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Merchants from Crete had come to Thebes with spices and wines to sell. And they also brought slaves. The Slave Master from Pharoahs palace purchased the entire lot, sight unseen, to be trained to work the laundry, in the fields and as scullery workers. In this lot was one wild eyed child. A mute female that seemed to be able to only make gutteral animal sounds. A female that had been captured during a village raid along a steamy jungle trek.
For want of a better name, she was referred to only as Murr, and was regulated to the lowest jobs, cleaning the refuse canals and sent up the smoke holes to clear debris from chimneys.
It was there, while she crouched to drag weeds from a murky waterway, that she caught His eye. There isnt much to say, one cant call it rape when one is owned, can you? In her youth, the features that would distingush her later in life, were softened and rounded by babyfat, then later by the wild mass of hair that her mother allowed to grow untamed. She ran wild, a small favorite in the lower pens, speaking for her mother, rarely far from Murr's side when allowed. Until the day she returned to their shared pallet...only to find her mother was gone, having been sent as a gift, to a Moorish nobel when the mute caught his eye.
Alone and abandoned, without her mother , she seemed to slip deeper and deeper into a lassitude, uncaring if she were punished for her innatentive work, that is until the day she met a strange Man in the reeds at the side of the Nile. |