Spartacus (33 page)

That was the time of not knowing.

In the second time of his life, in the time of knowing, he stopped being a child and the pervading sunshine gave way to a chill wind. In time, he drew a cloak of hatred around him to shelter and shield himself. That was the time that stabbed through his mind in sharp flashes of red agony as he hung from the cross. His thoughts of that time were wild and twisted and terrible. The recollections were as scrambled as the pieces of a jig-saw puzzle. He saw that second time of his life in the undulating masses of people who watched him, in their faces, in the sounds which came from them. Again and again as his passion endured, he was shunted back through his memory to that second time of his life, the time of knowing.

In that time, he became aware of things, and in this awareness his childhood perished. He became aware of his father, a brown-faced, work-hardened man who toiled from morning to night—yet the toil was never enough. He became aware of sorrow. His mother died and they wept for her. He became aware of taxes, for no matter how much his father toiled, there was never enough to fill their bellies, yet the land was as fruitful as any land could be. And he became aware of the great gulf that separates the rich from the poor.

The sounds were the same as before; the difference was that he heard the sounds and understood them, whereas before he had heard them without understanding. Now when the men talked, they permitted him to stand at a little distance and listen; before, they had urged him out of the house to his play.

Also, he was given a knife, but the knife brought no gladness with it. He went one day with his father across the hills a full five miles to where there was a man who worked with iron, and there they stayed for three long hours by the forge while the smith hammered out a knife for him. And all the time his father and the smith talked about the sorrows that had fallen upon the land and how the small man was squeezed. It was as if his father and the iron worker were in competition, each to demonstrate to the other how he was squeezed more than the other.

“Take this knife,” said the smith. “My price to you is four
denarii
. From that, one fourth will be taken by the Temple collector when he comes for his dues. One fourth will be taken by the tax collector. That leaves me two
denarii
. If I am to make another knife, I must pay two
denarii
for the metal. Where is the price of my labor? Where is the price of the horn I must buy for the hilt? Where is the price of food to feed my family? But if I should charge five
denarii,
then everything else goes up accordingly, and who will buy when they can get a knife elsewhere for less? God is kinder to you. At least you take your food from the ground and you can always fill your belly.”

The boy’s father, however, had another argument. “At least you have a little hard money in your hands sometimes. My own case is like this. I reap my barley and I thresh it. I fill the baskets, and the barley gleams like pearls. We give thanks to the Lord God of Hosts, because our barley is so beautiful and so full of sustenance. Who can have troubles when his storehouse is so filled with baskets of pearly barley? But then the Temple collector comes, and one quarter of the barley he takes for the Temple. Then the tax collector comes, and he takes one quarter for taxes. I plead with him. I point out to him that there is only enough barley to feed my animals through the winter. Then eat your animals, he tells me. And this is the awful thing we must do. So when the time comes that there is neither meat nor grain and the children whimper for food, we string our bows and think of the hares and the few deer left on the mountainside. But this is unclean meat for a Jew unless it is blessed. Unless there is a dispensation. So last winter, we sent our rabbi to Jerusalem, to plead at the Temple. Our rabbi is a good man. His hunger is our hunger. But five days he lingered in the Temple court before the priests would see him, and then they listened with contempt to his pleading, nor did they give him even a crust of bread to ease his awful hunger. When shall we hear the end of this Galilean whining? they said to him. Your peasants are lazy. They want to lie in the sun and eat manna. Let them work harder and plant more barley. Such is their advice, but where does a peasant find more land for more barley, and if we found more and planted more, do you know what would happen?”

“I know what would happen,” the smith said. “In the end you would have no more. That way, it always happens. The poor get poorer and the rich get richer.”

This happened when the boy went to get his knife, but at home it was no different. At home, in the evening, the neighbors came to his father’s little house, the house where they all lived crowded into one single room, and there they sat and everlastingly talked of how difficult it was for a man to live and how they were squeezed and squeezed and squeezed—and how far could it go, and could you squeeze blood from a stone?

Thus thought the man on the cross, and these were stabbing fragments of memory which connected with his suffering. But even as he suffered, even as the pain rose in waves beyond endurance and then subsided into waves only endurable, he desired to live. Dead already, given to the cross, still he desired to live. What a power life is! What a drive life is! What things people will do when it becomes necessary to the simple fact of existence!

But why that was so, he did not know. In his suffering, he did not call upon God, because in God there was no answer and no explanation. He did not believe any more in one God or in many gods. In that second time of his life, his relationship with God changed. God answered only the prayers of the rich.

So he did not call on God. Rich men do not hang on crosses, and his whole life had been spent on a cross, an eternity with spikes through his hands. Or had that been another? Or had that been his father? His mind worked poorly now; the beautiful and precise and orderly impulses of his brain were being disarranged, and when he remembered how his father had been crucified, he confused his father with himself. He searched his poor, tortured brain to recall how that had come about, and he remembered the time when the tax collectors came and were turned away with empty hands. He remembered the time when the priests came from the Temple, and they too were sent packing with their hands empty.

There was a brief moment of glory after that. There was a shining memory of their great hero, Judas the Maccabee, and when the first army was sent by the priests against them, the hill farmers took up their bows and knives and destroyed the army. He had been in that battle. Only a stripling of fourteen years, yet he had used his knife and he had fought alongside of his father and he had tasted victory.

But the taste of victory did not last long. Great columns of armored mercenaries came marching against the Galilean rebels, and there was a bottomless well of gold in the Temple treasury to buy more and more soldiers. The farmers with their knives and their naked bodies could not fight a great army. The farmers were smashed, and two thousand were taken prisoner. From among the prisoners, nine hundred men were selected for the cross. This was the civilized way, the western way, and when the crosses were strung like beads over the hillsides, the priests from the Temple came to watch and with them came their Roman advisers. And the boy, David, stood and saw his father nailed to a cross and left there to hang by his hands until the birds ate his flesh.

And now he was on the cross himself. As it began, so it had ended, and how tired he was, and how full of pain and grief! As time passed on the cross—time which had no connection with time as known to mankind, for a man on a cross is no longer a man—he asked himself endlessly what was the meaning of a life which came from nowhere and moved into nowhere? He began to lose that incredible grip on life which had sustained him for so long. For the first time, he wanted to die.

(What had Spartacus said to him?
Gladiator, love life. There is the answer to all questions.
But Spartacus was dead, and he lived.)

He was tired now. Weariness contested with pain, and so his ragged memories were of weariness. After the revolt failed, he and seven hundred other boys were chained neck to neck and marched north. How long they marched! Across plain and desert and mountain, until the green hills of Galilee were a dream of paradise. Their masters changed, but the whip was always the same. And at last they came to a land where the mountains towered higher than any mountains in Galilee, where the tops of the mountains wore a mantle of snow in summer and in winter.

And there he was sent into the earth to dig copper. For two years he labored in the copper mines. His two brothers, who were with him, died, but he lived. He had a body of steel and whipcord. Others sickened; their teeth fell out, or they became sick and vomited away their lives. But he lived, and for two years he labored in the mines.

And then he escaped. He escaped into the wild mountains with the slave collar still on his neck, and there the simple, primitive mountain tribesmen took him in and sheltered him and removed the collar from his neck and let him live with them. All through the winter he lived with them. They were a kind-hearted, poor folk, who lived by hunting and trapping, growing almost nothing at all. He learned their language, and they wanted him to remain with them and marry one of their women. But his heart longed for Galilee, and when spring came, he set out southward. But he was captured by a band of Persian traders, and they in turn sold him to a slave caravan moving westward, and he was put on the auction block in the city of Tyre, almost within sight of his homeland. How he ate his heart out then! What bitter tears he wept, to be so near home and relatives and people who would love and cherish him—and yet to be so far from freedom! A Phoenician merchant purchased him, and he was chained to an oar in a ship which traded with Sicilian ports, and for a whole year he sat in the wet darkness and wet filth, dragging his oar through the water.

Then the ship was taken by Greek pirates, and blinking like a dirty owl, he was dragged up on deck and examined and questioned by the fierce Greek sailors. Short shrift was made of the Phoenician merchant and crew; they were flung overboard like so many bundles of straw. But him and the other slaves, they examined, and each was asked in turn, in the Aramaic dialect of the Mediterranean, “Can you fight? Or can you only row?”

He feared the bench and the darkness and the bilge water as he might have feared the devil himself, and he answered, “I can fight. Only give me a chance.” He would have fought an army then, only not to be sent down below decks to bend his back over an oar. So they gave him a chance on deck and taught him—not without many a blow and curse—the craft of the sea, how to furl a sail and run up the rigging and steer with the thirty-foot steering oar, how to splice a rope and hold a course on the stars at night. In their first fight with a fat Roman cog, he showed a quickness of motion and a skill with the long knife that won him a secure place in their wild and lawless band; but there was no happiness in his heart, and he came to hate these men who knew only slaughter, cruelty, and death. They were as different from the simple peasants among whom he had lived his childhood as night was from day. They believed in no God, not even in Poseiden, the lord of the sea, and though his own faith had been shaken, the good years of his life were among those who believed. When they stormed onto shore, it was to kill and burn and rape.

It was in this time that he built around him a hard wall in which he encased himself. Within that wall, he lived, and the signs of youth disappeared from his face with its cold green eyes and its hawklike nose. He was a little less than eighteen years old when he joined them, but his appearance became an ageless one, and already there was a sprinkling of white hair in the black mop that covered his head. He kept to himself, and sometimes for a whole week he would speak no word at all; they left him alone. They knew how he could fight, and they feared him.

He lived on a dream, and the dream was wine and sustenance to him. The dream was that one day or another, sooner or later, they would raise the coast of Palestine, and then he would slip over the side, swim ashore, and make his way on foot to the beloved Galilean hills. But three years went by, and that day never came. They raided first on the African coast, and then across the sea along the Italian coastline. They fought on the coast of Spain and burned Roman villas and took the riches and the women they found there. Then they crossed the sea again and spent a whole winter in a walled and lawless city near the Pillars of Hercules. Then they sailed through the Strait of Gibraltar and came to Britain, where they beached their galley and cleaned and repaired it. Then they sailed to Ireland, where they exchanged bits of cloth and cheap jewelry for the golden ornaments of the Irish tribesmen. Then to Gaul, and up and down the French coast. And then back to Africa. Thus three years went by—and never did they raise the coast of his native land. But the dream and the hope remained with him—the while he became harder than a man has a right to be.

But he learned much in that time. He learned that the sea was a road upon which life flowed, even as blood flows through the body of a man. He learned that the world was great and boundless, and he learned that everywhere one went, there were poor and simple folk, people like his own people, people who scratched away at the soil for a living for themselves and their children—only to give over most of what they took out of the soil to chief or king or pirate. And he learned that there was a chief, king and pirate above everything else—and that was called Rome.

And in the end, they went down to a Roman warship, and he and fourteen others of the crew who survived were taken to Ostia to be hanged. So the sands of his small cup of life seemed to have run out, but at the very last, an agent of Lentulus Batiatus bought him for the school at Capua . . .

Such was the pattern of the second part of the gladiator’s life, the time of knowing and hating. That part was completed at Capua. There he learned the ultimate refinement of civilization, the training of men to kill each other for the amusement of Roman idlers and for the enrichment of a fat, dirty and wicked man who was called a
lanista
. He became a gladiator. His hair was clipped close to his skull. He went into the arena with a knife in his hand, and he killed not those he hated but those who, like himself, were slaves or doomed men.