Kissa
My young mistress walked thoughtfully away, leaving me alone in her bedchamber. I tidied up the scrolls and parchments she had brought with her, then sat on the edge of her bed and stared at the floor.
A trip to Antioch . . . a betrothal . . . a nightmare.
By all the gods, my mistress was naïve! She spoke of the upcoming trip as though it would be some sort of merry party, but she had never traveled such a long distance before. She said she would keep me by her side, yet how could she guarantee such a promise? Slaves did not travel with their owners. They either walked or were chained into wagons. Sometimes they had to carry water jugs or guide the donkeys loaded with food and water.
And when the caravan stopped at night, Shelamzion would sleep in a tent with her mother while I would be left to find a safe spot beneath a wagon or a palm tree. I would be vulnerable to every slave, merchant, and passing stranger who saw me. I would have to fend off the advances of strange men or die in an attempt to defend myself.
But Shelamzion would not think about these things. Neither would she consider the changes we would both face if she married the son of a Seleucid queen.
If she married this foreign prince, she might realize that she was as much a slave as I. We would move to Seleucia. We would live in a different palace, we would have new masters, we would eat new foods and have to accustom ourselves to new rules, ranks, and rituals. Everything Shelamzion knew would change, even the worship of her God. The foreign queen might let her continue to worship HaShem, but if Shelamzion made a mistake or angered one of her new relatives, that freedom could disappear. If Shelamzion refused to obey, she could be killed . . . and then what would happen to me? I would become one of hundreds of slaves in another foreign land.
I lowered my head into my hands. I had not lived long, but I had traveled from one world to another, and I had been forcibly taken to a place where everything was different. I had been beaten and violated, and though the gods smiled on me when they brought me to Shelamzion, no slave was ever truly secure.
My time in Judea had been bearable because Shelamzion was kind and not so very different from me. She saw herself as the pampered, fortunate niece of a great man, and to some extent she was right to think of herself that way. But her sheltered childhood was about to end, and once she was betrothed, she would realize just how much of a slave she was. Shelamzion might be called a bride, but she would be chained to whatever circumstances her uncle decreed for her.
My mistress was simply too young to understand the risks of such a venture, and these were not the sort of issues her tutor would address. These were things she would learn from experience, and for the first time I found myself wishing that Shelamzion could remain ignorant for a long time to come.