Slaves

Meanwhile in Whiddiff city, it was raining heavily in this month of late August. 

It was very early in the morning and slaves were being ferried to Pollow district using the old carriages that were simply made of misplaced wooden logs to make the wagon. Of course, these slaves that were coming in were not the first batch that Virtya used in order to plough Chanya, these ones were the newly bought slaves by Virtya because he had promised the fast batch of slaves that he would give them their freedom after they finished the harvesting of barley and sisal. As one should know, the first batch of slaves was the biggest of all and it had close to 30, 000 slaves, all these slaves had agreed to stay in Azuhai because there was no where else that they would go, lest they wanted to be caught once more and be sold back. However, because these first batch of slaves didn't have a place to stay, Virtya had decided to allow them to stay in Brovon district where they had made their mud houses close to Chanya, that way, even when Virtya would need labour to work on Chanya the next time, he would not have to go far as labour was just near him. In addition, Virtya was also going to give those slaves a share of his produce from Chanya so that they could start their livelihood from there. 

Anyway, not all slaves that were being taken to Pollow came in carriages. It could be seen that most of them were forced to walk from Golton harbour to Pollow which was a distance of 40 kilometers. These slaves were all chained up, emaciated, dehydrated and they seem as if they would die the next moment just from their empty eyes. It seemed these slaves had come from a long journey in the sailing ships.

The slaves were whipped if they dragged their fellows down which made some of them to die on the way because their weak bodies couldn't take it anymore. There were women, children, old men and teenagers mixed in these slave caravans. If one looked closely, they would see that some of the slaves were trembling hard but they didn't dare to stop as they forced their legs to walk. They were totally drenched because of the heavy rains that were pouring upon them, not to mention that the cold breeze could not be ignored. If one of the slaves died on the way, their appendages would be cut so that their dead bodies would be separated from the chains and then the rest of their bodies were either buried on the way or left to rot there. 

These slave guides that were employed by the slave traders were ruthlessness and mercilessly, it could be seen that they would rape the women and girls of the slave caravans when the faces of these women caught their attention. Of course, these women and girls would not resist because they didn't have the energy to do so and even if they had that energy, who would stand in for them?

On the other hand, in Pollow district, a wagon that was filled to the brim with slaves stopped for registration. The slaves were packed in the wagon as if they were not humans but merely cargo. This wagon was roughly made with logs of different shapes which resulted in huge gaps to form between each placement but it seemed that this arrangement of the logs that made the wagon was not made by mistake but it had its own purpose. One should know that the slaves were packed to the brim thus, these gaps were the ventilations that helped them to breath but if a slave didn't find a chance to be close to a ventilation, then, they would suffocate to death even before they reached to their destination.

The wagons had a huge sealing like door which was closed on top as a roof so that no slave would escape as they were being ferried. Of course, this roof was not perfect, it had narrow sills between the timbers whereby the rain drops found their way into the wagon through these sills.