Killer of Men - Christian Cameron [51]
It didn’t take me long to know, to know, honey, that I was dead and in Tartarus for some forgotten sin. I didn’t think that I was dead. I knew it. I flailed and swallowed my own filth. I was shackled under a rowing bench in the bottom rank of rowers. No one expected me to row – only free men rowed, back then – but I was shackled flat with eight other slaves, destined for market. Not that I understood. I knew nothing.
I went down again.
I awoke a second time when a tall man poured water over me while another man held his nose. They looked at the pus – that’s when I saw my leg, red and angry and inflamed – and flinched. The tall man with the pointed beard prodded my leg and I was gone again.
I surfaced a third time in a pen, somewhere in Asia, I learned. I wasn’t shackled, but my thigh still bled pus like a boy’s spots. I had a fever like a child. And the other slaves – there were hundreds – avoided me as if I had the plague. For all they knew, I did. Slaves don’t help each other, honey. That lesson hits you right away, when you go from the brotherhood of the phalanx to slavery.
I was never completely out again. I raved – and no one bought me. I wasn’t worth an obol. The wound on my thigh wept pus, as they say, and because of it, no one buggered me, not even the sick bastards who live at the bottom of the muck of the slave trade. No one made me play their flute, or any of the other things they do to slave boys and girls. You ever wonder why Harmonia flinches every time you move your hand, honey? You don’t want to know.
Have you seen the kind of slaves who sit in corners rambling, talking crazy, and never raise their eyes? No – you haven’t. I never buy ’em, not even for rough work. People can be broken, just like toys.
I missed being broken because I was so disgusting. Bless the Lord of the Silver Bow and his deadly arrows. His ravens sit on my shield to this day because of that beautiful, stinking pus. I watched it – they raped a boy until he stopped complaining just a spear’s length from where I lay. He was Thracian, and he got up silently from their abuse and killed himself, ripping his guts out with a stick, but few are so determined. Honey, you have no idea what a person can put up with, what depth of cowardice we discover when, by small surrenders, we can stay alive. Eh?
Oh, yes. Me, too. I’m sure I’d have given in. I was just a boy, and unlike the brave Thracian, I was utterly disoriented. I couldn’t imagine how I’d come to be a slave, and I couldn’t get my feet under me, so to speak, and I had a wound.
The slaves themselves prey on the weak. Oh yes! No honour among slaves. I had no food – ever. No honest boy came and brought me bread. They ate my gruel and my soup, and one day I awoke to find two bigger boys discussing my squalor and deciding I wasn’t worth ‘a fuck’ – pardon me, honey, but they meant it. And then they pulled up their rags and pissed on me.
This is harder for you than the death of Pater, isn’t it? Hard to picture the noble aristocrat as a victim, your own father with boys raining yellow urine in contempt. Hard to imagine me as a worthless slave. The dishonour. The shame. Eh?
Listen, honey – you know what Achilles says? Better to be the slave of a bad master than King of the Dead. Right? I was alive.
I told you that I tell the truth, at least as I remember it. Who is this fellow you’ve brought to listen to me? You look like an Ionian, young man. Well – eat well. You are my guest, and guest-friendship still counts for something, eh?
Odd as it sounds, I’ve always thought that the urine saved me. Being pissed on. It made me angry, and I think it washed the wound. Persians and Aegyptians use piss that way. Maybe not. Maybe the Deadly Archer simply looked the other way and I healed.
But, by the Lady, I was weak. I was so weak that I couldn’t stand. I hadn’t eaten for two weeks at least. I didn’t even know where I was, but I knew that I was angry, and I wasn