by Chuck Dixon
33
Owned
Their arrival on the beach was met with heated discussion.
The work was halted on the hole being dug for the chest. Caroline was shoved to her knees. Dwayne was still unconscious and bound at wrists and ankles with thongs secured to carrying poles. The six men who carried him now dropped him to the sand with a relieved grunt. One of them scuffed his ribs with a kick then spat a wad of phlegm at him. Dwayne only groaned in answer to this. Curious boys bent to study him until shooed away by the ax wielder.
The men did not seem to resent that Dwayne had killed one of their own. Maybe they weren’t sure how the man with the ax died or Dwayne’s connection to it. The gun was nowhere near Dwayne where he fell, and none of the men was carrying it. It lay somewhere back in the dunes.
A furious guy wearing more clothes than the others, along with a brass-studded girdle and a short sword in a decorative sheath stormed up to them. Caroline assumed he was the man in charge.
This captain ordered Caroline lifted to her feet. She was as tall as he, and met him eye to eye without looking away. He rubbed the cloth of her jersey between his fingers. He tugged on the plastic buttons at the collar with some interest. He touched fingers to her hair and brought them back to sniff his fingertips. She fought the urge to flinch away. He spoke to the others as he did this and they only shrugged and mewled as they had no more answers than he did. He aimed his next remarks at Caroline, and she could not follow a word of it. She tried some answers in halting Greek, but he only turned away from her.
The captain poked a toe into Dwayne’s side and was rewarded with a moan. He pointed at the empty knife sheath on Dwayne’s belt. The man who’d confiscated the ax took Dwayne’s dagger from his waistband and handed it over to the captain who ran a hand over the gleaming blade. His hand came back bloody, and he seemed more pleased than pained.
He gestured and barked, and two of the men turned Dwayne on his side. They fussed with the clasp to Dwayne’s belt until they had it loose. The captain was able to loop the belt around his waist twice and could make no sense of the plastic clasp. He finally simply tied a knot in the belt and sheathed his prize blade to hang over his crotch. This placed him in a better mood. The crew seemed relieved. He next tried on Dwayne’s sneakers, but they were far too big, and he impatiently tossed them aside.
To Caroline, the only good news here was that the men who captured them did not find their hide atop the promontory or the hidden inflatable. Dwayne’s handgun was not on him, and none of the men had it. It must have fallen away unseen when Dwayne was struck with a slung stone. None of these men would have known to look for it. If they had any theories on how their comrade lost the top of his head, they were not exploring them.
Despite the fear roiling in her stomach, she took an inventory of the items that could only be classified as temporal pollution. The plastic buttons on their clothes. The zipper on her pants. The synthetic fabrics.
Dwayne’s knife was the most problematic, as it would be prized by anyone who owned it. The tempered steel blade would survive the ages. She imagined an archeologist digging in a burial ground and finding Dwayne’s NRA t-shirt or her Manchester jersey. But both were cotton and could not survive two thousand years intact.
The man who’d appropriated the ax spoke up. There was an argument with the captain. Both men spoke harshly with fingers stabbed in Caroline and Dwayne’s direction. She didn’t need to understand the language to know that their fates were being decided here and now. She couldn’t know who was arguing in their favor until the captain cuffed the other man hard enough to drop him on his ass. The captain shouted to the men standing around watching. Caroline was shoved toward the raft with Dwayne lifted from the sand and carried after her.
She sat with a hand in Dwayne’s hair as the raft was dragged through the surf to the bireme. She looked back to see that the captain was once again directing the burial of the big iron-banded box. She noted the location. A hole was being excavated with mattocks and shovels at the base of the rock face. The formation was topped with a hump of rock in the vague shape of a turtle. Caroline recalled that rounded point of rock, more wind-worn but still shell-shaped, as part of the archipelago visible from Nisos Anaxos.
She was urged up the wooden cleats and oarlocks in the hull and over the wale onto the deck. Dwayne was cut from the carrying post and awakened with a bucket of seawater thrown in his face. He came around groaning and dazed. They hauled him to his feet and pushed him to climb the hull with shouts and punches. Curious crewmen lined the rails to watch. Some bore spears with long, gleaming blades.
The two captives were taken below down a rough wooden ladder through an opening in the center deck. Boards ran stem to stern to make a middle passage of smooth-worn wood. The areas along the port and starboard faces were open to the first oar deck below.
Caroline could see more men illumined by the streams of light that came in through the open oarlocks. They watched silently as the prisoners were brought below and down past the two rowing decks and into a hold. The floor of the hold was filled to a depth with sand ballast. Rows of amphorae cast to a pointed base were secured in the sand. There were wooden cages containing chickens and pigs tied to the bulkhead with rope, along with baskets of all sizes. And everywhere hung bundles of strung garlic cloves and dried peppers.
The entire ship and its crew reeked of garlic. It was one of the things that Caroline noticed when the shock of their encounter began to wear off. Their breath, their sweat, and even their clothes, when they wore them, gave off a stench of garlic that almost covered the rank stink of unwashed bodies and pig feces.
She also noted how many of these men were missing fingers. All of them had deep rope burns, fresh as well as scarred over remnants, on their hands and forearms. It came from being a sailor, she supposed. She was surprised that none of the men showed signs of flogging. A ship powered by galley slaves, yet not one of them had a back crossed with whip marks.
She was also surprised at the number of children on board, all boys as far as she could tell. Caroline didn’t really know much about children. To her best guess, the boys seemed to be between six and twelve to older. And they were everywhere chattering and pointing.
Down in the dark hold, Caroline was shoved to the sand which she noticed was speckled with rat droppings. Her right wrist was snapped into iron manacles with a three-foot length of chain secured to a rusting ringbolt set in the hull. They attempted to bind Dwayne the same way, but the cuffs would not close around his wrists. Instead, they bound his hands behind him with hemp rope and ran that through another ringbolt set on the hull strake next to Caroline’s.
They left them there. All but one man who seated himself on the sand well outside their reach. He sat with a sword across his knees and eyed them with mild curiosity. Caroline sensed he was waiting for someone as well as guarding them.
There were so many other ways common to this era that they could have used to restrain her and Dwayne—severed hamstrings or slashed Achilles’ tendon or even blinding. Caroline was grateful for this small blessing of simply being bound and shared it with Dwayne.
“Glass half full,” she said.
“Of shit,” Dwayne managed, his throat clotted with bloody phlegm.
“The gun?”
“I’m fine. How are you?” Dwayne said and hawked to spit.
“I’m such a geek.” She blushed. “I’m sorry. Are you all right?”
“I don’t think I’m concussed. Of course, that could be the concussion talking. You know, we plan, and we plan, but it always comes down to some fucker with a rock.”
“You’re lucky it was a rock. They molded lead pellets for their slings that could punch through armor.”
“Thanks for the history lesson, but it’s not helping me stay awake. Should we be talking in front of him?” He nodded toward the swordsman watching them and winced at the effort.
“No one will understand our language for another thousand or so y
ears, and probably not even then,” she said. “Now, what about the gun?”
“I don’t know. I lost it when I got hit. It’s still lying out there. Don’t worry about that.”
“I have to worry about it. As an anachronistic artifact, it’s significant. If it were found in the future, it would throw the world out of kilter. If it were found now, it would create a—”
Dwayne cut her off.
“Fuck that! Fuck all of that! We found a fucking city of man-eating Stone Age ape-men living in Nevada, and no archeologist found a trace of them. I think we can count on my Kimber staying in the cosmic lost-and-found for fucking ever.”
“How’s your head?” she asked.
“I’ll get by. Just hurts like shit. Sorry. Any idea why they haven’t killed us yet?”
“Curiosity? Fear? Maybe both.”
“Fear?”
“You blew that guy’s head off. They didn’t look for the gun, so they have no idea how you did that.”
“I got two more before one of them David-and-Goliathed my ass.”
“Even more reason to kill us. But they seemed more annoyed at carrying you than the fact that you killed three of their crew. They think we’ve got some bad mojo. Killing us could bring a curse down on them or maybe they think we have powerful friends.” She rolled her eyes upward.
“The gods smile on us? With our string of luck? That’s a laugh.”
Caroline pulled up a pant leg to examine her calf. An angry black bruise was forming where the slung rock struck her.
“They hit you?” Dwayne said.
“Brought me down with a stone.”
“They do anything else? I mean like—”
“Rape me? No. I guess the reputation of horny sailors is overrated.”
“Or they don’t know you’re a woman.” Dwayne cast a glance at their guard, but he was engrossed in vigorously picking his nose.
“Say again?” Caroline said.
“Those baggy BDUs and that football sweater hide all your goodies. Your hair is cut short. That’s probably not the fashion for the ladies these days. And you’ve got dried blood all over your face.”
She touched her face with her fingers. They came back with a dark gummy mess smeared on them.
“You’ve looked better, trust me. They probably think you’re a boy,” Dwayne said.
“They’d rape me just the same.”
“Probably. But they have boys on board for that. They find out you’re a girl, and that changes the equation. Let’s keep your gender to ourselves as long as we can.”
Their guard eventually lost all interest in them and fell asleep on the filthy sand.
Dwayne tested the rope bonds. The guys that tied him up were sailors. They knew their knots. With enough time, he could loosen the ring bolt from the hull. He couldn’t turn his head enough to see it. But it probably was a match for the one Caroline was chained to. A wrought iron cleat secured to a rib beam by thick wooden pegs. The wood that he could feel with his fingers was wet. Maybe it was rotten.
Caroline was curled on the sand, sound asleep in a post-adrenaline crash.
If he could get them both free while the boat was still anchored, they had a chance. Once this tub took off, they’d be lost forever. Dwayne braced his legs and applied some outward pressure to the ropes. He only managed to twist the ropes into his wrists enough to draw blood.
He tried rocking the cleat back and forth and feeling back to the heads of the wooden pegs to see if he could work them loose with his fingers. Between the pain in his head and the gentle rocking of the boat, he was lulled into closing his eyes, and then time slipped away from him.
34
The Diviner’s Boy
Caroline came awake in the dark. She felt rather than saw Dwayne by her. He was snoring noisily. There were voices coming through the decking above. The sounds of shuffling feet descended the planks into the hold. She kicked a foot out to awaken Dwayne. He sat up with a grunt.
A young boy, probably twelve or so, was in the lead. He wore a skirt and sandals and a faded wool tunic that looked several sizes too large on him and was belted with a length of cording. He held a lit oil lamp in one hand and a basket under his other arm.
Following behind him was an old man with long white hair and a scraggly beard. The old man wore a patched and faded robe cinched about him with rope. There was a hemp sack slung around his bony shoulders. He descended the steps cautiously, placing both of his bare feet on a step before proceeding to the next and reaching for any available handhold. His back was bent nearly double. Untreated scoliosis, Caroline guessed.
The boy spoke to the sleeping guard who got to his feet and climbed the steps to leave them alone. The boy set the oil lamp down in the sand and knelt before the captives well beyond the reach of either of them. He pushed the basket forward across the sand. Caroline strained the length of her chain to reach it and pulled it toward her.
It contained food along with a clay jar of water. She set the basket between her and Dwayne. She had to hold the food to his mouth so he could eat. They shared dried figs, salted fish flavored with, what else, garlic, and some kind of cheese that stank like hell, but they ate every crumb. They washed it all down with clean water that probably came from Jimbo’s spring.
All the while, the boy sat speaking softly to the old man, who remained silently studying the strangers. The old man rummaged in the woven hemp bag and pulled out an amber stone the size of a silver dollar. He held this stone up to his eye as though studying the captives through it and made clucking noises with his tongue.
“What’s his deal?” Dwayne asked, licking fruit pulp off his chin.
“I think he’s a seer or a soothsayer,” Caroline said. “He’s creeping me out. What’s he here for?”
“Sailors during this time didn’t sail from the sight of land without one of these guys around. They look at the portents and signs to divine whether or not the augments are favorable for the voyage.”
“So, what’s he doing down here with us?”
“The captain and crew have a lot of questions,” she said. “Are we real or phantoms? Are we witches or demons? Are we a danger to them or was finding us a good thing? Maybe we’re worth a ransom. Or maybe we’re favored by the gods.”
“And what he decides determines whether they kill us or not,” Dwayne said.
“Let’s hope we make the right impression.”
The old man removed a ball of string from the bag, and he unspooled a length. The string was made of strips of ragged cloth and twisted fibers knotted together. His fingers played over the knots. He muttered as he pulled another length from the ball. He stopped unraveling the ball. His fingers gently touched a hairy knot of the frayed material, and he cooed over it softly.
He turned to the boy and spoke in a reedy croak. The boy turned to Dwayne and Caroline and rattled off something that sounded like a question. Caroline shook her head in response, and the boy focused his attention on her. He repeated his question, but the words sounded different this time. The boy was trying to determine what language they understood. Caroline shook her head again. He spoke again, and this time it sounded almost familiar to Caroline’s ear. She nodded her head and beckoned with her fingers in a gesture she prayed he understood was a request for him to repeat that last phrase.
The boy’s brow wrinkled, and he leaned closer to whisper to the old man who replaced the looking stone in the bag and began to reel in the string. They were leaving.
“Look here! Here!” Caroline shouted, startling the boy. She traced a finger on the sand and wrote in ancient Greek script any word that she could recall that might be relevant.
STRANGERS
ISLAND
WATER
The boy moved closer on all fours to look at the letters traced in the sand. He looked up at Caroline with raised brows.
He said something to her that sounded like, “You speak Greek?” But the phrasing and pronunciation were barely similar in sound to what she had l
earned on her own. It was like the difference between Italian and Portuguese. So close and yet so far. It would take time to work out the differences—time they didn’t have.
“Speak me words!” she said, forcing herself to go slow and enunciate. She pointed at each word. “Strangers. Island. Water.”
The boy read the words aloud then wrote a word of his own on the sand.
WITCH
“No!” she said. “We visit. Far away land. Not witch. Not bad.”
The boy pursed his lips and turned to the old man, who was eyeing the exchange with interest. The boy pointed at Dwayne and then wrote a new word.
EAGLE
“Yes. An eagle.”
The boy wrote again.
Ρωμε
Rome. He thought the eagle in the NRA symbol on Dwayne’s shirt meant they were Romans.
“We are Romans!” Caroline said in rushed college Latin. The boy’s eyes widened. She took a breath and spoke again more slowly.
“We are from Rome. We are scholars seeking knowledge of the world. We mean you no harm.”
The boy’s eyes narrowed as he tried to follow what she was saying. Caroline knew her Latin pronunciation was probably as far off as her Greek. But her Latin vocabulary was a lot more extensive.
“Your Greek is terrible. We will talk in Latin,” the boy said, smirking, and spoke some phrases Caroline couldn’t follow entirely.
“Please speak slower. Your Latin is not much better than my Greek,” she said, turning the tables on the little snot.
He spoke slowly and told her that the old man was ordered by Ahinadab, whom Caroline figured was the captain or ship’s master, to find out the true nature of the captives. The captain thought they were spies from Hamilcar of Carthage sent to spy on him.
Caroline spat at that name, as she knew from her reading any good Roman would do. The old seer suspected they were witches. These were times of uncertainty. The gods were unhappy, and Ba’al was casting his eye upon the Earth from a rogue star. A reference to the comet.