Iron Axe by Steven Harper Page B

assailed her. Aisa should probably clean Helga up, but she put it off. Right now she needed a moment to herself. Aisa reached the open hearth just past the table and sat down. It was her allotted sleeping place. She kept it clean as best she could, but some bit of dirt or ash always hung about the spot—and her. The tripod hung empty overthe coals like the skeleton of a spider. In the morning it would be her duty to fill a kettle with water and hang it to heat for washing. She would be tired from lack of sleep, but at least
he
—Hamzu—had been warned.
    Aisa wrapped her arms around her shins and rested her chin on her knees, a shapeless bundle in the darkness. This spot was warm, more or less, and she could think about something besides the constant cold and never-ending hunger. She turned up the pleasurable thought that Hamzu would live, which drew from her a small, satisfied smile. Everyone called him
Trollboy
, but Aisa refused to use this demeaning nickname. Difficulty was, he had never told her his real name, so privately she called him
Hamzu
, which meant
strong
or
steadfast
in her mother tongue, and then refused to tell him.
    Aisa had felt a kinship with Hamzu from the day she first arrived at this place. Both of them were outcasts, both of them unwillingly served masters who treated them with indifference at best, cruelty at worst. And he was handsome, though he thought himself ugly. Unfortunately she did find his size and easy strength intimidating. Frightening, even. But his liquid eyes and his voice were kind and gentle. Unlike those of other men.
    Aisa’s first master had been her father, of course. He had been a poor excuse for one. The priests of Rolk, who ruled the green valleys and desert plains of Irbsa and taught the sun god’s wisdom, required a father to love his daughter, protect her, keep her safe. But Aisa’s father, Bahir, had loved dice far more than his children, and his debts kept his two sons working as laborers, but Aisa, a daughter, could earn nothing. When Aisa’s mother fell ill with a terrible, wasting disease, there had been little money for physicians, and Aisa had been forced to learn how to ease her mother’s pain using plants and herbs she could gather for herself. Aisa’s skill grew quickly, but not quickly enough to keep up with hermother’s fading strength, and in the end, she had died, leaving Aisa, now ten years old, to run the house in her place.
    Once Aisa reached marriageable age, thoughts of paying dowry and wedding weighed heavily on Father’s mind. Just after Aisa’s fifteenth birthday, Father wordlessly took Aisa down to the market and handed her over to a man in a purple turban. Only when Aisa saw the silver fall into her father’s hands did she fully comprehend what was happening—Father had sold her into slavery. No dowry to pay, no wedding to hold, and the silver would mean a long night over the dice cups.
    Aisa had been too shocked to resist the heavy shackles clapped around her wrists. Two days later, the man in the purple turban took Aisa and a dozen other slaves aboard a ship intent on crossing the Iron Sea, the small ocean that separated Irbsa from Balsia. Aisa huddled on deck, sick as an elephant in an earthquake.
    The weather grew colder and wetter the farther east they went. Aisa eventually became accustomed to the waves, but not to the water. She longed for the warmth of the desert, for familiar smells of sandalwood and spices, for familiar sounds of good music and calls to prayer, and she silently begged Rolk to give her the strength to cast herself over the side and let her chains carry her to the bottom. But Rolk withheld his strength, and the ship sailed on.
    Once, a group of merfolk, easily twenty of them, hauled themselves dripping over the gunwale to perch there. The men were sleek and flat-muscled. Tattoos of cobalt blue and scarlet red made intricate designs on their arms and faces. The women were