Testing, testing, 1, 2, 3!

Part 3!

“I, young one, was turned just over 2,200 years ago, during the time of the Greeks, though they weren’t the only people around they were certainly the most important ones. My village lay just beyond the outskirts of the Greek empire, and though I warned the elders, they weren’t willing to move, therefore sooner rather than later we were attacked. I was just 26 at the time, with a wife and child along the way, so when they came in the middle of the night like simple bandits I was one of the few that took up arms against them.

Bear in mind we were a simple village, sowing crops and farming animals, I as a blacksmith was one of the few who could wield a sword properly. They burned everything, barricading houses as they went and setting fire to hay we had stored for the winter. As I had left the house to help defend the village, Athella had stayed inside to hide, and died, suffocated by the smoke and then burned by wood that the furniture was carved out of.

Whoever survived the initial slaughter was forced into the centre of the village where the old and weak were killed and the young and healthy were bound and marched off to be sold as slaves. We walked through the night, surrounded by soldiers on horses, neighbour supporting neighbour who tripped from wounds or exhaustion.  I’m not sure what town we had been brought to, having never learned to read and write, but it was easily hundreds of times larger than our village, carts full of exotic animals, slaves, fruit, wines and fine clothes all laid out on floor that was covered in fine drapes. It was the busiest place I had ever seen, overwhelmed along with the rest of my village, we were dragged through all that until we reached a rundown villa where we were separated into genders and ages before being stripped and given simple cloths to cover ourselves with.

Thankfully only our hands had been chained at that point, so me being the rash young man, I sent out a message along the men that were bound with me that I had an idea. The man next to me, Pietro I think his name was, collapsed and as one of the guards came over I managed to wrap my chain around his neck. It was easy enough to suffocate him while the others tried to fend off the rest of the guards. One of them barely missed my head with his sword, hitting my left shoulder and cutting it deeply as I was just managing to get out of my chains that slowed me down enough for another one to break through and hit me with a hilt of the sword on the back of my head, effectively knocking me unconscious.

When I came to I was already loaded up onto a wooden cage along with 5 other men, my shoulder wrapped hastily in a bandage made out of a cloth, same one like the one we were handed from the slavers. None of the others spoke the same language as me but somehow we managed to communicate, telling me that I had been brought by the man who was riding a stunning bay stallion just in front of the cage that we were in. We rode like that through the night, never stopping to eat or drink, even the man who brought us didn’t reach for his supplies, at least not any that I saw between sleep.

We arrived at the villa first thing after dawn, it was a grand and open space, surrounded by all types of foliage; herbs, flowers, bushels, even trees, all lining the white path that led out to the dirt road outside. The back door was opened and we were let out one by one, standing by were a couple of other slaves with swords as well as whom I assumed was the master of the house, dressed in even finer robes than what the man who brought us was wearing. They didn’t look directly related though there was something definitely between the two.

He inspected us one by one, and as he stood in front of me I could tell he was asking the other man why he brought me since I was injured, whatever the reply was it seems it was good enough for him as he went onto the man next to me. I wasn’t the oldest man there, I think there was a man who was into his late 40’s, missing an eye and some fingers but from what I could figure out he was one of the few that could read and write, probably a healer of some kind. After announcing something the main man let the others take us round the back where field slaves were housed. They washed us down with buckets of water from the river that flowed at the bottom of the hill that the villa was built on, dressed us in rough clothes and while the others were sent out to the field to work I was held back so my shoulder could be dressed.