Killer of Men - Christian Cameron [57]
I never loved horses. I’ve known a few that were smarter than a rock, but not many. They’re stubborn and stupid and not unlike cats, except that cats don’t injure themselves the moment you turn your back. At any rate, after two weeks, Scyles said I would never be a charioteer, and he was right, but we kept trying.
I loved to drive. We started with a little pony cart, and I fell off a dozen times trying to make tight corners, but I was healed up by then. And we had exercises – wonderful exercises, like balancing on a board placed across the hollow of a shield, so that the face of the shield was in the dust and you could tilt and fall so easily – we’d fight that way, to practise balance. And the pony cart – I’d ride on the pole, or ride the pony, until I was comfortable anywhere in the cart or out of it. That was Scyles’ way. Then we tried a two-horse chariot with real horses, and I broke my arm the first day. That took months to heal, and I spent that time doing exercises and working like a normal slave in the kitchens. Scyles ran a tight farm, and he knew his business. If I wasn’t learning my new trade, I could at least run the treadmill that lifted water from the well.
It was while I was healing my arm that I discovered what stallions and mares were born knowing, if you take my meaning. One of the kitchen girls asked me how strong my spear was – all the girls laughed, even the oldsters. And that night she had me. There wasn’t a great deal of foreplay, and she laughed at how quick I was – this from a girl no more than my own age. Girls can be cruel.
But we played quite a bit, and I played with other girls, too. Slave girls like to be pregnant – it makes for less work. And it makes the owner a profit, unless he’s a fool. We had a rich owner and no one was threatened with being ‘sold away’, so the girls played. It was as much of an education as the athletic training, in its way.
The truth is, honey, it was a happy time.
There was hardship, and I was aware that I was not free. But I was young, and I had food, sex, challenge – all in all, life was simple and easy. We worked long hours. When we built a structure over the privy, we worked six straight days from dawn until dusk, but when we were finished we had done something. Other slaves ploughed, sowed and reaped, and I did some of all of that work once I was healed. We had most of the religious feasts, too. Really, in some ways I did less work than I did later as a free man.
On a farm where everyone is a slave, slavery does not seem so bad.
We did have some troubles. There was a boy I hated. He whined, he was weak, he went out of his way to avoid work and he refused to change. He also peddled tales to the overseers – who was having sex with whom, who had eaten too much, who drank the master’s wine. His name was Grigas, and he was Phrygian.
And there was a Thracian boy that I liked, although slaves find it hard to be friends – real friends – because so much of that has been taken from you. But Silkes was a handsome youth, and he was a great wrestler. He’d been taken in a war, and insisted that some day he would escape. He was the first man I heard discuss escape as if it could be done.
One afternoon, we were lying in the horse barn. We’d curried all the hunters and all the chargers and chariot horses and ponies. and now we were flopped on the spare feed straw that lay heaped where Grigas had failed to make neat haystacks.
‘So what if you escape?’ I asked. ‘Where would you go?’
‘Home,’ Silkes said.
‘How?’ I asked.
He shook his head. ‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘If I have to walk on water, I’ll walk home.’ He looked at me. ‘Perhaps I’ll hunt fish with my spear, and light a fire on floating weed.’
‘Now you’re just talking foolishness,’ I said. ‘If they catch you, you won’t be brought back here, learning to be a charioteer. You’ll end up breaking rocks, or cutting salt, or rowing. Something crappy.’
‘So?’ Silkes asked. ‘It’s all slavery. I’m not a slave. I’m a free man.’ He rolled towards me. ‘You’re just a Greek. Slavery is natural for