Never again. She would not speak to him ever again. She had finally expressed her true desire to him, had laid her heart bare, and he had said nothing in response. He was never going to set her free.
Her greatest wish was beyond what he was willing to grant. He would praise her skills and feast upon her flesh with his eyes, but when presented with the right thing to do he recoiled like a stunned snake.
They remained on their course to Nubia. To the land of deep mines and rich husbands, or so he had told her. She had been wrong about him, after all. He was not kind, not noble. He wished only for his own gain.
How easy it had been to forget her mother’s wisdom, to let her guard down. In her delusion she had imagined that Tahar might actually sympathise with her plight. She had thought him kind. She had thought him her friend. She had even thought—
It didn’t matter what she thought now. She could not influence him—not with tears, not with lies, not even with the truth. He was committed to his plan: to sell her to the richest suitor he could find. And now she was rededicated to hers: to take back what was left of her stolen grain and escape his wicked grasp.
The nights passed like colourless dreams. She had to be patient. She could do nothing until they were closer to the Great River. Even if she did recapture her grain, there was no sanctuary to which she could escape. The desert stretched vast and barren all around them. The secret wells that Tahar found with such proficiency were invisible to Kiya. Nor would she be able to find her own food. There were no street vendors or fishermen here—only quiet, lurking animals that did not wish to be seen.
Though Tahar saw them.
How he had sniffed out that swallow’s nest at the last oasis was a mystery to Kiya, but, oh—how tender had been the boiled eggs upon her tongue! He’d wielded his newly acquired bow with dexterity, piercing a very fast-moving hare and skewering it for their breakfast. He’d threaded its hide across the top of the addax-skin dress he had gifted her, explaining that the soft fur would help catch the dust. He had even discovered a band of grasshoppers clustering on the sunny side of a small dune. A Khemetian delicacy, the large green insects roasted were crispy and delicious. Seth’s bones, the man was almost as skilled as she at making something out of nothing.
Now they rested in the shade of a lone sycamore tree that Tahar had discovered at a bend in the small wash in which they travelled. It was funny, she thought, here she was, in the desolate wastes of the Red Land, and yet she had never eaten so heartily, dressed so elegantly, nor rested so well.
Kiya pretended not to watch Tahar, dozing contentedly, his heavy brows falling back from his closed eyes. Strange, aqua-blue eyes. She had never in her life seen such eyes. She had never even known such eyes could exist.
Perhaps his mother or father had come from far away. The people of the desert sometimes intermarried with foreigners. As nomads, the Libu ranged widely, always searching for better grazing lands for their flocks of goats and sheep, always hunting for their paradise—a Khemet all their own—but never finding it.
She was not unsympathetic to their plight. In many ways it was like her own—always searching, never finding. Always struggling to survive.
Still, she needed to be careful not to mistake her captor’s generosity for caring. He intended to sell her for his own gain. She could not forget that simple fact. If she did, she risked the worst possible fate—the fate of her mother.
Kiya recalled the vials that had littered the space beneath her mother’s bed. They’d been made of a beautiful blue glass and had smelled faintly of flowers. Every day her mother had tilted one of those vials to her lips and drunk the mysterious liquid inside.
Afterwards, her mother’s eyes would grow cloudy and she would drift off to sleep—often in the middle of the day. When she awoke, many hours later, she would tell Kiya to fetch one of the harem’s servants and order food, and while they waited for their meal, she would tell Kiya a story. That had been Kiya’s favourite time with her mother.
As she’d told her tales, her mother’s eyes would grow bright, lighting up the dark chamber. She would tell children’s tales—stories meant to teach Kiya about Khemetian history, its gods, and how things came to be. The tale she’d told most often was called How the Date Palm Got Its Dates. She’d come alive, pretending to be the monkey in the tale, and Kiya would laugh and clap as her mother jumped around their chamber, scratching her ribs and cackling wildly.
But soon she would empty another vial and her gaze would grow cloudy once again.
The day of the raid Kiya had had to clear those empty vials out of the way just to reach her hiding place under her mother’s bed. The vial that her mother had drunk from to take her own life had not been very different from the others, just bigger. It had been as if her mother had been saving the bottle for exactly such a moment—as if she had known the raiders were coming.
As if, perhaps, she had wanted them to come.
After the raid Kiya had pulled a blanket over her mother’s ashen face and vowed never to endure such an ugly fate. She might be the young child of a forgotten concubine of a dead king, but she was not dead yet.
Hungry and scared, she had followed the river trail until she’d reached the great capital city of Memphis. There Kiya had found other children like herself—parentless, unwanted creatures who survived on scraps, their own wits, and an aptitude for survival. Kiya had quickly become one of them.
Now Kiya studied Tahar’s placid face and struck upon an idea.
For she was one of them still.