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be a dangerous thing to do as well as an audacious one, potentially more dangerous than cursing his master. Granted, the mud-brick wall held little shrines to every god that could be invoked, and plenty of talismans for growth and plenty, which should have prevented any harm whatsoever from coming to the fields, but if Khefti even thought that Vetch was cursing the fields, his stick would be out and drumming a beat on Vetch’s back for days.
    Besides, Vetch wanted to hurt Khefti directly, not indirectly. And anyway, as the son of a farmer, someone who loved and served the land, something within Vetch shrank from wishing harm even on a tiny plot of tala plants.
    Vetch’s master was not a farmer; he was a potter and the master of a brick yard. Nevertheless, he made a great deal of money from his little tala field; his workshops were for his daily bread, but his tala bought him luxuries that his neighbors envied. A harvest like this one would bring more than enough to pay for a rock-carved tomb in the Valley of Artisans, a tomb he could not otherwise have afforded, and for which his apprentices were making a veritable army of abshati servants and pottery funerary wares fit for a man far above Khefti’s station. It also paid for all manner of luxuries: fine linen kilts, many jars of good date wine every day, melons, honey cakes, and roast duck on his table on a regular basis. Khefti even had a melon cooling in his well at this moment, a true luxury in the dry season.
    Oh, melon. . . .
    Just the thought of a melon made Vetch’s stomach cry out with hunger. He hadn’t even tasted a melon rind in an age. Khefti thriftily had his cook pickle the rinds from his melons, in keeping with his parsimonious nature.
    And that thought led down the well-worn path of food. Good bread and beer, melon and dates and pomegranate, honey and fish; all the things that Vetch had not tasted since he became a serf. For that matter, he had not had enough to fill his belly since the last of the great Temple Festivals at the beginning of the growing season, and that was only because it was the Temple of Hamun that provided the bounty. The raw latas roots Vetch had eaten this morning (in addition to his allotted stale loaf end) had helped with the never-ending hunger, but nothing would ever make it stop altogether.
    From the moment Vetch had entered Khefti’s service, he was always hungry; as the savory aromas from Khefti’s kitchen tantalized his nose, he would be making a scanty meal of whatever Khefti allotted him. Breakfast, a palm-sized loaf of yesterday’s dark barley bread (he could have eaten half a dozen of the same size), or supper, a tiny bowl of pottage his family wouldn’t have fed to a pig and another little loaf of stale bread. Sometimes the fare was varied by the addition of an onion beginning to go bad. Lunch was whatever he could find, in the hour when Khefti slept—a handful of wild lettuce, latas roots grubbed out of the riverbank and eaten raw, wild onions so strong they made the eyes water. Sometimes he found wild duck eggs in season; sometimes there were berries or palm fruits, or dates fallen to the ground. Mostly, he got only what Khefti gave him. He hadn’t seen cheese or meat or honey cakes since the farm was taken. He dreamed about food all the time, and there was never a moment when his stomach wasn’t empty. He went to sleep, curled around his hunger, and woke with it gnawing at his spine.
    The only thing that ever really competed with the hunger was anger.
    And anger was as constant a companion as hunger. Not that he could do anything about his anger, but at least when he was angry, sometimes he’d get so worked up that he’d upset his stomach, and then the hunger would go away for a little.
    And when he was angry, he could make the loneliness and the pain and the fear recede for a little. When he was angry, he wasn’t on the verge of the tears that often threatened to overwhelm him. Sometimes, anger was the only