Together with Gontran, the slaves returned to the barn, dropped off their tools, and sat on the ground in the shade of an oak, where a peasant woman had lain out loaves of bread on a cloth, and poured them each a huge cup of ale. The slaves ate and drank ravenously. Even the bread here was different from in the old world—one bite could distend your stomach—but Gontran tore into his food, not only because he was bent over from hunger, but also because he feared the other slaves would steal it. His stamina was slightly replenished, and his health recovered a little to 20/100. Yesterday evening had been so dark that he was unsure of which slave had taken his blanket. They all looked the same. Each was a thin, strong, sweaty young Slav in need of a trim for his beard and hair and a bath for his dirty limbs.
Everyone was too hungry to speak. Gontran heard only smacking lips, chewing teeth, and slurping mouths, though he was so hungry he barely paid attention to anything save his own food and drink.
Bread, he thought. Ale.
The meal vanished in minutes. Now Gontran needed to use the bathroom.
He stood to his feet and stumbled, surprised by how the ale had gone to his head. It was stronger than most old world beer—and in his old body, he’d never been a heavy drinker, only sipping from red plastic cups at the occasional party to keep up appearances—but he’d also stood up too quickly, and without enough breath in his lungs. To avoid falling, he grabbed the oak trunk and gripped it almost as though he was holding a mast in the midst of a storm and struggling to keep from being blown out to sea. His brain was so oxygen-deprived that his vision and hearing suddenly became cinematic, like in an old, cheap unsolved murder mystery show. The eating sounds around him grew choppy, and the film of his life which he viewed through his eyes seemed to seize up, start again, then seize up again. He was amazed by this experience—so this was why those crappy shows were like that—but he also wondered if and when it would end. Thankfully it cleared up after he took a few breaths. No one else had noticed. They were finishing their meals, chewing and burping, stunned by the odd lavishness of the bread and ale after hours of work.
Gontran asked Boscolo about the bathroom, using the only Italian word he knew for it—bagno, bath—which the maestro failed to understand. Then Gontran clutched his stomach, and Boscolo pointed at him and laughed, said something to the Slavs—who also laughed, all except for one, who looked at Gontran with pity—and then gestured to an outhouse in the woods that had been out of sight. Closing the door behind him, Gontran sat on the wooden bench inside, pulled down his undergarments, and voided the contents of his stomach into a dark hole which reeked of filth. It must have been deep, for it took a disturbingly long time—several seconds at least—to hear his shit smack the bottom. This induced a dizzying feeling which was compounded by his drunkenness.
Were medieval people just kind of drunk all the time? he wondered.
He needed to be careful, drinking that ale. Water would have been better, but water from around the marshes was dangerous, and shit from latrines could seep into well water. Being here more than a few days would make him an alcoholic.
Next, his problem was cleaning his ass. There was no toilet paper, nor was there a hose or bidet. What to do? He couldn’t go back out there with shit all over his ass. People here could be dirty, but they weren’t that dirty.
He looked around the dark outhouse, searching the same wooden walls over and over for salvation, but there was nothing.
How do I clean my ass?
Finally, he decided he would peek through the door, make sure no one was looking, then sneak outside, keeping his tunic and undergarments from touching his ass all the while. He could make it into the woods, find some leaves, hope they weren’t poison ivy or poison oak—did that even grow here?—and clean himself—
Someone pounded the door and growled a few Slavic words.
Gontran swore. But then he had an idea, and said: “Hey, could you get me some leaves or something?”
The answer came in Slavic, and sounded negative, repeating words with which Gontran was familiar—nyet and neechayvo. Gontran wondered if Slavic language speakers just said neechayvo all the time, or if he only noticed this because it was one of the three or four words he knew from those languages.
The pounding came again. Gontran got up, opened the door, and did his best to sneak outside without showing anyone his bare ass. But the other slave noticed immediately, of course, and pointed at him and laughed like Boscolo.
You are losing charisma XP, the game voice said.
The slaves and their maestro—sitting together on the blanket in the shade like a happy picnicking family—roared with laughter, except for the one slave who felt sorry for Gontran. He shook his head and crept into the woods, noticing that, as that first slave entered the outhouse, he was carrying a handful of leaves.
Gontran found some fresh leaves—fearful of using old ones—and, to make sure they wouldn’t leave a rash on his ass, he rubbed one on the underside of his forearm, then waited a moment. When nothing happened, he shrugged, cleaned himself, then tossed the dirty leaves under a nearby bush.
Taking a shit in the Middle Ages is complicated, he thought. In some ways he still had yet to get used to this time and place. There was also nowhere to wash his hands.
Pulling up his undergarments, he noticed that he was alone, and that he was out of sight of the slaves and Boscolo. He couldn’t even hear them; he must have gone farther into the forest than he’d realized, shuffling out here with his pants around his knees. His high stealth skill as a Master Thief (8/10) must have helped. Looking around into the bushes and leafy trees rushing in the cool spring wind and sun, he thought immediately of escape. But where could he go? And what would Boscolo or the Loredani do if they caught him?
Gontran looked down at the manacles around his ankles. He’d never make it wearing those things. And he couldn’t take them off. His stealth skills weren’t high enough to remove iron manacles with nothing but his bare hands and some twigs. Someone would find him, assume he was an escaped slave, and turn him in for a reward. But what if Gontran only traveled by night? Then he wouldn’t be able to see! And he would still need to steal food now and then. Without being able to run, he would never make it. He needed speed, not just stealth. Maybe he could find a blacksmith who would remove the manacles. That was a big maybe…and why should anyone risk their life to help?
While Gontran was stressing over what to do, he heard raised voices, and what sounded like people calling: “Capitano Cane!” He hated that nickname, but Annibale must have told them to call him that. Sighing, he crept out of the woods, waved to Boscolo, and rejoined the slaves just as they were returning to the salt pans. Now Boscolo and his three cronies called him “culo di merda”—shit ass—in addition to Capitano Cane.
Boscolo fell back onto his stool in the shade. There he sucked down a mouthful of wine, every now and then, from his wine skin. The slaves continued raking salt while Gontran shoveled it. This time, however, one slave spoke with him as they worked, introducing himself as István.
“Are you the one who took my blanket?” Gontran blurted, though he recognized at the same time that István was the slave who had pitied him earlier.
“No,” István said with his thick accent. “Sorry. That Béla Károly.” He pointed with his thumb over his shoulder at a slave who was indistinguishable from the rest—a thin white man, of indeterminate age, dirty and tired-looking, with taut muscles, and brown hair in need of a trim. “He nobleman, but the family make no ransom.”
“Why not?” Gontran said.
“He is not nice.”
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“No.” Gontran smiled. “He definitely isn’t.”
“You sound Frankish.”
“That’s right.”
“Are you truly the ship captain?” István said after a moment.
Gontran nodded. “I was. My name’s Gontran Koraki.”
“Where is crew?”
“I think they escaped.”
István laughed. “Not for long. No one escape Velence when they want you. Look at us.” He gestured to the closer slaves, but also to the others in the distance who were raking the salt pans under the maestri’s watchful eyes. “Long ago, we think: ‘Yes, aha, I escaped.’ But Velence wants us. And so they catch us like the fish in big net.”
“Could be worse.” Gontran looked to the sunny sky and the haze billowing through the marsh, rippling in the lagoon water. “Is it always like this?”
István shook his head. “In summer is bad. Very hot. Like the furnace, all day long. People die. And water.” He pointed to his bare feet, soaking in the salt pan. “It hurts skin. Blisters. Gives disease. You need remove those.” He nodded to Gontran’s manacles.
“I can’t,” Gontran said. “I’m a flight risk.”
“You keep them, you die, one week. First comes cut, then sick, then death. It spread fast. You must remove.”
“How?”
“Be nice to Boscolo.” István smiled in a peculiar charming manner. “Ask permesso.”
They both returned to work, keeping an eye on Boscolo, though from a distance it looked like their maestro had again fallen asleep in the shade, his whip slipping from his fingers, his sword at his side.
Prison guards are fundamentally disadvantaged compared to prisoners, Herakleia had once said during one of her endless lectures. The prison guard is bored and tired, he wants to be anywhere else, sometimes he even empathizes with his prisoners, and he is certainly less clever than they are—since he can see that there is no logic to the law save that of power, and he understands that the criminals who run society are making far more money than he can ever dream of, yet he fails to take advantage of this because he has been transformed into a coward thanks to decades of parental and societal abuse and neglect. In a fair fight, the prisoner will almost always overcome the prison guard. Every prisoner also possesses a nobility which the prison guard can never have. Despite the inevitable empathy, the prison guard cannot help viewing the prisoner as a fool for being captured. The prison guard thinks him lazy and worthless. This makes the prison guard lose his edge. He becomes careless. He assumes that the prisoner can never escape. And then in contrast to the bored, tired, and cowardly prison guard, the prisoner is obsessed with the idea of escape. For years he can think of nothing else. Ceaselessly he works toward this goal mentally, physically—exercising, reading, planning, organizing—all while the prison guard alternately envies him or thinks him lazy and stupid—unable to see him for who he really is. This is why the liberation of the world’s exploited peoples is inevitable. The world is a vast prison, but no prison is perfect. There is always a way out.
With the bread and beer in Gontran’s stomach, his thoughts drifted. He felt oddly content, and wondered how bad staying here would be once he got his manacles off. Then he rebuked himself for thinking that way. He was Gontran Koraki, the rogue adventuring merchant, and no one controlled his fate.
Sooner or later he would fool these Venetians, who thought they were so smart. He would never lose sight of his goal. He would break free.
His odd contentedness was brief. Soon it was replaced with fatigue, boredom, frustration. For a little while, having no control over his life had almost seemed nice, since no control meant no worry.
It’s all out of your hands, so why trouble yourself?
So far slavery here could have been worse, at least compared with what he had read in the old world about the antebellum south, where being whipped, raped, mutilated, worked to death, bred like cattle, and separated from your family was an everyday occurrence. Gontran had only been in Venice a few days, but he had yet to see anything like that here. Slavery was different in the past. Slaves could even command armies and rule empires. Wasn’t the vizier of Fustat a slave…?
But freedom had its own frustrations—the struggle, for one, to figure out what to do when you weren’t enslaved by need. Poverty itself was a different kind of slavery. But still, having some control—or at least the illusion of control—was always better than no control at all.
Gontran’s growing exhaustion soon turned to anger. This was directed against the slaves that had mistreated him, to Boscolo who had chained him and who napped all day in the shade of the leafy trees like a figure in a Renaissance landscape painting. Then there was Venice, the Loredani, and also himself.
If only I hadn’t fallen off that ledge.
Had Gontran escaped the doge’s palace, he would now be adventuring across the sea with Ra’isa by his side. More than anything, he longed to touch her. The thought almost made him cry as he shoveled salt in the Venetian lagoon that reeked of rotting fish, bubbling clams, and bird shit. He had never gotten a chance to touch her smooth, electric skin. And if they were ever reunited, what would he look like? After just a few months or years of slavery, Gontran would be unrecognizable. His teeth would fall out. He’d be little better than the living skeletons he’d seen in the Venetian dungeons.
By now the Paralos must have gone to another city and tried to forge an alliance again. The Republic of Ragusa was closest. This old nest of the Narentine pirates was not yet ensnared in Venice’s tentacles, and also just a day or two away in Dalmatia, as long as the wind was at your back. Then there were Amalfi, Pisa, Genova—all on Italy’s far side, sheltered from Venetian depredations by the land, always happy to take up arms against the Serenissima.
There were so many places for the Paralos to go, so much for the crew to do. The Roman Empire and their Mediterranean hangers-on—the Normans and Venetians—had made so many enemies that uniting different powers against them was far from hopeless.
Now, shoveling thick fat gleaming salt crystals in the marshes, Gontran grumbled swears, gritting his teeth and growling. Grumbling to yourself—wasn’t that something people only did in movies?
Guess not.
In the evening, Boscolo and the slaves returned to the Isola del Buon Castello, and had their bread with a little salted pork and wine. Once they had finished eating and drinking, and everyone was sitting back and burping, Gontran knelt before Boscolo, but before he could even ask for his manacles to be removed—before he could explain that Annibale probably wanted him to live a long life as a miserable slave—the maestro struck him across the face with his whip and bellowed a torrent of swears. With his health dropping to 19/100, Gontran backed away and apologized. Boscolo, his breath reeking of wine, his sword clanging against his leg, brought Gontran to the dormitory and threw him against the wall.
“Culo di merda,” Boscolo growled.
He staggered back to dinner, though he had forgotten to chain Gontran to the wall.
Gontran sat his weary, aching body against the cold dark wall, doing his best to make it look as though he was chained against it. Had István lied in some Machiavellian attempt to get rid of him? Machiavelli himself would one day live not far from here. Northern Italy was the land of Machiavelli, wasn’t it?
No, what István had said made sense. The manacles around Gontran’s ankles were time bombs. When an infection began, nothing would stop it. Amputation would follow, and there were few if any anesthetics available. If Gontran got lucky and found a barber-surgeon, the man would saw through his bone—and need several other men to hold him down. The unsterilized saw would poison his blood, and death would follow.
Trebizond had started producing small amounts of antibiotics for only the most desperate cases. Culturing the fungi was a complicated, labor-intensive process in the absence of scientific knowledge and equipment. It required modern factories. Then you needed to take a lot of penicillin for it to work, and it needed to be ingested as a pill, because if you just ate the blue mold on cheese, your stomach acid would destroy it before the fungi could get into your bloodstream.
In short, his prospects were poor. The manacles were a death sentence.
Beyond Trebizond, antibiotics were unknown. Gontran was going to die here if he couldn’t break free. There were no tools to saw through the manacles. Was he supposed to gnaw them with his teeth, or cut them with his nails? Of course not! He needed to strike when Boscolo came to unchain him in the morning. It wouldn’t be hard to choke him to death—Ra’isa had almost done the same to Annibale.
She should have finished him off.
Then Gontran could take Boscolo’s key and break free. But how would the other slaves react? István might leave him alone, at least, but what about Béla the blanket thief, and the other two slaves who had never missed a chance to laugh at him?
They can rot here for all I care.
Then the eternal question returned: where would Gontran go? Should he walk all the way back to Trebizond? But that must have been thousands of miles, and it took him straight through Konstantinopolis, where agents belonging to both the emperor and Demetrios Male?nos would be looking for him.
Everyone was always looking for Gontran. Everyone was always hunting him. He was like a rabbit in a forest full of wolves.
It didn’t matter. If he broke free, he might live. If he stayed here, he would die soon. More than anything he wanted another chance to kill Annibale, but Gontran would have to settle for escape. Besides, when the Venetian golden boy got wind of what had happened, he would be furious. Too bad Gontran wouldn’t be there to see it.
Exhaustion took him, and he slept despite the cold, his hands tucked into his armpits again. In the morning, when Boscolo entered the dormitory to unchain him from the wall, Gontran seized his chance.