CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Darius grunted as he swung the blunt ax high and brought it down in a high arc, over his shoulder, onto a large, green boulder. It smashed before him into a pile of small rocks, green dust rising up in a cloud, covering him, as it had since the sunrise. The pungent smell of athox burned his nose, and he tried to turn his head.
Darius knew it would do him little good: he was mired in the dust from head to toe, after another long day of labor, as he had been nearly every day of his life. At fifteen years of age, his hands were raw, his clothing tattered, having spent nearly all his life in labor, in hard, backbreaking work. It was the life of a slave and, like all of his people, he hardly knew anything different.
But Darius dreamed of a different life, even if it was a lif
