* * *
When the creature took her, Ashayt had been meeting with her new lover for little more than six weeks. Amun Sa would find her in the market at some point during the day, and help her with her sales, and after they would take walks and talk together. On some days he would not show up at all, and Ashayt would understand with an aching disappointment that his affairs had kept him away that day and that she would not be with him under the moonlight that night.
She wondered how long this wild joy inside of her would last. She knew at some point that darker thoughts would begin to tinge the edges of her happiness, like spilled wine seeping into wet linen, spreading its wicked fingers out ever wider over time. She knew that she would grow jealous of Amun Sa’s wife, angry that she could not take her place at his side, terrified of what would happen when she inevitably found herself with child and without a husband. She knew that all of this would come, but as of yet it had not. As of this sixth week in their illicit affair, she felt only love – and the overwhelming desire to partake of his body and to give her own over to him.
It was on the journey back from just such a rendezvous that the creature came. They had made the mistake of falling asleep together in the hut, limbs entangled, the sound of each other’s breathing a lulling drone. Amun Sa had for a time whispered beautiful things in her ear. He had again petitioned the king for permission to divorce, and had hopes that this time the answer might be different. He had heard word that his wife’s father was falling out of favor with the royal court, that politicians all across the kingdom were overstepping their bounds, using the drought as a means to further their own ends. It might be possible, it might …
They had slept, and in the early hours of the morning Ashayt had awoken with a start, convinced that someone was watching them. Some presence seemed to have filled the hut like a great, dark cloud looming over her, and yet there was no one to be seen in the small room. The only exits were the door, firmly barred, and a tiny hole in the roof to accommodate the smoke rising from the fire. The thatched roof could not have supported even a young girl, let alone the sort of adult who might desire to spy upon a sleeping couple. There could be no one who watched them, and yet it seemed—
Amun Sa stirred next to her, mumbled something inaudible, and all at once it seemed that the presence fled, pulling away from her mind like a receding tide. Within moments it was gone, and there was only the crackling of the fire and the slow breathing of the naked man beside her. Ashayt disentangled herself from Amun Sa with care, trying not to wake him, and stepped to the door. She removed the bar and pulled the door open just enough to glance outside, but there was nothing to be seen except the stars and the moon and their doubles in the river.
The moon – it hung far too low in the sky. Dawn was near, she thought, and they had spent many hours more in the hut than they ever had before. Surely someone would have missed them by now.
“My love, you must wake,” she said, closing the door and turning away from it. She went to the bed and knelt beside it, taking her plain linen dress from the ground as she did so. She touched Amun Sa’s shoulder and, when this failed to wake him, shook it gently. Amun Sa stirred, groaned, blinked his eyes.
“Wake up. Wake up! Oh, no.” Ashayt went to shake him again, but Amun Sa took her wrist in his hand and held her arm steady. He opened his eyes.
“I am awake,” he said. “What troubles you?”
“Oh, I have been a fool! I allowed myself to fall asleep, and now … it is near dawn, my Lord. The moon has fallen nearly to the hills.”
“Your parents will know you have been away,” Amun Sa said, concern in his voice. He sat up and rubbed a hand across his face.
“Stupid, stupid,” Ashayt was muttering, standing now and struggling into her dress. She could feel Amun Sa’s eyes on her body as she did so and felt, even now, the warm rush of pleasure that came with being desired.
“It is as much my fault as yours,” Amun Sa was saying. He too was standing, finding his clothing – much finer than hers – and beginning to dress. His wig, perched originally on a simple three-legged table, had fallen on the floor during their lovemaking, and he grabbed it now and hastily brushed the dust from it.
“I do not worry for myself,” Ashayt said.
“But your parents—”
“They are not my parents, they are my … my guardians, and anyway, I am too old and too strange to be made wife to any other man. They do not command me, and I would not listen if they tried.”
“You are not strange,” Amun Sa said, and Ashayt made a noise of frustration, wishing he would hurry, even as her heart filled with joy at these words. She turned, smiling, and pressed her lips to his, hard, feeling his teeth behind them. Amun Sa dropped his wig into the dust again and put his hands around her back, but Ashayt pushed him away.
“I worry for you,” she told him. “You will be missed, and how will you explain your absence?”
“I do not care. To whom will I explain myself? My frigid wife? Our slaves? There is no one in my household who would dare question my actions, and my wife knows her father has lost favor with the king. If she is even aware that I was gone – which I doubt – I will hear no word from her about it.”
“Your slaves will talk,” Ashayt said. She had finished dressing, had put on her own simple wig and was standing at the door, waiting for him.
“Let them talk, then,” Amun Sa said. He finished making himself presentable and came to join her. “Let them think what they will.”
Ashayt shook her head. “It will make its way back to the King eventually, and whether he favors your wife’s father or not, he will be displeased. Until you can be rid of your wife, we must be discrete. My Lord … my love, there is nothing discrete in sneaking back to our homes as dawn breaks.”
She could see that Amun Sa understood the truth in her words, and also that this truth frustrated him greatly. He paused for a moment, looking at her with his deep, dark eyes but not speaking.
“Go,” Ashayt said, and when he didn’t move, she opened the door for him and stepped out into the sand. “Go!”
Amun Sa remained for a moment more rooted to his spot. He opened his mouth to speak, and Ashayt put her hand to his lips.
“Please, Amun Sa. Because I love you and would not see you put in danger, I beg you, please … go.”
He went, touching her cheek as he did so, striding off into the dark toward his home. Ashayt watched him leave and, when he was out of sight, looked over her shoulder, past the river and to the east. The hills had not yet begun to glow in the way that said dawn was near, but neither did they blend into the inky blackness of night: sunrise was coming. By the time she got home, it would be time to make the bread. She closed the door of the fisherman’s hut behind her and began her trip.
She was cutting through a strand of reeds when the voice came to her, something more than a sound, as if spoken through a long and echoing tube that reached directly into the center of her head.
“See how the harlot flees the scene of her crimes,” it said, and in it Ashayt could hear malevolence and a kind of black humor that bespoke a person who might find glee in terrible things, like the torturing of small animals or the unjust punishment of slaves. She came to a stop, bare feet squelching in the mud, looking all around her. Again she felt that creeping dread, as she had in the hut, that she was being watched by some being of awful power.
“Who are you?!” she demanded of the darkness around her, and for a moment there was no response. Then came a dry rattling, the sound of an avalanche of bone cascading down a hard face of rock, as the reeds before her parted and a figure stepped forward. Ashayt could tell that it was a man, taller than her and broad through the shoulders, and it seemed to her that amid the shadows that hid his features, a single eye shone forth as if lit from within. Had he been standing there, all this time, waiting for her? How could he have known the path she would take?
“I know a great many things,” the man said, and again it seem
ed to her that his voice came not from his mouth but from all around her and from within her.
“Who are you?” she asked again, but this time in a voice that, robbed of courage, came out weak, little more than a whisper. She could feel the danger of this man coming off him in palpable waves, and she wondered if she had not lain with her lover for the last time, earlier that evening, without knowing it.
The man-thing gave her a leering grin that seemed too wide for his face, regarding her for a moment more with his strangely glowing eye, and spoke again.
“When first I was, I had no name, and since I became what I am now, I have been known by many. In the green lands, north across the great sea, they called me Harad’ur. They would bring me white-skinned girls like tiny flowers, bellies sliced open and still crying for their mothers. They would lie on the ground within the circle of stones and tremble as I drank the very life from their bodies.”
Ashayt had no immediate response to this, and it seemed that no further information was forthcoming. The thing – she could not manage to think of it as a man anymore – stood there before her, staring at her with its wicked eye. At last, she found the courage to speak again.
“What do you want of me?”
“You are not of this place,” it said, tilting its head to one side.
“I was born in the south and my people are no more.”
“The south is nothing but desert, baking under the hateful sun.”
“I am from the desert. What do you want?”
The thing chuckled. “I have a gift for you.”
“I want no gift,” Ashayt told it. “I want only to return to my home.”
“Oh? And not to the arms of your lover?”
Ashayt faltered, her cheeks warming, and said, “I do not know of whom you speak.”
“Make me yours, my Lord!” the thing exclaimed, its voice taking on a gasping, needing tone that Ashayt knew was a twisted imitation of her own. “I cannot wait a moment more! Use me as your vessel, an empty thing to be filled. Spray into me your hot and sticky seed while I go before you on my knees like a bitch in heat!”
Ashayt felt her mouth drop into an expression of shock and dismay, and seeing this, the thing cackled a kind of hideous, screaming laughter. Ashayt shrunk away from this sound, shaking her head in negation, and might have turned and fled if the creature had not abruptly ceased its laughter and leaned in toward her.
“I have a gift for you,” it said again, and it seemed to Ashayt that its eye began to grow, becoming a deep pool of silver in which she might swim – or drown.
“I want no gift,” she heard herself say again, but the words were muffled and indistinct, as if coming through sheets of wet linen.
“It is my time,” the thing told Ashayt, and now it was cradling her in its arms, though how she had come to be there she could not remember. “Like a plant which goes to seed, I must pass my gift on, and I have chosen you. Not because you are special. Not because you are unique. I have chosen you because you are here, and I am here, and your lover is gone, gone away to be with his wife, and cannot protect you.
“I will make you mine, and when next he sees you, he will not know the woman who stands before him. He will recognize your face and your voice, but he will no longer know you, and because this above all else pleases me, I have chosen you. This is my gift. May you live forever in this Gods-forsaken hell, as must I, because you were here, and I was here, and he was not.”
The thing bared its teeth and it seemed to Ashayt that its mouth had become lined with daggers. She thought that she should cry out, or at the very least feel some sense of fear, but it seemed her body could not manage. She closed her eyes, and took a breath, and felt a white-hot flash of pain at her neck. After that, there was nothing.
Part II