Killer of Men - Christian Cameron [53]
Six of the archers came in behind him. He began to gesture with his staff, and the men and boys he pointed out were taken.
I was the last to be chosen.
Someone was purchasing a packet of slaves – ten or twelve in a single lot. I was being used to make weight, which meant that somebody was getting swindled. I was as likely to die as live.
Slave traders. The very lowest form of life, eh?
We were fettered together by the necks and wrists and marched off up the road. I had no idea where I was, and no idea where I was going, and I didn’t care. I had already surrendered. I might not have broken yet, but I was breaking, because I had no one to talk to and no one to care about. I plodded along behind another man, as close as if we were file-mates in the phalanx, and I didn’t know his name.
On the other hand, neither of the boys who had wanted me dead were in the purchase. I was going to live, if I could just get through the walk to wherever we were going.
I had thought that the trip over Parnes was the hardest thing I would ever do, marching with all the weight of my brother’s armour, but this was far tougher, although the pace was gentle enough. I was touched with the whip only once – for falling – and otherwise we were fairly treated.
We walked some stades. Perhaps my fever was still on me, but I scarcely remember a moment of it. I knew we were by the sea, or perhaps a great river. I assumed we were in Euboea.
For the first time, I wondered how I had come to be a slave, when none of the other men were Plataeans or even Athenians. And as far as I could remember, we were winning the battle when I fell. But that made no sense.
The farther I walked up a long river valley in the brilliant noon sun, the more unlikely it was that I was in Euboea. For one thing, except for the old bridge, Euboea is an island. It has neither great mountains nor a huge river. I was walking along a great river, deep enough to carry a warship with three tiers of oars. It flowed out of a pair of mighty mountains in the purple distance, or so it seemed when I raised my head and looked around.
When we stopped at a well and the guards paid silver for water, the people were small and brown. Not much browner than I was myself, but brown with that flawless skin that marks Lydians and Phrygians – not that I knew that then. And of course our guards were Scythians. I’d seen Scythians in pictures, and Pater had fought some, and Miltiades had fought thousands and run away from others – a story he loved to tell.
As we walked, and my thigh throbbed, I saw that there were trees I didn’t know, and the goats were different.
I kept walking. What could I do?
We walked up that valley for a day. I’ve ridden the distance in an hour – the guards must have had orders to go easy on us – but I never expected to live.
We had a meal of gruel and bread in a village on the flank of a mountain, still above the beautiful river. I squatted next to the safest-looking male.
‘Are we in Asia?’ I asked.
He looked startled when I spoke. He chewed bread, and his eyes flicked around as he considered his answer. Finally, he nodded. ‘Yes,’ he said. He pointed up the valley, where something winked like fire. ‘Ephesus,’ he said.
I was such a bumpkin that I had never heard of Ephesus. ‘What’s Ephesus?’ I asked.
‘You are a fool,’ he said. And turned his back.
We walked on in the cool of the evening, and before true night fell, we were in the streets of a city more beautiful than anything I had ever seen in Boeotia or Attika. The streets were paved in grey stone. There was a temple that rose from the peak of the acropolis over the town, and it was made of marble. It looked like a house of the gods, and the roof was gold – that was the ‘fire’ I had seen ten stades away. The houses were brick and stone, every one of them bigger than anything at home. Water flowed from springs through fountains.
It was like a mortal going to Olympus. I had never seen anything like it, and I gaped like