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transformation, because I possessed a part of it, was caused by the Seeder. I killed the man and began my kingdom on the mountains.”
    He then turned towards my Mistress. “What lies behind the curtains? If my first cure came from there, then whatever is there can cure me again; isn’t it so? I must see the beast. Then I’ll be a man, again.”
    He pushed my Mistress and she struggled to hold him back, saying, “No, Ishme, it can’t be trusted!”
    Breaking free of her grasp, he entered the room and, in distress, she followed him.
    All this while, I’d tried to help, but I couldn’t. I was paralyzed. I trembled with fear for them both. I exerted and worked myself into a frenzy to move, but it was as if my body were a foreign entity and I an unbodied mite trapped within. I lay on the floor and, after they passed behind the curtains, I willed myself even more desperately to move but to no avail.
    “Do not go there, Ishme!” I heard her yell.
    He thundered, “Get away from me, sorceress! Move! It’s your fault all that’s happened to me!”
    “No, Ishme – do not say that! How could I have known?”
    Fumbling noises I heard, a loud bang, and then a body fall. After which, Ishme hollered triumphantly, “There you are! What manner of thing are you? I only want to be human! Speak to me! I’ll make you with my sword!”
    Commotion followed after and I heard a great noise A blinding light pierced the curtains. The temple rumbled. I felt a strong wind and then, only Ishme’s voice, growing dimmer and dimmer, roaring, “By Yog-Saduk, the Keeper of the Gates, and Aniburu, the Fearsome Planet, I order you to help me!”
    A silence ensued and I started weeping uncontrollably. I couldn’t imagine what had happened behind the curtains. Then my Mistress appeared, bloody and with tears in her eyes, and lowly whispered, “A fissure cracked through space. I saw the cavernous void. Ishme is no more. It has taken him.” Then she collapsed.
    My chronicle ends here and, even though there is more I could say, with Ishme’s passing, the story is finished. My Mistress was eventually restored to her temple in Ur and, at long last, she joined Inanna and the Gods in Heaven. When she changed and her eyes became like spindles of flaming fires, and her form in expanse as huge as gigantic cedar trees, I heard her voice filling earth and sky, saying, “Do not fear, Smenkhkare. If there is fear, it’s only in you. I’ll go and look for Ishme and if he still lives, I’ll come and tell you – but the spaces beyond are much vaster than I had imagined.”
    Once she left, I never saw her again. By my reckoning, that was over seven hundred years ago.
    Whenever I tell my story, men call me mad and a liar, saying no man from Kemet on the Nile can serve in a foreign land, but they don’t know that I wasn’t always known as ‘Smenkhkare’, for I’ve had many different names and sometimes, I confuse them. For I know now more of my mystery. Every one hundred years, I must go to steamy swamps and shed my skin. I make strange, sibilant sounds and, once the process is finished, I emerge a new creature.
    I remember in dreams the ancient Lady once saying, “We are all a part of it.” I’ve come to believe I am more so. The mystery of my beginnings I still search out, though I’ve partly convinced myself that I am one of the unwilling eyes of the Seeder from the Stars.
    I’ve left Crete and, after centuries of other lives, I’m finally returning to the Land of Two Rivers. Sumer and Akkad are dust and gone, and I travel as a merchant to Babylon. I’ll bury this papyrus scroll. If, in the aeons to come, I don’t forget, I’ll dig it up again when the time is right and remember.
    I’ll remember Ishme, poor Ishme, and the God-Woman, and what mysteries happened, what mysteries I lived and what mysteries lay behind the forbidden curtains. What really happened? I believe only two on earth have ever known – and one is dead.
    Julio Toro San