You are still trying to comprehend what is going on. One minute you were renting a slave boy costume for a toga party at college, and the next you were....an 11 year old slave boy in a place you do not recognize. The foggy reality in your mind might be a dream except for the vividness of what has happened.
The "master" has passed you off to the overseer of slaves on the estate, and to his son, an older boy of about 15 years who is learning his profession. You are to be put to work in the stables.
"How are you called, boy?" asks the overseer, his son walking beside you, a rod menacingly in his right hand.
"Kristian MacPherson," you respond. The overseer stops and looks at you.
"And what sort of name is that?"
"Scots Presbyterian, I think" you say.
The overseer seems puzzled. "Where are you from?"
"America."
The overseer looks at his boy and scratches his chin. "Perhaps the boy is addled or sick" he says.
"Or perhaps," the son quips "He is impertinent and needs a thorough flogging. That is to be part of my schooling, is it not Aulus, my father?"
The overseer continues on the way to the stables. "The Senator's manager wants him to muck out the stalls before Senator Gaius Publius's arrival back from Rome. There is always plenty of time for punishment of slave boys, Pontus, my son. And we will pass by the rack and the pit so he can see what he may expect later. Two boys are being punished there right now."
The day is hot. It is high summer and the early afternoon sun is oppressing you. The overseer orders you to remove your coarse tunic which you are quick to do under the threat of Pontus's rod. You are now covered only in your wrap around your waist and crotch. It seems as though it is most proper that you are nearly naked since your neck is collared and ankles are shackled.
Around the corner of an out building you see what Aulus was speaking of. There are punishment stations there that consist of a vertical rack, several sets of stocks for the feet and the pit that the master, or manager, had referred to. You stop in your tracks, your mouth open. Your eyes become wide with the scene in front of you.
On the rack a boy of about 12 is spread wide, his small, naked frame a canvas of welts. One of the Senator's retainers is supervising the whipping of the boy for some unspecified transgression. It surely must have been a major one. The poor kid is monstrously gagged with an enormous plug-like thing that looks as though it could tear his jaws apart. He tosses his head in agony, grunting into the gag with each lash.
The sets of foot stocks are empty, but at the bottom of the pit another boy, probably about your age is doubled, shackled wrists to ankles, and with his collar fastened to a stake so that he cannot move. This boy's mouth is a cruelly gagged as the other's. You are horrified to see his predicament.
All over the small boy's naked body vermin are creeping and crawling, including around and on his vulnerable boyhood. It seems that the vermin are going in and out of his anal opening. He looks with glazed eyes at the three people above him as if to say "Ooooh, pleeease save my life!" You feel as if you may throw up.
He is to remain in this strict position with his new best friends in the pit until the next morning.
"Well, little slave," the overseer says to you. "I think that is what you shall be named - Puerulus; little slave. I can make no sense of what you say you are called. So, that is settled, and now we must get you to the mucking." The three of you move off from the horror of the punishment stations and the boys suffering in agony.
You are thinking to yourself: How am I going to survive this? I have to escape somehow.
And then you think: Then what? Where will I go; Who can help me? Oh My God...... Pontus brings you back to your reality, pulling you along by your collar chain
You arrive at the stables and to the smells that make stables what they are. There appear to be stalls for horses, cattle and goats, all carpeted with straw well matted with days old caked dung and seasoned with fresh manure. What you have dreaded is knotting your stomach: your slavery is to be cleaning animal excrement in your bare feet.
Aulus leaves you and his son Pontus. The tools; shovel and sweeps are at the stable door. Pontus, now alone with you, grins at your discomfort - enjoying it more than he should.
"Your hands are free, Puerulus," he says. "Take off that cloth around your middle. I want to see you working hard in the stables in the nude." You stand like a statue, unable to move, until Pontus brings his rod across your thighs. "Do it!" he barks.
You yelp at the blow from the rod, but you pull off the cloth around waist and crotch exposing your boyhood to the gaze of the older boy. He smiles grimly. "It looks like just like a mouse," he laughs. "And it is pretty...as pretty as you."
Pontus advances on you, turning you around. "Bend over, boy," he demands, pushing you over with his left hand as his right spreads the halves of your round, 11 year old bottom. "Before you get to work, I am going to enjoy you."