The Wings of Ashtaroth

Chapter 1: Slaves: Section IV: Uta

Uta: Qemassen: The Palace: The Hamatri

Uta et-Lohit had been born a slave—the daughter, and granddaughter, and great-granddaughter of slaves. She had served the Semassenqa since she was a little girl, new and beautiful like the spring blossoms in the palace orchards. Now forty-five years old, Uta was neither new nor beautiful, face disfigured by Moniqa in same blow that had taken Uta's eye, hands hard and lined from long hours of labour: drawing documents, sharpening reeds for writing, mixing pungent inks.

Uta sat upright on her simple cot, examining her hard, lined hands, and their varied imperfections. She might have been a dyer for all the stains that decorated her fingers.

She should feel grateful. Her family legacy meant Uta had been trusted as a young woman, fit for work as Aurelius's keeper, privileged to be taught letters, to be educated for scribal duties. In the lower quarters of the city, even some freeborn Massenqa couldn't read or write, and most slaves didn't have their own bunk in the Hamatri—the basement quarters afforded to the more favoured of the palace slaves.

She needed a moment to stop, to rest her back. Uta leaned her head and shoulders against the plain stone wall, eyes closed, but the movement caused a spike of pain to lance up her neck. She winced, rubbing out the ache.

Too much time bent over her work. Too much time hurrying up and down the stairs in the heq-Ashqen's tower.

As Samelqo's primary body slave, Uta should attend Samelqo in his rooms at all times, yet he insisted she remain either in the Hamatri with the other palace slaves, or in the cubiculum outside his rooms, but young Madaula was housed there, and Uta wouldn't deprive the girl of her private space. Uta had little enough of that herself, in the labyrinthine cubicula of the Hamatri.

Last year, an earthquake had collapsed the ceiling of the easternmost side of the Hamatri, killing hundreds, turning into rubble the simple but beloved little rooms that had once housed families. Uta could still remember the shocked faces of the Semassenqa who'd passed below to assess the damage to their property. They hadn't expected the painted walls—murals, names, an informal archive of the people who'd lived and loved and died beneath their feet. When the Hamatri had been rebuilt, those histories had been erased. The new walls were bare gray stone, reinforced with large wooden posts. Even those walls that had survived the quake had been replaced, everything human stripped away. The Semassenqa couldn't afford the risk of the aboveground palace collapsing.

The cubicula had always been doorless, always arranged in a grid so that their entrances faced one another. Once, it had been comforting—a friend only a whisper away, a network of small homes each open to the others. Now, the Hamatri was faceless, nameless.

When the Semassenqa had bought new slaves to replace the dead, Uta hadn't been able to bear befriending them. Many masters claimed to love their slaves as family, yet in the end Uta's people were considered interchangeable to all but other slaves. The friends Uta had lost could never be replaced by the new faces that surrounded her, and these bare walls made strangers even of those she did know—the open doors of the small square rooms like the eyes of a jailer, ever watching despite the low light. The Semassenqa plied favourites with small gifts, the better to make spies of them, the better to turn them against their own.

The Semassenqa might have sown poison seed amongst the slaves, but if so, something much darker now pushed through the soil with it.

At a noise, Uta opened her eyes. Another slave now sat across from her—a young Lora girl, cross-legged on the simple plank-bed opposite Uta's own. Her new roommate, favoured for her fair face, not her family.

"You want I should go, Sese?" the girl asked.

Sese. Uta smiled wryly at the young girl's mistaken honorific. The Lorat had come all the way from Estralan and didn't speak the Massenqa tongue well. She would learn, as they always did, and then she would treat Uta and her missing eye with the same wariness as the other slaves. People knew better than to bother Uta, and she rather preferred it that way.