The House of the Rising Sun

Chapter Twenty: Reprimands and Good-byes

Chapter Twenty: Reprimands and Good-byes

Alexander

The guards threw me down face first against the dusty ground. My knees roughly scraped but I didn’t scream. I couldn’t be weak now. And I couldn’t speak Egyptian. The two guards untied my hands and elbows and then held me down by the wrists. I struggled to get up, but alas! They were too strong, and any attempt at escaping left me hurting more. My white kilt was now dirty and the hem was beginning to come undone. The two guards talked to each other, or maybe to me, but I retained my silence. It was all I could do. Then I heard a third voice and I saw some sandaled feet appear in my line of sight. His legs were fit, and right next to his left foot there was…a tail? Or was it a serpent? I struggled, as I feared that I was going to be put to death by poison, but the snake’s tail didn’t move. At least, not until the man in front of me pulled it up off the ground. He took a stance.

Suddenly I heard a CRACK! in the air and there was a sudden stinging sensation on my back.

“Mmph,” I muffled my cries. The two guards laughed at my pain, but I didn’t struggle. CRACK! followed by pain. This time, I felt my flesh ripping open and blood beginning to slither down my side. CRACK! “Ahh,” I seethed. My hands turned to fists and I clenched my jaw, trying to swallow back the pain. Why was I being whipped? What had I done? CRACK! This time it crisscrossed against another open wound from the whip and the sting was unbearable. CRACK! “MMPH!” I cried, still swallowing back the pain. I sounded like some sort of weak, dying animal.

This went on twenty-five more times, and my back felt like a bloody mess. The guards roughly picked me back up, opened a cell, and threw me in.

And I awoke from the nightmare. At first, I was relieved, until I realized my surroundings were the same as that from my dream, and the stinging sensation in my back hadn’t relented. I had been reliving the moment when I was whipped. Oh how Brutus would have loved to see me now! ‘Put in my rightful place,’ I could hear him telling Antony. Antony! Selene had gone earlier last night to him, or so she said she would. He would kill me, but he was my only hope of getting me out. And for what crime? What crime had I committed? Obviously one so bad I deserved thirty lashes for it.

I had wiped the kohl from my eyes long ago and I had taken off my sandals. They were in a corner of the cell along with the jewelry Selene had let me borrow.

Then I heard footsteps coming towards my cell. Antony! It had to be him. He would be the only one here to visit me at this hour of the night. I stood up and rushed over to the bars, only…it was not Antony. My jaw went slack and I stepped back, distrustful and my eyes narrowed.

“You are not Egyptian,” said Kerpheres, arms crossed over his chest. He spoke in perfect Latin. I clenched my fists.

“Why are you here?” I spat venomously.

“I know all about you and Selene,” he said. I was bewildered.

“What?” I asked. “What do you know about me and Selene?”

“You two think you are so secretive, running off in the middle of the night to the temple of Ra. I recognize your face, despite the fact you are…Egyptian…today,” he said, laughing.

“You know nothing,” I snarled, despite the fact he knew pretty much everything.

“I know enough that you are the one she ran after the day you Romans left Egypt,” Kerpheres continued to laugh. “And I knew enough to know that she’s so in love with you she’d risk her engagement to Amenemhet to be with you.”

It was my turn to laugh, and Kerpheres frowned. “You have proved to me once again that you know nothing,” I said.

“Selene is the rare desert flower everyone wants to possess,” Kerpheres said casually. “Amenemhet wants her, I want her, you want her…”