It hurt.
There were a thousand ways a man might describe it, and not one of them was worth the breath it would cost to say aloud. It did not matter regardless. Pain was no excuse worth leaning on, and he had long since stopped trying to lean.
''Control over oneself is all there is.''
The young man muttered the meaningless words beneath his breath, his voice pitched low enough that it reached no ear but his own over the faint hiss of grain shifting inside the heavy sack slung across his frail shoulders. Each step sent a fresh wave of agony rolling up through him, reopening the wounds that crisscrossed his back, their sting made hot and wet by the coarse sweat soaked fabric of a shirt that had been tattered when they gave it to him and had not improved since.
One would easily think the lashing to be the worst part of it. It was not.
The searing bite of the whip lasted only moments, and moments a man could endure, of all the moments men was to live for, what bear could one second truly have? It was the lingering ache afterward, the slow healing, the way the scabs cracked open every morning when he first rose, and above all the humiliation, that truly broke a man in the end. The whip took the skin. The rest took everything under it.
He was no king, nor prince, nor even a free man. To those who commanded him he was no more than a tool, a fragile and disposable thing to be used until it broke and then replaced at whatever the going rate happened to be that season.
As he trudged toward the kitchen tent the clamour of clashing steel filled the air, though not the steel of weapons, only pots and ladles and the iron tempers of the people wielding them, mixed in with raised voices arguing over nothing worth arguing about.
His knees threatened to buckle beneath him. He pressed on regardless. A single misstep, a sack split open across the dirt, and he would not survive the punishment. Not again. Not so soon after the last.
Those last whippings had been more than enough for any man. They had been worth it, though, for what he had gotten in exchange. The day was close now.The closer it came, the more his heart leaped at his throat.
He could think of a thousands things that could go wrong, it was an abyss where once he made the first step there was only down and down.
He had only to trudge on a while longer and not fuck it up. He had lived like this for years upon years. He could bear it another week.
With a trembling hand he pushed aside the tent's heavy flap. Inside, the air hung thick with the smell of boiling meat and stale bread and the sour tang of too many bodies in too small a space. The cooks and camp followers barely acknowledged that he had entered at all. None moved to relieve him of the weight. Each had their own work to attend to, and none of it was him.
Not that he had expected aid. Expectation was another thing they had taken off him years ago, and he had not missed it much.
A second mistake and they will toss my corpse to the dogs, he thought bitterly, feeling their glares burning into his ruined back. They will not even bother with the burying of me.
A raspy, high pitched voice soon reached his ear, the sound of it every bit as grating as the person it belonged to.
"Another sack broken, and I will go to Meneus myself for a change of task. I should dearly like to see whether you'd last a fortnight as a carrier."
The voice belonged to Virvana, head cook, a towering woman with a scowl that could curdle milk faster than the sun on a summer afternoon and spoil the pail it sat in besides. Her greasy unkempt hair clung to her damp forehead in strings from all the steam the big cauldron she cooked in flung in the air, and her eyes glinted with a cruelty she clearly considered the best part of her day, as she referred to the sack he had dropped that morning. The very sack that had earned him the lashes currently burning across his back.
Alpheo bowed his head. Complaining would earn him nothing but more of them, and he could not spare so much as one more.
Pride had been the first thing they took from him. Luckily, they had left behind a great deal more important things, and they had never once thought to look for them.
Kind as a snake and as beautiful as a cockroach, he thought, and kept about his work.
He lowered the sack to the ground with arms that shook from wrist to shoulder, spared her a single glance, and turned to leave.
I wonder if she'd be gentler after a good fuck. Or does she eat everything in this camp but cock?
The thought pulled a laugh out of him as he stepped back into the sun, and he stifled it quickly. Was there truly anything to laugh about? Was he going mad at last? Had the hunger finally climbed up out of his belly and gotten into his head?
How long could a man live like this? No. Wrong question entirely. How long could a man survive it? Calling this a life was like calling a sapling a tree, or a cage a house.
The sun beat down relentless overhead, its rays blinding him as he squinted against the glare. He looked down at his hands instead.
They were rough and calloused and scarred, the nails jagged and black with dirt, blisters risen beside cuts that had never been cleaned and never would be. Years of unending toil, written out plain where anyone might read it.
For a fleeting moment, he let himself remember.
Five years. Five years since peace had slipped through those same fingers. He laughed at the irony, humourlessly, the sound dry as the dust.
Back then I thought it was hell. Now I know better. That was heaven, and I did not know enough to kneel in it.
His back throbbed with each laboured breath, and still it was nothing beside the ache lodged somewhere behind his ribs. He had once known luxury. A warm bed with a blanket that was his alone. A family that loved him without needing a reason. A life of learning. He had been a student, and history had been his passion, tales of kings and conquerors and wars fought over things men thought worth dying for. There had been something magnetic in the stories of men who rose above their station, of heroes and villains carved into eternity where time could not reach them.
But no one sang songs for soldiers, and less than none for slaves. No one wrote stories for the nameless who suffered and died in silence, and that, he thought, was the cruellest thing in the world.
Alpheo clenched his fists until the blisters wept. He had once lived in a city that had never known hunger, where friends and entertainment were as plentiful as bread. Those days felt like a dream someone else had dreamed and told him about afterward.
When death finally came for him, and it surely would, no one would mourn. There would be no one left who knew his name well enough to say it.
They sold me for three silver coins, he thought, his mind spiralling back to that day the way it always did when he let it off its leash. He had been a farmer's son then, born into poverty but not yet into despair. His parents had been humble people. He had never known the whip, never once tasted the full cruelty of what men were capable of when nothing stopped them.
That peace had ended the day the slavers came.
They were not invaders, not in the way the word is usually meant, though they had certainly invaded his life and left nothing standing in it.
They came with silver in hand rather than swords, and bought lives as casually as one might buy a goat at market, haggling over the price the whole while.
For the fifth son of a poor family, the price of freedom was a single silver coin.
They offered three.It was a good haggle from his father.
He had been five years old, perhaps six, a thin boy with too many brothers and not nearly enough food to divide between them. Three coins sealed his fate, and his world collapsed so quietly that he had not even understood it was happening until the road had already swallowed the roof of his father's house.
Years of toil had followed. Years of pain and degradation and a hopelessness so complete it eventually stopped feeling like anything at all. What remained were the scars. On his back. On his hands. On whatever it is in a man that scars beneath both.
As the sun continued to bear down, he lifted his head, his gaze going unfocused across the tents.
Then he shook it off and forced himself to move. His musings would not fill his stomach nor ease the bite of the lash.
If I ever get clear of this hell, he vowed silently, as he had vowed a thousand times before, I will live each day of it to the fullest.
But for now, the world did not care, and had never given him cause to think it might.
His name was Alpheo, a mythical nominative, though its significance was lost entirely upon him and upon everyone who had ever shouted it. It was a strange name, and the fate of the one who bore it was stranger still. If he had to choose a single word to summarise his second life, it would be that of a pet. Like any other animal, his existence had been defined wholly by the whims of those who bought and sold him.
He had lived in many homes, passed hand to hand, each new master a fresh chapter of the same misery. The first had been a nobleman who saw in him no person at all but an object of entertainment for his young son. The boy had adored Alpheo's stories, woven with wit and pitched exactly to catch at a child's imagination, his voice a balm against the great and terrible boredom of the rich.
For a brief moment Alpheo had thought the worst was behind him.
The boy soon grew bored of the stories too. He found new distractions, as children growing toward men always do when knowing what the fairer sex was for, and Alpheo's purpose in that household simply ended. He was sold again, a transaction as simple and thoughtless as the trade of a loaf of bread.
By twelve he had been sold to a soldier, and his new role was that of a camp follower, cleaning the man's kit and carrying his food on the march. This life, too, proved merciless. He cleaned, carried, fetched, and starved, always the lowest of the low in a place where the low were counted carefully. When the soldier who owned him died in battle, Alpheo became the property of the military camp his master had served, inherited like a kettle.
In that endless cycle, which he intended to break any day now, he learned to survive. He bit his cheeks against the lash and against the hunger both, and toiled slowly, patiently, toward his freedom.
Yet through all of it he never once forgot who he was. The moment he did, he would be truly lost, and there would be nothing left to free. So he clung to the fragments of his identity, his dreams, his desires, anything at all that might distract him from the toil and the pain and that horrible weakness that came with both. When a man is left nothing physical, he turns to the abstract, because it is the only property they cannot take off him.
He wanted freedom. Gods, how he craved it.
Such a simple thing, in the end. A life where his will was his own, where he could walk unchained, where no hand would rise against him unless he had raised his own first. And yet it seemed as distant as the stars he slept beneath.
But the fire in his heart refused to go out, and for now that was the only thing pushing him toward life and away from the easier direction of a rope.
His simple desire to pay it all back.