A Mixture of Madness, Book II of The Bow of Heaven (62 page)

•••

Gods my breath does not come easy.

How many hours?
Eleven? Twelve? It has to be less than twelve. Two more guard changes after this. Pins and needles shooting through my fingers. Making fists only makes it worse.

Tired. Sagging. Lift up. Pull
up. Breathe out.

Must be a
full moon rising behind me. The ground is turning ghost blue. My tongue rolls over the vials like a lover. It is difficult, very difficult—not to keep from biting down on them, but to keep from swallowing them whole. My arms burn. My insides ache. I am soaked with sweat.

What are they doing down there? Laughing, gambling. Good for them.

Breathe. Take one more step toward dying.

I must devise
a regimen of exercise. Hang with feet draped on foot rest. Count to twenty. Up on the balls of your feet. Pull up with your arms. Exhale. Take five normal breaths. Let them laugh at you. Shake the stiffness from arms and neck as best as you can. Repeat. Repeat. Repeat…

S
omething crumples in my right thigh. There is a twisting, grabbing pain clawing at my leg! A cramp, its black heart the muscle torn by Sulla’s archer. A wound received on the first day of my employment with the house of Crassus come to haunt me on my last.

My left leg
will have to do the work of two. Will have to…

Hours or only moments
have passed; it could be either. My breathing is so shallow I am panting like a bird. I must rise up to breathe freely—grip the ropes with the tips of my fingers, pull down with my forearms and ignore the rope burns, contract the spent shoulder muscles one more time and push up on the ball of my left foot. There. I look at the darkened city beyond the curling smoke of the spent campfire around which three legionaries sleep; the fourth sits with his back to me, poking at the embers with a stick. A few seconds is all I can stand, then down I slump as slowly as I can, my torso twisting back into its contorted lassitude—constricting my lungs with the weight of my body while my muscles cramp and my shoulders scream.

I am puzzled by a question that hangs before my closing eyes, prying them open long enough to wonder why I am asking it.

Why did Crassus condemn me to this torture, to the one form of Roman execution that is not instantaneous?

•••

I am still crucified, but the cross is on the Via Appia just outside Capua. As far as the eye can see other crosses line the way, two facing each other every hundred feet. They are all skeletons, or mostly so. I had been to the city several times on errands for
dominus
, but it had never looked as dingy and drained of color as this. The sky presses low and dark; clouds move swiftly past, escaping the sight and the stink. The crows don’t seem to mind, though. Several sit on the beam above my outstretched arms, what is left of them, picking every now and then at a remnant with lackluster enthusiasm. The wind whistles low and tuneless through our bones. Thunder rumbles in the distance. There is no pain, so either I have died or I am dreaming. I think about it a moment, but can not decide, considering the landscape before my—whatever I am using for eyes, which possibility I hope to be true.

The corpse directly opposite me
picks up its head and speaks. It has to raise its voice to be heard over the wind and the width of the wide road between us. “Why would you serve a man like that?” it asks.

I recognize
him at once. “Your body was never found. You should not be hanging here.”

Spartacus laughs.
“Name one who does deserves this death. Not you, surely. Not me. Yet here we are. You found me. You have succeeded where others have failed.”

“I shall count it, then, among
my very few accomplishments. What do you mean, ‘a man like that?’ You know nothing of Marcus Crassus.”

“I know enough.
I know he killed 70,000 innocent people. I know you are defending him this very moment, even after he has had you killed.”

“
Innocent? Who among us is innocent? Not all of us are as handy with a
gladius
as you. You did the best you could. We both failed.”

“You compare yourself to me?”

“Never. I led no uprising. You used a sword. I wrote letters.”

“You could have
poisoned him in his sleep.”

“No.
I would have saved him from himself had I been able.”

“Then you’re a fool, and deserve your fate.”

“I could not kill a man I once thought of as my friend, if only to myself.”

“
That’s right, because between the two of you, you would have been the only one to think it. Look what your ‘friend’ did to my people.” He turns his head from side to side. “All I wanted to do was lead them to freedom. And he slaughtered us.”

“
Blame Crassus if you must. But if not Crassus, then Pompeius, and if not Pompeius, then Caesar, or a dozen other generals, as many as it would take.
Rome
would have kept coming until the task was done. Rome was wrong, Crassus was wrong, but until you have spent thirty-two years with the man, lived his life with him, become closer than any brother, do not be so quick to condemn him.”

“And
be sure to wash between his toes when he demands it.”

“
I was his slave, and that is my misfortune. But Crassus was a great man, once. Now he has become misguided. I mourn for him.”

“
She is beautiful,” Spartacus says. “You made the wrong choice.”

I had been looking off into the hills, but
as the dead gladiator makes that pronouncement, I turn toward him again to say, “Why do you—” He is gone. Squawking and complaining, the crows are flapping away in fear of his replacement. In the middle of the Via Appia stands Marcus Crassus astride Eurysaces, his giant black mount snorting and pawing at the paving stones with impatience, anxious to be moving away from this place. The general wears the armor and weapons lady Tertulla had given him before his departure from Rome.

“Wh
o were you talking to?” he asks.

“The slave
, Spartacus.”

“Hmph. A shame. I would have enjoyed a word with him.”

“I am almost certain it would not have been mutually relished.” We appraise each other in silence. Eurysaces stamps his hoof. “Well,” I say, “you finally got me where you wanted me.”

“You put yourself up there, not I.”
Crassus looks behind me as if searching for something. I cannot afford such luxury of movement.

“You are a cruel
, heartless, hate-filled shell of a man.”

“Alexander!”

“What perversity to kill me thus. Whatever there was between us is gone.”

“It saddens me to hear
you say so.”

“
Where has noble Crassus gone? Do you remember that man? Gods, but you were a paragon! In the beginning, after I stopped hating you, it wasn’t long before I actually began to revere you. How could that be? You were decent, a man of character—I was baffled.”

“
It is always disorienting when one begins service in a new house.” Crassus rises in his saddle and peers off into the distance.

“Am I keeping you from something?”

“Of course not. Do continue.”

“
‘Service.’ At this point in our lives can we not call it what it is?”

“All right. Slavery. You were my slave. What of it? You had money, power, respect, comfort, even love. How many free men can claim as much?”

“That is true. You make a fine argument for the condition. If only every slave had the opportunity to rise as high as I; if only every master could be as kind as you.

“
A slave, even a slave like me, has but one choice:  obey, or die. Either way, whoever that man was before—vanishes. He becomes something new. But what? For me, in order to survive as another man’s property, the only way I could make sense of it and remain sane was to take my identity from you. Don’t you see, Marcus, I have always been defined by you—it was your essential goodness that allowed me to live in this abhorrent state.”

“Deliriousness
,” Crassus admonishes, “is no excuse for familiarity.”

I ignored him—what more could he do to me?
“I became a reflection of you—instantaneous justification for living one day to the next. I had become a slave, but the man I served was honorable. I could be just and noble because Crassus was just and noble. I could become wealthy, fall in love, start a family, all because my world existed inside the universe of Crassus, and Crassus was good.”

“
So you have reconciled yourself to this,” he said, pointing at the endless geometry of crosses curving into the distance.

“
You did what you had to do. But even that foul necessity is not as heinous as what you are about to do now.”

“Why is that?”

“You believed your war against Spartacus was for the good of Rome. You don’t give a fig for Rome now—you will instigate this war with Parthia, risk tens of thousands of lives, disrupt hundreds of thousands of families who will pay the price for generations—for spite, for the lost virility you think you should have found on that night, for the chance to take your vengeance upon one man. You have lost your way, Crassus. If
you
are lost, then I am lost.”

“You are taking this very personally.”

“I thought there might yet be some hope of redemption, because
domina
still stood by your side. Do this, and you will no longer be deserving of a woman like the lady Tertulla. You were a man of honor, a statesman. Now look at you. Do you know what you have become? A Roman. How disappointing.”

“
I, too,” Crassus said, nodding ever so slightly, “have very much enjoyed your company over the years, but that is not why I have come. Prepare yourself. As for the rest, I do what I must, but I did what I could.”

“I do not
understand.”

“Breathe. Take
one more step toward living.”

“What
?”

“Wake up. It i
s almost time.”

•••

A spasm in my stomach jerks me forward, cracking my shoulders and setting the muscles of my chest on fire. My feet fly off the foot rest; all my weight is being carried by my arms. I am flailing about like a torn sail. I inhale in short gasps but I cannot seem to let it out. My left ankle slams into the foot rest but I am grateful for that little agony, a beacon to guide me up and onto the flat surface. There—I push off on the ball of my left foot, my arms almost useless.

M
y chest cavity releases my lungs from its grip and I am free to exhale. I have no idea how long I have hung in this place, or what guards amuse themselves below. My left thigh burns and I know my calf will cramp at any moment. I need not worry, for the foot rest fails before I do, splitting in half and setting my body free to be wrenched back by my arms. This is more than I can bear, but my body goes on struggling without me. Down the hill a voice says, “That’s it for him, then.” My knees bend, my feet and back press upon the post, pushing, pushing up against the rough wood. Two things, however, are now as clear as the tear that hangs on my eyelash, refusing to fall:  the first is that I can no longer feel the glass vials in my mouth; the second is that I will never last to see the sunrise.

•••

There are some predicaments from which the mind, once it has been exercised in misuse, even though it bring all its powers of reason and logic to bear on the thorny snare that entangled it in the first place, simply cannot escape. Cause will have its effect.

Epilog

19 BCE   -   Winter, Siphnos, Greece

Year of the consulship of

Quintus Lucretius Vespillo and Gaius Sentius Saturninus

You will not be surprised to learn that I did not perish upon
that cruel wood, and may have some interest in the circumstances leading up to my rescue and consequent escape. I have but a hazy memory of the former, and none at all of the latter—I must combine my own memory’s etchings with the version accorded me by my savior.

I suffered greatly that night, but to my unending shame, I made Livia suffer more. Looking back to that wretched time with the perspective of another thirty-seven years, I see a fool blinded by his own pompous, self-justifying rhetoric, a sagacious and perceptive shade by the name of Spartacus, and a lord of Rome who paused in the making of the means of his own destruction to help a man he would, but could not call “friend.”

I shall tell you what I can, but first I require a brief nap, for in this heat, my thoughts, rather than marching in orderly fashion like the line of ants that now stream in single file along the terrace wall with blind determination, are like a rabble of copper butterflies startled from a field of campanula, flying this way and that, with no…

•••

The thwack of the ladder against the back of the crossbeam brings me out of my semi-conscious stupor with a thrill of agony. Instinct and pools of strength kept secret even from myself push and pull me up to work at the air with my crumpled bellows, my cheeks inflating each time I send a befouled breath out into the darkness. It is the last deep of the night, that hour when dawn’s nearness may be smelled and heard, but not seen. Behind me, a legionary takes each complaining step with caution, either to minimize the jarring of his movements, or to guard against spilling his precious charge. I peel my tongue from the roof of my mouth in preparation to receive the balm of water which he carries. This time there will be no brave declination. I shall take what is offered. I have no wish to extend my misery, though that will surely be the result. I am beyond caring. It is the sensation I crave—the slippery invasion of liquid, its coolness, the oppositeness of the hardening concrete which has become the interior of my mouth. I anticipate the wetness on my lips, the drops that will fall to run down my broken chest, the clean taste of life that my body must have, that it demands, overriding any argument my shriveled mind might make to refuse it. In my delirium, I believe that I can smell it.