Spartacus (17 page)

They had ridden since daybreak to come to the house where Elpinice lay. Now, near it at last, they looked at the thing that had halted their progress. Mid-way the track lay a slave, the flies thick upon him, his tunic half-ripped from his back. No need to ask why he lay there. In his back was a hole big enough to have let out a dozen lives.

The hole had been made by a Roman pilum.

The horses shied away. Spartacus dismounted and turned over the slave. He did not know him, but the Thracian, Ialo, did.

‘This is one of the men who rode with you to the raid of the great Stone Way.'

They mounted and went on. The shrill of the waterfall drew nearer. The track shelved downwards steeply. The hills drew back. Then they halted a second time, sitting very still in their saddles.

Ialo was long to remember that moment, the strange winter heat and clarity, the singing of the larks overhead, and the smoke slowly upwinding from all that remained of the Roman house.

It had been burned with a thoroughness that argued practice. Its streaked walls – for there had been a fall of rain in the night – were as bare of their painted woodwork as a skeleton of flesh.

Ialo was startled by the Strategos suddenly laughing. ‘Yesterday we trapped the Masters in a pit,' he said, and laughed again, terribly, looking about him in the great hill-pit that shielded the smoke-hung house. Then he dismounted, the Gladiators behind him.

They clambered up through what had been the atrium. No dead lay near. Spartacus took a great charred stake and began to lever aside the debris. Silently, the Gladiators also seized stakes and toiled beside him, seeking to uncover the passage that led to the room where Elpinice had lain.

That passage at length they uncovered. The room itself, after long toil in the cool winter sunlight, they uncovered. Then Ialo and the Gladiators stood off, and Spartacus remained there alone.

All that afternoon they waited, watching from afar. It was evening before he called to them and they came and broke down the room about the two calcined bodies. In the peristyle lay the body of a faceless slave, who had died defending these two. Ialo secretly dragged the body in beside that of Elpinice and her child, that he might guard them for ever in the Land of Mist.

They heard a strange singing in the hills, and found Titul the Iberian hiding behind a bush. He had crawled there, hacked and bleeding, the only survivor of Elpinice's guard. His tale was short.

‘They came on us at noon, half a century of cavalry that had followed the raid we made on the great Stone Way. We fought, hurling great stones and javelins. But they slew us, for we had no arrows. Before they fired the house they took the woman in her bed. Many of them. She cried on the Strategos.' He paused to lick his wounds, being mad. ‘As was proper. Great was the lust of men in the vanished Western Isle.'

The Conqueror

[i]

NOW the whole of Southern Italy lay undefended at the feet of the Thracian Gladiator.

[ii]

A self-deputed scout, Kleon the literatus pushed northwards with a hundred Gauls through the winter-touched land. If he engaged himself more in mapping than sacking, that was a small matter to the Gauls, who sacked and looted as the mood came on them.

Once, in forced marches from Papa camp, out on some mysterious mission to the north-east, Gershom ben Sanballat, the tribune of the Bithynians, overtook the Greek and his scouts. With the Jew was a full three thousand men, his original company of Bithynians now swollen with recruitments of Syrians, Egyptians, Negroes and Greeks. But they called it still the Bithynian legion. The Pharisee guerilla grinned sardonically as he pointed to a burning villa.

‘Is this the beginning of your New Republic?'

Kleon was coldly unmoved. ‘We must destroy before we build.'

‘As the divine Plato doubtlessly said,' growled Gershom. And then: ‘Where are we to winter, Greek?'

‘In Kadesh, perhaps.'

The Jew cursed him and marched away his legion. By evening that day they were beyond the furthest trailings of Kleon's scouts. Then the latter turned westward, combing the roads that ran parallel with the sea. It was the design of the slaves to intercept all travellers from the North.

These were few enough. Merchants had fled the roads, seeking Greece and Africa by sea. But that evening Kleon, sleeping in his camp, was awakened by the noise of much drunken mirth. Rousing, he rose and went into the flare of torches and found a half-score of his Gauls, much laden with wine-skins and incongruous finery, surrounding a band of travellers scooped from the northern road.

They huddled together, these travellers, or rather huddled about one figure. Coming forward, Kleon surveyed that figure with cold, amused eyes.

She was a woman of that beauty that was singularly Roman, however she had departed from the antique codes of the Masters. Tall and full-breasted, with level brow and widely spaced eyes, she stood calm in the tumult, with a calmness that angered her captors. Kleon thrust through them and took the woman by the jaw, turning her face into the full light. She did not struggle, only looked at him with eyes into which flashed a sudden disgust and fear. Kleon knew that look – the look of a woman for the Mutilated.

‘What is your name?' he asked.

‘Lavinia.'

She had been the mistress of Cossinus, brought down from Rome under the protection of that Kharmides who now lay out on the great North way with his throat cut from ear to ear by a Gaulish miner. Kleon stood and regarded her with cold, clear eyes. Should he hand the woman over to the Gauls? Or was there any other purpose she could serve?

As the mistress of Cossinus she must be aware of secret matters in Rome – how the Senate had taken the defeat of Varinus and planned the new campaign against the slaves. But he himself had no leisure to question her; and, even as women sickened in his presence, so he felt for them an unquenchable loathing. With all – as all with him. Excepting . . .

He turned from that thought in a strange pain. ‘I will send you to the Strategos,' he said.

Her eyes widened with fear. ‘Spartacus, the Thracian?'

The Greek grinned coldly. ‘Even so. But he seldom eats women.' His eyes were cruel. ‘As for anything else he may do – that will be nothing unusual in your experience, will it?'

Next morning he watched her go south under the guard of ten of the most trustworthy Gauls. And for some reason he remembered Elpinice again, whom he had hated; and stood and stared after that train that carried the Roman woman to Spartacus.

[iii]

Meanwhile, marching mostly by night on their mysterious venture, Gershom ben Sanballat and his legion faded into the east. The Pharisee, forced for long periods to eat of unclean meat, contented himself with little but fruit and looted corn. At night he slept on his shield. No watch-fires were lighted when the slave-legion made camp, for it might be that strong bodies of Romans were still abroad, remnants from the rout of Varinus. These the Jew had no desire to engage.

The city of Nuceria prepared for winter. It was defended by an ancient wall and ten centuries of soldiers under the command of a Greek named Glaucon. A good general and a stern disciplinarian, he had had the ancient walls strengthened as the country around began to seethe with the slave revolt. From those walls he would watch undisturbed the smoke of burning homesteads rise in the air. Nuceria they might not attempt.

Glaucon had half a dozen warnings nailed on its walls. These were the crucified bodies of slaves captured in their attempt to slip away and join the army of the Gladiators.

He had campaigned in many countries, Glaucon, and amongst his slaves had a Jewish woman, Judith. A child of the Egyptian Diaspora, she was a tall, dark woman of whom Glaucon had soon wearied as bed-woman; for even in his bed she shuddered as at an unclean touch. Amused, Glaucon had made her his cook, for she was deft in the preparation of the spiced dishes he had grown to love in the East. Also, placed on oath in the name of her God, he knew she was incapable of poisoning him.

With the passing of the years he allowed her considerable freedom and bore with her occasional Jewish insolence. Daily she went to a farm beyond the walls, bringing back fresh eggs and milk and herbs to savour her dishes.

On a day in early winter she found the farm very quiet. Coming to the rear door she entered. As she did so an arm encircled her throat and she found herself held by an armed man. He gagged her with care, and hesitated a moment in the darkness of the passage, hungering, half-minded to rape her. Then he chattered something in unintelligible Latin, and dragged her into the kitchen of the farm.

Several score of armed men – or so it seemed to her – lay on the floor, the tables, the shelves, lay everywhere, fast asleep. Only one man other than her captor did not sleep, and he looked a frowning question; a tall, black-haired man who combed at his curled beard.

‘Release her,' he commanded.

Released, Judith stood and looked at him. And suddenly they both smiled; and the Bithynians woke to hear greetings exchanged in a strange tongue, and saw the woman kiss the hand of the leader of the Hasidim. She had heard of him often in Alexandria, in the days when he stayed the Hellenizing Jannaeus; who of the Diaspora had not heard of Gershom of Kadesh?

So it was that, their commander and his advance-guard secretly admitted to the city through the wall-gate of Glaucon himself, Nuceria next morning awoke to find itself in the hands of the Spartacists.

Assured of their northern frontier, the slaves prepared to evacuate the camp under Mount Papa.

[iv]

Preparing, the slaves were conscious of a change in the quality of their leadership.

No longer was each band left to its own devices, to squat by the fires and drowse on memories of the kennels and mines. Instead, centuries and exact legions were instituted, each legion composed of four thousand men, armed thus and so; and if possible composed of a definite tribe. Feuds were forbidden, or the robbery of the merchants who now swarmed round the camp to sell their wares in exchange for the loot of Metapontum and the treasure-train from Brindisium. Standards were given to each legion of slaves, insignia and tribunes bearing badges of rank. Daily the slaves were marched out to skirmish and drill, leaving their women in staring bands on the parapets of the Papa entrenchments. Those who were smiths or armourers erected crude smithies and set to the forging of iron weapons.

At this breath of Roman-like discipline, the slaves, in their hatred of the Masters, were delighted. Practising ecstatically, they imagined themselves both Masters and conquerors of the Masters. They obeyed their centurions without question, and, sweating, would leap and wrestle, naked, in the lines of long, open-air gymnasia. Even the Gauls and the Eastern men lost their shame in appearing unclad; and with bodies shining with oil would hurl the discus or practise as slingsmen.

Shouts of adulation would greet the Thracian Gladiator as he passed through the sweating companies. Crixus the Gaul alone appeared unchanged, and confessed a complete inability either to drill or manoeuvre his legion. ‘I am a Gladiator, no soldier. As once you yourself were,' he said to the Strategos.

The heavy Thracian burr of the Latin did nothing to guise the passionless ferocity of the words. ‘Once I was also a child, Crixus. But I've stopped drinking milk. You'll drill your legion, or I'll appoint another to drill it for you.'

The Gaul stared. It was indeed a new Spartacus, this. Then Crixus went to drill his men.

That night a message was brought to the Strategos that a woman and three men captives, taken by Kleon on the northwards road, had arrived in the camp under a guard of Gauls. Ialo the Thracian brought him the message. He had now made himself the Gladiator's intimate attendant, and stood in the dark of the hut looking questioningly at Spartacus seated on a little stool. So every evening he sat in darkness, unless a tribune came seeking his counsel, or Kleon the eunuch were in the camp. Then torches would be brought and the two sit poring at a table over the plans that the Greek would sketch on his tablets or sometimes with drops of spilt wine. The Gladiator looked up.

‘Bring in the four of them.'

So they were brought before him, and Lavinia, in the light of a single torch, looked at the conqueror of southern Italy, who had shaken the Republic as no other since the days of Hannibal. All Rome was a-rumour with his name and intentions, one rumour preponderating over all others. It was said that the Thracian savage was mad, mad not with the brutality that might have been expected, but insane, being clement, one who neither tortured his captives nor looted unnecessarily. And Rome had listened open-mouthed, and laughed, knowing that only the feeble-minded could antic in such a fashion; and stilled its fears, knowing the successes of the rebellion accidental after all, to be speedily nullified when the consuls took the field at the end of the winter.

So Lavinia remembered, standing dishevelled and dusty, but still with beauty upon her, in the presence of the slave who had shaken Rome. Behind him stood Ialo; the Gauls lounged at the door, slaves in authority. If the story of his reputed clemency were a lie, she shivered at the thought of what would next happen to her – had he no use for her himself. She herself had experimented with slaves in moments of idle curiosity as to how a mutilated man behaved and cried.

Then Spartacus raised his head and looked at her.

At first there was fear with her, then, as always when she met the gaze of his kind, a shuddering disgust of the slave who dared look at her with unshielded eyes, a feeling of a foul contamination. But she saw strange eyes, glowing yet dull, and minded that thing that he carried on his standards, the slave-army insignia of a Snake. Now she knew at last where they got that sign, and shivered while those dark eyes grew suddenly gold. Spartacus stood up.

In the tent were cloths Elpinice had used, a bronze mirror, for all she wore Gladiator's armour, a spatula and a horn cup. In the dark of the evenings under Papa Ialo had been wont to find the slave-leader staring at these, strangely and terribly. Now he gestured towards them.