Spartacus (21 page)

Castus stared, his mild face troubled. ‘She might be dragged to pieces between oxen. So malefactors are executed in Gaul.'

Kleon the eunuch literatus spoke, coldly as ever. ‘Why waste time and oxen? She can die more quickly.'

‘How?' asked the Thracian.

Kleon shrugged. ‘A sword-thrust. Garotte. What does it matter?'

Gershom ben Sanballat combed irritably at his beard. ‘Let her be stoned to death.'

Gannicus laughed his great bull-like laugh. ‘Crucify the bitch by the little Gaul's pyre.'

Oenomaus moved from his customary silence. ‘Why not hand her over to the legion – to the Gauls or the Germans, and let them dispose of her.'

And to all this seemed a good plan, moved with a twisted lust as they looked on the woman. For her beauty still lingered. Even with her tortured body in evidence, some of them still desired her: for those wounds added a strange and loathsome fascination. Spartacus had sat on his little stool, listening. Now he raised his head.

‘Each a fine end, but I have a better.' He looked across to Ialo. ‘Listen. Find a litter for this woman. Take her across the hills to the Appian Way. Take fifty of the Thracians as a guard, and leave her only when she is safe with some convoy for Rome.'

Then he looked at the grovelling woman for the last time. ‘You'll carry my sign-manual to Rome, my message to it and to you: Ave atque vale.'

Kleon looked on him with a cold amazement. ‘You've tormented the woman, and now you spare her. Both courses are bad and unstatesmanlike.'

Then he saw that Spartacus was smiling, terribly.

‘I have ceased to be a statesman.'

[vi]

All that night the Roman prisoners heard a constant hammering and shouting outside the camp, by the stream that led past the pyre of Crixus. Lights shone there from great fires, but the Romans could make nothing of the commotion. Nor, but that it interfered with their sleep, did it greatly interest them.

Other things occupied their hours, for it was cold weather, and they were half naked, and mostly unfed since their capture. The centurion and the young third tribune, bound so that they might not lie at their ease, leaned against each other and dozed, glad to be freed from the daytime crowds of jeering and mocking slaves. Towards dawn the young third tribune became wide awake and watched morning coming over the Apulian mountains as Crixus had watched it come out of the sea. In the air was the smell of the morning's green coming, and somehow, despite his bonds, he felt a strange gladness upon him.

The slave army began to awake around the enclosure. The yawning Romans set to chafing cold limbs and beating the blood back into chilled bodies. Presently there arose a clamour of horns and a band of Gaulish slaves entered the enclosure. They bore food – steaming corn in great pots, and dishes of stewed lentils. Amazed at this bounty, the Romans ate ravenously; and, staring at them while they fed, the slaves laughed.

Hardly had they gone, bearing the empty pots, when another band entered the enclosure. They filed in to the number of four hundred or so, and the heart of the centurion, despite his strong spirit, momentarily failed him. For this new band was the Gladiator bodyguard of Spartacus, well known to the Romans by their gilded armour and war-hardened bodies. They bore great whips in their hands, and the centurion groaned.

‘What will they do?' whispered the young third tribune.

‘More flogging.' The centurion had taken part in Rome in an Eastern triumph. He knew what portended. ‘They will march us round the pyre of Crixus, half-flayed.'

But it seemed that he was mistaken. The Gladiators proceeded to release the prisoners, till three hundred of them had been so set free. Then, motioning towards the gates of the enclosure, the slaves cracked their whips. The Romans surged forward through the gates.

The knee of the young third tribune pained him, and he limped in the rear, till it seemed as if a red hot iron had been applied to his back. Withdrawing his whip for another blow, the great Gladiator behind him laughed.

Beyond the camp, they stood and swayed to and fro for a little like a herd of doubtful cattle.

Beside the pyre, flanked on one side by a river, on the other by scaffoldings of timber, an arena had sprung up in the night. Around it was thronged the slave army. Leading towards it was a living corridor of slaves, and down this corridor the Romans were driven.

At the entrance to it, each of them was handed a Gaulish sword.

Inside the arena they were separated into two parties. It was clear, pale weather, and the centurion saw the white apple-blossom on the orchards beyond the encampment. Then the terms of the combat were made known to them. They were not to fight as individuals, but as two parties. The conquering party would be granted the mercy of joining the Free Legions.

At first the Romans hung back in horror, and the crack of the Gladiators' whips rose in the air. Then they began to surge forward, wielding the clumsy and unaccustomed swords amidst the shouted laughter of the slaves. Presently the centurion engaged with a man he knew, and, as they hewed at each other, each warmed a little to the ring of the weapons.

In a moment, from the stamp and bloody struggle of the fight that wavered to and fro in the arena, bodies were falling with gaping wounds, sacrifices to the manes of dead Crixus. A warm, dreadful stench arose; and, drawn by the shoutings of the slaves, great flocks of carrion-birds came from the hills.

[vii]

Two hundred and eighty of the Romans perished at the funeral games of Crixus. Of the remaining score, half were so wounded that they were despatched by the whips of the Gladiators. Then, with the pyre a little hill of ash, the slaves broke camp, marching northwards with determination to break out of Italy and escape to their own lands.

The Defiles of Mutina

[i]

THEY had passed up through Italy, crossed the mountains, and entered Gallia Cisalpina through autumn-flooded lands. At one place where swamps extended for miles it seemed that they must turn aside and make a wide detour. But Hiketas had great drag-sledges made, and on these the Free Legions crossed safely. All the hills were in bloom with flowers, and it was near the reaping-time of the corn.

As they marched the slaves filled their helmets and the breasts of their tunics with corn-heads. The hungry rearguards strayed far to right and left of the march, beating off the straggling attacks of Roman velites and seeking unlooted villages. Spartacus rode in the centre, Castus with the Gauls in the van. Kleon the Greek had taken to himself a roaming commission that ranged from the van to the rearguard.

Rain in drenching torrents met them beyond the borders of Gallia Cisalpina. In the late afternoon Kleon, abandoning the draggled and plodding rear to the care of Hiketas, rode up the toiling lines of the slave army till he came to the Bithynian legion. It was still so-called, though the Bithynians had dwindled to a scarce century, and most of the slaves in that legion either Greeks or Negroes or Iberians. They marched as a disciplined cohort still, but wearily. All the slave-army was weary and dispirited.

They had met but little opposition to their northwards trek. All the country lay fear-stricken. Women had been hidden away in the hills. One town they entered was empty but for a single man, dying of plague. Rome lay silent in their rear. It was like marching in soft-raining, thundery weather, waiting for a sky-tumult that refused to burst.

Kleon shivered under his drenched abolla, and, raising his eyes, looked north. Fading into the evening light went the long slave lines, an army of forty thousand men. He saw the stallion of Spartacus white amidst the general dunness, considered that for a moment, passed beyond the moving blurs of no-colour that made up the Gauls and Germans: and met the horizon. What lay awaiting them there?

An Iberian, with a great package strapped on his back, stumbled out of the way of the Greek's weary horse. He raised his eyes. It was Titul.

‘Where is your horse?' asked Kleon.

‘I ate it at the last halt,' the Iberian explained. ‘Now I carry my treasure till we fight the Masters again. Then I will steal another.'

‘You won't have long to wait, I think.' Kleon smiled at him grimly. ‘And beyond that come the mountains and the cannibals. We are certainly a crafty army.'

‘Cunning in warfare were the men of the vanished Western Isle,' said Titul, being mad.

Kleon smiled wryly and rode on. The Iberian was beyond irony. Had there ever been a Western Isle? He dismissed the matter, seeing in front of him a swaying litter borne between two shaggy ponies. Beside them, amidst a clump of his devoted spearmen, marched Gershom ben Sanballat, rain streaming from his beard and helmet, his tunic ragged and faded. The Greek grinned at him.

‘This is a sad plight for a victorious tribune. You have lost a boot, Jew.'

‘And you a Republic.'

Kleon mocked him. ‘It is still – there.'

He pointed to the rain-darkened sky. Gershom grunted. He was irritable and discontented, even though it seemed that the Strategos harkened now to his counsel. But they should have dispersed and sought the sea. Into what wild mountains were they being led?

‘You'll need the aid of Hiketas before you reach it.'

‘We'll need his aid yet,' said Kleon, cryptically, and rode on, not turning his glance on the inside of the litter. The Jew had married his cook, seeking an heir to make sacrifice to his manes when he was dead. And that might well be soon enough.

Judith looked after the Greek, leaning from her litter. She was heavy with child. Then she sought the eyes of Gershom. He plodded through the mud to her side, avoiding the slipping hooves of the ponies.

‘What did the Greek Mutilated propose?'

‘Jehovah knows. He would stop this march if he could, and turn us back on the Masters again.' He spoke testily. ‘What ails you now?'

She was looking in horror at his bare right foot. ‘Your boot?'

‘I left it in the marsh. Let be, let be. If the eunuch has his way, I'll find it on the return march.' His leg was already twinging with rheumatism. He regarded the cloudy sky with louring gaze. ‘And he'd find no great enemy to me in his planning, I sometimes think.'

For it was one thing to escape from Italy and the power of the Masters, and another to seek the land of the Hyperboreans and live there in unending twilight, hearing the howling of Behemoth as he hungered under the Northern night.

And Gershom cursed his ragged guard and plodded forward, the rain swift in his face.

[ii]

Day died, and the main army of the slaves made camp halfway up the La Fata pass. Here the mountains filled all the northward skyline in tenebrous outline, white and cloud-piercing; and far in their slopes water gleamed as the day waned fast. The Gauls looked on these mountains and remembered their passes as they were beaten southwards, slaves into Italy. And the sight moved them to tears, as was the easy wont of their race. But the Germans regarded them without love or fear, with impatience, seeking beyond them their forested homes.

The Negroes shivered that night, as did the men of Asia. The Greeks with patient, cold faces looked at the ragged horizon, and knew it madness to attempt this passage into a land of barbarians. How might a man live without a city? For the city was life. And the cold of Gallia Cisalpina soaked into all bones but those well-shielded in the looted fabrics of the villages fired in the northwards march.

But near midnight the rain ceased and Kleon, prowling wakeful the limits of the camp, found the sentry posted highest up the Pass fast asleep in the lee of a rock. Kleon stirred him to wakefulness with his foot, and found him the brother of Brennus. The Gaul grinned, unabashed.

‘There'll be less of haughty footwork, Greek, when we pass these mountains.'

Kleon was unperturbed. The tribunes of the slave horde were accustomed to the insolence of their legionaries.

‘You may soon be lacking a throat, far less feet, if you keep as poor watch as this.'

They listened. But there was only the sound of the rain and its thin seep on the sleeping land. And it came on the eunuch, as so often, how strange it was that men should toil and moil on this little earth that knew them not – that knew only its winds and rains and the suns that ripened the crops, and the light and glow of the imaged sun, never the seedsmen or reapers. It was the Fear of the Fates and the Gods that drove men, shadows they made in their own dark hearts.

He turned about and made his way back through the litter of the slave-encampment, coming at last to the tent of the Strategos, where Spartacus slept guarded by his Gladiators. As he came to it he heard a stirring there, and a torch showed damply through the mirk. Kleon saw it was the Strategos himself, and Spartacus recognized him.

‘I'm uneasy to-night, Kleon. This mist on the Pass, I think. I'm going to ride up and see what lies beyond it.'

‘But there is no seeing at all in this darkness.'

‘We'll see as much or as little as the Masters.'

Kleon shrugged irritably. ‘Then I'll come.'

So he did. They rode past the post of the now roused Gaul, and went up the tortuous track of the Pass. Above them its walls towered blackly. Underfoot the road was warm with a slime, and the horses slipped and plunged continually. It might have been near the third division of the night, but the darkness had not lightened at all. Spartacus said: ‘I had a dream.'

‘What dream?'

‘One without much gladness. That I was no longer either the Strategos of the Free Legions or a hunter in Thrace, but dead and quiet, down there in the South.'

‘So you'll still hold North?'

But the Thracian was not listening. He had halted the great white stallion. He motioned Kleon to silence. They listened. Nothing but the soft sound of the rain. Yet presently another sound, remote and distant.

The distant sound of marching men.

Now they were upon the Peak of the Pass. But all around was the shroud of the mist, thick as carded wool, and soft. The sound of the tramping grew in their ears.