Bloodline: Godseed (Pt. I)

“In those days the gods still walked the earth,” Nomti said, taking a bite out his loaf and washing it back with a slug of beer. His tanned and grizzled features contrasted strangely with the brilliant white of his garment.

“They hadn’t been contained yet. As a matter of record, it took a millennia and a great cataclysm to contain them when the battles were fought before. Some of the gods had committed the unspeakable. And bore offspring.”

Nanu nodded her head as her grandfather spoke. “The great ones!”

“Yes. Great warriors. Evil ones, however. Not… pure. Not of the gods, and not of man… too dangerous. So Atum and Nun raised the waters of chaos, conspiring against the very gods themselves, to destroy the seed of the gods before all was ruined. Yet a few men were gathered up and saved to begin anew.”

Nanu frowned. “Those who built the great tombs?”

“No, those are remnants from before the time of the cleansing. Only recently did they become the tombs of great kings. Those that survived the waters were hidden in the hand of Ra until chaos receded. Yet even in their midst, some of the god blood had been preserved…”

* * *

The sun beat down on Akana as she picked out stems, leaves and rotten fruit from the grape harvest. She didn’t mind – she felt fine and sang as she sorted through baskets of warm grapes, singing, and enjoying the goodness of life.

And some of that life stirred within her. Her breasts lay bare and tan over the fullness of her belly as she poured out the now suitable fruit into the new winepress her husband had completed shortly after the waters receded. It would be soon.... soon.

A movement inside brought her hand to her middle. A knee? A bottom? She smiled and gently pushed back at the child. In return, it moved back harder, sharply kicking at the new pressure. She pressed again – and the baby responded with a kick that felt as if it could break a rib. “Gods have mercy! What a little warrior you are,” she said to her stomach. “What a tough little man I shall bring into the world! That will teach me to push you around, sweet one.”

As she tread the essence from the grapes her thoughts went to the time before. The battles, the citadels, the incredible powers of the gods… all done and gone. She would never see the crystal towers again… nor the shimmering balloons high above the peaks… or the great interlocking blocks of stone carved to knife-edged precision and put into place with concentrated waves of sound. Vanished. Far off as they drifted in the seas over what had been cities and patch-work farmed plains, she had seen the triangular peak of a building or two, but she doubted that much could remain. The tempest had been incredible in its fury.

The baby kicked again, hard enough to knock her breath away. “Child, be at peace!” she groaned. This one could not come soon enough. He would be of use to his older brothers in a few years, gathering grain they had grown painfully with primitive plows and harvested with pitiful hand tools. Nothing like the way it was before. Before… back when the gods had walked the earth…

The gods. A cloud drifted across the sun just as her thoughts went back to that night… just one night of great failing… the night her child had been conceived. She couldn’t know it for sure… but the feeling wouldn’t leave her.

Her husband wouldn’t understand it… but that awful visitor had possessed a strange power she’d never felt before. Djal had left with the boys, visiting his brother inside the great city. She was home alone, running a newly combed batch of flax through the linen spooler when the knock came.

He was the biggest man she’d ever seen. She wasn’t about to let him in, but he pressed his huge and hairy hand in the gap of the door and pushed her aside like a papyrus doll.

“Beer,” he demanded, “and meat.”

Because hospitality required it, she served him both. She considered running away to the neighbors but something kept her riveted to the floor. His eyes burned with an intoxicating madness; his features had something of the divine and something of the animal within them. He finished his meal, then eyed her. Something in his look enslaved her. She knew it was wrong… she knew it was mad… but she found herself serving him drink after drink, and partaking of it herself, and at some point, delivering her body into his arms. There wasn’t much to remember… except the strange canine smell of his breath… and the hairiness of his back… and dreams… endless dreams that night of hunts and the smell of blood… lying among jackals in a cave…

When she had awakened the next day, he was gone. And only a week later, her family were among the few that had been gathered away from the waters of chaos.

Even then, the little one had been in her womb… riding on the waves… up above the peaks.

There for the landing, and the re-dedications, and the libations to the gods. There, growing inside...

Another kick came - and with it a clenching pain.

Djal was in the field and heard her cry. Racing back, he carried her inside. This birth would be without the help of the physicians, he thought grimly. No liniments to ward off the tiny destroyers… no measuring the beating of the hearts. Just nature running its course.

He prayed that course would not kill his wife or child. Though if he’d known what was to come, he might have prayed for both.