Amun Sa and the Girl from the Desert Read online

  * * *

  The creature that had once been known as Harad’ur visited her but one time more. It came only eight nights later, as Ashayt made her way north along the river’s edge by the light of the moon, grown now nearly full and shining like the sun to her new, powerful eyes. She had fed on each of these nights, had fought the ecstasy with all of her being, and each night it had grown easier to not kill whichever poor slave she had chosen for the activity.

  She was beginning now to retain enough consciousness to note that they seemed to be enjoying it, and she found this very curious indeed. She was coming also to understand that she possessed a tremendous ability to overwhelm her victims with lust and desire, and that when she was done they would wake with no memory of the event. She had watched from the darkness beyond their limited vision, several times, to make sure of this. Never had she seen the panic and fear that she had expected; there was only confusion, and a kind of unexpected serenity. She had murdered her lover, but she was bringing these random strangers joy. The thought of it was darkly ironic, and left a bitter taste in her mouth that was even stronger than the salt and sweet of the blood.

  Ashayt was walking with her head down, watching the rocks at her feet and trying not to think about Amun Sa, trying not to think about anything but putting further distance between herself and the city of Ineb-Hedg. When she felt the presence descend upon her as it had twice before, Ashayt stopped cold and found herself turning in circles, staring out into the night, trying to find the source of the feeling. At last she pinpointed it: a group of palms, not far from the river’s shore. She stood staring for a time, but the creature seemed to have no intention of approaching her.

  “Come out, thing,” she called to it. “Come out and say whatever it is you have to say and then be gone, unholy monster that has damned me to this hell.”

  There came from the palms a chuckle, and the creature’s rotten, grating voice.

  “You could end your own life, little girl, if you wanted. It seems you yet wish to live.”

  “I am afraid,” Ashayt said. It was a simple truth, and though it shamed her, she was not about to let this creature hear it in her voice. “I am afraid to die, and so I flee the punishment I deserve.”

  “There is no such thing as ‘deserve,’” the thing said, and it stepped out from the palms and stood with its bare feet in the sand, regarding her. After a time it leaned back its head, and sniffed the night air, and sighed with contentment. “It is a lovely night, don’t you think? Even now, after hundreds of years, nights like this make me appreciate the freedom that I bought when I killed my master.”

  “What do you want?” Ashayt demanded. “You’ve done what you wished. You’ve taken all that I had. What more can I give? Do you want my life, now? Is that how this ends? Then take it. Come here and take it and leave me in peace.”

  The creature gave her a leering grin but came no closer. “You will never be at peace. I knew that when I made you what you are, and that is why I gave you my gift.”

  “I never wanted your Gods-damned gift,” Ashayt said, her voice broken and weary.

  “I never asked if you did.”

  “No. But I’m asking you, now. What do you want from me?”

  “I have watched you, each of these nights. Did you not feel it? No, because I did not permit you to do so, but I was there. You refuse the gift I have given you. You drink from slaves when you could drink from kings, and you leave them alive. Alive! I have made you into death personified, yet you leave them alive. Why?”

  “I will never kill again,” Ashayt told him. “That is my vow.”

  “Can you not see that they ask for it?” the thing asked her, tilting its head. “How is it that you do not understand? They beg for death with every breath they take. They tempt and taunt it with each passing day. They war on each other, these things. They torture and kill and maim. They keep their fellow men as slaves. You, girl, would be a slave yourself if not for blind, stupid luck. You would never have met your precious Amun Sa if you had but turned left instead of right on any of the days you traveled through the desert, lost and alone and afraid.

  “These people, these humans, did that to you. These things did that to you, and now you refuse to kill them? That is the conclusion you’ve drawn? You could lose yourself in unparalleled ecstasy each night, every night, and yet you choose to end it prematurely. Why?”

  Ashayt considered this for a time, but at last shook her head. “This thing you’ve given to me, it is true that I have never felt its equal. Even at the height of my passion with my lover I did not feel what I feel now when I take the blood. You are right, it is ecstasy like nothing else in the world, but there is more to the world than pleasure. There is more to the world than the feeling you describe, and there is more to man than the actions of which you speak.

  “You have given me the peak, yes. A pinnacle above what even Amun Sa was able to give to me, and for that you want my thanks. Yet you have taken from me the time after, when I would lie with my head on his chest, and listen to his heart beating, and smell the scent of his skin. You have taken the times when I would walk with him to market and hear stories of his youth and laugh with him. You have taken the feeling that he and only he could give me, that all was right in the world. I loved him with every part of me, not just those simple, stupid parts that respond only to pleasure. You speak of the terrible things men do and I will not deny them, but a life lived only for that dumb pleasure would be just as sad, and empty, and barbaric. That would be nothing. It would be nothing! And that is what you’ve left me with. Nothing.”

  Ashayt found herself weeping again, trembling with rage and loss, furious with this creature and its inability to understand the things it had taken from her.

  The thing that once had been called Harad’ur, that once had feasted on the blood of tiny children left in its circle of stones as sacrifice, looked back at her, unspeaking. If any of her words touched it in some place where once had dwelt a soul, Ashayt could not see it. Its expression did not change. Its gaze did not falter. It only looked on, mute and uncomprehending, and she hated it all the more for this.

  “Go away from me,” she said, and, turning back to the river, she began again to pick her way among the stones.

  She did not look back, and after some time, she felt the creature’s presence disappear.

  * * *

  Ashayt made her second vow while standing on the shore of the Mediterranean Sea, some two hundred miles from the darkened alley in which she had killed her lover. Here was the border. Here was the edge of her homeland, the place she had lived every day of her life since coming screaming into the world, and now she turned her back to the waters and looked at the lands she had crossed to reach this point. After a time she knelt in the damp sand and closed her eyes. She thought of nothing until it seemed that the rushing sound of the waves had filled her entire body with a sort of thrumming energy. At last she raised her head to the black sky above, dotted with the tiny sparks of the stars, and looked out into that eternal night.

  “Amun Sa,” she said, and waited. “Amun Sa, are you listening?”

  There was no response. Only the lull and crash of the waves, and Ashayt put her hands over her eyes and waited, waited in that damnable, deafening, crashing silence, that forever-void she had created when she had taken his voice from the world and sent him on to the land of the dead. Then she tilted her head up, neck extended, back arched, arms out, and screamed his name to the uncaring heavens. She let forth her cry again, and again, and again, until at last her voice shattered like crystal on stone, and she doubled over in pain, digging her fingers like claws into the wet sand.

  “I will never return,” she screamed in silence at the sand, embracing the pain that tore her throat, that made the tears pour from her eyes in a torrent, that made her whole body twist in upon itself.

  “This is my punishment. This is my penance. My love, my dearest, my Lord, my beautiful Amun Sa, I will never again touch this land.
I will never again see the home of our people. I will never again set foot in the place where I knew your love. Amun Sa, I loved you. I loved you and I killed you, and even if I live until every star in the sky has burned out and the Gods have grown old and frail and senile on their thrones, and even if every day from now until then is agony, it can never be enough. It will never, ever be enough.

  “Please forgive me for what I’ve done, my love. Please forgive me, for I never will. That is my promise. That is my punishment. I will never return to the land of our love, because there can never be forgiveness.”

  Somewhere below, in the Land of the Dead, she hoped that Amun Sa could hear her. Ashayt pressed her forehead to the cold, wet sand, and then kissed it with her lips. She could taste the salt of the sea, and with it came a dry and calcified aroma, the scent of the hundred, billion, trillion ocean creatures that had come before her, and those that would go on living long after her sad, sorry life had at last come to its close. She thought of the way he had smiled at her, on that first day when they had met, and how she had known instantly and beyond the smallest doubt that she was to be his forever and ever, until the end of all things.

  Kneeling there in penitence for a sin from which she could never be absolved, the girl from the desert began to sob.

  Coming November, 2012

  The Children of the Sun

  The Final Chapter of the II AM Trilogy

  https://iiamtrilogy.com

  About the Author

  Christopher Buecheler is a professional web designer / developer, a published author, an award-winning amateur mixologist, a brewer of beer, a player of the guitar and drums, and an NBA enthusiast.

  He lives a semi-nomadic existence with his wonderful French wife and their two cats, Carbomb and Baron Salvatore H. Lynx II. Currently they reside in Providence, Rhode Island.

  You can visit him at https://www.cwbuecheler.com