I hid the body in a secure place and was therefore incredulous when I discovered the treasure missing a few days later. The adored body disappeared from my safekeeping just as its lover disappeared from the safekeeping of the entire oasis. They searched for him in the caves, on the cliff faces, and in the nearby pasture lands, but the wretch had vanished. I lamented the loss of my adored, golden object for some time until I found consolation with my real-life object of adoration. It never once occurred to me that the loss of the devotional image was a harbinger of ill and a warning that I might lose the original as well. All the same, a series of events began to unfold in my oasis that day. My true love first disappeared from the bedchamber. Originally, her excuse was some feminine complaint. I thought she was expecting a second child, but the signs of pregnancy did not appear. Instead of witnessing her return to the bedchamber, I was flabbergasted when she moved out of the palace altogether and sought refuge in the temple, spending her nights there. When I asked why, she cited an emptiness of heart, saying that this was a threat from the spirit world and that the only antidote was singing hymns of grief and seeking refuge in the sanctuary. I heard her sing those immortal songs that caused stone to crumble and birds to fall dead to the ground from delight and that had once enchanted the sages, who had summoned her to be the temple’s goddess. At first, she withdrew there alone, but later I found that her maids and servants had joined her and had begun spending their nights in the temple. So doubts troubled me. I detected in my slave Hur’s eyes a sorrow I ought to have deciphered but did not, because lassitude spawns intellectual apathy and spiritual ruin. Thus I chose to ignore his sorrow, attributing the whole affair to the bizarre phases of this mysterious community known as women. I once went to recite a psalm of longing inside the sanctuary, where she accosted me at the entrance. I gazed into her eyes, but she turned away. The enchanting way she turned to gaze into the distance reminded me of the immortal look flowing through the body of the lost devotional object. She seemed privy to eternity’s secret, which lay beyond the horizon. Pain tormented my heart, but I asked her, “Punishment obeys a law, and according to the legal code of the ancients the culprit is entitled to learn the complete charges against him.”
Avoiding my gaze, she said, “The culprit was fully informed of the charge a long time ago, but the plaintiff has not been granted the defendant’s undivided attention.”
“I just don’t get it.”
At that she turned toward me and then I saw another woman in her eyes. She said defiantly, “The day you set aside for entertainment, didn’t compassion’s shadow scream, asking you to stop? Didn’t the voice of prophecy shout in your ears to warn you that you were making a big mistake, the day you set aside for entertainment?”
I stared at her with genuine astonishment. Stunned, I asked, “Is it reasonable for the earth to quake just because one action figure wants to play with another? Does it make sense for the sky to fall just because one shadow gives offense by wishing to joke around with other shades?”
Pallor spread over her cheeks and the sparkle left her eyes. I thought she was going to faint. With the language of a priestess prophesying, she declared, “You really don’t know what you did. You don’t know that you mixed the sacred with the defiled. You don’t know that you betrayed prophetic counsel and shook the pillars of existence. You….”
She stopped. She sighed, and her sigh sounded like the hissing of a serpent. She tried to finish, but anger choked her. In her eyes I saw an even more hideous gleam. Was it contempt? What was certain, however, was that this look was a message instructing me that I had lost her forever, because a woman can hide everything except her decision to leave a man.
At that time I stood nervously by the temple’s entrance. I stood there nervously because I did not understand. I forgot my intention to pray. The longing in my heart to encounter the spirit world faded. I stood where I was, dumbstruck, because I found myself an accused man on whom a death sentence has been pronounced, even though he does not know the nature of his offense. I perceived, intuitively, that something had happened. The conspiracy hatched in the spirit world had begun to mature. I remembered the lost goddess then. I considered it an ill omen and felt hurt. I did not know that this was only the opening volley in the bloodshed that would follow after the “big mistake” but before the breach.
The nobles of the tribes had grown accustomed to gathering in my assembly to represent the divine trinity Ragh, Yeth, and Seth, according to the dictates of the prophetic teachings, recorded on leather sheets that the sages had left me. They launched their first raid against the neighboring tribes on a troubling pretext. The public reason was self-defense against the greed of envious persons, whereas the private subtext was a desire to seize herds of animals and to extend their area of influence. The cavalry, composed of partisans of the goddess Yeth, were the most ardent and the most vociferous advocates of war. I heard their nobles stress in the assembly a heretical idea, the gist of which was that the noblest form of defense is a pre-emptive strike and that a weapon that remains in a person’s hand will end up in his throat, unless used against an enemy. With this vicious doctrine they were secretly alluding to the deadly metal blades with which blacksmiths, partisans of Seth, were flooding the markets of the oasis. Among the citizens, they circulated rumors that advocated the necessity of using weapons, if only as a training exercise, since in their opinion, iron formed into weapons is not really a weapon, until used as one. I noticed during the nobles’ debate, which preceded the agreement to wade into the first clash, that those from the tribes of Seth were covertly supporting the position of the cavalry of Yeth, by an occasional wink and by repeating prophetic dicta that laud aggression and say that life is merely a voyage of struggle, during which you are inevitably conquered by other people, unless you conquer them first. I heard them allege repeatedly that these dicta were copied from the laws of the ancients. The tribal lords, who had assumed the role of the partisans of Ragh back on the day set aside for entertainment, opposed them and advocated a wait-and-see approach, pleading for the rule of wisdom. They said that wisdom is iron’s ancient enemy, that these two have never united under a single roof, and that tribes have noticed, since the beginning of time, that the appearance of one entails the disappearance of the other, because wisdom flows from the spring of peace-making, whereas iron flows exclusively from the spring of blood. I remember that back then the tribe of Seth adopted the position of the tribe of Yeth when the moment came to vote for the first attack. Then their alliance was disclosed and intellect lost the first battle.
My assembly still met whenever necessary. My consort would sit beside me without volunteering any opinion. She seemed bored by all the assembly’s wrangling, which often deteriorated into name-calling, and began to absent herself. When I once asked why, she replied, “I didn’t know that men’s meetings, when drawn out, become even more mean-spirited than women’s.” When I disputed this, she observed that a man’s initial comments deserve to be heard but become pointless chatter if prolonged while his heart becomes a shell. In her head, a woman always conceals in her quiver a valuable thought she does not reveal. Indeed, a woman never states what she would like to say. She never says what she ought to say, because she knows that the thought we treasure is always inestimably more precious than the statement we utter. For this reason, we never grow tired of listening to a woman. For this reason, we are attracted to a woman, since we anticipate that she will eventually tell us the thought she is hiding. Woman, however, is too intelligent to condescend to speak her secret, unlike man. She concluded her exposition by stating, “How despicable is a man who has not been granted wisdom by the spirit world.” I realized that she had pronounced a final verdict on my assembly. I also understood that her final phrase, with which she terminated her bizarre exposition, was directed at me, not the nobles of my assembly. Her phrasing would not have aroused my suspicions had I not detected contempt in it. I must confess that this was what most upset me, because I knew that when a woman feels contempt for a man, not even the spirit world can deflect her evil. These intimations shook my heart’s optimism; so I learned to be suspicious and began to read hidden meanings into every phrase. Next she began to siphon off the leading figures of the assembly, one by one, until I discovered that they had deserted me to unite in her assembly in the temple. I was astonished at the ability of people to change over night and to turn their backs on me, after I had placed my confidence in them, and to shun me so unequivocally that they saw nothing wrong in scowling at me today after kissing the ground beneath my feet yesterday. I confronted a noble from Ragh’s clan, a man I had previously installed as the head of his people and a pillar of the assembly. I decided I would try to reason with him, even though I had no hope of success. He was a mature man of great dignity, inclined toward silence. He wore a veil of blue linen. In fact it was reported in the oasis that he was the first to substitute for leather veils these linen ones that caravans procured for him from nations to the north. That was not all, for he had dyed the linen blue the day after I installed him on the Trinitarian throne as a representative of the putative offspring of Ragh. When asked his reasons, he had said that since blue is the color of the sky, it would have been inappropriate for descendents of the divine lords to wend their way through the throngs without a sign to notify strangers of their true status as persons tracing their lineage back to the lord of the sky. Then he pushed his game one step further by deciding to change his name as well, substituting for his former name, Imsikni, a new one, Amnay. At the time, I did not lend any significance to these initiatives. All I did was joke about them in the assembly, just as strangers had previously joked about them. I did not understand then that joking about people is not merely a mistake but also dangerous, for a joke conceals a display of contempt that will provoke the people subjected to it. Then they do not merely harbor hatred for us, but the show of contempt for their position increases their determination to carry out their heretical innovation, even if it verges on the impractical or the insane. Here was Amnay strutting before me as haughtily as a lord, veiled by a blue cloth that idiots assumed was a guarantee of affiliation with descendents of the sky, hiding behind a lofty sobriquet accepted by strangers as having been bestowed on him one night in a heavenly revelation, and leaning on a staff that, in his grasp, became a mace and symbol of sovereignty. Here he was, pretending not to see me, in fact avoiding me, as he had done repeatedly. I blocked his way, not to remind him who he really was, not to avenge myself for his skullduggery, but to heal my rancor and to cheer my heart, as I had attempted to do the day I set aside for amusement, when I had laid the cornerstone for my own downfall, as my former consort was pleased to remind me. I blocked the way of this gent, who was bristling with fine clothing, and asked, without muting the disdain in my tone, “The master of nobility shows himself to people by bristling with wisdom, whereas the master of vacuity reveals himself to people by bristling with lies.”