Read The Companion for Free Online Page B

some firsthand accounts of Christian slaves.” Ian recognized the master, one of the few officers not slain or heaved overboard and therefore one of the few men who could read. “They’re employed as agents of business if they know the language, or to sail a rich man’s ships if they are sailors.”
    Ian wished he’d learned more Arabic or knew how to sail a ship .
    He lost all feeling in his hands before he located a splinter of wood he could grate against his ropes. It took long hours to free them, and the pain of the returning blood almost made him regret his effort. He passed his splinter to the next man, and the old salt pried off another. Soon they all had their hands free. He realized he had a fever when he started shaking uncontrollably. The saber cut on his upper arm must be infected. The odor of death was added to the reek of tar and fetid water when a sailor named Young who had renounced Christ on the deck above died soon after he returned to their purgatory. The nightmare of the dark and the stink, the hunger, and fear made the ship’s boy set to shrieking until they knocked him senseless. They could hear the pumps working, yet the water rose until they were thigh deep and could not sit if they would. They slept fitfully, braced against the curve of the hull or leaning on another, in shifts. It was miserable to the point of unreality. Time lingered in a haze .
    A great thump against the ship’s side and muffled shouting, answered more faintly from afar, told them the ship had docked. It was not long before the hatch above opened, leaking a square of unbearable light. They did not have to understand the language to know that they were being bid up into the sun to a future more fearful even than their wretchedness in the hold .
    The ship’s boy was a gibbering idiot by now. The scurvy piratical lot cut him from the others and brought a club down upon his head once, twice, with a dull thud. No use for him. Ian squinted in horror against the stabbing light as they cast the lifeless body into the harbor. He hardly noticed the rope they used to fasten the remaining cargo together at the ankles until they were jerked down the gangplank. They stumbled into a town, thriving with the shout of commerce. Twenty-four survived out of the five-score sailors and passengers that set sail from Bristol. Famished, half-naked, they looked a poor bargain for whoever bought them .
    The slave market was even more frenetic than the bazaar at large. Groups of young men gleaming ebon in the sun, their male areas smooth enough to make the English shudder, crouched in the dust. Women, some with faces as covered as their bodies, huddled together. Others sprawled naked and displayed. Traders called out the virtues of their human wares. And through all, the merciless sun beat on their heads, burning their pale and waterlogged bodies. Everywhere, the scent of human sweat and fear mingled with that of aromatic spices, overripe fruit, and meat hanging days too long among the flies .
    Their keeper cut the gaggle into individual lots. Ian found himself pushed, stumbling, into a dusty ring surrounded by shouting and whirling colors. It was over so quickly he hardly had time to feel the shame. A stocky bearded man, gabbling at him, cast a rope about his neck. In the background a tall figure swathed totally in a hooded burnoose, his hands concealed in its sleeves, nodded. The burly man said something to him and then tugged on Ian’s rope, jerking him through the hooting crowd. The tall specter strode in their wake .
    Ian ripped his thoughts back to the cool Mediterranean breeze that soothed his hot cheeks in the darkness. He had been bought as a beast of burden for a caravan. Jenkins’s comforting accounts of slavery as a sailor or an agent of business were not for him. He probably had his beefy frame to thank for that. He looked an admirable brawny pack animal.
    He must not dwell upon that time. The flash of a raised whip in the sun swept over