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Nainaii jolted from sleep.

Burning pain in her hands and lower back greeted her, as they usually did.

The sacks of grain she and her daughter used and shared as a bed were softer than the packed dirt of the floor, but not by much.

Every morning was like this.

The night Ilai could no longer tell whether it was the uncomfortable sleeping arrangements or the endless labor of her waking hours that left her joints aching.

Morning light streamed in under the thin wool blanket that covered the entry to the storage

room. The rays cleared her groginess, and as she woke, Nanai Eli'i remembered what she'd been

dreaming about. The same thing she had dreamt about almost every night for the past two years,

since the day Assyrian soldiers came to Elam with iron

and fire. She'd been bathing her daughter with water from a tall clay jar when the hue and cry

rang out through the streets of Susa. The Assyrians had arrived, the walls had fallen, and death

was coming. Only fragments of what happened next state with Naya Eli in her dreams. Images and feelings that her waking mind tried its very best to forget.

She thanked the old gods of Elam.

In Shushinak, the Lord of the Dead,

Uhuater and Hishmitik, who had been with her when she gave birth to her daughter

for the holes in her memory.

What she recalled was wretched enough.

The omnipresent stench of smoke,

the screams coming from inside a burning house, the blood-soaked soldier clutching a severed head

by the hair, the unbreakable grip of the Assyrian dragging her toward the makeshift slave pen

...