I Am Walking Past… I am walking past a roofed corner in one of the back courtyards of a slaver’s compound. Turning, I look in. Facing me is the gagged face of a young slave. He is probably around sixteen. The gag cuts at the corner of his mouth. I can see the darkening hair, too, of his upper lip. His eyes are dark and wide. Damp sweaty hair falls over his forehead. He is bent over a table. His arms are outstretched in front of him, secured to the corners of the table by thin rope. I can see t...

When our old master died, his widowed wife wanted to move back to her birthplace where she could be with her similarly widowed sister their last years, so she put the estate up for sale. It was purchased, its land, buildings, and all the slaves, by a younger man, a merchant in the city who wanted a summer residence for his family. There were many changes. Rooms were added to the house. New furnishings were brought from the city in carts. Walls were whitewashed. A larger kitchen garden was laid o...

The quarter of the city that is devoted to the slave markets, consists of two straight streets with a number of smaller lanes running between them. One of the streets has a wider space, a large square, where anyone can come and sell slaves, standing them against the wall and remaining there while possible buyers walk slowly around the circuit. Women and girls can be taken into a small alcove off the square to be stripped down. Boys and men are simply demonstrated nude in the first place. Then th...

It took a week to travel from the border, where I purchased new-captured slaves from the traders there, to the sea-coast where I lived. It was late in the season. The autumn skies were dreary. The days were changeable, one filled with the sullen imitation of summer heat, the next blown with cold winds and showers. And sometimes there were the heavier rains that you could see coming in from the distance, crossing the plains in slow grey curtains which turned the track to mire in minutes. I only h...

When Alexius was around fifteen, on a morning in early summer, the overseer ordered him and Mikhail, another boy his age, to go the bath-house. The overseer went with them, watched them undress and closely supervised their wash. ‘Now scrub between your legs, and under your rears,’ he ordered. ‘Soap your hair properly…rinse it again.’ When they had washed to his satisfaction, he stood them together, without their clothes and he studied them up and down with a long scrutiny. Alexius had black...