Spartacus (16 page)

As Bracus put it to his young companion, “Once you have seen Thracians, you don’t want anything else, you know. Anything else is very dull, tedious and meaningless. Good Thracian play is the most exciting thing in the world.”

It was time for the pairs. The dancing girl and the musicians had gone. The little arena was bare and empty in the hot morning sunshine. An aching, quivering silence hung over the whole place, and the four Romans, the lady and the three gentlemen, lay upon their couches under the striped awning, sipped at their rose-colored Judean wine, and waited for the game to begin.

 

 

“Quem di diligunt adolescens moritur.”
If the gods love you, you die in childhood.

“No,” said Spartacus.

And then the black man asked him, “Do you believe in the gods?”

“No.”

“Do you believe there is another place after we die here?”

“No.”

“Then what do you believe in, Spartacus?” the black man asked.

“I believe in you and I believe in me.”

“You and me,” said Polemus, the young, handsome Thracian, “we are meat on the butcher table of the
lanista
.”

“What else do you believe in, Spartacus?” the black man asked.

“What else—? What does a man dream? When a man is going to die, what does he dream?

“I tell you what I said before,” the black man said softly, his deep voice resonant and sorrowful in his chest, “and I tell you this. I am too lonely and too far from home and too bitter for home. I don’t want to live any more. I will not kill you, my comrade.”

“Is this a place for mercy?”

“It’s a place for weariness, and I’m tired.”

“My father was a slave,” said Spartacus, “and he taught me the only virtue. The only virtue of a slave is to live.”

“We cannot both live.”

“And the only kindness of life to a slave is that, like other people, he doesn’t know the time of his death.”

Now the guards had heard them, and they hammered with their spears on the wall of the shed for silence. The Jew returned; in any case, he would not have spoken; he never spoke. He stood inside the door, cloaked, his head bent with sorrow and shame. A trumpet sounded. The young Thracian rose, his underlip quivering with tension, and he and the Jew dropped their cloaks. The door opened, and naked, side by side, they walked into the arena.

The black man was not interested. He was wedded to death. Fifty-two times, he had fought with net and spear and emerged alive, and now the cord that bound him to life had snapped. He sat on the bench with his memories, bowed over, his head in his hands; but Spartacus leaped to the door and pressed his eye to a crack, so that he might see, so that he might know. He took no side; the Thracian was of his people, but the Jew was something that tore his heart in a peculiar and strange way. When a pair fought to the death, one had to die, but the essence of the matter was life while life persisted. The essence of Spartacus was life. People recognized that in him. It was survival pitched onto the plane of the stars, and now he pressed his eye to the crack which gave him a channel of vision down the center of the arena.

His vision at first was blocked by the pair, but they dwindled in size as they walked to the center of the arena and faced those who had purchased their flesh and blood. Their shadows flowed behind them; their bodies were dark and glistened with oil. Then they moved ten paces apart, and each stood framed at the edge of his vision, with the sand and sunlight between them. Spartacus could see the box where the Romans sat; it defined the end of his vision, a broad, gay pavilion of pink and yellow and purple color, with its striped awning, the slow motion of the feather fans of the body slaves. There they sat, who had purchased life and death, the few and the mighty—and all the thoughts that must come to one man at least in every age of time, all of the thoughts came to Spartacus . . .

Now the trainer, the master of the arena, entered. He bore the two knives on a tray of polished wood, and he offered them symbolically to those who had paid the price of the game. As he slanted the tray toward them, the sun flashed from the polished metal of the blades, twelve inches of shining steel, razor-sharp, beautifully tooled and hafted in dark walnut. The knife was slightly curved, and the merest feather touch of the blade would split the skin.

Bracus nodded, and hatred was like the touch of one of those knives on Spartacus, from head to foot—and then controlled and passionless as he watched the two gladiators select their weapons and then move apart outside of his field of vision. Yet he knew what their movements were; every movement he knew. Eyeing each other with the wary horror and alertness of the condemned, they were each of them measuring the twenty paces of space allotted. Now they bent and rubbed sand onto the hilts, and onto the surface of their hands. Now they were crouched and every muscle was trembling like a taut spring and their hearts were pounding like machines.

The trainer blew his silver whistle and the two gladiators re-emerged in Spartacus’s field of vision. Naked, crouched, each with the gleaming knife cradled in the palm of his right hand, they had shed their manhood. They were two animals. They circled like animals, shuffling their feet in short, flat steps on the hot sand. Then they closed and were apart in one convulsive motion, and the Romans were applauding and the Jew’s breast was marked with a thread of blood he wore like a sash.

But neither of them seemed to be aware of the damage done. Their concentration upon each other was so intense, so absolute, so demanding that the whole world appeared to pivot upon them. Time ceased; all of life and experience was concentrated upon each other, and the intensity with which they studied each other became something painful. And then again they came together in what seemed to be a single, integrated convulsion of force and decision, and then they were locked, left hand gripping right, and they stood together, bound to each other, body to body, face to face, the locked wrists straining and screaming in silence the desire to close and cut and kill. Their transition was complete now; they hated each other; they knew only one purpose, the purpose of death, since only by killing could one of them live. Gripped together as they were, muscles rigid and straining, the two became one, one entity torn within itself.

As long as flesh and blood could stand it, they strained in that grip, and then it broke and they tore apart, and now there was a ribbon of red the whole length of the Thracian’s arm. A dozen paces from each other, they stood panting and hating and trembling, each of them painted all over with blood and oil and sweat, the blood trickling down and staining the sand at their feet.

Then the Thracian struck. Knife outstretched, he flung himself at the Jew, and the Jew went down on one knee, parried the knife upward and flung the Thracian who hurtled through the air. And almost before the Thracian struck the ground, the Jew was upon him. It was the moment of supreme horror and extreme excitement in the game. Death was cutting at the Thracian. He twisted, rolled, convulsed, used his bare feet to ward off the terrible knife, but the Jew was all over him, cutting and stabbing—yet, such was the convulsive desperation of the young Thracian, unable to deliver a death blow.

The Thracian found his feet; his bleeding, torn body literally sprang into the air and on its feet and he stood there, but life and strength were running out of him. The explosion which brought him to his feet had tapped his deepest well of strength. He balanced with one hand, clutched the knife with the other, and swayed back and forth, probing at the air with his blade to ward off the Jew. But the Jew stood back and away from him, making no move to close again—and indeed there was no need to close, for the Thracian was hamstrung, cut across face, hands, body and legs, and bleeding his life into the soggy spreading blot of the sand beneath his feet.

Yet the supreme drama of life and death was not played out. The Romans awoke from their trance and they began to cry at the Jew, shrilly, hoarsely, demandingly,

“
Verbera!
Strike! Strike!”

But the Jew did not move. He had only the single slash across his breast, but his motion had flung the blood all over his body. Now, he suddenly hurled his knife into the sand, where it stuck quivering. He stood there with his head bowed over.

In just an instant, the opportunity would pass. The naked Thracian, who now wore a suit of red blood over every inch of his skin, sank to one knee. He had let go of his knife now, and he was dying quickly. The Romans screamed, and a trainer bounded across the arena, swinging a long, heavy bullhide whip. Two soldiers followed him.

“Fight, you scum!” the trainer roared, and then the bullhide curled across the Jew’s back and around his belly. “Fight!” The lash struck him again and again, but he didn’t move, and then the Thracian rolled over on his face, quivered a little and began to moan with pain, low cries of pain at first, and then a rising crescendo, whipped out of his twisting body. Then the cries of pain stopped and he lay still; then the trainer stopped whipping the Jew.

The black man had joined Spartacus at the crack in the door. They watched without speaking.

The soldiers approached the Thracian and prodded him with their spears. He moved a little. One of the soldiers unhooked a small but heavy hammer that hung from his belt. The other soldier wedged his spear under the Thracian and turned him over. Then the first soldier struck him a terrible blow upon the temple with his hammer, a blow which crushed in the soft surface of the skull. After this, the soldier saluted the spectators with his brain-clotted hammer. At the same time, a second trainer led a donkey into the arena. The donkey wore a bright feather headdress and a leather harness from which a chain dragged. The chain was made fast to the Thracian’s feet, and the soldiers whipped the donkey with their spears, so that he cantered around the arena at a sharp trot, dragging the bloody, brain-dripping corpse after him. The Romans applauded this and the lady waved her lace handkerchief with delight.

Then the bloody sand was turned over and smoothed, for the music and dancing before the next pair.

 

 

“Not a word,
lanista
. It was delightful. It was sufficient.”

“Yet I have a reputation.”

“Devil take your reputation. But wait—I’ll tell you what. Bring the Jew here. No other punishment. When a man has fought well, that’s enough, isn’t it? Bring him here.”

“Here? Well, really,” Lucius began—

“Of course! Don’t try to clean him up. Let him come as he is.”

While Batiatus went on the errand, Bracus held forth, attempting, as the connoisseur so often attempts, and with the same concession of futility, to explain the precise beauty and skill of what they had just seen.

“If one sees that once in a hundred pairs, then one is fortunate. A moment of glory, better than an hour’s tedious fencing. That is the famous
avis jacienda ad mortem
. A flight to death—and how better could a gladiator die? Consider the circumstances. The Thracian measures the Jew and knows he is outpointed—”

“But he drew first blood,” Lucius objected.

“Which means nothing. Most likely they never fought before. That was taking the measure. They must each make a series of passes to find each other. If they were evenly mated, they would fence, which would mean skill and endurance; but when they locked, the Jew broke the lock and strung the Thracian’s arm. If it had been the right arm instead of the left, it would have ended there; but as it was, the Thracian knew he was outpointed, and he staked all on a lunge—a body lunge. Nine out of ten gladiators would have blocked it and tried for a lock, yes and even taken a nasty cut to block it. Do you know what it means to parry one of those knives with all the weight of a man’s body behind it? Why did I send for the Jew? I’ll show you—”

While he was talking, the Jew had appeared, still naked, smelling of blood and sweat, a wild, awful picture of a man standing before them, his head bent, his muscles still quivering.

“Bend over!” Bracus ordered him.

The Jew did not move.

“Bend!” cried Batiatus.

The two trainers who were with him took hold of the Jew and forced him over onto his knees before the Romans, and Bracus exclaimed triumphantly as he pointed to his back.

“See there—there! Not the whip marks. See where the skin is broken, as if a lady’s nail had scratched him. That’s where the Thracian’s knife touched him as he went under the lunge and flung him.
Avis jacienda ad mortem!
Let him be,
lanista
,” Bracus told Batiatus. “No more whip. Let him be and you will have a fortune out of him. I’ll make him his reputation myself. A toast to you, gladiator!” Bracus cried.

But the Jew stood dumbly, his head hanging.

 

 

“We are gladiators,” answered Spartacus.