The Silver Sparrow

Flight

Mara di Rosso died on a quiet Sunday morning, suspended by a rope from the ceiling in Hasheem's old room, in her father's house.

It wasn't the first time a woman had hung herself in his room, Hasheem had been told. People killed themselves in the pleasure district. These things happened, in the Salasar, in the peninsula. Everyone broke, eventually, one way or another. Some broke into weapons, others into pieces. Some lived, some took another life, some died bringing to life monsters and beasts.

The world made rooms for these things. It made rooms for change when one wished for change, for courage when one chose to face its consequences, for love and desire when life demanded vengeance, for kindness and compassion when one drew the line between humans and beasts.

Humans and beasts. Hasheem asked himself that Sunday morning, staring at the bruises on her dangling feet, storing into memory the piercing creak of the beam above her swinging corpse, if what he had done or was about to do would make him a beast or a man, if there ever was a time where the line was constant and reliable, when things were as simple as the black and white that separated the lands they lived in and fought for, if he would find the answer in the ending of his life, or the beginning.

***

He was sold for the price of a pig, was the common introduction to the story of his life people liked to hear. That particular line, among the other, more spiced-up or entirely made-up ones, happened to be quite accurate.

Five hundred silas was the actual sum. Back then, it was considered outrageously high for a ten-year-old boy. In the world of slave auction, the starting price for a child that young was just fifty, given they weren't being offered for free as a bundle deal with the mother. Young boys and girls needed more time to train. They also made mistakes, lacked the strength needed for most jobs, and could die young. Not a great investment, unless one were out of options.

Some children were, however, the most profitable assets for the pleasure district of Rasharwi. Men could be expected to pay a good fee to break the innocents, and comely children could be sold above market price for such purpose. In the business of pleasure, it was also considered wise to train them young. Children had less resistance, could be taught and shaped into whatever was needed, made to believe it was what their lives were meant to be.

By the hands of Fate or whichever god who had sought to curse him out of boredom, Hasheem hadn't been born comely, not just anyway. At ten, his was already a face that made people stare and hold their breaths staring—the kind of face that stood out in the crowd. But more than that, he was a pureblood Shakshi, born, raised, conveniently orphaned and directly plucked from the White Desert during the raid that wiped out his kha'gan. As with most purebloods, his typical package of light hair, pale eyes, and dark skin was a rarity in a city full of black-haired, fair-skinned Rashais. An exotic flower, the auctioneer had said to raise his price.

Beauty, however, was a privilege until it singled one out from the rest to be sent to private quarters of captains and generals before the auctions commenced. They couldn't do that with girls whose virginity had a price. Boys, however, didn't lose their values no matter how many times one used them. They also couldn't become pregnant, so they were used with little care, often, and often for free.

They had–– not unexpectedly––used him the most often during those eight months while waiting to be sold in the holding cells at Sabha. By the time Hasheem had been put on auction, there wasn't much he hadn't been through. These things, of course, had value, and pleasure house bidders knew experience and endurance when they saw them. Unsurprisingly, his was the highest price paid for boys that day. The bid had been won by the House of Azalea, the biggest, most profitable pleasure house in Rasharwi.