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but he will never listen to me. He thinks all Elementals were gone generations ago. Bah! All glassworkers should be watched. Ta’uz has ever been lax in that regard. If I were Master of Site…”
    His fingers tightened about the glass. “What is your name, girl?” he asked, again using the common tongue.
    I told him, and then said my father’s name.
    Boaz regarded me steadily. “Your names are as heavy and cumbersome as your language. You belong to Ashdod and to the Magi now, and from henceforth will wear names that please us. Your name,” he indicated my father, “is Druse, a good worker’s name. And you,” he swung his eyes back to me, “shall be called Tirzah.”
    Gayomar jerked with surprise, but did not speak.
    I was not so reticent. I stood up, my eyes angry. “No! My name is –”
    “ Your name is Tirzah! ” Boaz shouted. “Do you understand?”
    I closed my mouth with a snap, but my eyes were no less angry and resentful.
    “This glass is very beautiful,” he said, his eyes harder than I’d seen them yet, “and its beauty catches at the hearts of all who gaze upon it. But I own it as tightly as I own your soul, and it will do my bidding as will you. Do you understand?”
    I was still silent, my entire body stiff and resentful.
    His eyes dropped to the glass, and I thought I had bested him. His hands ran over it, and I could see how gentle their touch, how caressing their passing.
    I relaxed. He thought it beautiful, and for its beauty, he would not deny me my name.
    Then he hefted the glass in one hand, raised his eyes to mine, and opened his fingers.
    The glass smashed into a thousand pieces on the tiles, and as I heard its death cry so I remembered the death scream of the vase I had dropped.
    I hated Boaz at that moment, and knew I would take that hatred and stoke it and feed it until I could repay him a thousand times over for the humiliation of my slavery and my rape and the death agony of that brave glass.
    “And so I will dispose of you, Tirzah, should the whim take me. Do you understand? ”
    “Yes, I understand, Excellency.”

3
    K AMISH bundled us back through the garden. His relief in being left his life found outlet in his anger at us – particularly me, and by the time I clambered back into the river boat my arms were already darkening with livid bruises.
    “Gesholme!” Kamish shouted at the river boat captain.
    We huddled in the belly of the boat, out of the way of the oarsmen, my father’s arms wrapped protectively about me. He realised a little of what I felt, although not all, for he’d never heard the glass in the same manner I had. The other slaves regarded us silently, then Mayim, the other glassworker, reached out and gently touched my arm.
    “That was wondrous,” he said. “I thought that glass was fractured beyond help, yet you still worked it into beauty. You must have magic in your fingers, Tirzah.”
    I eyed him carefully, wondering at his choice of words, but then decided it was simple praise. Nothing else. I nodded, grateful, then cuddled a little closer to my father. Druse.
    I thought of my new name – Tirzah. It was pretty, and rolled off the tongue with its own special music. But I would ever associate it with Boaz, and with my slavery.
    One day I would cast it off.
    But not now. Tonight all I wanted to do was cling as tightly as I could to my father, and close my eyes and pretend that none of this was happening.
    Time passed, and I dozed.
    I dimly realised we had left the confines of Setkoth, for the sounds of the city grew dim, and the smell of the river changed from rotting vegetable matter and human filth to that of the sweet cleanliness of open countryside and thick reed banks. The breeze grew cold, but my father was warm and there was a tarpaulin beneath our feet that our small group managed to wrap about us to keep out the worst of the night chills.
    I wondered vaguely where this Gesholme was, and what it was, but the river was soothing, and I slipped