The Binding

Chapter Thirty-Two

She laughed. "Yes. You do seem to attract them, don't you?"

I gasped. She had a point.

Yisu made a loud sniffing noise from her seat and turned to frown at me. "You're not a mortal anymore. It won't do you any good to continue thinking like one." I blinked back at her baffled.

"Time doesn't deal in absolutes, Kaja," Sria said. "He wasn't a good man, and he wasn't a bad man. He was Avati. Good people will sometimes do vile, selfish, and despicable things. Bad people will sometimes be charitable and kind. That is the way of things."

"What do you mean by time?"

"Time is what we are. It's all we have," Yisu replied.

Sria continued, "An eternity to commit an infinite amount of actions in an infinite number of ways. Gods aren't good or evil. They just are."

I thought about that. But it didn't feel right. I shook my head, "Avati don't have eternity. We just imagine we do." Sria said nothing, just watched the road in front of her. I closed my eyes. I suppose it boils down to perspective. Maybe watching hundreds, then thousands of generations live and die is eternity.

"Why did you separate?"

She swallowed, her face strained. "Over the years, I watched him grow dark and angry. It took centuries to finally leave him. I was tethered to him, so separating was nearly impossible. I eventually left and traveled west."

"Tethered?" I asked, startled. "He was Taman?"

She smiled, slightly sad. "No, he wasn't Taman."

"I don't understand."

"Everyone tethers, Kaja. A mother tethers to her child. Husbands and wives... even friends," she answered. "Ezra is tethered to Leif as much as he is tethered to you." She stopped and then snickered half under her breath. "Well, maybe not as much. The way a Taman tethers, like everything else they do, is extreme."

Yisu giggled in agreement.

I stared at the back of her seat for a moment. "He wasn't the source Hattu was referring to."

"No, I don't think so."

"Then who is it?"

"I think we all know who the source is, Kaja," Yisu answered.

Sria continued as if she had never stopped. "The last time I saw Poas was in Kush."

"Kush?"

"It was an empire south of Egypt. It was also called Nubia by some people."

"Nubians." I was familiar with the name. "The Sudan. Didn't they conquer Egypt?"

"Sure... one of many," Yisu answered. Her feet were dangling off the edge of the seat and dancing excitedly... or maybe it was boredom.

"Just about everyone in the region attacked Egypt at some point. Many of them succeeded. Hyksos, Kushites, Assyrians, Greeks, Romans... they all claimed Egypt for themselves. But who calls themselves the King is unimportant."

I agreed with Sria on that point. In the end, it never seems to matter who was wearing the crown. People still gathered food, built homes, married, had children, and died. The rest is just fluff.

"I loved a Kushite man there. He was a priest," she said. "Poas destroyed him."

"What happened?"

She held out her hand toward me, palm up, in an inviting gesture. It took another moment for me to understand. She wanted to show me. I reached forward and gently placed my hand over hers. I knew. I simply knew I'd be able to see exactly what she wanted to show me.