"We go... to trade a woman... for a young lad."

While the destination seemed clear enough from A to B, Sarsamax didn't seem the least bit dabbling as to how that desitnation was arrived at; whether the line be crooked or straight.

I knew this was coming. I knew what I had to do, even though it was wrong. It is a shameful humiliation to exact upon a woman, shearing her hair from her scalp so that she is left bald.

"I do not know exactly what came over her once we entered the lower bowels of the Great Stadium where the livestock and gladiators are kept imprisoned between events. Athamé seemed to fall beneath a trance, overcome by a sleep that wasn't the natural kind of sleep. And I do not know whether she bore any recollection later upon waking, that it was by my hand she'd been made bald. It grieved me to do this to her, though I'm not sure why. There have been numerous slaves who've lost their hair to me in the course of discipline. And even a free woman once as well, whose submission I'd refused, and who'd been derisively scorned by another woman in the process and named 'Pimple.' It amused me then. But not with Athamé.

It was only hair, she had assured me. It will grow back. Perhaps I was looking ahead a little further than she was, at the time.

It was by my hand, and mercifully not another's. There was none to witness her shame, save for some lowly scaliwag whom I'm not sure even had the good fortune of a proper name.

Each of them had something to sacrifice then, and neither was any more or less than the other. Odd that it was her hair he found the hardest to give up. Was that a true sacrifice then, in the way of cleansing rites? Suddenly, he wished they didn't have to go on this journey at all. How gladly he'd have carried the seer over his own threshold and left Sarce to his own devices. Yes... he could see it all so clearly now.