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Thracians and the Greek helped, but I never heard a word from them. They were
somewhere else – funny that, in a hull only as long as a dozen horses end to end, I had no idea where they were. They weren’t among the twenty men I could see when I rowed, and the
others around me were silent and utterly broken. In fact, one died. He just expired, and his oar came up and slammed his head and he didn’t cry out because he was dead.
    I managed to get to the Illyrian in the evening, when the oarsmen were rested, and in the morning, before we began to row. We were off the coast of Illyria now, and we stayed at sea, and every
islet on that coast – seen out of the oar-port of the man in front of me – seemed like a potential ship. But our pace never varied, and we rowed on and on. We never raised our boatsail,
the small sail in the bow, and we seemed perpetually in motion.
    And we never landed.
    After a week, the food failed. Suddenly, there was no more barley, much less pig or thin wine. The guards complained and hit us more often.
    My Illyrian awoke from whatever torpor had seized him and was given an oar.
    We continued north. I assumed it was north – I could seldom see the waves.
    The Illyrian didn’t know a word of Greek. I tried to teach him, in grunts and whispered bits, but he wasn’t listening: he didn’t care, and, after a while, I gave up.
    The oar-master came to him every day. Stood over him and laughed, and called him a boy and a coward, and told him that he would be sold in Athens to a brothel. But the Illyrian was too far gone,
and spoke no Greek, so he endured the abuse.
    Another day, he was told he was rowing out of time and beaten, and then beaten for crying out.
    You know that feeling you get in the gut, when another man gets what should be yours? That feeling you have when you hear a good man abused? The feeling between your shoulders when a woman
screams for help?
    When you are a slave, all that happens. For a while. But by taking away from you your ability to respond to these, they take your honour. After a while, a man can be beaten to death an
arm’s-length away and you don’t even clench your stomach muscles.
    On and on.
    We rowed.
    We rowed all the way up the coast of Illyria and Dalmatia, and men continued to die, and we rowed without food for a while, as I say. It’s hard to tell this, not just
because it’s all so low and disgusting, but because there’s nothing on which to seize. Abuse was routine. Pain was routine. Men hit us, and we rowed. Our muscles ached, and we rowed.
Sometimes we slept, and that was as good as our lives ever were.
    We came to an archipelago of islets, and they had small villages on them. Finally, we landed. None of us was allowed ashore, and all I can say is that after a time, a dozen slaves and some food
came onto the ship and some copper was unloaded.
    And then it all happened again.
    My Illyrian was moved out of the stern-post rowing station, and I was moved back to the upper deck, and we rowed. There was food. That seemed good.
    We rowed.
    We made another landfall, and were beached again. This place had a ready-built palisade for slaves, and we could see it was full from our benches, with forty or fifty male slaves waiting to be
sold.
    Our Illyrian looked at the beach and wept.
    We were pushed ashore, roped together and put in the palisade. By luck, I was roped to the Greek, Nestor.
    After darkness fell, and the guards went off to fuck the female slaves in another pen – I call these things by their proper names, children, and may you never know what slavery is! –
we lay side by side, and whispered very quietly.
    ‘Still alive, brother?’ he said.
    ‘Yes,’ I said.
    He nodded in the dark, so close I could feel it more than see it. ‘Good,’ he said. ‘I was thinking,’ he went on. ‘Arimnestos is an odd name. Where you
from?’
    Where was I from? May I tell you the truth, friends? I hadn’t thought of home, of
anything
, for