Free The Songs of Slaves by David Rodgers

Latin.
                  “No one is going to buy you if you look sickly and sullen,” Sejius growled. “Now, look up, and look alive. Because if we don’t sell you today, here in this fine port, tonight I will thrash the living shit out of you, until you are so broken that the Kyrios will have no further use of you then to sell you to the poor for soup meat.”
                  He marched away, looking for someone else to taunt. Connor dropped his head again.
                  It was the gray of the cobblestones, or perhaps the smell of the Germani lingering in his nose, that brought his mind back to those days, now weeks past. Tied to the mast until the numbness in his limbs became a burning pain, rolling and toiling with the angry sea, he had fought despair. Deprived of food and water until his tongue swelled and was as dry as leather, left in his own filth, until another of the drunken marauders would stagger up to strike him. But for all this, his was the lighter load. It was the women, the girls and the young boys who suffered the deeper atrocities. Raped over and over again, beaten without cause and without mercy, until they stopped resisting at all, stopped weeping or crying out to God or to each other. One woman died the first night. Another broke away and leapt overboard, drinking in the seawater and swimming for the bottomless depths. But in anguish and brutality the living continued interminably, as the Jutes manning the ship drank and sang songs.
                  Now, hundreds of miles away, Connor clamped his eyes shut, trying to shake the images. He could not. They were seared in his mind, branded with a burning iron. But with distance came some piece of understanding. The Jutes, their captors, were not only acting out of the cruelty of their black hearts. They had departed from Eire wit h ships full of kidnapped people . They arrived in their outpost on the far side of Britannia with ships full of slaves. The savagery of the murder, the physical and sexual violence, the mental torture and control exerted over every captive’s need for food and water disarmed the resistance and stripped away even their victim’s sense of self. Though once free people, one by one terror gave way to isolation and helplessness. The strong ones, or the lucky ones, buried themselves deep within a passive and submissive exterior. The others lost their identities altogether. Their families were broken, murdered, lost hundreds of miles away; and as they were unloaded from the ships on that cold, misty morning, and again divided, sold, or traded, and taken into the round huts of the Germani settlers they were given new names and new roles. The old was lost forever, and home became something intangible, best left to the escape of dreams.
                  As they had come into port, the Jutes had unbound Connor. He fell to the deck, too weak and numb to fight. Like the others he was dragged to shore, where he saw the marauders greeted by their families and friends, as if they were heroes. He saw the men, who had just murdered the helpless and gang raped their captives, take their wives and children lovingly into their arms. They decked their women with gold stolen from those they had slain. And Connor looked on, silenced, crushed and astounded at what an evil thing was man.
                  The next days passed in a haze. He was taken to Woderic’s house and bound once more, as if the chieftain still feared him. But the next day he was moved, passed on to men who were traveling south. Dania was moved, too, and several of the others, all in wooden cages on the backs of carts. Connor could remember the lonely hills of the dark countryside better than what actually happened on that journey. They were traded to other men – Angles. Again, the women were violated, and the few comforts they had all been given were stripped away from them. The next day they were all loaded on