She didn't learn the word "irony" until many years later, but if Callisto had known the word, she'd have known it was what she was experiencing now.
Not that long ago, she and her playfriends had fantasized, often, about what it would be like to live in a grand palace, with marble walls and comfortable furniture, surrounded by nobles and servants. Their real futures, of course, would involve marriage to acceptable, strapping young village lads, hard work on their farms, and motherhood.
Then one day, the army of the warrior woman Xena had swept through Cirra, and young Callisto's world had turned upside down.
Now she was walking with a servant girl, through the granite and marble halls of a grand palace that was far beyond what her inexperienced child's mind could have imagined… and it was her peaceful future as a wife and mother, that had become a mere daydream.
Her life had been a waking nightmare since Xena's attack. Cowering just inside the door of her family home, she had seen her elder sister assaulted by three of Xena's soldiers. Seen her sister fight back against the men, and die for it. Seen her mother, Arleia, cut down by the swords of the same soldiers- her blood had spattered Callisto's face as she fell. In her dreams, she could still taste it. She had seen the village put to the torch, the people being slaughtered all around her.
She had managed to slip away, unseen, in the smoke and the chaos, and had come upon two other children and one of the village women in the woods nearby. The woman had tried to lead them to the next village, to safety, but she hadn't known there would be slavers following in Xena's bloody wake. The men had captured Callisto and her companions and carted them away.
A port. A slave ship. She had endured much on that voyage; such indignities that no woman- or man- should have to endure at the hands of other humans.
They had come to this strange place, dry and hot. She had been put up on the auction block like a piece of livestock, and sold there.
She understood she was now in a land called Persia, and she was now a slave to the house of His Most Excellent Majesty, the Sultan Farhid al Suleiman.
