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him.
    This time, though, her purchaser was not a king dreaming of philosophy, but a satrap eager to replenish his harem with a fine breeding woman acquired by purchase rather than the more costly method of capture. She was dressed in the costume of the city’s women, a voluminous garment made of a material that sparkled, designed to conceal the outline of her body. It made every encounter here between men and women charged; the very volume of the garment directed the imagination to the naked body of the woman inside it. The garment concealed the details of the body, but made explicitly clear the outlines of the fantasies of the gazers. Sugar and salt crystals were applied to her face and hands and body, so she looked like an underworld woman. Thus she was delivered by the man of faith to wait for the lord of the underworld, the salt of the earth.
    While Souraya waited for him, she reflected on her course of action. She looked at herself, waiting for the new man, as withdrawn from her own body as if she were a ghost or a god. What should she do with the woman sitting here by candlelight in a cavern hung with velvet? She could leave the woman underground here, and see what happened to her. Her destiny with this master might even prove to be less burdensome than a future with her husband. She could leave this woman even deeper underground, and be free of her forever. She had now lost so much and lived with so much fear that even her own destruction was no longer unthinkable to her.
    But if she were pregnant? Any child not assuredly fathered by this man would almost certainly be murdered. She had seen for herself how the women’s quarters teemed with this lord’s children. Am’s child would have a better chance of surviving if born to Adon, whose desperation for a son would tempt him into believing in himself as the father. Besides, like many iconoclasts, he had so little sense of what he looked like that he could easily be deceived in the matter of resemblance.
    The chieftain was preceded by a wife, carrying the traditional equipage of welcome: a tray and cups of rock crystal, chiseled from the walls that sheltered them, filled with a tea made of “earth-milk,” stalactite drippings, and salt butter.
    The wife made the arrangement of the refreshments an opportunity for a concentrated scrutiny of the newly purchased. Souraya was not surprised by her intensity: what she had gleaned from the girls of her own people who had entered polygamous arrangements was that one was as wived to the women in such a marriage as to the husband. The wife looked Souraya full in the eyes, then pulled aside the velvet hangings and held them open for the chieftain to enter. She bowed as he crossed the threshold, and took her own leave by backing out the door; it was a grave discourtesy here for a woman to turn her back to a man.
    A woman who has been bought feels a rush of sickening, defensive, and absolute attention when she sees her purchaser, as a soldier does when he stands and faces for the first time a combatant on the field, who is coming toward him to kill him. A woman’s purchaser, too, wants power over a body, but differs in that he pursues her life, not her death, which is a different kind of destruction. Souraya stood up to meet the man who owned her.
    Another wife followed him in with a tray of jewelry, set it down, following his gesture, and left. He had a pale face, from living so much out of the sun, and an appraising eye, perhaps for the same reason. He, more than many men, was surrounded by a world he had imported and created. “Please be seated. There.” He spoke to her with a formulaic, proprietary courtesy, and a slight impatience, as if he wanted to treat her in a more perfunctory fashion, but was inhibited by the value his investment in her gave her.
    “It must be a grief to you to leave your brother,” he said, “but these are the natural sorrows of women, like the transplantations of fruit trees. There is a shock,