Amun
Sa and the Girl from the Desert
by
Christopher
Buecheler
This document is a spoiler-free excerpt containing two chapters from the upcoming novel The Children of the Sun by Christopher Buecheler. Learn more about The Children of the Sun and the II AM Trilogy at http://iiamtrilogy.com
Amun Sa and the Girl from
the Desert
By
Christopher Buecheler
Smashwords Edition
Copyright
© 2012 Christopher Buecheler.
All rights reserved.
http://www.iiamtrilogy.com/
http://writing.cwbuecheler.com/
Amun Sa and the Girl from the Desert is a work of fiction. Names, places, and incidents either are a product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
First Edition: September 1, 2011
Amun Sa and the Girl from the Desert by Christopher Buecheler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution - Noncommercial - No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available: please visit http://iiamtrilogy.com for contact information.
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Cover
Art by Karla
Ortiz
Cover
Design by Christopher Buecheler
Part I
The girl knelt over the grinding wheel, preparing the flour that would become the morning’s bread, and stared out over the vast floodplain that lay between her and the great river to the east. Her hands moved unconsciously, trained by years of repetition, and this allowed her mind to wander free. She contemplated the ecstasies of the previous evening and those that might come tonight. The sun had not yet come up over the hills beyond the river and already she was anxious for it to set.
She was not from this place, though she had lived here now for more than ten years, ever since Nubian warriors from the south had come to her tribe to loot and rape and murder. If there had been any other survivors, they had been scattered to the winds, and so she had begun the journey north alone. A girl of only nine years, she had by guile and luck and effort survived where most others would have perished, avoiding the teeth and claws of beasts, the swords of man, and the shackles of the slave caravans. She had left her home in the desert and traveled along the great river until she came to the outskirts of the capital city Ineb-Hedg, the seat of power where Kings had dwelt for centuries.
She arrived there with only the name her mother had given her, Ashayt, and the skills needed to make the firm, brown bread that everyone ate with every meal and fermented to make their beer. She was of a proud people, and the hardships she had so far borne had not stripped her of this pride, and so she refused to join the legions of beggars that could be found throughout the city. She instead went door to door, first inside the city’s walls and then out of them, until at last she found a family who could make use of her skills and would agree to take her in.
A childless couple with a meager few acres of land and only a handful of slaves, her benefactors would never be wealthy, but they were free and owed nothing to any man. They traded their grain and, soon, her bread at the markets, and while Ashayt knew they would never be able to provide her with a suitable dowry for marriage, she was nonetheless happy to become something like their daughter. She was from the desert, marked by her dark skin and many tattoos, and no man from this civilized world would want her anyway. Or so, at least, she had thought.
The flour milled, Ashayt set out to mix it with water in several large clay bowls. After this, she would leave the mixture in the fresh air for a time, so that the spirits would bless it and allow it to finish its transformation into dough. She would build up the fire under their stone oven and, when it was good and hot, she would take the dough, and kneed it, and form it into loaves. This she did every morning, and when the bread had cooked and cooled, she would put aside loaves for her family and for the slaves, and put the rest into her basket, and take it to market.
Ashayt could hear the slaves calling to each other in the fields and knew that soon the rest of her family would arise. They would wonder why she had been so anxious to go walking after dinner and why she had again been out so late. She smiled to herself, thinking of how thin her excuses were wearing. Did her foster mother suspect why it was that Ashayt was away so long and so late at night? Had she noticed the change in Ashayt’s mood, the constant smiling, the humming of gentle tunes? Ashayt thought the woman did indeed suspect but had yet kept her peace about it.
Her foster father, on the other hand, seemed completely oblivious. He was a good man, and he loved her in his fashion, but he cared mostly for the fields and the crops. The droughts of the past few years had brought these worries to the fore. They consumed his every waking moment, and Ashayt thought it likely that they occupied a good deal of his sleep as well. She pitied him. Most of what they could grow in this climate and with their small amount of manpower was used immediately. There was little to trade. Ashayt often wished she could make the rains come, make the great river return to its annual floods and bring life back to this normally fertile valley, but such a thing was beyond her power, and so she only did what she could with what grain they had.
There had been some rain, though, during this otherwise parched summer. There had been rain the first night she had lain with him, in that little fisherman’s shack atop a bed of woven reeds, when he had shown her what it meant to be a woman and to be with a man. After, lying in his arms, she had listened to the rain falling on the thatched roof, listened to the countless peeping frogs at the river’s edge, and thought to herself that there could be no better thing in the entire world.
Smiling still, thinking of the things that had been and the things that yet would be, Ashayt set her bowls of dough out to rise, and went to stoke the fire.
* * *
She had first encountered the man whose face and body and hands would come to occupy her every waking thought in a small alley outside of the city’s market square. He had been chasing a pickpocket and was unable to stop in time when Ashayt stepped out from behind a wall, carrying her basket of bread and daydreaming. The thief had narrowly avoided her, and the man chasing him shouted in surprise and warning, but too late. He had collided with the dark-skinned girl, knocking her to the ground and scattering her bread around the alley.
After taking a moment to ascertain that she was not badly hurt, Ashayt opened her eyes and saw standing above her a beautiful man, young and well built, with sun-bronzed skin the color of the sunset on a field of wheat and eyes like deep, dark pools. He was wearing an obviously expensive wig of human hair, the locks of which reached to his shoulders and were decorated with many beads. Her breath caught in her lungs, and for a moment she was unable to do anything more than stare at him.
“You should have been more careful,” the man told her, and extended his hand to help her up. “Now you’ve lost your bread, and I’ve lost my thief so I won’t be able to pay you for it.”
He smiled at her, and for Ashayt that was the end. All of her life before that moment seemed as if it belonged to someone else, some other girl. Now she was someone new, a woman whose only desire was to possess this man standing above her, and to be possessed by him. She reached out and took his outstretched hand, let him help her to her feet, stood staring at him.
“Are you hurt?” he asked, and Ashayt shook her head. No, she was not hurt. She was as far from hurt, it seemed, as it was possible to be. Every part of her body seemed to be singing in excitement and joy and desire.
The man took her basket from the ground and, squatting, began to collect those loaves of bread that seemed like they might be salvaged. After a moment, Ashayt joined him. This alley was little-used, and that was a good thing. Some of the bread was broken and a few loaves more had landed in a puddle of what she thought was camel urine, but most were merely dusty and could still be sold.
“Can you speak?” he asked after a time, and she nodded, but no words seemed to come to her lips, and so she continued to collect bread in silence. The man stopped and watched her, amused.
“Do you speak?”
Ashayt made an effort to find her voice and managed a single word. “Yes.”
“You are not from here.”
“No.”
“What is your name? Where are you from?”
“I am called Ashayt. I come from the south. From the deserts outside of Tjenu.”
“Well, I cannot say it is good to meet you, my lady Ashayt, for it has cost me a sack of turquoise worth fifty deben, but neither can I say I am entirely unhappy with this event. I am called Amun Sa, son of Hêtshepsu, son of Nifé-en-Ankh. I am third-cousin by marriage to King Pepi, Lord of all the Earth and descendant of Ptah the Maker, may he rule forever.”
Ashayt, confronted so suddenly with the knowledge that the man who stood before her was nobility, of a social standing so far above her own that it was inconceivable that he was even speaking with her, found herself again at a loss for words. She went immediately to her knees, bowing before him and putting her forehead to the sand. When at last she was able to speak, she began pouring forth a litany of apology, begging for forgiveness for her running into him.
“Please, girl … Ashayt, stop. Enough. I beg you, I … Ptah have mercy upon me, in the name of the King, I command you to stop!”
This last was delivered in such a tone that Ashayt understood that she was not to argue. She was only to obey. It was a tone that only a man of royal upbringing would have even known how to use, and she followed his command instinctively. She stopped apologizing, snapping her mouth shut, but continued to lie prostrate before him.
“Well, that’s a start. Now, please, stand up. I see more of this already each day than I care to.”
Ashayt did as he told her, keeping her gaze low, unable to meet his eyes.
“Why won’t you look at me?” Amun Sa asked her and, after a moment, spoke again in that tone of command. “Answer me.”
“It is not right, my Lord,” Ashayt answered. “I should not … I must not even speak to you. I do so now only because you command it.”
“Why do you feel this way?”
“You are cousin to the King!”
“Third-cousin. By marriage. My father’s wife’s great-grandfather was the tenth son of the great King Teti of Seheteptawy, borne by his third wife, the Queen Khuit. I am just a scribe, and not a King.”
“Yet you are of noble blood, my Lord, and I am nothing, a peasant girl from the desert and a baker of bread. I have cost you your jewels, and their worth is more than I could ever hope to pay back. Oh, please forgive my clumsiness and allow me to rid you of my presence.”
Amun Sa studied her for some time, long enough that at last Ashayt was forced to look up and meet his eyes, if only for a moment, to confirm that he was still there. When she did this, she felt again that thrill of desire running like a bright streak through her, and a shiver went down the entire length of her spine. She quickly glanced back to the ground. At last Amun Sa spoke.
“I give forgiveness for your clumsiness gladly, for truly I think the fault belongs to that damned pickpocket. As for ridding me of your presence, that I cannot allow. I find your presence pleasant.”
Ashayt felt her cheeks warming, but she said nothing.
“May I accompany you to the market, Ashayt-from-the-desert?”
“If it would please you, my Lord,” Ashayt said.
“Then let us be on our way, for it would please me very much.”
Amun Sa bent, and picked up her basket, and started forth. Ashayt, confused and startled both by this stranger’s actions and by the overwhelming desire within her that she could not seem to force down, stared for a moment in surprise. Then, with no other options immediately available to her and no reason to search for any, she followed him.
* * *
They became lovers, of course. Ashayt supposed that her desire for Amun Sa had been naked on her face, in the way she moved, in the way she spoke. For his part, Amun Sa had never seemed to suffer from even a moment’s hesitation. He would tell her later that he had wanted her from the very moment he had helped her stand up in that dusty alley.
They had not lain together that night, nor for weeks afterward, but he had been waiting for her at the market the next day, and the day after that. As he helped her sell her bread, they told each other of their lives. Ashayt learned that Amun Sa was twenty-six, and had been married to the daughter of a powerful governor since the age of fifteen. He and his wife hated each other, and they spent time together only when absolutely necessary.
“She is an ill-bred, illiterate shrew that cares only for acquiring jewelry and stuffing her face with delicacies – while the people her father governs starve,” he told Ashayt one day as they walked along the river’s edge. Ashayt, who could not read herself and who had never tasted anything that might be described as a delicacy, had kept her mouth shut.
“I wish so very much to be rid of her,” Amun Sa muttered, mostly to himself, as they walked along the river’s edge.
“Could you not leave her and take for yourself … another woman?” Ashayt asked him, careful to keep her voice neutral.
“I would do so gladly, but we were wed at the command of my King, and I have been forbidden to divorce.”
“Yet you do not wish to be with her.”
“I do not. She has taken command of my finances like a good wife, but wastes our income on nonsense. She has borne me but two children, and not because she is barren, but rather because it is an effort to kindle any desire for her, an effort to bring her to my bed, and an effort even more to convince her to perform her duties as a wife.”
Ashayt, who at the time had only a vague notion of what those duties entailed, felt her cheeks warming. I would perform them for you, she thought. I would do whatever you asked.
Amun Sa was looking at her now, and she could not meet his gaze, but she knew he must have guessed at some of these thoughts, for she heard him laugh quietly. He stopped walking and stood looking out at the expanse of blue water, typically so wide, but grown now sluggish and thin from drought. Ashayt stood next to him, also looking out, wondering why the Gods had put this man before her yet saddled him with an unbreakable marriage.
“I should let you return to your family,” Amun Sa said after a time.
“They will not miss me yet for a little while,” Ashayt said. It was not precisely the truth, but neither would her foster parents object if she returned home later than normal.
“Yet I must let you go. I must, for both of our sakes.”
“Why, my Lord?”
“I fear that if I remain any longer in your presence, I will ask you to do things with me that men and women sometimes do, when they are free. When they wish to show that they care for each other. That they desire each other.”
It was the most direct statement of his feelings for her that he had yet made, and Ashayt felt a rush of adrenaline at his words. She chose her response carefully.
“My Lord Amun Sa, if you were to ask me to do these things with you, I would not refuse you.”
“I am a married man and cannot take you for a wife. We could never be much more than ghosts, moving together in the dark but fleeing when the light comes, and if there are children, they will be the children of ghosts. They would have to live without knowing their father’s name. You should go and find another man, one who can make for you a proper husband, with a fortune for you to care for, who will be father to your children and—”
Ashayt touched the fingers of her hand to his shoulder, and felt there flesh that was jerking, shaking. Goosebumps rippled across his skin as she stroked it, and Ashayt found herself fighting against the desire within her to press herself against him, force him to hold her, force him to make her his. She wanted to do this, but knew she must not. It must be his choice, his decision, his desire.
“There is no other man,” she said. “Neither here in this city nor outside of its walls. There is no other and I would not wish it so even if I could. My Lord, you know what I will say, if you ask … but you must ask.”
Amun Sa turned to look at her now, still trembling, his dark eyes almost black in the slowly setting sun. He reached his hand out and ran it once down the side of her face, his touch like a gentle summer breeze, and Ashayt closed her eyes.
“Please ask,” she whispered.
Amun Sa put his hands on her shoulders and was silent for a moment longer. Ashayt stood still, eyes closed, barely daring to breathe.
When Amun Sa spoke, his voice was hoarse. “Ashayt, do you love me?”
“Yes, I do.”
“Then tell me so.”
“I …” Ashayt paused, not in doubt or fear, but simply because she had never said these words, and they felt new to her lips. She took a breath, looked into his eyes, nodded.
“I love you, Amun Sa.”
She could see his desire in his eyes and thought for a moment that he would sweep her from her feet right at this very spot, take her to him and kiss her, bring her to some secluded place and show her what it was to lie with a man. With a visible effort, he took hold of himself, and he smiled at her.
“And I love you, Ashayt, so I ask you. Will you come to me tonight, and lie with me, and love me as I love you?”
“I will. Only tell me where, and when, and I will come.”
“There is a fisherman’s shack, not far from the market, on the western bank where two palm trees lean together to form a cross. The man who owns it does not use it during the night, and when we were young my friends and I would stay there sometimes, fishing for eels. There is a bed, and a place for a fire. I will be there when the moon comes above those trees, and I will wait there for you. I will wait until the sun rises, if I must.”
“I will not make you wait,” Ashayt told him. “I will come to you when the moon is in the sky. I would … I would go with you now, if it was your wish.”
Amun Sa smiled at her, leaned in and pressed his lips to the skin between her neck and shoulder, and whispered, “Do not tempt me.”
Ashayt shivered, sighed, tried in vain to slow her beating heart. Never before had a man put his lips on her body in such a way, and the touch of them overwhelmed her, filled her with desire. The thought of what else might be in store, later that night, was nearly too much to bear.
“Tonight, my love,” Amun Sa told her, and Ashayt nodded.
“Yes, tonight. At the fisherman’s shack when the moon is above the two palm trees that form a cross. Yes.”
Amun Sa looked into her eyes for another interminable moment, and Ashayt wished with all her heart that he would seal their arrangement with a kiss, but he turned instead and set off toward the city, and he did not look back.
Ashayt closed her eyes and stood listening to the noise of water on stone, the rush of wind in the reeds, the call of birds in the palms. She smiled, and looked up at the sun still hanging so far above the horizon, and began her own journey home.
* * *
When the creature took her, Ashayt had been meeting with her new lover for little more than six weeks. Amun Sa would find her in the market at some point during the day, and help her with her sales, and after they would take walks and talk together. On some days he would not show up at all, and Ashayt would understand with an aching disappointment that his affairs had kept him away that day and that she would not be with him under the moonlight that night.
She wondered how long this wild joy inside of her would last. She knew at some point that darker thoughts would begin to tinge the edges of her happiness, like spilled wine seeping into wet linen, spreading its wicked fingers out ever wider over time. She knew that she would grow jealous of Amun Sa’s wife, angry that she could not take her place at his side, terrified of what would happen when she inevitably found herself with child and without a husband. She knew that all of this would come, but as of yet it had not. As of this sixth week in their illicit affair, she felt only love – and the overwhelming desire to partake of his body and to give her own over to him.
It was on the journey back from just such a rendezvous that the creature came. They had made the mistake of falling asleep together in the hut, limbs entangled, the sound of each other’s breathing a lulling drone. Amun Sa had for a time whispered beautiful things in her ear. He had again petitioned the king for permission to divorce, and had hopes that this time the answer might be different. He had heard word that his wife’s father was falling out of favor with the royal court, that politicians all across the kingdom were overstepping their bounds, using the drought as a means to further their own ends. It might be possible, it might …
They had slept, and in the early hours of the morning Ashayt had awoken with a start, convinced that someone was watching them. Some presence seemed to have filled the hut like a great, dark cloud looming over her, and yet there was no one to be seen in the small room. The only exits were the door, firmly barred, and a tiny hole in the roof to accommodate the smoke rising from the fire. The thatched roof could not have supported even a young girl, let alone the sort of adult who might desire to spy upon a sleeping couple. There could be no one who watched them, and yet it seemed—
Amun Sa stirred next to her, mumbled something inaudible, and all at once it seemed that the presence fled, pulling away from her mind like a receding tide. Within moments it was gone, and there was only the crackling of the fire and the slow breathing of the naked man beside her. Ashayt disentangled herself from Amun Sa with care, trying not to wake him, and stepped to the door. She removed the bar and pulled the door open just enough to glance outside, but there was nothing to be seen except the stars and the moon and their doubles in the river.
The moon – it hung far too low in the sky. Dawn was near, she thought, and they had spent many hours more in the hut than they ever had before. Surely someone would have missed them by now.
“My love, you must wake,” she said, closing the door and turning away from it. She went to the bed and knelt beside it, taking her plain linen dress from the ground as she did so. She touched Amun Sa’s shoulder and, when this failed to wake him, shook it gently. Amun Sa stirred, groaned, blinked his eyes.
“Wake up. Wake up! Oh, no.” Ashayt went to shake him again, but Amun Sa took her wrist in his hand and held her arm steady. He opened his eyes.
“I am awake,” he said. “What troubles you?”
“Oh, I have been a fool! I allowed myself to fall asleep, and now … it is near dawn, my Lord. The moon has fallen nearly to the hills.”
“Your parents will know you have been away,” Amun Sa said, concern in his voice. He sat up and rubbed a hand across his face.
“Stupid, stupid,” Ashayt was muttering, standing now and struggling into her dress. She could feel Amun Sa’s eyes on her body as she did so and felt, even now, the warm rush of pleasure that came with being desired.
“It is as much my fault as yours,” Amun Sa was saying. He too was standing, finding his clothing – much finer than hers – and beginning to dress. His wig, perched originally on a simple three-legged table, had fallen on the floor during their lovemaking, and he grabbed it now and hastily brushed the dust from it.
“I do not worry for myself,” Ashayt said.
“But your parents—”
“They are not my parents, they are my … my guardians, and anyway, I am too old and too strange to be made wife to any other man. They do not command me, and I would not listen if they tried.”
“You are not strange,” Amun Sa said, and Ashayt made a noise of frustration, wishing he would hurry, even as her heart filled with joy at these words. She turned, smiling, and pressed her lips to his, hard, feeling his teeth behind them. Amun Sa dropped his wig into the dust again and put his hands around her back, but Ashayt pushed him away.
“I worry for you,” she told him. “You will be missed, and how will you explain your absence?”
“I do not care. To whom will I explain myself? My frigid wife? Our slaves? There is no one in my household who would dare question my actions, and my wife knows her father has lost favor with the king. If she is even aware that I was gone – which I doubt – I will hear no word from her about it.”
“Your slaves will talk,” Ashayt said. She had finished dressing, had put on her own simple wig and was standing at the door, waiting for him.
“Let them talk, then,” Amun Sa said. He finished making himself presentable and came to join her. “Let them think what they will.”
Ashayt shook her head. “It will make its way back to the King eventually, and whether he favors your wife’s father or not, he will be displeased. Until you can be rid of your wife, we must be discrete. My Lord … my love, there is nothing discrete in sneaking back to our homes as dawn breaks.”
She could see that Amun Sa understood the truth in her words, and also that this truth frustrated him greatly. He paused for a moment, looking at her with his deep, dark eyes but not speaking.
“Go,” Ashayt said, and when he didn’t move, she opened the door for him and stepped out into the sand. “Go!”
Amun Sa remained for a moment more rooted to his spot. He opened his mouth to speak, and Ashayt put her hand to his lips.
“Please, Amun Sa. Because I love you and would not see you put in danger, I beg you, please … go.”
He went, touching her cheek as he did so, striding off into the dark toward his home. Ashayt watched him leave and, when he was out of sight, looked over her shoulder, past the river and to the east. The hills had not yet begun to glow in the way that said dawn was near, but neither did they blend into the inky blackness of night: sunrise was coming. By the time she got home, it would be time to make the bread. She closed the door of the fisherman’s hut behind her and began her trip.
She was cutting through a strand of reeds when the voice came to her, something more than a sound, as if spoken through a long and echoing tube that reached directly into the center of her head.
“See how the harlot flees the scene of her crimes,” it said, and in it Ashayt could hear malevolence and a kind of black humor that bespoke a person who might find glee in terrible things, like the torturing of small animals or the unjust punishment of slaves. She came to a stop, bare feet squelching in the mud, looking all around her. Again she felt that creeping dread, as she had in the hut, that she was being watched by some being of awful power.
“Who are you?!” she demanded of the darkness around her, and for a moment there was no response. Then came a dry rattling, the sound of an avalanche of bone cascading down a hard face of rock, as the reeds before her parted and a figure stepped forward. Ashayt could tell that it was a man, taller than her and broad through the shoulders, and it seemed to her that amid the shadows that hid his features, a single eye shone forth as if lit from within. Had he been standing there, all this time, waiting for her? How could he have known the path she would take?
“I know a great many things,” the man said, and again it seemed to her that his voice came not from his mouth but from all around her and from within her.
“Who are you?” she asked again, but this time in a voice that, robbed of courage, came out weak, little more than a whisper. She could feel the danger of this man coming off him in palpable waves, and she wondered if she had not lain with her lover for the last time, earlier that evening, without knowing it.
The man-thing gave her a leering grin that seemed too wide for his face, regarding her for a moment more with his strangely glowing eye, and spoke again.
“When first I was, I had no name, and since I became what I am now, I have been known by many. In the green lands, north across the great sea, they called me Harad’ur. They would bring me white-skinned girls like tiny flowers, bellies sliced open and still crying for their mothers. They would lie on the ground within the circle of stones and tremble as I drank the very life from their bodies.”
Ashayt had no immediate response to this, and it seemed that no further information was forthcoming. The thing – she could not manage to think of it as a man anymore – stood there before her, staring at her with its wicked eye. At last, she found the courage to speak again.
“What do you want of me?”
“You are not of this place,” it said, tilting its head to one side.
“I was born in the south and my people are no more.”
“The south is nothing but desert, baking under the hateful sun.”
“I am from the desert. What do you want?”
The thing chuckled. “I have a gift for you.”
“I want no gift,” Ashayt told it. “I want only to return to my home.”
“Oh? And not to the arms of your lover?”
Ashayt faltered, her cheeks warming, and said, “I do not know of whom you speak.”
“Make me yours, my Lord!” the thing exclaimed, its voice taking on a gasping, needing tone that Ashayt knew was a twisted imitation of her own. “I cannot wait a moment more! Use me as your vessel, an empty thing to be filled. Spray into me your hot and sticky seed while I go before you on my knees like a bitch in heat!”
Ashayt felt her mouth drop into an expression of shock and dismay, and seeing this, the thing cackled a kind of hideous, screaming laughter. Ashayt shrunk away from this sound, shaking her head in negation, and might have turned and fled if the creature had not abruptly ceased its laughter and leaned in toward her.
“I have a gift for you,” it said again, and it seemed to Ashayt that its eye began to grow, becoming a deep pool of silver in which she might swim – or drown.
“I want no gift,” she heard herself say again, but the words were muffled and indistinct, as if coming through sheets of wet linen.
“It is my time,” the thing told Ashayt, and now it was cradling her in its arms, though how she had come to be there she could not remember. “Like a plant which goes to seed, I must pass my gift on, and I have chosen you. Not because you are special. Not because you are unique. I have chosen you because you are here, and I am here, and your lover is gone, gone away to be with his wife, and cannot protect you.
“I will make you mine, and when next he sees you, he will not know the woman who stands before him. He will recognize your face and your voice, but he will no longer know you, and because this above all else pleases me, I have chosen you. This is my gift. May you live forever in this Gods-forsaken hell, as must I, because you were here, and I was here, and he was not.”
The thing bared its teeth and it seemed to Ashayt that its mouth had become lined with daggers. She thought that she should cry out, or at the very least feel some sense of fear, but it seemed her body could not manage. She closed her eyes, and took a breath, and felt a white-hot flash of pain at her neck. After that, there was nothing.
Part II
When Ashayt woke with a gasp and a start to find herself lying in a thatch of reeds, the lower half of her body submerged in tepid, murky water, she could not remember how she had come to be in the place, or what had happened to her after falling asleep in the fisherman’s hut. Groaning, she pulled herself to a sitting position, fingers digging into the thick, stinking mud, and set about removing the leeches that clung to her legs and feet.
They’re drinking my blood, she thought to herself, and a shudder tore through her body, twisting and knotting her muscles as if she had come down with a fever. She coughed once, gagged, moaned. Her entire body hurt, and the sun pressed down upon her like a heated weight.
That hateful sun was far too high in the sky. Morning had long passed and she thought – though it was hard to think with her head pulsing so – that the time was now closer to dusk than to noon. Her foster parents would be either fearful or furious, or both. She needed to get home. Ashayt pushed her own questions about what had brought her to lie unconscious in the swamp to the back of her mind and focused instead on summoning the strength she needed to stand up.
Her first effort was a dismal failure and resulted only in her crashing back into the bog, releasing another wave of noxious air that reeked with the scent of decay. Again her body heaved, trying to vomit, but there was nothing inside of her and after a time it gave up. Ashayt lay on her side in the muck, gasping for breath, exhausted by even the simple attempt to get to her feet. Around her, the chorus of chirruping frogs and buzzing insects seemed to be laughing at her plight.
Her next attempt was more of a success, in that she did not immediately topple over upon standing up, but neither could she seem to summon the energy to move. She stood instead with her back bent, hands on her thighs, breathing the deep gasps of someone who has performed a feat of incredible physical exertion. At least up here, away from the mud, the air was clearer and stank less. It was a small change, but it seemed to help. Ashayt thought that soon, she might even be able to take a step or two.
Time passed. Ashayt was unsure how long it was that she stood there, gasping, willing her strength to return, but she thought that the sun’s progress in the sky marked it as at least a quarter of an hour. Finally she felt prepared to move, and with a deep breath took her first aching step forward. Her entire body seemed to complain about this course of action, and she thought the pain and weakness she was feeling very similar to a fever that had taken her a few years before, and from which she had been very lucky to return at all. She knew she would soon collapse again, and thought that if she did so among these reeds, where few ever ventured, she would likely die in this place.
She made a creeping sort of progress, angling her way out of the bog, and at last came to its edge. Here there was a dirt road, the side of it lined with a stone wall to prevent people and carts from falling into the very swamp from which she had just emerged. Ashayt leaned against this wall for a time, breathing deeply, ignoring passersby as they stared at this disheveled, muddy girl with the dark skin and darker tattoos. Right now she was more concerned with summoning the strength to get home than she was with the effect of her appearance on those coming in and out of the city.
At last she thought she had the strength to continue, and Ashayt began her slow, shuffling walk along the wall, using her left hand against it for support as she went. Without the wall she would not have made it very far at all, and even with it a journey that should have taken no more than twenty minutes took her more than an hour and a half. No one stopped to offer any help. No one had ever stopped to offer her help, not once in her life – except for Amun Sa, and he was not there. Ashayt pressed on regardless, as she had so many times before.
At last she came to the outskirts of her family’s fields and there saw a slave whose name she could not remember, hunkered down and pulling weeds. He glanced over at her briefly and then turned to stare, rising to his feet. Ashayt opened her mouth to say something, though she did not know what, and at that moment it seemed that a white-hot blade stabbed deeply into her left eye. She made a cracked, dry noise – not a scream, she couldn’t have managed a scream – and pitched forward into the dirt, and closed her eyes, and remembered nothing more for some time.
When she woke again, she was lying naked and clean on her simple cot of wood and stretched hide, covered with a single sheet of linen. Her foster mother, Nephthys, was leaning over her, pressing a cool, damp cloth to her forehead. The only source of light in the room was a single tallow candle, and yet it seemed to Ashayt as if the room were brightly illuminated.
“How are you feeling, little mau?” the woman asked, favoring Ashayt with a smile that managed to look both relieved and concerned at once.
“I … I feel better, I think,” Ashayt said. Her voice was hoarse, and she felt as if every last ounce of water in her body had been burned away. “But I am so thirsty.”
“That is no surprise. When the slave brought you to us, your skin was so hot to the touch that I feared you would die right there. I gave you a little water, but it was making you choke, so I had to stop. Here …”
Nephthys handed her a clay mug filled with water, and Ashayt drank from it gratefully. She could feel the cool liquid running down and through her, but it did not seem to slake her thirst, and after a time she lay back, breathing deeply and trying to will away the awful demons that must surely be infesting her.
“Ashayt, my Ashayt … where did you go?” Nephthys asked. “We feared you abducted, and when you returned you were filthy! Covered in mud and grime.”
“I awoke in a swamp by the river’s edge,” Ashayt said, staring up at the ceiling and trying to remember. “I don’t know how I got there. I don’t remember anything after … after …”
But of course, she could not tell her foster mother the last thing she remembered, which was falling asleep in Amun Sa’s arms as she lay with her head on his chest and listened to his breathing. After that there was nothing, just a great black span until her awakening in the reeds at the river’s edge, long after the day had begun. What had happened? When had she and Amun Sa parted and how had she come to be in that place?
“After what?” Nephthys prompted, and Ashayt shook her head.
“After beginning the return from my evening walk,” she said. “I walked to the temple, and listened for a time to the chanting, and then I left that place.”
This, at least, was true. She had been early for her rendezvous with Amun Sa and so had walked first to the temple and listened to the monks therein, singing to the Gods. Then she had turned and headed not south, where her family’s farm lay, but instead northeast, to the little fisherman’s shack that had become their place of consummation. She’d waited for him there, naked and glistening with sweet balsam oil, and when he’d entered and stopped, stunned by her appearance, she had spoken not a word but had instead gone to her knees–
“You remember nothing more?” Nephthys asked, interrupting her reverie, and Ashayt felt her cheeks warming. She shook her head.
“Nothing, until I woke in the reeds. I … It must be the fever, again.”
Nephthys nodded, frowned, and glanced out through the small window opening on the west wall, as if she might find the answers to her questions written in the stars.
“I had hoped it would not return so soon,” she said. “But these are ill days, and the Gods are disturbed. Irrational. They strike down those who have done nothing to deserve it. First droughts and now sickness.”
Ashayt, who felt she had done much to deserve the wrath of the Gods, said nothing. She closed her eyes, and the world seemed to swing suddenly sideways. When she opened them again, some greater length of time had passed than she had expected. Nephthys was now slumped in her chair, leaning against the wall and snoring, and the sky had gone a beautiful royal blue that foretold dawn’s imminent arrival. The thirst raged still within her, and though she drank again from the ceramic cup, it seemed that no amount of water would satisfy it.
“Please,” she said then to the Gods, her voice cracked and broken and nothing more than the faintest whisper. “I am not ready to die. There might still be a chance for me, and for him, to make this thing between us right. We might be wed, if only he can convince the King, and then there could be children, and a life outside of the fields for these good people who have raised me. There might still be a chance for love, and life, and happiness, and I beg only that you let me live to see it.”
The Gods had never answered her before. Though she prayed now with as much fervor as she ever had – even as a girl, hiding in the bushes outside of her home and listening as her family was butchered – still they refused to give her the slightest sign that they had heard. Ashayt, exhausted again and unable to summon the strength even to keep her eyelids open, gave in to the sickness that assaulted her, and she slept.
* * *
Someone was knocking on the door. A thin structure made of branches and woven reeds, it shook and rattled with each hit. Ashayt, awake again on her cot, knew that the sound would carry throughout the meager, three-room house of mud bricks. She heard her foster parents murmuring, wondering who it might be that would come calling. Her foster father, Bes, would be the one to open the door.
“Greetings and welcome to this, my most humble home,” Bes said to the visitor, as was custom. Ashayt knew there would be polite bowing to accompany these words.
“May your home and fields be blessed by the Gods with many long days of prosperity,” came the reply, and Ashayt found herself sitting bolt upright in her bed, a newfound energy coursing through her body. There could be no mistaking that voice; Amun Sa, her love and lover, the very reason for which she woke each morning, was standing at the entrance to her home.
“You have my thanks, stranger,” her foster father replied, and Ashayt could hear in his tone a wariness that suggested he had noticed the quality of Amun Sa’s trappings and understood that this man who had come to their home was of some greater class than had any business on the outskirts of the city. “Of what service can I be to you?”
“My name is Amun Sa,” her lover said, “and I would be stranger to you no longer. I am third-cousin by marriage to King Pepi, Lord of all the Earth, Descendant of Ptah the Maker, may he rule forever.”
Bes was clearly at a loss for words. He stammered for a moment before finally regaining his wits and saying, “My Lord, you bless our home with our presence.”
“Truly, it is I who am blessed to be here,” Amun Sa replied. “For today I have been given a great and wonderful piece of news, and it is because of this that I have come to stand at your doorstep. I have come to speak with you, sir, and to beg you if I must. I have come to ask permission to court your daughter.”
Ashayt was unable to keep herself from making some small, strained noise of joyous disbelief. If the words that Amun Sa was saying were true – and he would not have been there if they weren’t – then he had been granted permission by King Pepi to divorce. The thing they had both hoped and prayed for had happened.
Despite her weakness, despite her thirst, despite the fever that seemed to be raging through her body, Ashayt leapt from her bed and began to dress. She could hear her foster father stammering, again, and her foster mother making a sort of disbelieving noise.
“Are you sure you have the right home, my Lord?” Nephthys asked. “Our daughter is … she is not our true daughter, though we have loved her as such for many years. She comes from the south, from—”
“From the desert, yes. I know.” Amun Sa laughed. “I assure you, I have the right home. Her name is Ashayt, and she has lived with you as your daughter these past dozen years. She is dark skinned, with lovely, swirling tattoos that cover her body from head to toe, and she is the most beautiful and wonderful creature that the Gods have ever put on this earth, and I love her with every fiber of my being, and I cannot stand for one second more to be apart from her.”
“My love!” Ashayt cried, bursting now through the fabric that hung between her bedroom and the common area and racing toward him, seeing his face light up and his arms open wide. “Amun Sa, my beautiful Amun Sa!”
And then he was holding her, and she had wrapped her arms around him, and he was pressing his lips to the top of her head, and she put her face against his chest, and she was weeping, weeping with joy and love and the simple disbelief of all that was happening to her now, at last, after so many years of being alone.
She heard her foster mother say, “I told you she had someone,” in an amused tone.
“Please, sir, may I court your daughter?” Amun Sa asked again, still holding her close to him, and she heard Bes give an incredulous laugh.
“I’m not sure we have a choice,” the man said.
Ashayt had managed to get some amount of control over herself and turned now to face her foster parents. “I will have no other. I love him. I love him, and I will never love another as much as I love him, not should I live a thousand years or more.”
“Ashayt,” Nephthys said, a joyous expression on her face, “My lovely Ashayt, my tiny little mau … you don’t need to justify yourself to us. You are a grown woman, and you have earned the love of a fine man who can give you a life that we could never provide. How could we say no? How could we stand here and look at the love on both of your faces and tell you that we do not approve? All we have ever wished, from the moment we took you into our home, is that you would find happiness. Does this man make you happy?”
“More so than I have ever been in my life,” Ashayt told them.
“Then, by all means, marry him,” Bes said, and he laughed. “Marry him now, before he comes to his senses and realizes that a cousin of the King has no business with the daughter of a struggling farmer. In fact, good sir, could we not convince you to do this tonight?”
Amun Sa laughed as well, and he shook his head. “I would be happy to do it, happy to pledge the rest of my life, this very night, to the daughter of a struggling farmer, but I cannot. Not yet. My King has approved my divorce from the woman I was forced to marry, but it is not yet finished in the eyes of the Gods. In five days’ time I will be free, and I say to you now that I will marry your daughter on the sixth day. I will do it gladly, and I will welcome her and all those who love her into my family.”
Ashayt turned again and pressed herself against him, taking in the scent of him, the feeling of his strong arms wrapped still around her body. It seemed impossible, this thing he suggested, like a wisp of dream, borne upon the summer breeze, that must inevitably fall to earth. How could it be that she had come to have everything she had ever wanted? How could it possibly be?
“My love,” she said to him, and felt again the urge to weep with joy. “My love. My love.”
It seemed to her as if she could never say these words enough.
* * *
“I feared you had given up on me,” Amun Sa said. “You’ve not been at the market for two days.”
Ashayt smiled at this idea, and she shook her head. “No, I would never leave you. I have been … unwell.”
They were walking together under the moonlight, and while Ashayt supposed that Amun Sa thought the winding path he was taking terribly clever, he could no more disguise that he was maneuvering them toward the fisherman’s shack than if he had announced the destination out loud. Ashayt, for her part, did not mind. She lacked the strength to perform as enthusiastically as sometimes she did, but she still wished to be again with her lover after two days without.
Amun Sa glanced over at her, an expression of concern on his face. “Should we turn back? If you are not feeling well, my dearest, then I do not wish to … that is, I won’t make you—”
Ashayt laughed and touched her fingers to his shoulder. “I know where you are taking me and want nothing more,” she said.
“But you—”
“I am a woman in love who feels much better than she did during the day, and I want to be with you. I might still have some fever – I feel hot inside, though Nephthys says I am cold to the touch, and I am still so very thirsty no matter how much water I drink.”
“What have you eaten today?” Amun Sa asked, and Ashayt tilted her head, trying to recall.
“I … don’t think I have eaten anything, my love. Truly, I’ve had no desire for food. Just water and more water. I spent most of the day sleeping, if truth must be told.”
“I hope the Gods will favor you with a swift recovery, my Ashayt. We have many long years ahead of us to enjoy in good health.”
Ashayt shuddered with pleasure at these words and gave her lover a brilliant smile. Oh, how wonderful that plan sounded to her ears, to her heart. She felt the sudden and overwhelming physical desire that Amun Sa so often inspired in her, swelling up from within, and realized that she wished to wait not one moment longer, much less the fifteen or twenty more minutes it would be until they arrived at the fisherman’s hut. She took his hand and slowed, then stopped, peering around her. It was dark, now, and there were few people out of doors. Surely there must be somewhere …
“What are you doing?” Amun Sa asked, perplexed, and she stood up on tip-toes to whisper into his ear.
“If we went and stood in that alley, there, we would be deep in the shadows, and no one would see.”
“My darling …” Amun Sa murmured, his tone slightly nervous as he glanced around, looking for any others who might be out sharing the evening cool with them.
“I don’t want to wait. I can lean against the wall, with you behind me, and you could cup my breasts with your hands while you fill the part of me that is empty.” She longed to feel his arms around her, his fingers pinching at her nipples, his teeth at her neck.
“Are you sure?” Amun Sa whispered back, and Ashayt felt something wild and animalistic open up within her, a ravenous desire that seemed impossible to deny.
“Take me there,” she snarled into his ear. “Take me there and press me up against the wall and … and fuck me. Hard and fast, like a beast. Like a brigand in the night. I am not yet your wife; for another five days, I am only your woman, and I wish you to lay claim to me.”
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