His red hair hung in amber knots. As he was dragged out he didn't resist, and accepted his fate. The sky reddened slightly with the soft fall of night, and the dust of the desert kicked up around his bare feet and chained ankles.
Meanwhile, all the talk in the bazaars had been of rumours that the pharaoh had once again refused to give up his flame-haired concubine. His fixation with the woman had been known for some time. Babushka'd old peasant women would complain that she'd used sorcery to bewitch the boyish ruler. Whilst gossipy traders and their jewelled wives would curse the illegitimate harlot. Calling her "dog" and "mongrel."
The temple priests had repeatedly begged the besotted pharoah to give up his favoured love. That the kingdom was in danger. That ill omens loomed large, and that blood and rebellion simmered in the avenues and fields beneath the palace walls. Even more so, that his deviancy was against the holy laws. An abomination, strictly forbidden by the gods. What sort of message did it send out to the people, if even the pharaoh himself engaged in such sin? "The whole land has fallen into debauchery and licentiousness," they pleaded. Prostitutes in every port, and feral children on every street. Men taking their slaves to wife, or marrying foreign women. Their daughters whored out for trade and riches. Deformity and disease, rife across the kingdom. All ritual abandoned, and every division broken down.
Yet still, the pharaoh refused. Threatening war if anyone dared to remove the ruddy temptress from the opulence that surrounded him.
As the man with amber knots of hair was led to the temple, the streetlamps burned red through the dust. The heat from the distant pyre already warming the cool night air. As he headed through the crowds he inwardly lamented his innocence. But, outwardly, his tea-coloured freckles and leprous skin betrayed him. The baying worshippers seeing in his ugly, freakish appearance only the mark of sin and defilement. A blemish on a troubled and forsaken nation -- that could only be cleansed by fire, before the old and violent gods of Egypt.
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