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They took the village in the early morning, striking a few hours before the dawn as was the custom of their leader. It was quick work. They finished the butchery before the sun even rose, hacking off the last heads and limbs, and raping the last of the women in the angry pink glow of pre-dawn. The commander, a giant beast of a man called Jint, was over seven feet tall and sun-darkened, almost black. He sat at the prisoner’s feet then, leaving the tidying-up to the forty-odd blades left in his party. He popped a wine skin and looked up over his shoulder at his captive.

They’d trussed Am’Ram on his rolling gallows like a holiday fowl. His legs were corded round and round with thick black hemp rope. His head, held still by what looked like a crown of ropes and knots, fastening him to the big wooden works. It had been the new God King’s idea to send his father’s killer out with the raiders, and Jint had been impressed with the young prince’s ruthlessness. This Wrock-Ramses hadn’t seen even seventeen years yet, but he was obviously possessed of the merciless judgment of his blessed father. Looking up at the old man watching his people erased off the face of the earth, though, Jint had to wonder if it even worth the trouble. He had good men busy for a month solid just making a gallows that could be easily pushed along in a war-march, one had died of heat stroke. “All that work,” thought Jint “And look at him. Is this even his village or was that a lie? He looks on as stone faced as if we were out hunting desert-pigs!”

And so he did. The village was a sixty mile haul from the glass palace and the country was hot this harvest season. Am’Ram had been trussed as such for the entire cursed thing, and yet he never even asked for water. His hands were bound so tightly that Jint could see the new skin where the rope was biting into his wrist, yet Am’Ram hadn’t so much as gasped for his discomfort. All during the two day movement, the men in his command evaporated like dew under the great Sun God while Am’Ram, burning and tossing on his rolling death-machine, just watched it all, a blank look on his face and the smallest ribbon of sweat far up on his forehead. Of the sixty riders, servants and scouts he’d brought to the raid, he counted only thirty six left. Only two of those had died at the hand of the enemy. The desert had eaten the rest.

Take this old man…

He held the wine skin in front of his slave’s face like to give him wine.

…and tell me: How are you enjoying my murdering here today? You see just over there, where your tent used to be, I believe, no? The woman, see how my men have their way with her one after the other. Her eyes are glazed and red I can tell you, and she’s as good as dead even as my people befoul her. I fucked her myself, sir! I was first. While I fucked her, I fucked her ass with my knife!

It wasn’t true, Jint hadn’t fucked anybody this day but by now it had become personal. Jint would see this man suffer one way or the other. Pharaoh had said to bring him back as he’d left, but the young God-King knew that accidents happen on the battlefield. Am’Ram opened his mouth for the wine then, as if he’d heard the thoughts in Jint’s head. The commander squirted a small blip of nectar into Am’Ram’s mouth and continued:

Your people are dying today, sir. All of them. Afterwards I’m going to march you to the top of the sky at the Stone Spear. Then I'm going to set you on fire, and fling you off. It will be as the new God King had bid me. You are beaten. The people will see the last of you as a falling star, crashing and burning at the whim of the God-King.

Am'Ram, swishing the sweet wine around in his mouth and finally swallowing just smiled, all the while holding the awful soldier’s gaze with his own. The smile however, slight, one sided, and - yes - maybe even a bit smug, enraged the Commander as if Am’Ram had slapped him dead in the face. He grimaced.

Ok, old man, have it your way. Remember my friend, we are a long, long way from the palace, and you are in rough company.

Am’Ram just regarded whim, leaving the weird smile on his face, and not averting his eyes until Jint gave an exhausted grunt. Throwing the empty wineskin at the prisoner, he stalked off in a hurry through the by-now very hot desert morning. The trussed man watched him go and maybe smiled just a bit more as his tormentor moved off.

***

The dark woman ran as fast as she could. She felt her child’s head bouncing and her skin rolling and sliding under the impacts of her footfalls and it sickened her. “I can’t stop my love,” she said as she ran over a brown arroyo towards a grassy, sandy neck in the slow-moving river. She saw the sun playing off a million mica chips in a sparkling, mid-morning flood of sunlight. She ran harder now, heaving her legs for the high grass. She hadn’t turned to look behind her the entire sprint to the river, but she knew they were back there, catching up. Just as she was beginning to get loose from the sightlines of the village, she heard a voice - gruff and dirty – yelling:

Ashet ashet! Ashay Ashet Shet! Stop girl…Stop girl at once!

She had not, and she would not. She was still booking along at top speed when she gained the high grass, slowing only when the saturation at the surface started sucking at her feet. She had to walk the last few feet searching out her steps in the bog. “Damn the tides,” she though, plodding and puzzling over which roots looked big enough. Then, clear as the Sun God himself, she heard a voice - MUCH closer than she’d expected - saying:

Shet! Timas ay. Timas - zo ee zo…

Now! The grass there. The grass. You here, I’m following.

Her bowels turned to water as the men - mere yards behind her now - smashed into the grass. She felt them breathing, and she threw her weight forward, and fell out of the grass just as she felt something - a slung stone she guessed - hit her hard in the back of the head. She was ok, but she had a fleeting thought that the wound might hurt later on, after all the excitement.



***



The noon of the day turned viciously hot. The men had stacked the bodies of the villagers by the hundreds. The tiny town seemed to have made a home for ten times as many people as one would think. Commander Jint was impressed that many people could fit in such a tiny space. He was even more impressed that his remaining soldiers (heat had even further winnowed the God King’s men. The thirty-six had become sixteen, with the rest unconscious or moved off to seek water and shade. It was near noon. The desert was baking. Jint kept flashing looks at the captive as he ran about shouting orders. More times than not he found Am ‘Ram staring right back through bands of black hemp enwrapping his head. Jint had told them to make sure the prisoner was still “tightly bound.” Three men in helmets and skirts and nothing else had wrapped him head to toe in hemp, leaving only spaces for eyes and mouth. The black rope drank the sun. Jint thought he saw the ropes themselves smoking at one point. His captive remained unimpressed.

Finally there were no bodies left to stack. Jint's men fell back, and began to argue about who would deal with building the fire. It was a long hard discussion too. The day was hell-hot even without actual flames. The men shuddered to think what a real, hungry, well-fed fire would do to the area with regard to breathing, and remaining on one’s feet. Jint, though, seemed invigorated. He clapped his hands and told all assembled to thank the prisoner over and over for the wonderful jobs he’d provided all of them. He made sure that each man there knew exactly how it was that they’d ended up here, now. He was about to suggest, outright, that they fire the man there, and then he was interrupted. Shouting behind him and voices hailing him. He turned to look across to the tree-line and saw two of his men returning. They were carrying a third person between them, each arm over the other man, like drunks carrying somebody even more drunk. Commander Jint cupped a hand over his eyes to get a better look at the third man. His mind was already confirming for him the surreal horror of what he was seeing, but something in a deeper part of him rejected it. They moved closer though, and after a while it became impossible to deny. Jint could only watch as they made their way toward the captive’s rolling gallows.

***

She didn’t understand why they were all staring at her. She felt certain the God King’s men hadn’t caught her, hadn’t seen what she’d done. Until she knew however, she was stuck in a weird sort of catatonia. She could think only about Moses, and the floating carriage that his father had designed only a few days ago. He'd designed it so that the infant could bathe in the river with his mother, instead of having to burn in the heat on the riverbank. Lessi was hidden inside herself like that almost all the way back up to the village, but when she saw her husband, her trance was broken, and she started to run.

It was his wife. The third man was Am’Rams good wife Lessi. All at once he knew what had happened, and he looked off in the distance to where the river peeled off onto the border, or the Western Desert. They were - he saw now - carrying her almost completely. Her head was bowed, there was something wrong though, he could tell. The binds around his head and face were still burning and his face swelled and pressed against them. His vision was just skewed enough so that he couldn’t quite see Lessi’s face. He knew she’d be crying though, because she’d done what he’d asked her. She would cry, he expected, for the rest of her days. He thought it through, cooking inside the tight, black ropes. He was wrapped to an oak-wood Joist almost three feet around and the wood was turning to a spiky porridge with his sweat mixing in, and softening it. The small of his back up to his shoulder blades was white-hot pain as the splinters ground into his flesh. They’d brought him his wife. He growled between the ties at his mouth, one word, low and heavy and unmistakable:

Untie.

***

Jint was amused. The crusty old gypsy had stayed quiet and awake all day while watching his family and his friends sliced into pieces before him and burned. He’d been tied to a post from before the sun came up until now, almost a full eight hours. The Commander had been looking all day for some sign, some token glance or tiny sound to acknowledge the horrors being delivered upon him. There had been none. The man Am’Ram had watched as hundreds of his blood kin were slaughtered. Their houses put to the torch and their lands set aflame, and he’d said nothing. He’d not wept. He’d not moaned. He’d not swooned or cried or even so much as swore. On a day when the God King lost twenty-four faithful, skillful, soldiers to simple heat and bright sunlight, there sat his captive, wrapped in black layers and trussed up with hands behind back. His eyes never wavered.

But then he called to him. More correctly, he called to anybody. The murderous slave wanted out of his ropes.

Eshellk, Eshellk a da et, a da et.

Untie, Untie. The wife. My wife.

Jint spoke the gypsy language enough to know what the request had been, and staring at the guy’s wife he had no doubt why. The girl’s face was fine enough, and her flowing pink gowns showed no sign of blood or penetration of any kind. It was when her head bowed that her husband could see the truth of what had happened out deep in the grass at the river’s bend. His good wife, whom he’d married at age eleven and stayed with for these forty-eight years, his beautiful wife, who’d given him two healthy, strong sons and unconditional love for all their days together. This, his wife, his life, had a throwing axe buried deep in the base of her head just before the spinal cord. She bowed and lolled her head and made desperate, confused noises. There was piss, and runny black shit running down her leg. She was looking at Am’Ram, but she saw nothing. Her eyes were rolling back to white, and then spinning in the sockets like bearings in a wheel. She started coughing, and a fine pink mist of blood clouded the air in front of her. She looked at him then full, becoming - for an instant - his wife. Jint, watching closely from a few feet away, summoned the men from the battlefield and had them take a security perimeter at forty feet. Soon Jint, Am’Ram, and his wife were alone inside a small, safe circle of armor. Jint spoke as he cut:

You’ll do your duty as a husband scum, and I will pray for you to step out of line every second you waste. Be quick so I don’t reconsider. For the Pharaoh, two enemy heads is always better than one. Take it…

And then he’d slammed a gleaming white-bone dagger into the slave’s hand, moving away to a safer, more defensively sound position. Jint was a brutal man, but he knew the Gods must be served, lest more ill luck befall his raiders on the way back home. The old warrior Am' Ram would have to give his damned wife mercy and swing the dagger himself. If the slave decided to get jumpy with him, then so much the better. He would be on him before any such decision could be fully formed, and at last the old slave-dog would trouble him no more. Am’Ram finished up cutting himself free and then everything was still, if only for a few moments.