I think this is my new boilerplate for my stories in Jan 2023
. Before I publish, I do everything I can to ensure they are of the quality this site deserves. I've been trying to find editors and getting nowhere for years. All I really need is proof-readers. A stray comma, a missing word or when I switch tenses without realising it. I've far more stories unpublished in need of proof-reading than published. So if you read the story and find errors, please contact me. I have stories going back 7 years waiting to be published, and it's hard to keep writing if I know I'll never share them. That's why I'm submitting another tranche of stories rather than let them moulder unseen.
Ancient in Greece, but not a ruin. Ch. 01
"Professor Plumb?" A young woman's voice startled me from my daydreaming as I prepared my small fishing boat to sail.
Looking up to see a woman standing on the edge of the promenade, a few feet about me. Slim with shoulder-length brown hair and wearing a skimpy bikini and a small sarong around her hip. Her overly pink skin told me as much as her accent. She was English and freshly arrived on my Greek island. I almost chuckled to myself that I'd been here less than 2 years and already I'd gone mostly native.
She removed her oversized sunglasses and smiled at me, and I felt a familiar stirring of my memory.
"It's me, Abigail. I was in your class 2 years ago."
"Oh, hi. But call me Henry. I'm not a professor anymore."
Now I had a name and a reference. I had a vague memory of her in my history class. But after 25 years of teaching, many of the faces ran together, and I forgot them, even the pretty ones, and she was attractive. I returned the smile, as I no longer had to worry about the political correctness of considering a student's physical attributes.
Not that I had a problem in that area. But the number of presentations about sexual harassment was one reason I'd retired early. It made even the mildest of professors feel like predatory fiends. But that was only one of many reasons to end my academic career early.
Both my father and his father died suddenly, just before turning 60. While I had no expectations of the same, I'd always eaten sensibly and exercised. It had coloured my career plan. I planned to retire at 55, but accepted that 56 was close enough, and I wanted to supplement my pension before I left.
Being an ancient Roman and Greek civilization scholar. I read ancient Latin and Greek. 5 years ago I'd been asked to take part in a project to translate a huge cache of Roman slave auction records. As with almost all property, those are the records that are collected and kept. Most of the translations were to be done by students from across the world. My job was to supervise and correct translations, along with other professors from other universities.
I'd found a record of an auction from northern Italy of a slave with a very odd name. At first I put it down as the Roman equivalent of a typo. When I found a second record of the same name, from another auction 2 years later. At a location a little further south, I pondered if it was a proper name.
I asked around the department, and my colleague, whose specialty was the Vikings, commented that it could be a Romanisation of a Norse or Scandinavian name. That was fairly common, as people struggled with uncommon words. Now I accepted the name. I took a stab in the dark and searched what records I could from Constantinople.
By pure chance, I found a record of a Norse trader who had been imprisoned and enslaved over debts. Although, the records looked a little suspicious as the family name of the complainant was the same as the magistrate's and smelled off. But it was enough to pique my interest, enough to post a request on the system. Asking for anyone to notify me of any other records of the person and a rough time period.
Over a period of 17 years, he kept popping up, each time he moved further south and spent 1 to 2 years with each master. Which led me to believe he was unusual. The prices he was sold for suggested he had skills rather than being sold as a difficult slave.
As he neared the toe of Italy, he vanished and I thought I'd lost my trail. Until a Greek colleague contacted me saying he'd found a record of the name in records from a Greek island. Not from slave records, but on a bowl which purported to praise a slave who had been a family's children's tutor, who had died defending them from assassination.
It was enough to get me to travel to Greece to investigate further. One child saved by the slave became an important trader and politician. In his records it said how he owed everything to his slave tutor, who was also his family bodyguard. He had sacrificed himself to protect the children from the political rivals of his father.
Knowing that my slave was a tutor explained why he was sold on after educating his master's children. And why his prices got higher rather than lower as he aged. At that time, travelling all the way to Constantinople to trade would require both physical strength and resolve. As well as the intelligence, to master other languages and understand how to navigate there.
I used that factual information and wrote a book from the slave's perspective. While most of the events were made up, my expertise in the period meant I could provide a detailed description of daily life. The food and conditions, the clothing and practises. Enough to bring it to life. In a similar vein to the Shardlake series of books by CJ Sansom. Novels based on historic events.
I found a publisher who gushed over the book but wished I had more. So I offered to split the book into three parts. The first of how he became a trader, ending with his enslavement. The second covering his slavery until he was sold to a Greek. And the last covering his time on the Greek islands until his death. Admittedly, my accuracy of the first book was a little doubtful in places. The others, including the Greek political infighting, were as accurate as anyone could determine.
Making sure the first book was not to be published until after I retired. To ensure the university could not try to get their claws into the royalties. As I'm not a person who cares much about material things and I'd never married, I decided to spend at least 6 months on a Greek island. Sit back, catch up on the books I'd never read, and eat olives whilst sipping ouzo.
I blinked as I came back to the present to hear Abigail saying that she nearly didn't recognise me. Hardly surprising, as I was a three-piece suit professor when I knew her, and now I was in baggy shorts and flip-flops. Tanned and with sun bleached hair. Without realising it, I'd been staring at her chest whilst my mind ran off to my books again.
"So, why are you here?" She asked.
"Fishing." I replied, gesturing to the boat and grinning at the useless answer.
A voice called her name, and we looked over at the bus stop 50 feet away. A crowd of people her age and all together were climbing on the bus. One girl was gesturing for Abigail to hurry.
