Spartacus (11 page)

He captures them, and holds their misery, thinking to himself, “What a wonder, what a magic in the old chant!” He eases them out of this terrible darkness and they stand on the pearly beaches of Troy. There are the white towers of the city! There are the golden, bronze-girt warriors! The soft chant rises and falls and loosens the knots of terror and anxiety, and in the darkness there is shuffling and motion. The slaves do not have to know Greek, and indeed the Thracian dialect of Spartacus is little enough like the tongue of Attica; they know of the chant, where the old wisdom of a people is preserved and kept for the time of trial . . .

Finally, Spartacus lays himself down to sleep. He will sleep. Young as he is, he long ago met and conquered the terrible enemy of sleeplessness. Now he composes himself and explores the memories of childhood. He wants cool, clear blue sky and sunshine and soft breezes, and all of these are there. He lies among the pines, watching the goats graze, and an old, old man is beside him. The old man teaches him to read. With a stick, the old man traces letter after letter in the dirt. “Read and learn, my child,” the old man tells him. “So do we who are slaves carry a weapon with us. Without it, we are like the beasts in the fields. The same god who gave fire to men gave them the power to write down his thoughts, so that they may recall the thoughts of the gods in the golden time of long ago. Then men were close to the gods and talked with them at will, and there were no slaves then. And that time will come again.”

So Spartacus remembers, and presently his memory turns into a dream, and presently he sleeps . . .

He is awakened in the morning by the beating of a drum. The drum is beaten at the entrance to the barracks, and its crash echoes and re-echoes through the stone cavern. He rises, and all about him he hears his fellow slaves rising. They move in the pitch darkness toward the entrance. Spartacus takes his cup and bowl with him; if he had forgotten it, there would have been no food or drink for him this day; but he is wise in the ways of slavery, and there is not such great variation in the manner of slavery that he should not anticipate. As he moves, he feels the press of bodies around him, and he lets himself move with them to the opening at the end of the stone barracks. And all the while, the drum continues its crashing beat.

It is the hour before the dawn, and now the desert is as cool as it will ever be. In this single hour of the day, the desert is a friend. A gentle breeze cools the face of the black escarpment. The sky is a wonderful fading blue-black, and the twinkling stars gently disappear, the only womanly things in this cheerless, hopeless world of men. Even slaves in the gold mines of Nubia—from which none ever return—must have a little surcease; and thus they are given the hour before dawn, so that a poignant bitter-sweet may fill their hearts and revive their hopes.

The overseers stand to one side, grouped together, munching bread and sucking at water. Not for another four hours will the slaves be fed or watered, but it is one thing to be an overseer and another to be a slave. The overseers are wrapped in woolen cloaks, and each carries a whip, a weighted billy and a long knife. Who are these men, these overseers? What brings them to this terrible womanless place in the desert?

They are men of Alexandria, bitter, hard men, and they are here because the pay is high, and because they get a percentage of all the gold the mines produce. They are here with their own dreams of wealth and leisure, and with the promise of Roman citizenship when they have served five years in the interest of the corporation. They live for the future, when they will rent an apartment in one of the tenements in Rome, when they will each of them buy three or four or five slave girls to sleep with and to serve them, and when they will spend each day at the games or at the baths, and when they will be drunk each night. They believe that in coming to this hell, they heighten their future earthly heaven; but the truth of the matter is that they, like all prison guards, require the petty lordship of the damned more than perfume and wine and women.

They are strange men, a unique product of the slums of Alexandria, and the language they talk is a jargon of Aramaic and Greek. It is two and a half centuries since the Greeks conquered Egypt, and these overseers are not Egyptians and not Greeks, but Alexandrians. Which means that they are versatile in their corruption, cynical in their outlook, and believing of no gods at all. Their lusts are warped but commonplace; they lie with men and they sleep a drugged sleep over the juice of the Khat leaves, which grow on the coast of the Red Sea.

These are the men whom Spartacus watches, there in the cool hour before the dawn, as the slaves plod from the great stone barracks, shoulder their chains and go toward the escarpment. These will be his masters; and over him they will hold the power of life and the power of death; and so he watches for small differences, habits, mannerisms and indications. In the mines, there are no good masters, but it may be that there will be some less cruel and less sadistic than others. He watches them detach themselves, one by one, to take over where the slaves are shaping up. It is still so dark that he cannot distinguish subtleties of face and feature, but his is a practiced eye in such matters, and even in the walk and heft of a man there is definition.

It is cool now, and the slaves are naked. Not even a loincloth hides their pitiful, futile, sun-blackened organs of sex, and they stand and shiver and wind their arms around their bodies. Anger comes slowly to Spartacus, for anger is not productive in the life of a slave, but he thinks, “All things but this we can bear, but when there is not even a scrap of cloth to cover our parts, we are like animals.” And then revises it in his mind, “No—less than animals. For when the Romans took the land where we were owned and the plantation where we labored, the beasts were left in the field and only we were sorted out for the mines.”

Now the drum stops its wracking sound and the overseers uncoil their whips and crack the stiffness out of the bull-hide, so that the air is full of a snapping and cracking music. They lay the whips in the air, for it is too early to lash the flesh, and the gangs move forward out of the shapeup. It is lighter now, and Spartacus can clearly see the skinny, shivering children who will crawl down into the belly of the earth and claw at the white stone where the gold is found. The other Thracians also see, for they crowd close around Spartacus, and some of them whisper,

“Father, oh father, what kind of a hell is this!”

“It will be all right,” Spartacus says; for when you are called father by those old enough to be your father, what else is there to say? So he says the words which he must say.

Now all the gangs have gone toward the escarpment, and only the huddled group of Thracians remain. A half dozen overseers are left, and led by one of their group, their whips dragging tracks through the sand, they move toward the newcomers. One of the overseers speaks and demands, in his thick jargon,

“Who is your leader, Thracians?”

No answer.

“It is too early for the whip, Thracians.”

Now Spartacus says, “They call me father.”

The overseer looks him up and down and takes his measure. “You are young to be called father.”

“It is the custom in our land.”

“We have other customs here,
father
. When the child sins, the father is whipped. Do you hear me?”

“I hear you.”

“Then listen, all of you Thracians. This is a bad place, but it can be worse. When you live, we ask work and obedience. When you die, we ask little. In other places, it is better to live than to die. But here we can make it better to die than to live. Do you understand me, Thracians?”

The sun is rising now. They are chained and they carry their chain to the escarpment. Then the chain is removed. The brief coolness of the morning is already gone. They are given tools, iron picks, sledges, and iron wedges. They are shown a streak of white in the black rock at the base of the escarpment. It may be the beginning of the vein; it may be nothing at all. They are to cut away the black rock and expose the gold-bearing stone.

Now the sun is in the sky, and the terrible heat of the day begins again. Pick and sledge and wedge. Spartacus swings a hammer. Each hour, there is a pound more of weight in the feel of the hammer. Hard he is, but never before in his life of toil did he do such work as this, and soon every muscle of his body strains and whimpers with the tension. It is simple to say that a hammer weighs eighteen pounds; but there are no words to tell the tortures of a man who swings such a hammer hour after hour. And here, where water is so precious, Spartacus begins to sweat. It oozes from his skin; it runs from his forehead down into his eyes; he wills with all the strength of his will that the sweat should stop; he knows that in this climate, to sweat is to perish. But the sweat will not stop, and thirst becomes a savage, aching, terrible animal inside of him.

Four hours are forever; four hours are eternity. Who knows better than a slave how to control the desires of a body, but four hours are forever, and when the water bags are passed through the gangs, Spartacus feels that he is dying of thirst. As do all the Thracians, and they drain the leather jacks of the crawling green and blessed fluid. And then they know what a thoughtless thing they have done.

These are the gold mines of Nubia. By midday, their strength and power to work is ebbing, and then the whips begin to urge them on. Oh, there is a great mastery of the whip in the hands of an overseer; it can touch any part of the body, delicately, lightly, threateningly, warningly. It can touch a man’s groin or his mouth or his back or his brow. It is like an instrument, and it can play music on the body of a man. Now thirst is ten times worse than before, but the water is gone, and there will be no more water until the day’s work is over. And such a day is eternity.

And yet it ends. Everything ends. There is a time of beginning and a time of ending. Once again, the drum beats, and the day’s work is over.

Spartacus lets go of the hammer and looks at his bleeding hands. Some of the Thracians sit down. One, a lad of eighteen, rolls over and lies on his side, his legs drawn up in tight agony. Spartacus goes to him.

“Father—father, is that you?”

“Yes, yes,” Spartacus says, and he kisses the lad on his brow.

“Then kiss me on my lips, for I am dying, my father, and what is left of my soul I want to give to you.”

Then Spartacus kisses him, but he cannot weep, for he is dry and singed, like burnt leather.

 

 

Crassus was neither an ignorant nor an insensitive man, and he had read the mighty cycle which Aeschylus wrote on Prometheus, and he saw something of what it meant for a Spartacus to emerge from where he had been to a point where no power Rome could assemble might stand up against his slaves. He had an almost passionate need to understand Spartacus, to envision Spartacus—yes, and to crawl a little inside of Spartacus, as difficult as that might be, so that the eternal riddle of his class, the riddle of the man in chains who reaches for the stars, might resolve itself somewhat. He squinted at Batiatus now, telling himself that actually he owed this fat and ugly man a great deal and wondering which of the bedraggled maidens of the camp might be found to share his couch for this night. Such generalized lust was not within the comprehension of Crassus, whose desires operated differently, but the commander was meticulous in small, personal debts.

“And how did Spartacus escape from that place?” he asked the
lanista
.

“He did not escape. No one escapes from such a place. The virtue of such a place is that it so quickly destroys the desire of the slave to re-enter the world of men. I bought Spartacus out of there.”

“Out of there? But why? And how did you know he was there, or who he was or what he was?”

“I didn’t know. But you think my reputation for gladiators is a legend, a fiction—you think that I’m a fat and useless hulk, knowing nothing about anything. But there is an art even to my own profession, I assure you—”

“I believe you,” nodded Crassus. “Tell me how you bought Spartacus.”

“Is wine forbidden to the Legion?” asked Batiatus, holding up the empty bottle. “Or must I add drunkenness to the contempts in which you hold me? Or is it said that a fool holds a tight rein on his tongue which only liquor loosens?”

“I’ll bring you more wine,” answered Crassus, and he rose and went through the curtain to his sleeping chamber, returning with another bottle. Batiatus was his comrade, and Batiatus did not bother with the stopper, but knocked the neck off the bole against the table leg and poured until his glass dripped over.

“Blood and wine,” he smiled. “I would have liked to have been born differently and to command a legion. But who knows? Your own pleasure might be to see the gladiators fight. I am bored with it.”

“I see enough fighting.”

“Yes, of course. But there is a style in the arena and a courage in the arena that your own mass butchery cannot quite match. They send you to retrieve the fortune of Rome after Spartacus has smashed three quarters of the armed power of Rome. Do you hold Italy? The truth of it is that Spartacus holds Italy. Yes, you will defeat him. No enemy can stand against Rome. But for the moment, he has you one better. Yes?”