Do not deny us, Marai. It sighed.
Marai agreed uneasily, understanding that if the owners of these voices could touch him with lights, give unfathomable pleasure, fly about in the sky in utter defiance of all the gods he knew and talk in his head, they could just as easily strip him to the skin without a bit of remorse.
Slowly, he began to remove his sandals. He unfastened the cords that held the goatskin cloak around his shoulders and threw it, together with his leather cap, on top of the sandals. After a moment’s hesitation, he shed his pattern-woven kilt and stood, head bowed and clad only in his loin strap.
The air around him shimmered impatiently, waiting. He hesitated, remembering how he had been violated earlier that evening. After a few moments he grumbled, then fumbled angrily with the leather strap that held the frayed linen rag together. Taking care to protect his genitals with his hands, he discarded the filthy scrap onto the heap. The pile of fur and cloth erupted into greenish flame, dissolving his only clothing into white ash which quickly faded into nothing.
“My clothes!” Marai yelped, straining his eyes for movement in the white, rolling fog.
You will be given other things
Before you go forth from here
The seductive voice laughed again, teasing him until he blushed heartily.
After Marai stood for a few silent moments covering himself, he began to feel silly. It occurred to him that if such a voice wanted him to reveal himself fully he should be grateful, not shy. Armed with that thought, Marai stopped hiding himself. He savored the thought, as he began to move around the fogged in area, that the voices said he’d be leaving and that he was part of something that “had never been here before”.
Perhaps it will be best to relax and enjoy the wonders befalling me. These voices haven’t harmed me yet... Now they assure me they won’t! he thought.
The shepherd felt around the room the way he might have explored a dark cave or the bottom of a dry well. He couldn’t see anything but cloudy whiteness. The floor rose and fell at irregular intervals in a series of ramps beneath his feet. Upright walls to either side and occasionally to his front swam with moving forms of the same rainbow-like growing and contracting honeycomb patterns that had covered the outside of this strange place. As he studied and stared at the patterns, he noticed these shapes were myriads of angles inscribed in circles all constantly locking and interlocking. This continual pattern channeled into corridors that bent in further circular and wavelike patterns. Amazed, Marai moved from place to place, wondering what the purpose of each area might be.
At some point during his wandering, a whine sounded above his head. Marai looked up. A circle of light, similar to the ones that lit his way across the sand, formed above him. Another light formed beneath his feet. Amused, he stared at it, then in a sudden fit of self-preservation, he tried to leap away. The light rooted his feet in their tracks and the whining noise sent down a starry and glittery but sheer tube that fastened onto the light under his feet.
Marai fought, cried out, raved, beat with his fists, rammed with his shoulders and struggled inside his transparent prison, but could not free himself. The beings had trapped him as surely as one traps a mouse under a jar.
After what seemed an eternity of fighting, he fell against the inside of the tube, exhausted, yet still pressing at the sides with his hands and feet.
Marai,
The combined voices tried to soothe him. The shepherd froze again, his raised fist glued to the sheer wall surrounding him.
A tingling sensation danced slowly over his body. He roared in horror as same green-yellow flame that had destroyed his clothing ran like a wildfire over him. Certain he had been set on fire, he fought and thrashed in the tube, trying to put himself out until it dawned on him that he wasn’t even suffering. There was no burning sensation. His skin felt cool and wet. A pleasant tickling sensation ran wherever the “fire” traveled on his skin. In the wake of the flame he saw his skin brightening and calluses fading.
“Oh Goddess...oh goddess...it’s...” He pleaded even though he knew by now that Ashera had nothing to do with any of this. “It’s bathing me?” His terrified cry rose into astonishment when his hair lifted away from his head, as gently as if a loving maidservant handled it. The tangled, braided knot in the back of his head unfastened itself. Tingling and wetness rolled through his hair and beard, combing the wiry, kinked mass out straight and fluffy as it did.
Eventually, the pleasant sensations ceased and the sheer tube retracted into the clouded ceiling. The spot on the floor released him and the matching spot above him faded. Letting out a sigh of relief, Marai rubbed his arms, noticing his skin felt almost raw in some places. All of the tough, dead skin at his knees, elbows and hands had been stripped away. His feet, devoid of the necessary thickened skin even hurt when he took a step.
“Why?” the shepherd begged again, but instead of an answer, the collective voices sang a variant of the same atonal dirge that had greeted Marai earlier in the evening.
We are Children of Stone
Grains of sand
Our world smiles no more
Our days have passed
We drift at the end of our time.
The gentle voices sang again and again in varying levels, speeds, and in rounds until the man of the sand knew each phrase in the deepest part of his heart.
“Are you ghosts then, like my young Ilara?” He asked as he continued to meander around in the white clouding. The shepherd felt the depth and finality of their sadness inside his thoughts. Gentle breezes glimmered at his chest and rushed sweetly past his face, caressing it like a lover while they sighed through him.
We sing for you,
Who cannot see...
You cannot know our look
Soon you will understand
In this you will come to know us
To begin,
You must see your own image
As other eyes see it.
Marai began to realize that the voices worked in contradictions. If he expressed one thing, they answered in the opposite. They showed him they were not Ashera, goddess of fertility, by rudely awakening his centers of pleasure. They showed him they were not the goddess by displaying her form on the vessel and tempting him once again.
As he was thinking of this, and wondering what puzzle they would present next, a shimmering wall, made of the same material as the cleaning tube flowed in front of him from above his head, like rippling silver water.
Marai regarded the image reflected in the sheet. He stood at least a head taller than most men. Ai-and-a-half, his shorter brothers and cousins used to tease him. As a child he had been tongued-tied and halt of speech. The ridicule from these flaws had produced a lifelong shyness and the bent posture with his head-between-his bulky-shoulders. He lurked at the side of crowds like a slow-witted vulture, even though he was quite bright. His hands, feet, and knees were large, but the legs and arms connecting them to his body were long, gangly, and corded with thick, aging muscle. Despite his rangy and clumsy appearance, all who knew him marveled at his strength. Giant, they called him. His wide, hirsute chest was manly enough but his flabby, hairy belly, now that he was older, equaled its girth. Years of work in the sun had blackened his arms, face, and legs. Only the area his kilt covered showed his skin’s true, bright copper color. Marai’s beard, more than a quarter gray, hung to the middle of his chest. The rest of his dark hair sprawled and curled to the middle of his back. His reflection sneered at its’ newly realized ugliness, frowning its’ fuzzy black brows above his hawkish nose and small, beady eyes. The dark wells of his eyes revealed a hidden fire that lit his face with an expression some people took as madness.
Disgusted by what he saw, Marai held his hand up to block out the eyes he saw reflected in the image.
When he was a boy, he had dreamed of growing into the likeness of the sun god, Shamash, or into the stately elegance of El the Powerful, or Yahweh-Sin the moon. As a new man, he fancied himself
the youthful but not so innocent, shepherd Dumuzi who won the heart and bed of his precious Ashera, bringing rapture to her an incredible fifty times.
Ilara had distracted him from all of those vain fantasies. Her pathos and the sweet, dutiful acts she brought to his home, his hearth, and his bed had evoked his need to protect her from the mark of tragedy in her life. When fate caught up with her and she died, he never thought of his appearance again. Now, the sight of his aging body reaching well into decrepitude depressed him.
“Why did you have to show me?” the shepherd sulked. “I’m a rundown bag of goat gristle and I know it.” He turned away from the image, barely noticing that the reflective sheet had ascended out of sight.
You did not know your body
You now despise its look
You must know this;
That which is truly God
Is in all things,
Be they flawed or not.
The shepherd paused and stared at his wooly chest. These “Children of Stone” were talking like men who spoke about the God Yahweh-Sin, not the moon god Sin, but some supreme god of the mountain. They spoke of the mover behind all who stayed hidden and who was greater than even El or Anu.
“I know...you’re working for Yahweh-Sin, aren’t you?” Marai wondered, for a moment, if it might be true that Yahweh-Sin was greater than these other gods. His singing hadn’t roused any other gods in so many years.
When the voices gave no answer, Marai trudged, tired again, back the way he had come. He entered what he sensed was a larger room. The encompassing mist had gradually thinned enough that the shepherd could almost pick out shapes in the whiteness. Before he had time to think about what might be happening, the friendly lights that had led him to this place returned, circled, and whisked him to the center of the room.
There, his shins struck something that opened with a blast of air that nearly knocked him off his feet. The fog cleared a little more, revealing more of the same vague rainbow patterns of yellow, green, blue, red, and on to indigo that had been on the outside of the “fallen star”. An ovoid shape in front of him glowed with the unearthly, brilliant white.
Marai tensed again, cringing involuntarily, as the “thrumm” noises began in his head again. The thing appeared to be a kind of altar, but when he gazed at the open surface the light and image bent, before his eyes, into the form of a shallow well or a deep basin.
Sacrifice...They are going to sacrifice me...he worried, unable to tear his glance away.
We are here
You have seen yourself.
Now, come to us.
Do not fear death
We would never harm you.
Find solace within us.
The oval-shaped thing grew out of the middle of the color drenched floor like a wide pod balanced on a stalk. It continued to change shape as it did, gradually resembling joined shells.
Marai remembered merchants passing through the wadi station sometimes traded pearly looking shells from the Green Sea that looked like smaller versions of this thing throughout the wilderness.
When Marai dared to look inside the oval again, the sight of something a little like the seeded center of an immense split fig or pomegranate temporarily dazzled him.
It is womb. The voices chorused reverently MaMa.
Marai didn’t see any part of a woman in it. He had seen the womb and afterbirth of ewes. What he saw before him wasn’t either of these. As for it being a mother, his own mother Liah, had died just before his family left Ai for Mari. He knew only Houra’s mother and several aunts who served as mothers. Pomegranates and figs contained seeds, like this glowing thing, but a fig could not give birth to a man any more than he could give birth to one.
New thoughts without voices filled him, the same way the voices themselves had filled him earlier. Marai knew the creatures who made the voices he was hearing didn’t look like people of Earth. He didn’t want to know what they looked like any more. They had frightened him enough tonight. Instinctively, he knew that the thing growing out of the floor before him wasn’t the original shape of the makers of the voices either. What he was seeing was a form they wished him to see. This “pod” was like a giant glassy fruit with seed-crystals crammed into and lining the inside of it.
In his wanderings through the hills, he’d seen large gray stones that, when split open, revealed a nest of glittering crystal shards. This thing was mostly like those. At the same time, it was like a fruit, but still very, very different from fruit or stone. It was all of these things and yet still not one of them individually. That these stones could think, act, and pilot this craft with will alone stunned the shepherd. Amazed, he knew they were the gods in many ways.
“Children made of stone..” he breathed, panting in a sudden fit of ecstatic joy. “Is this you? The voices? In these crystals here? Really?” Marai felt his heart hammering as if it wanted to explode. He felt the blood rushing in his head and in his fingertips. When he touched the wet place on the upper part of his mustache and looked at it, he realized his nose was bleeding.
We become all you desire
We satisfy the hunger in you
For woman
For Mother
For child…
Come…….
The voices sighed up at him and through him from within the fig-shell. So much unrestrained love poured up from the seedbed that tears of joy began to involuntarily course down the shepherds’ cheeks. He wept openly in the sheer happiness of his discovery and in grief for the loss of all of the women in his life: his true mother, his wife, the goddess who never answered his prayers and even Houra, because she wasn’t with him to share this moment.
Holding himself upright at the edge of the stone like crystal-filled pod, his thoughts filled with an image of the children as beings of light. They were without any kind of form his soul could comprehend and so intensely beautiful, that any other sight he had ever seen paled by comparison. Maybe it would have been a dreadful thing for men to behold the way these “Children” appeared in their own world. Yet, even with all of this magnificence and power, their existence on Earth had been threatened so much in a former visit to his world that they could never return in the same way again.
Once before, they had come. Like heedless youths in love for the first time, they had fallen in love with the world of men. He understood that. They had come back to fix the thing that had gone wrong and to continue uplifting and teaching. Long ago, one of them had been left behind as a guardian of sorts. That noble experiment had also failed. They had come to reclaim the guardian, if it wasn’t too late. This time, they chose the form of thoughts and words given life and yet encased in crystal stone. It would limit them, yet as teachers, they had chosen this humble existence. Because of the form they had chosen, they needed Marai to complete their journey...to be a human vessel who could bear them around in the world of men.
If you would touch us...
The voices hushed in rapturous awe as if they had been fed and encouraged by the shepherd’s outpourings of grief and joy.
Marai understood that too, and put out his hand, no longer afraid. The first crystalline orb he touched was the size of his thumb. It was the same size as all of the rest. Unlike an earthly crystal, it felt like warm, living skin. At the touch of his slightly bloody fingers it turned bright blue. Several other orbs near his hand turned lesser shades of blue. Those further away turned pale lilac, then pink and finally silvery-white again. They begged to be caressed, and petted like the perfumed skin of a woman hot with desire. When the shepherd moved his hand away, the colors purred like a giant, tamed cat; their color fading back to light silver.
Lie with us…
The voices whispered, the spoken words becoming one with the thrumming that grew through him like a heartbeat.
Marai tried to make sense of what he saw, but nothing he had ever known could compare to the splendor he felt at that moment.
“Why me? Why was I chosen for this?” his heart was in his
throat.
Long ago, we began a journey
We were many, like your stars
We came as watchers, of many races.
All who lived as we,
Went out to see this place
Of later greatness
We came in hope
At the end of our time
As we came…
Your singing marked you well. The children explained.
“But my songs were for The Lady of the Morning and Evening Star.” Marai’s jaw dropped in disbelief. He wondered if these voices were saying that his gods and goddesses were not alone in the realms of Heaven. Did they mean that there were many more heavens with gods and even more goddesses in the sky?
He, like everyone else he knew, believed the land beneath his feet was the center of all things and that everything else in the firmament rolled about it, piloted by the various gods according to their dominion. Were the “children” saying that there were creatures who never came down to earth and never even concerned themselves with life that lived in the firmament as well? Were there unknown tribes of “Sky-People”? How many were there, he wondered?
We understand how we must teach you
Learn this:
When a song goes from you,
It goes into the vibration of all beings
It will be said
By one of your world many eons hence that
One who sings, prays twice
“But why me? I’m not great or powerful...and all things with life and breath have songs to sing, so why me? Certainly, I can’t matter so much in the goddess’ grand scheme.” Marai mused, pondering the silence over his last question. “I guess fifteen years of prayer can teach a man something, after all.”
How magical are your words, Man of Ai
The orbs glittered as they spoke in a chorus of voices.
In this small portion of time
Men rule this world
Voices in Crystal Page 7
