“Curses?”Neff’s mother exclaimed. The broom she’d been using to sweep the dusty roof stilled in midair. “Pepi. You wouldn’t.”
“I would if they sold, Ahura, yes, indeed. You can’t be squeamish about these things, especially not at a time like this. If we want to keep our heads above water, my dear, we have to give the people what they want, whether it’s good for them or not.”
Neff’s mother scowled but resumed her sweeping with a sigh of resignation. “If you say so, imi-ib. Who’s Imeny again?”
“Thejeweler.You know the one. His wife has that mole. Here.” Her father pointed to the side of his face.
“Oh, yes. Yes, of course. The one who oversalts her fish.”
Her father chuckled. “We’ll never share a meal withthemagain, will we?”
Neff chewed her bread, half listening to her parents’ prattle. Her father’s spell scrolls hadn’t always been so popular, but over the past year, he’d built up a reputation as a merchant of good fortune in Bubas. This had been accomplished through a combination of luck and cunning. Luck because two village women had found husbands shortly after using his love scrolls, and cunning because Pepi made sure that they told everyone in the village all about it. By spending time listening to people at the market every day, her father had grown to understand their fears and desires, and used that information to sell, sell, sell. If the spell worked, the customers always came back for more. If it didn’t, and they returned to her family’s stall to complain, her father merely came up with a logical reason—invariably one that could be blamed on the customer themselves.
Pepi wrote the spells in the common script, a highly simplified version of the “gods’ words” that the merchant class used to do business—but a large portion of the population couldn’t even read that. Writing was considered a magic all its own, and most Khetarans viewed anyone who could do it with a sense of awe. Which made it easy for Neff’s father to tell the disgruntled customers that they didn’t say the words right. “If you don’t say them in the right way,” he’d proclaim, “the magic doesn’t work!”
So they’d buy another scroll, desperately attempt to memorize his instructions, and try again.
He’d send them off with a smile and resume bellowing hisfamous phrase to anyone in the market who might listen. He’d said it so often, Neff often heard her father muttering it in his sleep.
“Spell scrolls! Very effective! They’ve worked a thousand times!”
The business’s success had allowed them to build the two-story house that her mother so lovingly swept and tidied every morning. Her father was rarely at home. He was always the first vendor at the market every morning, and the last to leave. After their evening meal, he wrote new scrolls until all the light faded from the sky.
When Neff turned six, her father began teaching her to write the common too, so that one day she could help him run the business. At thirteen, she was nearly old enough to work the stall herself, but her father wasn’t convinced that she’d mastered the necessary attitude to be a good salesman. “You give up too easily,” he’d said the day before, when she’d allowed a woman to walk away empty-handed. “All that customer needed was a little more convincing!”
“She said no,” Neff had argued. “What was I supposed to do?”
Pepi shook a finger at her. “The mouth says no, but the heart shouts yes! Couldn’t you hear it? Your problem, my girl, is that you don’t believe in the product.”
Neff had looked down at the scrolls, arranged in neat piles. Cures for headaches, infertility, broken hearts. “But the scrolls don’treallywork, do they, baba?”
Her father sucked his teeth. “Hold your tongue, Nefermaat. Have you learned nothing from me? Haven’t I taught you that words have power?” He shook his head. “You’re not just selling a scroll, child. You’re selling hope. Now, I can’t guarantee that my customers will always receive what they desire, but if you make thembelieve… well, they certainly have a better chance.”
“I’m sorry, Yati,” she’d said. “I’ll do better next time.”
There on the roof, Neff remembered the exchange as her mother ruffled her hair and planted a loving kiss on her head. If the magic works, she thought,why couldn’t it give Mamet the big family she wanted?The concentration of her mother’s devotion, which could have been more comfortably spread across three or four additional children, was sometimes difficult for Neff to bear alone.
“Are you all right, Neff?” her mother asked. “You look a bit pale this morning.”
“Bad dreams again,” Neff replied, taking a drink of the thick, sweet beer.
“Really?” Her mother frowned. “Do you remember what they’re about?”
Neff sighed. “No. As soon as I wake, they fade away.”
“I used to have one about a date palm tree,” her mother said dreamily, leaning on her broom. “I picked the fruit and ate and ate, but my belly was never full. Your father had some ideas about what it meant, but he’s no Hour priest. I think I was just hungry.”
Even if I could afford to visit an Hour priest to interpret my dream, Neff thought,I wouldn’t know what to tell him!She’d only had the dream occasionally at first, but now it came nearly every night. And although she couldn’t remember anything about it, she somehow knew that it was always the same dream, over and over again.
She’d begun to dread going to sleep.
Neff knew that dreams, like words, were powerful. They were messages from the gods. And some nagging, relentless urge kept telling her that she shouldn’t ignore this one. If she didn’t figure out what it meant, she was certain the dream would never let her go.
Her father smacked his lips as he finished up his beer. “Perhaps your dream is telling you to wake up earlier, like your yati, so wearen’t late to market!” he said. He stood up from the table and clapped the crumbs from his hands. “Come on, it’s time to go!”
Neff shoved the rest of the bread into her mouth and washed it down with the dregs of her beer. She was brushing her dress clean when she suddenly remembered what day it was. “Wait!” she exclaimed. “We can’t go to market now. Bast is coming through the village this morning.”
Every year, the village of Bubas had the honor of watching Bast, their patron goddess, be taken from her shrine and brought upriver to Thonis, where the Festival of Bast took place. Neff had never been to Khetara’s capital city, but her friends had said that the streets were lined with gold and precious stones of many colors. She hoped to see it one day, but until then, she and everyone else in Bubas took pleasure in the goddess’s annual visit, when a lucky few would have the opportunity to address her with a question or a prayer.
