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"This Queen had no true s which

she did This Queen was one of thoseand no reason to anything that can ever be known Yet she cannot bear the thought of it And so she created day in and day out her ethical syste desperately to believe in thematic reasons Her war on the cannibals, for instance, had ste else Her people of Uruk hadn't eaten hu happening around her; there really wasn't a whole lot more to it than that For always in her there was a dark place full of despair And a great driving force tobecause there was none

"Understand, it was not a shallowness we perceived in this woht shine if she tried; that she could shape the world to comfort herself; and it was also a lack of interest in the pain of others She knew others felt pain, but well, she could not really dwell on it

"Finally, unable to bear the extent of this obvious duplicity, we turned and studied her, for we must now contend with her She was not twenty-five years old, this Queen, and her poere absolute in this land which she had dazzled with her customs from Uruk And she was almost too pretty to be truly beautiful, for her loveliness overcame any sense of majesty or deepto it, a ring which evokes tenderness instinctively in others, and gives a faint

"On and on she ith her questions How did ork our miracles? How did we look into ic, and why did we clais ere invisible? Could we speak in the sa her into closer understanding of as divine? She illing to pardon us for our savagery if ere to be grateful; if ere to kneel at her altars and lay before her gods and before her e knew

"She pursued her various points with a single-h

"But it brought up the deepest rage fro spoke out now

" 'Stop your questions You speak in stupidities, she declared 'You have no gods in this kingdoods The only invisible inhabitants of the world are spirits, and they play with you through your priests and your religion as they play with everyone else Ra, Osiris-these are merely made-up names hich you flatter and court the spirits, and when it suits their purposes they give you so to flatter them some more '

"Both the King and Queen stared at Mekare in horror But Mekare went on:

" 'The spirits are real, but they are childlike and capricious And they are dangerous as well They marvel at us and envy us that we are both spiritual and fleshly, which attracts theer to do our will Witches such as we have always kno to use thereat power to do it, and this we have and you do not have You are fools, and what you have done to take us prisoner is evil; it is dishonest; you live in the lie! But ill not lie to you '

"And then, half weeping, half choking with rage, Mekare accused the Queen before the entire court of duplicity, of ht be brought here Our people had not hunted for human flesh in a thousand years, she told this court; and it was a funeral feast that was desecrated at our capture, and all this evil done so that the Queen of Kernel ht have witches to talk to, witches of whom to ask questions, witches in her possession whose power she would seek to use for herself

"The court was in an uproar Never had anyone heard such disrespect, such blaspheypt, those who still chafed at the ban on sacred cannibalism, they were horrified by this mention of the desecrated funeral feast And others who also feared the retribution of heaven for not devouring the remains of their parents were struck dumb with fear

"But in theand the Queen, ere strangely silent and strangely intrigued

"Akasha didn'tin our explanation had rung true for her in the deeper regions of her mind There flared for the ods? Spirits who envy the flesh? As for the charge that she had sacrificed our people needlessly, she didn't even consider it Again, it did not interest her It was the spiritual question which fascinated her, and in her fascination the spirit was divorced from the flesh

"Allow me to draw your attention to what I have just said It was the spiritual question which fascinated her-you ht say the abstract idea; and in her fascination the abstract idea was everything I do not think she believed that the spirits could be childlike and capricious But whatever was there, she h us As for the destruction of our people, she did not care!