Free Reincarnation by Suzanne Weyn

but she shook her head, waving it away. "I
    wish I could read, but my father believes education is wasted on a girl."
    "That's a shame," he sympathized. "Though I realize it is the common opinion, it's a stupid one."
    "I would like to learn to read," she admitted for the first time in her life. To have said this to anyone else would have been to invite scorn and ridicule so she never said it, barely allowed
    herself to think it. He was so different from everyone else, though. She felt that she had
    always known him and could trust him with her most secret thoughts. It made no sense and
    yet the feeling was so strong.
    "You should learn," he said. "I will teach you if no one else will."
    "Would you ? " she checked eagerly.
    He nodded. "I don't like the idea of anyone being kept down, especially you."
    "Why especially me?" she asked, surprised by her own boldness.
    A flush of color came to his cheeks. "Because you're not a silly girl. You deserve to learn."
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    "How can you tell?" she asked.
    "I just know," he murmured quietly. "We can start with this. It's a copy of a work by Herodotus the historian. It is his description of life in ancient Egypt. Though Greece rules
    Egypt now, it hasn't always been the case. It's very interesting to read about their old
    culture. I am told my mother was of Egyptian descent, though I never knew her."
    "I can see the Egyptian in you, just a bit," she said.
    "We'll read it together," he agreed. "Let me put this bird down first."
    She trailed him into the woods until they came to a campsite. There he gutted his gull and
    tied it upside down from a tree. "Is this where you live?" she asked.
    "I live wherever is convenient," he told her. "When you have no home it's easy to move as soon as you're discovered."
    "Don't you want a home?" she questioned.
    "I don't want anything other than to live each day as it comes. To want things is to be
    constantly disappointed."
    "You don't want a job or a family?"
    "Definitely not a job," he said with a laugh. "Any job is a form of slavery. You toil and labor like Hercules ... and for what? A few drachmas and an early death?"
    "Why are you so concerned about slavery?" she asked him. "You are not a slave."
    "Aren't you concerned about it ? " he countered. "A woman in Athens is a man's slave with no rights, no freedoms."
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    Hyacinth laughed with scorn. "I do not toil or labor like a slave. In fact, I do just about
    nothing all day. I would almost rather be a slave."
    "You're a silly girl to say that," he scolded. For the first time, she sensed disapproval from him, and was sorry for it. She remembered Charis telling her that he was the child of a slave
    and could be dragged into slavery himself. How foolish she must have sounded to him.
    "House slaves do all right," he went on, "but in the mines and quarries slaves know only a life of grueling toil with no respite."
    "I suppose you're right." She was eager to change the subject, realizing that she had
    sounded shallow and probably stupid to him. "Tell me what you have learned about ancient
    Egypt."
    Artem sat beside her on a flat rock and unrolled the scroll. "I'll point to the words as I read,"
    he said. "That way you'll get the sense of how the written words and the spoken words line
    up. It's how I began to learn," he said.
    Hyacinth was fascinated as he read the words of Herodotus to her. According to the Greek
    historian, many of the customs the Greeks thought of as their own had actually been
    brought back to Greece by travelers to Egypt. He claimed that even their gods and
    goddesses were simply versions of the Egyptian gods, that the Greek goddess of fertility,
    Demeter, was the same as the Egyptian goddess Isis, but only by another name, and
    Dionysus was known in Egypt
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    as Osiris. "Do you know that they had gods and goddesses who were half animal and half
    human, like Anubis the dog-headed god? They had two goddesses who were both half cat,
    half woman. They were named Bast and Sempket," he told