Spartacus (27 page)

Spartacus looked from one to the other of his tribunes. And they saw he had aged, the blue gloss gone from his tended hair, the skin wrinkled about his eyes, those strange eyes shadowed. But he himself felt strangely little of this ageing, as though, a mirror for them, and no more, he reflected their lives, but in his inner self remained un-old. And he knew that without his leadership the slave-army would tomorrow fall to pieces, at the mercy of the cross and the rack and the whips of the Fugitivarii.

So long was he silent, standing there looking at them, that they moved uneasily under his gaze. For they might not forget him who had ravened like a beast at the death of Crixus – that Spartacus still shadowed their minds, though he was long dead, and the gaze of the Strategos merely one of pity, and, for a moment, a despairing compassion. Then he said:

‘To-morrow we'll march south. Unless Crassus gives us passage we must meet him in the open. Here is the road—'

He traced it with a stick upon the frescoed wall, while the tribunes sat and watched. The fresco chipped and showered in little flakes. The slave-leaders watched the line as it wavered down through the hills to the borders of Lucania.

‘We should reach Rhegium ere the month is out.'

But that night a quiver of apprehension ran through the slave lines, it was Crassus the Lean himself they would face tomorrow, Crassus of whom all had heard. And even in the Bithynian Legion there was fear at that knowledge, as though the small, lean man with the bloated face and the hunger for wealth was staring at each on the slave-block in turn.

Yet with the dawn they took heart, for Spartacus was undefeated and undefeatable, as all knew. They greeted him with shouts as, mounted, he watched them march. All the camp marched out to the south, not merely the desperate cuneus which had pressed north against Mummius the legate.

Judith went no longer in her litter but with the rest of the women who panted in the pace of the Free Legions. She remembered how she had come to that camp and the child that then lived, and the face of Gershom that was now turned from her. The woman who had been in childbirth stumbled with her new-born child, panting into the sweat of the south. Mella tramped with happy, untiring limbs, loaded with the gear that served the Strategos. And a great song arose from all the Free Legions, a song that was sung in the fields of harvest by the harvesting slaves.

Spartacus slowed the march to caution by noon. Then they saw that Crassus would dispute their passage, his army in battle array.

Spartacus disposed his forces, and then flung forward his Bithynians, hitherto undefeated, the terror of the legions.

But they broke and fled before the centre where Crassus himself stood. At that, on the right, the fresh African legions advanced through the arrow-hail of the slave-sagittarii, and fell on the unprepared following of Gannicus. The Germans fled.

As the night fell, Spartacus drew off from the field, his Thracians covering in ordered retreat the rout that streamed outwards, south, from the first defeat the Free Legions had met under the command of the Thracian Gladiator.

V. IN RHEGIUM

The Pirates of Sicily

[i]

LUCANIA and Brittium lay undefended. The slaves straggled southwards through these lands, the Thracians taking upon themselves the brunt of the retreat. Behind, Crassus and the winter followed at their heels.

The news of the slave-defeat was borne to the Senate and from thence abroad all Italy. It reached about all the dun lands of the Mediterranean lying on the edge of harvest, ripe with olives and the fruits of the vine, the tale of the great slave revolt that at last was nearing its end, brought to that end by Crassus the Lean. In Calabria the old slaves of the farms heard the news and shook their heads, knowing that always, till the world ended, there must be masters and slaves. In the mines of far Cyrene came the news, and the slaves, chalk-dusted, whispered it as they strained at back-breaking loads. It reached to Thrace and perhaps in the hills some hunter heard of the end of the great attack on Rome that another hunter had planned.

Meanwhile, cool, watchful, defeated but unrouted, and never before so displaying his generalship, Spartacus moulded the slave flight into ordered retreat; twice, on the march, he turned about and flung the Bithynian Legion into the Roman pursuit, the Bithynians hungering to avenge the disgrace of their cowardice in the face of the Lean. The Roman pursuit slowed down, for Crassus saw that the revolt still endured: in despite that littered field where Kleon the eunuch had seen the second of his hopes of Empire crumble to dust under the wheeling attack of the African legions.

He rode south ahead of the main slave army, two thousand men of the Gaulish legion with him. Coming to Thurii, they found it garrisoned. It refused the slave-demand to open its gates, and Kleon, with a sudden cold rage in his heart, ordered assault upon its walls. It was taken after a day's engagement, the slaves, ferocious with defeat and retreat, clambered upon the walls like madmen, they made of themselves living tortoises that flung a last line of desperate men up on the walls and over them, piling on the spears of the Romans till these had no spear-heads left and must needs take to the gladius, no weapon to use in such desperate encounter. Kleon himself sat on horseback and directed operations: at night Thurii fell and he gave it over to the sack of his Gauls.

Presently it was alight, and the Gauls sought from house to house, cutting the throats of the Masters and driving out the slaves. The women, when caught, were raped ere their throats were also cut; and Kleon, riding to the Forum, heard about him shriek on shriek from the patricians' houses and saw blood trickle from the steps of darkening atria. Then rain fell and put out the gathering fires.

In the darkness such of the inhabitants of Thurii as might fled out into the countryside. The Gauls camped in the city and slept, drunken on wine and lust and blood. Kleon lay down in a house in the Forum, assured that no other city of Lucania or Brittium would now resist without heed the passage of the slave-army.

In the morning the Gauls awoke and turned in beds where women shivered and wept, or lay still with knives in their breasts. And a great weariness with lust and slaughter came on the Gauls, and with it a sickened disgust for the Masters, their houses, and their women. They flocked out into the streets and yawned, idle and fed, and curious for sport.

In the centre of the patricians' quarter the house of the Governor had resisted until nearly dawn. Now it was taken, the Governor killed, and his women apportioned among apathetic Gauls who stripped and robbed them, and then bade them go. But one of the women was the Governor's bride, newly wed, and the tale went round among the slave soldiers that her bridal was as yet unconsummated. Immediately, in a shout of laughter, she was seized in a score of rough hands, disrobing her, a tall, dark girl: when a drunken tribune cried a better plan.

‘What of our leader, the little Greek? Not his fault that he lacks the means – he's the suitable groom for the Governor's wife! The woman to Kleon!'

It caught at the humour of the slaves. They had the Governor's wife dragged through the streets to the house where Kleon sat: and had her sent in with the tribune's message. She was stripped and stood before him, young and frightened and proud, dark, and he saw in her eyes things he had seen too often to have compassion for them. And he heard the cruel jest with which she was delivered, and was unmoved by that as well.

The woman saw a man, thin and tall, with a face that held nameless memories: a cold face, alien in its inhumanity. Then she understood the purport of the jest, and reddened darkly upon her pallor. The man was a eunuch.

‘What is your name?' Kleon asked, and remembered how long before he had asked that of another Roman woman, Lavinia.

She answered ‘Puculla', staring at him, her hands trembling. And then a strange thing happened. The fear seemed to fade from her eyes. They looked at each other a long moment, with the Gauls crowding in the doorway to watch. Kleon turned to them, passionlessly.

‘I thank you. I'll heed to the woman.'

[ii]

The slave forces retreated slowly up through Brittium. Spartacus saw the scene with both his own eyes and those of Crassus the Lean. For himself, Brittium was the road to Rhegium and Sicily. For Crassus it was a cage in which to hem the slaves till fresh legions could be brought or raised against them: or they starved into submission. To attain Sicily the slaves would need ships. If they did not attain it –

He gave orders to strip the country in their southward march. So it was done. Trees were cut down and sawn and dragged in the rear of the army in the Gaulish waggons. Anvils and all iron things were taken from the smithies. Harvests were stripped as by locust-plagues. Herds were raided and driven together, a sea of tossing horns and humps, flowing in advance of the slave-retreat. So, more like a nation in transit than a moving army, the slaves came to the Rhegine neck and passed it.

But there Spartacus left forces on guard, Gershom and Castus with their legions; and himself pressed down to the seacoast with Kleon and Gannicus.

It was late autumn. The sea flung long hands up on the land, there were vine-lands through which the army passed where the slaves rested and slaked their thirst, crushing the grapes on their lips in a strange, tender ecstasy. Here in Rhegium the slaves now rose, and would have massacred the Masters, but that Spartacus forbade it. And he directed that no granaries or houses be destroyed, nor women unwilling be taken to the beds of the slaves. Then Ialo found him an empty house in the city that looked on the Messine Straits, and he set to reorganizing the slave-hosts for the coming invasion of Sicily.

All shipping had fled, and for hope of transport they must negotiate with the pirates of Sicily. This task was deputed to Kleon. But here, in the sound of the sea, a strange restlessness seized the Greek. Like a ghost long void of hearing and taste, yet remembering a sound and a scent, he would wander the shores night after night, smelling the sea and looking up at the coming of the stars in the quiet of the Rhegine nights. Then he would return to his room where the woman Puculla awaited him, with downcast eyes and silent lips.

And a strange relationship flowered between them, dimming his hate of the Roman and Italian name, his bitter memories – her loathing of a slave as an animal with whom no patrician might consort. At first, while Kleon slept, she would shudder at the thought that he was no man, one mutilated beyond manhood, with no lust of men that might injure her. And hate had come in her heart, unaccountably, at that thought; then it passed. In the days that now were come her eyes lost hate and fear alike, looking on the eunuch her master.

And Kleon, women-hated, women-hater, stirred to a strange, queer pity as he looked at his slave. In their third week in Rhegium, while still they awaited the coming of the pirates and their ships from Sicily, he told her she was free, she would be passed beyond the slave lines and the Romans receive her, for she had come to no harm. She bent her head and thanked him, and went soft and barefooted from his room. And Kleon stared after her with cold, green eyes, and sighed at himself – what was the woman to him, he to any woman?

On the next night he had her mounted on a Rhegine pony and himself rode with her up to the Rhegine neck, through the guarding lines of the Bithynian legion. Beyond, far in the night, were the watch-fires of the Masters. And they rode together and did not speak, and a strange peace was with them, they had laid aside master and slave. And Puculla said, gently:

‘I'd have had such as you to share my bed in other times, and my children as well, O Kleon!'

And Kleon said: ‘And I'd have had you, for the delight of you, and your gentle heart. But this is not to be.'

And she wept, and they kissed one the other; and Kleon saluted her and they said vale, and she rode away. And she came back again and they kissed again – with a ghost of passion, the mutilated slave; with a hungry horror and pity and a weeping tenderness, the Roman woman. Then she went out of his life, he never saw her again, he went back to the Messine town. But he went back strangely altered. For that dull hopelessness that had come on him with the failure of the March on Rome now passed. And with it there passed, more ancient, he had thought it life-enduring, that frozen hate that had girdled his heart since the morning he had ceased to be a man.

[iii]

He plunged into reorganizing the slave army with a skill and fire that moved the Strategos to a look of wonder.

‘You sleep seldom these hours, Kleon.'

The Greek laughed at himself. ‘It's because Sicily's so near, no doubt – Sicily and Syracuse. It was there that Plato went to found the New Republic.'

Of that the Thracian knew nothing, till Kleon told him the tale. The great slave laughed.

‘I'd have liked to have known your Plato. Is he dead?'

‘Many years ago.'

‘Had he slaves? There were slaves in this Republic he planned?'

Kleon looked away. ‘There were slaves.'

‘Then he was only as the other Masters. I know nothing of the histories or plans of men, but there'll never be peace or the State unshaken, with women suckling their children at peace and men at work in the fields with quiet hearts, but that slave and master alike is unknown in the land. These slaves we lead – would they be better Masters than those we go to supplant in Sicily?'

‘They would be no worse.'

‘And it would come to the same. If ever we build our slave state, there'll be no slaves in it at all.'

The Greek was fired by that vision a moment. ‘We could do it in Syracuse – if we kept but strong enough, lived long enough, you and I.'

The great slave-general laughed again, but hardly. ‘It is only the slaves themselves that can do that. Not you or I alone. We are here to lead. We pass. But they endure.'

And Kleon went back to his own lodging with a strange twist to his thoughts. Would ever a time come when men were so? Would ever return that Golden Age of which Hiketas had dreamed, men hunting and living untrammelled and free, ere Cronos spun the wheels of Time? Would ever again the men of the Golden Age stir in the blind, dull hearts of the great slave-hordes? Till Puculla and Kleon and Titul might yet be one?