Greater Than All [removed] Torth #5

Prologue: Stormed By Hope

[Art Attribution: Laura Rowe]

Byiyi was especially good at the job of toweling.

Other slaves in the Grand Spa claimed that she had an easy job. They said she was lucky, and they said it with envious authority. Byiyi answered those remarks with an apologetic, good-natured smile, but deep inside, she was not so sure they were right.

Every time a dripping, naked god stepped out of a marble pool, Byiyi was obliged to rush across wet tiles with a clean towel.

Every time she gently blotted a god dry, she remembered the sisters and brothers she used to bathe and take care of, whom she would never see again.

The gods—the Torth, everyone called them—had ripped her away from her family. They had punished her for screaming and crying about it. Byiyi had suffered so many pain seizures during her first moon in this city, blood had poured from her ears.

A Torth had punished her for that, too, for making a mess.

Byiyi had learned to bury the screams inside her heart. She supposed other slaves buried their screams, also. One did not make a sound in front of the gods. Slaves only spoke in slave zones, where they pretended that life was bearable. Everyone learned to keep silent in this cloud-shrouded floating city, and never complain, or else they did not survive beyond their first three lunar cycles.

A well-muscled Torth stepped out of one of the mineral pools. Byiyi dared not keep him waiting.

When she enfolded the muscled god in her fresh white towel, she imagined that she was caring for a strong child. A healthy son.

As an exotic sapient, Byiyi was unlikely to encounter another one of her kind, anyway. There were no other spindly, long-faced Athpinari on this world.

And if she did meet another Athpinari?

Well, she would never dream of disobeying the law. City slaves were not permitted to have children. Sexual activity meant execution by torture. She could never be a mother. She could never care for her own children the way she used to dress and play with her siblings, whom she still missed and mourned for.

Only when she toweled a Torth did she allow herself to imagine the family she yearned for.

That was what made her so good at it. She wanted to stay immersed in her daydream.

But the god was dried off. Another slave began to dress him in a white spa robe.

Byiyi fiercely missed the pretend-adolescent in her arms whom she had loved. She had felt so proud of him, so whole, with that child who....

Well, who did not exist.

She trudged to the towel rack and picked up another folded towel, ready to do it again.

Every day felt anemic and feeble. Byiyi knew that her love-filled daydreams were not enough to sustain her forever, although this was the best life she was capable of having. She was unsure if she would survive for another six lunar cycles.

If only she could believe in silly legends, like some of her bunk-mates.

They kept each other up late with tales of heroic runaways. Lately, all they talked about was Kessa the Wise, an ummin elder who supposedly rode on storm clouds and conversed with the gods in their silent tongue.

What nonsense.

Byiyi found it much easier to imagine her nonexistent children than to imagine a nonexistent hero. A child could, theoretically, be real. But a runaway slave? That was nothing but an impossible, wistful, foolish fantasy.