Free The Children of the Sun by Christopher Buecheler Page B

last Amun Sa spoke.
    “I offer forgiveness for your clumsiness gladly, for truly I think the fault belongs to that damned pickpocket. As for ridding me of your presence, that I cannot allow. I find your presence pleasant.”
    Ashayt felt her cheeks warming, but she said nothing.
    “May I accompany you to the market, Ashayt-from-the-desert?”
    “If it would please you, my Lord,” Ashayt said.
    “Then let us be on our way, for it would please me very much.”
    Amun Sa bent, and picked up her basket, and started forth. Ashayt, confused and startled both by this stranger’s actions and by the overwhelming desire within her that she could not seem to force down, stared for a moment in surprise. Then, with no other options immediately available to her and no reason to search for any, she followed him.
     
    * * *
     
    They became lovers, of course. Ashayt supposed that her desire for Amun Sa had been naked on her face, in the way she moved, in the way she spoke. For his part, Amun Sa had never seemed to suffer from even a moment’s hesitation. He would tell her later that he had wanted her from the very moment he had helped her stand up in that dusty alley.
    They had not lain together that night, nor for weeks afterward, but he had been waiting for her at the market the next day, and the day after that. As he helped her sell her bread, they told each other of their lives. Ashayt learned that Amun Sa was twenty-six, and had been married to the daughter of a powerful governor since the age of fifteen. He and his wife hated each other, and they spent time together only when absolutely necessary.
    “She is an ill-bred, illiterate shrew that cares only for acquiring jewelry and stuffing her face with delicacies – while the people her father governs starve,” he told Ashayt one day as they walked along the river’s edge. Ashayt, who could not read herself and who had never tasted anything that might be described as a delicacy, had kept her mouth shut.
    “I wish so very much to be rid of her,” Amun Sa muttered, mostly to himself, as they walked along the river’s edge.
    “Could you not leave her and take for yourself … another woman?” Ashayt asked him, careful to keep her voice neutral.
    “I would do so gladly, but we were wed at the command of my King, and I have been forbidden to divorce.”
    “Yet you do not wish to be with her.”
    “I do not. She has taken command of my finances like a good wife but wastes our income on nonsense. She has borne me but two children, and not because she is barren, but rather because it is an effort to kindle any desire for her, an effort to bring her to my bed, and an effort even more to convince her to perform her duties as a wife.”
    Ashayt, who at the time had only a vague notion of what those duties entailed, felt her cheeks warming. I would perform them for you, she thought. I would do whatever you asked.
    Amun Sa was looking at her now and she could not meet his gaze, but she knew he must have guessed at some of these thoughts for she heard him laugh quietly. He stopped walking and stood looking out at the expanse of blue water, typically so wide, but grown now sluggish and thin from drought. Ashayt stood next to him, also looking out, wondering why the Gods had put this man before her yet saddled him with an unbreakable marriage.
    “I should let you return to your family,” Amun Sa said after a time.
    “They will not miss me yet for a little while,” Ashayt said. It was not precisely the truth, but neither would her foster parents object if she returned home later than normal.
    “Yet I must let you go. I must, for both of our sakes.”
    “Why, my Lord?”
    “I fear that if I remain any longer in your presence, I will ask you to do things with me that men and women sometimes do, when they are free. When they wish to show that they care for each other. That they desire each other.”
    It was the most direct statement of his feelings for her that he had yet made, and