PROLOGUE
Crs'tal looked up at the heavens. Far away, in the distance, she could see the last fading light of the great bird-like vehicle that carried her lover Jared away.
Crs'tal could not imagine how far a light would have to travel before it could not be seen by the naked eye, but she did know each moment that passed carried her beloved Jared and his ship further and further from the plain on which she stood.
Months before there had been a disturbance in the heavens and Jared's great sky ship had landed on the plain, casting The People into confusion, causing them to run from place to place in terror and to make endless bloody sacrifices to the ugly gods they worshiped.
The People were squat and dark, with hooked noses like the beaks of hawks.They had short sturdy limbs that allowed them to walk long distances over the rugged terrain of the plain and nearby mountains.
Their visitors had long, graceful limbs, fair skins, and hair the color of the sun. the People carried on the activities of their daily lives with implements of soft, beaten copper and stone.
The visitors from the sky carried knives of hardened metal and weapons that belched fire and light. Those weapons brought death with voices as loud as thunder. The People had watched from their hiding places as the fair visitors walked the streets of their village and examined their dwellings. It did not pass unnoticed that the visitors did no harm in their explorations. Satisfied the sky-born intruders were none of their own kind, The People came to the conclusion the entities who fell from the sky were Gods and thus, their priests and wise men made the decision to worship them with sacrifices of children and the deflowering of virgins.
The sky men turned away in horror.
Crs'tal had been one of the young women marked for sacrifice in honor of the visitors, but the Chief of the Sky Gods, Jared, had stopped her execution with a shout of outrage, and taken her hand to lead her from the bloody altar while The People watched with open mouths.
Jared had taken one look at the world in which Crs'tal lived and fallen into a spell, charmed by the woman's mysterious eyes and her beautiful surroundings. Certainly the world of The People was beautiful, with its mysterious, brooding plains and the towering, Andes, the mountains whose saw-toothed peaks were often shrouded in dreamlike mists. Yet something in this place felt like home to the man Jared, who had spent his life in travel from galaxy to galaxy looking for intelligent life on other worlds.
But Jared had been appalled at the casual way the priests and wise men of The People regarded life. He recognized the bloodthirsty attitude of The People as that of a race only recently ascended from the animal kingdom.
Like children, the dark citizens of the plain stood in ignorance, in desperate need of instruction. As his men watched to see no harm came to their leader, Jared set about making a set of laws for the innocent and savage people of "Earth," the name he had given the world he had found. When those laws were complete, Jared set about teaching them to the holy men and women who tended the many gods and goddesses of the place.
Crs'tal, drawn by love and gratitude to the man-god who saved her life, soon become a voluntary slave to Jared, making him comfortable in the manner of her people, feeding him the best foods she could coax from the housewives of the clan and prepared with her slender hands, clothing his nakedness with fine textiles woven by the nimble fingers of temple women who usually toiled for kings alone. In time she came to his bed.
In return for her love Jared created a post of importance for Crs'tal as chief acolyte to the Mother Goddess, the Moon. Jared had decreed the women who served that office be called "The Mamacuna. The Mother's Chosen.
"No man of The People, priest or commoner, was to so much as lay a finger on the women who served the silver statue of the Goddess Jared ordered cast in Crs'tal's image and honor.
He did, however, rule that if a woman of the Temple of the Goddess desired to take a lover, she could do so with no aspersions to be cast on her person or office. And so, Crs'tal was safe, if in her newly sacred role, lonelier than she had ever been in her life.
Crs'tal had known much tenderness at the hands of Jared and so she was saddened beyond telling when he told her he had to go back to his own world. "But I will not stay for long," Jared stood behind her, his arms wrapped across her chest, her head drawn back to touch his chin while his fine blue eyes roved the distant heavens. "I will come back. I could not live without you."
Crs'tal did not doubt Jared's words. Did he not speak in her own tongue? Who but a God could have fallen from the sky to save her from the knives of the priests would later whisper words of love while the night beings sang outside their window?
How she resented the hours Jared spent with the priests. And that was even before she knew Jared meant to return to his home in the Milky Way: the sky formation known to The People as the Road to Infinity, the pathway to the Otherworld for the dead.
Once, near the end of Jared's stay on Earth, trying to help Crs'tal picture how far away his world, Deesa, was from her own; he had walked with her on the plain. The night had been clear, unmarred by mist or cloud, and the Pleiades, the sister stars that fortold times of famine or plenty for The People had shone clearly upon their faces.
"Out there," Jared pointed to a mass of tiny lights along the outer edge of the star-mass. "Is a world nearly as beautiful as this..." He sighed like a lover who misses his mate.
"You wish to return to Deesa so soon? Are you so sad here?" Crs'tal asked.
"My wife died before I began this journey," Jared shook his head. "I loved her very much."
Crs'tal had looked away in pain. She loved Jared, but although he treated her tenderly, Jared did not seem like a man in love. She sometimes wondered if she had left some lover's thing undone to have him treat her like a pet cony.
"Your moon is so beautiful," Jared said, interrupting Crs'tal's reverie. He'd told her world had three moons, but none so large and silvery as the single moon of this beautiful world.
"The Moon is the Mother of life," Crs'tal reminded him with a whisper. She turned away so he could not see the tears on her cheeks.
"I shall remember," Jared said gently and turned the small dark maiden to face him. "As I shall remember you, Crs'tal. In a strange way we belong to one another.You saved my life and I have saved yours. I thought I could never love again."
"Love?" Crs'tal whispered. "You said your love was dead."
"I love you, Crs'tal," Jared turned her to him, and tipped back her head to claim her lips. "I love you more than I have ever loved anyone in my life."
And so, they pledged themselves in the light of Mother Moon and a child was conceived of their mating there on the windswept plain. But Jared had to leave her before Crs'tal had been sure his seed had taken root in her belly.
His sky boat became no more than a pinpoint of light in the heavens, a light she watched nightly, until it was no more. Only the yellow tracks of his ship remained, the gray skin of the plain torn away by forces The People could not understand or explain.
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