From the first hours with Fercus, working out the details, it was this part that he had barely allowed himself to consider. It seemed a small worry with the possibility of torture and death to come if the attempt on Sulla’s life had failed, or if he was caught escaping. There were so many ways for him to suffer a disaster that the night and day he would spend as a slave had been pushed to the back of his mind, almost forgotten.

He looked around him, his eyes making out shapes even in the dark. He could feel the weight of the metal cuffs holding his hands to the smooth chain that clinked at the slightest movement. He tried not to remember what it had been like the first time, but his memory brought back those nights and days and years until they clustered and murmured within him and it was hard not to cry out. Some of the chained men wept softly, and Tubruk had never heard a more mournful sound.

They could have been taken from distant lands, or had slavery forced upon them for crime or debt. There were a hundred ways, but to be born to it was worse than all the rest, he knew. As small children, they could run and play in happy ignorance until they were old enough to understand they had no future but to be sold.

Tubruk breathed in the smells of a stable: oil and straw, sweat and leather, clean human animals who owned nothing and were owned themselves. He pulled himself upright against the weight of the chains. The other slaves thought he was one of them, guilty of something to have been beaten so badly. The guard had marked him as a troublemaker for the same reason. Only Fercus knew he was free.

The thought brought no comfort. It was not enough to tell himself that he was just a short journey from the estate and freedom. If you are thought a slave and if you are chained in darkness, unable even to rise, where then is precious liberty? If a free man is bound to a slave coffle, he is a slave, and Tubruk felt the old nameless fear he had felt in the same room decades before. To eat, sleep, stand, and die at another’s whim—he had returned to that, and all his years of pride in winning his way to freedom seemed ashes.

“Such a fragile thing,” he said, just to hear his voice aloud, and the man next to him grunted awake, almost pulling Tubruk over as he struggled up. Tubruk looked away, thankful for the darkness. He did not want the light to come through the high windows to reveal their faces. They were heading for short, brutal lives in fields, working until they fell and could not rise. And they were like him. Perhaps one or two of the men in this room would be picked out for their strength or speed and trained for the circus. Instead of ending their lives as crippled water carriers or taken by disease, they would bleed away their futures into the sand. One or two might have children of their own and see them taken for sale as soon as they had their growth.