Authors: Howard Fast

Tags: #Ancient, #Historical fiction, #Spartacus - Fiction, #Revolutionaries, #Gladiators - Fiction, #Biographical fiction, #Fiction, #Romance, #Revolutionaries - Fiction, #Rome, #Historical, #Slave insurrections, #Rome - History - Servile Wars; 135-71 B.C - Fiction, #General, #Gladiators, #History

Spartacus (46 page)

BOOK: Spartacus

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Again, they were up before dawn and out on the road, and by mid-day they came to where another great road met theirs and crossed it, like the top of a T. Now they were travelling north and westward, and when the sun was setting, Varinia saw for the first time the snowy tops of the Alps in the distance. There was a moon that night, and they went on without pushing the horses too hard. They halted once during the night to change horses for the last time, and then before morning they turned off the main road onto a dirt road which ran eastward. The road wound down into a valley, and when the sun rose, Varinia could see the whole length of the valley into the hazy distance, a pretty river flowing through the center of it, and rising hills on either side. The Alps were closer now.

They were unable to go very quickly now, since the chariots lurched from side to side in the rutted dirt road. Varinia sat among the pillows, holding her child in her arms. They crossed the river on a wooden bridge, and then began a slow pull up into the hills. All day long the horses strained against the traces over the winding mountain road. Gaulish peasants who saw them, stopped in their work to watch the two great chariots and the fine big-chested horses who drew them, and always there were tow-headed children to come running to the roadside and stare with wide eyes at this unusual sight.

Late in the afternoon, when the road had become only a rutted track, they topped the hills and saw a wide and lovely valley stretching before them. Here and there in this broad valley, Varinia could see a little town, a huddle of houses, and in other places, clusters of peasant huts. There were broad stretches of woodlands, many little streams, and vaguely in the distance, a suggestion of a large walled city. The city lay to the west of them; they took their own path down and northward, in the direction of the Alps, which still seemed far away.

It was as difficult to go down as to go up, for the horses had to be held back, and the road twisted and turned. It was dark already when they reached the valley bottom, and they stopped to rest and to wait for the moon to rise. They travelled a while that night in the moonlight, halted again, and then went on in the early light of the following day. All the roads were poor here. They went on and on—and finally they reached the rolling hills where the Alps began.

Here Flavius parted from Varinia, leaving her early one morning on a stretch of road where there was nothing in sight except fields and woods.

“Goodby, Varinia,” he said to her. “I’ve done what I promised Gracchus I would do, and I think I’ve earned some of the money he paid me. I hope that neither you nor I will ever see Rome again, for that’s not a healthy city for either of us from here on. I wish you luck and happiness—and for that little boy of yours as well. There is a little peasant village about a mile up the road. Better if they don’t see you come by chariot. Here is a bag with a thousand
sesterces,
which will buy you food and shelter for a year if necessary in these parts. The peasants are simple people, and if you want to get across the mountains into your own land, they will help you. But I would advise you not to try that. There are wild people living in the mountains and they hate strangers. Also, you will never find your own folk, Varinia. The German tribes wander through the forest from place to place, and there’s no telling where a tribe is from one year to the next. Also, those forests across the Alps, from all I’ve heard, are a dank and unhealthy place to bring up a child. I would make up my mind to live somewhere in this neighborhood, Varinia. I must confess that it wouldn’t appeal to me, but this is what you wanted, isn’t it?”

“This is what I wanted,” she nodded. “I’m very grateful to you, Flavius.”

And then they swung the chariots around, and Varinia stood there, the child in her arms, watching them as they drove off in the clouds of dust—watching them until a fold of the land hid them from her.

Then she sat down by the roadside and fed the baby. Then she set out along the road. It was a fine, cool summer morning. The sun was coming up in a clear blue sky and the birds were singing, and the bees went from flower to flower, drinking nectar and filling the air with their song.

Varinia was happy. It was not the happiness she had known with Spartacus; but he had bequeathed to her a knowledge of life and the rich reward of existence. She was alive and free, and her child was alive and free; so she was content after a fashion, and she looked upon the future with hope and anticipation.

This is what happened to Varinia. A woman cannot live alone, and in the village which she came to, a village of plain Gaulish peasant people, she found shelter with a man whose wife had died in childbirth. Perhaps the people knew that she was an escaped slave. It didn’t matter. She had full breasts, and she gave life to one of their children. She was a good woman, and people loved her for her strength and outgoing simplicity.

The man whose house she came into was a plain peasant man, a man who could not read or write and who knew only the lessons of toil. He was not Spartacus, yet not so different from Spartacus. He had the same patience with life. He was slow to anger and loved his children deeply—his own and the child Varinia brought him.

Varinia herself, he worshipped—for she had come to him from the outside and had brought life with her. And in time, she came to know him and return some of his feeling. She learned their language easily enough, a Latin base with many Gaulish words mixed into it; she learned their ways, which were not so different from the ways of her own tribe. They tilled the land and brought forth a crop. They offered some of the crop to their village gods, and another part they paid to the tax collector and Rome. They lived and died; they danced and sang and wept and married, and their lives went on in the ordinary cycles of the seasons.

Great changes were taking place in the world, but among them the changes were felt so slowly that nothing was really disrupted yet.

Varinia was fruitful. Each year brought another child out of her loins, and she had seven children by the man she married before she stopped conceiving. Young Spartacus grew up with them, tall and strong and straight, and when he was seven years old, she told him for the first time who his father was and the story of what his father did. It surprised her that he understood so well. No one in this village had ever heard the name Spartacus. Greater things had shaken the earth and passed this village by. And as the other children grew, three of them girls and five of them boys, Varinia told the story many times again—told how an ordinary man who was a slave put his face against tyranny and oppression, and how for four years mighty Rome trembled at the very mention of his name. She told them of the dismal mine in which Spartacus had labored, and she told them of how he had fought in the Roman arena with a knife in his hand. She told them how gentle and good and kind he was and she never put him apart from the plain people among whom she lived. Indeed, when she told of the comrades of Spartacus, she would single out this one or that one in the village as an example. And when she told these tales, her husband listened with wonder and envy.

It was not an easy life that Varinia lived. From daybreak to nightfall, she labored, weeding, hoeing, cleaning, spinning, weaving. Her fair skin was burned brown by the sun, and her beauty disappeared; but her beauty had never been something she set great store by. Whenever she stopped to think and contemplate the past, she was grateful for what life had given her. She no longer mourned Spartacus. Her life with Spartacus was like a dream now.

When her first son was twenty years old, she took a fever, and after three days, she died. Her death was quick and without too much pain, and after her husband and her sons and her daughters had wept for her, they wrapped her in a shroud and laid her to rest in the earth.

It was after she had died that the changes came home to this place. Taxes began to be increased, and the increase was without an end. A dry summer came and most of the crop was ruined, and then came the Roman soldiers. Those families who could not pay their taxes were herded out of their houses and off their land, chained neck to neck, and marched off to be sold for payment in Rome.

But not all those whose crops were ruined accepted this role meekly. Spartacus and his brothers and sisters and others in the village fled into the forests that grew to the north of them, the forests that rolled on up into the wild Alps. There they lived a poor and wretched life on acorns and nuts and what little game they could kill; but when a great villa was built on the lands which had once been theirs, they came down and burned this villa and took all it held.

Then soldiers came into the forests, and the peasants joined with the mountain tribes to fight the soldiers. Escaped slaves joined them, and year after year the war of the dispossessed raged. Sometimes their strength would be smashed by the soldiers, and sometimes the power of the insurgents would be such that they could sally down onto the plains and burn and harry and plunder.

With this kind of a life, the son of Spartacus lived and died—died in struggle and violence as his father had. The tales he told his own sons were less clear, less factual. Tales became legends and legends became symbols, but the war of the oppressed against those who oppressed them went on. It was a flame which burned high and low but never went out—and the name of Spartacus did not perish. It was not a question of descent through blood, but descent through common struggle.

A time would come when Rome would be torn down—not by the slaves alone, but by slaves and serfs and peasants and by free barbarians who joined with them.

And so long as men labored, and other men took and used the fruit of those who labored, the name of Spartacus would be remembered, whispered sometimes and shouted loud and clear at other times.

New York City

June 1951

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