Spartacus (31 page)

Crassus saw these seceding slaves were in his hands. Yet he followed them cautiously, unsure of the quality of either Gannicus or Castus. And there was still the Gladiator to deal with, and in greater force. What if, as the Gaul slave had babbled through his breaking bones, the Slave himself should march on Rome while Crassus hunted the lesser vermin?

But it was a necessary risk, and Crassus took it, watching with cold, narrow eyes the burning of the villages by Lake Lucania. Now he sat and watched the roused slaves twice fling back his attack in a pelting wave of routed men.

Twice. But now Crassus raised his eyes and saw a low cloud of dust to the northwards that told him the Fourteenth and Seventh legions had encircled the Lake and were marching down to assail the slave camp from a fresh angle. The slaves also saw that dust-cloud and guessed its cause. Their tribunes – a barber, a farm-slave, a circus-sweeper they had once been – held a hasty council. Their decision was swift. They must strike camp and fight out in cuneus formation.

So, twice, as twice the Roman legions had assaulted their entrenchments, they attempted to do. But already a thousand or more of the slaves were dead. And some cried for Gannicus, till the rumour spread that he was dead; and men broke from the arrow-headed cuneus march, and faltered at sight of the Roman spears. Then Crassus gave the signal for his cavalry to charge the slave camp.

Barely a third of it reissued from the tangle of the slave entrenchments. But the charge had done its work. The slave base was destroyed, and, like a wounded beast, the cuneus attempted to fight its way along the shore of the lake. By this time Castus had taken command of his legion, and was cool and quick, keeping the straying Gauls at the cuneus spearhead encouraged with shout and curse. He believed Gannicus dead, and, himself planless, fought with a fury in which there was little hope.

Behind, the depleted horse of Crassus returned again to the assault.

And now at length, for the bitterness of three defeats, the Fourteenth legion reaped its revenge. At the thrust of the slave cuneus the legion deployed in enclosing forfex: then, shields low, the small, dark legionaries closed in at a rapid run, on the shaken ranks of Castus.

The Gauls saw their leader a moment, young and fairheaded and desperate, hewing with his sword. Then a Roman sprang on his stirrup and seized him by the hair, and while Castus swung round and attempted to cut him down the Roman shortened his gladius and plunged it carefully into the neck of the Gaul. Then he withdrew the blade and, pushing aside Castus' hair, again stabbed him, almost severing his head from his neck. So died Castus. Then the forfex closed on the head of the cuneus, and the Gaul formation fell to pieces.

Yet still they fought, in little wedges here and there. But the Romans drew off after a little, and their slingers and sagittarii shot their arrows and stones upon the slaves, so that the latter fell in great numbers. The women fought now by the side of their men, tall and white-breasted and desperate, a great Gaulish woman armed herself with a pilum and a Roman shield and killed four legionaries before she herself was cut down. Another, the mistress of the brother of Brennus, was young and swift, with her child in her arms, she ran through the turmoil of the battle and escaped through a segment of the Roman forfex. Almost she had reached the shelter of the village wall when a slinger killed her with a singing pellet that shivered her skull.

The Gauls knew nothing of the Death Ring that the Germans could form in a desperate hour, and formed now, the great schiltrouns of the forests. Against these for a time the Roman attack broke in vain. Then the pressure of sheer numbers broke the circles, and the legionaries slaughtered at pleasure. But even while Crassus wheeled in his horse to charge the rear of the schiltrouns a shout arose and men lifted their eyes and saw on the crest of the hills the shine of fresh standards, the serpent standards of Spartacus.

[v]

Crassus faced about his legions, but the Thracian flung the fresh Bithynians against them, driving a wedge through the Roman ranks, himself leading the battle, axe in hand. Crassus had his bucinators blow the retreat, calculating to retire the legions still unbroken.

But again his calculations missed the generalship of the Gladiator. Spartacus sprayed fresh line on line of slaves on the Romans, wheeling off each line after it had engaged but a few minutes in battle. No troops might withstand such onset or such tactics. The Fourteenth legion broke and fled, pitilessly pursued by the Thracians. The rest of the Romans drew off in good order.

The battle was to Spartacus, as once to Pyrrhus. But of the eighteen thousand Gauls and Germans a bare three thousand survived. With these fell Castus, as has been told, who loved Spartacus, and never knew him; and Gannicus, who hated the Gladiator, and was killed in his sleep.

The Mountains of Petelia

[i]

THE slave army was again encompassed by mountains.

But this time it was summer and retreat, the mountains the brush-hung slopes of Petelia, not the passes of Mutina. In the dry air the withering vegetation seemed sometimes to take fire and burn before the wearied eyes of the marching slaves. High overhead carrion birds followed the long, straggling march that wound through the valleys, deeper and deeper into Calabria. The slaves marched with dragging feet and panting breath, the northern men with a lurching weariness, their tongues licking parched lips. In the rear the Thracian Legion beat forward stragglers from the German and Gaulish remnant: and themselves would pause and lean on their spears, and peer up at the enfolding mountains with heat-hazed eyes, seeking fresh-water springs where they might fling themselves full length in thirst, lapping at the water slowly, like exhausted dogs.

Spartacus pressed on, deeper and deeper into the mountains that opened, deserted, before him. Crassus' messengers had been ahead, at their orders the inhabitants had fired the crops and driven off the herds, and hidden their granaries under earth and manure. Enraged, the slaves left in their trail a line of blazing homesteads which lighted on the pursuit of Scrofas, the quaestor whom Crassus had sent to follow and keep touch with the slave retreat.

Kleon rode in the rear of the Thracian rearguard, he had taken over that duty after the desertion of Castus and Gannicus, no longer the secretary and councillor of the Gladiator but (and he thought of this with a wry twist of lips) a eunuch-general of the Free Legions. Bithynians and Egyptians well able to endure the heat rode with him a motley collection of mounts – Italiot ponies, great heavy-limbed horses from Cisalpine Gaul, a half-score light Arabs: all spoil of this battle, that raid, or yon loot. Now and again they would wheel about and stare back through the westwards valleys. But Scrofas was a dull and cautious commander, he marched many stadia in the rear of the slaves, shepherding them forward into the summer heats and famine of Calabria.

And Kleon, with his irony tempered now by the adversity that ground upon it, wondered what plan the Thracian had that he led them so, wondered while he knew what the end of the venture would be. Twice they had planned to march on Rome, twice failed. The second time, even after the desertion of the Gauls and Teutones, they might still have marched on the City of the Masters, as he and the Jew had urged Spartacus to do. Let Crassus devour the deserters, and, while he devoured, the Free Legions descend on Rome and devour a fenceless city. But Spartacus had refused. ‘We'll save what we can of the Northern folk. They've fought beside us long.'

So, in forced marches, they had come on the scene of the second Battle of the Lake, made that salvation that Spartacus had promised: and sold Rome in the task. Then into the mountains of Calabria.

Whither? Where?

[ii]

Spartacus halted his van that night around the buildings of a great deserted plantation. Here in other days many hundred slaves had toiled at the wheat harvests of Calabria, their kennels with their rusted chains lay broken and deserted – but for one into which the slaves peered and saw there a mouldering cadaver, a slave abandoned to die of starvation, through neglect or deliberate intention. Spartacus himself walked about the plantation and looked at the kennels of the slaves, then around him at the footsore, ragged army he had led into those mountains – he had led to so many strange ventures since that night when the first of them climbed from the pits of Batiates.

Sun and wind and rain in their faces, battle and wounds and hunger to endure, the snows of Mutina and Rhegium, the blistering heats of the hills of Petelia: yet that had been better than this once lived in these mouldering kennels before the Revolt, this life of stripes and despair and sodden hatred. And again in the great slave leader there grew that feeling of a passionate identity with the slave host that he led – the feeling that he was one with them, lived in their lives, tired with their tiredness, exulted in their hopes. His tribunes questioned his plans: the great host never did – unless deserters like Gannicus or Castus misled it with lies and rhetoric. And he knew now, with a great faith, the reason for that. None of his marchings and plannings had been his alone, but an essence of the dim wills in the minds of the multitude, in the Negro slave who had starved and shivered up by the Rhegine dyke, the Thracian shepherd who limped with a bloody heel, the Bithynian porter who disputed with the Thracian land-serf the name for victory and defeatlessness. He was but a voice for many, the Voice of the voiceless.

And he knew that even in this march into Calabria, when he had seen so plainly that never now might the Free Legions conquer Italy, he followed as much as led the dim mind of the host. The Gauls and Teutones were a remnant: the rest were men of the Middle Seas, if they could reach and capture Brindisium, suddenly, by strategy, they might find there ships enough to take them from Italy.

And then the curtain closed down, he might not see beyond that.

He spoke with Kleon and Gershom that night, the three of them sitting at meat, corn and the flesh of a kid, the while the maid Mella served them. There was no sign of Scrofas: the Free Legions had yet enough food: the air was blue with the smoke of its fires, and sprayed with the warm stench of humankind. Kleon looked at the other two.

‘We three alone to survive! Remember the crowded councils in Nola? Though I can remember little but the crowd, what we said or did grows dim already.' He brooded for a little, and then laughed. ‘As this story will grow, dim and confused, in the ages to be, the story of the slaves' insurrection. They'll mix the marches and forget our names, and make of Gannicus a loyal hero and of Gershom here a strayed Gaul from Marsala! Poets and the writers of tales will yet tell it, perhaps, each setting therein his own loves and hates, with us only their shadowy cup-bearers. All dim and tangled in the tales they'll tell, except their beginnings with that spring when we roused the slaves. And all the rest a dream or a lie.'

‘So they do not make me a Roman,' said Gershom ben Sanballat, ‘they may lie as they will.'

Then the Strategos told them of his plan to capture Brindisium, and Gershom nodded, combing his beard.

‘This from the first was what I advised you, Spartacus. And now you follow my advice, and once I'd have rejoiced, pointing to my own wisdom, and scorning your lack of it. Yet—'

Kleon smiled at him his slight, dark smile.

‘And yet, Bithynian?'

‘Yet the Strategos had the right of it, Scythian. Once we might have conquered Rome, all Italy, we might have built under Spartacus a kingdom of slaves with the Masters underfoot. Or your Republic, with neither Master nor slave. But that a devil was against us.'

‘There are neither Gods nor devils. Only the Fates, who are mindless.'

‘There is the One God,' Gershom said, ritually. ‘But he is reserved for the Jews.'

Then Spartacus said a strange thing, his eyes remote. ‘There's a God in men. But an Unknown God.'

And they fell silent for a little, till the Thracian roused. ‘We march at dawn. How is it with the Bithynians?'

‘Ill enough. But they've food.'

‘So have the Thracians – a little. And your Gauls, Kleon?'

The Greek smiled that twisted smile once bitter.

‘They march astounded with a eunuch for leader. I think I fail in some duty they're too polite to name. Perhaps the fertilization of the Mother Goddess – for otherwise their women will be barren.'

Gershom growled, rising, ‘Then they'd need of a eunuch tribune. Their women spawned litters like dogs from the day the Free Legions were formed.'

And the Greek returned to the lines of the Gauls and lay down with a light cloak over him; and the Gauls took him as their leader, for he had wisdom, though mutilated to a no-man by the Masters.

Gershom of Kadesh went back to his legion, to the tent of Judith, again heavy with child. She woke as he came and rose, stoopingly, to bring him wine. But he made her sit and share the wine that he drank. And he looked at her, big with child, with angry, kindly eyes.

‘Rest, woman, for we march at dawn to-morrow.'

She asked where and he did not say. Then Judith said: ‘I don't think we'll ever see Judaea again, or our unborn son either, Gershom. Yet I'm glad you have brought my womb to fruit, glad to have lain with you, though no son may ever say the prayer in the Temple when we die.'

Then Gershom saw there was upon her the fancies of a woman with child; and he answered nothing, seeking sleep; and the woman lay beside him, but not to sleep, hearing long the crying of the nightbirds over the camp of Spartacus.

The Gladiator himself could find no sleep. And again, a strange whim upon him, he went out alone (for Ialo had died by Lake Lucania and he had chosen no other guard) and walked through the ruined lines of kennels where once the slaves had lain; and in his heart he felt all the bitterness and tears, and all the wild stolen delight of a moment's ease, that these other slaves had known. And he cursed the Masters, yet without hate; and went back to his room in the house of the plantation, and found the maid Mella waiting him there, slight and brown, weary with her day's march up through the hills of Petelia.