The Songs of Slaves (8 page)

New pain shocked him as a cudgel struck his back. Strong arms cast him to the ground. He looked up to see the narrow-eyed man standing over him, with one of his fellows on either side. Connor struggled to get up, but the two men held him down.

“We meet again,” the narrow-eyed man said. He flashed a broken-toothed smile.

Connor said nothing.

“I caught your bitch,” the man hissed. “I fucked her and I killed her, and I left her for the dogs to eat.”

“You lie,” Connor said quietly. “Your eyes tell me so. And if you had caught her she would be here.”

The man’s anger intensified.

“I settle for you then.”

He kicked Connor in the side, and then again. Connor ignored it. The screams of the women and children drowned out the pain, as more and more of the Jutes were entering the frenzy. He had to get up. He had to do something. As he tried, the narrow-eyed man crashed down on him, striking him hard in the face.

“You threatened me, little man,” the Jute spat. “You killed my friends. You stole what was mine, and let my best treasure r
un away. Now you will see who has power
here.”

The two men pulled Connor so that he was on his face. The narrow-eyed man grabbed his belt and untied it. Connor heard him pulling at his own belt and his own breeches.

“You are going to pay much!
”

For a moment the shock of what was about to happen paralyzed Connor, but only for a moment. With renewed strength he struggled against the men that held him down, but each of them had all their weight on his shoulders. He was pinned. The narrow eyed man again grabbed at his clothing, pulling on it until the seams began to give way. Connor drew his legs up and turned to his side, trying to protect himself. With all he had left, he forced himself to wait, to
read his enemy’s actions. W
hen the n
arrow-eyed man pulled back to put himself into position he created the space Connor
needed
.
Connor struck, mule kicking him hard in the head. The man fell to his side, and Connor instantly kicked again, smashing exposed genitals. The two who held him reacted, struggling to gain better control as Connor bucked, but the narrow-eyed man howled and cursed. Rage would not allow him to lay there long. The narrow-eyed man shot to his feet and jumped on Connor’s back, driving the wind out of him. He took a handful of Connor’s hair as he drew his long knife.

Connor winced as the blade came to his exposed neck.

“You’re dead!” the man shrieked.

But the slash did not come.

Connor looked up to see a tall, broad-framed man with a black beard and long black hair. Even without his helmet and armor, Connor could see that it was their chief, the man he had fought in the forest. And he held a sword point to the narrow-eyed man’s neck. The two who held Connor released him immediately and stood.

The chief spoke calmly in his own tongue. The narrow-eyed man protested vigorously, but his defense was brief. He sheathed his knife and stood up. The chief lowered his sword.

The narrow-eyed man spat on Connor.

“Someday I kill you,” he said, his veins bulging with hate.

“No,” Connor said. “Someday I will kill you.”

The narrow-eyed man limped away, seeking a new victim for his malice.

With a command from the chief, the two men pulled Connor up. The pushed him to the mast and set his back against it. The chief handed them a long coil of rope and they began to bind him, starting with his hands, then his neck, and then moved to his torso and hips. They tied the final knot high over his head. All the
while the chief stared at Connor with his sword in his hand.

“That should keep you out of trouble,” he said finally, speaking in Latin. “You have been much trouble to me. You have killed some of my good fighting men and you have injured others. I will not throw you away without getting something for you.”

Again, he was quiet for a moment as he stared at Connor’s defiant face.

“And there is another reason I did not let him kill you. You are a warrior. So am I.”

“You are no warrior,” Connor said. “You are a thief, a murderer, and a violator of women.”

Woderic smiled faintly.

“Because I am a warrior I know how your mind works,” Woderic continued. “You want to die right now. That is the warrior’s place, to either succeed or to die in battle. But I will not let you have this, as you are my enemy. No, Hibernian, tonight you do not sleep in
Valhalla
. Tonight you sleep here, in this cold world.”

Woderic spit in Connor’s face.

He sheathed his sword and crossed the deck. The two who had held Connor walked beside their chief, pushing the frenzied men out of his way. He
reached the back of the ship, where a few of the captives cowered, as yet not drawn in to the violence that conflagrated all around them. Woderic reached down to a crouching form and grabbed a handful of red hair. He pulled Dania up to her feet and looked into her green eyes as his face contorted in a malevolent smile.

Connor screamed as rage broke out of him. He screamed like a madman. But the ropes held, and the atrocities had just begun as the rain began to fall. To his right the green shores of his land gave way to gray, and then the gray shadow gave way to mist, and Eire itself was gone. And when his voice was broken and would no longer rise at his heart’s command he whispered the words:

“
My God, my God, why have you forsaken me
?”

Part II

Provincia Nostra,

Gaul

409 AD

III: “Provincia No
stra”, Gaul, Late Spring, 409 AD

             
The sun finally rose above the high roves of the buildings and laid a heavy hand on Connor’s reddened skin. It would grow hot today – it seemed that here it was always hot. The clouds gave their shade grudgingly, as if they too feared the sun. Connor watched as the light made the ochre walls and red tiles glow. He had never seen so many buildings so large
–
built of stone and plaster with hardly any wood visible. It was just as everything Titus had described, and everything he had read in all of his studies, and yet he realized as he stood at the threshold of this vast city and its crowds began to swell, that he had never imagined it adequately. Growing up in his huts and forests he had never been able to conceptualize what he was now seeing. He had always imagined that he would have felt wonder, that he would have felt the urge to explore the great metropolis – to see the palaces and aqueducts, and stadiums
–
and try to understand it. But this was lost on him now, for the massive edifices and swirling throngs of people were hostile and alien – a more tangible bondage than the iron collar around his throat and the rusty chains that held his naked body to the post. The colors of the market seemed garish. The smells of fish
and seaweed blowing in from the nearby harbor assailed him as he tried to chase
the flies from his exposed skin
.

             
Connor dropped his head again, seeking solace in the patterns of cobblestones. It was three hours after dawn, a new day
–
the second day since they had landed in Massilia, the largest and most important port in Gaul. Like the first day, his keepers had kicked him awake and stripped away the simple cloth that was his only covering. They marched him along with the others to the area of the market reserved for the selling of slaves. He was again unchained from the group and fastened to the filthy wooden post the city had provided for its rich source of revenue. Many were chained nearby – tall Germani, Africans with obsidian skin, browned Persians who had been taken in the wars. But amongst these were chained others – men and women who had fallen upon unforgiving times, now stripped of their possessions and separated from their families to be sold to their fellow citizens. Connor could always tell these, for their heads held lower, and there was no light of defiance – no light of anything – in their faces. They were first amongst the dispossessed, and their numbers were staggering. The day before, Connor had seen these
abandoned souls as he had in the other markets, sold quickly and cheaply, led away with little more than a whimper to some unknown end. 

             
“Raise your head!”

             
Connor looked up to see Sejius, the big framed man who provided some of the muscle for his Greek captors. Blonde and in his middle years, Sejius’ hard face was further disfigured by a long scar that ran from below his left eye down to his chin, a testament to his violent temper. Like many others Connor had noticed, Sejius was a Germani, but he had been within the
Imperium
so long that he only spoke Latin.

             
“No one is going to buy you if you look sickly and sullen,” Sejius growled. “Now, look up, and look alive. Because if we don’t sell you today, here in this fine port, tonight I will thrash the living shit out of you, until you are so broken that the
Kyrios
will have no further use of you then to sell you to the poor for soup meat.”

             
He marched away, looking for someone else to taunt. Connor dropped his head again.

             
It was the gray of the cobblestones, or perhaps the smell of the Germani lingering in his nose, that brought his mind back to those days, now weeks past.
Tied to the mast until the numbness in his limbs became a burning pain, rolling and toiling with the angry sea, he had fought despair. Deprived of food and water until his tongue swelled and was as dry as leather, left in his own filth, until another of the drunken marauders would stagger up to strike him. But for all this, his was the lighter load. It was the women, the girls and the young boys who suffered the deeper atrocities. Raped over and over again, beaten without cause and without mercy, until they stopped resisting at all, stopped weeping or crying out to God or to each other. One woman died the first night. Another broke away and leapt overboard, drinking in the seawater and swimming for the bottomless depths. But in anguish and brutality the living continued interminably, as the Jutes manning the ship drank and sang songs.

             
Now, hundreds of miles away, Connor clamped his eyes shut, trying to shake the images. He could not. They were seared in his mind, branded with a burning iron. But with distance came some piece of understanding. The Jutes, their captors, were not only acting out of the cruelty of their black hearts. They had departed from Eire wit
h ships full of kidnapped people
. They arrived in their outpost on the far side of Britannia
with ships full of slaves. The savagery of the murder, the physical and sexual violence, the mental torture and control exerted over every captive’s need for food and water disarmed the resistance and stripped away even their victim’s sense of self. Though once free people, one by one terror gave way to isolation and helplessness. The strong ones, or the lucky ones, buried themselves deep within a passive and submissive exterior. The others lost their identities altogether. Their families were broken, murdered, lost hundreds of miles away; and as they were unloaded from the ships on that cold, misty morning, and again divided, sold, or traded, and taken into the round huts of the Germani settlers they were given new names and new roles. The old was lost forever, and home became something intangible, best left to the escape of dreams.

             
As they had come into port, the Jutes had unbound Connor. He fell to the deck, too weak and numb to fight. Like the others he was dragged to shore, where he saw the marauders greeted by their families and friends, as if they were heroes. He saw the men, who had just murdered the helpless and gang raped their captives, take their wives and children lovingly into their arms. They decked their women with gold
stolen from those they had slain. And Connor looked on, silenced, crushed and astounded at what an evil thing was man.

             
The next days passed in a haze. He was taken to Woderic’s house and bound once more, as if the chieftain still feared him. But the next day he was moved, passed on to men who were traveling south. Dania was moved, too, and several of the others, all in wooden cages on the backs of carts. Connor could remember the lonely hills of the dark countryside better than what actually happened on that journey. They were traded to other men
–
Angles. Again, the women were violated, and the few comforts they had all been given were stripped away from them. The next day they were all loaded on another ship, along with many other male and female slaves who spoke a recognizable but strange-sounding dialect. They were Britons, whose lands were falling under the advance of the Germani invaders. Their famed Roman garrisons had not been there to help them.

The ship left the harbor and set sail for the mainland, but instead of being bound as before, Connor was chained to one of the oars, along with some of the Britons. The other slaves were confined, and abuses
continued, but not as relentlessly as before. There was bread and water at dawn and dusk.