We walked north towards unknown country. The land dried out; the trees thinned. The first night we slept, unfed, in a crack in a rock face in a sandy ravine, back to back, our feet touching. He said to me in the night: “Do you regret it?”
I said: “I will never regret it. How could I?” I pressed the raw soles of my feet into his.
All night I was listening for my mother’s voice, in and out of sleep. I dreamed of her standing over me, in the wet season camp, and her saying: “You must live in the law, Ninshubar, not twist it for yourself.” But when I woke, cold, hungry and thirsty, in the earliest light, I saw we were still alone, just the two of us, in the same narrow ravine we had gone to sleep in.
That day I turned us east and west and east again, zigzagging over the half-known land of neighbours. Before dusk I had to stop. I was leaving footprints of blood in the dirt. The Potta found me berries and one small blue egg.
“For you, Mother,” he said, smiling. I took the food gratefully.
While he watched me eat, he said: “You have done nothing wrong, Shuba.”
“I know that,” I said. “I know. Yet it is a thing to cast the law aside.”
“It is the law that was wrong,” he said.
We crossed grassland, here or there studded with forest. In the night we lay together in a hollow of dark trees, our foreheads pressed together.
“The law is the law,” I said. “And under the law, she had a right to tell me where to put my bed.”
“Your law,” he said. “Not the law of my people. Not the law even two days’ walk north of here.”
I kissed his cheek. “It is the law of the gods I grew up with.”
“Those gods are behind us now,” he said. “Stuck in their caves. Far away from us. We will have new gods to worry about soon! Stranger gods!”
That made me laugh.
The next day my feet were worse not better, and I began limping badly, favouring the sides of my feet, or my heels, going slower and slower although I was very brave, and said nothing to the Potta.
The secret signs of my people’s law, the twisted twigs and special marks upon the earth, were gone from the land. This was stranger country. Everything looked different: the grasses, the trees, the shapes of the mountains beyond. Even the earth was different, a strange, staining orange.
One step and then the next.
* * *
For six days we climbed, with mountains ahead and to the left of us. After that we began to see the signs of a new people. Sometimes we would spend a whole day only hiding, because we heard people passing too close. For a long time after, the path we followed sloped gently downwards, following the course of interlinking valleys.
For one long moon, we followed the course of a great river, and then one morning the distant horizon resolved into the magical blue of the ocean.
My spirits rose up inside me.
“Maybe we will stop down here,” I said. “Make a camp for a while.”
“Maybe,” said the Potta.
“I’m going to swim at least,” I said. “And I will help you to do so also.”
He laughed. “I may not be a dolphin in human form, as you are, but I think I am safe to go swimming now.”
We paced out down grassy terraces, winding between outcrops of dark grey rock. I thought, The sea water will be good for both of us, but especially for his burned skin.
Near dusk we had not yet reached the sea, so we found a crook in some rocks, and began to light a fire. As I twisted the fire stick, the Potta said to me, “How are your feet?”
I was looking up at him when his face changed.
“Shuba…” he said.
Everything I would remember after, I remembered as if it had happened in silence.
The men were standing all around us in the dusk-light, as if they had somehow sprung up whole from the earth.
Strange men with hard faces and long greasy hair.
I was already on my knees; now I put my hands above my head, looking at the Potta, willing him to do nothing except copy me.
As I looked up into the Potta’s face, time froze for a moment as one of the men swung something at him.
Now he was on the ground, my pale-skinned Potta, with blood surging from a wound at the side of his head, and the orange of his hair growing dark with it.
In the silence that is all I have left of it, I stayed kneeling, not looking around me at the men, just looking at the Potta, until they pulled a bag down over my head.
For a very long time after, I tried to remember, anything, something, anything at all, about that last sight of the Potta. Was he breathing still? Did I see him move?
* * *
I woke up with sacking over my face, lying on my back with numb arms beneath me, my legs twisted agonisingly to one side. There was an overpowering smell of dried fish.
I was in a boat, and we were underway.
I could see through the sack, although not perfectly. There were four men in the boat, but no Potta. I was thinking about what to do about my arms, when one of the men clambered over some sacks to get to me.
Even with the bag over my head, there was no mistaking what he planned to do to me.
When these men had come at me on the land, I had made a calculation. Part of that calculation, then, was that I did not want the Potta to get hurt. Also, at that time, I had been clear that I did not want to die.
But that was then. Now the calculation came out differently.
Well, if you are going to do something, it is better to do it quick.
I lay limp as he untied my ankles. Then with one giant wrench of my body, with everything I had, I wrested myself up into a sitting position and in the same movement brought my forehead down, as hard as I could, into where I thought the man’s head was.
I hit skull, a piece of luck. Then I tipped my head back a little and bit down hard on him, through the sack, on whatever I could get of him, knowing it might knock my teeth out.
I got his ear – and it crunched between my teeth.
A moment later my mouth was full of salty sweet blood and ear and sack, and he was screaming like a devil spirit. He reared back from me in the muddle of it and as he did, I managed to twist up onto my knees, then feet, the boat lurching, and I smashed my head down again on top of him. Again, the old gods were with me, and I hit bone.
And then something unexpected happened: suddenly there was only emptiness where the man had been.
He had gone.
A splash.
A scream.
I sat back down into the boat, falling painfully against my bound arms, and spitting ear and sacking out of my mouth. My forehead was bleeding into my eyes, and I had wrenched my right shoulder badly, but it was my teeth and lips that hurt the most.
A pause, another scream, further away now, and the boat rocked as everyone moved. And something else unexpected: the men in the boat began laughing, great shrieks of laugher.
I sat back against the edge of the boat, waiting for what would happen next.
For a while anyway, the next did not involve me. There was a melee as they pulled down the sail and got out oars, shouting back to my would-be rapist. But even in the midst of their efforts, they were panting with laughter.
I stayed still and quiet, trying to understand what was happening through the pinprick holes in my sack. My forehead burned, and the bleeding seemed to be getting worse. I had bruised my mouth, split both lips. One of my front teeth was wobbling.
They pulled my attacker back on board, with him screaming what could only be abuse at me.
For a while after they left me alone.
Later the man who was the leader of these men came over and beat me, but carefully and deliberately, with a heavy stick.
He hit me wherever he could without getting too close to me: shoulders, shins, the top of my head. I tried to duck my head down, but I let him do it. There are always repercussions when you refuse to submit to others.
Afterwards he pulled the sack off my head, and then, having gestured for me to twist round, he cut the cord that was tying my wrists. I did not understand the words he spoke to me, but I hoped that I understood his message: No more trouble and we will leave you alone.
* * *
It was a small boat, old but of good oak, and with three stained sails, and oars for when we needed them. It was small for the five of us, but I had my own scrap of space. When the sea or the weather got rough, they would shout at each other about what to do next, and at the end of the shouting, we would either head to shore, to hide from the worst of it, or head out to sea, to avoid plunging catastrophically into the shore.
At first, I felt quite unlike myself, with a churning sort of sickness in my belly, and this sickness, for a few days, pressed out all other matters from my mind. But when I thought that only death would be my salvation, the sickness began to pass, and then, miraculously, was gone. For all of this, the leader of the men, the shortest and most powerful of them, who had given me my beating, was often kind, passing me water, or a cloth to wipe myself with if I was sick.
We were at sea for one full passing of the moon. There were days when we kept close to the shore, and I sat mesmerised by the yellow cliffs, the wheeling gulls, and the swell crashing up and over the rocks at the base of the cliffs. There were many more days when we were too far out to see more than the dark of land upon the horizon. My world then was shrunk to the sea, the sky, and to our colourful, overloaded boat, and my stinking companions. In the sky there were the signs of all the weather to come, and I learned to watch each cloud, and eddy upon the water, with great interest. The sea beneath us was sometimes gentle as milk, and at other times threatened to kill us all. Sometimes it boiled with fish, or produced dolphins from its sparkling depths, marvellous and powerful.
We only went ashore at beaches with rivers or springs. The men would fill their water jars and settle their legs, and I was allowed to ramble about as long as I stayed in sight. Sometimes there was forest pressing down upon the beach, and huge and unfamiliar birds, sometimes food to forage: eggs, nuts, coconuts, fruit. Sometimes they let me fish, although I was only given a net and never a spear.
When we were at sea they gave me water every day and dried fish, sometimes fruit if they had it. They kept well back from me whenever they could and there was no more violence between us. Most of the sacks onboard contained dried fish. But also there were animal skins tied up in wedges at the back of the boat, and small chests containing other treasures, tightly strapped down to the floor of the boat. And finally, there was me, a trophy that I do not believe they had planned for.
Trophy that I was, I cannot have looked like much of a prize. I was in a kind of shock, like a fledgling bird that had fallen from its nest. I was in pain from my beating, although my feet were healing. My Potta was gone, and I did not believe I would ever find him again. But over and above that, I struggled to know if what I was seeing and feeling now was real and true. Was this the real world or a terrible dream sent by the gods?
I had always been told that if you go off your own country, you will shrivel and die of the sadness that is not belonging. I knew what that meant now. What was a world without law, without the land that my family had cared for since the dawn of time? What was a world that I had no living connection to? But the days went by, sometimes like a dream that was really not so terrible, when the wind was behind us and I had a full belly, and the sun was bright in a dark sky, and dolphins rushed alongside us, casting at me their holy eye.
And somehow I did live, heartbroken and cast out as I was.
* * *
One morning in the distance… the most astonishing thing. A growth upon the shoreline: mountains of a sort I had never seen. Termite mounds, but made by great giants, and all wrong, with sharp lines where there should have been curves. As we got close, I saw there were people all around these mounds, more people than I knew existed in the world. Dozens of boats, just like the one I was in, jostled in and out of the beaches and the long stone structures that snaked out from the land.
I was so astonished that, for a few heartbeats, I forgot to breathe.
The leader of my captors rummaged in the string bag he carried, and produced a piece of cloth, very white and bright. This he passed to me, and he gestured for me to put it on.
It is nothing to me, what people choose to drape themselves in, but all the same how I did admire that cloth as I tied it across my chest. How gloriously black and lustrous my skin did look against the chalky white.
Soon enough, we were close enough to hear it; the roiling hubbub that these great mounds gave out. On the big stone steps ahead, there was a scene of great activity: people jostling, baskets and pots being passed up.
As our boat came flush with the stone, the leader of my captors took my left arm in one hard hand, and pulled me off the boat with him. My legs seemed all at once to have no strength in them, but he pulled me on. Another man followed us up; the other two stayed with the boat. I found I could not make my calculations. What was the right thing to do here, and what was the wrong? I looked back at the men on the boat, and if I could have, in my alarm then, I might have run back to them.
Instead I was taken up the steps and through a hole in the side of a giant termite mound. Inside there were so many people, all in pieces of dyed cloth of very many colours, and all of them looking so strange to me, like no people I had ever seen. The unfamiliar stink of them hit me hard in the back of my throat.
Pushing through, my captors took me to a large open space inside the mound. Here there were many people shouting, and others tied up to posts. My captors held me out in front of them, and began shouting too. People turned to look at me.
We were there a handful of heartbeats when an old woman came through the crowd to stand before us. She was wrapped from head to foot in black cloth, and she was holding out a small, shining object, that later I knew to be a silver shekel.
I felt my captors let go of me.
What I did not know then, amongst so many things, was that in this new land, here in Sumer, the temples had first choice in the slave markets, by ancient right, and the price they offered, one standard piece of silver, could not be refused.
The old woman crooked one finger at me, turned, and walked off. For a heartbeat I stood just where I was, then slowly, then more quickly, I followed on behind the old woman.
She did not look back at me, but kept on going, and I followed the black hem of the old woman’s dress through the shouting, sweating, heaving crowd.
I knew that along that thin line, my life thread ran.
One foot in front of another, I followed on behind the woman.
One step and then the next.