Free Daughters of the Nile by Stephanie Dray Page A

Africa. “It stretches farther than your eye can see! We bridged rivers in five places and looped around the landscape where shale or other soft stones are prone to landslides.”
    Julia feigns a little yawn. “Wake me when you’ve finished marveling at standard engineering, will you? Honestly, you’re worse than Agrippa. We have aqueducts in Rome, you know. Soldiers too.”
    She’s speaking of the Legio III Augusta, which is overseeing the construction. Ordinarily, the officers show me only the barest modicum of respect, but now that I’m in the company of the emperor’s daughter, the highest-ranking officer makes haste to welcome us into their camp and boast of their aqueduct.
    It’s a rough place, here on the river. Alongside the surveyors and engineers, there are men at hard work with picks and shovels. Laborers run pipes, sweating under the sun, while stiff-necked soldiers guard the dusty camp from the raiders on the frontier.
    While we survey the marvel from the vantage point of a watch post, I hear Tala sharply scold the children in a Berber dialect I’ve learned. I turn to see Pythia and Tala’s son Ziri standing close together, innocent of any wrongdoing. But my daughter is kneeling in the dirt beside a cage of camp dogs, trying to give them a drink from a water skin.
    “What is she doing?” Julia asks.
    Groaning, I give a shake of my head. “My daughter can resist no creature under the sky . . .”
    My big Berber woman tries to haul my daughter away from the dogs, but Isidora is so intent on the animals in the cage that she actually struggles. “Can’t you see he’s hurt?” my daughter shouts, slapping at Tala’s tattooed hands.
    Never before has she treated her nursemaid in such a way and it shocks me. “Isidora! Shame on you. Tala is trying to protect you. You don’t know those dogs. Do you want them to bite you?”
    “But he’s not a dog,” Dora cries, sniffling. “He’s a boy!”
    I march to her side, frustrated by the increasing frequency with which my daughter says strange things to vex me. Peering into the cage, I’m brought up short. There, curled up on the straw amidst the caged hounds, is a little boy with cinnamon-kissed skin. A gash across his dirtied cheek is caked with dried blood and his filthy fingers splay over a festering wound in his side.
    I think the boy is dead, so I startle when his agonized eyes pop open and fasten on mine. “Sweet Isis!”
    Julia comes up behind me, demanding of the centurion, “Why is this boy in a cage?”
    The centurion, who has, thus far, forced himself to politeness for our inspection, clears phlegm from his throat. “He’s a raider.”
    A raider , he says! The boy can be no more than eight or nine years old. He’s a scrawny, pathetic thing, mangier than the dogs that sniff around him. He is a bag of bones I could rattle to death with one hand, so my lips curl with contempt when I say, “A fearsome warrior, I’m sure. No doubt it took the whole legion to subdue him.”
    “Just about,” the centurion replies. “Little bastard bit half the ear off the soldier who captured him. He was riding with Berber raiders from Numidia. Garamantes, maybe.”
    The condition of the boy gives rise to my anger. Straightening to my full height, I look the centurion in the eye. “I was told Lucius Cornelius Balbus rid us of the Garamantes. Isn’t that why he was granted a Triumph in Rome?”
    The centurion shrugs. “We caught the raiders trying to steal the livestock from a farm after they’d set fire to the granary. We spared this one on account of his age. If he lives, maybe he’ll fetch a price.”
    They’re going to make a slave of the boy. It’s not the worst thing they could do to him, by far. So near to the frontier, it would be risky to try to find the boy’s tribe, not to mention more trouble than any legionary soldier would bother with. No Roman magistrate would have any interest in the matter either. What are the soldiers to do? They