Voices in Crystal

by Mary R Woldering

  “But, my beauty...” Naibe cautioned, sitting for a moment. Her hair floated over his chest. “We must see that what passes between us is clean and has no shadow to cast on us…” Naibe‘s voice sighed down to him.

  “I didn’t want her to come to resent my bed, so I said nothing that first night.” Marai’s breath sighed out in misery. He didn’t want to remember the truth or to see Ilara as anything but an undeserving victim of the life he brought her.

  “The second night, she told me the truth.” he continued. “She had been betrothed twice before but each time her suitor had mysteriously died. She was certain a curse lay in her belly, whether I entered her or not.” Marai reflected solemnly.

  “The man who brought her was not her father. Her own people traded her, warning him not to take her to his bed on account of the curse, but to trade her to others. He had told her to say she was older than she was when he saw how well our clan was doing. He thought we might take pity by the time the truth was known. If she convinced them she was older, she would not be considered a child. Then she told me then she was only twelve or thirteen years old and that her first red moon had come once a year earlier, but ceased as they traveled. She said she had never made the usual offering to the goddess. She said she was unfit to be a wife – a man-killer. Now she was doubly cursed.”

  Naibe-Ellit blinked calmly, thinking of her own life of being used by men. Child or no, many men were greedy for the sweetness of a virgin’s blood. Whatever pain or bleeding girls suffered in giving themselves to a man the first time could be blasphemously offered up, too. An evil where women were ripped from their mother’s and sisters arms and taught nothing, was growing in earth. She knew that one day, women would not look to each other for truth, but take lessons only from men. As far as the girl causing her suitors to die? That was something else entirely, but certainly no curse. Naibe knew the memory was getting too painful and urged Marai to turn to her again with a sweet caress.

  “So what did you do, when she told you this.?” She lay back on the cloak, pulling him up into leaning over her again. She loved the way the dim moon and starlight illuminated his hair and just the slightest part of his beard. Naibe couldn’t resist reaching up to touch them both.

  “Nothing. I took it badly.” he reflected. “In the morning, I took her to the women... and I told my father we had been tricked.” Marai turned from the woman beneath him. His knees lodged under his chin. He saw himself hauling the girl by the arm, full of swagger and disappointed hurt. He saw himself hurling her at the old man’s feet.

  “I was angry that we’d been lied to. My brothers went to find he man ...to question him, and perhaps to beat him if they didn’t like his answer, but he had gone from the tent we lent him...in the night, like some madman.” The shepherd sighed. They found what was left of the wretch in the brush....Wild dogs...Perhaps it was her curse...or it was bid by the god Sin himself.” He shook his head dismally, but continued.

  Naibe’s eyes evoked his confidence in telling her his story.

  “Now, as she wailed for her captor as if he had been her father, her truth became known to all of us. She cried for mercy.. She said the man had been desperate, and told her they would both die soon. The plan was for him to come back later, with weapons and men once he’d met with his connections on the road.” Marai paused, knowing that very event had been like a prophecy of what would later happen to the people of Wadi Ahu. He had run off from a diminished clan, himself, to be with his goddess that night N’ahab-Atall’s rogues were waiting over the next rise to pillage them in the night as soon as the wanderers they had conscripted to deal with Naim were able to put a sleep herb in the beer.

  “My father spooked. He didn’t want to accept a cursed or a lying woman in the clan and declared me divorced at once. He wanted to cast her into the wilderness along with the man’s bones. He didn’t want her even taught by the women or sleeping among the unmarried girls” Marai wagged his silvered head in the sudden realization that some things never change. “But...I felt sorry for her.”

  “And you were sweet to her, like you were to the three of us.” Naibe’s smile was sunrise to the shepherd. She gestured him to tell her some more.

  “I told my Abu Ahu, I would use her as a servant...to help with the herding. I would seek another wife to replace her as soon as one came along. Then, my sweet sister Houra softened the hearts of the women on her behalf, saying the curse was fulfilled because the man had been killed for his crime. After a while, they took her to them and counseled her in the “ways”. In three months time she returned to me in the night to try again to be my wife.”

  Naibe-Ellit put her fingertips to his lips to hush him now. She already knew making him talk about the first time he bedded his young wife would not be about the tender love he expressed in her arms tonight. It would be too painful. As he lay next to her, his thoughts flowing through her, she saw the scrawny young girl poking cheerlessly about the hills at his side.

  Her drawn face was certainly pretty enough, but it was a face that evoked pity more than desire. She was taller than a lot of girls. This was why everyone had believed she was older. She stayed thin, even after she was accepted into the Ahu clan. There was no reason left for her to be afraid to eat. She didn’t take much food from them as if she wanted to starve herself out of shame. Still, Naibe saw, she seemed a fair match for her quite tall and gangly-looking new husband who bore so little resemblance to the man lying with her now.

  “How sweet...” Naibe-Ellit giggled. “So, she came to you that night...” The woman gasped at how well she could see into Marai’s memory, but her delight quickly turned to pity. “And...you were gentle with her., She really did try not to cry out so much when she got her belly full of you.” The woman shuddered at the way the girl struggled, sobbed, begged and tried to push her husband off of her, even though it was all over in a such a short while.

  Young Marai’s face bore such a helpless look as he tried to console her, to tell her it wouldn’t be so hurtful next time, but she had been almost hysterical. She hadn’t suffered a physical pain. A pain of the soul had come forth to rob her of her pleasure. Something was still very wrong with her.

  Naibe hadn’t ever known sex to hurt like that. Some inept or overly endowed men would come to her with only the urgency to satisfy themselves. That was burdensome and uncomfortable, but it didn’t really hurt.

  “But yet she was instructed in a woman’s way of joy, by your women?” Naibe paused, trying to sort out the reasons for the young wife’s unhappiness with such a kind man. “Did she feel you wished her to submit; To give too much of her soul over to you? She feared too much, then...Did she not understand you would respect her even if there was not the sweetest of love?...” She kissed his brow with a tender question. “You wanted so much for her to desire you!” Naibe pulled Marai’s head down to her breasts, to console him. She knew the worst part of the story was coming soon enough.

  “I tried.” The tears of rage Marai began to feel upset him more than the ugly memory he was reliving. Here, in the arms of his goddess, he had almost begun to weep. She would reject him. She would see him as a weak excuse for a man. He hadn’t wanted to feel all of the frustration and anger again. He had twisted the memory of his ill-fated marriage to Ilara so that he could take the blame for its failure, instead of laying it at her feet. “I wanted to be needed.” The shepherd kept seeing the way Ilara’s blank eyes filled with something close to terror of him at times. Her eyes that told him that he would never understand what was truly in them.

  When they were together in the night, Ilara lay rigidly beneath him, her crossed arms draped loosely around the small of his back. She would sigh, more in relief than pleasure, hopeful he would spend himself quickly so she could get some rest.

  “I realized, after some months,” Marai continued “that there would never be joy between us and finally, I agreed, as my Abu had suggested, to divorce her as unyielding. I told her she could live with us as a sister,
with full protection of the clan, but that I needed a woman to trust me and to receive me, more than I needed one to endure my love. I tried to be firm with her, but she cried out to me so helplessly...that it was already too late for her.”

  Naibe-Ellit stroked his hair again, wanting to stop the storytelling, right then, and make up for all of the misery the shepherd’s marriage had brought him.

  “Not with your child in her belly...and then the way she started getting sick all day... more than a woman with child sickens at first” she sighed in the tragic realization that very little of Marai’s marriage had been any good. It was becoming easier for her to understand why he never wanted to take a wife again and why he believed he was cursed.

  The tears had begun to creep down his cheeks. More than fifteen years hadn’t tempered any of the pain Marai felt when he remembered. Now it had another layer. He was filled with new self-anger that he had not let himself see any of the truth either. Instead, he had wrapped it in legends of her purity and created a sweet “heaven-marriage” that existed only in his dreams.

  “She grew thinner and weak, certain she should not ask us for food.” Marai’s lips pressed tight. “The women took her in to watch over her while I was on the ridge in the day. They told me she would take only small portions of food. She would claim it was not right of her to want our things. They complained that she truly was starving herself. I came back for a while and got her to eat, promising I would not cast her out.

  Soon the color came back to her face. I thought she was getting better, so I took the sheep to the higher green plain with my brothers, thinking the child wouldn’t come until the lambing was done.” Marai’s voice drifted in the last of the memory

  “She labored early. The women tried to stop the birth by giving her a sleep-herb, but she couldn’t hold it down. In the morning of the second day, they got her to squat on the bricks, but she had been bleeding greatly and was too weak to push by then. When they came to get me, it was only to ask me if they could cut her.”

  Naibe felt her heart skip a beat. If the women had asked him that, they knew his wife was already dying. They were trying to at least save the child for him. Most of the time, if the mother was strong, it was the baby who perished a at the hands of the women tending her. A healing and cleansing was then worked so she could, in time, try again.

  “I couldn’t let them kill her that way”. Marai insisted. “She had suffered so much as it was and, besides, that’s something you do to an ewe gotten too old to be of any more use. I ran all the way to her. When I came, they were already wailing for her. She’d brought forth my little daughter, already dead.” His hand reached up to mop his eyes.

  “But then she died too, Brown Eyes...she just slipped away from me, not even speaking to me...And yet, she was holding my hand so tight until her last moment came. She wanted me to help her, to love her, but I failed to see it…I failed her...”

  Naibe-Ellit loosed her perfumed hair and lifted it to wipe away his tears, wanting to dissolve into his sorrow, as he continued. Her caress reassured him and led him gently on.

  “My father had no pity on me. He even cursed me for bringing the wrath of the goddess on the wadi station in keeping a woman who was crossed by a curse like that. All but my sister Houra treated me with scorn. How could I not know she was marked, they asked? Even though my father prayed to Sin, he never doubted a goddess wronged by lies of a dishonest man and his handmaiden could be dangerous. I lost my wits, for a time, and stayed with her poor body and the child’s body like one mad...begging the Lady Ereshkigal to return her or the child to me alive. When I knew it wasn’t going to happen, I buried her in the hearth and never lit fire there again. I made offerings to her ghost. Then I began to sing to you...to my sweet Ashera in you, to forgive my evil in taking that girl into my heart and not properly turning her away. My vigor failed...I...” Marai shut his eyes, unable to look at the woman lying before him.

  Naibe-Ellit waited patiently for his torment to fade.

  “Shh...Beautiful man...the spirit of this woman lingers long, because she did love you at last, but knew it was not to be...that all of it had gone so very wrong.” She smiled up at him, eyes filling with desire this time, instead of pity.

  “Her spirit speaks to you still, my goddess? Even after her grave was profaned so long ago and so far from here?” He sensed Ilara’s spirit, too. It was a quiet little pulse of light, like that small sparkle he thought he saw one evening. Ilara had been in her sixth month. She sat at her hearth carding some of this years wool she planned to keep for spinning.

  “What does she say to me? Anything?” his eyes blinked, almost unbelieving. In his belief, as his people thought, one became a ghost and ate dust in the afterlife. It was the sacred duty of those who loved them in life to nourish them by saluting their memory. That was why he had stayed, and why Sheb had railed at him.

  Sheb didn’t believe ill would come after so long. But it had. Now he sensed just a spark of Ilara, not unhappy in her death...just watching them and knowing.

  “I could lie to you, my king, and say she wishes you to take me now.” Naibe joked. “But she merely smiles at us. She only smiles to see you understand how it really was. She has been trying to tell you, but you understood her no better dead than you did when she lived. She blesses you for your hard work for her, but she really hasn’t been here much at all.” Naibe smiled, as if she, herself was drifting and enchanted.

  Sitting for a moment, she spread her hair out carefully, then lay back in its billowing darkness. Walking her fingers up from the nape of Marai’s neck to his lips, she stilled anything else he wanted to say, then pulled his head down to her breasts. In those quiet few moments, she lay caressing the tenseness in his arm and feeling his heart pulse against her belly. She felt his head lift slightly to find her throat with his mouth. The touch of his hand traced from her breast to her belly and mound so gently and sweetly exploring. It left her gasping and begging.

  Now ...Now...

  Both of their hands found the knot of his loincloth at the same moment. Uttering a little cry of delight, she reached to touch him...

  “You see how much we both want this now...” she gathered him into her arms, widening her knees for him. “Bridegroom, dear to my heart”, She whisper-sang her prayer so tenderly in his ear. Her eyes were clear as golden, shining pools. A knowing, but magnificent calmness filled her.

  That Prayer! Marai’s thoughts cried out in a passionate rush, as he caressed her and followed each insistent touch with his mouth and tongue. How can she, who didn’t know even her own name, know it, unless she is truly the goddess?

  He had listened to the song when the children sang it to him in his sleep. Maybe it was to help them re-form him so well. He heard it as a tale of undying love from the city of the temple...a thing to bless the coming of the fertile time.

  Peret was in full flower now. Men were planting in the fields of Kemet. Repeated and paraphrased he felt the song come through both him and Naibe-Ellit tonight as a tribute. It was her song...welcoming him...like sweetest sorcery, as if he were her Dumuzi, the Lady’s greatest love who had also been a shepherd.

  “Goodly is your beauty, honey-sweet.

  Lion, dear to my heart,

  Goodly is your beauty, honey-sweet.

  You have captivated me,

  Let me stand tremblingly before you

  Bridegroom, I would be taken by you to your bed.

  You have captivated me,

  Let me stand tremblingly before you

  Lion, I would be taken by you to Your Bed

  My precious caress is more savory than honey,

  In bed, honey filled,

  Let us enjoy your goodly beauty,

  Lion, let me caress you.

  My precious caress is more savory than honey.”

  He laughed like a little sigh as they whispered the words of the verse together. It was, somehow, like a prayer.

  The Children were speaking through them too, by
the time the small piece of the verse had finished.

  “Tell me what you want of me, man of Ai...” she gazed quietly and steadily into the shepherd’s eyes.

  “I would go with you to my garden and there I would always sing to you, sweetest woman...all of my songs...” he whispered once before his mouth and tongue found hers.

  The thunder of ecstasy that leapt through him, at the moment he entered her, erupted in a single tiny cry of “Oh my goddess...my sweet...oh love me so...”

  Her eyes leapt wide in shock and her mouth stayed open for a moment in a voiceless cry of pleasure. Slowly, she began to move and draw him on.

  Her eyes. He remembered them then and forever afterward. The soft, knowing, yet passionate expression in them lifted his spirit so much that he felt as if he had left his body and she had left hers. They floated together.

  Silently, he became all of the songs he had sung throughout his tortured years, soaking each word that had ever escaped his heart into her skin with his sweat. She sighed, whispered, accepted and returned his pleasure with a greater passion than he had ever dreamed possible, even of a goddess. What were sighs of pleasure at first, blossomed into words and half-phrases, cried almost aloud in joy. Marai moved tenderly at first, swept away by her soft, hot wetness.

  Her mouth seemed to go all over him at once. Her tongue and teeth and nails, licked, nibbled and dug at more places than the sky had stars. He lost his sense of where and when he was. That she liked him so much, lifted him into a different realm and wanted to break his heart into a dozen pieces.

  He felt himself fading into her body as certainly as he had faded into sleep on the children’s shining vessel. The pleasure he felt no longer roared toward or created a desperation for physical release. Instead, it created a need to extend every instant of joy they felt into an eternity of shared peaks and waves. He fell in love with her face reflecting everything he felt. Her skin shimmered as if it had become the moon. Sometimes the pleasure was too great for him to keep his eyes open. Other moments he rested in her arms, rebuilding even more passion between them. The whispers of the children rushed through them, sounding oddly chant-like. The children’s reverberating, pulses were physical, but rejuvenating, gathering and sending more energy through both of them from one to the other, again and again. Her head rolled and tossed in its wonderful bed of hair. Her voice called and built into deepest, sweetest groans, then faded as she floated on wave after wave of pleasure, limp and open-mouthed beneath him. He would kiss her and caress her gently, whispering how sweet each time felt to him, then turned with her slowly, ushering her to even more.