*** Let Me Know When the Matriarch Messiah Releases ***
Chapter 1
O my Lord, the stars glitter
and the eyes of men are closed.
Kings have locked their doors
and each lover is alone with his love.
Here, I am alone with you.
—Rabi’a al-Adawiyya, eighth-century Persian philosopher and mystic
Skyline Boulevard above Silicon Valley, California
6:30 a.m. GMT-8, January 2, 2022
She never realized it would be this long. She never, ever thought she would be holding his, his…his thing. Yes, she has seen one before. She is certainly not that innocent. But it enchanted her, it called to her, as it seemed to purr in her two hands.
This moment is exactly what he has been waiting for since they first touched. And finally, here she is with him. Outdoors in his redwood forests, amidst his mountains. He referred to a game children play. I’ll show you mine if you show me yours.
Zara gently squeezes his dearest thing and says, “Like a ripe banana with a brownish tinge and little reddish spots.”
As she squeezes again, Peter lets out, “Oh, yes. Do that again.”
“Oh, yes, you are so much like my silly little boy brother. Playing with your…your…”
As the two gaze down at the seven-inch-long banana slug wiggling in Zara’s hands, wisps of drifting white fluffy fog float by, swarming the majestic redwood giants in the grove they have found by this mountain crest drive overlooking the San Francisco Bay.
Peter has been such a dear. Zara mentioned how much she missed the mountains of her childhood in Duhok province in Iraq. And so, he suggested they spend time in the mountains of his childhood. It was time for her to know what drove his fondness for these yellow creatures.
As Peter draws his fingers lightly across his beloved banana slug, they land upon Zara’s fingers. And her finger purrs as much as the slug does.
Six months ago, she was about to leave Peter at his grandfather’s grave. They had completed the mission her Sasha had coerced her into, the search for the black object of the ancient matriarch. She smirks as she recalls how that malevolent Sasha got what he wanted. And he certainly got what he deserved when he took Peter’s gun, which ironically exploded in his hands as he tried to kill them.
She should be more thankful to Sasha, “The” Alexander Murometz to the rest of the world, she muses, as it was at his insistence that she met Peter, a man who has surprised her at every turn and twist.
After she left Peter that day, intimating that they were parting forever, he went back to pray at his grandfather’s grave. The man-boy, who believed in aliens over God when she first met him, found solace in praying. Not because his mother told him to do so. Not because she would have wanted him to. But because he had an inner calling. At that moment, she thought, maybe, just maybe, he would be different from any other man who had sought her love.
Her mother said she first noticed Zara’s father as they were on the same worship schedule together. Already, they shared a belief in common. A bond that made their marriage so wonderful. A bond that created Zara and her little brother. And maybe that is why Zara has come back many times over the past six months to visit Peter.
Peter touches her banana slug earrings. Zara responds by rubbing her scarred cheek with his hand. A drop of dew from the giant redwood above them lands on her nose. She puts her nose upon his to wipe away the drop, followed by a light affectionate peck on his lips.
“This means so much to me,” Peter whispers in her ear. “You being here with me so early in the morning—the most likely time to catch banana slugs slithering out to bathe in the mists. Most women wouldn’t dream of doing this.”
Another dewdrop forms on the brow of Zara’s dark plum headscarf from the dampness of the passing fog drifts. She passes the wiggling object of Peter’s second fascination back to him so she can brush the drop off her headscarf before it lands in the eye of Peter’s first fascination. Her.
“So, am I to assume an outing into the cold damp woods before sunrise is not your typical first date?” muses Zara.
“First date, huh? We’re so far beyond first date, aren’t we? Only the women who count in my life come here,” Peter asserts as he puts his treasured yellow friend back onto the forest floor, matted with fern leaves and redwood twigs and needles.
“My father took my mother, my sister, and me up here on family outings,” says Peter. “I fell in love with these denizens of the Pacific coastal forests. They are so peaceful. They hurt no one.”
Peter glances at the broad trunks of the surrounding redwoods towards the road. “Except if someone hits them as they cross the road. But no one would be driving so fast out here at this time of morning.”
She gazes into the branches above, the drops hitting her eyes as she stands among his beloved banana slug in his most sacred place on earth. In this regard, he is like me, she thinks, as she has her sacred place on the mountain back at her childhood home. A flattop rock next to the twisting trail where her beloved father would take her hiking. The place where she found her greatest peace. That is, until she met Peter.
Her fingers touch her ears, on which hang the banana slug earrings Peter so adored. Her tribute to his love for these creatures. She gazes at him. Eyes and nose so relaxed. His face devoid of lines, so serene. Her grandmother Roza was right again. She needed to be open to his culture and his ways to truly understand him.
Peace comes from tolerance. The root of tolerance is mutual understanding. His communing in these woods with his yellow mollusk friends is his source of deep mysticism. No different from Roza’s father’s Sufi twirling dance. Both ways to understand Xwedê’s world and be closer to Her.
Her eyes close as she revels in her realization about why she has made the long journey from the Anatolian Kurdish State to California many times since his pappy’s funeral—the culmination of their two-month mission together searching for the mythical black object of his family’s legends. Because there is more to this man than his silly demeanor would portray. In their first meeting, Peter’s penchant for Sammy the Slug, mascot of his alma mater, led her to form a less-than-complimentary first impression. But his composure, his placid eyes gazing in unity with nature, remind her so much of her father on her mountain back home. Perhaps he really is a man seeking the Divine. Like her. Like what her mother had with her father. We shall see, she thinks.
“So, I showed you mine,” Peter challenges, brushing a dewdrop from her nose as the fog intensifies. “Time for you to show me yours.”
Having grown up on the other side of the world, both geographically and culturally, from this man who now asks her to show him something most intimate of her inner being, she purses her lips as she stares at him, unsure what he is truly seeking. Their several-month relationship had already transcended the physical, the emotional, the limits of what she has had with previous boyfriends. What could he have not already seen in her, given their ancient ability to bond spiritually?
Her hand tugs her headscarf more tightly to her head. Shelter from the cold fog? Shielding her most intimate thoughts from this man? Or simply her instinctive subconscious action?
Knowing not what drives her action, she turns back to him, facing the redwoods. The negative-ion-charged Pacific air passes quietly as it flows through these monolithic beings. Ones who have seen a millennium pass. Ones whose family has seen the passage of time since the ancients. Seen the mysteries of the ancients. Like the mystery they encountered because of their descendancy from the ancient matriarch Nanshe’s family. Through their solving the mystery of Nanshe’s words, passed from generation to generation.
The words that Peter’s pappy, Nikolas, made him memorize. The words that her Sasha knew would lead to an ancient monolith, the black object. Known to the rest of the world as Alexander Murometz, her malevolent Sasha built the world’s most powerful, politically invasive private enterprise so he would have access to the resources needed to find this object. The black object that spawned Zara’s prophecies. This stone could destroy the world. And this silly man in front of her had outfoxed, outargued, outwitted the most manipulative man in the world, her Sasha, to prevent Turkey, the US, China, and Russia from starting a world war.
Another dewdrop hits her nose. But this time, she does not wipe it off as it mingles with the drops from her eyes. She searches inside for the strength to remember that which remains unresolved in her life, with her family, with her destiny.
“My great-grandmother was our link to the wisdom of generations of spiritually inspired women before her,” Zara says, still facing away from Peter. “Sara liked you. She saw something in you when she first met you. That first dinner at her ancestral house, when we were staging for our mission to retrieve the object.”
Turning back to Peter, she says, “Sara told me that you harbor the same light her husband, a Sufi imam, had within him when they first met.”
She points to his eyes. Blue ones that naturally go with his once-blond and now-sandy light-brown hair. “Sara said the light we should seek is blue. The world thinks the light is white. But the one we seek, we yearn for, we die for, is blue. She so feared dying before she could find the blue light. For in the blue light, we shall return, she said.”
Peter, who knows so much trivia because he is an editor of all sorts of topics, papers, and books, is speechless. Finally he mutters, “Blue? Where did that come from? I’m not getting the connection to the mystery of the ancient matriarch we solved.”
Turning back to Peter, she replies, “As you had with your grandfather Nikolas, who entrusted you with an ancient oral family tradition, passed from mouth to mouth, from generation to generation, as far back in time as that temple, the world’s oldest temple, which our follies led to be destroyed, so there is a line of similar wisdom passed down in my family line. But through the women. Mother to daughter and to granddaughter.”
She sucks in her cheeks, then continues. “I had always thought the wisdom originally came from Rabi’a al-Adawiyya, the saintly woman whose beliefs inspired the Sufi faith. A woman who dedicated her life to the love of God, of Xwedê. The woman who, since I stopped working as Sasha’s mercenary, I have strived to emulate. But after meeting you, meeting Father Jean-Paul, whose research says these oral traditions come from an age twelve thousand years ago, I can only wonder if I should tell you the other side of the story.”
Eyes aside for a moment, she says, “That ancient pendant hanging from Jean-Paul’s neck next to his crucifix is thousands of years old, portraying a woman praying to God who had a worm next to her. When Jean-Paul stated that worm was in fact an image of your beloved banana slug, he shook my spiritual paradigms. The text next to the carving, in an ancient form of proto-Greek, said, ‘And she hears the voice of God.’ This ancient woman with two halves of an apple, standing next to a spotted banana slug, became my clear sign from Xwedê to unite with my other half so I could speak with God.”
Alone in this ancient grove, she moves to place a peck upon his lips, but stops just short of lips touching as she glances for the time on her MoxWrap. Instead, she smiles and says, “Who would have thought that a pendant would foretell a five-thousand-year-old prophecy of our relationship?”
He tries to return a peck on her forehead, but her fingers push his chest back as she points to the time. Nodding his acknowledgment of her faith’s need for a certain cleanliness, Peter says, “Imagine if you hadn’t realized our meeting had been prophesized? You wouldn’t have bonded with me in the ways of the ancient matriarch. We wouldn’t have found the black object that gave you the ability to hear the voice. Her. Who you believe is Xwedê. All because of an image of my friends here. My banana slugs.”
Her eyes close as she thanks the voice for guiding her openness to ultimately allow the spiritual intimacies with him, which she would have never otherwise permitted. Intimacies that conflicted with her traditions of modesty. Just as she had chosen to wear a headscarf out of respect for her family’s traditions, her modesty, she had chosen celibacy as her path forward. That was before meeting Peter.
She exhales long and deeply and turns to face her other half now. She unbuttons the top of her jacket and then the top of her shirt. She spies Peter staring intently as she quips back, “Showing you ‘mine’ does not mean that.”
With a light scoff, he smiles and retorts, “That, coming from a woman who sleeps with me every night we’ve been together, for the months since we found our bonding accessed the powers of that black object that empowered you to talk with Her.”
He stares at her long earlobe and adds, “And how many men do you know who could go through the intimacies of the night next to you, under the bedsheets with you, and not look or touch?”
She moves closer to him, coming short of putting her forehead to his as she exhales. “You do look, you do touch the nakedness of my bared soul, as I do yours. This intimacy, one far more revealing than physical intercourse, is the gift of our touching the object and the genetics that the ancient matriarch left for us.”
Head canted slightly down, she gives him a playful lascivious smile. “If you must see my chest, you can look now.”
Out from under her shirt, she pulls a slim gold chain with a pendant. An ancient stone emblem. A circle atop a crescent. “My mother thought you the man the prophecies spoke of, and she first entrusted this family heirloom to you. A secret they had not even shared with me. And to my doubt, you fulfilled all of their expectations. And mine, by giving this back to me.”
She rubs the pendant, kisses it, then puts it up to his lips. “After the blast that destroyed the object and knocked you out, I left you in that hospital in Rome only because my great grandmother was near death. I made it back only hours before she left us. She could no longer speak. In her hands she held a parchment I was to have, or so she told my mother. Mama said her last words were that I must carry on with what this parchment said. I took her hands in mine and cried and cried. What happened next, I have not talked of until now, as I thought it only for the women of my family. But my grandmother, my mother, and me, we have not made any progress in understanding this parchment.”
Her finger gently wipes a teardrop as she continues. “In her last moments, I rubbed my tears on her hand. And she miraculously spoke. ‘Seek the light. Blue light. She awaits you.’”
He opens his arms for a warm bear hug. The type her father gave her. The type that endeared him to her. The kind that gives an inner warmth. An inner glow.
At first leaning in to revel in the warmth of his arms, she closes her eyes and exhales as she gently pulls back with uplifted edges to her lips. “You trying to be like all the other lovelorn men in my life? Baiting me with a hug?”
Crinkling his nose, he replies, “Hey, the game is ‘I show you mine and you show me yours.’ Don’t get shy on me now and not show me yours.”
Glancing down, edges of her lips now downturned, she says, “Truly, I do not know. Sara waited decades before showing my great-grandfather the writing. He had said it was an ancient form of Kurdish.”
“Did you ask Jean-Paul? With his expertise in biblical archeology and ancient languages, he should have been able to discern something on the parchment.”
“No, these sayings from Sara were given to her by her great-grandmother, only to be shared with by a woman with her husband if absolutely necessary, after several years of marriage and children.”
A wee bit of a snort is emitted through his nostrils as Peter says, “And you are sharing this with me because? Do I qualify for that ‘H’ word? Your mother thinks of me as such. Is this the secret you’re sharing with me in our little show-me game? You only need to say the word and we’re onto the next phase of our relationship.”
She bats him on the chest. “Be happy that I come back as often as I can. You should know by now I am not one to be rushed along. At least anymore.”
Turning away from him again, she adds, “I do not know why I do keep coming back. We are so different. Night and day. Dogs and cats. Goats and sheep.”
A quick flip back towards the impetuous Peter, she adds, “But I have no one else to turn to. I do not understand what my great-grandmother has asked of me. From the visions we have when we touched in that special way near the object, you and I are like the reincarnations of the ancient matriarch and her husband. Mei, Sasha’s biogenetic and fashion executive, says we are the two people on Earth whose DNA most closely resembles the ancient matriarch and her husband. In that, you are like my husband. The one my Sara said I should turn to. The one whose dreams, whose visions could shed light on what I need to do.”
He makes a fist and lightly taps her chest below her neck. “That’s more of a tease than pretending to strip off your shirt. But I’ll take it. I’m your ancient husband who will wait at your side, will support you, and will be there when you are ready for someone more than a husband-like brother.”
He leans in to give her a peck again, but she pulls back shaking her head. He smiles as he knows why, and then he reaches for their gear on the ground and pulls out her prayer mat.
Tucking her family’s pendant safely under her shirt, she glances at her MoxWrap around her wrist, the never-needs-charging, nearly cost-free device that offers 12G data anywhere in the world where a satellite connection can be made. It’s the omni device that propelled MoxWorld Holdings to become the dominant global digital platform company it is today.
Zara says, “You remembered. Sunrise. You know I appreciate your respect of my traditions, my faith. My need for wudu, purification.”
He holds out an unopened bottle of spring water, which she uses to wash her face, her arms, her hands. She then pulls her headscarf around her neck again and loosens her jacket so she can supplicate in prayer.
Peter smiles back and then points across to the road. “That way is Mecca, no?” He kneels, clearing a place among the redwood twigs and fern leaves matting the forest floor to place her prayer mat.
She watches as his hands gently moves along his beloved slug friends who dine on the forest floor flora. She now feels it, understands it. His serenity in his grove. His deep meditation here. Not on the mollusks, but his deep connection to something more transcendent. She was right at the cemetery—he is a man of prayer. But a prayer of his own derivation. He does not wear his faith on the outside.
“Peter, you do not have to pray with me to show your respect of me.” She glances around at the banana slugs moving through the leaves. “I see in here your place of worship. You pray in your own way. And I respect that.”
Patting the place on the mat next to him, Peter replies, “I do so because I want to.”
And with that attestation, they pray together. Man and woman, as the prophecy of the ancient originators foretold.
Prayer completed, Zara rises to roll up her mat. She rubs her foot through her boot as Peter intently stares. “Still find my feet arousing, do you?” she says, staring back.
“You’ll never let me live that down. The first time you caught me staring at your feet on the plane ride to Kurdistan to find Alexander’s object. You didn’t seem to mind so much after you found out what a wicked foot massage I can give.”
“Now is not the time or place for one, but my feet. I have spent years in military boots, fighting Saddam with the Peshmerga, then Assad and then the Daesh with the YPJ,” laments Zara. “I do not understand why they hurt now. These boots you bought me are the exact size I used to wear. My feet must have grown soft.”
A tender moment, literally for her feet and figuratively for their relationship. Her vulnerabilities exposed, and yet she still feels safe. A safety with a male she only ever truly felt with her father and brother.
And she leans into him to give him that peck on the lips she has so wanted to give but did not in deference to her need for spiritual ablution before prayer. Their lips barely touch when the tender moment is shattered by the sound of crunching, snapping, and a woman’s screams coming from the road.
The runner in Peter comes out, and he springs up, racing to the road to aid those in need as if he were in the Olympic hundred-meter dash. But when he gets, there he screams, “Oh my God. The poor slugs.”
By the time Zara catches up to him, her ancient genetic husband is helping a cyclist, a lycra-fleece-clad woman, off the ground. Her carbon fiber bike is shattered in many places. A couple meters up the road, she sees Peter’s friends, or what is left of them, smeared across the road. This woman hit and slid through a herd of banana slugs trying to slither across the daunting damp descent.
A blood-curdling scream comes from the other direction—the type of cry she heard all too often in the battlefields of Iraq and Syria. Three meters downhill, another cyclist, a man in a bright yellow lycra jacket with a torn left sleeve, shrieks in torturous pain. The type of scream she heard when one of her soldiers took a bullet in the abdomen. The type of scream her Ezidi cousin, Rona, let out as the Daesh, who had held them as sex slaves, mercilessly violated both of them.
The woman trying to untangle herself from her trashed bike tells Peter to help her fiancé first. Zara hears tires at high speed coming around the corner from them. As the lights of the oncoming car come into view, Peter, like the proverbial rabbit caught in the headlights, bolts up. Faster than Zara has ever seen him move, he dashes in front of the oncoming car, shielding the screaming rider on the ground, waving his jacket as a signal flag.
The charging red Mini Cooper slides diagonally across the road, smashing into the grey steel railings meant to prevent vehicles from rolling down the mountain towards the San Francisco Bay.
Zara yells to Peter, “Check the driver. I have the screaming guy covered.” Her field combat medical training comes into play as she determines the wailing guy has dislocated his shoulder and likely has a broken wrist along with a good deal of road rash lacerations.
Peter assists the Mini Cooper driver out of his mangled motorcar. He’s okay, but furious at the situation as he taps his MoxWrap for road service. Peter returns to help the woman cyclist. He scans around and is saddened. At least half a dozen banana slugs were killed because two cyclists were joyriding down a mountain road at a time when it wasn’t safe. For man or slug.
Zara says, “This man will be okay, but he needs medical attention. I called 911, but it will be more than an hour for emergency medical assistance to reach our location because of some sort of traffic congestion this morning. His injuries do not warrant an airlift out.”
After determining the woman has only road rash and a snapped three-hundred-dollar handlebar, a shattered two-thousand-dollar carbon wheel, and a smashed seven-thousand-dollar bike frame, Peter asks, “What were you two doing racing down this road at this hour?”
The woman cyclist taps her MoxWrap. Up comes a 3-D projection of a contest for fastest time down this mountain road, good only until 7 a.m. The prize? Free trip for two to the Tour de France. She says, “My Harold wanted to win this so bad. So, we had planned our equipment perfectly for the fastest descending speed just after sunrise.”
His arm around the woman, Peter brings the black-fleece-clad woman down the road over to Zara and the injured man. Zara says, “I can reset this shoulder. I did this a number of times in the battle for Kobanî.”
The man’s panicked eyes are alit, and his fiancée cries, “We have to get my Harold to an urgent care facility sooner than the ambulance can. If you could kindly give us a lift in your MoxMover, we can make our appointment with our wedding planner and then the church at noon. The whole family is coming into town tonight. Harold has to be ready.”
Shaking her head so ever slightly, Zara contrasts this woman’s dilemma with those of her people she fought for. She battled Saddam, Assad, and the Daesh for Kurdish freedom. And now, this woman’s wedding plans are more important than anything else in the world. Such is love. Or at least life in love.
Zara and Peter help them into their MoxMover. Between them, their bikes and Peter’s gear, there is only room for either Peter or Zara. She offers to stay up here as she calls for another MoxMover. There is one only minutes away that can pick her up. She is acutely aware that Peter also needs to be back in the city to prepare for his special day tomorrow. The launch of his first book, his first creation.
She pecks Peter’s forehead and says, “I will see you later at your mother’s house. Take care.”
And off Peter goes with the killers of his beloved slugs. It is a great person who helps out those who mercilessly murder the ones they love most.
Standing with her prayer rug, Zara tightens her jacket, chilly in the damp fog as her adrenaline rush subsides. She rubs her pendant through her shirt. Did she do the right thing, opening up to Peter? He is not her husband. He may never be her husband. The tradition said the words were only for women. Only shared with their lifelong mate, their forever husband, if absolutely necessary. Is being her ancient genetic match enough to be her husband? Oh, what did she do? Does she really feel that way about Peter?
When the MoxMover she called for arrives, its gull wing door opens, and his face appears. “My little Zara. I thought you would never call for me.”
Sasha.
Copyright Tail of the Bird Books 2019