Red Moon Interlude

For the slave-born and slave-made, the King’s farm was a place of torment. Stories of beatings and murders circulated, but every investigation died quietly. At best, the royal family compensated slave owners with cowries or a share of the next harvest; at worst, it bullied them into silence. To Eyanka, a slave’s life was worth less than a prisoner’s, a criminal’s or even the cattle the enslaved tended. Still, owners competed to rent their slaves to the King because royal labour paid better than domestic work. When those slaves came of age, they could be sold to the crown for the army or the farm.

Over the years, the enslaved learned the place Eyanka assigned them. The slave-born had never known freedom; the slave-made remembered it until punishment made remembering dangerous. In time, most yielded to the identity the village imposed upon them. The Little Girl had been enslaved at five. At thirteen, she knew no other way to name herself.