I love your descriptions of chores and day-to-day labor, not only in the sections discussing the care of the horses, but also (like in this chapter), the washing of the clothes on the river. Well done. And I thought your description of winding the cloth into a rope until it almost seemed to burst was really smooth, vivid, and moved the narrative along. This is something I’ve noticed about your style. Your good at embedding descriptive prose in between the smartly-executed dialogue.

I had never really thought about bar soap in antiquity, so to satisfy my own curiosity, I skimmed a fascinating article about it--mostly the ancient history section--on Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soap#Ancient_Middle_East

P.S. - I liked “dawnward bank” of the river, but it made me come to a full stop because for a very brief moment I thought it might have been a typo for “downward”. That’s probably just a “me” thing and doesn’t warrant tweaking, but I thought that I would share it as a data point. Maybe something like “dawn side of the bank” could work?