A small village on the route to the tribes. The day before.
“My lord father?” asked the young woman kneeling before him.
Abdul-Shihab frowned at his eldest daughter, Falia. As usual, she was dressed in the loose caftan of a boy, without the veil of modesty unmarried women wore. Her hair was braided to keep it out of the way, and her only concession to her gender was in the colorful embroidery on her caftan, though even that was little enough. Frankly, it amazed him that his first wife, docile as she had been, had produced this… this… hoyden. Falia was strong-willed, defiant, everything her mother had not been. Whether this was due to something in her blood, from her mother’s side naturally, or something to do with the women who’d raised her when her mother died, Abdul-Shihab knew not. What he did know was that she was blight to the honor of his family name, and somehow, he would have to be rid of her.
Falia looked up at her father, and moaned inwardly. He was frowning, which likely meant a beating. Not that that was unusual. She was used to it and in fact would have been surprised if a day had gone by when he didn’t beat her. She smiled a little, hoping to appease him, and perhaps he would not beat her too severely, though that was a faint hope at best. Sometimes she wished that she’d died in the raid that took her mother. Surely d*ath was preferable to the scorn and torment she suffered each day. But there were good things as well. The goats she tended for instance. They at least judged her for what she did for them, not out of any preconceived notions about how she should behave, or what was “proper.”
“My lord father?” she asked again. Anaya (she refused to call her father’s second wife ‘Mother’) had sent her to bring him for dinner, and that was what she’d do. Even if he beat her for it. It was ridiculous, really. Anaya was twenty, only two years older than Falia herself, though she was aged beyond her years by the number of children and the amount of work Abdul-Shihab had laid upon her. They’d been married seven years and already Falia had three half-brothers and two half-sisters.
****
The village of Budur was small, out of the way, and precisely fit the idiom, “Don’t blink, or you’ll miss it.” Indeed, one could almost think that the saying had actually come from Budur, silly as that may be. Everyone knew everyone else, which partially explained why Falia was so hard for her father to be rid of. She had frightened away all of the young men with her wild (for a g*rl, anyway) ways, and her unfeminine ideas. Why, the g*rl actually thought that she could protect her father’s flocks as well as any boy. Actually, Falia did a better job through having to prove her right to be out in the fields to begin with than most of the boys did with their fathers’ herds.
There was a perfunctory shrine to the Eye in the middle of the town by the well, but no one really paid any mind to it. After all, the Eye didn’t really have anything to do with the business of raising goats. Did it? If anyone ever did worship the Eye with more fervor than usual, he or she was promptly sent to Umbar to join the priesthood, and the family was usually thought to incur blessing that way. Other than that, religion had very little to do with life in that sleepy little town.
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