My name is Kemisi, but everyone calls me Sheba. They always have. When my parents called me it, it was a child nickname. They were glad to have found me and glad to have raised me and praised the gods by naming me after one, but they believed to use a god’s name so lightly, even if it was messed around, was bad luck. So they called me Sheba, a ritual offering to the gods. I thought it was because, again, they were happy to have found me. Only later, when I went among the other girls, did I realize that it also meant an offering of meat. Like something left for the wolves.
This was something the girls in the village were very quick to point out to me. Eventually calling me a meat roll or dog food lost its novelty, but it was always something that could be quickly taken up when a village boy spent too long talking with me, or when a traveler commented on my skin. They were always commenting on my skin.
I would be called a black-face dog feast and sent away, lashed with shawls and washing until I fled home. I would stay away from the other girls for several days, shopping and washing and running errands far away from them, and they and I would all forget. After a week or two I would start passing them in the streets or by the well. Things would be well, and I could even talk with them, but before a month’s cycle I would be drawn into a conversation over my head with a scholar or traveler who thought that my quiet nature hid intelligence.
Such a thing is not so, and by the time this stranger realized it, the other girls always realized that I was talking with someone. If the scribe was elderly, with white hair, they would taunt me about having his affections. If the man was young and handsome I would be whipped with a soaking-wet robe and the girl who did it would screech about how I got her washing all dirty.
I do not think this all would have been quite so bad if not for Ebio. Her name means honey, and to all adults she was nothing but honey. She ran errands on feet as fleet as the wind and was always willing to help. She was never mean within adult eyesight, and she was always innocent and truthful. She cultivated the persona as cunningly as any valley farmer. When it suited her, she would take this reputation and use it like a cudgel or a kopesh against whoever had angered her lately. Some she accused of stealing her jeweled neck-collar, or her favorite wig. Some she said beat her up, and she would come in with a black eye and split lip to prove it.
One day I was taking an order for a bag of grain to the mill when I found Ebio being beat by her friend Merit, with the others standing around them. I did not know what to do. I knew Ebio’s tricks, and so did anyone who was not one of her big cluster of friends, but this looked very serious.
I was not to know then, but Ebio's suitor at that moment was training to become a scribe, and he wanted to leave for Memphis. She and her friends were preparing their usual tactic because they were sure that he would decide not to go if she was so hurt. Their plan would likely have failed for lack of a false perpetrator, if I had not happened across them.
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