Spartacus (25 page)

Only another night. Night indeed, Kleon knew, riding to that night and their camp on the borders of Picenum, to the dream that he and the Thracian had dreamt, an end to the dream that the slaves would ever march through the Forum of Rome, seize Rome and build it anew. And he did not think that ever again, such was the thought of his bitter despair, that dream would be dreamt by men, they would cower in acquiescence to the lash and mutilation till the world ended, power and freedom put by as dreams, together with dream of the Golden Age of which Hiketas had sung.

Hiketas?

But none knew of him as the night fell; and Kleon rode hither and thither through the voiceless, marching legions, seeking in vain for sight of the Greek, or his sister and lover, or the great machines they had made in and dragged from Umbria. Then at last he heard from a centurion in the Bithynian legion that the machines had been abandoned at the Halt on Rome, and Hiketas had refused to leave them. He and the woman and a dozen more Greeks had stayed and died there, the centurion thought. And Hiketas had cried a message that the Free Legions would have no more need of machines since they had no need of the greatest of Cities.

And how and when he had died none knew, nor ever knew in the Spartacist host, nor of the eyeless doorkeeper in a Roman cellar who lived into a time when men spoke of the name of a general Caesar to one witless who strove to tell, untongued, of the Halt before Rome and the great machines amidst which his sister and lover had died in the hands of the Roman legionaries.

She had taken long to die.

[v]

They flung up a hasty camp that night, the slaves, and lay under the fall of the dew, over-disheartened to set up even the tents of the tribunes. There was no attack, though down in the south shone the watchfires of the Roman velites. A great ruined villa stood near the camp, and here quarters were found for the Strategos, he went in through a ruined atrium where the faces of the broken Penates had been smeared with cow-dung by the slaves a year before. His Gladiators clattered in at his heels and lay in the atrium, while Ialo and Mella sought to stir life in the old fireplaces abandoned to rust and damp in the narrow kitchen.

There were no stars that night. The General of the slaves sat in his sleeping-room, awaiting the meal that Ialo prepared, looking out through a slit in the walls at the land that rolled south to those watching fires of the Roman scouts. And now he felt neither the fear nor the wave of anger that had followed the fear when panic had come on the Free Legions. He felt again strong and sure, yet filled with the same dark restlessness that had turned him at Mutina. What next – where, whither, whence?

He wrapped himself in his cloak and went through the atrium and the lines of the sleeping Gladiators. Two guarded the entrance. These would have roused the others to go with him, but he motioned them to silence, and went out in the dark to wander the camp where the slaves slept in unease. In the section where the Bithynians lay he heard the weeping of a wakeful child and knew that Gershom's son was crying for milk. All about him rose the smell of sodden humankind – so familiar to his nostrils it had seldom had meaning. Now it had, a dreadful meaning – that so these would live and endure as long as the Free Legions endured. No houses or habitations, no huts they might call their own, no mornings to see the same hills, the same skies, remembered and near: but a constant marching to and fro, and uncertain campings under alien hills. Until—

He went back to the villa and found Ialo awaiting him. Only then did he know his own weariness and allow Ialo to unbuckle his lorica. He heard movements in his sleeping-room and asked who was there.

‘Mella,' Ialo told him. ‘Shall I send her away?'

‘Let her be. Have you eaten? Or she?'

Neither had. At his order they ate with him, the Thracian and the Sicel maid, in the flare of a torch in the peristyle. On its plinth at the far end an Aphrodite smiled on them with painted eyes. And a strange fancy came on Spartacus, so that he looked from that perfect face in stone to the starved and unbeautiful face of the little Sicel maid.

So looking, he caught suddenly her own glance upon him. And he knew at once the hunger that looked from her eyes.

But desire for women had long gone from him. He needed no longer their presence to shut from his memory the faces of Crixus and Elpinice. And the strange compassion that touched his heart went by without leaving an impress thereon.

So they ate and drank in the sputter of the torchlight, Ialo and Mella glancing with still faces on the veiled snake-eyes of the Thracian Gladiator who would save them yet, and all the host. And it seemed to Spartacus that he ate and drank with the slave host itself; and again that strange feeling of identity with them, of them, came upon him. And he stared down into the future, as the three broke bread and drank wine, and saw for a moment an alien table, with alien faces about the board. Then that went by, like a shadow on the wall, and the present was at hand, and its question: Whither?

‘Where were you born, Mella?' he asked.

She stammered that it was in Sicily. She had been reared on a slave-farm there, one of the greatest of the farms, her father and mother both slaves. They had been vulgares, and were long since dead.

He asked how they died and she told him they were killed together in a pit by wild dogs. They had become old and games had been declared because of the news of some General's triumph in Rome. She did not know what General that had been, but she remembered the pit and her father and mother, they had fought off the dogs for a little while.

Neither Spartacus nor Ialo asked for what crime these things had happened in the pit. Slaves over-old for toil – they had lent some amusement, in the crunch of live flesh in the jaws of dogs, to the Master and his friends ere they banqueted.

But Spartacus's memory was roused.

‘I've heard of this Sicily. It is an island. There are many slaves there?'

She whispered, the little Sicel, gazing at the Strategos in awe, that indeed there were many slaves there, many thousands, they had risen in revolt many times. So she herself had heard ere she was sold as a breeder to the farm of Gaius Cassius. She had been brought from Syracuse to Rhegium in windy weather, many of the slaves had been flung overboard to lighten the ship when pirates came in pursuit.

She told more of her life, in her soft, scared voice, to that listener she found less frightful now, who sometimes seemed to draw her heart from her body – the body intended for breeding slaves in the kennels of the Umbrian farm. His eyes were dark and remote as he listened, though he smiled at her in the end.

Then he stood up and went to his room, and Mella lay down and slept near at hand, Ialo across the entrance to the room.

Spartacus tramped that room in thought till the day was near at hand.

He would march the Free Legions down through the Peninsula, cross into Sicily, and seize it as a home for the slaves.

Mummius

[i]

BUT next day he found that the whole of the army of Crassus the Lean, emboldened by the slave retreat, had marched out from Rome and now barred the way to the south. From refugees who straggled into camp he learned that Crassus had with him as legate one Mummius, a seasoned soldier and a skilled commander, and that the legions under their command fell little short of the fighting strength of the slaves.

To Spartacus three courses were now open: to retreat into Picenum, to march again on Rome, to force a passage southwards to Rhegium, as he had planned. But he might not attempt either of the last two courses, the Free Legions demoralized as they were. The slaves were in no condition to face the legions of the Masters: accordingly, he sent scouts forward into Picenum and prepared to withdraw into that country.

Titul the Iberian rode out at noon, commander of the slave velites. He took with him Brennus and thirty Gauls, and had orders to return before nightfall. It was a day of wind and flying cloud, and the Gauls loosened their braided hair and rode at ease.

In Picenum, hardly touched by the campaigns of the slave-revolt, the Masters were again attending their fields, long gangs of slaves at work on the land, sheep thick on the pastures under the hills; and up the hillside the light fell dark on the olive-groves of spring. But the land seemed to wilt at Titul's advance, knowing his following slaves at a great distance. Nevertheless, they attacked none, for their orders were definite. None attacked them, because of the terror of the Criminal's name: and it was as yet unknown in Picenum how the Free Legions had failed before Rome.

Yet, twenty pace miles into Picenum, riding the verge of a little wood, almost they marched into the midst of a double column of legionaries. Titul stayed his scouts with an effort, and the Gauls lay down and watched, in the sun-dapple of the leaves, the columns that marched south-east. Then they saw that two full legions were passing, legions with cavalry, the soldiers fresh and well fed. The wind had died away, and still the legions marched by, a cloud came over the sun, the legions marched without noise in the dust: and it was to the slave-velites as though they watched an army of the dead. Then the columns swung eastward again, into a village in the hollow below, and seemed there to form and halt.

Titul beckoned to Brennus and another.

‘I'd have the two of you go down to the village, and seek out news of these Masters' legions.'

Brennus was blunt. ‘Seek it yourself. Who'd fail to recognize us as Free Legionaries? And I, at least, am unanxious to die on the cross.'

Then Titul remembered a field they had passed but a little way back, where, unobserved themselves, they had seen ten slaves and an overseer at work. ‘We'll return and strangle the overseer and the two of you can divide his clothes and go into the village.'

Three Gauls rode back to the field and slew the overseer, the terrified slaves standing and watching, unhelpful. But as the Gauls stripped the body and turned to ride back to Titul and his company in the shadow of the little wood, the slaves implored the Gauls to free them. They were manacled one to the other, and when they were discovered with their overseer slain they would undoubtedly be crucified, as a warning to other slaves.

The Gauls listened and were moved a little. But they had no time to unmanacle the gang, and the slaves of it would encumber the scouts. So they left them, hearing their cries for long as they rode round the shoulder of the hill.

Then they brought the garments to Titul; and Brennus and the other Gaul halved them, and went down to the village while the rest of the company hobbled their horses under the trees and slept with one of their company for guard. In the failing of the daylight lights began to spring up in the village, and the slaves, awakening, could see that a stockade had sprung up around the halted legions. Then, as the dark came down, the Gaul who had companioned Brennus returned.

Titul was the first to hear the strange, slobbering sound down the track. He and another went forward to look, and saw what seemed to be a bear crawling upwards in the half-light. Then they saw it was the Gaul who had gone with Brennus. But each foot was a bloody pulp, and as they lifted him up his hands spattered them with blood.

He whispered, ‘We were caught and crucified. Me they nailed without care, one of my hands by the skin only. I tore myself down when the darkness came.'

Titul asked, ‘Brennus?' and the Gaul, slobbering and biting at his crusted lips said, ‘He's on the cross.'

For a while, as they held him up in the shadow of the little wood, his lips broke into a meaningless babble. Then he ground his teeth into them, for he had crawled the dust and stones of the track to do more than babble. ‘The legions are those of Mummius, the legate of Crassus the Lean. He is here to hold the Strategos from marching into Picenum – not to fight, but to retreat if the Strategos advances'; and he slavered in wild pain again, though they gave him wine to drink from a skin that a Gaul carried. His hands and feet had begun to swell, but still he might not die.

Then Titul took a knife from his belt and asked the Gaul if he could kill himself; and the Gaul tried, but he might not. Then two others came and held the knife and he drove it into his heart.

The slave scouts mounted and rode back in haste through the coming night to the Spartacist camp. And all that night, as the inflammation burgeoned in hands and feet, Brennus hung from the cross. As the morning came in a red flow of light, the Romans saw his tongue hanging thick and swollen from his lips; with the greater heat of the day flies came to vex him, the legionaries passed by below, indifferently, paying no heed to the humming clouds or the thickening odours of blood and excrement. But by nightfall agony had left the Gaul. And in the last of the light three legionaries passing the cross saw his body stiffen; and they stopped, idly, to watch.

As they did so, far up in the hills, there came a strange, agonized lowing.

‘What was that?' one legionary asked of another.

The other was an older man. He stared, puzzled, into the gathering night.

‘I'd have known that had it been in Gaul,' he said. ‘It was the lowing of an aurochs.'

[ii]

A Gaulish woman, heavy with child, awoke groaning as her man shook at her shoulder. It was still night. Outside the nest of bushes and grass in which she lay she could see the stars pallid in the Italian sky, waning into dead whiteness by the east.

‘It's still night,' she told him. ‘We must sleep.'

‘The bucina, woman! Can't you hear it? I must run to the ranks. You'll see to join the other women?'

She gave a cry of fear, but he did not hear it, in the clatter of belting himself in his sword and seeking his helmet, clumsily, with chilled fingers. He had been a serf on an Apulian farm, she the bedwoman of an overseer. Now she was with child, conceived in the cold of those winter marches while the slaves tramped into Cisalpine Gaul and dreamt that that child would see birth in Gaul itself. He patted her shoulder and she heard him run; and all around the stirring and running of many feet. The horns blew up again. She cried after the man – he would surely return.