Memoirs of a Fallen God

Chapter 2

I awoke to the soothing touch of something warm and wet moving across my forehead. The sensation was strange but not at all unpleasant. Slowly, I opened my eyes and found the wizened features of an old woman hovering above me.

I remember well the tan skin of her face, wrinkled and shriveled like some over aged piece of fruit, and the grey bun of her hair, tied neatly atop her head in a little tower. But it was her eyes I remember best. Caring. Considerate. A mother's eyes.

She hummed some wordless tune as she worked, dipping an old rag in a bucket of water beside the bed in which I lay. Though her hands were the callused, rough hands of a life-long slave, they were nothing but gentle as they ran the wet rag across my forehead.

She noticed me looking at her. The wrinkles of her face tightened as she smiled down at me. She did not look quite so old, then. Even though my poor little body still seemed to hurt everywhere it was imaginable to hurt, I couldn't help myself. I smiled back.

Thus began my time with Mother Mera. Since those early months spent in her care, I have ever judged kindness against that warm, nurturing woman's standard, and time and again, I have found all others wanting.

I, who had no memory of loving parents or any tender experience at all to draw from, knew that wizened old woman loved me before either of us had exchanged a single word. It was in her smile, in the gentle caress of her knotted hands. It was sitting right there behind her eyes, clear as day.

So it was that while the other slaves, even those as young as I, worked the fields from dawn 'til dusk, I spent long days in Mother Mera's tidy little one room shack, healing. I ate as much of her simple, excellent cooking as I could fit in my stomach, and slept, at her encouragement, for as long as I could keep my eyes closed.

Despite my injuries, despite the near constant aches and pain, despite the threat of death if I did not recover fast enough, it was without question the happiest time of my life. For the first time I could remember, I was loved. She sang to me, she told me stories, she held me close whenever the pain grew and left me shaking. She treated me, in every way, as if I were her own precious child.

From time to time others, mostly children, were brought into her home, to have one injury or another treated. That she welcomed every one of them with as much love and attention as she treated me mattered not a bit, for Mother Mera's capacity for affection seemed boundless, and I suffered not at all for what she shared with others. It was simply who she was.

And well did I need such tender care, for my injuries had been considerable. As Mother Mera explained to me once I was recovered enough to sit up and listen, had my injuries occurred as the result of an accident out in the fields, in all likelihood I would have been killed out of hand.

A slave who can't work is worse than worthless, for he still needs to eat. As it was, the only reason I was allowed time to recover seemed to be the master's irritation with the slave driver, Niroko, and the money he had demanded as compensation. My recovery was already paid for.

Of course, had any of my injuries proved crippling, it would have been an entirely different matter. Irritated or not, compensated or not, the master would allow no crippled slaves on his estate. Mother Mera thought it a matter of pride. Any injury that left a slave crippled was a guarantee for a swift death.

Yet it seemed very few of those who came into her tiny shack injured walked out the door in anything other than perfect health. Though I didn't realize it at the time, it is obvious to me now that Mother Mera was more than the simple slave "physick" she claimed. While I remember well the unpleasantly fragrant poultices and salves she applied to many injuries, I can also recall injuries she simply looked at, or ran a hand over, and the patient seemed to feel relief all the same.