33. This Night – Black Lab
The soles of Kisara's feet were hardened after years of walking over shingle and shale-covered beaches. Likewise, her hands were slender and pale but calloused, and could wrench a fish from the water or de-feather a bird as easily as they could swing at her sides as she walked.
And she walked a lot.
She yearned for the ocean, but not the one that lapped at the bottom of the slave-ship that brought her to this dry land. She longed for the endless blue, the sheen of vividness that stretched from horizon to horizon. She wanted the lagoons of her childhood, where she and her brothers would play during the hottest part of the day, and the rock pools where crabs could be found. She wanted the steady shush of waves that rocked her to sleep at night, and the cool salty breeze that greeted her cheeks each morning.
Egypt was a huge country, and the parts of it she'd seen were like ancient skeletons – dry and hard and laughing at her with their skull-teeth dunes. Her strange colouring made people distrust her, though a few took pity on the skinny little thing who wandered with nomads when they tolerated her.
"I'm going home," she told herself, time and again. "I'm going to find the ocean, and a ship, and I'm going home."
Her brothers hadn't been captured by the slavers. Only she had been foolish enough to be caught. She had scars where they'd attached collars and cuffs, then tied her by her neck to other slaves in front and behind. The slavers didn't know about the sharpness of shells, though. They didn't know how a single slice with the one on her necklace, made every night throughout the long voyage and even longer trek, had whittled away the ropes until, one night when the moon was full, she escaped their encampment and their plans for her.
But she couldn't escape Egypt.
"Please, I don't want to die here, so far from home," she wept when she could go no further. Hungry, thirsty and exhausted, it was simple for another batch of slavers to pick her up, and she didn't even have the energy to fight them. "I don't want this unfriendly land to be my grave."
She never escaped Egypt, but that night, when a young boy crept to her cage, freed her and gave her a horse to travel on, she learned that Egyptians weren't all so hostile to a stranded foreigner like herself.
He had eyes like the sea, she thought as she bent over the horse's neck, turning his name over and over like the shiniest of beach pebbles: Seto, Seto, Seto. Blue like the sea. Like my sea. She added his name to her mantra and drew strength from the memory of his kindness and blue eyes.
And the day she died she looked into his eyes once more, and couldn't remember whether the sea she'd been searching for was forever on the horizon, or locked in his blue eyes.