Poseidon's Spear (Long War 3) Read Online Free PDF Page B

cocked my head to one side.
    He sneered. ‘Not even your wits left, eh?’
    Outside, there were shouts – rage – a scream.
    He ran out of the pen and slammed the rickety gate closed.
    The palisade was hastily built – badly cut palings rammed into the sand and held together with a heavy rope woven in and out of the palings. I could see. My arm hurt, but I got myself to
an edge.
    Two other slaves came to look.
    The rest just lay still with their eyes closed.
    Our guards were running full tilt for the central fire of the camp. One of the Illyrian servants was making for the wood line; another was face down, and experience told me he wasn’t ever
getting up.
    ‘You’re an idiot,’ said the Thracian at my elbow. ‘Make trouble.’
    ‘Uh,’ said the other, a Greek. ‘Never fucking talk when they can hear.’
    ‘Sorry,’ I muttered.
    ‘Skethes,’ said the Thracian.
    ‘Arimnestos,’ I said.
    ‘Nestor,’ said the Greek. He looked to be fifty years old, and as hard as an old oak tree.
    Something was happening at the fire. A woman was screaming.
    We couldn’t see anything because it was too dark. But we didn’t have to.
    There was the unmistakable sound of a man being beaten with spear shafts – blows falling like hail on a tent, the hollow sound of a man’s head and chest taking them.
    And the women, screaming. They were being raped.
    One by one, many of the slaves went to sleep.
    I couldn’t. I lay there and hated.
    Towards morning, two more guards opened the pen and threw in the body. It was a man, and he was alive. I didn’t have to be a philosopher to figure out that he was one of the Illyrian men,
although his face was a swollen pulp and he was covered in weals and blood and shit – his own.
    All the slaves woke when he was tossed into the pen. He lay there, bleeding, for a long time. Too damned long.
    Finally, I couldn’t stand it. I guess I wasn’t broken. Again, my experience as a slave helped me because I wasn’t shocked and I was learning the ‘rules’, sick as
they were. So I stripped my loincloth off my groin, dipped it in our drinking water – well might you flinch, young woman – and started to wash the man.
    I gave him some water when his eyes opened – they were just slits.
    He punched me as hard as he could in the nose – my recently broken nose.
    He roared some sort of war cry, and Skethes pinned his shoulders and Nestor rammed my loincloth into his mouth.
    The guards, watching through the palisade, laughed.
    Fuck them
, I thought. I had found a way to rebel. I went back to washing the brutalized man.
    The three of us got him cleaner, and we dripped some water into him, and when the sun rose above the rim of the world, we fed bread to him, too. By then, he knew where he was. He didn’t
speak. He was, in fact, in shock.
    As soon as the light was strong, we could see the bodies. Six of them. The two girls, the other Illyrian nobleman, two Illyrian servants or slaves and one of the oar-master’s bully-boys,
all dead in the sand, with a lot of blood around them.
    The oar-master woke the slaves with cold water, and ordered us to bury the bodies.
    ‘You useless fucks,’ he went on to his guards, ‘can watch them, and you can think about how I’m going to take the price of two blond slave girls out of your pay.’
He hit a guard.
    The guard flinched.
    ‘Useless coward,’ the oar-master said. ‘And one of them escaped. So we won’t get all their tin, and their war party will come. Your fault!’ he screamed. He looked
at Kritias. ‘If my contact here is killed, I’ll sell the lot of you as slaves.’
    Really, you have to wonder that someone didn’t kill him. But I caught that. I’m still proud I did – neither hate nor shock nor the will of the Gods plugged my ears. Dagon had a
contact among the Illyrians.
    I must have seemed to be listening too closely.
    He struck out with his stick and hit me.
    I didn’t make a sound.
    The guards stood over us and prodded us with