“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.
“Not used to that, are you?” he asked.
I shook my head.
“Better this than a galley, though, right?” He watched me through narrowed eyes as he spoke, and continued to observe me even after I nodded my agreement. He popped the lock off as the potboy brought breakfast. My whole body protesting, I was still first in line for the food.
I dragged myself through the next days, working, resting in the afternoon, digging until the light was going from the sky. I ate and then slept dreamlessly. Slowly I grew stronger and was awake longer. During rest periods I watched the other men as they wandered in and out of the barracks. I began to wait with them when we came in from the fields for my turn to rinse myself at the wellhead instead of going directly to my pallet of blankets in anticipation of my next meal. I was still first in line to eat.
Every night the men entertained themselves under the overseer’s watchful eye. They talked until by mutual consent someone’s offering of poetry or song was chosen, a different man each night, in a subtle order of rotation I didn’t understand. Some knew only one piece, others had a broader range, and they were careful, in an unscripted way, not to overuse anyone’s limited repertoire. One evening, as I lay on my pallet, with my right hand chained to the ring in the wall, I heard a man across the room reciting Eacheus’s speech from the ending of the Eponymiad.