Spartacus (23 page)

Spartacus was riding wrapt in his thoughts, Ialo behind him, the maid Mella somewhere in the centre with the women. He shook his head.

‘These folk are unaccustomed to such weathers. They'll fight better on the plain.'

‘They'll fight not at all beyond the Alps, in the wild lands of the North.'

Spartacus nodded; that was true. And again, as the night before, he knew, looking at the winding drift of the slaves, that angry possession upon him – all the slaves himself, feeling the stinging pain in the torn feet of a Gaul who limped past, in the worn womb and the heavy breasts of a woman near to childbirth, straggling from the baggage centre, in the humped determination of his Thracians, marching with sloping spears in the glister of the rain. All that, but more. For he saw the glister of the unending weapons with a keen, wild pride, not in that he owned or commanded them, but that he was of the horde, among them, going armed to meet the Masters. He rose in his stirrups and looked back, and backwards, as frontwards, loomed an unceasing human drift. He turned to Kleon.

‘Another might lose himself. Ride back and bring me news of the Jew.'

It took Kleon almost an hour to come to the Bithynian legion, still at the peak of the Pass, under a hail of darts and arrows from the fundatores of the Second. As he dismounted a slinger's pellet rattled on the helmet of Gershom ben Sanballat. The Jew smiled sourly, combing his curled beard.

‘Easier work than I wish, fighting these light-armed scum. In a little while it'll be less easy – when the legionaries themselves have gained the peak and we are retreating below.'

‘They'll have you at their mercy, then,' said Kleon.

The guerilla Pharisee was sardonic. ‘This comes of reading Plato.'

But Kleon saw the situation with a sudden sharp clarity. ‘Bithynian, you must detach a fourth of your legion to hold the peak – hold it and die in the task. And you march down the Pass to aid the Strategos.'

‘And who'll command this fourth to be sacrificed?'

Kleon looked through the rain at the far mountain-tops, those hills across which the Strategos planned to lead the slave army – into the wild, uncitied north, into a waste of barbaric fields, of forests bent at night under snow, wild oxen calling, not the criers of news, mist and beer, not sun and wine, men vulgares from kings to commons, not a single literatus to be met though you lived till Gershom's Behemoth came down and devoured the world. So he knew his answer.

‘I will.'

The Jew stared at him angrily, haughtily. ‘You? Is this a jest from your Plato, Thracian?'

‘Nor one from the codes of Jehovah, Bithynian. Hasten your division – unless you fear to march down to the pila of the Masters below.'

‘By my God, but I won't. You'll die here.'

‘If I don't, I'll die elsewhere. And I've no fancy to die in that barbarian North. Hasten, Gershom.'

And at length, seeing that he would not be moved, and that so things might come to a better pass, ben Sanballat gave his orders and marched away three fourths of his legion; and he came to Kleon and kissed him, and that the Greek suffered, with a sudden twist of his bowels, the tears that might have come to one unmutilated. And he saw, terrible in Gershom's eyes, a picturing of that fate that Gershom knew to be his. Then the Jew turned, cursing his Bithynians, pulling angrily at his beard, and marched down the Pass.

Kleon found no orders to give, they awaited the nearing attack of the legionaries, for the Roman velites had now drawn back. Then Kleon turned and found Hiketas by his side, and stared at him in surprise.

‘You here? Your place is with the Strategos.'

Hiketas yawned, delicately. ‘Over-late to order that now. I'm here with my Amazon, and here I stay.'

They stood with arms entwined, like lovers on an Attic vase, the woman had her hair braided under her helmet, brother and sister, lover and mistress, they smiled in each other's eyes, and then in the cold, bitter eyes of Kleon. Then Hiketas said:

‘Like yourself we've no mind to adventure among the barbarians. We've known them before. We fight against the Cities, if at all.'

So they waited. Below them, the Second legion mustered. Beyond, far to the north, the Germans and Thracians were debouching on the plain before Mutina and engaging the legions of Gnaeus Manlius.

[v]

Spartacus drew out on the plain, the Bithynian rearguard at his heels, and engaged the Fourth and Ninth legions before the praetor had time to well order their battle. Night was falling, there was no hope in retreat on Mutina, though its lights shone whitely through the rain, the great flares by its watch-gates where the shivering sentinels peered through the drizzle at the manoeuvring phalanges of the slaves. Wolves had come howling from the hills. In Mutina they could guess the reason.

Then towards the city came a stream of fugitives, the fundatores and the sagittarii pursued by the slave cavalry. One man, a Balearic slinger, was the first to reach the gates. Him Mutina saved. But thereafter so close and hot was the pursuit of the slaves, at the heels of broken bands of legionaries, not merely light troops, that Mutina refused to open and watched the slaughter under its walls. The rescued slinger told of a type of battle familiar enough to Italy of late: the Gladiator breaking the legions' formation with the impact of his iron cuneus wedge, and his cavalry slaughtering through the breach.

Gnaeus Manlius fled from the field. Gaius Cassius groaned when the news was brought to him in Mutina, scratching in his bath, winking and fluttering his eyes. The road to the North was open to the slaves. They could pass unpunished, with the flower of the enslaved of Italy in their ranks, to seize new provinces and stir the vulgares to nameless crimes. And, scratching and calling for a young maid to bring life in his rotting bones, Cassius groaned again, for this meant the end of all beauty and culture.

But Spartacus, watching the Fourth legion break, heard at last from Gershom ben Sanballat of how the rearguard came to be in action, of its fourth that was left at the peak under Kleon, to die there, as the eunuch preferred, rather than face life in the North. The Strategos clenched his hands.

‘Kleon? How long can he keep the peak?'

Gershom of Kadesh looked at the sinking sun, poised on the rim of the horizon.

‘Until that goes down.'

‘Then we may save him yet. Call Castus.'

So Castus was called and a moment thereafter the slave horse drew off from pursuit of the flying legions of Manlius, and vanished round the bend of the hills, across the estuaries where the sea-birds nested, following the track the Second legion had taken a day before.

Spartacus camped his men under Mutina. Then he summoned the city to surrender, but it refused, strongly walled, albeit it refused with caution and offered a gift of corn.

The winter night came down with a speed unknown to the slaves from the south. At its fall Spartacus sent for Ialo and with him left the camp, they passed through long lines of little fires, where the rain fell hissing in cooking-jars and hissing on the slaves' wet hair and arms. The southern men shivered and sought to bind their wounds. A child wailed, lost, in the rain. Red eyes gleamed on the camp's outskirts.

Then, in the midst of the Bithynians, they passed a boughshelter with a tribune's pole and heard there the wail of a new-born child. Spartacus half halted at the sound. It came again and he smiled, and walked on.

The rain cleared. Beyond the camp they came to the verge of the Pass where Gnaeus Manlius had sought to reform his legions and stay the slave-army. Here the Romans, dead and wounded, lay in serried ranks, with piercing them the cuneus dead of the slave attack. Already robbers from the slave-army were at work. Ialo plucked at the Strategos's cloak.

‘There's no profit in coming here. We can spoil them tomorrow.'

‘Tomorrow we march at dawn.'

And then Ialo saw a dreadful thing, that the Strategos wept. He walked with unshielded face, weeping – suddenly weeping his dead, the lost and forlorn, the rejected, those born to stripes, his people who had died here so bravely, so aimlessly, for they hardly knew what, for a hope and belief so dim, yet in which they had followed him blindly. So Spartacus wept for his dead, the first and last time, with an anger and passion that frightened the slave who companioned him. And then it was there came that resolve that altered the face of history – a resolve newborn from sight of those heapings of torn men who lay so quiet under the coming of the stars.

They came in frost. As they walked back to the camp the Thracian Gladiator raised his head and saw in the north, shining, straining in their traces, the Seven Ploughing Oxen, following the Pole-star home. For a moment he looked at these, and then went into his tent, sitting there long with his head in his hands, none disturbing him, though Ialo and the Sicel maid kept watch.

But at midnight the camp sprang to life with the coming of a fresh host down the Pass. Castus and his spent cavalry had returned, bringing with them the remnants of that quarter legion of Bithynians left to guard the peak. Castus had dispersed the Second legion, taking no prisoners. He stood blood-splashed and exhausted in Spartacus's tent, his young face weary, yet still eager-eyed for a word or a look from the Strategos.

‘Kleon?'

‘The eunuch has a wounded leg, but he lives.'

The Greek lay in his tent when Spartacus went to see him, following Castus, Ialo carrying a torch to light the way through the dark slave-lines. He lay and bit at his arm, for pain he could not endure. He turned a cold, bright glance on the Strategos and Castus.

‘The way's open now then, Spartacus. And I – I'm saved for the cannibal pots.'

‘You've been saved for the sack of Rome.'

They stared at the Thracian. Then Kleon knew.

‘Rome?
Then you're to turn back?'

‘We go back to conquer Italy. It's ours – our Legions made it. And we'll march against the City itself.'

The Falling Star

[i]

THEY turned south, the winter at their heels. And turning, it seemed that new strength flowed up through their bodies from the touch of that southlands earth, even with the Gauls and Germans who at first had complained so bitterly. They crossed La Fata Pass again, down through Gallia Cisalpina and halted in Umbria, capturing a nameless city. There, in a fever of preparation, Spartacus set his tribunes to organize for that conquest of Rome that had come on him as an ultimate necessity the night he stumbled over the dead slaves on the battlefield of Mutina.

But now he saw himself neither as king nor dictator, a God drove him on, a God crowned with the knowledge that unless the Beast that squatted in the Seven Hills were killed, there would be no possible life ever again for men while the world endured. And, knowing he might fail, the Thracian knew also that he might not dare refuse that attempt with all the strength and all the force and all the cruelty the task might demand. And it seemed to him each morning of those hasting preparations that the slave-horde awoke in him, moved with his body, looked with his eyes, hungered with his hunger, tired with his tiredness, were shadowed with the hate of that same Shadow – the Wolf that looked north from the Tiber mouth.

Beating out bolts and grinding their swords, building great machines under Hiketas' direction, the slave legions toiled like men possessed through that month of the hastening spring. The Strategos had made over to Gannicus and Gershom the administration of the legion laws and requisition of food and supplies. And Kleon the eunuch drew up a great Law, the Lex Servorum, to use in the time when the leaders of the slave-legions sat in the Senate. It dreamt, this Law, of a land of little farmsteads sleeping secure, of quiet towns with literati in the porticoes and freemen in the mills and booths, of the sea and the wind in the hair of Plato's dream. Kleon read clauses from it in the night-watches to Hiketas and his sister, Gershom ben Sanballat sitting by, sardonic, combing at his curled beard.

‘In that time there'll be no need of laws, far less of this cumbrous Lex,' Hiketas affirmed. ‘If it were for this only that we march on Rome, do you think I'd have joined the Free Legions or would sweat now upon my catapults?'

‘Only by Law may the perfect State and citizen be created,' Kleon affirmed.

‘Only by the will of Jehovah may such be done,' said the Pharisee Jew. ‘And He makes no dispensation for Gentiles.'

‘Only by perfect freedom may life be perfect again,' said Hiketas. ‘As once it was in the Golden Age, when there were neither Laws nor swords, Masters nor slaves—'

‘Nor talkers, eunuchs, or geometricians,' growled Gershom ben Sanballat. ‘When do we march?'

‘In six days' time,' said Kleon. ‘If the war-machines of Hiketas are ready by then.'

‘They'll be ready,' affirmed Hiketas. ‘And with your Lex and my ballistics – who shall resist us?'

He went smiling away with the woman who loved him, his sister and mistress; and even Kleon, cold and indifferent in such matters, believed their love evil, though there were no Gods, no Laws but those men made themselves. Gershom ben Sanballat looked on the thing with the aversion of one who had looked overmuch on Gentile abominations to be vexed from aversion to hate. To Castus it was a matter of indifference – he hungered for a love that was still denied him, that of the Strategos himself. To Gannicus it was a matter of staring amaze and jesting filth.

Spartacus slept that last night in Umbria with a soundness of sleep he had little known for months. It was a fresh spring night, blowing from the hills the smell of the wakened earth. Ialo slept by the door of his room, and near dawn stirred at a sound. The Sicel maid Mella had entered the room and crept to where the Strategos lay. Ialo got softly to his feet and drew his gladius and came behind the girl. So he waited for her to raise her arm to stab.

But she made no effort to strike, and when the Thracian saw the look on her face he lowered the gladius, staring at her puzzled. Then he slipped back and made pretence to sleep again; and Mella went out and the dawn came in, and Spartacus awoke.