The Price of Freedom: Innocence Lost

Work Pays Off

The next few days of your life are like hell on earth. You survive on what little food you can catch, and while Lula insists that it's only been a few days, you feel like you've been locked away in the darkness for eternity. In the dim light that leaks through the cracks in the floor above, you witness things that you'd never even dreamed about in your worst nightmares. A woman wakes you up wailing one night and when the sailors come down, they find that her child has died in her arms. Ignoring the woman, the men pry the child out of her hands and take it on deck to throw overboard like a bad piece of meat. The woman continues to scream for hours until one of the other slaves beats her unconscious so they can get some rest. Nobody helps her. Nobody cares.

One morning when Lula's listing the types of work you might be expected to do as a slave in Rome, the conversation is cut short when you hear a horrific, gasping sound of someone in horrible pain. You turn around to see that one of the strongest slaves has his chains wrapped around another man's throat, choking him to death. You shout out to object, but Lula quickly puts her hand over your mouth.

"No noise!" She whispers to you. "If you make big noise, sailors will come and stop the man before is finished." You stare blankly at her in confusion for a second before she explains to you. "The man is told to do it." She says, pointing to the slave that was being strangled as his eyes roll back in his head. "He is ask the strong man to kill him. He know he do it quick. Pain go soon."

She's right. Almost as soon as she's finished talking, the man with the chains around his neck goes stiff. The man who choked him gives the chains one last tug before rolling the dead body away and sitting back like nothing had happened. "Why?" You ask Lula, completely unable to comprehend it.

The girl just shrugs like it doesn't matter. "He no want to live anymore." ... Perhaps you can understand that.

You don't know how much longer you can take it yourself. Every day you grow weaker, Alexius is practically skin and bones. In the day you often pass out from the heat, and the stink is so unbearable that it's made you physically sick on more than one occasion. Then there's the screams. Every night a group of the sailors will come down to the hull and choose a woman to take up with them on deck. Sometimes the women will go quietly, other times their screams will go on from the moment they are chosen till they're brought back in tears a few hours later.

One night, you catch Lula glaring at one of the sailors with pure loathing in her eyes. "I kill every one of them before I let them do that to me." You hear her whisper under hear breath. You ask her what she means, but she just rolls over and tells you to go back to sleep.

One morning you're woken by a hard kick to the stomach and look up to see a pair of sailors hovering over you. "This one'll do." One of them says gruffly while the other gets to work releasing you from your chains. As they drag you away, Alexius stares after you with a terrified look in his eye that asks what's happening and why are they taking you? You don't have an answer for him, and remain silent as you are dragged out on deck.

The light of the sun almost blinds you after spending so long in the dark and you're so weak from lack of food that you collapse onto the hard, wooden deck the instant the sailors let's go of your arm. "See that boy?" One of the men asks you. It takes awhile for your eyes to adjust to the light before you actually see what he's pointing to. One of the sails has come loose and is flapping in the wind. "That sail needs to be secured if you ever want to reach dry land. Go climb up there and tie it back up."

You look up at the mast and shudder at the thought of climbing the thing. It has to be more than 100 feet high, and you've never climbed so much as a ladder in your life. You know you'll be beaten if you refuse to do what you're told, but if you tried, it would only take one wrong step and you'd fall to your death.

Nervously, you walk over to the pole and start to climb the ladder. You keep on putting one foot infront of the other, occasionally looking down to see how high you've come. The higher you get, the stronger you're hit with the realization that if you fall, you're going to die.

You're trembling when you reach the crow's nest and ever so slowly force yourself to climb over the side, clinging to the yard for the top sail with your arms and legs and gradually shimmying to where the sail's come loose at the end. The sailors below are cheering you on, but you know they don't really care if you fall. That's the reason you're up there. To them, your life is only worth the money they can make selling you.

Pushing yourself upright, you're forced to hold onto the yard with one hand while you reach out with the other and quickly grab the rope when a gust of wind blows the sail your way. The force of the wind almost knocks you off the yard, but you cling to it with all your strength, waiting for it to pass before securely tying the sail back in place.

The sailors are cheering for you down below and they gather round to rub your hair and pat your back once you're safely back on the deck. After that, the sailors seem to use you as some sort of cabin boy, bringing you up on deck every morning and set you to work, running around carrying messages from one of the end of the ship to the other, scampering up whenever sails that need to be trimmed. The work is hard, but it's a vast improvement from being locked up in the hull every day. You're given more food to keep up your strength and some of the sailors even start to treat you like one of the crew. Running around the deck all day also makes you a little faster.