The captain poked a toe into Dwayne’s side and was rewarded with a moan. He pointed at the empty knife sheath on Dwayne’s belt. The man who’d confiscated the ax took Dwayne’s dagger from his waistband and handed it over to the captain who ran a hand over the gleaming blade. His hand came back bloody, and he seemed more pleased than pained.
He gestured and barked, and two of the men turned Dwayne on his side. They fussed with the clasp to Dwayne’s belt until they had it loose. The captain was able to loop the belt around his waist twice and could make no sense of the plastic clasp. He finally simply tied a knot in the belt and sheathed his prize blade to hang over his crotch. This placed him in a better mood. The crew seemed relieved. He next tried on Dwayne’s sneakers, but they were far too big, and he impatiently tossed them aside.
To Caroline, the only good news here was that the men who captured them did not find their hide atop the promontory or the hidden inflatable. Dwayne’s handgun was not on him, and none of the men had it. It must have fallen away unseen when Dwayne was struck with a slung stone. None of these men would have known to look for it. If they had any theories on how their comrade lost the top of his head, they were not exploring them.
Despite the fear roiling in her stomach, she took an inventory of the items that could only be classified as temporal pollution. The plastic buttons on their clothes. The zipper on her pants. The synthetic fabrics.
Dwayne’s knife was the most problematic, as it would be prized by anyone who owned it. The tempered steel blade would survive the ages. She imagined an archeologist digging in a burial ground and finding Dwayne’s NRA t-shirt or her Manchester jersey. But both were cotton and could not survive two thousand years intact.
The man who’d appropriated the ax spoke up. There was an argument with the captain. Both men spoke harshly with fingers stabbed in Caroline and Dwayne’s direction. She didn’t need to understand the language to know that their fates were being decided here and now. She couldn’t know who was arguing in their favor until the captain cuffed the other man hard enough to drop him on his ass. The captain shouted to the men standing around watching. Caroline was shoved toward the raft with Dwayne lifted from the sand and carried after her.
She sat with a hand in Dwayne’s hair as the raft was dragged through the surf to the bireme. She looked back to see that the captain was once again directing the burial of the big iron-banded box. She noted the location. A hole was being excavated with mattocks and shovels at the base of the rock face. The formation was topped with a hump of rock in the vague shape of a turtle. Caroline recalled that rounded point of rock, more wind-worn but still shell-shaped, as part of the archipelago visible from Nisos Anaxos.
She was urged up the wooden cleats and oarlocks in the hull and over the wale onto the deck. Dwayne was cut from the carrying post and awakened with a bucket of seawater thrown in his face. He came around groaning and dazed. They hauled him to his feet and pushed him to climb the hull with shouts and punches. Curious crewmen lined the rails to watch. Some bore spears with long, gleaming blades.
The two captives were taken below down a rough wooden ladder through an opening in the center deck. Boards ran stem to stern to make a middle passage of smooth-worn wood. The areas along the port and starboard faces were open to the first oar deck below.
Caroline could see more men illumined by the streams of light that came in through the open oarlocks. They watched silently as the prisoners were brought below and down past the two rowing decks and into a hold. The floor of the hold was filled to a depth with sand ballast. Rows of amphorae cast to a pointed base were secured in the sand. There were wooden cages containing chickens and pigs tied to the bulkhead with rope, along with baskets of all sizes. And everywhere hung bundles of strung garlic cloves and dried peppers.
The entire ship and its crew reeked of garlic. It was one of the things that Caroline noticed when the shock of their encounter began to wear off. Their breath, their sweat, and even their clothes, when they wore them, gave off a stench of garlic that almost covered the rank stink of unwashed bodies and pig feces.
She also noted how many of these men were missing fingers. All of them had deep rope burns, fresh as well as scarred over remnants, on their hands and forearms. It came from being a sailor, she supposed. She was surprised that none of the men showed signs of flogging. A ship powered by galley slaves, yet not one of them had a back crossed with whip marks.
She was also surprised at the number of children on board, all boys as far as she could tell. Caroline didn’t really know much about children. To her best guess, the boys seemed to be between six and twelve to older. And they were everywhere chattering and pointing.
Down in the dark hold, Caroline was shoved to the sand which she noticed was speckled with rat droppings. Her right wrist was snapped into iron manacles with a three-foot length of chain secured to a rusting ringbolt set in the hull. They attempted to bind Dwayne the same way, but the cuffs would not close around his wrists. Instead, they bound his hands behind him with hemp rope and ran that through another ringbolt set on the hull
