Caliphate

Kitznen, Province of Affrankon, 12 Jumadah II, 1533 AH

(13 May, 2109)

"I don't understand why we work so hard after we do the housework," Petra said, despairingly. "I mean . . . you go to school while I work all day. Then you come home and Ishmael escorts us so we can do outside work for pay. Then we spend most every night while you try to drum some education through my dense skull into my stupid brain. It's too much."

"Your skull isn't dense and you're not stupid," Besma corrected.

Besma bit her lower lip, uncertain whether she should tell Petra the reasons. Finally, she decided that, yes, the slave girl who was also her best friend was old enough to know.

"I'm fourteen now," she began. "Within a year, two years at the most, my father will arrange a marriage for me. Ordinarily, I'd ask for you to be part of my dowry so I could free you. But I know my stepmother won't permit that so she can keep a hold over me even after I'm married."

Petra suddenly looked sick at the thought of her only real friend going away. Indeed, she felt sick, so much so that she almost missed the next sentence.

"We're working so we can make enough money to buy you from my father or, if he won't sell to me, to let you buy your own freedom which, as a pious man, he is certain to permit. Either way, you'll be free."

"Free," Petra echoed, wistfully. "I can't even imagine . . . "

Besma smiled, ruefully. While she was not, technically, a slave, she would never be free and she knew it.