• The sun hung high in the cloudless sky, beating down mercilessly on the workers in the golden wheat fields below. A light breeze was blowing in from the east, but it was hot and dry, stirring up the dry dust of the fields and blowing it into the eyes of the slaves who toiled there. The slave drivers stood watching them, some from high, shaded, wooden platforms while the others who carried whips stalked through the field like hungry predators. Fat water skins hung from their belts, which they frequently took long, greedy drinks from, water spilling from them and dribbling down their chins while the slaves struggled to keep on their feet from exhaustion and thirst.

    One of the slaves faltered, and collapsed with one hand reaching out beyond him. His eyes were fixated and open, gazing beyond where his hand was reaching. The old one was dead, and the wind picked up to turn his grey hair and shabby coat a dusty
    tan. His thin, weak frame lay in the dust at the feet of his fellows, many of whom kept working while a few others stopped and stooped to pick him up. The angry crack of a whip and a hoarse yell of “Back to work!” had them straightening up, raising their sickles and harvesting wheat while the old one lay in the dust, reaching for the water skin that only he could see that would have saved him.

    The young female looked over her shoulder again at the corpse, her raven hair glistening in the savage sun light. Dead bodies in the fields were nothing new to her; with the way they were starved and beaten, the dead that lay around them were envied. The old one would be carried from the field at sunset, once the day’s work was done. The slave drivers didn’t care about the dead, so they would be free to do as they wished with him. It wasn’t always like this, though. She could remember, vaguely, listening to the elders as a child, when she was too small to work and they were too feeble to be in the fields. They would speak of a time when her people had been masters of the land around them, a formidable force on the battlefield and free. But they had been too scattered, and too trusting. They had welcomed the strange men when they arrived, helped them to establish villages and work the land. That had been their first mistake; the men then became ambitious and lazy and their people too scattered to save themselves. They were defeated and enslaved, prisoners in their own homeland. In the years that followed, their new masters felt that wasn’t embarrassment enough, so they began to rip families apart, sending them to different parts of a quickly growing empire. That was normal now, as was being bred, and then being separated from the children, their father or both.

    A bitter wave of hatred began to rise inside of her; she was tired of stepping over the dead, tired of being controlled, and damn tired of watching her children starve. There had been a few uprisings in the past, but they had all been brutally crushed because there was no unity among the people. What they needed was a leader, but they would never find one; no one wanted to take the risk for some unfathomable reason. And out of those who were willing to revolt, no one was willing to follow. She swung her sickle and stepped over the now dust covered body as she worked. Without unity they were doomed to suffer the same fate as the one at her feet. Lucky b*****d, she thought bitterly, you beat me to it.