My best hope for rescue wasn’t the king’s war galleys or his soldiers. It was Baron Hanaktos’s daughter. All night long I prayed earnestly to the goddesses of mercy to intercede on my behalf and stir Berrone’s soft heart with pity.
The next morning Gorgias and the slaver went off together after Gorgias had first checked my chains and pulled tight the narrow thongs that held the leather gag in place. “We are off to arrange your sale,” he told me, and I knew that anyone who heard would think I was soon for the galleys. Basrus, I thought, was probably taking Gorgias along to carry all the gold my sale would bring him.
We were left under supervision of the other slavers, and no sooner were they gone than Berrone appeared. She had a servant with her. She pointed me out to him and then retreated to a nearby market stall while the servant approached the pens and gestured to the slaver left in charge. He asked about me and was told I wasn’t for sale. A bribe was offered. The guard declined, and the servant went to check with Berrone. Thank the gods her father’s allowance to her was so large. Back and forth between the market stall and the guard the servant went, the bribe no doubt growing with each iteration, until the slaver’s eyes were so wide that when he looked over at me, their whites showed all around.
Basrus was undone by his own secrecy. His guard knew no more than that I was an unruly slave destined for the galleys. He could keep half the money himself and still offer his master far more than he thought I was worth, no doubt expecting his master to be pleased. I could almost hear the resulting curses from the slaver. Best of all, I didn’t think that the guard had seen Berrone. With luck, the slaver wouldn’t know who bought me and couldn’t track me down before I reached the safety of Hanaktos’s megaron. All that mattered was that the deal was done before Basrus returned.
A few minutes later the slaves were directed out of the pens and down to the shore to wash. My shackles were undone, and my arms untied. There was still a collar on my neck with a short rope attached, and the bribed slaver took me in hand. On the way to the shore he and I were at the end of the line. It was an easy matter to put the rope into the servant’s hand and walk on without me. No one else even noticed. Perhaps he intended to keep all the money and tell his master that his troublesome slave had escaped.
The servant tugged impatiently, and I followed, struggling to undo the knots on the gag, but the leather thongs were thin, and the knots were too small to untie easily.
“Hurry,” said Berrone when we reached her. “My mother wouldn’t let me buy you yesterday, and when I asked my father if I could buy you last night, he said no.” The last knot unraveled, and I pulled the bit of wood free just as she said, “He told me that he’d ordered you sold himself because you killed that man on our farm.”
Their farm? I’d opened my mouth to speak but was as dumbstruck as if the gag had still been in place. Berrone mistook the cause for my wide-eyed stare.
“Don’t be afraid,” she said breathlessly. “I am sure you didn’t mean to do it. And my father won’t know I’ve bought you. That’s why I waited for Basrus and Gorgias to be gone. I am going to hide you.”
She knew Basrus and Gorgias by name. They worked with her father, or for him. Berrone’s father was in league with my abductors, and his daughter, unknown to him, was going to hide me. What could I do but go quietly?
CHAPTER FIVE
HOURS later I was locked in a pantry under the house, surrounded by storage amphorae, in the pitch dark. We’d ridden away from the market, Berrone in the seat with the sullen servant, me balancing on the pins at the back, and taken the road out of town and up toward the baron’s megaron. We didn’t go through the gates. Just before the walled courtyard, we’d turned aside to follow the road slightly downhill again and around to the stable yard. There were two rows of stables facing each other, one row built against the solid walls of the megaron’s foundation, one facing it, and a ramp that led up to an ancillary gate into the forecourt above us. On the far side of the ramp was an open terrace shaded by olive trees and scattered with the usual debris of farm and residence.
From the terrace, Berrone had led me into the kitchens, where she’d explained to the house steward that he was going to hide me. The steward, not surprisingly, hadn’t taken to this plan at all. He’d presented all sorts of obvious difficulties, none of which Berrone had considered. I couldn’t serve in the house without being seen by her father, and if I served in the kitchen, the staff would talk. Oh, no, Berrone had said. Oh, yes, the steward had insisted. I almost felt sorry for him. This obviously wasn’t the first time that Berrone had presented him with a mess to clean up, and he could afford neither to offend her nor to disobey her father. I stood by, trying to look as innocuous as possible and not at all like a dangerous, man-killing slave, while the steward gave me the evil eye and tried to convince Berrone to take me back.
Finally, they locked me in one of the underground storage rooms and told me to wait. The floor was packed dirt, which might as well have been stone, it was so cold. I had no idea who, if anyone, was going to come for me. If the steward revealed my presence to the baron, I was doomed, and for all I knew, the baron’s plans were common knowledge in his household. Servants, in my experience, always know everything.
Behind me a mouse crept through the dark. The packed earth was probably riddled with mouseholes. I was hungry and wondered if the mouse was getting anything to eat, so I crawled across the floor myself, feeling in front of me until I reached the storage jars I had seen in the dim light before they closed the door. I rose up onto my knees, running my hands up the sides of one jar until I reached the waxed seal at the top. I could feel the symbols in the wax that would have told me what was in the jar, if there’d been any light to see by. I felt further, to the next jar and then past it, looking for more accessible food, a bag of nuts, perhaps, or root vegetables, but everything was in clay, safe from the vermin.
I may have been meek, but I was more able than a mere mouse. I broke the wax seals and lifted the lids, then dipped my hand into a jar, hoping for the best. The first jar was pickling juice with little lumps, which turned out to be onions. The next jar held olives in salty brine that left me wishing for a drink. I looked further but found nothing but olive oil. If there was anything else stored in the bottom of the jars, I was unwilling to plunge my arm into the oil to the shoulder to find it. All I could do was go back to the onions pickled in vinegar to try to slake my thirst.
I fell asleep in the dark and woke in the dark and began to be more afraid. I couldn’t guess how long I’d been in the cellar. Had Berrone forgotten me? Would she decide to make a clean breast of her mistake and hand me over to her father? Or would she just leave me to die in the dark and be carried out in a week or two, when someone came for more pickled onions?
I considered banging on the door but was worried that announcing my presence to others in the household would only get me an audience with the baron. When I heard the key turning in the lock, I scrambled to my feet and was standing when it opened to admit the light of a lamp. The steward hung it on a hook near the door and looked me over. A taller, heavier-set man looked at me over his shoulder.
“He’s dangerous,” warned the steward. I almost laughed. In one way I was no danger at all but in another more dangerous than he could imagine. Someone somewhere was sweating over my disappearance, I was sure.
“You let me worry about dangerous,” said the other man. He leaned against the doorway with his arms crossed, muscles bunching, and I swallowed my laugh.
The steward said, “This is Ochto, overseer for the baron’s field hands. You’ll go with him, and if you give him trouble, you disappear, do you understand?”
I nodded.
“We’ll tell the lady you ran off.”
“I won’t be any trouble,” I promised.
“No, you won’t,” Ochto agreed.
“And you’ll keep quiet about where you’ve come from. Or maybe you’ll find yourself under the baron’s eye and wish we had knifed
you and buried you out by the olives,” the steward said. Just then he saw the broken seals on the storage jars. You would have thought I’d been eating infants. He stepped around me to get a better look.
“What have you done? Nine!” he shouted. “Nine broken seals?” It occurred to me only then that the carefully sealed jars would have to be repacked and resealed and that those that couldn’t be resealed would have to be consumed or wasted. No slave, no matter how hungry, would have helped himself to the provisions stored in the room.
“I was hungry,” I explained, afraid that my disguise was slipping already. He was not sympathetic. “I’m sorry,” I added humbly, but he waved me toward the overseer with a glare and went to mourn over his ravaged pots.
Warily, I stepped into the corridor, intimidated by the bunching muscles of the overseer, but Ochto only directed me to walk ahead of him toward the stairs to the upper level. With a creeping feeling between my shoulder blades, I preceded him down the dark passage and up the steps to the kitchens. Outside the kitchen he tapped me on the shoulder and pointed to a path next to the stables. The path led downhill to more outbuildings and a long, low barracks for field workers.
There was a narrow yard with a wellhead and two doors into the barracks. Ochto pointed me toward the one on the right. I ducked my head through the low doorway and found a large room lined with pallets and men dressed in the simplest and coarsest clothing.
They were all sitting on individual pallets or lying down. Ochto nudged the one closest to the door. Without comment, the man swept a small collection of items out of a niche in the wall behind him and moved to another pallet farther away, the occupant of which packed up his things and moved as well. This continued down the row until the youngest in the room, younger by a year or two than myself, shifted to a pallet that was empty. When Ochto nodded at me, I sat on my new bed. To the entire barracks, he condemned me with a single word: man-killer.
I hunched, pulled my knees up to my chin, and wrapped my arms around my legs. The room was quiet, the others flicking glances at me. I ignored them. After years in Sounis’s palaces being eyed with disgust by my uncle and my own father and courtier after courtier, I assure you I am unrivaled at pretending not to notice other people’s glances.
In time, quiet exchanges began among the field hands. No one met my eyes, and I didn’t meet theirs, but I sent quick glances around the room. It appeared to be half the length of the entire building. To my left was a door that led to the other half of the barracks, probably with a private room for the overseer in between. At the opposite end of the sleeping quarters, there was another door that led outside. There were open spaces in the stone walls that let in the light but not too much heat.
We seemed to be waiting, but I had no idea for what until the door opened again and a husky young man brought in a large pot, which he set on the floor. Behind him several young boys carried stacks of wooden bowls and spoons, which they distributed among the men. When the overseer pointed at me, I rose and served myself some soup. By the time my bowl was full, the rest of the men had gathered behind me for their servings. I went back to my new bed and ate.
So I became a slave. Before I had been a prisoner, the captured prince of Sounis. Now, in the eyes of Ochto, sitting on a stool by the door, slurping his own soup, I was no different than any of the men around me. My freedom was like my missing tooth, a hole where something had been that was now gone. I worried at the idea of it, just as I slid my tongue back and forth across the already healing hole in my gum. I tasted the last bloody spot and tried to remember the feel of the tooth that had been there. I had been a free man. Now I was not.
After eating, the men carried their bowls and spoons back to the boys who’d brought them. The soup pot was carried away, and everyone lay down. I did the same and was surprised to be woken bleary-eyed by the call to rise. The sun had dropped in the sky. The worst of the day’s heat had passed, and the men were to go back to work. I stumbled after the others out of the barracks and along the path to the fields.
The baron’s fields rolled down toward the water and stretched for some miles along the shore behind his megaron. We hiked between mature grapevines, into folds of land and up again, climbing rolling hills, until we were walking through olive groves and came to an undeveloped hillside in the process of being cultivated for more trees.
There were piles of rocks by the road, and digging tools. The slope was being terraced for new planting. Several men headed off to spots where the waist-high walls were partly built. They were masons who knew their jobs. Others were ferries, carrying the rocks to the masons. The rest of us picked up the digging tools and climbed up the hill or down to shift the dirt. Those heading downhill moved the dirt shovel by shovel into the space behind the newly built walls, creating flat terraces to hold a tree. Those uphill had a more difficult job, cutting through the roots of the dried grasses into the rocklike soil to gouge a space for a wall to fit. I grabbed a shovel and headed downhill before I could be sent upward.
In terms of my freedom, I may have been no different from the other slaves around me, but in other ways more significant to the job at hand, I was as unlike them as it was possible to be. The first time I swung the shovel into the dirt pile the newly healing skin split under the scabs on my back, and my muscles burned like fire. My hands slipped along the shaft of the digging tool. I gripped harder, strained at the load, and tipped a pathetic half shovel of loose dirt, dry as dust, into the empty space behind the stone wall.
The man beside me looked at the results of my effort and then at me. I could hardly excuse my performance by telling him of my sheltered childhood as the nephew of the king of Sounis. All I could do was scowl and wait for his contemptuous comment. To my surprise he only shrugged and moved away to work somewhere else.
I tipped another tiny shovel’s worth into place. Ignoring all the others, feeling more and more humiliated by my own performance and more sullen every minute, I worked stubbornly until the sun dropped to the horizon. When I heard a shout from above, I looked uphill to see the overseer resting on his shovel. He was a worker as well, and he was calling it a day. All around me, the men moved slowly to the rock piles, where they left their tools. Together we made our way to the barracks. My back hurt so much I was afraid that if I took a misstep on the rutted path, I would drop like a sack of oats. I watched every step as if it were my last, but I made it to the sleeping quarters and to my own pallet, where I fell, without a thought of dinner, into a dreamless sleep.
I woke in the morning starved. I was also, I found, when I levered my body into a sitting position, chained to the wall by a bracelet around my hand. I was looking at the smooth iron ring, remembering Eugenides once in a similar position and wishing that I had his pluck to deal with the situation, when Ochto squatted beside me to unlock it.
“Not used to that, are you?” he asked.
I shook my head.
“Better this than a galley, though, right?” He watched me through narrowed eyes as he spoke, and continued to observe me even after I nodded my agreement. He popped the lock off as the potboy brought breakfast. My whole body protesting, I was still first in line for the food.
I dragged myself through the next days, working, resting in the afternoon, digging until the light was going from the sky. I ate and then slept dreamlessly. Slowly I grew stronger and was awake longer. During rest periods I watched the other men as they wandered in and out of the barracks. I began to wait with them when we came in from the fields for my turn to rinse myself at the wellhead instead of going directly to my pallet of blankets in anticipation of my next meal. I was still first in line to eat.
Every night the men entertained themselves under the overseer’s watchful eye. They talked until by mutual consent someone’s offering of poetry or song was chosen, a different man each night, in a subtle order of rotation I didn’t understand. Some knew only one piece, others had a broader range, and they were careful, in an unscripted way, not to overuse anyone’s limi
ted repertoire. One evening, as I lay on my pallet, with my right hand chained to the ring in the wall, I heard a man across the room reciting Eacheus’s speech from the ending of the Eponymiad.
I hadn’t really listened before because I’d been falling asleep as they started. I was falling asleep then, but a mistake caught my ear: “laughing-eyed chorus” instead of “doe-eyed Kora.”
Without lifting my head, I recited the line correctly, not considering if anyone would hear or care what I said. There was an uncomfortable silence before the speaker hesitantly started again, and in the space of the next few lines, I was asleep. In the morning, as I shoveled my meal out of my wooden bowl, I realized that everyone was staring at the man on the next pallet and that he was eyeing me. A chill settled in the muscles of my back. Then, like someone tensing before a dive into cold water, the man beside me said, “You know the Eponymiad?”
“Your pardon?”
“You were in-house? You know the poets?”
I shrugged. “Some,” I said, not sure where this was headed. Nowhere, it seemed, as everyone went back to his food and then trailed off to the fields. They talked among themselves about me, I could tell. I wondered if I’d revealed some weakness, lost the protection of my invisibility.
That evening the skin between my shoulders crawled as I received my portion of food, and it took all my self-control not to hurry to my bed to get my back against a wall. Eugenides wouldn’t hurry, I reminded myself. I wouldn’t, either.