Goat Foot #2
The prophetic words of Mamlakat Aldam, the Red Palace, weren’t written in Safaitic or Dadanitic letters, nor in Aramaic or the Arabic of the Koran, but in the dialect of the dead.
The Maiden herself couldn’t understand them.
Nor could anyone else, not even the sages who were sought for counsel.
Here the old women declare that this muraled message that so terrified the Maiden said, Not you, but her: not the mother, but the daughter.
Meaning: Your daughter will be remembered across the centuries and you will be forgotten—a sentence as painful as the one revealed to Snow White’s stepmother by her magic mirror, a harsh truth that drove them both to seethe with envy.
In any case, whatever it was, just because nobody deciphered the letters on the Red Palace doesn’t mean their power wasn’t felt; they marked the girl’s birth as unlucky and turned mother against her own child.
So it goes with the written word: Even if nobody reads it, its mere existence can set the laws of curse or blessing into motion.
Goat Foot, or Sheba, eldest daughter of the kingdom of Sheba, came into the world in a birth devoid of pain, coitus, or fertilization, a sterile and perfect event.
Perfect? Perfect until her mother, the Maiden, looked at the being she’d just pushed out and had the disappointment of her life, for despite the baby’s angelic face, she wailed and suffered from a twisted foot and little legs covered in hair.
An unpleasant apparition. In that small, rebellious being, with its furred body and goatlike foot, the Maiden saw a punishment and a backward evolution, like the sprouting of a pig’s tail. A return to primordial chaos.
“Goat Foot,” she replied dryly when asked what she’d name the girl. “Let her be called Goat Foot.”
Priding herself on being extremely clean, devoted, and immaculate, the Maiden, driven by pity and revulsion—more the latter than the former—concluded that the newborn was by nature dirty and stained, or maculate, an offense to sight, smell, and decency.
She refused to hold her or breastfeed her, and ordered her slaves to bathe her every day and scrub her with water and vinegar.
Every time little Goat Foot sought tenderness from her mother, or human warmth, she found only the smooth cold of completely shaved skin, the clean and neutral scent of bleach, a painful lack of smiles, and the absence of the soft, narcotic effect of physical affection.
The Maiden refused to show her child her own strict hygiene practices.
She didn’t train her to use the chamber pot nor to feel disgust at her own excrement, which all civilized beings should keep far away, even when it comes from their own bodies.
Nor did she teach her to brush her hair, blow her nose, play with dolls, or cover her mouth when she coughed.
She didn’t make sure the girl learned feminine ways or table manners, or developed musical abilities, gambling skills, or grace on the dance floor.
She didn’t even give her daily and nightly routines, leaving her on her own to do and undo as she liked, at any hour.
So Goat Foot started life as a child without boundaries, a blend of contradictions.
She embraced multiplicity and renounced nothing, in a splendid mix of animal and human, dirty and clean, living and dead, past and future, white and black.
Just like nature itself, Goat Foot gathered and fused it all in a great unity where everything fits and finds its place.
Because she, the small Princess of Sheba, always understood that in the great confection of the cosmos, alpha and omega bite each other’s tails.
Seven years after the first birth, the Maiden became pregnant again, but this time the high walls met the dawn unspoiled by any ominous graffiti.
The heavens sent friendly signs and a girl was born, blessed and protected; the Maiden held her to her frozen breast and baptized her Joy, or Alfarah, declaring her the sole legitimate heir of all the kingdoms. If you ask the alaleishos if she did it as a mortal blow to her firstborn, they’d say yes.
If you ask whether a double virgin conception is realistic, they’ll answer emphatically, “If the Maiden could get pregnant once, why not twice?”
Young Alfarah was a happy child, true to her name.
But the same couldn’t be said for her older sister, Goat Foot.
Far from it. The Maiden hadn’t wanted to spread panic or confuse the royal court with news of her first birth’s wretched results.
She’d wrapped that first baby in a blanket with three black lines through its intense blue, the color of luminous ether, and ordered her buried alive ten elbows deep, somewhere far from Mamlakat Aldam.
“Take her away from my sight,” she declared. “Bury her in a grave so deep not even hungry hyenas can dig her out.”
She was, of course, referring to those eager, carrion-eating hyenas, the ones possessed of big clitorises, erect as penises. Was the Maiden a bad person?
“Bad, bad as milk,” reply the alaleishos.
So bad it’s best not to mention her. One wonders what cruel things the Maiden uttered with those red, fleshy lips of hers, which seem to be external symbols of an inner wound that drives her to harm others.
What is she hiding behind the mask of her beauty?
Because her beauty is superhuman, nobody denies it.
Though the alaleishos insist it’s a double mask: On the outside, the features are perfect, but on the inside, they’re horrific to an unbearable degree.
They also say she’s wrapped in a blanket of white smoke, or foam, and that she carries a green palm in her left hand, and in her right, a cup of the water of forgetting.
The Maiden made sure her orders were followed: For Goat Foot, the unwanted child, there would be no parties or banquets, no monuments, no jars of perfumed water, no silk-draped halls. Beneath the earth, all that awaited her was gloom, ant armies, and eternal unease.
“Your alaleishos are crazy old women,” Zahra Bayda tells me, “and your Queen of Sheba must have been even worse.”