The palace was too quiet for the little boy who ruled the kingdom.
Pharaoh Khamudi sat on his golden throne, drumming his fingers on the armrest watching his priests chant verses he had heard a thousand times. Their scented smoke danced around and about toward the ceiling. Hefty men fanned him with ostrich feathers, and scribes waited with their pens. To them, this was majesty. To him, it was bondage. Bondage for a boy of his age. A twelve-year-old boy.
“I wish I could just be a boy for a day,” he whispered under his breath. "All these feel like a prison sentence." He continued. No one dared to answer. Who in their right senses would dare to answer the king?
Pharaoh Khamudi had ascended the throne after the death of his parents in a mysterious manner. Some said he drowned in the Red Sea, but he had yet to understand how or what his parents were doing in the Red Sea. Well, for a boy his age he mourned as much as his little mind would let him. But now he finds the responsibility of his boring, taxing, and limiting him from living the youthful life he had so wished for.
That night, when the torches burned low and the guards yawned at their posts, Pharaoh Khamudi slipped out of the palace. He wrapped himself in a plain linen robe, and he covered his head with a hood just like the picture of the assassin he had read in the Assassin's Creed at the palace Library. Then he walked barefoot through the back gate and out into the night air. He threw the hood away from his face once he was in the fields and let the night air massage his face. For the first time in years, he could perceive the scent of freshly baked bread and not the regular scented smoke in the palace. Everything felt different. Even the noise.
He hadn't taken a thousand steps in the streets of Thebes when he spotted some boys crouched around a set of carved dice. They were shouting, arguing, and slapping the sand with their hands when they won. The only thing Pharaoh Khamudi was conversant with - throwing a dice to summon the gods. He paused and watched them with so much confusion. Unlike how serious he was taught to be while throwing his dice. These boys did theirs with so much wild laughter and so much careless freedom.
“Want to play?” one of the boys called, squinting at him.
Khamudi took a few steps back. He mustn't be recognised as the king. When he was sure that none of the boys recognized him for talking to him like a mere human, other than a God, he was revered like at the palace. He didn't hesitate.
“I don’t have coins,” he said. He knew severally that he had to drop a few gold coins to throw a dice back at the palace.
The boy grinned, bent to the ground, and picked a small stone which he shoved into his hand. “Bet with this. Doesn't matter. We're just young boys, we don't gamble like our Papas.”
Excited, Pharaoh joined the game. Throwing the dice with so much stress and ease, just like he does back at the palace. The boys cheered at his skills. And for the first time in years, he laughed louder than he had in years. He lost his stone at some point, but he won it back in the next game and more. He yelled, laughed, rolled in the dust like a normal human and not a God.
It wasn't long before a group of soldiers came by.
“Street rats gambling again while you should be at home?"
Pharaoh Khamudi quickly threw his hood over his face. But that didn't stop the soldiers from picking him out.
“And who’s this stranger with such rich cloth for a poor man?” They dragged him out of the group of boys.
Khamudi, hid his face on the floor. Thinking of his next move. Nobody was supposed to know he had sneaked out of the palace. It could only mean a problem for him.
Luckily, one of the boys drew closer and threw a stone at the soldiers for ruining their fun. Then he shouted to the others, “Run!”
Khamudi froze for a moment. He had never run from anything in his life. It wasn't long before his brain caught up that he wasn't Pharaoh for that night. He was just a boy with a stone in his hand. Without thinking he ran along with the boys through the narrow alleys until the shouts faded behind them.
Tired but hyped, Khamudi leaned against a wall catching his breath. The boy who had saved him from the grip of the soldier looked at him and smiled.
“You throw dice like a king,” he teased.
Khamudi almost told him the truth. Instead, he smiled for real. “And you fight like a soldier.”
The boy grinned at that compliment. "What's your name?" He asked.
"Khamudi."
"Sounds familiar. I've heard my Papa call that name several times. Said it's his master's name at the palace."
Khamudi froze.
"You're just a boy. I'd have said you're Pharaoh Khamudi." The boy joked and they all laughed.
Pharaoh Khamudi laughed with them, too. He wished he could tell them he was the Pharaoh. But it would only mean that he won't be returning the next day to play with them. For they would never see him with the common eye they do today. And that would kill the fun for him.
By dawn, he slipped back into the palace, his robe dusty, his sandals torn.
But from that day, whenever he sat on the throne, bored by chants and scented incense, he remembered the sound of dice clattering in the street, and the voices of the boys who had become his friends.
[Source](https://pixabay.com/photos/dice-six-gambling-to-play-689618/)
