into life. The earth buzzed like an anthill, swelling in a mad and joyous new song. Shivering tingles of pleasure shot up his legs, paralyzing him with madness, joy, renewed fear, and even sudden exhaustion.

  There is something here

  In grains of sand

  Something is new

  It has never been here before, like this

  Long It has not been at all...

  The voices sing/whispered in his head, paraphrasing their original song to him. He trudged on suddenly hesitant feet and newly nagging legs that wanted to do nothing more than sink wearily into the sand before he could reach the summit of the dune.

  Marai shielded his eyes from the greenish glow, then timidly looked into the pit from which the mysterious light came. The goddess he had sung to, dreamed about, and expected to find when he opened his eyes, did not greet or enfold him in her burning embrace. All of the courage he’d grown in his proud march to the dune suddenly vanished. From the size of the smoldering pit, Marai knew the thing he saw was easily the same size as Wadi-Ahu.

  His cousin Sheb’s settlement was big enough for some seventeen date palms, a large pond, a well, a mud-brick hut and enough tent space for their extended family as well as a large caravan of traders. The edge of the thing he saw sticking partway out of the sand no more resembled his goddess Ashera, her chariot, entourage and lions than he looked like one of his sheep. The voices had told him they were not the goddess but he hadn’t wanted to believe them. Now it seemed they had been telling the truth and he had been quite a fool to convince himself of anything else.

  The part above the sand was four times his length, twice his height and it looked puffed up like newly baked flat bread. Its glowing silver and gold surface was as smooth as pond water on a still day. Because of the vapor shimmering around it, Marai knew that this thing in the sand pit was still too hot to touch, but was quickly cooling into a shimmering milk color that looked almost wet. As he stared, in disbelief, the shepherd saw the smoothness of the surface above the sand transform into patterns of endless, faceted rainbow color and light moving and dancing in childlike glee under the glowing milkiness. Marai stumbled backward, falling face down in the sand in his attempt to get out of the sight of the great thing lying there.

  Blessed goddess...it’s a real star fallen right out of the firmament. The shepherd bit his lips until he tasted blood, slobbered and struggled with his fear frozen legs. He tried to make them work, so he could run far away, but they were all but rooted to the ground. Oh my sweet goddess... He became penitent, hoping that if this really wasn’t Ashera, that she might hear the pleas of her favored singer and come to his aid. Is this more of your wrath I bear...to be slaughtered by some unknown demon because I dared invoked your sweetness? Dared to fancy myself beloved? Is it your joy to see your faithful servant at his worst? Do my years of singing in atonement for my impetuous deeds mean nothing to you? his thoughts raced.

  A rush of exotic vapor swept through his flared and sweating nostrils. For a moment he stopped blubbering, sniffed like a beast and then waited for his doom.

  You still have the thought

  We are Your Lady of the Star

  If that is your knowing

  If this pleases you

  We can make her for you

  See us now

  A frightfully seductive voice belonging to a girl too young to know its’ sensuality filled the shepherd’s thoughts.

  Marai urged his complaining legs and body to the top of the dune once more. What he saw this time knocked him to his knees again. The instant before he buried his face in the vibrating sand, he saw a sweetly muscular girl-woman reclining naked in the exposed part of the milky-looking shape as if she rested in a giant, carved crystal bowl. Her beringed hands cupped her large, round breasts, offering them to him.

  Marai’s senses stilled. He knew this wasn’t really the goddess, although he wanted it to be. Even though the image he saw was larger than life, it could move and breathe. It smiled at him from the glazed surface. Pearls and golden shapes cut like crescent moons and stars burst from a crown that pressed ever so lightly into her abundant black ringlets of hair streaming down to the surface of light where she sat. Her headress created the illusion of a starry crown floating at her brow. Dozens of ropes of perfect pearls streamed past her offered breasts to the mound of black between her ripe, hard thighs. More pearl ropes, draped like a belt, hung about her wispy waist and ample, but firm hips that ached for the giving and taking of pleasure. She appeared to be fifteen, at most seventeen years old..not a girl, but not long a mature woman. When she spoke inside his thoughts, a dusky, night-filled child-voice haunted him from a thousand of his dreams. The image was every bit Ashera, goddess of the morning and evening star. It was an unknowable miracle.

  If you long for a thing

  You create it for yourself

  When you see me

  Who am made of your every desire,

  Why are you so afraid to look on me?

  Those lips moved. Her hot, impassioned breath came out of the image to ruffle his hair.

  She is so alive, he thought...and yet...How can she be anything other than just an image? Marai ached to touch her. Feelings awakened by the power of the voices earlier that night came to life again, then chilled in fear.

  The sight of me thrills your heart,

  Your loin leaps up for me

  Am I no
t the essence of She,

  The Evening Star?

  Look up, man of Ai,

  Do not bow your head

  See and delight in what has been given to you

  The shepherd sat at the crest of the dune, pondering his situation. He knew either the real Ashera would retaliate over her form being used or this was his Ashera. The image continued to offer itself for a moment, then faded into rainbow colors and patterns that danced over the surface of the fallen thing in the pit. Without an image, the sweet voice continued to sound inside his thoughts.

  Enter me, my sweet, my man of Ai. The voice echoed softly.

  Hesitating less this time, he scrambled down the inner wall of sand to the place where the image of her sweet thighs had joined. Now more curious than afraid, the shepherd touched and investigated the glassy surface. His trembling, sun-blackened fingers slid along the area in front of him, then recoiled in his surprise, because what he touched felt like a woman’s oiled skin, moist with the honey of desire. At the same time, that place felt a little like glass, or something so highly polished that it felt wet when he touched it. It left no moisture or scent on his fingers, but it begged to be touched or even caressed like the opening petals of her fragrant vulva wanting to be spread.

  A thrill of pleasure raced through him, as he caressed the place again and again, marveling at the feel of it with both hands. The part beneath his right hand suddenly gave way into an “O” shaped opening into which Marai fell. He pitched headlong through the portal, seeing only bright, white light as pure as cleaned lambs’ wool illuminated by the noonday sun. The little balls of light that had led him through the dark wilderness now swirled around his head and body with such a playful ferocity, that the man of the sand barely felt himself land on a flat bottom in the midst of the gleaming clouds.

  Marai screamed, half in fear and half in anger at having been so easily tricked by this illusion. Scrambling back to his feet to escape, he gasped in horror as the opening sifted shut like a ripple of water flowing from an open bowl. Groping at the wall, Marai realized the opening was gone as if it had never existed. He was trapped.

  Houra thought she heard Marai singing again in the middle of the night. A gentle song had begun like part of a peaceful and quiet dream. Maybe this was part of her dream of hope about him. It was settled, she knew. They were all going to move to Kemet in the morning. She hadn’t readied anything. Their few possessions could be quickly packed onto the few asses they owned or abandoned. Marai hadn’t actually promised to go with them yet, but Houra had sensed something in the tone of his singing tonight. Perhaps he was saying goodbye to this place and good-bye to all of the the sad memories here.

  Recently, Houra had been thinking about the shepherd every night. Her thoughts about the big shepherd were especially poignant when Sheb lay snoring in her arms. It would have been nice, just once, to have crept to his cave when her husband was asleep or to have wandered off after him across the flat top of the cliffs. Sheb guarded her too well. It was not her people’s way for women to come and go as they pleased. In a place where life was hard, women needed to obey their protectors, almost without question. She had always objected to that idea. It made little sense to her that a man could marry or take concubines, as long as he could afford them, but women were to be subject and obedient to the men in their lives whether they were father, brother or spouse.

  It would have been impossible for her and Marai to love like sister and brother gods Ashera and Shamash though something about the idea seemed so right. Marai had been her first and only true love. Sheb was the sire of her children and the master of this crumbling way station in the wilderness. For that, she loved him. On the other hand, her half-brother... Houra paused, wondering why she was thinking of him as though she would never see him again. It was foolish. If he was singing, he hadn’t gone anywhere. Morning would come and he would still be there, leading out his small herd of sheep.

  Houra had often wondered why she hadn’t been able to give up her girlish fantasy of Marai. Sheb was younger, successful, and much better looking, than her half-brother, but Marai had always been a different sort of man. His very presence swept her into forbidden dreams of light and visions of golden gods in faraway places. His sunburnt, filthy exterior couldn’t hide the magnificence she knew was there, just beneath the surface. When he stood near her, his imposing frame had a way of blotting out the sun. His quiet charm, even in the face of his great sorrows, evoked the care of so many women, even though he refused them. She felt she had so much in common with him, because she and the shepherd kept dreaming their dreams of better times than this.

  The songs Marai sang were always simple, elegant variants of the love poems everyone who had lived in the Shinar and Akkad regions had known from childhood on. They told of fertility and of the love between Inanna and Dumuzi the shepherd boy. Rituals for the spring and the growing season went with them, so they were supposed to be inspiring and erotic. When he sang them, however, the tone of them became so erotic that guests at the wadi would wake up to listen.

  After a while, when the constant stream of sojourners were told about the curse that marked the big man, they would say it was such a shame that he had gone mad. He had even become unable to perform the acts about which he sang. Perhaps the anguish of his failed manhood made the songs even sweeter, the visitors remarked. Then, mortally aroused, they would go to their tents and to their wives on that account. Sometimes women whispered that a child had been born when nine moons passed from a night of these songs. He was so alone, so sad and so wounded that, despite his haggard ugliness, he was magical.

  As Houra lay thinking about the shepherd and about opportunities missed, the night sky suddenly grew brighter than day. The entire camp jolted and trembled in horrid, shaking and roaring just once. Then everything in the night grew still and dark again. Houra gasped and sat straight up. No one else woke or cried out. No feet scampered. No hands sought weapons.

  I have to get up..the boys!.. She stared in horror at Sheb slumbering, peacefully dumped beside her as she struggled to rise from her mat.

  You are a witness to a wonder...be still.

  Gentle voices washed over her like the hand of a soothing mother, lulling her back into the blackness of sleep. In her slumber, Houra saw Marai garb himself for travel and go into the wilderness. A strange moonbeam that shone from no visible moon illuminated his way.

  Is he leaving us? Houra asked herself, then as if her brother could hear her she asked the distance. Why, Marai? Why would you do this all alone and apart from us? She felt sad, more than angry. After everyone all but got down on their knees and begged you to go with them! When all of us are going in the morning when it will be safer? Why like this?

  As if thoughts were wishes, Houra suddenly thought she heard her young sons whispering to her:

  There is something here that

  Never was here before

  Prepare your mate and young

  Look to the others.

  When you wake

  A change has come

  Wolves have come

  More with the sun

  Understand, what begins in pain

  Will end in complacency

  Do what you must

  Houra trembled; struggling against what she assumed was a prophecy of her own death until the voices whispered to her again:

  You live and will live long

  You will see, touch, hold this man of Ai

  In your arms

  Once more

  On the day of his embrace

  You will rise

  You will understand all.

  “Marai...” she spoke in her sleep, fighting to wake herself.

  Be at peace.

  Hold your beloved and

  Love your sons.

  The one for whom you cry

  Was never for you

  He is for the ages

  See the wonder

  Oh Woman who remains behind

  In the descending dre
am Houra saw Marai fall into the web of blazing white light and vanish into banks of gleaming clouds. She sighed, hurt and defeated. Her only understanding of what she saw was that, somehow, Marai walked with his goddess. He was no longer in the world they had shared at Wadi Ahu. Like a demonic wraith, his goddess had lured him to a lonely place and had lifted him out of his very footprints, perhaps to destroy him. He was gone without a trace.

  “Abu!!!...Abu...!” Horrified shouts borne on Iar-el and Tisehe’s scampering feet poured through the loosely tied door flap of their father Sheb’s hut. “They’re gone!.. Everyone’s gone!!”

  Forcing his eyes open at the sound of his sons alarmed cries, Sheb squinted at the bright mid-morning sun flooding in through the open flap. Staring past the boys, the wadi man sat bolt upright in shock, then leapt from his pallet. Girding his robe, Sheb strained his ears for the morning sounds of braying asses and shouting herdsmen. Only the plaintive bleats of Marai’s sheep, still penned up for the night, met his ears.

  It was instantly clear to him that last night’s guests at Wadi-Ahu, a caravan of assherders making the circuit of wilderness water holes, the very men brokering the deal for the swap of the wadi and it’s marginal debt for travel goods, weren’t in camp any more. The herders must have crept away without a word or sound before daybreak.

  Erupting into sudden curses that these travelers had doubtlessly dropped a potion into last night’s beer and probably robbed him blind, Sheb stormed out of his house to the brick beehive-shaped storeroom. He dragged the older son Iar-el by the arm, intent on showing him the enormity of his neglect.

  “What in El’s name happened to you two last night?!” he shrieked, red-faced and overwhelmed. “I let you two sleep like men who know their duty and you let those dung-eating thieves walk right over you and carry off whatever they want!” he shrieked “Don’t you have any ears?” Sheb let go of Iar-el long enough to grab the younger son Tisehe by one ear and start to shake him.