Free The Children of the Sun by Christopher Buecheler

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 knead 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 the bread 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 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