Marai returned to the evening meal and to an evening of song. All in all, he was happy and even broke into his song to the goddess to “return to the night” for everyone. This time, when he sang, he couldn’t take his eyes off of young Naibe, the image of his goddess.
She smiled, briefly, then turned her head so that no one would think the song was sung for her.
One by one, the women at the wadi station took their plates to clean them. Deka took theirs. She had somehow slipped ahead of everyone by the time Marai Ariennu and Naibe-Ellit got up and already had lit a lamp in each side of the tent. The women laughingly rolled out their bedding.
Shall we ask him if one of us joins him tonight, or wait for him to choose us? Naibe-Ellit innocently asked the elder woman, giggling merrily at the thought of bedding the big man.
Marai, who entered the tent just then and was making his way to his side, sensed the question. He paused a little, turned to look at the women seated wide-eyed and waiting, on their pallets, then chuckled and shook his head. A yawn stretched over his face.
Sleep he said That is what I want the most! The shepherd gestured a cross between a wave and a salute of affection, then slipped through the slit in the dividing drape.
Well, damn you then, Marai...Ariennu half laughed. Sleep well and dream of me!
A clan of several bedraggled people led by a man named Aruat, came out of the northern waste in two more days. They agreed to take Marai and the women with them as far as the eastern bank of the Great Asar River. Even thought the shepherd felt a little uneasy about the group from the beginning, he agreed to go with them because they were of Kina ancestry.
The goods Marai brought with him had been created by the Children of Stone. They had all of the proper seals a merchant from Mari would typically carry. Aruat’s travelling clan never openly questioned the shepherd’s business, even if they secretly doubted he had come by his goods honestly. Aruat’s family had fallen on particularly hard times after a crop failure in their homeland. Having a successful-looking merchant in their travel party gave them a greater sense of credibility.
Any traveler would need plenty of that at Kemet’s eastern gate garrison in A-bt. It was a place of easy guile, where unscrupulous merchants and contractors preyed on people who had been starved out by the famine. These corrupt men cared little if their victims lost the rest of their goods, their wives, their daughters, or possibly their own lives. The only chance of passing through the gates safely was to know someone on the other side well enough to provide a name and a town, or to have a destination already worked out for future employment. Only people with writs of permission and the attentiveness to keep them from being stolen, could pass through the gate and surrounding towns, unscathed.
Epharath insisted the assembled parties could avoid that difficult place altogether, by turning south as soon as the smell of the moisture from the swampland near the great river was noticed. That would take them straight into the town of Heq-At just north of the holy city of Ra at Iunu. He admitted that, as no one had ever returned to report success or cry of failure from that route or even the other path, both choices were still quite risky.
The more miserable part of traveling with this caravan, Marai sighed, was that the travel would begin in the safer but cooler hours of the morning. This close to the Copper Road, night travel was likely to meet with brigands. It was a minor adjustment. During the heat of the day, the group of travelers would stop. They would make a wind wall and take shelter from the heat, sleeping in a few open tents. As the heat eased, they would move again, arriving at the end of the day at the next station, or at least at a place suitable for tenting through the night.
As they began, Ariennu noticed that Marai was either getting better at lying, or was less reserved about casting the illusion of truth on his listeners. He was even blossoming into quite a storyteller. Each day at the resting time and then again at the evening gathering, he would have some adventure to tell from his days as a boy or a young man in the wilderness. Even the greatest doubter eventually grew fascinated with his stories because they reminded many of the travelers of their own carefree days.
If the weather was calm, and none of the myriad of unforeseen circumstances befell them, the slow walk to Kemet would take a month or more. It would be late in Peret; “the sowing season”. They would find lodging near the nobles farms and hire out to tend the crops as they grew toward harvest.
Directions were set by the position of the Divine Soul of Aset the Goddess, or Sepat, seen as the brightest star in the night sky. At each wadi or way-station, the travelers would refresh themselves through the late afternoon and early evening. From each station manager, the travelers would learn of the next direction they were to take, what hazards they might face, and the predicted walking time.
Travel in the wasteland was plotted between the water holes, or wadis, and known only by word of mouth. Travelers were always at the mercy of directions given by each manager along the way. Updates came in the unlikely event that someone turned back to go the other way. People went into Kemet. They never came out unless they had been cast out as criminals. If that happened, their bones bleached in the sand long before they ever reached the mountains of the Sin.
When the walking started out just before sunrise each day, the people in the combined caravan sang to mark the pace of their steps. As the morning’s travel began, Marai would lead out with a prayer-song to the goddess Ashera, except instead of asking her to “Bless his starry night” he asked her to bless the new day and to keep safe their steps. As he sang, he looked at Naibe-Ellit from time to time still wondering if somehow the real goddess had come from her realm to take the poor wretched woman’s place. Others in the group would whisper that the young woman did look q quite a bit like the statues that were sold in any number of temple markets.
Some of the people would chime in with parts of the songs they knew. Some would add ribald and suggestive parts, praising the sexual union of the gods and begging for a return of fertility to their own forsaken land. Some songs were simple praise litanies. A myriad of other deities, both local and cultural, were sung and protection from the negative spirits was asked. In that way, most known deities received something on the journey.
As the heat of the day blazed, weariness and boredom overtook the stoutest of the singers and the tunes faded. Marai spent those quiet walking times digging into his own thoughts. He tried to separate the thoughts that were his own from the children’s thinking, to see if he could still do that.
The crackling buzz of the Childrens’ voices in his head had grown too familiar. Most of the time, their insistent whispers had merged with the same small voice of instinct that had always existed in his heart. Their voices had grown more faint with time and the journey. It was getting harder to tell them apart.
Marai resolved to exercise his independence just a little bit every day, because it wasn’t his plan to be completely overtaken by them.
The women traveled better than most of the women on the journey. Ariennu shifted easily into her role as Wise MaMa again and accordingly changed her tale. She settled on being Marai’s “sister” a widow, as originally planned. Naibe was her “daughter” not yet married, but promised to a spice merchant from Mari who lived on the outskirts of Ineb Hedj. Marai, too, changed his tale to the truth. He stated he was a widower whose wife had died before she could birth a child. Everyone explained that Deka was with them as an independent woman plying a business as a seer, while seeking a return to her homeland. That, too, was more truthful than not.
Ariennu was constantly called upon to make medicinal preparations for aching feet and blisters or to cool down a fever in a child or an elder. Whenever they passed a patch of shrubbery, she and Deka would go through it, looking for any herb or mineral that might be used in any sort of healing preparation.
One of the women miscarried. Another birthed a daughter who was promptly named Adrinna, the same name as Ariennu in the woman’s dialect. An elderly m
an died. At first, the entourage feared it was another plague striking them. Fearing they had been striken, they buried him quickly and agreed to wait at a distance from the next wadi. Marai had known all along that it was simply the old man’s “time”, but these people were superstitious and insisted it had to be an evil spirit.
Deka was pressed into blessing the ragged and half-starved group, so she decided to make a barrier against the evil ones that live in the wind. Much later she would remember what she had done and why she had such an instinct.
“Do you know a spell, Deka?” Ariennu cornered her as she was lighting some of the myrrh bundled in grass stems which the children had given them to trade.
“No, I don’t. Don’t take a tone with me, either.” The elder woman snapped back. “In all this time I believe I’m the only one of us who showed any wit or knowledge. I simply asked you! Is it something they teach?” She pointed to the blue opalesque prism that glimmered just below the surface of the skin on her forehead.
“I...I don’t know...” the dark woman suddenly hesitated. “Does it really matter how the knowing comes, if it works?” Deka answered, beginning to walk around the encampment, waving the two smoldering bundles in her hands.
“The man was old.” Ariennu followed Deka around the camp. “Why not tell them that, instead of letting them think it was an evil spirit and wasting our supplies?” she sighed. Deka had always been a little resilient to rules from the day she arrived with the Kush man, Chibale. It made her interesting in those days, Ariennu remembered. Now it made her haughty and irritating.
“And so you tell me now there are no evil spirits that could be warned away by our good intentions, sister?” Deka’s eyes glimmered a little greener.
In a flash, Ariennu found she could look through them the way one looks through a cat’s eyes. The elder woman shrugged and returned to their tent, unwilling to press her any further
Marai noticed the turmoil and tried to explain to the women that everyone was trying to find their way with the newness of their gifts...that it would take time to adjust but Ariennu found something to sew and began to work at it. This meant she wasn’t interested in talking or in listening to anything anyone had to say on the matter.
The following afternoon the full entourage, feeling much better about the state of everyone’s health, began to pack up and move toward the next station.
Most of the time, Ariennu was Marai’s constant joy. By day she exercised her increased ability to send her thoughts to him. She took great delight in seeing his face crinkle in silent mirth when she sent some truly vulgar tale his way or related, in no uncertain terms, exactly what she planned to do to him if he didn’t watch himself. She tried to make him blush or make him burst out laughing with her explicit mental descriptions of certain feats of sexuality in her past and of how well they had been received.
In the evening, when the other women were asleep, she would creep into Marai’s side of the tent. Lying gently beside him, she would stroke his chest, marveling at the firmness of every muscle. She would wait until he woke slightly, then whisper into his ear how much she wanted him. He would pat her hand, comforted by her touch, but never responded more than that.
I know I look and feel good to you...don’t deny that... her thoughts penetrated his sleepy silence. If I knew a spell...a real one, I’d use it. she would intimate.
You know my reasons, sweet lady... He replied, sending her the pieces of their earlier conversations. He didn’t want to start that part of the curious “marriage” to any of the women until they had all settled in Ineb Hedj or wherever the children led them after that. He had waited many years already and could continue to wait. “Now” just didn’t feel right.
And you know my reasons...she breathed. I’ve always done what I’ve wanted...when and with whom. I was sick when we met, but I’m not sick now. I have my needs too. I won’t wait much longer for you, my beauty.
The shepherd touched her gently, sighing into the loose ruddy-black curls of her hair. She sensed his frustration. On impulse, he kissed her mouth sweetly but stayed his hand from continuing to explore her unbound breasts. She sighed into his open mouth, flicking at his upper lip with the tip of her tongue. Opening her eyes, she saw his silvering glance staring into her heart with the quiet answer. She sat, laughing a little, before returning to her side of the tent.
You’re a fool, Marai...a fool... Her thoughts answered back.
Ariennu’s eyes grew shifty from time to time after that. After the evening meals, she would return to the tent to clean a little while the men stayed up drinking and bragging. She would do some mending if she needed to, then lie down about the time Naibe and Deka were settling in for the night. Waiting until Marai was snoring gently in his side of the tent, she would quietly spring to her feet and begin to prowl about the camp.
At first, she would go to the watch-fire. She would sit down for some pleasant conversation with the few men who were poking at the embers and drinking. Complaining she couldn’t sleep and that she needed a stronger drink, she almost always got a favorable response. One of the young men, whether he lived at that station or was traveling with them, would bring her a cup. Very quickly, she would single out a nice and healthy looking young man from the group gathered at the fire and begin giving little signals about what she really wanted. Gradually a burly arm would find it’s way around her back, pretending to give her some warmth.
The first time she flirted with a young man, Ariennu had been ecstatic that she could still attract one. She had been too sick and generally unwanted most of the time she had been at Marai’s people’s station.
N’ahab-Atall had called her a useless and two-faced stinking old hole, even though they had been lovers and cohorts for years. He told her she was too old looking for him now and better off to drink away her needs. For a while, some of the other men had been minimally attentive, but for her it was the same as being an already gnawed bone thrown to a dog after the master was finished with the meat. She had wanted to kill him, but by that time the illness had come and she hadn’t the strength.
After a few moments of drinking and joking with a new man, Ariennu would announce she was “better” and was going to return to her tent. She would stand, yawn, stretch so that the object of her intent could see how glorious her body looked. She would begin to walk away, but as soon as she was out of the light at the center of the camp, she could hear men in the background starting to huzzah and murmur. They were goading the selected one to get up and take what was being offered. Under the cover of night Ariennu and someone would make their way into a granary, a storage room, a stand of brush or whatever was available for minimal privacy.
Nothing ever lasted as long as it was refreshing. After a while, she would emerge from whatever place she and her partner of the moment had deemed a good place and return to her tent.
Deka woke one night as the elder was washing herself.
Are you mad? She a asked her older companion. Does Man-Sun know of this? she scolded We have to travel with these people!
I’m sure he does know...and it’s his fault...If he had seen to me... As for traveling with these people as you said, I’ve taken care, just like this...Ariennu grinned, raising her left hand delicately. Making a circle in the air, the elder woman slowly let her hand fall.
Deka watched as Ariennu’s features blurred for a moment. She became flat-looking and translucent but at the same time she was filled with the same prismatic color as if she had transformed into one of the Children of Stone in human form.
No one remembers just who I am, Deka. She affirmed. They know it was a good time, but they assume it was their wife or concubine, or a dream... or a free woman in the camp... never that it was me...And I get what I need out of it, too.
Deka nodded quietly, dimly accepting the antics but deciding to say nothing more.
Ari’s sport never came to light among the travelers, but as she had said, Marai knew. She made a point of using her newly discovered abi
lities to make certain he would dream about everything she was doing with the men at night, including how she could make then forget.
Shaking his head and frankly a little embarrassed, Marai knew the truth behind his hesitation. Until that night in the cave, he had believed himself unable. What if he tried with them and failed? These three women had known everything from the outstanding to the monstrous and awful. He knew very little of giving pleasure to a woman. It was just something he never thought of when he had been with Ilara. He pitied her so much that such emotions on his part seemed to suck any of the joy he felt in going to her out of his attempts.
It was different and better when he would dream of lying with his beloved goddess. When he dreamed of being her Dumuzi, the time spent was always confident, and powerful. The moment in the pod with Deka, he understood, was supposed to be just a taste of what awaited him in their arms. He wasn’t ready for it. For now, he let Ariennu hold him after she had washed, and he pretended to be asleep.
Ariennu felt his thoughts and caught herself wondering if he really had been cursed after all. That hugging and cuddling from a man was so strange. Tenderness was a thing women enjoyed with each other because a woman could always soothe the hurt of a bad coupling like no other. The men she had known were, at some point, always brutes. For Ari, nothing under the sky would change that.
Naibe’s presence both unnerved and unmanned the shepherd. How had she dared to assume the look of his goddess. He wondered again if some sort of awful retribution would catch up with the poor woman one day, or if the goddess appreciated such a marvelous imitation? The young woman traveling with him now was so different from the bizarre lump of flesh who danced naked in the thieves camp that night he returned from the Children’s vessel to Wadi Ahu.
These days, she seldom spoke. That was a change, Ariennu told Marai, because she used to babble incessantly in some strange baby-like language. At least she could see her talking, before she was changed. Now, the young woman was reflective.
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