Prologue of For Love of Their Children

      Children surrounded her.  None of them were hers, but she loved them all the same.  She strode past two boys who could be twins, brown and lean, with dark hair and downcast eyes.  They chiseled at a rock that would outlast them by thousands of years.  They were old enough for clothes, just sack cloth tied around their waists with tufts of hemp.  When her eyes left them, she heard them sigh, just the barest wisp of breath, a secret relief.
     It did not do to attract the attention of the Masters.
     Dirt, sand and gravel slid and crunched under her sandals.  The Master let her fingers trail along one of the orange blocks, the one to her right.  It would eventually be part of a magnificent tomb.  The Great Ones would find their immortality beneath such stones.  For the children, though, there were only shallow mass graves, anonymity in dust.
     The blocks made a valley, a place of cool shade.  More of the older, stronger children were here, working with chisels or antlers to square off blocks that got more complete the farther she walked.  At the end of this lane, naked children worked in the full harshness of the sun with sticks and cloths to polish away the last imperfections, to make the blocks immaculate.  Nothing less would do for the chosen of the Gods, those who would ascend after their deaths.
     The Master turned left at the end of the row, around the corner and out of the stone valley.  On this side, the sun raged against the side of the quarried blocks and the weaker children, the expendable ones, worked with inferior tools.  These were the ones not born to be slaves, the ones captured in the outlands and sold for profit.  She loved them, too.  She loved them all.  Hordes of them labored here and the noise was clangorous, a riot, though their mouths were silent.  
     Here was a small boy of indeterminate age, with dark skin and broken nails.  He looked at the Master as she approached, looked her in the eye.  And he held up his broken tool, an antler gone blunt and passed down from the coolness of the valley where the strong ones worked, finally snapped and useless.
     Like many of these children.
     The Master held a tiny crop, a symbol of her rank.  She pointed it at the insolent boy and an Underseer rushed out of a canvas lean-to.  His crop was not a symbol but a tool, and he whipped the boy across the face with it once, hard but not hard enough to break his teeth.  The face for insolence, and then the back for sloth.  The boy’s back received harsher treatment.  After the first blow he cried out, by the third he screamed and tried to squirm away, and by the fifth he only sobbed in prostration.
     This is how the weak ones were spent.  Only a few of these would grow strong, adapt to their lives.  Building the tombs was a war against time, against the impermanence of the Kings who were Gods.  Soldiers died in wars, the Master knew that.  Only the strong would survive, and she loved the strong ones into their strength, the weak into the mercy of death.
     It was cool in the ground where the weak were buried.
     “I am tired,” said one of the girls.  One of the weakest of them all.  Always tired, always slow, back scarred with almost hourly reminders to keep up her pace.  Tall for eleven, scrawny, skin that said she came from the North – far from this place of God-Kings.  The sun was not kind to these blonde-haired ones, with eyes like the sky nearest the sun.  
     The Master pointed her crop, and an Underseer came.  "If your stone is not cut there is no rest," the Master said amiably.  
       “No,” the girl said.  
     The Master raised an eyebrow.  ‘No’ was not a word allowed to the children.  Her name was Mithodroxes, the Master recalled – and if she knew the name of a child it was because the child frequently required her attention.  None too bright, then, this one.  But the Underseer would know what to do with her.  She would lose a tooth today, or worse.
     "No," Mithodroxes repeated, and the Master heard something other than defiance - maybe fear.  "I'm not tired, I don't feel well.  I feel... dizzy, and the rocks are glowing, and there is a gray band surrounding you only it's gold at the same time."
     "An aura?"  The Master lurched, the crop forgotten.  She waved off the Underseer before the first blow could land.  "You're sure?  You had best not be lying to me, girl."  A girl who could see auras would be worth more alive than spent under the quarry sun, worth more than a thousand such children, more than a brick of gold.  And if it was more than merely auras, if the aura presaged a vision...  The Master shuddered, licked her dry lips.
     Mithodroxes was not looking at the Master any more, or the stones; her eyes shut and her body started to shake.  The stone adz dropped from her hand as forgotten as the Master's crop.  Her bare feet twitched in the hot red sand of the quarry, and she dropped down into that sand, started to shake from head to heel among the rocks.  Her fingers and toes were impregnated with quarry dust and glittered as she twitched.  Where her skin had not merged with the dust, it reflected the red stones and red dirt and was red with too much sun for too long, poor fair skin that would always burn and peel and burn again and never tan.
     The stones stood over her, some rounded and striated and rough, some squared, about to be freed from the ground to be hauled away and made part of some human construction.  A thousand boys and girls labored over the rocks, swarming them with ropes and wires and adzes made of stone or bronze or horn, each playing their part in the liberation of the blocks.  The powder-blue sky overhead was the seat of a brutal yellow sun whose heat was like a great fist.
     “Take her to the cooling shed,” the master said, and Underseers rushed to obey.  “Tell the Great Overseer.  No, he will beat you for speaking to him.  I will tell him myself.”  At the end of the row, in front of a piece of leather stretched over sticks to provide shade, a messenger-boy awaited.  “I treat you fairly, do I not?” she asked him.
     “Yes, Great One,” the boy said, dropping to his hands and knees and staring at the sand in front of her feet.
     “Do I only beat you when it is proper to do so?”
     “Yes, Great One.”
     “Do this thing for me.  Go to the cooling shed, by an unseen way, and listen at the walls.  Come back and tell me what you hear.  If you do this, tomorrow you may go inside the shed and drink the cool water at the hottest time of the day.  Of course I will have to beat you for spying, but I will have Thud do it.”  Thud had the lightest hand of all the Underseers.
     “Yes, Great One,” the boy said, and scrambled off through the sand, running before he was even upright.  
     He is a good boy, the Master thought.  Perhaps he could join the priesthood, just as a slave to begin: carrying water and cleaning the temple.  But in time he might be taught to read.  He was of old Hitaian stock, smart and nimble.  When the Great Ones had come to this place, they had found it already populated with great tombs, roads, writings.  The boy’s blood came from the people who had done all that, built all those things, before the Great Ones had taken them.
     The Master strode through the quarry.  It took a thousand or more steps to reach the tent where the Great Overseer sat in his gilded chair, reviewing plans scratched on parchments.
     “Great One,” she said, pressing herself into the dirt just as the messenger boy had done for her.  Two large women with bronze kilts stepped behind her, flanking her.  She could hear their feet in the gravelly sand, see their shadows.  The Overseer’s punishers, the ones with enough rank to punish the Masters.  The shadows had sword hilts poking over their shoulders.
     The Great Overseer did not see fit to notice her for longer than it had taken her to walk her thousand steps.  He shuffled his parchments, issued orders to messengers, drank cool wine from a cup of hammered bronze.  At last, when he had attention to spare for her, he said, “Speak.”  His voice was hoary, like the sound of a broken antler scraping against granite.
     “One of the slaves has seen an aura,” she said into the dirt.  “And her body went into the spirit-dance, like a fallen dervish.  I am much too lowly to judge such a one, Great One.  I sent her to the cooling shed.”
     “Yes,” he said, as if the word were an effort.  “The cooling shed.  It will be an interesting day.”
     “Yes, Great One,” she said, not understanding.
     “Go.”
     “Yes, Great One.”  She retraced her steps, grateful to leave the presence of the Great Overseer unmolested.  Back at her quarter of the quarry, the children had slowed their work.  Without Underseers to remind them, their pace slackened, and without the eyes of the Master they lost all pride in their efforts.  In the shade, her good ones still did at least fair work.  In the sunshine, though, it was necessary to point her lash.  The Underseers returning from the errands she had set appeared to enforce her will.
     The cries of children in pain always set her nerves on edge, burdened her with sadness.  But time wore ever onwards.  These ones would be crushed and she pitied them.
     Later, when the children were working once again at capacity, the messenger boy returned to his post before his small shade.  The Master went to him and he prostrated himself.
     “What did you hear, boy?” she said.
     “A strange tale, Great One.  The child, the slave, she slept in the shade for some time. The Great Overseer never came.  Another person was inside, one of high rank, and all of the Underseers fled his presence as quickly as they could.”
     “His?”
     “Yes, Great One, from his voice that I heard later.  A voice I never heard before.  The girl woke and she spoke to the darkness.  She said, ‘I saw through closed eyes, saw myself lying in the red sand, saw the children at their labors (but were they moving slowly, so slowly they were not moving at all?), saw the Master standing over me with hands on hips, shouting something I could not hear.  Saw all the Masters and their Underseers and their whips held static while I whirled out above them, higher and higher, the quarry shrinking beneath her.  It was a red patch in a sere brown desert.  A dusty road stretched away to the city of Hitai that is also the kingdom of Hitai, and that was just a patch of ground beneath me too, and I saw the great mass of land that housed the city, saw my home far to the Northeast where I had lived with my mother and my brothers when just a small child, and all the places, all the lands of the world, and the world receded into darkness.  It was a map on a black wall, then an orb hung in darkness, then just a point of light that whirled away into the nothingness around me.’”
     The boy paused for breath, licked his lips with a dry tongue.  “Did she say more?” the Master demanded.
     “Yes,” he breathed.
     “Then speak it.”
     “Now she was among the gods, little white points of light glaring at her unblinking.  Under the sky they twinkled and winked but here in the dark they probed her with a constant stare.  She saw the world that had swept away from her was just one of many worlds in thrall to the yellow sun (cooler but more brutal out there in the dark), sweeping through the night amongst the gods.  Farther away, past two more such worlds, through a staggeringly huge herd of tumbling stones of all sizes from sand to mountain, most of them the size of the rocks she quarried.  More of them than all the water buffalo in all the world, all the greatest herds come together in one place to cross an infinite river - if only her slave mind had words for the concept of infinity.”
     Yes, the priesthood for certain, the Master thought.  Messenger boys should not contemplate the universe, only their instructions. “Go on,” she said.
     “You will not beat me?  For speech so high above my station?”
     “If it is fair to do so, I will,” she said.  A scowl crept across her mouth, there and then gone, like a breeze in springtime.
     “Yes, Great One....  And out past this, where the sun was impossible to tell from the other gods, just a tiny point of remote light, there was a ball of rock and cold and fear.  Cobalt blue in the darkness, it crept through space impossibly slowly, as the boys and girls had been moving at their work as she left the world.  It was not round, not even solid, a collection of things held together by mutual attraction.  She could not see it moving but she knew it turned, turned, always turned about itself.  How large it was she could not say: she was beyond knowing about the size of things now.  Bigger than her body, smaller than her soul.  And it was made of fear.
     “Off in the further darkness, beyond what she could see with or without her eyes, something else moved.  Something more massive, not bound to her yellow sun.  And as it moved, the space near this blue thing moved, rippled like the water near shore when a bug lands in the center of the pond.  It was enough, though, to set the blue fear on a new course.  She watched it for a thousand thousand years, moving and not moving, drifting across the paths of other things.  It skimmed above the herd of stones, wobbling through the rippling space that was their wakes, left the field in a new direction.  She watched her world growing in its path, bigger and bluer and greener by the moment, each moment a thousand years.  It whipped past, growing a great white tail behind it, nipped into the outer clothing of the sun and around, and then shot back towards the world so fast she could nearly see its motion.”
     The Master felt gnawing worry, chewing at the bottom of her stomach.  Was this boy, too, a prophet?  He would not do for the priesthoods after all.  So much education, lucidity, was a danger.  He would have to be murdered.  Strangled, I think.  A mercy killing.  And all the while his strange words grew in her mind, painted a picture she could almost see.  It was right there, just beyond her comprehension.  
     “And then what happened?” she said.
     “Then I heard the other voice,” he said.  “The voice of the Great One.  A dry voice in the dark. ‘You bit your tongue.  You are dry and need water, hot and need cooling.  The fair ones die in droves in this place.  They should reserve you for indoor labors, but you are so expendable.  The Kings care little how many die to make their tombs, only that the tombs are beautiful and impress the people.’"
     “The one in the shed said so?”
     “Yes, Great One,” the boy said.  “I know you must have me thrashed for repeating such things.”
     “Yes.  I will do it myself.”
     “Too great an honor,” the boy said.
     “Go on.  What next?”  
     "’I was in the sky,’" the girl said.  "’The blue fear is coming.’"  The Great One told her to be quiet, to drink cool water.  It was silent for a time – perhaps the girl went to sleep again.  I heard the Great One tend to her, wiping her skin with a cloth.  Then he said, "Lud.  I need you."
     “His name?” the Master said, her voice low, secret.  “He used the name of the Great Overseer?”
“I did not know,” said the boy.  He dropped lower to his ground, scraped his forehead in the sand.  “I am too humble for such a name to cross my lips – I did not know.”
He would certainly need to be strangled now, and had provided the perfect excuse.  “You are forgiven, child,” she said.  “Only, continue.  The Great Overseer came, yes?”
“Yes,” the boy said, lifting his head fractionally from the sand.  “The Great Overseer wondered how he might serve.  The Great One told him, ‘Have this girl taken to my palace.  When I see her next, she is to be clothed in green silk and samite, anointed with rosewater, with gold at her wrists and ankles.  See that it is so.’”
     “He said that?” the Master whispered.
     “Yes, Great One,” the boy said.
     There was no color in her face when she caught his shoulders, dragged his to his feet.  “What are you, boy?  What kind of devil?”
     “Only a messenger,” he said, and his face was split in a smile.  White teeth in a dusty bronze face, dark eyes like polished jewels, mirth like sadness.
     “The Gods have smiled on you,” the Master told him.  “I had marked you for strangling.  I was going to do it myself.  Remember that.  Remember my mercy.”
     “If there are gods,” he said, “this is their mercy, not yours.  Look.  They are coming for you now.  Best to not be seen handling a slave.”
     She let go of him, turned around.  
     Lud stalked out of his work section into the dusty quarry proper, squinted into the brightness of the day until his eyes found her.  He strode across the yard, slow steps seeming to take eternity to cross the thousand steps between him and her.  At last he was close enough to make himself heard.  "Xand," said the Great Overseer.
     The little woman seemed huge to the children, she knew that, a monolithic figure whose face beamed down to them from the sky.  But she groveled before Lud, as befit her station.  "Tell me how to serve," she begged.  Later it might occur to one so humbled to resent being demeaned before her charges, but not now.  Before Lud she was meekness itself.
     "That child.  Whence did she come?"
     Formal language was not a good sign, and she replied in kind to try to mitigate the damage that must be coming.  "From Sorub, Great one, by way of the caravans.  That day you in your wisdom bought the whole shipment of slaves to speed the quarry, else she might have become a bed slave or a house slave, but she most fortunately came to work for us and learn the great speech of Hitai."
     "She never showed any signs of the sight before today?"
     "No, Great One.  Never anything, else my eyes are blind."
     "Not yet," he said, and Xand's heart beat faster.  "Your King took her, marked her for greatness.  Is your King wrong?  Is she a slave to be bought and sold, scourged with whips, worked as an ass from the desert?  Or is she a Great One to be dressed in samite and bathed in rosewater?  Shall she have dust on her wrists and elbows, or bands of gold?"
     It was a trap she could not avoid.  She did her best not to whimper.  "The King is correct, Great One.  I should have seen her greatness but I am stupid and unworthy.  I must be punished accordingly."
     "Yes," said Lud, and made the tiniest of gestures with his index finger, the one bearing his ring.  Three Underseers appeared as if from the air to enact his will.  Two restrained Xand while the third drew a long curved knife from her waistband and slashed out her eyes.  "You are banished," Lud said next, and waved vaguely, unseen, at the Western wall of the excavation, facing the desert.
     To her credit, Xand did not cry out or beg.  It would be useless and might result in further punishment.  She refused to be dragged away, walked under her own power although the ruins of her eyes drove nearly everything from her mind except pain and panic.  Tears and blood mixed to wash her face in gore, wasting precious water.  The Underseers led her, one at each hand, almost kindly but denied any overt expression of kindness.  At the gates the Underseers made to cast her to the sand, but Lud shook his head ever so slightly and they backed away, leaving her on her feet.
     "You are blind and stupid," he said loudly.  And more softly - for her ears alone - "but a loyal and devoted servant of the King.  Go in His grace."  Lud tossed his own waterskin, half full, at her feet.  Xand heard the sound, knew it for a day of life, snatched it up.
     "Thank you," she said simply, and turned away.  She walked with all the dignity she could muster from the quarry out into the sand, into the full embrace of the sun.  Only when she heard the gate clang closed behind her did she allow herself to collapse in pain and despair, as ruined in her person as in her eyes.
     From the wall behind her, above the gate, the messenger boy watched her go.  His teeth caught the sun, a smile making him seem half a god.