Amun Sa and the Girl from the Desert
by Christopher Buecheler
This document is a spoiler-free excerpt containing two chapters from the upcoming novel The Children of the Sun by Christopher Buecheler. Learn more about The Children of the Sun and the II AM Trilogy at https://iiamtrilogy.com
Amun Sa and the Girl from the Desert
By Christopher Buecheler
Copyright © 2012 Christopher Buecheler.
All rights reserved.
https://www.iiamtrilogy.com/
https://writing.cwbuecheler.com/
Amun Sa and the Girl from the Desert is a work of fiction. Names, places, and incidents either are a product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
First Edition: September 1, 2011
Amun Sa and the Girl from the Desert by Christopher Buecheler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution - Noncommercial - No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available: please visit https://iiamtrilogy.com for contact information.
Cover Art by Karla Ortiz
Cover Design by Christopher Buecheler
Part I
The girl knelt over the grinding wheel, preparing the flour that would become the morning’s bread, and stared out over the vast floodplain that lay between her and the great river to the east. Her hands moved unconsciously, trained by years of repetition, and this allowed her mind to wander free. She contemplated the ecstasies of the previous evening and those that might come tonight. The sun had not yet come up over the hills beyond the river and already she was anxious for it to set.
She was not from this place, though she had lived here now for more than ten years, ever since Nubian warriors from the south had come to her tribe to loot and rape and murder. If there had been any other survivors, they had been scattered to the winds, and so she had begun the journey north alone. A girl of only nine years, she had by guile and luck and effort survived where most others would have perished, avoiding the teeth and claws of beasts, the swords of man, and the shackles of the slave caravans. She had left her home in the desert and traveled along the great river until she came to the outskirts of the capital city Ineb-Hedg, the seat of power where Kings had dwelt for centuries.
She arrived there with only the name her mother had given her, Ashayt, and the skills needed to make the firm, brown bread that everyone ate with every meal and fermented to make their beer. She was of a proud people, and the hardships she had so far borne had not stripped her of this pride, and so she refused to join the legions of beggars that could be found throughout the city. She instead went door to door, first inside the city’s walls and then out of them, until at last she found a family who could make use of her skills and would agree to take her in.
A childless couple with a meager few acres of land and only a handful of slaves, her benefactors would never be wealthy, but they were free and owed nothing to any man. They traded their grain and, soon, her bread at the markets, and while Ashayt knew they would never be able to provide her with a suitable dowry for marriage, she was nonetheless happy to become something like their daughter. She was from the desert, marked by her dark skin and many tattoos, and no man from this civilized world would want her anyway. Or so, at least, she had thought.
The flour milled, Ashayt set out to mix it with water in several large clay bowls. After this, she would leave the mixture in the fresh air for a time, so that the spirits would bless it and allow it to finish its transformation into dough. She would build up the fire under their stone oven and, when it was good and hot, she would take the dough, and kneed it, and form it into loaves. This she did every morning, and when the bread had cooked and cooled, she would put aside loaves for her family and for the slaves, and put the rest into her basket, and take it to market.
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 and 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 only 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.