The Children of the Sun (9 page)

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 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 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 had shouted in surprise and warning, but too late. He 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 he 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 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, he 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 offer 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.