Spartacus (34 page)

On the third night the insects left him and the beasts came. But they found him still living, and all that night he lived; and they came not near him, tearing at other flesh in the dark. And the last time he awoke he found the morning in the sky, and before his swimming gaze saw the world lighten, greater and strange.

‘O Spartacus!'

It was a cry of agony in his brain and heart, but he heard it only as a stifled grunt from his lips. Then that agony of mind went as well, in a sudden flow of memory, a glister and flash of imaged memories: the first Bithynian camp, the horreum on the road to the South, Papa in mist, the battle-games of Crixus, the defiles of Mutina, Rome shining at dawn, the snows of Rhegium, the passes of Petelia – he fought and marched and debated again, heard cry in his ears the myriad slave voices, heard the ghost of that Hope and Promise wail away as the morning came upon the Appian Way. And then again pain seized and tore at his heart and passed again; and wildly, a last wild moment, he raised his eyes.

And he saw before him, gigantic, filling the sky, a great Cross with a figure that was crowned with thorns; and behind it, sky-towering as well, gladius in hand, his hand on the edge of the morning behind that Cross, the figure of a Gladiator. And he saw that these Two were One, and the world yet theirs: and he went into unending night and left them that shining earth.

It was springtime in Italy, a hundred years before the crucifixion of Christ—