11
“ANMI, ANMI.” Ikay’s whisper sounded like a roar in the silence in the chamber.
Jessica stared at the frieze, the carvings lit in sharp relief by Ikay’s light. She didn’t know when she had started crying, but her cheeks were wet with tears.
With trembling hands, she ran her fingertips over the shapes of the woman taking the bowl from the Pengali man. Her ancestors? Her mother?
“Am taali isverian; I am equal.”
Her hand caressed the skin on her own upper left arm where the characters of the tattoo had faded—the same script as on these walls. A clue to her past she he had carried with her all her life.
She had questions—thousands of them. How old was this frieze? Who were these people? Where had they come from? Were any of them still here? If they were not, could she find them? How h
