Under The Egyptian Sky

This is the beginning of my dissertation piece entitled Under The Egyptian Sky.

~*~

The crickets stopped. Chione froze under her blanket, all thoughts of sleep pushed to the back of her mind. She knew all too well what the silence meant. They had come for her as well.

            There were rumours at first. Whispers of screams on the wind and the youngest of the family taken in the dead of night. No one dared believe it true. Until the gaggle of childless mothers in the market grew every day in numbers. Until their wailing couldn’t be ignored any longer.

Chione raised her head from her straw pillow and peeked through the open window, not to see her silent captors but to just lay eyes on her beloved home once more. For one last time.

She knew that after this night she would never see her father fix the canals again, nor her brother herding the noisy cows down to the bank of the Nile and back. She would never again see her mother’s kind round face or her sister’s dazzling eyes. All she had ahead of her was the uncertainty of where she would go, but the certainty that she would never return.

The moon and the stars gave her father’s fields a soft glow. The inundation had been long and hard this year but with Isis’ blessing, the crops would be full and rich once more.

Chione’s mother screamed from the far side of the house.

When the rumours of kidnap had been confirmed, Chione had been relocated to the store room. It would take them longer to find her but find her they would and she had come to the decision it was pointless to run anywhere.

The young girl slowly lowered her head back onto her straw bed and offered a prayer to the gods.

Ra, help me, Chione begged silently. Just, please. Help.

Her mother’s screaming was joined by the frantic shouts of her siblings and father. One of her brother’s yells of indignation was cut short. There was silence again, for a moment that seemed to stretch forever.

Then Chione’s sister wailed. It was a long, haunting note, full of pain and loss.

That was the last noise Chione ever heard a member of her family make.

A stampede of feet, joined by the violent discarding of items in the corridor. Suddenly, the wooden door was thrown off its hinges, with all the force of the Nile herself and Chione was dragged by what felt like a thousand hands, kicking and screaming into the night.