Chapter 3: From Melio to Neapolis

Although Nikon had some sense of the direction he must take to reach the shore of Scyros, opposite the archipelago state of Andro, getting there, through the rough terrain and hostile environment of land under the control of the state of Neapolis would, he knew, be extremely difficult. Nikon wondered if Neapolis was still attacking the islands of Andro. If so, their forces in their own country would be weaker. But then he’d heard that no country in the region had the military force that Neapolis did.

Pointing his face to the sea, Nikon started out across the uninhabitable scrub land, finding food and water as he was able to do along the way.

Thus it was that he was in a weakened condition when he came upon a small caravan of traders headed toward the east. When he hailed them, they stopped, and three big, strapping men came down off their sturdy, big-muscled horses and gathered around Nikon. To him they were barbarians, perhaps from the north. Big, hairy beasts with flaming red hair that descended to their shoulders and long, bushy beards. They wore coarse-cloth tunics over fur trousers and big, black leather boots.

Nikon did not like the way they were circling around him and he was about to bid them farewell and move away when he heard mumbling and whining from one of two rough carts being pulled by oxen behind the traders’ horses. The cart from which he heard the noises was more a cage on wheels, with black drapes hanging inside the walls, shielding whatever was therein from view.

Nikon looked over to this vehicle and thought he could see the rough-weave draping cloth stirring and a dark face looking out.

“So, you would like to accompany us into the capital city of Neapolis, would you?” the one who appeared to be the barbarians’ leader asked. He was wearing a big grin and he had reached for and was fingering the hem of Nikon’s tunic, much too close, Nikon feared for the lump that was hiding the ruby he carried. “Fine cloth for someone journeying in the wild,” he said.

“No, I am not a traveler,” Nikon said. “I was just walking ahead of my compatriots. We are headed for our military encampment nearby.” Nikon had decided that these were not men he wanted to travel with, even if they had food and water to share with him and horses and wagons to ride on occasionally in his journey.

“I am not so sure there is a military encampment near here—and you look too sweet and tender to be a soldier,” the leader of the traders said. “You look more like a sweetmeat to be enjoyed.”

Nikon took a step away from the northern barbarian, who had come quite close to him. The musky scent of the man was both repelling and intoxicating.

The sound of a shriek split the tension of the air, and, startled, Nikon turned to look at the cage-like cart. The black drape was drawn aside and a small Nubian man was shrieking. “Run. They are evil.”

Nikon didn’t have a chance to run, however. At a signal from the chief trader, the other two were at Nikon’s side and holding fast on his arms, and the leader of the traders was raising his tunic over his head to reveal massive chest and arm muscles and a torso covered with curly red hair. He strode to the back of the cart and pulled bolts open and hopped nimbly into the cart interior. The cart thrashed back and forth briefly, accompanied by the screams of the Nubian prisoner.

Then the trader was hopping down from the cart again and turning and grabbing the ankles of two black legs and pulling them beyond the tailgate of the cart. The Nubian appeared to be trying to sit up on the back edge of the cart when the trader had let go of his legs to untie and lower the flap of his own leather codpiece and let a formidable thick cock tumble out, but as the Nubian sat up and made to jump from the back of the cart, the trader drew back his arm and punched the Nubian in the face, snapping his body back into the covered cart. After that all Nikon could see were the hips and legs of the small black man, as the trader fisted the Nubian’s ankles and spread his legs and started pistoning his channel with a hard cock. No sounds were coming from the Nubian now, so Nikon concluded that he had been knocked unconscious by the blow to his face.

When the trader was done and had unceremoniously pushed the black legs back into the cart, he turned and looked at Nikon with a grin on his face.

“Will we make sport of this one too, Traymor?” one of the barbarians holding Nikon asked.

“Not now. We have been stopped long enough. We must press on to an encampment for the night. There we will make sport.”

One of the men holding Nikon mumbled, “Sure, you get your pleasure, but we—”

“What was that that you said?” the trader leader growled.

“Nothing, Traymor, nothing,” the other man immediately answered. Nikon could feel the man shudder and this was all he needed to know about who was in control in this band—and how cruel he could be.

“Haul the golden-haired sweetpie up here,” Traymor ordered, and Nikon was picked up between the other two, manhandled over to the back of the cart, and thrown in. He landed nearly on top of the body of the unconscious Nubian and scuttled to the far end of the cart as the door was shut and the bolt shot home.

The light was dim inside the cart, but there were tears in the black drapes and Nikon could see—and smell—well enough to determine he wanted to avoid the other back corner of the cart. He was jolted and fell onto his side as the cart lurched into motion, but he was able to grasp the side panels enough soon to keep his body steady as the caravan resumed its track across the scrubby terrain.

After a while the Nubian began to moan softly and then he was awake and sitting in one of the front corners of the cart and staring dully at Nikon.

“I thank you for trying to warn me,” Nikon said at length, knowing that the assault the small, black man had suffered was from an attempt to help him.

“You will be sorry you hailed this caravan,” the Nubian answered in a voice with a thick accent whose land Nikon couldn’t identify.

“How do you come to be here?” Nikon asked.

“I was stolen from my family in the south some time ago and taken north. And now I am being taken east to be sold as a slave. If I live that long.”

Nikon said nothing to that, and after a brief pause the Nubian continued. “There were three of us when we started for the east. The other two were used up and sold. I can only believe I too will be used up soon.”

“Used up?” Nikon asked. But there was no answer to that, and soon the two sank into their own thoughts and did not speak again.

Sometime after the caravan had stopped, the bolt to the door scraped open and the door was thrust aside and one of the traders muttered, “You, sweetmeat. Come outside.” Nikon did not move, though, and the man growled. “You do not want me to come in there and get you.”

Nikon moved forward then as the trader shoved a metal plate of food across the floor of the cart and the Nubian leaned forward and snapped it up and began to eat greedily from it. When Nikon reached the back of the cart, strong hands grabbed him by the arms and roughly pulled him from the cart. “You eat later. After the sport,” the trader muttered.

The sun was already down and the traders had set up their camp, had a fire going, and apparently had already eaten. All three were stripped down to their fur trousers with the leather codpieces and their black boots. Their torsos were bulging, with veins standing out as there was no fat for them to go through, and glistened with sweat from the work they’d done to settle the camp for the evening. The horses were grazing beyond the rim of the stand of trees the camp had been set up in. The beasts’ saddles were spaced just inside the circle of light that came from the open fire.

Without ceremony, Nikon was stripped of his tunic and loincloth and pushed over to near the fire and forced belly down, bent over the seat of one of the massive saddles. He knew what was coming and he was determined not to beg or give them the satisfaction of hearing him scream. He would do all of his screaming inside.

The three of them worked on binding his wrists and ankles and stretching his extremities out and staking them to the ground so that he was spread-eagled over the saddle with his bare buttocks elevated. With the three of them there, he had no hope of resisting. So, he didn’t.

For the next hour, the three of them took turns fucking him from the rear, and although he could not help but groan and grunt and moan, he did not give them the satisfaction of crying out or screaming.

After the three had had their sport, they released him and let him lean against the saddle and eat and drink a mean meal.

“Traymor, look at this. There is something inside the boy’s tunic,” one of the traders who had been playing with Nikon’s tunic said. All three traders gathered around and stared in awe at the ruby they had found.

“I knew you would bring us good fortune,” Traymor declared with a laughing voice. “And such a sweet ass you have. We may get nearly the worth of this from you in the markets of Tyre.”

“Only if you do not use me up before reaching Tyre,” Nikon answered dryly. For that, he got a backhand slap across his face. But he also received a speculative look from Traymor, and although he was taken by each of the three in the evening again and then lay under Traymor, his buttocks pinned to the ground under one of the carts by a slow-pumping cock, at night for the next several days, Nikon felt that he was not abused as he might have been, an observation also made to him by the Nubian, who began to voice hope that he too might survive to reach Tyre.

Two days later, the caravan stopped while it was still light and Nikon was let out of the cart—although the Nubian wasn’t—earlier than usual and was staked out with a collar and chain beside a small waterhole, as the traders set about establishing an encampment. When one of the traders came close enough for Nikon to speak to him without Traymor hearing them, he asked, “Why have we encamped early? Where are we?”

“We are at the eastern border of the land of Neapolis now. Traymor favors this encampment as he believes the temple ahead is bewitched and provides good fortune protection to him for the journey into the wilderness, where the going will be rougher and the bandits more plentiful. From here we turn south to the city of Neapolis before entering the wilderness.”

“The temple?” Nikon asked.

“Do you not see the Temple of the Son over there? That marks the far reaches of the Neapolis state.”

Nikon looked the short distance across a plain and saw a stepped temple made out of smooth, black stone that rose to the height of at least twenty men. He could not see an entrance to the temple and thus assumed they were looking at the back side of the edifice. “A temple to the sun? I didn’t realize the Neapoli were sun worshipers.”

“No, it is the temple to the son of the king. They don’t worship the sun, but they nonetheless have strange customs here. But you need not worry about that. You should be asking me about the size of men’s cocks in Tyre.” At that, the trader laughed at his own joke and moved off. Thirsty, Nikon moved over to the side of the waterhole and leaned down and drank greedily.

When the traders came for him, Nikon was prostate on the ground, moaning and burning up with fever, his skin red and puffy and covered with blotches.

All he heard was a cry of “It’s the plague. It must be the plague” before he passed into unconsciousness.

Nikon was in a haze when he regained some semblance of consciousness and for some time later he was not quite sure what was reality and what merely his fever playing sport with him. He opened his eyes to a vision of a god. The man was tall and willowy, although his musculature was strong and hard. He was white against the blue of the sky. That’s how Nikon would have described him if he had been asked—white. His skin was fair and his hair was stark white. He was of an indeterminate age, but surely not young. He probably was old, but he moved with a smooth grace and was hard of body, which belied the vision of a wrinkled old man. His torso was bare. He wore a necklace around his neck made of white crystals. His hips and legs were swathed in a long, pristine-white skirt and the sandals on his feet were ribboned with white lacings.

He was leaning over Nikon’s prone body with a basin at his side, sponging Nikon off with a cool liquid that chilled at the touch. Where it did not touch, however, Nikon’s body was burning hot.

The man was humming a low-toned, haunting tune as he sponged Nikon’s body. All of this was quite clear in Nikon’s mind later when he recovered from his fever and found that he was then lying, clothed in a white tunic, in the same place he had been lying when he became ill, but now he was lying on a clean mat with a jug of water and a sack of food beside him and a placard on a stake at the edge of the waterhole with a large X painted on it—a sign he took as a warning to not drink from the waterhole, which gave him an explanation of why he had been sick.

What was not so clear, however, was the image of the man releasing the chained collar at Nikon’s throat with a mere touch of his hand and later, the sensual sensation that the man was working his cock with his mouth and taking Nikon to a pleasurable climax.

There certainly was no man there when Nikon awoke, but someone most certainly had been there and had left Nikon in far more comfort than the traders had left him in, at the edge of the waterhole. Nikon felt weak but the fever had passed as had the red blotches on his skin.

The traders had also departed. For this, Nikon was grateful, although he was in despair that he had lost the ruby and he worried about the plight of the little Nubian. Upon thought, though, he reasoned that perhaps his parting from the band had all been from the good fortune of possessing the ruby as long as he had it. This left worrying questions about whether this protection—and thus his good fortune—had deserted him now.

He sat on the mat for a good part of the day, but no white-haired spirit appeared. Near dusk, he decided he needed to move from the waterhole and, taking up the jug of water and the sack with what remained of the food he had been provided, he walked to the shadow of the Temple of the Son.

Nikon circled the base of the temple three times, not finding an opening, until he noticed a place where an inscription had been carved into the wall of the temple. As he approached, he noticed that at this point, the stone rim at ground level that surrounded the base of the temple had indentations of two footprints in it. Putting his feet in the indentations, Nikon leaned over and read the inscription.

Proceed on the right footing But turn to contrariness And behold the rays of the son.