Basrus was undone by his own secrecy. His guard knew no more than that I was an unruly slave destined for the galleys. He could keep half the money himself and still offer his master far more than he thought I was worth, no doubt expecting his master to be pleased. I could almost hear the resulting curses from the slaver. Best of all, I didn’t think that the guard had seen Berrone. With luck, the slaver wouldn’t know who bought me and couldn’t track me down before I reached the safety of Hanaktos’s megaron. All that mattered was that the deal was done before Basrus returned.
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?
CHAPTER FIVE
HOURS 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.