A Conspiracy of Kings (5 page)

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?

H
OURS 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.