Spartacus (16 page)

‘There is a house back there in the hills.'

She became aware of the horses in motion, of an arm thrown about her, iron and sure. Winding down through a pit in the hills, they came to the deserted villa. It had been the country-house of some rich Lucanian of Thurii or Metapontum, now fled the slave-occupation. The door of the fauces hung ajar and from the kitchen on the right arose no smoke or the sound of slaves at their toil. The Gladiator kicked wide the doors and went in, carrying the bed-woman of Batiates. For a moment he stood in the gloom of the atrium, looking round him in wonder, for he had never before entered such a dwelling.

The gloom sparkled with light. The last rays of sunshine in the watersplash re-rayed on the marble ceiling, and back from there to the mosaic'd floor, flung wandering beams down the corridors on the painted bodies of the statues that stood pedestal'd in the peristyle. One, a Hermaphroditus of Silanion, showed the body of the son of Hermes united with that of the river nymph in an obscene ecstacy. A Symplegma of the school of Cephissodorus stared up in a blank, cloacal anguish at the stare of the giant barbarian.

And a sudden, wild anger seized on Spartacus. His shout brought in the Thracians. Loosening his arms from about Elpinice, he pointed to the shining figures in stone.

Then, to the crash of the breaking statues, he carried the bed-woman of Batiates to a sleeping-room.

[iv]

Up and down the atrium paced the Greek eunuch, and presently heard the screams die to a faint moaning. They moved him only to an impatient frown. How long would this delay their march? How long the Thracian waste the hours at the unclean bed of a woman in childbirth?

Knowing Elpinice an enemy of his plans, Kleon had hoped to see her die in the raid on the great Stone Way. Even when she had survived that raid, and they rode back into Lucania again, the conviction had been firm upon him that the Strategos, finding her pregnant, would abandon her by the way. What need had the slave commander to burden himself with an ailing woman when he might have women as he chose from the captives, from the hundreds of women slaves who now filled the camp under Mount Papa? But instead he had halted the march like a midwife – he who had shaped so sure in the seeming, cold and passionless, of Plato's Prince!

Going outside, the eunuch found the darkness now close at hand. He set to garrisoning the house in the pit, the hills around sloped up to the oncoming dark, the cry of the rivulet was here unceasing. Kleon stood in the dimness and looked at a star that came out and twinkled over far Papa. It was the star of the Sea-born herself.

And, for the first time since that day when the Libyans of Pacianus had robbed him of his manhood, a sick desolation came on him. Always to be alone, never to know kind hands or the lips of love! Never to see the seed of his body borne to fruit, or to hear the voice of a child. And for a moment, dreadfully, the eunuch wept. What availed him his plans or the game he played with an ancient dream from the antique times? What to him though the slaves should gain or lose, what to him life or death, already half dead, with a body mutilated to shame?

But that night Elpinice gave birth to a son, and drank warmed wine and water, and slept awhile; and woke with the coming of the morning and urged the Strategos to leave her. And this at last, though reluctantly, he did, a dreaming slave with power forgotten, and the dream that he captained a legion of men. Titul and half his company he left to guard the house, and embraced Elpinice, and saw her eyes strange, so that he remembered that night long before in the kennels of the ludus in far Capua.

Then he rode through the dawnlight to Crixus' camp.

[v]

Thoranius the quaestor had marched from Rome with the Seventeenth Legion to reinforce Varinus. He was a wily man whose father had been a freedman. Gross and uncultured, half a barbarian, he seemed to Varinus at first a worse lieutenant than either Furius or Cossinus. He bellowed like a bull about the camp, and would slap his thigh with a freckled hand, stirred to mirth by his own crude wit. In appearance like a merchant and wearing his armour with plebeian clumsiness, he at first gave little evidence of the fact that he was a consummate tactician, a man whose lowly birth alone had retarded a speedy promotion.

Then, twelve hours after his arrival in Varinus' camp, he led the praetor out by the cane-brake that fringed the camp, and propounded a campaign plan plotted to the minutest detail.

At first Varinus listened to it coldly, then disagreed, then argued, then finally accepted it, though its boldness and unconventionality left him in uneasy doubt. Following his agreement, the camp hummed with activity through three long days. On the fourth morning Varinus marched out his veterans and went south into the land of ravines that led towards the sea-coast. Thereafter there departed from the camp, in bands of three hundred, eight hundred, nine hundred, and a thousand, with the space of an hour betwixt each departure, a full half of the Seventeenth Legion new-brought from Rome by Thoranius. The surrounding country had been scoured for spies or fugitives, and no eyes other than those of hawks watched Thoranius' men depart by four different routes that yet all led south.

From the slave-camp under Papa that same dawn Spartacus, newly arrived from the east, remounted his tireless stallion, and rode out at the head of two thousand slaves, Germans and Thracian, light-armed troops, Gannicus their quaestor, and marched swiftly west. Following this, ere the dust of the Strategos's departure had settled, Oenomaus took six hundred men, Greeks and Gauls, out of the camp, and marched north. After him a company of Gauls and Iberians, men capable of a pace unknown to either the Romans or the rest of the Free Legion, ran swiftly forth from the Papa entrenchments, and vanished north-westwards into the mountains. They were led by Castus. Crixus, Gershom and Kleon the eunuch were left in the camp, in command of the Gauls and the Eastern slaves, guarding not only the camp, but the companies of Roman prisoners taken in the battle near Paestum.

All night a fierce frost had held the ground, but now, under the sunlight, and with the departure of the last of the raiding companies, a mist arose and rolled over the plain. Papa stood crowned in cloud. The Roman prisoners, digging in relays all through the previous day and night, toiled anew under the direction of Kleon.

The time was short.

Gershom ben Sanballat was uneasy, and left his Bithynians, also engaged in hasting excavation, to walk down the lines of reed huts and shelters till he stood by the side of the Greek. For a little they said nothing, watching the Romans. These prisoners, though scantily clad and ill fed on rotten corn, yet toiled under no lash, a fact which awakened more resentment in the Free Legion than any other order of the Thracian Strategos.

‘They dig ill,' said Kleon. ‘I think they suspect that these are Roman graves.'

The Jew combed his curled beard with his fingers, and cast quick, bright eyes over the mist-wreathed countryside. ‘I would that the corpses were safe in them.'

‘They'll come.'

‘Doubtlessly.' The Jew's eyes lit on him in sardonic appraisal. ‘It seems to me I once heard you say you cared nothing where we went or how we might fare, life being the smallest of matters to you. Yet I find you under a tribune's helmet, and in the secret counsel of the Strategos. Surely, whatever the game he plays, it's an ill thing for a Greek to serve a barbarian who eats horses and worships his dead?'

Kleon smiled, coldly indifferent. ‘If he eats horses I have seen him perform greater feats. I've seen him make captains of companies eat their oaths and their pride at one meal.'

‘As Jehovah is God, that's true.' Gershom ben Sanballat was pensive. ‘Yet why in the Free Legion I march under the orders of an unclean Gentile, who seeks to build a tyranny on the dreams of a Corinthian eunuch, puzzles me much.'

Kleon's face flushed in a vivid anger. Then he said, in a strangled voice: ‘That is an ill taunt, Jew.'

So Gershom himself knew, yet he knew no way of confessing it. The blood had stained his own face ere the words had left his lips; his fingers faltered in the glossiness of his beard. Bending forward, he cursed the Romans, and at his words they toiled with a renewed activity. Then the Hasidim guerilla turned to the white-faced Greek.

‘It was ill. You're twice the man, I sometimes think, in that you are less the bull. But I grow impatient with this plotting and planning, as though we were statesmen, not skulking slaves, this building of sky-republics, these secret raids and hopes. You and your Thracian build a house in sand.'

‘Sand or rock, their end is the same, a dream of order on a planless earth, of endurance where all things meet and melt.'

The Jew was again the cold Pharisee. ‘So speak the Hellenes, blaspheming God, as the bedmen of the Whore in Jerusalem.' His thoughts went far with his gaze. ‘But she'll find that both God and I still live – if I ever win back to Kadesh.'

‘Your queen?' Kleon was again indifferent. Then: ‘Your Bithynians will have set half the camp with traps if you do not heed to their digging soon. They work with more heart than my Romans.'

The Jew went back to his company. Meantime the Gauls, all but a party that kept the entrenchments and several who loitered outside the dyke, lay stretched at ease, or mended their armour and tunics. From near the camp entrance the long dyke being dug by the captives and Bithynians drove straight through the lines of hutments to the far wall of the original enclosure. Towards noon the excavators abandoned the digging, and, under the vigorous direction of Kleon, set to carrying away the excavated mould. By mid-afternoon the great gape of the dyke had vanished. Roofed over with branches and turf, it seemed now a lane of solid ground splitting the camp in twain. A smell of fresh mould hung over the lines. Quietness settled on the camp.

An hour passed, and Crixus, who all day had sat on the northwards wall, descended and ran swiftly to the great camp-gate. His Gauls seemed hardly to mark his passage, unless it was that their singing and laughter grew louder as they loosened the long swords slung from their shoulders. At the gate a few Free Legionaries were already crowding, indifferently, staring upon the band that approached.

It was a straggling band of eight hundred men, escaped slaves (they shouted) who had fought their way from Apulia to join the Free Legion. They were casually welcomed by Crixus and the sentries, and entered the camp, three abreast, a disorderly throng, laughing and rejoicing.

Inside the gateway they found an abutting wall. Betwixt it and the main camp palisade was a narrow corridor that curved unexpectedly. For a moment the foremost of the new arrivals hesitated, but the pressure behind was too great to resist. The company passed in. The sentries closed in a compact body and marched in with it. Crixus, at the gate, blinked his eyes and looked northwards again.

Then, behind him, across the inner wall, arose a screaming tumult and the crackling of boughs, the hiss of arrows and the scrape of weapons. For a time the noise was deafening. Then it slowly died away. Crixus paid no heed, standing with his hand on his hip, his helmet pushed back from his forehead, his eyes blinking in the winter sun-dazzle.

Just before sunset another band of sturdy, well-fed slaves arrived at the camp under Papa. They also passed through the hospitable gate; and again, in a little, arose the terrible tumult.

The Strategos himself returned at nightfall, bloody but unwounded, with the remnant of his companies reeling behind him in weariness. Crixus went out and saluted him in the glare of the torches, the giant slave on the giant stallion who told him the unslavelike news.

‘We ambushed Varinus at Carrae, among the rocks. His Legion is destroyed. What happened here?'

Crixus laughed. ‘As we planned. Though I haven't been to see.'

Together they stood inside the camp and looked at the trap into which the companies of Thoranius had walked. Shepherded by guides, they had marched in the pits dug that morning and covered with turves. As the turves gave way beneath the feet of the ostensible slaves, the Gauls had assailed them with arrows and then with the sword. Twice this had happened, and now the dyke was heaped with Roman dead.

Some had died of suffocation, some from the arrows and stones rained upon them. Some were perhaps as yet undead. But they would not outlive the night. Already from that dreadful pit, arose a fetid stench.

The Gladiator turned away, the strange barbarian moulded from a wayward slave to an archon-tyrant under the hands of a dreaming eunuch. But that ancient self that amazed his world lived in him still, if with voice less wild.

‘This was your plan, Kleon. It has saved the camp. But I swear that never again we'll trap even Romans like this.'

Kleon laughed thinly, his face pallid with the stench from the pits. ‘Had the Romans held this camp and slaves marched in disguised – would their deaths have come as easily as death to these? They'd have been torn again from the pits to the cross and the torturing-iron.'

‘The Roman is a wild beast,' said Gershom ben Sanballat. ‘They have died fitly.'

Crixus laughed. Then shivered. ‘May I not die so.'

Before midnight Castus and Oenomaus had returned with their depleted companies. Yet everywhere that day the slave armies had triumphed, the two Gauls separately destroying two of the bands of legionaries despatched by the wily Thoranius in his plan to fill the slave-camp with disguised Romans. Then the two Gaul leaders had combined their forces and fallen on the Roman camp. Thoranius himself had been killed, fighting desperately, and the rest of his legion dispersed.

Meantime, through the night, northwards, Varinus fled with a small band of horse and halted not until he gained the gates of Capua.

[vi]

Spartacus halted his stallion and stared. Behind him the troop of Gladiators also came to a stop, staring at that thing that lay athwart the track. In the air was the shrill of a waterfall. The hills shelved down in a pit to the hidden Roman house.