A Note on the Chapter Title: Abeona - a goddess who protected children the first time they left their parents' home, safeguarding their first steps alone.
Kurama learned many seasons later that Zeru lived through the laming, raving and hallucinating on the back of a cart. He overcame the illness, though it burnt his body to a husk, and was sold to a gem cutter in Rome. He worked the wheels there to polish the jeweler's stones. Eventually, his feet were cut off, leaving him alive, with his ankles wrapped to hide the stumps. He tried to steal once, and for the crime his nose was lopped off, leaving a gaping chasm in his once-handsome face. Still he lived.
At that point Kurama had no more pity to give to Zeru, however. His heart had been wrung dry, the last drop suckled out by greedy lips years before.
Slaves clung to the mud around him, fighting whips and brusque handling, praying in lilting Celtic tongues. One woman scooped the slime of the Tamesas into her two palms and ate it, sucking the lines in her fingers. Kurama understood. She wanted the earth of her homeland inside her, to keep with her forever, to grant her strength and courage in her captivity. Moments later a legionary forced her through the brackish water and over the lip of the trireme, and Kurama looked away.
The others designated for the rich customer exchanged frightened glances, leaning into each other imperceptibly for warmth and comfort. Even the dullest sensed the precipice of displacement they faced and the frightening journey ahead. The clothing they wore today was simple leather, chosen so the fine silks couldn't be destroyed by the channel's waves. Kurama assumed that any callouses they gained would be buffed, grated and powdered down on the other side, and nearly began to vibrate with impatience. His eyes roved over the white crests of waves and the dots and curves of the gulls that circled high above, cocking his ear to their eerie screeches. He leaned back against the ship's warped, salt-bleached wood, and watched the last strands of morning fog curl above the river basin.
Home, he thought, a clumsy shudder running up his spine. He might never see it again; might never taste this salt, mud and wet, the rotting fish of whelk-dotted shores at low tide. He wondered whether the horses would prance in Rome; whether the does and fawns would stand poised with graceful fear before the hunters; whether the crows sidled and cackled with the same mysterious powers; whether the wildflowers would peek their heads out each spring with such colorful pride, like a chick grown finally to a rooster. He didn't want them to. He wanted the rolling heather a day's walk from his cottage to be the most beautiful thing in the known world, as he suspected it was. He didn't want his eye turned by gauche Roman frippery.
Blaming his itching tears on the strong salt winds, he looked away, and didn't protest when he was led down to the hold and chained away from the galley slaves.
The trip was a misery. The boat rocked and swung with little rhythm, leaping up over a wave only to come crashing down in a spray of foam, the beat of the rowing drums and the lamps that swung crazily on iron chains casting demonic shadows over faces until no features looked human, and all was unrecognizable. Kurama curled up, ill as though he'd eaten spoiled meat; sure spirits, which howled even now with the voice of the wind and caressed and slapped him with cold wet fingers, had abducted him. His eyes rolled deliriously, the jerking of the boat tipping him over and nearly ripping his arms out of his sockets as he reached the end of his chain. A few repeated pulls of that sort, and Kurama lost consciousness, entering a feverish world of beating drums and dancing goblins, where dark was light and light was dark, all upside down and inside out and then, finally, he awoke to a bucket of freezing salt water that left him gasping and burning. It brought him back to himself enough to climb a ladder at the urging of a Roman, blinking and shivery as he rose through the square entrance to the hold and closed his eyes for a moment, scared. When he opened his eyes he saw before him, face shaken, a shore that looked remarkably like the one they'd left behind.
For a second his heart soared, thinking they'd changed course and were back at the land of the Britons. The legionaries smiled, however, and in moments he knew the truth. He was in a Gallic harbor, looking at an unknown land. The gulls that screeched, the smell of rotting fish, and the hard wind that stank of salt and whipped his tunic up into his face, however, broke his heart.