Stars Ch. 01

"Oh really! And will those descendants bring justice, too, for the fraud you and your husband perpetrated on me?"

"I have long feared, Lord, that I have been betraying both you and the nameless god. Perhaps you can understand, now, why I cried in the beginning, every time you came near me. Why I believe I might deserve death."

This woman was, I realized, telling the truth: her feelings for me had not been an act. But instead of making me feel better, that realization made me feel worse. What do you do when someone you love -- someone who loves you -- is the victim of a stubborn religious delusion? I was not, I realized, going to be able to deprogram her.

"I won't put you or Abram to death," I told her. "But I want you both out of this country as soon as possible."

Turning to leave her apartment, I paused at the door. "I'm not saying this to make you change your mind," I told her, "but you can forget about producing descendants with Abram. He's sterile. He's been screwing those two slave-girls I sent him on a regular basis for a year, and neither of them has gotten pregnant."

"He got one of my handmaidens pregnant once," she said.

"Oh yes? And was this handmaiden a virgin?"

"She did have a man, my Lord, but I asked her to not sleep with him while she was producing the child for us."

"That's not worthy of your intelligence Serai."

She nodded, and convered her face with her hands.

"You're right Lord." she replied eventually. "I've long suspected that my supposed barrenness was actually Abram's problem."

I turned, again, to leave.

"But," she added, "nothing can be impossible for the nameless god. I must believe, that when the time is right..."

"Sarai," I told her, "I've got something like ten sorcerers on staff here at the palace, and not a single one of them can do real magic. It's all tricks. Clever, but still just tricks. I don't believe in magic. Only reality. And the reality of this situation is that Abram is never going to give you a child."

"But didn't you say, Divine Lord, that my idea of an all-powerful god was starting to make sense to you?"

"I did, Sarai, but not one that works outside reality. Not one that gives us detailed instructions on how to carry out its will for us. If you had a bit more faith in the workings of your all-powerful god, you might have been able to go back to your husband with the start of a family in your womb. But no! You had to use the silphium to derail the natural course of events..."

I, Ramses IX, am venerated in Egypt and beyond as the living incarnation of the great god Horus, son of Isis and Osirus, but I felt like the most powerless, most vulnerable man on earth when Serai looked at me in the same way she had on our first night out there on the star-powdered steppes of the Sudan.

"Is understanding of the meaning of our love," she asked, "coming to me too late?"

I reached for her hand, pulled her toward me, her soft lips on mine, breasts pressed against my chest. When she took off her gown, I could already see a glistening thread of natural lubricant suspended from her pubic hair: she was as ready as I'd ever seen her. But then, breathless and already moving urgently against me, she suddenly broke away, and walked over to a chest on the other side of the room. Opening it, she took out a stoppered clay jar, and threw it hard enough into a corner to to smash it in pieces.

"The silphium," she explained.

* * *

What does your name mean, Serai?

"Something like 'little princess,' Lord. 'Head of the household,' maybe."

"Shouldn't you be a real princess -- a princess of the nation -- now that you're carrying my child? What' the word for that kind of princess in your language?

"Sarah."

That became our private joke, my private name for her, in our last months together. I was surprised -- and charmed -- to hear, later, that she'd started using it in place of Serai after she got back to Canaan.

I didn't want her taking an overland trip with our child in her womb. So, because the Mediterranean was calm at that time of the year, I arranged for a ship to take her and Ufina to our trading entrepot at Tyre, where Abram would be waiting for her.

Her stomach was already too big, on our last night together for me to be on top of her, so we got her hips to the edge of the bed, where I could enter her standing. I had come to a place of understanding, acceptance and even gratitude for her presence in my life, and was surprised, therefore, that our love-making was exposing a hidden vein of residual anger over the fact that she was leaving. That anger grew with the urgency of my passion to the point where I could no longer contain it.

"Bitch." I told her as I thrust into her. "Slut."

"Yes Divine Lord! Yes!" she gasped as her orgasm approached.

And she was not, of course, saying "Yes I'm a bitch" at all, but yes, rather, to all the weird twists in the destiny that had brought us together.