King of Thieves

Chapter Two: Dawn of the Day

The night was cold and the wind like powerful blows upon his naked back. The watery light of the moon led them through the desert dunes, now dark monoliths that sank into the blurry, indigo stained horizon. Above their heads were the bright white stars scattered across the sky and blinking intermittently. Shmuel pressed as much of his exposed skin as possible against the horse's steaming sides, but his teeth still chattered as the beast trod through the sands at an even clip. Some time long after the last buildings on the outskirts of the city slunk into the darkness behind them, the one called Renpet pulled a spare cloak from the pack strapped to his horse's rump and passed it to him.

The gift did not come without a warning. "It's a little dirty," he admitted with a breathless chuckle, concealing the lower half of his face with a cupped palm as if he wished to whisper a secret to an invisible person next to him. "We haven't had a chance to wash it, so I apologize for the smell."

Shmuel nodded gratefully anyways, taking the coarse linen cloth and shivering as he wrapped it over his shoulders. No matter how clean one tried to keep their home in the Hebrew slums, it always reeked of the human scents of sweat and filth. Lifting the edge of the cloak to his nose, Shmuel thought that it would hardly compare. It was probably just a spare saddle blanket that smelled a little too strongly of horse dung. However, a moment later he drew back sharply, nearly falling right off the horse as he found out that sweat and filth was not what Renpet meant by dirty.

"This smells like..." He did not finish his sentence, interrupted by the thief boy's soft chuckles. Shmuel did not quite remember his name, Nek-something or another. Egyptians had such difficult names sometimes. The boy tossed a smile over his shoulder, but the motion was over so fast that he could hardly catch hold of his features, only that he was indeed young, maybe even a year younger than Shmuel himself.

"Want to switch? I don't mind the smell."

Shmuel blanched at the admission, ignoring the offer. "Don't mind?" he asked in a strained, high pitched voice on the verge of snapping at the seams. "It smells like blood!"

Shmuel was no stranger to that scent, either. He had experienced far too much of it in his young life, but most people he knew at least tried to wash the scent from their clothes, if not the stains. That someone could actually come to tolerate such a wretched scent was beyond him. Shmuel leaned closer to the thief boy, peering at his face from behind, and his expression softened at the truth he saw there.

Shmuel was used to reading expressions, if only to tell with ease when the overseer or their master was in a good or foul mood in order to avoid a lashing or confiscation of what little privileges they had. The distinctly pleasant smile he saw on the thief boy's face wasn't the smile of one who enjoyed the scent of blood, human or otherwise.

He declined the offer, making sure to not press the linen anywhere close to his nose. It was fine, he tried to tell himself; he had dealt with much worse than a blood scented blanket in his seventeen years of living.

Their nighttime ride stretched into the next morning, the three travelers speaking little as their mounts plodded across the desert sands. On occasion, Shmuel heard Renpet mutter strange incantations under his breath, prayers to some god of his to keep them safe in the wilds of the desert lands. Throughout each and every prayer, both Shmuel and the thief boy were silent. Only once or twice the two brothers spoke to each other in half-sentences and mostly about whether or not they were traveling in the right direction.

Now that the sun was starting to rise, staining the sky a light and hazy blue, Shmuel looked upon the horizon and realized for the first time since the moment he chose to follow this stranger that he was free. Though his limbs were sore with exhaustion and he wanted nothing more than to sleep after having stayed up all night riding the horse, he realized that he was breathing clean and cool desert air, free of the threat of the overseer's whip at his back. As warmth seeped into the Egyptian landscape, Shmuel started to laugh gently, eyes alighting with tears that did not fall.

Renpet, who had taken up a position at the rear of their procession, started in surprise. He cast a curious glance over his shoulder at their new companion. Shmuel saw a smile spread across his lips, not one of cruelty or mocking, not even the wry ones that his brother seemed to give, but a genuinely happy smile. His quiet laughter fading, Shmuel stared at the desert sands. Ahead of them a large town was coming into view and just beyond its borders, the Nile and its live-giving waters.

"Egypt's sunrises are deceivingly lovely, aren't they?" Renpet mused as they slowed to a walk, the flat-topped peaks of buildings beginning to come into view on the horizon. "Hard to believe it gets so hot later in the day. Is this the first time you've been out of the city?"

"Yes," Shmuel said with a startling cough. As he tried in vain to clear his throat, he realized that the source of his frog-like croak was the fact that he had not drunk a single sip of water since the extremely short break the slaves had taken ten minutes before the thief boy entered his life. Said boy slowed his horse enough for their calves to brush each other. He leaned over and handed Shmuel a water skin, which he accepted with a grateful nod. "Thanks."

"Sorry," the thief boy apologized immediately, glancing away as if the sand dunes slowly coming into harsher contrast with the sky were incredibly interesting. "I forgot about that. No wonder why you weren't talking much."

"Yes, yes," Renpet hummed with an apparent roll of his eyes. "Dying of thirst can do that to a man, Min."

"Min?" Shmuel stared at Renpet as he sipped at the refreshingly cool water. Renpet merely laughed at his expression, clearly as amused as Shmuel was confused. He was quite sure that the thief boy's name had been much different - and by different he meant much, much longer and harder to say.

"Nekhtamin, Min, same person," Renpet explained briefly. "My brother's named after a goddess, so it's a bit hard to give him a good nickname. Can't exactly go around calling him 'Nekh', now can I?"

Shmuel didn't understand the dilemma at all, but then again he knew the name of only one Egyptian god - Ra - that was spoken of so often and with such reverence that he would have had to been daft not to learn it.

"Are you all named after your...gods?" Shmuel asked haltingly. Even the word gods felt awkward on his tongue, for how could there be such a vast amount of supreme beings in existence at all? If either of the Egyptian boys noticed his faulty pronunciation, they chose not to comment. Shmuel was quite sure that they had never even spared a single thought for his people's God, so he considered the possibility that they assumed he would know theirs, having lived in this country all his life.

Renpet shook his head vigorously, invoking a deep and long-suffering groan from his brother. "No, of course not! I'm not named after a god; nefer means beautiful and pet refers to the sky. But there are plenty of people who are named after gods, yes, like Nekhtamin. Or...or the Pharaohs! I'm sure it's similar among your people."

Shmuel nodded for simplicity's sake, having a hard time following Renpet's rapid Egyptian, let alone try to explain concepts he knew only in Hebrew to the pair. It seemed as if they had already moved on from the topic of naming conventions; the twins now chattered quietly as they rode alongside each other. Every now and again, one would break into muted laughter and try to smack the other on the shoulder.

"I wish that I could have seen the looks on those priests' faces when they saw what we stole," Nekhtamin sighed longingly. He reached behind him and patted the lumpy pack strapped to his horse with a wide grin. "It was stupidly easy, too."

His brother shook his head and reached over, trying to hit him over the head and failing, his horse jerking in protest of the sudden movement. "That's nothing to be proud about," he scolded without real malice. As they drew closer to the outlying residential area around the city, they could just make out the tiny forms of people crawling down to the riverside to bathe and clean their linens. It was a fairly large town with a port that was already crowded with workers and boats unloading their cargo.

The sky was quickly easing into a lavender hue, the first lines of pink and gold seeping into the horizon. The sand beneath their feet was still cool to the touch, but the ghoulish shadows that their forms cast on the ground were beginning to lengthen and emerge from the darkness of the night. Renpet moved around Shmuel's still form, tapping his shoulder just once to indicate that he wanted the blood stained cloak back.

Shmuel shook it off his shoulders with haste, handing the foul thing over gingerly. Renpet chuckled at his disgust and folded it neatly, shoving all of their traveling cloaks into the pack. Shmuel still wondered why they had three cloaks - why one was stained with blood - but he held his tongue. He had always been good at keeping silent, never asking the questions that swirled around in his mind. What happened yesterday was just...

Looking out over the port town, seeing the Nile from such a distance, and having an expanse of seemingly endless desert at his back had distracted him from the reality of what his life had become in the last few hours. Surely his family thought him dead, perhaps killed by the thief, perhaps killed by the guards in his escape. Suddenly, this novel sight was no longer so brilliant. A sharp pain burrowed deep into his chest at the familiar faces of his family - his younger brothers and sisters, his older brothers, and his mother who was long gone from this world.

Sure, he was free, but they were still in chains. Sure, he was free, but he was also a fugitive who was no doubt implicated in a crime he didn't commit.

"Is this...Khmun?" Shmuel asked after remembering the conversation that the two had held when he first met Renpet.

Now that it was getting lighter, the sky dyed a delicate pink the color of a newborn babe's cheeks, he could really get a good look at the two and was surprised to find that there weren't many differences at all. Renpet had a sharper, more well defined face, but they looked surprisingly similar. Shmuel was no stranger to twins of course; one of his childhood friends' sisters were twins.

Nekhtamin grinned as they started walking towards the town, having motioned for Shmuel to get off the horse. He gathered the leather reins of both his and Shmuel's horses and passed them to Renoet, who was still sitting atop a golden red mount. Now that it was light out, he saw how the beast's coat burned like the desert sands or the blazing sunset. "We're not at Khmun yet, to answer your question. That's further down the Nile, all the way in Lower Egypt. It'll take more days than we're prepared to face in the desert to get there. This town's called Gebtu and it's pretty big, but that's just perfect."

"Perfect as in...easier to hide?"

"See, he thinks like a thief already!" Nekhtamin directed his exclamation towards his brother, who turned away with a huff of disdain and adamantly crossed arms.

"I never said otherwise!"

"You were thinking it. You were definitely thinking it! You think being a thief's such a horrible thing."

"Well, it's certainly not going to guarantee us a long and prosperous life! And we're stealing from the gods, in case you forgot! They'll smite us for sure."

They were like any other pair of siblings Shmuel had ever met. At least, ones who got along. Watching them bicker and push each other lightly on the shoulders had him remembering his own siblings, his older brothers who would ruffle his forever dusty and unruly hair with long-suffering chuckles.

"Are you going to sell...you know, this stuff?" Shmuel nodded down at the rough canvas pack in his arms. It was deceptively heavy. They said that they had stolen temple treasures - that had to mean gold. Shmuel had seen scarce amounts of the expensive material, just catching the occasional glimpse of it in the streets, worn by some official or a rich lady accompanied by her modestly dressed handmaids.

"We'll just lay low for now," Renpet said, looking him over with a critical eye. Shmuel shrunk back, knowing very well what he was examining. "And get you cleaned up. You look like you have one foot in the afterlife already."

"What about you?" Shmuel asked.

"Oh, I'm-"

"Renpet's taking care of the horses," Nekhtamin interrupted as he trotted forward, the unwieldy weight of the lumpy saddlebag not bothering him in the least as he slid down a gentle slope of sand. "Horses are only for the rich and the army, so it'd be stupid to take them into the city. But it'll take forever to get to Khmun if we go by foot. Not to mention we might get finished off by Set, god of chaos, before the Medjay ever find us."

"I hardly think they'll send the Medjay after a pair of petty thieves," Renpet said, his voice fading away as he headed away from Shmuel and Nekhtamin. "And please don't give them a reason to want our heads on a pike by the time I get back, Min!"

The slightly shorter and much less muscular boy tossed his head to the inky blue sky and laughed so lightly that Shmuel might have missed it if he wasn't walking right next to him. Hearing that sort of laughter for the first time in years, the laughter of someone who at that very moment could care less about what happened in the past or what would occur in the future, Shmuel couldn't help but smile.

After the sun had already started to turn the sky a golden hue and the azure blue of the night faded into a lighter shade, the remaining two reached the edges of the port town, which was already stirring to life. People moved quietly, slinking out of homes to set up shop or cleaning themselves before work. Muscular laborers with calloused hands and dressed in nothing but loincloths moved together in groups. Merchants off to the port or the market wore clean white linens.

The two boys in their dusty and sand-encrusted clothes kept to the side streets, slipping through alleyways between homes and staying away from anyone with curious eyes. Nekhtamin led the way, as solemn and quiet as he was last night, running away from the marketplace guards with a Hebrew slave tailing him.

Why did he do it? Why, when no other Egyptian before that point had ever looked straight at Shmuel and saw him as a human being? Even now Nekhtamin and his brother gave Shmuel no special attention, but neither did they ignore his existence altogether. Instead, they had chosen to bring him along on whatever journey they were on, even though they knew nothing about him aside from his name and his former work.

"Were...were you two slaves once?" Shmuel asked in a low voice as they crept along the cool walls of the housing district.

"Hm? No." Nekhtamin didn't ask why Shmuel had assumed such a thing and didn't sound like he particularly wanted to know, but he answered without missing a beat. "Our parents were farmers."

Shmuel frowned. Such an answer didn't explain much. He didn't know too much about the other slaves in Egypt, having seen mostly Hebrew slaves his entire life, but he knew that Egyptians could be made slaves, too.

"We're here!" Nekhtamin exclaimed softly. He went up to the dingy wooden door of someone's home and knocked. The motion made the rotting beams groan in protest. The Egyptian boy turned around with a smile. "This is Abt's home. She's a friend of ours, sort of."

Before Shmuel could ask what 'sort of' meant, the door creaked open and a woman emerged. She looked older, closer to Shmuel's mother's age before she passed away, but the lines of her face were much more severe. She greeted them with a frown, which stayed on her lips even as she ushered them inside. Her dark eyes fell upon Shmuel and narrowed considerably. However, she continued to move about her home with swift motions, entering the house's only other room in a flurry of dust smeared linen.

"Get up, you two lazy bastards!" she rasped with a few resounding smacks in the other room. Shmuel's eyes widened, but he didn't dare move. Looking to the remaining twin, he saw that his traveling companion was quite relaxed. In fact, Nekhtamin seemed to be vaguely smiling as the woman reemerged with a deep roll of her eyes. She grabbed a roughly moulded clay pot from the ground and shoved it at the nearest person - Shmuel. "Toss this on their heads if they don't wake up in the next five minutes. I suppose you'll be wanting breakfast, huh? And where's that brother of yours? You know, the nice one?"

"Yes please!" Nekhtamin chimed, breaking away from their tight triangular formation to dump the packs along the far wall. Shmuel glanced into the pot, turning it slightly and hearing water slosh about inside. The clay's rough texture against his hands reminded him of the crude watering jugs his own parents had in their home. "He's settling the horses down. Should be back in two hours or so."

Shmuel wondered exactly how they intended on hiding three horses in the desert, but he held his tongue and shifted in place, really hoping that there was only water in this pot.

"So, who's the kid?" The woman, Abt apparently, pointed sharply to Shmuel. "Another of your lackeys?"

"How many times do I have to tell you, they're not lackeys; they're my friends! And this is...Um, your name, what was it? Foreigners' names are always so hard to remember."

Shmuel recoiled with a dark glare of resentment that startled even himself. "It's Shmuel. Your name are much harder, you know."

The other boy laughed and dismissed his distaste with a wave of a hand. "No it's not. Nekh comes from Nekhebet, right eye of Ra and goddess of Upper Egypt. Renpet's name is nefer for beauty and pet for sky. Yours is the name that sounds weird."

Shmuel quieted. Indeed, there were many Hebrew slaves in Egypt, but they were far outnumbered by their masters. There had never been a single Egyptian who had bothered to ask his name. Mostly, he was just called "boy" if someone really needed to catch his attention.

No one in the room paid him any heed once he quieted down, the woman preparing what looked and smelled to be day-old bread and lumpy onions and radishes. Nekhtamin had started sorting through the packs and Shmuel stood in the center of the room, holding the water pot as he glanced about uncertainly.

"That's five minutes already," Abt called at last. "Go wake those two idiots up."

Before she was even finished speaking, a loud clamor came from the other room; the short figure of a child no more than twelve stumbled out from the dim area of the house with his shendyt half falling off his waist. The unbalanced side-ponytail that younger kids seemed to wear wasn't even in a ponytail yet; the tangled mess of hair whipped to the side as he turned to the guests.

"I'm up, I'm up!" he said hurriedly. When he saw the guests in his house, he instantly brightened, running up to Nekhtamin with a wide smile across his tanned face. "It's Min! You're back already? How long you staying for? Where's Renpet?"

Nekhtamin leaned down and patted the boy on his head with a quirky smile. "Just a few days," he said apologetically. "And Renpet's down at the oasis. Now go wake your father before our friend here pours water over his head."

The young boy slunk away, sounds of a scuffle soon coming from within the other room. Shmuel lowered the water pot, his arms vaguely aching. Normally such a light burden would hardly bother him, but the rising sun outside was a painful reminder that he hadn't slept at all last night. Nekhtamin seemed to be just fine as he bustled about, separating foods wrapped in linen cloths from the gleaming treasures they filched from the temple. Shmuel found himself peering over Nekhtamin's shoulder, staring in wonder at the gold coins, sculptures, and necklaces. There wasn't much, only about seven items in all, but it was more than Shmuel had ever seen in his life.

Nekhtamin glanced over his shoulder, laughing in amusement when Shmuel stumbled away. He lifted a delicate necklace made of rows of small, glimmering chains, letting the impossibly thin links slide through his fingers. Next he lifted the gold statue, frowning as he tested the weight in his hand. The multitude of gold coils sat in the dirt at his feet. The young boy came over to take the food away - a few loaves of oddly fragrant bread, strips of dried meat, and fresh garlic, onions, and cucumbers. In the other pack was a jug containing some sort of drink.

"Disgusting, isn't it?"

Nekhtamin lifted one of the gold coins and held it up for Shmuel to see, abruptly dropping the circular trinket in the palm of his hand. He rolled the item between his fingers, staring at the design etched into its surface and wondering just how anyone could craft such a delicate thing. He glanced over at Nekhtamin curiously; he sounded as though he were speaking through a mouthful of sand. His hand tightened into a fist around a handful of coins.

"Look how much they have hidden away in the temples!" He threw the money to the dusty floor with a hiss. "Food and gold in abundance, yet they won't even lower our taxes when the harvest's bad."

Shmuel watched the other boy's lips twist into a sneer. His dark eyes flickered shut for a little longer than a second before he jumped to his feet, running into the next room and reemerging with an older man who he assumed was the woman's husband. Not that he could really tell - they all looked about the same to him. Egyptians, that was.

"Was the harvest that bad this year?" Shmuel asked. Of course he had heard others talk about it in the shop, but stonecutters were not really ones for gossip, as he had learned over the years. They spent their days bent over their work, which was always far too loud to be heard at anything short of a scream. Most of the workers and apprentices only spoke during their lunch break.

Nekhtamin fixed him with a crooked gaze. "Where have you been?" he muttered. "Yeah, the Nile flooded too much this year even though they've been building so many temples and monuments to the gods. It's all anyone's been talking about recently."

"What do the building projects have to do with it?" Shmuel questioned perhaps a bit too eagerly if Nekhtamin's strange glance in his direction was anything to judge by.

"It's Pharaoh's duty to uphold ma'at, the correct and right order of all things in this universe." Nekhtamin's voice was light and rhythmic, the tune of his words no doubt familiar to him and sounding slightly rehearsed. "When the pharaoh fails to maintain the balance, the natural world falls out of order, and in those years the Nile may not flood enough or it may flood too much. Either way, the harvests in those years won't be good."

"But everyone says that this country is doing great." Shmuel was reminded of the few clients who came into the stonecutting shop to chat with his former master, Mehy. They often said such things. With the amount of business they got by order of the pharaoh's vizier and officials themselves, he had thought that Egypt was flourishing.

Again Nekhtamin scoffed loudly. "That's what they'd like you to believe. They say that the pharaoh's building so many monuments to appease the gods, and maybe that's his intention, but those damn taxes he keeps raising aren't do anyone out here any good. What's the use of a good flood this year if we're starving in the meantime?"

"You don't even pay taxes, you brat," Abt shot back at him, a sharp smile revealing rows of slightly crooked teeth. She set a series of clay bowls and plates on the low, badly splintering wooden table in the middle of the main room. Everyone started eating, muttering unintelligible prayers of thanks to their gods for the food.

Though none of them bothered to stare, Shmuel felt somewhat ill at ease praying to his God, the Hebrew God. It had always been such a natural motion within his own home and his own community, as derelict as it had been. Even though he wasn't always sure if his prayers would reach God or if God really and truly cared, it felt as natural as breathing to offer thanks. But here among strangers who all uttered their thanks to their own gods, the words suddenly caught in his throat.

He knew that their gods and goddess weren't real - there were so many to keep track of that he wondered if it was perhaps just one strange memory game - but how could he protest when his own God had done nothing for him in all his years of living, either?

Shmuel smiled tentatively in thanks as Abt slid a plate over to him. Everyone had a share of the stolen bread, along with the onions and radishes from this small family's garden out back. He lifted the chunk of fragrant bread, head reeling from the mere thought that they had baked precious spices into it. It took him a moment to even take a bite, mouth watering at the richly herbal taste, even though the bread itself was a bit hard and stale.

"So Sahtu, you know what apprenticeship you want to take yet?" Nekhtamin asked the younger boy, who was fidgeting while he nibbled at an onion. The twelve year old nodded to the older man who was busy trying to fix his clothes with a great yawn that filled the house. He spared a glance towards Shmuel, staring at him with a perplexed frown on his face, but he shrugged after a second and came to sit next to his wife.

"Same as Nez. I might as well be of some use to you," he said with a little smile that seemed to Shmuel more like the quirky smirk of a child up to no good. His naturally high, boyish voice rose in pitch as he blurted out words that came so fast Shmuel could hardly keep up. "I'm not so smart like you two and I don't want to ever end up like my parents. Nez said he'd put a good word in for me in a few moons. Can you believe it? Me, a goldsmith?"

"That's great! It's a good trade." Nekhtamin nearly knocked over the water jug in his haste to throw himself over the younger boy's back with a laugh. "I'm so proud of you! Our little Sahtu's gonna be a goldsmith!"

It was somewhat amazing how Nekhtamin's voice took on such a gaudy lilt. Sahtu, whose unruly hair was not yet tied up in the odd single side-ponytail that most Egyptian male children seemed to have, tried to shove Nekhtamin away with a grumble. The two adults at the table didn't laugh, but their eyes were creased with genuine happiness at watching the two boys bicker and tousle on the ground.

Shmuel watched them quietly. Before he could lose himself in memories of his own, memories of the little happiness that he and his family had claimed for their own in the Hebrew slums, Nekhtamin had pulled away and tapped him on the shoulder.

"You're awfully quiet. You can relax, you know. It's safe here. We've known Abt and Nezem for years."

"That's...that's not it. Just..." How could he tell the brightly smiling teenager that the familial happiness contained in this room simply caused him pain, knowing that this was exactly what he left behind in Thebes? How could he tell this carefree boy-thief of how he knew that no matter how hard they tried to accommodate him, he would never really be one of them: an Egyptian.

Shmuel heard nothing from the other boy, whose sharp features were even more defined under the morning sunlight. He nibbled on the bread, his stomach clenching in anticipation of more food than he had seen in a long time. Come to think of it, perhaps their lowered rations were due to what Nekhtamin had called a bad harvest. Lately, it had been getting hard to acquire even the basic ingredients to make the cheapest bread.

"Sahtu's not their son," Nekhtamin said suddenly. His voice was so soft that Shmuel almost missed his words. Nekhtamin was watching the other two fool around with a small smile tugging at the corners of his mouth. "We met him over a year ago. We were still fooling around the streets of Khmun at the time; we stupidly went where we really shouldn't have been. I made that decision so quickly that Renpet really thought I was going to get us killed."

"Decision?"

"Mhm, just like you. Completely not in the plan, just happened."

"You're the one who made them think I was trying to escape in the first place..."

"Can't say I'm sorry that I did," Nekhtamin chuckled humorlessly. He nodded to the stripes of pale scar tissue that laced Shmuel's shoulders and back, as well as the deep grooves where the ropes had chafed at his skin day in and day out. "Even if you have to leave everything you've ever known behind, freedom's still better than all the gold in the world."

In that moment, Shmuel remembered the sight of the azure, predawn sky and the blazing golden red of the rising sun existing simultaneously on the same horizon. He remembered how, just a few hours ago, he was riding under the cold light of the moon with no one at his back to bellow orders or strike him with a whip. And for just that moment in time, he had come to understand with perfect clarity just what Nekhtamin was saying. If anyone had told him that leaving behind his loved ones was worth it for freedom, he might have disagreed.

It pained him to know that he really would throw everything away just to grasp that freedom.

Nekhtamin continued on. He didn't seem the oblivious type, but he never seemed to linger too long on any words of his that made Shmuel fall silent and contemplative. "Anyways, Sahtu's real parents were poor farmers with a lot of debt and a lot of kids. They sold him to the traders-"

"The slave traders?" Shmuel's voice dropped to a muddled hiss halfway as he realized too late that he had said the words far too loudly. Everyone turned to watch him with owlishly wide eyes. Suddenly it was quiet, only the faint thrums of sound from the outside world to be heard. "I, um..."

The loud thump of Nekhtamin's elbow striking the table made him start.

"People do that," he said darkly, eyes narrowing at some distant memory. Slightly behind him, Sahtu turned his head away, staring straight ahead at nothing. "Sell their own kids for just a few sacks of grain and vegetables."

"They couldn't help it!" Sahtu blurted in a strained voice that fluttered between steady and choked. His eyes, a lighter shade of brown than the twins, stared straight at Shmuel. "The harvest was bad that year...I have a lot of brothers and sisters...Of course they didn't want to, but. You know, they had to. Because my older brothers were already working in the fields and they didn't want to...to my younger sisters or brothers."

Suddenly, not even the light of the sun could disperse the gloom that had settled over them. It was Abt and her husband Nezem who finally moved, shuffling the occupants in the room around to return life to their limbs. Abt encouraged Sahtu to his feet, telling him to dry his tears and go to the river to bathe already, and Nezem moved to the pile of stolen gold and began to talk business with Nekhtamin.

"His parents sold him to be a slave..."

"It's not that rare," Nekhtamin muttered. More than sadness, his voice was laced with anger and his eyes burned at the sight of some distant memory that Shmuel did not have access to. "Sorry."

"What're you apologizing for?"

The other shook his head as he climbed to his feet, stretching his limbs out half-heartedly. "It's nothing. Nothing we can fix now, anyways. Now, why don't you get some rest? You must be exhausted."

Shmuel nodded. As if by some magic spell, his arms and legs were suddenly leaden like he was strapped to a block of stone. There was a faint ache behind his eyes, reaching deep within his head like a series of tiny, grasping hands. He was once again aware of the fatigue that had threatened to bring him to his knees before Nekhtamin even came crashing into his life.

Just as the golden light of the sun banished the last remains of the previous night's inky darkness, Shmuel settled against a cool, firm wall of the little house and fell into a deep sleep.

An edited chapter two. I removed Kenamon's POV, though he's not entirely gone from the story. Most of the events in this chapter are similar to the previous chapter three, just with some added dialogue. We'll be following Shmuel, Nekhtamin, and Nefer-renpet for the rest of the story.