The memory arrived without warning, as they often do.
I was in the outer market, negotiating the price of summer silk with a vendor I had dealt with twice before, when it came: a smell, which is the sense most reliably connected to the older layers of memory, something burning and sweet simultaneously, the particular smell of a specific kind of incense that I had not encountered since a life I had lived several centuries before this one.
The vendor was still talking. I continued the negotiation automatically, the way you can continue a familiar action while another part of your mind goes elsewhere. I agreed a price. I collected the fabric. I thanked him with the appropriate words.
Then I stood on the market street in the early summer morning and let the memory settle.
