Spartacus (11 page)

It was as though a dark cloud fell over the sun of their victory. All stared, Spartacus now silent, with strange, glazed look and heaving breast. Then they turned their gaze to the giant stallion which stood shivering beside him. Its nostrils were still in the grasp of his great fingers, and as the general of the slave-host groaned, his knuckles whitened and the stallion groaned beside him. And, because of that terrifying sound and sight, the slaves drew away from their prey, staring at man and stallion. Slowly his grasp relaxed and the Gladiator looked up in the eyes of the great beast he had held. Those near at hand cried out to Spartacus to beware, but he did not move, staring at the stallion. It heaved its head and snorted, and snorted with quivering nostrils between its knees till its white knees were spattered with a bloody foam. Then it raised its head and slowly, hesitatingly, made a step towards the Gladiator. The leader of the slave-horde had found a mount.

[iv]

By mid-afternoon the slaves had marched away, all marching in ordered companies in imitation of the iron-clad Gladiators. Laden with weapons and armour, they marched with great carrion-birds already a cloud overhead. The Roman dead were left unburied, the Roman wounded that survived unharmed. But the dead of the slaves Spartacus buried in a great mound; thereon was heaped a pile of stones and at the foot the fragments of the broken aquila strewn for a memory. Into far years that cairn survived, long after the name of the battle was lost, and all that they did and suffered there.

At nightfall Varinus' legion came up and heard the news from such of the wounded as still lived. Thereat Varinus cursed coldly his dead legate, Furius, with regret that he had not lived to meet torment in the hands of the Gladiators or the mines-slaves. Then he desecrated the mound of the slaves, left his wounded to care for themselves, and pressed on all that evening in pursuit of Spartacus.

But he was too late to come up with the horde that had routed Furius. By the falling of dusk, in sight of the marsh, he was aware of lines of entrenchments and the burning of watch fires. The slave-leader had left behind him the Gauls to entrench the camp while he fell on Furius.

Cursing, Varinus gave orders to camp for the night. The legionaries dug hasty earthworks against a surprise attack, then lay down and slept in weariness under the deepening frosts of Spring.

And at length it drew near to dawn.

[v]

A figure muffled in a grey abolla came hastening through the dimness, passed a watch-fire and stood by the side of Kleon. The eunuch leaned on his pilum and looked towards the Roman camp. As the muffled figure approached he turned round indifferently.

‘Time?'

‘The horses are waiting. Come.'

They passed through the camp together, skirted the edge of the marsh, crossed the last line of entrenchments, and came to a thicket. Here three great horses were tethered, Roman horses from the rout of Furius' half-legion. They stood with bent heads in the darkness. Kleon groped to an unaccustomed saddle. The muffled figure, hand on the saddle of another horse, made a gesture.

‘Not yet. He's waiting the light.'

The eunuch looked up at the sky. His head ached under the weight of his helmet and the effect of the stifling marsh air. But now, faint, a ghostly whisper, he was aware of a little wind that arose. The reeds sighed underbreath, moved by the God, and the thicket shook beside the horses. In the east a dull pallor overmantled the sky.

The night was lightening; and with a feebler glare burned the fires. Kleon and the other looked back on the slave encampment.

It was completely deserted.

Yet not quite. As they looked they could hear the ringing tread of one who wore greaves and carried armour. Then, against the Roman camp and the reflection of the dawn on the dark western horizon, across the deserted lines of the slave-horde, they saw a great figure pass and vanish into shadows. Kleon shivered, for the cold bit into his bones. Why ever had he volunteered this wearying watch?

Then he felt against his breast the crinkle of the roll of
The Republic,
and smiled with a chill amusement for his plan.

Beyond the thicket rose a sleepy cheeping of birds.

The footsteps of the giant figure drew near. Now he himself was at hand and the horses pricked startled heads. Kleon soothed them and was aware of a giant pair of hands reaching for a bridle.

‘Don't mount yet. Walk the horses softly.'

Hand beside the moist mouth of his beast, Kleon led the way. Each crunched twig underhoof seemed to him thunder-loud. The dead reeds swished as they passed. Far off in the east a wolf howled.

They held along the south border of the marsh, till the darkened water lay entirely between them and the Roman camp. Then the giant spoke:

‘It will soon be light. Ride.'

Now the eastern sky was stippled in crimson. Mounting, the three looked back. The watch-fires of the slave-camp had died to a smouldering glow where all night the three had paced to give the illusion of an army still camped there.

Kleon yawned.

‘Vale, Varinus!'

Then the three of them rode south.

South to Lucania

[i]

ALL that morning they rode, while the light paled and grew and was touched with gold; and the sun, unseen, crept up behind the bastion of the eastern mountains. They passed down wild and deserted valleys, skirted long necks of swamp, rode soft with muffled bridles by villages and great farms. Ever the sky brightened and presently the sun was on them, and the white hoar under-hoof began to thaw. A thin mist rolled over the Campanian land. The eunuch hung wearied in his saddle, but the other two pressed on untiring.

Still holding south, they held by the banks of a river for many pace miles, on a ragged via terrena fringed with rushes. Once or twice they sighted boats: once, in a forest clearing a gang of slaves at work. Still they rode undetected.

Sleep came and went before the eyes of Kleon. Now and again he would jerk to a vague wakefulness: once dreamt himself again at sea with the pirate ships of Thoritos. In a clear moment he spoke to the others.

‘We've surely missed the track. They cannot have passed this way.'

The giant eased the pace of his horse, a great white stallion. He turned his face. It was the Gladiator Spartacus.

‘They passed this way.' He rode for a little looking at the track they followed. ‘See.'

Kleon for a moment saw something in the path ere his horse was beyond it. Then weariness fogged his eyes, sick of the jest and the plan he had planned.

‘What was it?'

The third rider, still muffled in abolla, answered him:

‘A slinger's pellet.'

The speaker pushed back the hood of the abolla then, for the day promised heat. It showed the young-old face of Elpinice, weariness-pinched, her gaze on the riding Gladiator.

The three rode south.

The slave-horde had passed that way. But at legionary's pace they must have passed, for there was no sign of them. They had set out silently as soon as night fell, under the leadership of Castus and Gannicus and Crixus, with the little company of Eastern men commanded by the Jew ben Sanballat. The three had remained behind to patrol the watch-fires and deceive the watching Romans.

Few of the slaves, stealing away in the darkness in long files, realized that they left the Strategos himself behind. Several of the leaders even did not know. Some said two Italian shepherds, men well acquainted with the country, remained. But Elpinice was the second, and Kleon, moved by the plan of his humour, the third. Riding now, he cursed that impulse. Would they never halt?

Yet this at last they did, at an open and deserted horreum, away from the river track and with the Lucanian mountains looming in view. Beyond the horreum itself, through a fence of osiers, the steadings of a farm loomed. Though no smoke arose and it also seemed deserted, they did not approach. Instead, Spartacus hobbled the horses in the shelter of the overhanging eaves of the building; Elpinice disappeared. Kleon staggered inside.

The floor was thick with the chaff-winnowings of many a harvest. In one corner mouldered a heap of straw. To the Greek eunuch it seemed he would never reach that straw. Lying on it, it seemed he had slept but a moment when a hand shook him.

‘Time to ride south again.'

[ii]

He rose and followed the Gladiator out of doors. The sun was again low in the sky. The great white stallion stood tail-switching, snuffling at the necks of the other horses. Elpinice squatted near. In front of her was a heap of olives and a goat-milk cheese, at which she hacked with the dagger that had cut the tribune's throat. She pushed a handful of olives towards the eunuch.

‘Where did you get the food?' he asked.

‘At the farm while you slept. It is deserted, so I stole the cheese and olives.'

Kleon looked at her in cold puzzlement. ‘Didn't you also sleep?'

‘Like the dead – after Spartacus awoke.'

The Gladiator stood unhelmeted by the open door, staring into the sunset peace with his dark, blank eyes. The wind moved the strands of his great beard. The stallion ceased to snuffle at the necks of the other horses and thrust its muzzle into the hand of its new master. Spartacus did not move. And to the woman who looked at him there came back again a memory of those faces in stone on the terraces of the Violet City. She ceased to eat, sitting still and clasping her knees.

The eunuch glanced from one to the other – the slave bed-woman of a lanista and the taciturn Thracian savage. And for a moment a cold wonder held him. How had these two come to free and lead the Gladiators, to gather about them the beginnings of the slave-revolt? How came this savage to show the generalship he had done in two battles? And he remembered the saying of the Jew ben Sanballat that the ordering of these battles was the ordering of a hunter planning a battle, their success the success of surprise against known tactics in marshalling a battle. How long would these successes continue with the half-armed rout that already called itself Legio Libera – the Free Legion?

And he knew it likely that another month would see that legion dispersed or enslaved afresh. The Republic as yet had hardly moved. Now, with the rout of Furius, the Wolf would howl her packs to the hunt and the slaying. But ere they gathered . . .

That would be a good play to play. And the Greek eunuch thought with a twisted mouth how the divine Plato would have stared in amaze had he heard it proposed that a Thracian savage, a slave eunuch and a courtesan hardly more than a girl should set to organizing the Republic which he had planned! Yet, ere the Romans gathered and ended the revolt for ever, the Gods might laugh at that jest – if he could prevail on the Thracian to play it.

‘Strategos.'

Spartacus turned round slowly, the stallion still nuzzling his hand. For a moment Kleon felt a strange pity for this black-staring barbarian with whose heart and head he planned to play. Then he saw, as Elpinice herself had seen, that the Thracian was altering. He had altered in the space of a day, it seemed, the blankness was fading from the deep, dark eyes, there was a wakening purpose there, a fresh set to the giant head, the bearded mouth grown stern. Elpinice gave a cry, staring. Her child-savage possessed by a nameless God: he was changing and transmuting before her eyes.

Kleon said: ‘When we reach Lucania – what then?'

‘We'll march to the sea and seize a town. Then we'll seize ships, and each return to his own country.'

Elpinice recognized phrases of her own, whispered in the kennels of Batiates. But now they were said with a purpose and deliberation that made them Spartacus's own. Kleon laughed his shrill, high laugh, squatting and eating the olives.

‘Each his own country! And aren't the Masters waiting in each country? The Wolf has conquered the world. There's a Roman Army in Thrace, I've heard. What better will you be?'

The girl's young-old eyes turned on him under her straight line of brows. ‘At least we'll be out of Italy.'

‘And still: what better will you be? Listen to me, Strategos. I'm a eunuch and no-man, from whom men and Gods turn their faces. But I'm a literatus as well – one who has read and pondered the thoughts and plans of many men. Slaves have risen before against the Masters, in Italy and in Greece. For a little while they've held their own, but never for longer than a little while. They've wasted the early days of revolt either in looting and rape or in seeking escape to that land that lies neither in Thrace nor under the Nile Cataracts: but elsewhere.'

‘Where?' Elpinice asked, for the Gladiator stared in silence.

Kleon pointed west, where the sun already rested on the hills.

‘The dead go there, they used to tell. Beyond drowned Atlantis, the Islands of the Blest. Nowhere, in fact.'

Then the girl with old eyes, the slave bedwoman of a Gladiator-farmer, said a thing as unexpected by the Greek as a blasphemy on the lips of a woman.

‘I think it's neither in Thrace nor your Islands, this land you mock. It lives in our dreams and our hopes, and maybe we'll never attain it. But – we broke out of Batiates' ludus to
try.
'

‘Then let us try here – in Italy. Given a leader strong and skilful, given men who will follow him without question – the land we dream is Italy,
we
its Masters, not its slaves.'

Still Spartacus said nothing. Kleon stirred a little, even he uneasy under that uncanny stare of a wakening child or a wakening beast. Again it was Elpinice who spoke.

‘And this leader and his men?'

Kleon had finished his olives. He wiped his fingers on his thighs, and rose up slowly, his twisted smile on the Gladiator with the giant stallion behind him.

‘There is your leader. He might change the order in Italy as no man before, casting down the Masters and raising the slaves, for the Republic is weak and its armies scattered, he could seize and hold all Southern Italy, and carve it out the state that Plato dreamt.'