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But, apparently, she had more to say this night.
“Do you ever wish your Fate was different?” she said softly into the moonlit darkness of her chamber.
“Before the soldiers captured your family, what did you do? How did you live?”
She’d asked all of these questions many times before over the course of their… acquaintance. And he always dutifully answered each time.
As he did now, in her tongue, in which he’d acquired fluency over the past years.
“I was training to be a stone mason like my father,” he said low, knowing that despite the quiet of his voice, the rumbling baritone carried to her ears just fine.
“We had a small patch of farmland as well, that sustained the three of us during the fall and summer seasons.”
“Hmm…” she sighed, as if his voice was lulling her to sleep.
He rather thought it had that effect. For she mostly asked for him to speak directly as she was preparing for sleep.
“And were there pretty girls or boys that caught your eye in your homeland?”
She asked this question many times too.
At first, she only mentioned the feminine sex. Then, she broadened the range to his own sex, in case his tastes ran in that direction.
They didn’t. His tastes ran in only one particular, extremely narrow direction. His answer was always the same.
“No. There was no one.”
She let his reply simmer a bit in the still night air, as if savoring it like a delicate treat. He knew her moods as if they were his own. So he knew his answer pleased her.
Then she said:
“If you hadn’t been captured and bought for my personal slave, what would you have done? Would you have wanted a family of your own? A wife and helpmate?”
“It doesn’t matter,” he answered the way he always did.
“It is useless to imagine.”
“Hmm…” she seemed to concur.
“But it’s ever so depressing to wallow in reality every day. I suppose I have been privileged and have nothing to complain about. Even so, sometimes, I wish I were far away. Somewhere that I didn’t have all these responsibilities. Surrounded always by so many people. Maybe I would have been happy on the green isles of your homeland. It must be a sight to see! So many trees and flowers and grass, you said. I wish I could visit someday.”
He hummed his own accord, eyes closed.
He missed home too, but he could barely recall it in truth. Only in his dreams did vivid memories wash over him.
“If I lived in your village, would you have noticed me?” she asked with a whimsical note in her voice, not expecting an answer this time, merely thinking out loud to herself.
“I doubt it,” she answered her own question.
“Women in your realm must be big and tall like you. With fine hair and light eyes like your mother and father.”
He didn’t correct her that his parents were not truly his. She knew already from past interrogations that they gave him the name “Shai,” which meant “Gift,” because he was an unexpected gift in their later years, after unsuccessfully trying to have children of their own. They’d found him in a basket drifting down the river where his mother did her washing.
But he supposed his features more resembled his parents than the Egyptians.
“You would mistake me for one of the flat-chested adolescent boys, no doubt,” she chortled at her own expense.
“And I would watch, green with envy, when you walked through the village with a pretty girl on your arm.”
