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7
Silence. The audience chamber was an antechamber of death. Moonlight glowed on lacquer surfaces. The room smelled of wax and flowers.
Ramy-baba's mind was awhirl with horror. She had betrayed her lover and sister, and condemned herself and Ramy to death. She had brought mockery and war upon Ramyon. Had it been worth this to hurt her sibling over a romantic jealousy? Ramy-baba was deeply ashamed, and she sat waiting for her sister's sharp words.
Both sighed.
"Forgive me, sister," Ramy-baba at last said.
"What have you done?"
"I wish I could undo it, but now I can't."
After a long silence, Ramy said: "We must prepare for death." She rose. "I have to go to my room and tidy things up."
Ramy-baba shifted her bulk erect. "Will I see you again?"
"I will come to your chamber when I have composed myself."
"I pray that you do."
She watched as Ramy walked with small steps. Ramy slid the door open, let herself out, and slid the door almost closed, leaving Ramy-baba the option to leave the room if she chose. What did anything really matter now? What would anything matter in a few hours when they were in the Celestial Hall? Ramy-baba thought she might just sit here the rest of her time. Then, ashamed in the face of her sister's courage and determination, she walked down dark corridors, over the creaking wooden bridge-floor, and into the babas' tower. There, the doors were closed as the other babas slept. She went to her room, which was large and had a window view, since she was an important baba despite her youth. Sobbing, she straightened her possessions—her amulets; small clay figurines including some cute ones and some frightening ones for warding off evil spirits; jewelry, perfumes, fungi preparations for her skin and her egg-pipette. When there was nothing left to do, she lay down on the bed and pondered the incredible reversal of her fate. She thought about the other babas. There were terrible jealousies among the wasps. Many hated Ramy-baba because she domineered them as was her right by caste order. They would deal with her harshly if she lived into the coming days; better to go now, quietly, to have been without saying goodbye, just to have been and then not to be.
Long before the first milky green fingers of dawn rose over the horizon, there was a rustle of silk as Ramy hurried into the room. She wore her best gown from the wedding ceremonies, and Ramy-baba assumed Ramy would want her husband to see her for the last time like this before they buried her.
Ramy-baba turned away and hung her head. "Will you forgive me?"
She felt Ramy's arms steal around her from behind. "Who else can I turn to, foolish baba?"
Ramy-baba turned and gave back an embrace, so that they were entwined, the one sister much larger than the other. "We have so little time."
"By dawn, the others will be awake. We will be at their mercy," Ramy said.
"We will be quick and merciful," Ramy-baba said. With longing, she ran her pudgy fingers and droopy arms up and down Ramy's slender back.
Ramy waited passively, her hands on her sister's shoulders, her breathing coming quicker. Ramy-baba groaned with desire as her palms burned on the smooth waist and oval buttocks, the sharp hip bones and long shapely thighs of her sister.
"Go make the bed," Ramy-baba whispered, sending her sister off with a lingering palm on one buttock. She watched as Ramy walked away loosening her wedding dress with two hands on a button behind her back. Ramy cleared a pewter jug and some cups from the fruit table by the window. Ramy opened the bay windows and arched back her back with two pressuring hands while staring into the predawn of Shur.
The red moon hung like a distant lantern over the sea. Fog swirled like milk far below on the Obayyo, the Lantern Road. Already, birds twittered and thrashed in the highest tree crowns. Dew dripped like a steady heartbeat on a tin barrel cover out on the stone balconies.
While Ramy pulled a mattress from the bench box under the windows, and unrolled it on the table, Ramy-baba at the other end of the long room took a velvet bundle from a secret drawer, careful lest Ramy see. She unrolled the bundle, exposing two special knives. Each knife had a long handle of intricately carved ivory, suitable for a woman to hold with both hands and sweep slowly sideways pushing with all the strength of one forearm. The blade was extremely pointed for a quick puncture, and very sharp, but wide to pressure the organs and keep them apart.
Engraved on the hilt of each was a poem from the Ancient Poet, in archaic language, carved in elegant Oba High Period calligraphy, a poem fit for the occasion of a double departure from life. Invoking an innocent nursery tale, fit for the beginning of life rather than its end, the first sword said:
Two moons embrace above the koh tree.
The celestial dome turns, hiding them behind the tree trunk.
Rabbit-in-the-Grass catches his breath—when will they reappear?
The other sword said:
The celestial dome turns, revealing what hid behind the koh.
Not a single moon in sight, alas.
Rabbit-in-the-Grass sighs and hops away.
Loosely bundling the knives in their blue velvet cloth, Ramy-baba trundled over to the table.
Ramy had dropped her clothes on the floor and lay naked in the dim light. The slender curves of her youthful body glowed with a faint milky-blue light. She lay on her left side facing away, the curving shadow between her buttocks a mysterious valley. Her long right leg was pulled up slightly, laying a curved knee upon one nearly straight.
Ramy-baba stared long. She was not a poetess, but she wanted to capture this last divine vision in every detail. She wanted to remember it like a perfect poem well told as the knife made its journey from east to west.
Ramy's arms extended over her head, elbows in her orange hair that was fluffed out to accept the full scent and breeze of the night. On each side of her chest was a dark wrinkled spot, a nipple useless as that of a man, but exquisitely tender to the touch of both lovers.
Ramy-baba took great care to lay her bundle down without making a sound. Then she advanced upon her sister like a shadow. She noticed that Ramy lay with her face toward the moonlight, and her blue tongue was slightly extended in pleasure.
Ramy-baba touched a nipple with her own blue tongue, and Ramy's tongue slid further out. The two sisters lay together, the larger spooning the smaller, who writhed while the other alternately ran her palms and fingertips over and over the same hills and valleys until Ramy turned, and from there it was a language of tongues, of roving fingers, until finally, when the foam-sea could no longer be denied, Ramy-baba mounted one brown leg over her sister's waist and held Ramy's head in her fingertips. The pipette extended from baba's upper palate. It was long as a finger when fully extended, and stained in various shades of brown and gray. It was hollow, and sheathed in a thin layer of skin and nerve endings that made a glow of passion and desire in Ramy-baba's head as she closed her eyes and sought the tiny bony protrusions on either side of Ramy's neck. Ramy groaned with anticipation, flailing her wrists passionately against her sister's massive shoulders as the beak found its way into the protrusion, parting a sphincter there, and sinking down into the spongy tissue that contained love's fluids. As the shaft entered, it released a fungal poison that acted as a powerful stimulant. Ramy uttered a series of high, choking moans while struggling to breathe at the same time. Her body, held tenderly by her sister, convulsed in erotic spasms. Ramy-baba, too, was utterly aroused. The same fungal release made her blind with desire as she tensed her normally flaccid body for the receipt of fertilized eggs. The eggs would fall together into the womb near baba's center, where over nine months the next son or pair of sisters would form.
While she was still high from their shared orgasm—in fact, while the beak was still in Ramy's pleasure hole, and Ramy was half-conscious—the baba whispered "I love you" and began strangling her sister. "This is the best way, my beloved," she whispered as she made her fingers ever tighter, until at last she felt Ramy go limp. Then she reached for the knife to finish the first of two duellos, slicing the belly as swiftly as a sunset.
Ramy-baba dismounted and threw her robe loosely over her body. She did not want to be found naked—men and non-sisters would be revulsed at her appearance. If the woman-sister was beautiful as a star in her man's eyes, the baba was ungainly like the earth.
The Ancient Sage had written: "The baba is a soil of unpleasant appearance, but she mothers flowers that rival heaven for beauty."
Still weak and in shock, Ramy-baba staggered around the table for a last look at her dead sister. Ramy's hands lay limp together. Her legs would never run again. Her eyes stared sightlessly into the sky, whose first tendril of light made her eyes glitter. Her face had a vacant, slightly shocked expression. Her tongue had turned from blue to black and hung fully extended from her red lips like a dark worm on the marble tabletop, where the mattress had slid aside during their love making.
Ramy-baba arranged the body, which was still warm, but cooling rapidly. First she used a long linen bandage to hold the burst organs in. She worked the body into the wedding dress and laid it on its back. She folded Ramy's hands on her chest and straightened Ramy's legs, and put tiny white slippers on the bare feet. She wept softly all the while.
Then she sat down and composed herself. She tried to listen to the sound of her heart, but there was too much rushing in her ears. She chose the knife with the two moons because it spelled hope. Still composing herself, she held the knife before her and stared at it in an effort to make it enter her torso more easily. She stared at it long and thoughtfully, weighing her sins and praying to the gods and goddesses who waited for her, most of all Ramy who had just become an ancestor-god.
The castle was silent as the bottom of a pond.
They would give her as long as she needed, presumably on order of Lord Ramyon. She was a non-person, half dead already. She sat for a time, testing the knife's heft, balancing it in one hand, then the other. Slowly, she brought the point to her belly.
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