Killer of Men - Christian Cameron [54]
The people were tall and handsome, and they looked like Greeks – dark hair, straight noses, fine-breasted women and strong men, with a proportion with fairer skin and red and blond hair. They were taller and more handsome than Boeotians, but not a different race.
I felt even dirtier.
The guards moved us carefully from square to square so that we didn’t offend the citizens as they strolled through the cool evening air. But several men and at least one woman stopped to look at us.
Women in Boeotia seldom leave their own farms. I was not used to seeing a half-clothed woman in her prime gawping at slaves and mocking the guards. I stared at her.
She turned and stared back, and then her hand moved and she tried to strike me. I moved my head.
The man with her stopped. He was examining the older man who had called me a fool. Now he turned and looked at me. He was even taller than the other tall men, with the muscles of an athlete and the chiton of a very rich man.
He looked at me for a moment and then threw something at me.
It was a nut. He had been eating nuts, and he threw hard.
I caught it.
He nodded, whispered something to the beautiful woman at his side and turned away. Then the guards moved us on, up the acropolis and into a slave barracks at the bottom of the temple district.
In the morning, I was sold to the man who had thrown the nut. He came in person to collect me. I had no idea what he saw in me, any more than I knew why I was a slave, but the man obviously saw something he liked and bought it – or rather, his beautiful wife did. Later, I came to know that he was simply that way, and his life of random acquisition had probably saved my life and my spirit, for the slaves who went to the temple sometimes became priests, but those who didn’t died of the work. The rest of the parcel I came up with carried mud bricks for the new priests’ barracks for two years. Back-breaking labour in the sun.
A priest told me that my new owner’s name was Hipponax, and that I should call him Master and avert my eyes. Hipponax put his carnelian seal on a clay tablet, grabbed me by the neck and hustled me out of the slave barracks. At the portico of the great temple, he stopped and looked me over. Then he made a face. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘you were cheap.’ He laughed. ‘Aphrodite’s tits, boy, you stink. Let’s get you a doctor.’
We walked down from the acropolis, past the magnificent steps to the Temple of Artemis and into the lower temple precinct, where he took me to the Temple of Asclepius. We don’t even have Asclepius in Boeotia. He’s a healing god.
I was there for three days. They cleaned my leg and poured wine over it twice a day and wrapped it in bandages. I was bathed and fed well – coarse food, but there was barley bread, pork and lots of onions, and I ate like a horse.
Let me give you, in a sentence, the difference between Ephesus and Plataea. At the Temple of Asclepius, I was housed in the precinct of slaves. I thought I was living with aristocrats. My bed had linen sheets and a white wool blanket, and they gave me a linen chiton to wear as if it wasn’t worth more than my best spear. I was waited on by free men and women until I was healed. Imagine!
Most of the other men in my ward were victims of old age, and most of them were Thracians. In fact, the overwhelming number of slaves in Ephesus were Thracians, blond men and women with robust bodies and big heads. And I didn’t have a word in common with them.
On the third day, my new master came and fetched me. I was clean. All my hair had been cut away and my head shaved. I thought it was a condition of servitude, but it turned out that they did it to rid me of lice. They shaved my pubic hair, too. That worried me. Easterners were notorious for their sexual licence.
I wore my linen chiton when I followed my master on to the street. The sun, reflected from marble and pale grey stone, blinded me. I had a crutch and I hobbled along behind him as best I could.
We walked down just one level of the town. The acropolis was at the top, and then the temples,