I am not allowed to slump.

I am not allowed to rub ash through my hair.

I am not allowed to weep, or drool and run mad like David.

The voices rising and fading about me, I stare up at the sky and count. Not the curving jut of the roofs surrounding the bustling courtyard, not the vines and espaliers that still don't look like home, not even the wild herons returning to the sea with plangent cries.

I count my costs.

There is the illusion of power if somehow I am chosen, the opportunity to do some good, even if it is only raising an old man's youngest sons.

Then there is the more likely outcome of being used and disappearing, nameless, in a lone exile for the rest of my days.

Death seems preferable.

I drop my head as a trio of men approach, and the mosaics at my feet gleam in cracked circles of infinity.

Mordecai thinks I am such a piece, obscure and voiceless but vital to the pattern.

A sun-hot spear haft prods my neck. "Eyes up," comes in a cultured accent. I raise them, slowly, to the sun refulgent against the two guards' breastplates. The soldier to the left of the eunuch whistles, and the wood slacks against my skin.

This is when I have to count again, fast. A fast death now is better than a long slow life of emptiness, I know that.

I almost slump.

I almost stoop to rake dust from my sandals into my hair. I almost weep and drool and spit and cry out, waiting for the strikes, the order, the spearhead sinking between my ribs.

It is not fear that stops me.

My body is mine to defend, I know that, and I would consider it's death to be a victory over it's violating.

My mind and spirit are mine to defend, and their release from this body would be a victory over their silent caging.

But I carry more than myself, and so it is for Mordecai that I hold still under the appraising, appreciating, degrading. The silence of sacrifice, of submission. Sometimes for good, sometimes under the burden of other's wrongdoing; the sacrifice history is fullest of and it's telling is most devoid of.

The choice of a woman.

Why didn't she get a sword? I imagine agitated, naive women saying at that thought, seeing me standing small on cracked circles of infinity, the heat in my face and sweat down my spine. A knife? I would die before being sold like that! The coward, the ambitious swine...

But the youngest, the purest, the innocent without shards of dreams, they will say brave. They, those who do not know the price will say heroic, and it is for them that I will explain. That it was bravery, braver to make a woman's choice in a man's world, braver to give every last thing of myself for the remnant of my family, that it was unyielding strength that made me yield.

The men move on, accepting me into the next year of my choice, and I place a grimy foot where a mother-of-pearl chip fits between red feld-spar.

For such a time as this.