Spartacus (26 page)

Yet he did not return. A Negro swore over his brother wounded in a skirmish of the retreat from Rome, and shook him, and then laid him down with a groan. The blind brother cried after him, as the Negro stumbled into his rank, not looking back.

The bucinae were sounding March – all march.

Three German brothers roused in a pit they had dug to shelter them from the dews. They groped for arms and armour in the dark. One said, ‘March! Gods, to Germany, let's hope!' And another panted, ‘Not to Rome, anyhow, whatever the Thracian says.' And the third said, ‘Gannicus'll see to that.'

Gershom ben Sanballat hurried from the villa and gained the quarters of the Bithynian legion just as the bucina sounded. In his tent Judith slept with the child, appeased with exhaustion if not with milk. He stared down at them and then shook them awake.

‘We march. The Free Legions are caught between two armies of the Masters. It is cuneus order.'

She had heard of that order before. She caught his sleeve. ‘But not for the wife of a tribune?'

‘We take no women or baggage.'

She wrung her hands, staring at the child. Gershom's face seemed frozen as he girded on his sword. Then a quietness came on Judith. She rose and helped him, and they stared at each other. Then he took her and kissed her, and did not look at the child; and ran from his tent, cursing the Bithynians to haste as the bucina roared again.

The wolves lairing up in the hills heard it and growled and turned in sleep. The Roman velites heard it in the south, and stirred from sleep and stared at the winking watch-fires of the slaves, and turned to sleep again.

The morning came winged over Italy. The cities left in the wake of the slave-passing stirred to a furtive half-life. In the ruined fields and plantations the birds were crying from a dimness now shot and sprayed with the stippled arrow-hail of the sun. A low wind blew from Campania.

The Roman velites rode north till they came to a hill, and looked down on the camp of the slaves around the abandoned villa. It seemed as on the day before. There was nothing to report back to the main army where Crassus the Lean was now stirring from sleep.

Since the failure of the attack on Rome, it was now plain to the provincial praetor that the end of the slave-revolt was imminent. He could wait for the Spartacist army to disintegrate, and destroy it at his leisure. It would never advance on Rome again; if it marched south, he could hold it; if it retreated to the north Mummius would fall back in front of it, as instructed, giving battle under no circumstances but extreme necessity.

The slave-revolt was near its end.

The provincial praetor, the Dives, the Lean, sat waiting for news from the velites. But none came. At noon he sent a centurion of the Eighteenth legion to report on the appearance of the slave camp. The centurion was a grizzled Lucanian. Coming up with the velites who watched the camp of the Spartacists he looked across the ochre shimmer of the day at the palisaded dykes; then he rode his horse three stadia nearer.

And then he knew what trick the Spartacists had played.

He returned to the velites, cursing them.

‘Send to Crassus at once. The slaves escaped during the night. They have left only their baggage and women.'

When Crassus heard this, the face of the Dives went livid with anger. He commanded that the hundred men of the velites be decimated. Then the whole army stirred at the shouted orders of the tribunes and marched north on the slave-camp.

All day the women in that camp had watched stupefied the dark hovering of the Roman scouts to the south. Now they saw that the end had come. And some were glad, wearied of this life of travail up and down the Italian roads, rain in their faces, fear in their hearts, their food the leavings of hungry men. Better all ended: and for most their Gods had no terror of after-life for slaves and the simple, only death and long rest, long rest. But there were still other women of the slave-host, young, who looked at the nearing army of the Masters with hope and not fear in their hearts. Surely they would be spared, they were still young and fair, too fair for the cross; and the bed of a legionary better far than the bed of a rebel slave. And they washed their bodies and braided their hair and waited with trembling lips.

But the woman Judith watched that approach, she and a little Jewish maid; and they looked at each other and then at the child, drooling and wailing for lack of milk. And Judith knew it must be the child first.

So she took a cloth and held it over the child's face, firmly, till the limbs ceased to kick; and there came a strange heat from the small face, though her own body was set with beads of frozen sweat. And then the maid plucked at her dress.

‘Look, they are coming from the north as well!'

Out of the north were coming more Romans. But it was a flying retreat of disordered horse.

[iii]

In the pace of the short trot, as near as half-trained men might come to the step of the Roman legionary, the slave army had moved north through the mists of dawn. Spartacus rode in the van, Kleon beside him, Gannicus a little in the rear. They had made their plans at the council over-night when Titul brought back the news of Mummius halted in Picenum with his two legions. Now the Thracian pondered the alternatives if these plans failed.

Once, speaking to the tribunes who rode about him, he glanced back at that hasting march of the slaves, and his heart rose high and glad. Kleon saw the Strategos fling back his great head with the clouded, wild eyes; and a queer pain held the cold heart of the eunuch for a moment. This slave who led them, whom some strange God had gifted with leadership – how he changed and altered, he whom the Italian lands knew only as the ruthless, sure Spartacus! And he thought how perhaps a time would come when historians told of this revolt, and figure the Thracian as a wild barbarian, sure of himself if dim of plan. While instead –

‘The Bithynian and German legions will march on the village where Mummius lies. But at sight of Mummius' camp they'll pretend to fall into confusion. Gershom and Gannicus will draw them back and appear to make hasty entrenchments, with stragglers stealing away to the hills. Meanwhile Castus and I will hold round this hill of which Titul talked and take Mummius in the rear.'

‘And if he fails to come out and attack us?' asked the Jew.

‘Then I'll fall on him and force him from the village. See to your men.'

Gershom ben Sanballat fell back to his legion, his Bithynians staring at him eagerly. But he rode with a twisted heart and mind: once he half halted to order his legion to turn back and save the camp and Judith. They would obey him, so readily! He could yet save the woman and his son, march on the seacoast, and capture those ships that troubled his dreams.

His major tribune, a little Syrian, ran to his stirrup and trotted there. ‘Is it fighting?'

Gershom growled at him. ‘No, no, we go for milk baths to Picenum, a land of milk. Pfu!'

The little tribune grinned, and ran by his side. In swinging strides the Gauls kept the pace. The cavalry fanned out northwards. Fanged with spears, the shining march of the slaves advanced. By noon it was not ten stadia from the village where Mummius lay.

Here Spartacus divided his forces and marched north-westwards on detour, taking with him Castus, Oenomaus, and Kleon the eunuch. Gershom and Gannicus eyed each other. Gershom curled a thick, sardonic lip.

‘No doubt you'd prefer to take command?'

‘That's well. Now I'll show you leadership, Bithynian.'

‘That's well, Scythian. I'll watch.'

‘I am no Scythian.'

‘I am no Bithynian.'

It was an ill beginning. The legions straggled undecidedly, the Germans fingering their slings, the Bithynians their swords, the velites a straying pack. Gershom fell back on his legion, composedly combing his beard. Gannicus sent after him a message that the Bithynians were to take the van.

‘This is leadership,' Gershom growled to his tribune, ‘the essence of leadership.'

‘What?' the little slave tribune asked.

‘To see that another's throat is slit in preference to your own,' the Jew answered. ‘As doubtlessly the divine Plato said – but of him you never heard.'

Nevertheless, he took the van with his legion. The velites straggled intentionally now, at Gershom's order, with the appearance of scouts who had little fear of finding an enemy. They passed by the field where the ten chained slaves had watched the Gauls of Titul slay the overseer. Ten shapes lay very quiet there now: already the spot was a-caw and a-crow with ravens. Gershom glanced at it indifferently, and then turned his eyes on the ochre limning of the little wood where Titul and his company had spied on Mummius' men.

So, about the time of sunset, they came in sight of the village where the legate of Crassus the Lean sat staring moodily up at that hill. A young man and haughty, he was hated by his tribunes. Nevertheless, they feared him, as did Crassus, for it was whispered that the Vestal herself protected him, and shared his bed on occasion as well. A slave brought him wine, passing under the place where Brennus hung on the cross. The legate asked what had happened to the spy.

The slave told him the spy was dead.

Mummius drank his wine, watching the dying day. Then he looked up at the wooded knoll again, and there saw halted and staring a great concourse of armed men. For a moment he regarded them unbelievingly, then leaped to his feet and cursed and shouted for the bucinators to sound.

At the orders of a great, black-bearded leader on a heavy horse, Mummius could see the armed slave-rabble falling back in apparent confusion. His blood raced at the sight and he forgot the orders of Crassus. Calling for his horse, he determined to attack the slaves.

They camped and began to throw up hasty entrenchments. But fear was evidently upon them. From the skirts of the camp Mummius could see small bands stealing away to the hills. He resolved to assault the half-made camp forthwith, and addressed his men. They answered with stern shouts, and brandished their swords.

Mummius forthwith led them against the enemy. With his cavalry he attacked from the south, almost veering into the line of march on which the slaves had come. But the legions he commanded to attack the slave-camp frontally, and this they did under a hail of arrows from the slave sagittarii.

For a time the fighting was bloody and indecisive. Then the Romans heard a shouting in the village and looked back and saw there, sweeping round the northern hills at a slow, untiring trot, the Thracian Legion of the slaves, well-known now for their Greek helmets and tunics. For the Thracian arrogated to themselves the Greek name in the rebellion and took upon themselves the avenging of wrongs suffered by Greece at the hands of Rome.

Mummius, at the head of his cavalry, heard nothing of the shouts, seeking the weakest place in the slave defences. Into this, at last found, his cavalry rode, opposed by kneeling ranks of slave-pikemen. Yet scarcely had they engaged than a sweating centurion from the Roman legions was at Mummius' stirrup.

‘Legate – SPARTACUS!'

Mummius looked back and down the hill in the fading light. There he saw his legions half faced about to meet the wild forfex attack of a new slave army – not the customary wedge attack of the Spartacists, but one in shape like the closing claws of a crab.

Caught in this claw as darkness fell, the Romans broke and fled, such of them as the slaves did not hew down. Spartacus took no prisoners. Mummius himself rode hard to the south, almost riding into the camp where the slave-women and baggage had been left. But he and the rest of the cavalry rout swerved aside from that, the slave horse at their heels, and so came on the halted lines of Crassus.

The provincial praetor retreated and entrenched himself strongly, showering Mummius with abuse and ordering the decimation of such of his following as straggled in during the night. Meantime, as the last of the light went, the slave legions came marching back and reoccupied their camp, miraculously saved from the Roman advance.

Quiet came down on the hasting events of the day. The Gaul woman laboured in the pangs of birth, delirious, her man dead in the forfex charge by the fringe of the little wood where Titul had waited. The Negro found his brother and embraced him. The two German brothers lay on the earth and keened the death-song for that other who had perished under the hooves of Mummius' horsemen.

Gershom ben Sanballat went to his tent.

[iv]

Reinforcements poured down from Rome to the army of Crassus the Lean, for at length the senate had recalled the legions from Africa. Daily the provincial praetor sent out his velites to reconnoitre the slave camp. The weather was now white-hot in the plains, waving its mists down over Campania. In the noon hours it grew so sultry that only Italians or Africans might bear it, peering into the shimmer of the sunhaze.

In the slave camp Spartacus had set the Free Legions to regrinding the poor iron of their swords, to raiding the surrounding regions for cattle, and to making sandals from the hides so procured. Foreseeing a long march in these preparations, the slaves sang. The Germans set the horns of the cattle on their helmets, hoping in this way to add terror to their appearance. The Gauls hung on their shields the tufted tails of the bulls, and the women fed on the meat for the moment so abundant. In the deserted villa Spartacus assembled his tribunes and outlined his plan.

‘We'll march south to Rhegium, seize ships or charter them, and cross into Sicily.'

Kleon said indifferently that this plan might as well be attempted as any other. He sat and stared with cold, pale eyes into the sunhaze, and would say no more.

Gannicus growled that they should retreat again into the north. But he knew while he said the words that his plan would find no hearing.

Castus looked at the Thracian with eyes of love and said nothing.

Gershom ben Sanballat pulled at his beard. ‘So we fight again for a New Republic – but this time in Sicily. It'll fail again, Strategos. Let us scatter now to the northern ports and seize ships, each to his own country. We are faced by now with the unwearied legions from Africa, led by one with the heart of a hungry sow in an orchard. Crassus the Lean is no mincing consul or swashbuckling legate.'