Voices in Crystal Read online

  Copyright © 2014 Mary R. Woldering

  All rights reserved.

  ISBN: 149092406X

  ISBN 13: 9781490924069

  To My Parents, and my family, who nurtured my creative soul.

  To Annette Taylor:

  first with me on the journey,

  without whom this story would never have been told.

  CONTENTS

  CHAPTER 1: THE STAR

  CHAPTER 2: AWAKENING

  CHAPTER 3: THE WOMEN

  CHAPTER 4: THE JOURNEY

  CHAPTER 5: INEB HEDJ

  CHAPTER 6: THE GARDEN OF THE SCRUTINY

  CHAPTER 7: THE TEST

  CHAPTER 1

  THE STAR

  “O beautiful one, Asher-ellit;

  Immaculate one of the goddesses,

  Torch of Heaven and earth,

  Radiance of all the lands,

  Goddess ‘Lady of Heaven’,

  First-begotten of Sin,

  First-born of Ningal,

  Sweet sister of Shamas

  O Asher-Anu, you rule the heavens;

  Oh Queen of Morning and Evening Sky,”

  Marai’s voice rose like the drone of a horn.

  “Come bless me this starry night.

  Shine for one who begs to serve you.

  Come bless me this starry night.”

  Each intoned phrase Marai, a shepherd, sang would be different from the last in some way, but each part of his song worshiped a particular aspect of his beloved, yet dreaded goddess. After each composed verse, he would chant “Come bless me this starry night” until fatigue overtook him.

  Some nights the big man would sing for a few moments. When he finished, he would trudge cheerlessly into the inner recesses of his cave home to collapse in sleep. On more ecstatic nights, he sang of his love for the goddess until it was nearly daybreak.

  Ever since his little wife Ilara had died, Marai had shunned the company of the travelers who moved through his family’s wadi station seeking shade, water and supplies. The sojourners were almost always heading west toward the road around the mountains and up to Kina. Sometimes the travelers made their way down into the less hospitable wastes, hoping for a miracle. Some would continue moving along the Copper Road into the protected “East Gate” of the Kemet lands.

  Tonight, Marai hadn’t felt quite as bad about eating with his family and the travelers, even though his cousin Sheb drew him aside to continue the inevitable argument about their safety in this desolate place.

  It was past time to move on, the shepherd mused. His thoughts weren’t so solidly on the goddess tonight, even though he sang heartily enough to her. As he sang, he paused from time to time to see if anyone from the encampment below was annoyed by the melodious baritone he was sending up beyond the heavens.

  You change our fates,

  Evil turns to good;

  I have sought you for so long among the gods;

  I have offered all to you;

  Come bless me this starry night”

  “I get so tired of worrying about him, kinsman or not.” Sheb complained. He looked up from his seat on his mat, watching his wife twist the rushes around the reeds. It was her last basket of the day. She and some of the other women always tried to make several large burden baskets. It gave her family something to trade other than water, lettuce, onions, and sheep for the grain, medicines or even dates and finer treats the travelers brought to swap for their own needs.

  “He won’t talk sense. I’m betting he won’t come with us. He’ll stay here until he dies if he feels his Ashera bids it.” the owner of Wadi-Ahu sighed. He punched at the straw padding in his mat on the packed hard floor, hoping his wife Houra would come to bed soon.

  “Thinks he will sing her down from the sky, presuming like a god himself.” his hands shrugged up. “By all the gods, I wish your brother wasn’t so...so...ox-headed about the curse, when we know it’s not true at all! I’m getting to where I don’t even care if he stays or goes.” Sheb grumbled.

  He knew no true goddess would curse a man’s entire family over something so trivial, but his cousin claimed he owed the goddess, in her cruel aspect, all of the devotion he could muster for his wrongdoing.

  Wrongdoing? It wasn’t anything of the kind. the station-owner thought to himself. That girl was cursed when she came into the camp. Her father had been a liar and thief. She was lucky she could cast her spell of pity on the big hulk of a man.

  She died, Sheb had to agree. Some women do when they give birth. His cousin Marai had taken her death in the birthing of a stillborn daughter as a threefold curse. He felt he needed to atone for his crime.

  First, the man went mad, then he became either impotent or uninterested in having another wife. He stayed as a hermit in his cave, praying and singing to his thankless goddess every night for the fifteen years that had passed since the tragedy.

  Marai preferred to call his goddess Ashera, the way people named the goddess in Akkad.

  Sheb thought his cousin’s goddess was more like Inanna of the Shinar faith, but let it go. Not so much as a whimper came from the goddess in response to all of the shepherd’s devotion. It should have been enough to make anyone an unbeliever after so many years...anyone but Marai.

  Sheb and Marai’s families were Kina by ancestry, but men married women wherever they wandered, bringing bits of their wives beliefs along with them. Marai’s mother was of Shinar Ai. Sheb’s mother was of Kina-Ahna. The family had always been wandering sheep traders who sought their fortune on the outskirts of the great cities in both lands.

  When Marai had been small, his abu or father, Ahu, had brought the combined tribe here to the wilderness below the great mountain of the god Sin. It was the mountain of the Law, because the peaks reached up beyond the clouds. At one time, there had been twenty men and their families living at Ahu’s clan wadi station. It was a humble place, not far from the Copper Road; a route between the copper mines and Kemet. It was under the mixed control of various tribes of nomads and Kemet peasants.

  After the bad luck had come, some of the families left. One-by-one, the grown sons went west to the infamous “East Gate” of Kemet in search of an easier life. There, they might work farming the flood plain or, if they were strong and able, they might cut rock for the kings. Sometimes they would leave, after an argument, headed in unknown directions in search of a more prosperous life than guarding the water on the road.

  Sheb bin Ebach had become the tribal leader and station manager after Ahu’s death in these bad times. It was of no comfort to him at all. The hard life grew harder. As if the scarce crops and near drought conditions weren’t bad enough, gangs of bandits now claimed to “own” the vast reaches of the foothill wilderness. Although the confrontations with them had never been too bloody or awful, these men exacted protection tribute. Paying for them to make the Kemet militia look the other way was more acceptable than opposing them. It was a humiliating existence.

  Sheb had been dutifully paying various groups of these men for the passage of several moons when some of his cousins learned of a way to get out of this life of virtual servitude. They were told they would be given enough goods and guarded passage to make it six weeks through the wasteland to the East Gate of Kemet unharmed. They would be given names of successful former nomads living near Ineb Hedj in the farming regions. In return the wadi would be traded to new owners.

  Marai had argued with Sheb that night privately, that everything about this deal smelled like the same trick his dead wife’s father had offered Ahu years ago, but he underestimated how desperately his cousin wanted to leave. Sheb had insisted it was time to quit the wilderness. It couldn’t even be said they really “owned” the wadi-station anymore because of the protection fees
and constant threat of impending violence. There was no real choice left.

  At some point, the raiders would grow tired of taxing them and swoop down to claim the water hole outright. Then, they would be dead. Being alive with a family that had a chance of living to have many descendants made more sense to the wadi manager than protecting a mere two generation owned water hole from thieves.

  Tonight, he had put his foot down. He had spoken with the other young men and the rest of the cousins. They would meet with the representatives of the protectors in the morning, and then be guided to wadi-station at Mis-el, which lay a day away. He would take his wife Houra, and the boys to Kemet with the other families. They would sell baskets and grow a crop for a nobleman, perhaps. Marai could stay and worship his goddess until he died for her, brother-in-law or not.

  Sheb’s thoughts turned to the warmth of his wife’s work-frail body that always stretched next to his at night. Yawning, he motioned for her.

  Houra wearily pushed herself up from her mat, depositing the half-finished basket by the hide-shrouded door frame of the sun-brick house her father Ahu had built. Once it was to be the start of a little city with many brick houses so he would be reminded of his home in Ai. No one else built a brick house. The other families stayed in the wanderers tents, as if they knew nothing about living here was ever going to be permanent.

  As Houra finished the basket, she watched the faint, bobbing glow of her brother’s torch as it faded into the distance. She saw him make his way home to a cleft in the bank of distant gray rock. It was Marai’s hermitage...his praying place and the winter shelter for about thirty sheep.

  Sometimes in spring the younger men and her own sons helped him during lambing or shearing when they would all move the herd to the higher plateaus. The rest of the time, the shepherd kept to himself.

  Wonder if he’ ll sing tonight… Houra asked herself as Marai’s light faded from view. One more song into the clear air. After some moments of silent contemplation, the woman tied the flap shut and took her place beside her husband, noticing he’d already fallen asleep. In the cooling rush of the night air, she lay awake, thinking of her childhood.

  When she was small, one of the travelers who visited the station was said to be an oracle. The woman, judged little Houra to be gifted by the goddess and fit more for temple work than a life in the wilderness. Ahu was stubborn. He thought the woman was more in need of a serving girl, and that the woman was a fraud, so the men drove her group from the camp, but not before she cursed them all.

  For all of her twenty-seven years this supposed “gift of prophecy” had only manifested itself as an occasional jumbled dream which never bore fruit in real life. Reality, to her, was a good husband, a life protected by him and, until recently, a healthy extended family in this rocky edge of the wilderness. A mere two sons, no surviving daughters, and no children in her belly in three years was curse enough. Perhaps, she thought, life elsewhere would be healthier and she might have another child. It was time to move on. Except for the thought that Marai might actually let the family leave him here alone, life in Kemet seemed promising.

  As Houra drifted before sleep overtook her, she thought she heard the voices of children. Inclining her head to the door to hear the faint voices, she wondered if her sons, who slept outside as young guards, were playing tricks on her. Houra grumbled in frustration, knowing that waking her husband to tell him about it wouldn’t help. Sheb was a good man and a hard worker, but he had no interest in her visions. Unless she was certain the voices were real and not of the other world, she knew not to provoke him.

  The more she listened, the more she knew she heard voices that sounded like whispery children singing. The hushing wind song sound grew, becoming more of a feeling than a sound. She decided the sound was inside her thoughts and not in her ears. Maybe something wondrous had come. If the thought-like voices had come from Marai’s direction, the woman hoped upon hope that it was the voice of her half-brother’s goddess Ashera telling him to go to Kemet with his family.

  Houra’s thoughts returned to life at the station. Though it had never seemed worth it, Marai pastured the few scrawny sheep on one of the scrub-grassed plateaus above the encampment. Now, with the wet season coming to an end, the days felt less humid and the nights felt warmer.

  On days like this she often saw rain falling in the distance. It hung like a gray mantle draped over Sin’s dark arm as it stretched along the hills down from the southern stronghold of his holy mountain, Sin-Ai. It seldom rained for very long, where they lived, but the pond where the ancient riverbed, or wadi, surfaced would magically fill with water from beneath the earth again. If they were unlucky, a rushing flood might come out of the hills. Even if there was a flood like that, the pond would be almost dry in half a season.

  Houra’s earliest memories were here. When she had been little, Sheb and his parents, brothers and sisters, their husbands and families all had tents at the water hole. Her father had named it for himself when he’d taken charge of it years before. In those days, Marai was a too-tall and lanky version of all of the other dark-haired youths living there. He was the youngest of many direct brothers and sisters, but older than the five children by Ahu’s second wife. She was the youngest of those children. Sheb was the son of Ebach, one of Ahu’s younger brothers.

  The small clan did not increase well.

  Houra knew well enough that the first indication of a curse from the once spurned oracle was the death of Marai’s wife in a birthing so agonizing and bloody that it nearly frightened all of women away from wanting children for fear of such a dreadful labor. The ill luck increased. A fever in one of the visiting caravans nearly turned the settlement into a charnel yard. All of the elders of the tribe sickened and died one by one. Children withered and wasted away. Women, herself included, miscarried. Her brothers, who said they would never desert the clan, left under cover of night. Two years ago, Marai and the remaining relatives began to fight. One by one they left, each blaming the “curse of the goddess” or the evil his madness wrought on the camp for their departure.

  Houra noticed her husband’s snoring stop and his breathing grow still. He was pretending to sleep.

  “Have you heard the way he sings to his beloved, lately?” she asked “It’s been different.” Houra drew close to her husband. “It’s as if he knows we’ll be leaving soon.” She inclined her head to the door. “I think I can talk him into coming with us, after all. I just need to talk to him in the morning, when he comes to take out the sheep.”

  Sheb roused himself more fully, noticed his wife was speaking and, with a tired sigh, pulled her close to his chest.

  “He’d better be singing a farewell song to his goddess, tonight.” he muttered, scratching his head. “Sometimes I wish she’d come get him like he wants. It would solve a lot of things.”

  “Sheb...” Houra felt a shiver of revulsion and pulled away from him to catch his expression in the lamp light. “You never said anything so...” she frowned.

  “Well, I’ve felt it lately.” the way-man grumbled, propping himself up on his elbow. “So he’s on your mind tonight, as you come to me?” The air between them grew dark and brittle.

  “Just wondering how he’ll do in Kemet. He’s so used to the wide places.” Houra lied. She knew Sheb had always been jealous of a man who had so much less to offer, in this case, than he did. Things hadn’t been good between them ever since his own elder brother had left for parts unknown. Sheb had always felt unmanned by the secret bond between her and Marai.

  She knew something was happening tonight and she sensed her half-brother was part of it, but Sheb didn’t need to know any of that. Seduction by the light of the flickering lamp would be easier now that her husband was a little rested. Tisehe and Iar-el, their sons, were sleeping near the well, on the pretense of guarding the visiting caravan. This group of visitors were more of the usual ass-traders who had come in before the evening meal, offering a fine beer in payment. Tired from the dusty jour
ney, they had settled down, without revelry. It was quiet. Houra set her face against the soft, warm furriness of her husband’s chest.

  “Marai’s able-bodied and strong.” Sheb scratched the back of his neck under the thickly bound braid of his ebony hair “He’ll find work the same as the rest of us...and separately. Abu Ahu’s tribe is finished. You’ve known that.” His sidelong glance at his wife narrowed. “You wish for him like Ashera longed for her shepherd boy Dumuzi... Do thoughts of a brother’s bed keep you awake at night?” Sheb half-accused, screwing up his face for his mates reaction.

  “What?” Houra felt her heart rush at the uncustomary candor her mate owned on this very strange night of little voices. “Why, no!” tumbled from her mouth, but Sheb and Houra both knew her thoughts of long ago had returned uncomfortably often. Houra would have her girlhood fancies, but always came back to a real vision. The idea of herself stretched beneath her big, hulking half-brother, now that he had grown ugly with his age, madness, and lack of care, struck her as so bizarre that it startled her back to faithfulness.

  Marai had always been sensitive and gentle with her when she had been a little girl. She often roamed into the hills where the sheep were pastured to see him and her cousins there.

  Old Ahu had sensed the magic growing between them. The thought of them learning each others bodies out in the wild had galled their father so much that he quickly decided on her marriage to her cousin Sheb. Brother and sister marriages, he claimed, were a thing of the gods. They happened in royal houses, not in the Shur among the tribes.

  Houra knew that, yet something about her brother always drew her to those thoughts. Sheb had won her heart and hadn’t brought that memory up in years. She threw her arms around her husband’s neck firmly enough to convince him of her undying faithfulness. Soon enough, he nuzzled her ear, no longer annoyed. As they began to move together, Houra heard the shepherd begin his song.

  You change our fates,

  Sweet Asher-Ellit, Asher-Ana