by J. Naomi Ay
“Shika? What?”
“You think he hasn't been busy taking the virginity of every teenage girl in Karupatani? Of course, he has. Every one of them is the same way. Look at my Rekah! Three wives, concubines, girlfriends, too many children to count. Bah!” I spat towards the river.
“You're right,” she agreed with a frown. “Every one of them is a dickhead, and His Imperial Everythingness is the king of the dickheads and always has been.”
“He is,” I laughed. “I don't know what that word is, but it sounds appropriate.”
“So now that you admit you speak Mishnese, tell me why you've been hiding it from everyone.”
I closed my eyes and held my face up to the last of the sun's warmth. I debated whether I should tell her my story. I had never shared it with anyone but kept it close to my heart all these years.
Opening my eyes slightly, I glanced into her vivid blue ones. Her gaze was very intense. Her eyes had always been very striking, and her son had the same. Even now, here in the woodland, dressed in our skins, she had the bearing and look of Mishnese Queen though I was certain she did not realize this.
“Alright,” I agreed. “But if you laugh at me, I will stop.”
“I won't laugh, I swear, Girl Scout Honor.” She showed me three fingers in some sort of salute.
“Well,” I began my tale. “When I was a girl, about sixteen, I wanted to go to Mishnah to study. Many of our people were allowed to travel across the ocean and study at the universities in Turko. Pedah went there and even Tuman for a while. Sorkan was living in Mishnah too, and it was safe for us to go then.”
“What did you want to study?”
“Music, Art, Astronomy, I didn't care. All I wanted was an education. I wanted to wear Mishnese clothes and high heeled shoes, put on makeup and cut my hair. I wanted my own speeder and a modern house with a fancy kitchen and a vid. I wanted to travel anywhere. I wanted a job, and I wanted to make my own money. I didn't want to spend my life as my mother and grandmothers in these primitive huts cooking over old wood stoves and fires, sewing skins for clothing. A thousand years ago on Rozari, our people were one of the most advanced civilizations in this galaxy. I wanted to live like them, not like this.” I showed with my hand my skin dress and slippers. “I wanted to be like you are.” She smiled at this, brushing her hand across her own skin dress. “So, I told my parents I was leaving.”
“What did they say?”
“My parents told me that I had been matched to one of the princes, so I had no choice but to stay. You see my mother was a cousin to the princes' mother. Merakoma's wife who had been killed years earlier and my mother shared great grandparents.”
“So you stayed.”
“I had no choice,” I replied, recalling how sad I was then. How at sixteen, I thought my whole life was over, my dreams were all crushed. “I had to obey or run away and I had no means to go anywhere. It has worked out fine though.” I was ready to walk some more, so I stood and reached for her hand, leading her back to the trail as it had become somewhat dark. “Pedah was the one I had hoped to be matched to.”
“Really?”
“Oh, he was perfect for me. He had a doctorate in Mathematics from the University and was smaller than his brothers and wore wirey glasses. He was…what would you call him?”
“A geek?”
“Yes,” I agreed as this word sounded appropriate. “I was too. Pedah was not interested in a bride then. Like all of them, he was enjoying every girl who crossed his path. I was given to Tuman who had always been overly cautious.”
“Given?”
“Yes, that was how it was done. I met him at the altar. Tuman is a good man as I'm sure you know. He was training to be the High Priest then and took his duty very seriously. He took his duty to me as his wife and later his duty to the MaKennah equally seriously. Pedah and I became good friends though and he taught me Mishnese in secret.”
In my mind's eye, I saw Pedah here in the forest waiting for me. He lay on his back, studying the stars, a blade of grass between his teeth.
“There is the hunter crossing our sky tonight, Garinka,” he would say pointing into the sky and I would try to follow his finger and see the image among the pinpricks of light.
“It's not really a hunter,” I would protest.
“Not at all,” Pedah would laugh. “They are gaseous emanations millions of light years away that only now are bursting through our atmosphere to appear as these spots of light which we call stars. But for now, we will pretend it is the ghost of a hunter.” And then we would make love.
“Pedah is Rekah's father,” I told her. “But that is a story for another day.”
“What?” she gasped as I knew she would.
“Now, now,” I said. “I know you won't go repeating that. Lookah is Tuman's daughter, I believe.”
“You believe?”
I shrugged. “It could be either one really although I think she takes after Tuman more so in her temperament. That is not necessarily proof of her parenthood. They were after all brothers and very much alike.”
“Wow.” The MaKani shook her head. “You amaze me, Garinka. Did Tuman know you were screwing his brother?”
“No. Not unless the MaKennah told him. I don't know that it would bother him any. He and Pedah shared everything.”
“You haven't told him after forty years or so? But you told Senya?”
“Before this moment, I have told no one. The MaKennah knows because he knows everything, does he not?” I stepped over a fallen tree and around the ancient stump of a long dead willow to the entrance of the meadow. “Ah, here we are.” The meadow came alive before us. It was filled with flowers as it always was this time of year, and the golden light of the two moons glowed in the grass. “Sit down,” I said and set down myself though the grass was a bit damp from the rains. I didn’t mind. The dampness was warm and comforting to me and reminded me of my youth and Pedah who would lie here with me in this forest in the darkness and dampness just like this.
“Three years after I married Tuman,” I began. “The MaKennah came to live with us. He was twelve at the time and quite a wicked child. I was afraid of him. The Mishaks had tried several times to kill him. His body was covered in welts and scars. I thought there was something truly evil about him especially because of his strange eyes. Tuman and my father-in-law the King insisted I let him live in my house and take care of him even though Pedah wanted to have him. The men all thought the boy needed a mother figure, though I was only twenty at the time, hardly older than he. I had to feed him and sew clothing for him and tell him to bathe, and all the things you would do for a child and all the while, he never spoke to me, just gazed at me with those eyes. At some point, I was afraid to go in to my own house knowing that he would be there. It was quite difficult for me to care for a child his age. I was just getting used to my own husband and baby.”
“And brother-in-law,” she added.
“Ay yah, him too,” I agreed.
“So what happened?” Hesitantly, she sat down beside me, resigned to get wet as I.
“I tried very hard to pretend he was a normal child. Rekah loved him, you see. I decided that if my baby could love him, he must not be all bad. I spoke to him, I chatted as if he would respond and when he didn't, I made up responses for him. I put food in front of him though he would turn away from it, refusing to eat it. Eventually, he started to.”
“Did you make him eggs?” she asked. “He can’t resist eggs.”
I ignored her and continued my tale. “After a time, six months or more, he came into the house covered in filth. I ordered him to stand on the porch while I grabbed a cloth and washed him down. Underneath the mud were cuts and bruises. When I asked him what happened, of course he wouldn't say. Somehow though, I got out of him that he had gotten into a fight with a bunch of the village boys. Always they were after him, you know, in the beginning. Nobody knew much about him and all of a sudden there he was living with us, half Mishak, and we were exp
ected to acknowledge that he was our future King. Of course, all the wild boys, sons of chiefs most of them, they set out to challenge him at every turn. He took quite a beating that day and didn't fight back. Do you know why? If he did, he would have killed all of them. He didn't want to, of course. He knew a year or so later they would all be his friends, so he took the beating and turned the other cheek so it is said.”
“He told you this?”
“More or less,” I replied. “But that is not why I brought you here.”
“Garinka,” she sighed, sitting up and picking at the damp leather of her dress. “You have shared with me so far two very interesting stories, and yet this is not why you brought me here? Please tell me something relevant now so I won't go home and cut off the Great Emperor's dick because he's screwed every woman in Karupatani, in addition to every woman on Rozari. If I had a laser, I’d be blasting it off. I tell you, he had better be heading to the Command Center right now while you are stalling me because neither poor old Keko nor that big Karupta dude are going to be able to protect him.”
I laughed at her words. “I do like you, MaKani. You are indeed a Warrior Queen.”
“You are stalling, Garinka,” she insisted. “Are you trying to protect him?”
“This is what I want to tell you, MaKani,” I continued. I did not think I was stalling on Senya’s behalf. If I was stalling at all, it was to avoid joining in the dinner preparations. “Several years later, shortly after Lookah was born, I was out taking a walk in the early morning hours along that trail back there.” I pointed to the trail we had just come from. “The MaKennah had just turned sixteen years then. It was August like now. My husband, Pedah, and my father-in-law, the King were worried because the MaKennah had not yet been with a girl. Many girls were after him of course. All the time, you know. They chased him like mad, and he would come running into the house and lock the doors or climb up on the roof or into a tree just to get away from them. My husband even asked me to find for him a woman to teach him. They were a bit afraid that he, like his Uncle Akan, might favor the men." I laughed again for the thought of this was so ridiculous, even as I knew it was then. The MaKani coughed. “Had I not still been nursing Lookah, I would have been his teacher.”
The MaKani made a noise like she could not swallow.
“Well, who better than I?” I asked plainly when she had ceased to make this noise. The MaKani did not know how beautiful I was then. I was not always this fat old woman with sagging breasts and lines in my face. “I was young and slim, with thick black hair. I was the daughter of a chief, the wife of a Prince and cousin to the MaKennah through his paternal grandmother. There was no one with better bloodlines than I, save my sister who was not married to a prince but later too had her virginity saved for the MaKennah.”
“I think I'm going to be ill.” The MaKani closed her eyes. “You talk about it like he’s a champion racehorse. Did the King collect stud fees for him too? Tell me, Garinka. Does he have a bunch of little bastards running around Karupatani that I don’t know about?”
“You do not understand our ways, MaKani,” I replied. “And as far as any of us know, there is none but your own son. Whether or not he is a bastard, I will leave that for you to decide.”
She made another noise which I did not understand whether it meant that she was relieved or more angered. “So you didn't because you were breastfeeding Lookah? I'm surprised that stopped you.”
“Don't be sharp with me, MaKani,” I retorted. “This is our way whether or not you like it. Let me tell you that your husband has a reputation for being cold with all his lovers. He had no concern for any girl's pleasure, only his own. But that is the way it is with these de Kudisha Princes, the most spoilt group of men every to live in this galaxy. If I had taught him, he might be as great a lover as he is King.”
“Oh he can be,” she replied haughtily. “Maybe it just took the right girl.”
“That is good for you then.” I smiled and showed her I was not angry. “Tuman is a terrible lover. Pedah was much more sensitive, but I won't talk about that. Now, let me continue my story. I was walking the path that morning, and I did espy this very meadow filled with flowers. I had walked this path many, many times since I came to live in this village and always in the early morning as I left my house and my babies asleep with Tuman. Then I might get a few moments' peace and exercise before my day began. Sometimes, I did even meet Pedah here. Not once, never, did I ever come across this glade before.”
“Maybe it was always too dark,” she suggested. “Or maybe you were too distracted. Both brothers, huh? Did you have a go with Sorkan too?”
“No! And not Merakoma either if that is your next question.” Although I did not speak this aloud to her, I would have if he had asked. He was forever devoted to his dead wife, my mother’s cousin. “Do you want to hear my story or shall we return to the village?”
“Okay.” She rolled her eyes and lay back in the grass again. “Go for it. You were walking on the path, and you saw this meadow which you had never seen before.”
“Here it was always as the whole way there.” I pointed behind us at the fallen logs, ferns, dirt and wild berries. “Never had I seen such a grassy meadow and variety of wild flowers all together.”
“And?” She grew impatient. Perhaps the darkness bothered her or perhaps she was hungry and anxious to attend the banquet.
“So I came off the trail and walked into this glade when I did now discover the MaKennah lying here just as we are among the grass and flowers. His wrists were cut and seeping blood, and he was pale and unmoving. I thought he was dead.”
I was so relieved that he was dead. He is over and done with, I thought, and we shall not have to worry after him again. Every night when he did not return to his bedroom, Tuman could not sleep. We did not know what would become of him. Would the Mishaks return and take him away? Would they kill him? Or would he grow up to rule over all of us with his foul temper, for we knew even then he had strange powers that would emerge when he was angry. Would he destroy us all? Of course, I chastised myself for such evil thoughts but still I didn't move.
“I should have run back to the village and gotten help,” I told her. I could even have stood here and screamed, and surely someone would have heard me. I did not though. I just stood watching him.”
“Obviously, he wasn't dead. Or maybe he was. I think he’s on his fifteenth life or something like that by now.” She picked a handful of wet grass and tossed it in the air.
“No. I watched him until finally after a time, he stirred. He awakened and he smiled and his eyes grew bright, and for a moment I thought it was for my presence that he was so pleased for never before had I seen him as this. He laughed, he was so happy. I knelt down beside him and asked him what made him so, and he laughed again.”
He was so beautiful when he was happy. If he had asked just then, I would have pleasured him. I wanted to. Pedah and Tuman were still young and beautiful, but the MaKennah was an untouched boy with a body that knew not the pleasures I could introduce to him. He didn't want me though.
“He sat up and then he did something amazing,” I told the MaKani. “He rubbed his wrists together, and they healed, before my very eyes. The cuts stopped weeping and immediately scabbed over. A few hours later the sores were gone completely. Whilst we were still in the meadow there, he rose to his feet and turned his face to the sky.
What makes you so happy? I asked of him.
Katie, he replied and then he raised his arms and disappeared right before my very eyes.
I did not know what this word meant, Katie. I thought perhaps it was some kind of new drug. A few days later, he told Tuman, Pedah and the King that he had been with a girl from a distant planet in a metaphysical way. We all laughed at that, but it was true. Later on, I understood that when I had come upon him, he was near death as in order to visit you as he had done, he had to be near enough to death that his soul could depart his mortal body. He killed his body so that he cou
ld come to you and give to you his virginity.”
“How do you know this?” she asked though the challenge had gone out of her voice.
“Did he come to you then?”
She didn’t answer, just picked more grass and tossed it in the air.
“I know something else,” I said, looking at her steadily. I did not know if she would believe what I was about to say. She would think I was truly this mad old Karupta woman, yet I believed this with every fiber of my being.
“What?” She wiped at her face smearing grass stains on her cheeks.
“He is not of this world.”
“That’s for sure.”
“I say this to you in all seriousness.” My heart pounded hard as I spoke this. “He is not mortal.”
“Garinka,” she sighed and rose to her feet. “I was almost completely with you on the first revelation, but you've lost me here.”
“You do not believe me?” I was disappointed. I wanted her to understand him. I wanted her to know that he was unlike any other man, and she could not expect to treat him as if he were.
“No, that's patently absurd. I am out of here. I've had enough of Karupatani weirdness today, and Garinka, this is just the icing on the proverbial cake.”
“Katie,” I called her by her name. “He is not simple like you or me. We cannot do what he does. We cannot separate our souls from our mortal bodies and transverse time and space as he does.”
“He's got alpha and beta proteins which give him weird powers,” she replied as if it were that simple. She fumbled through the brush, searching for the path back to the trail which would lead us to the village.
“He is an angel,” I cried, my voice trembling.
“More likely a devil,” she snorted. “How the hell do we get out of here?”
“He’s come here for a reason,” I told her. “I think he’s even an Archangel. I think he’s Mika’el himself.”
She stopped and turned back to face me.
“Have you been getting into the Barkuti, Garinka?”
