Wundery Plus subscribers can listen to Tides of History early and ad free right now.

Join Wundery Plus in the Wundery App or Apple Podcasts. The rope chafed the captive's neck, the strands biting into skin that had already been rubbed raw.

It was red and inflamed throbbing with pain and getting worse.

So were the similar marks on his wrists where two tight bindings had cut deeply,

leaving wounds that refused to scab over and heal.

Yet those pains were not what concerned him at the moment. The sharp bronze spearpoint jabbing into his back,

forcing him to walk forward up the earth and ramp toward the altar was a much more pressing concern.

He was a young man, a boy really, still in his teens and barely old enough to hold a spear himself.

He hadn't the slightest idea what to do with one, and he didn't think that he had done much

to distinguish himself in the battle prior to his capture.

His father and uncles had been experienced warriors for all the good it had done them.

He had watched them die next to him, spitted on spear points, and hacked apart with axes as

they pleaded.

The enemy had taken their scalps as trophies and left the rest of their bodies amid the trampled millet for the dogs and the elements to dispose of.

But him, they'd taken alive, wrapping that rope around his neck, along with hundreds of others.

Many had died on the weeks long walk through the broad river valleys and tree-covered hills

on their way to this city, this sprawling mass of houses and workshops and rammed earth walls.

At this moment, the boy envied those who hadn't made it here, to the place his captors called

Daiy Shang, great settlement Shang.

It was great in size, he thought, but that didn't make him any fonder of it.

He would die here, along with the rest of the members of his lineage who had been unfortunate enough not to die earlier.

The bronze axe fell with a meaty thud, separating another captive's head from his body with a single blow. A spear point pushed the next captive forward,

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