Bob’s Memoir: 4,000 Years as a Free Demon
6
Build Me a Temple
THE STORM immediately abated around the ship, but it was no better for me. A giant tentacle wrapped around my waist and squeezed until I could no longer breathe. I thought for an instant of how I could be killed and prepared for my return to the primordial mass. I whispered a little apology to my girls in the satchel and then the serpent flung me through the night sky.
It was my first encounter with one of Poseidon’s tentacled monsters of the sea, but sadly would prove not to be my last. I loved the sea, but its god and I never got along all that well.
I’m sure I was only airborne for a few seconds… minutes at the most. But it seemed like I sailed through the air for days. I wished Pinaruti had thought to add wings to his image of me. Flying would be so cool.
Landing wasn’t.
I hit the sand at the water’s edge and just lay there gasping, still clutching my precious satchel. As I dried out in the sun, a weathered old man came up to me and nudged me with his foot to see if I was alive. I groaned.
“You look a mess,” he said. “What kind of creature are you?”
I looked down at my legs and hooves. I reflexively touched my horns. Apparently, my midnight flight had stripped my latest body from me. The old fisherman didn’t seem to concerned. Not the kind of response I’d expect, so I just went with it and told him honestly.
“I’m a demon. Sorry about the appearance. I usually try to clean up before I meet people.”
“Oh. I see. Yeah, this shore is one that will wash up all kinds of things. I’m Theodoglus. You can call me Doug. Nice to meet you, demon.”
“Bob,” I said, by way of introduction.
“Yep. Saw a mermaid here once, Bob. She was right nice when I helped her back to the water. Quite a handful. Two hands full, in fact. Oh, and that god with a three-pointed spear. He shows up every so often to go have a drink in the village. Anything in particular you’re looking for? Have anything to trade?” He sat in the sand beside me and broke off a piece of smoked fish to share with me. I noted he had a wineskin, too. After he saw me look at it, he offered some of that as well.
“I don’t understand what’s happening at all,” I moaned. “Some god has been pushing me to build somebody a palace, I think. It all comes to me in dreams. Just don’t hardly know what it all means.” I was picking up some of his vernacular in my mind speaking, just from sitting beside him.
“Dreams, huh. I know just what you need.” He looked away from me out toward the sea as he rubbed his fingers together. I tell you, the gesture for money is older than I am. At least I understood that. I reached down into my satchel and felt around until I found a bag of coins.
Feeling around in my satchel often involves feeling one of my women and I got a little distracted. Finally, however, Nimia understood my gesture and placed a bag of coins in my hand.
“I’m happy to pay for information. If you can tell me how to find out what my dreams mean, I’d gladly give you…” I looked in the bag and saw mostly pieces of sandstone. I dumped it out on the ground and sorted through it until I found a couple of actual metal disks. “…two silver Drakos. That seems to be all I have that’s real.”
“That’s enough for me to tell you, you need to go see Nansi. She’s about three days to the rising sun, next to the big river,” Doug said, still eyeing the sandstone coins. “If you could turn a couple of those into silver, I could get you a donkey to ride. I know it’s fool’s ore and it will turn back into sand eventually, but the wine I spend it on will have turned to piss by then, too. So, it ain’t my problem.”
What a cagey scoundrel. I wondered how many other magical creatures he had encountered who gave him fool’s ore. He seemed to know an awful lot about everything. Maybe he had met Poseidon. I worked the transmutation spell on a couple of the small disks and handed the silver coins to Doug.
“I don’t really need a donkey,” I said. “But a fresh wineskin and some food would be helpful. Maybe some clothes.”
“Well, you best stay out of sight while I go fetch it. Most people are afraid of the magical beings,” he said.
“But not you?”
“I’ve seen them all. Of course, nobody believes me. I’ll take a coin into the bar and get the wine. Somebody will look at it and say, ‘What did you see on the beach today?’ and I’ll say, ‘A demon with big horns and hooves for feet. Chest as thick as a tree trunk and eyes like burning coals.’ They’ll all just laugh and say, ‘Sure, Doug.’ But they’ll take the coin and give me the wine.”
“Sounds like a good schtick.”
“Just combing the beach to see what washes ashore.”
I stayed out of sight. I couldn’t depend on people to be as friendly as Doug. He got me wine, smoked fish, some cheese, and even a flat loaf of bread. Once I hit the road in the direction he’d indicated, I worked a transfiguration spell on myself and picked up the look of one of the hardier sailors I’d worked with—young and well-muscled, but not so handsome as to attract unwanted attention.
I walked all day and all night before I felt I was far enough away to hide and spend some time in the satchel with my girls. Not too much time, mind you. I didn’t want this god-whoever-he-was to get angry and toss me into the sea again.
“So, all these things came from whoever this god is,” I said as we looked at the drawings, maps, molds, horse, chariot, and the lapis diagram.
“You must be doing well to have a god giving you all these gifts,” one of the statue girls said. “If you find a nice place to let me off, I’m ready for you to let me out of the bag. I love everyone here, but I want to see the world, not just be dragged through it in a bag.”
“I’ll do my best to find you a place. Where we are camped right now is not a good choice.” The girls all attacked and drained me.
Now, if you’ve never had five nubile young women attack your cock and make sure it is drained, let me tell you that when they are done, you are drained. I would have been happy to just cuddle up to Nimia and Portia—which is where I ended up—but statues one, two, and three were undoubtedly the kinkiest of all the women I’d collected in Knossos. Which is why they’d been statues. If there was a position they could bend their bodies into, or a hole to be filled, they wanted it. I wasn’t sure how they managed to get my cock into some of those places, but that didn’t stop me from coming.
In the morning, I emerged from my bag and continued the journey eastward.
It’s not like there were blinking lights and big signs that said, “Nansi: Get your dreams read here!” But her house was obvious by the number of gifts and statuary outside. And the line of people waiting to see her. I hadn’t even thought about a gift for the seer. I reached in the bag and grabbed the first thing I found. It happened to be statue three. People were a little shocked to find a naked girl suddenly standing next to me. They gave me room and I quickly moved to the front of the line.
“I think this is your opportunity. I need to give a gift to the seer,” I said.
“Oh, cool! Maybe she’ll be pleased enough with me that she’ll teach me to interpret dreams, too. That would be such fun.”
“What is your name?” I hissed as we got to the door.
“Saris,” she whispered. “The one with the lovely tight asshole.”
I blushed as she said this just inside the door and just loud enough that I thought Nansi might hear her.
“I hope whatever dream you have brought me is worth the price of this lovely maiden with the tight asshole,” Nansi said upon greeting us. “You would not believe how many men bring me a dead chicken and the story of a wet dream, hoping I will tell him he is destined to marry the subject of his fantasy. I usually tell them to continue raising chickens, because they are far more successful at that. I don’t get many demons, though.”
I quickly felt my head and glanced at my feet to be sure my latest body was still intact. Nothing was showing through.
“I guess we don’t dream much under normal circumstance,” I muttered. “How could I dream something better than what I have in my hands? But these dreams seem to be wanting me to do something and I don’t understand what. Building a palace somewhere in the desert is the best I can come up with, but he shipwrecked me and threw me up on land so I’d come and find out what he’s talking about. It’s like we speak different languages.”
A word about languages. I was born or created or summoned with the Minoan dialect ingrained in me because it came straight from Pinaruti’s limited imagination. But I’d discovered in our trading ventures that people in other areas speak other languages. In fact, Doug didn’t speak the same language I did. I simply pulled his meaning from his mind and gave him my meaning the same way.
It’s a pain to learn all those languages, so most of the time I just kind of read minds and answered mind to mind. It didn’t work with the god. That’s why it was so frustrating with this god. It was like he could only communicate with words and I didn’t understand them.
A few centuries (millennia?) later, I finally learned English so I could write my memoirs. I like the language because if you don’t have a word for something, you just borrow one from a different language, or make it up on the spot. Remember my term omnimnemonic? I’m still proud of that one.
English was so much easier than German, where you can make up words, but the entire definition has to be contained in the word. I’d be Demoncarryinginfinityroomwanderingtheworld. See what I mean?
I didn’t have any difficulty communicating with Nansi, though. Her words seemed to carry the definition straight to my head and she had no trouble understanding anything I said as I described the sequence of dreams. I even pulled the lapis slate out of my bag to show her the plans.
“I see,” Nansi said after she’d examined the gifts and listened to my dreams, and let Saris get her robe open enough to get a hand on her bosom. “Ninra is tired of playing second tier war games and wants to establish himself as the patron of Bathra. Ninra is the golden god with wings and a storm for his body. He has two lions with him that will attack and destroy his enemies. The palace he wants built is a temple where people can worship him. The lapis slate has the temple plan; the maps show where it is to be situated. The brick mold is sacred and will be what you use to cast the bricks for his temple. I know you are used to working with stone, but there is only sand and clay where you will be going. The silver stylus was used to write the chants and spells you must use to bind the bricks together. The stallion is you, dear Bob. He has chosen you as the architect to build his temple. The tree and birds indicate he will not let you rest until you have begun his work.”
“No shit? He could have just told me,” I said.
All the time Nansi was interpreting my dream, Saris had been crawling around her like some cat, rubbing and petting and purring. Nansi was obviously becoming aroused by the naked girl’s attentions. For my part, it didn’t take much for me to get aroused when two pretty girls are playing with each other.
“Show me now how best to use this lovely gift you’ve given me and I will show you how to interpret the god’s language in the future,” Nansi said as her robe finally fell fully open to reveal a beautiful body of her own. I was all too happy to demonstrate our various techniques for making love and Nansi hung a ‘closed for the day’ sign on her door so we could play uninterrupted.
Early the next morning, before the line formed at her doorway, I slipped away, kissing both Nansi and Saris thoroughly before I left. They were both still splayed on the bed with their legs spread wide, recovering from the kisses I’d placed there.
The route to Bathra was a simple one. I built a little boat out of cypress I found growing near the river and jumped aboard to float downstream on the current.
I found a secluded place just outside the city of Bathra where I could slip into the infinity room and have the girls make sure I looked okay for my surveillance.
“Are you going to keep building a boat every time you need to travel?” Nimia asked. “You might as well create a lake here and bring it into the infinity room when you aren’t using it. I might want to learn to sail, too!”
That sounded like a reasonable idea, but I wasn’t sure how to create a lake. I hauled the boat through a gateway into an unused part of the infinity room—which was actually most of the infinity room. Hmm. I guess that if you use a little bit of infinity for a purpose, like our house and courtyard, the rest is still infinity, isn’t it? So, of course there were unused parts.
Anyway, I just plopped the boat down on the sand and it started to drip the river water off the sides. As I watched the water drip, I hollowed out a space by virtue of creating a wind to blow the sand out of the hollow to a depth and size I deemed large enough for a small lake, and commanded the boat to keep dripping until the lake was filled.
“Bob, sweetie, honey,” statue girl one said sweetly. Even at my young age and inexperience, I knew that when a naked nymph playing with my cock used that particular voice, it indicated she wanted me to do something for her. In this instance, it seemed unlikely that she was about to ask for sex, since that was already assured.
“What is it? And what is your name? You haven’t been statues in a long, long time.”
“I’m Bileah and my sister is Cileah. And we love you.”
“But…?” I said.
“We’re feeling a strange pull from the city you are about to visit. We don’t know what it is, but we want you to know we love you and when we leave you it isn’t because you aren’t wonderful to us,” she said.
“I see. Saris left to join Nansi, and she had a premonition beforehand, too. It might be that the god Ninra who has commanded me here has a destiny in mind for you as well. I will be attentive and watch for the right moment to summon you,” I said. I wasn’t upset about this. Had Nimia or even Portia suggested that she would leave me, I might have felt differently. But they were my wives. These two women were not my wives and I couldn’t even call them my possessions. They were simply two free women who had been swept up in my flight from Knossos and had been terrifically good sports about it. I had no other claim on them.
After a night of loving all four women, I straightened my clothing and headed for town with the leather satchel over my shoulder. I had the look-away spell refreshed on it, so unless I actually handed it to someone or pointed it out, it would go unnoticed. I slipped into town with the morning traffic, just another peasant on an errand to the city.
I found the site where Ninra indicated he wanted his temple and looked at it in despair. It was populated with houses connected by a sewer ditch that stank in the mid-morning heat. The only source of water was a canal that ran from the river. It was neither close nor full as the area was in the midst of a drought. A lot of the traffic in the area comprised people carting clay jugs to or from the water for their homes. Some went as far as the muddy river itself to get water.
To make it worse, at one end of the site, there was already a temple. I visited as a sojourner to pay respects to the local deity and found the priestesses to all be rather fierce. Not that they weren’t beautiful as well, but I could imagine leading this small army of women to war against a much larger opponent and winning handily.
The temple honored Namri, the patron goddess devoted to protecting the poor. And the poor had clustered around her temple. The priestesses were kept busy tending the sick, getting food for the poor, and teaching the orphans. They were almost desperate in their devotion. I was not going to go into this neighborhood and simply tear down these poor people’s homes and the goddess’s temple in order to build a new temple devoted to a god of war. I needed a new strategy.
I retreated from the neighborhood and left the city to contemplate what I should do.
I spent a restless night outside the satchel, calling out to Ninra. He demanded to know why his temple wasn’t built yet. Not particularly reasonable since I’d only arrived that day. When I explained the situation, he declared that he would simply cut off their water supply and they would move. I explained that they had little or no water as it was with the area in a drought. He said that he would make the sewers back up and they would leave because of the smell and disease. I explained that they already lived in a sewer that simply didn’t drain because of the lack of water and because it had no outlet to drain into. Then I talked about the goddess who already had a temple there and was sworn to protect those people. Ninra had only one answer to every question. He would make war against the goddess. I politely suggested that might take many years, would raise great antipathy toward him, and he might well lose the battle, if the priestesses were any indication of the goddess herself.
Finally, Ninra settled down enough to ask me what I thought he should do.
“The city is poor and beset by drought. Perhaps you could negotiate with the goddess and join in league with her. If you provided rain to end the drought, she might be willing to share the site.”
“Share? What is share?” demanded the god. It was a foreign concept to him.
“If, say, you were to occupy one part of the square and the goddess occupied another part, you could have an alliance. She might care for the poor and you might defend the city. People would flock to your temples and bring you many sacrifices,” I said.
The idea of many sacrifices appealed to Ninra, though I’m not sure how much of the concept of sharing he ended up grasping. He finally appointed me as his ambassador to go talk to the goddess Namri.
If you get confused about the names, don’t worry. I’m making them up to sound like what I heard. Toss in Nimia, Nansi and Saris with Ninra and Namri and I got confused myself. But what I saw in my head was Great Zeus in the cave we shared, fucking all the little nymphs we could bring him. I figured what Ninra really needed was to get laid.
I dressed slightly better to return to the goddess’s temple the next day—not as fine as a prince, but as befits an ambassador. The priestesses didn’t object when I approached the altar and seated myself in front of it to wait. They looked at me strangely, but went on about their tasks until one finally separated herself and approached me.
“What do you want here?” she demanded. She didn’t need to do a lot of obvious adjustments to her robe, nor did she flex her muscles to show me she could probably remove me from the temple. I didn’t want to get into a fight with her.
“I bear greetings to the fair goddess Namri, protector of the poor and defenseless, from the fierce god Ninra, who holds at bay the hordes at our frontiers. Oh, fair and mighty goddess, I entreat you to accept the gifts I bring that we might sit and learn to know each other.” I reached into my satchel and pulled out Bileah and Cileah to set them beside me with food and drink. The priestess was apparently not used to naked nymphs appearing in the temple and stood back a step, ready to object.
“It is well,” a clear and feminine voice said from the other side of the altar. The priestess was struck dumb and stood aside staring, as the goddess herself took shape opposite me. “I am Namri, protector of the poor. Who comes before me?”
“I am Bob,” I said as formally as I could. “I am but an emissary, hoping to bask in your glorious presence as I bring greetings from the god Ninra.”
“Join me at the table, Bob. Are these gifts?” She pointed at the two naked girls setting our table.
“The food and drink are gifts, fair one. The ladies, Bileah and Cileah are here of their own accord. I would not trade in humans, but they come willingly to offer themselves to your service,” I said. This whole conference had been their idea and it was working well so far.
“Welcome. I accept your service, gentle ladies. Let us discuss the god you serve, Bob.”
From then the conversation turned to my description of Ninra and his desire to make a gift to Bathra and to the goddess. I phrased things carefully, ultimately showing the plan for the temple, which I had altered somewhat, positioning it beside the temple to Namri. She picked the plan apart and I filled in holes with other ideas as they came to me. I was becoming quite an architect. It seemed things were going well until she stood.
“I will take this conversation no further until I have met this Ninra and have looked into his eyes. Tell the god I will expect him to dine here at sunset tomorrow.” With that, the goddess disappeared. So did Bileah and Cileah and all the food and drink. I stood and faced the priestess who had suddenly come to life again.
“I go to convey the words of your mistress to my master,” I said. “I think we’ll see you tomorrow evening. Better prepare for company.”
The startled priestess stammered and nodded her head as I turned to leave.
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