Spartacus (22 page)

Spartacus whispered from his saddle. ‘Back. Walk your horse and then rouse the camp. Softly. Bring up the Thracians first.'

‘But you—'

The Strategos was loosening the great axe from his saddle. ‘I'll wait.'

For a moment the Greek looked at him in a cool deliberation. He saw in a flash the possibilities and chances. The Strategos killed in a squabble with scouts: the Free Legions leaderless: himself the Voice: the Free Legions wheeled round to the South and the Cities—

Spartacus heard the clop of the hooves of his horse fade southwards down the Pass.

Still he waited; but that muffled sound of marching men seemed to have ceased. He got from the stallion's saddle and knelt on the track, his ear to the ground. For a little while he heard nothing, except for the seep of the rain, the weeping countryside all about. The marchers had halted. Or had he and Kleon imagined them?

He mounted and waited. The stallion pawed restlessly at the ground and then swung its slavered head against his knee. He leaned forward and patted it, staring into the mist.

Mist. This, he thought grimly, was his future, a winding fog into which one peered, and it changed without form, taking to itself the shadowy likeness of faces and desires created in one's own heart. And queerly, like a ghost remembering life and the pain of death, he suddenly remembered Elpinice, and the slopes of Vesuvius, and the mists from the crater.

And then that went by. Her memory troubled him but little now, taking his women as he needed them, the touch of their breasts and their warmth against him, the strange, wild cries that they gave in his arms, held in his hands – finding such surcease from the flare of the days as he might in these moments that preluded sleep. But he knew as he waited in this silent hour and stared with dark eyes at the mist-hung Pass he would never again partake in such passion of pain and appeasement as he had partaken with Crixus or Elpinice.

So pain in their memory had gone as well. Some cord had seemed to snap in his brain as he watched the funeral games of the Gaul. He had wakened to that as they fought and plodded up from Italy to the raining North. And still he could foresee and plan the way, and set the array of battle-lines, cold, yet with a new, strange warmth upon him, a warmth of care and pity new in his heart. And that care and pity the slave legions that followed his command.

For he found himself entering their hearts and thoughts, with a new and bitter impatience upon him – often; yet also a comprehension, an understanding, as though somehow he himself were these men, these women, these lost stragglers of rebellion against the Masters and their terrible Gods; as though the life in their bodies was a part of his, he the Giver of Life to this multitude that had risen about him in the storm of days and shaken the Republic to its foundations. As though he were all of the hungered dispossessed of all time: as though at moments he ceased to live, merging his spirit in that of the horde, his body in that of a thousand bodies, bone of their bone, flesh of their flesh.

And sometimes he would think himself fey as he sat the great stallion by some rutted track and watched the northward march of the slaves; or bent his head from the saddle to see himself in a wayside pool, armed and armoured in his general's gear, with the gleaming helmet with the horsehair plumes and the lorica polished by Ialo, his guard. So long he had thought of himself as the Strategos, as the Statesman that Kleon the eunuch would have, that it was with a wrench as with bodily pain that he knew himself less and more and beyond: the crawling dirt-slaves of the baggage wains, those scrofulous, envermined, eyeless things that had once been Romans and followed the slaves because they had no other thing to follow – knew himself all these and all the slave host, bound in a mystic kinship of blood.

And the little Sicel slave Mella, freed from a farm in Umbria – once such a maid he'd have taken in haste, indifferently, after Elpinice's death; with abrupt impatience, bringing his lust to her body as hunger to a dish, after the death of Crixus. But that evening she was brought to his tent she was young, a girl on the verge of budding-time, and some strange compassion, as when gazing on the marching hosts, seized the bowels of the Strategos. He had said to her, ‘You need have no fear. I don't need you for my bed, for my service alone.'

At his smile her shivering had slackened a little, she had known much of rape and wild crying in the night on that farm from which the slave-army had freed her, her overseer had found a grave goodness in the girls that were not yet beyond their ninth year, she had lain in the stifling stench of the sheds and expected no better in the tent of the Thracian who ate his dead and worshipped a horse.

So Spartacus had guessed; and Ialo had set her her tasks, to sweep the tent and bring wine, to sleep in a corner and tend him. And sometimes even now, his heart emptied of all desire, as it seemed, and filled with a burning question of the Gods and men, Spartacus would yet look at her with an ancient kindling of fire in his blood. But that had been seldom enough as the north drew near, as they piloted the dripping heights of La Fata Pass with beyond it the township of Mutina, no legions brought to oppose them, all Cisalpine Gaul lying strangely silent.

Were they to be allowed to pass on unmolested?

And then the Gladiator knew that they were not. He swung the stallion forward, and hefted his axe, and waited. The marching feet were the feet of heavy-armed legionaries.

[iii]

Gaius Cassius, the Governor of Cisalpine Gaul, had received early warning of the march of the Spartacists up through Umbria. He had groaned when he heard that his own richest farmstead, that of the Luda, had been looted by the horde, the wine drunk, and the slaves set free. For this meant that his usual supply of bedwomen would be denied him this year; and the large slave-farm in Umbria had been his passion for nearly fifty years.

There slaves had been bred in great numbers for Rome and Sicily: vulgares, broad-bodied, of German or Negro descent, specially and carefully mated in the manner laid down by experts, giving that combination of strength and docility ideal in the ordinary slave. He had also bred great men of Iberian blood to be sold as ostiarii, the porters of the markets, eunuchs and cubicularii, castrated or with artificially deformed genital organs. These curiosities were greatly in demand among the patricians in the Baths. There also he had bred slaves to be sold as runners for the fugitivarii, the capturers of Runaways.

But of his best breedings were the women-children destined for sale into prostitution at the age of ten. Of these the flower were culled and sent to him; and his overseers, freedmen, intent on enriching themselves, regarded this with a constant vexation. Early infected with the venereal diseases common to North Africa, where he had served, it was but rarely that the discarded of his bed were returned to the slave-farm in fit condition for sale in the open market, naked, with whitewashed feet. In his years of debauchery he had also become infected with leprosy; and, inflamed in the colds of the northern province, this disease had vexed him to the edge of insanity again and again, finding its only relief in heated baths and the ministrations, night upon night, of great numbers of girls from the stud-farm. A patrician, Gaius Cassius was a man of culture, and knew that without the strong hand of Law men would live in misery and fear. And, groaning in pleasure, he would fondle the horrified children.

Now, in his sixty-fifth year, he heard of the coming of the great slave horde, led by a Thracian Gladiator. Together with Gnaeus Manlius, the praetor, whom he hated, he consulted on means of defence. Manlius had long since ceased to feel interest in the province, or indeed, in most other things of the life to which he had been assigned: he hungered for Rome. Large, dark and strong, like one of the ostiarii bred on Cassius' farm, he sat in the council chamber through those raining days, receiving the messengers who had circled around the slave march, and brought the instructions of the Senate. The Spartacists must be met and destroyed ere they left Italy.

‘That's easier to order than to execute,' he would affirm to Cassius, squatted in a padded sedile, scratching at his ulcerated skin and drinking draughts of warmed wine brought him at innumerable intervals throughout the day. And Cassius would groan, thinking of his ruined farm in Umbria.

In the Province at the moment were three full legions, the Second, the Fourth, and the Ninth, each of six thousand men, fully armed and equipped in the new model. Besides these were the cavalry and several thousand irregular troops. Cassius made over complete command to Manlius. The latter summoned the legions to Mutina, leaving the irregulars for police-work, and received news of the nearing approach of the slave army, forty thousand strong, but at least a third non-combatant, disorganized, wearied with rain and mud, hasting to escape from Italy.

And the rain fell, fell and fell continuously, as at last Gnaeus Manlius moved.

When he moved from Mutina that night his plans were still misty in his mind. But then he heard the slaves were encamped half-way up the thither side of La Fata Pass. Sending one legion on a detour of thirteen pace miles, through the shallow estuaries haunted by the sea-birds, he took the Fourth and the Ninth Legions, and with them climbed the Pass. His intent was to reach and seize the peak ere the morning came, and so trap the slave rabble betwixt himself and the tribune of the Second when the day broke.

In that upward climb, climbing west, he felt the day coming behind him, rather than saw, though he frequently looked back. He himself rode with the horse, the sound of their hooves muffled in the blanketings of fog. Winter was near and in places they splashed through freezing pools. Once they heard the howling of wolves in a little wood, and the forward velites jested among themselves, saying that these were undoubtedly Spartacists, you could tell them by their smell.

The praetor had flung out a light line of Balearic fundatores, they trotted away, short men, into the mist, their pouches swinging on their hips, climbing the Pass. At their heels toiled the legions, heavily armed, with the shorter pilum that was used in this mountain country. With the cavalry the praetor brought up the march, as swiftly as they might in that dim-veiled track.

Now, it neared the third division of the morning and from his spies the praetor knew he was near the ridge of the Pass when he heard in front a sudden shouting break out. He cursed and halted the cavalry, sending an order forward to halt the legions as well. The shouting continued, and two centuries of the Fourth climbed swiftly up to see what had caused this outbreak from the fundatores.

Then it was that the mist suddenly cleared, it went in a great waft of air from the far mountains, suddenly the rain ceased and the world sparkled frost-keen about them, on the edge of winter, and the Roman legions looked up, the praetor, dark and tall, shaded his eyes and looked at that scene in the early light.

The fundatores had fallen back after that first attack, for now the slaves had reached the peak, and the air was filled with the hiss of the light-feathered arrows. But of these things, other than shifting specks, neither Gnaeus Manlius nor his legions saw much. What they did see remained in the mind of Manlius for long, he remembered it that year he rode up the Appian Way, lined with its dripping fruit, he remembered it under the torture of Catiline, he remembered it when he and Brutus watched the sardonic smile on the face of a bowed patrician in the Senate on an Ides of March.

For, crowning the ridge, was a still, watchful figure on horse-back, helmeted in gold, armoured, immense in the spreading glow of the mist, the sun suddenly upon him. So he gleamed like a God, gigantic, and the legions stared and murmured as they looked at the terrible figure. For there was terror in it. In those mountain changes of the air they could see his face, immense and near, bearded and calm, high-browed under the helmet-rim, his eyes cold and staring upon them, yet filled with a glow like the eyes of a snake. And to the praetor Manlius, it seemed he saw more than the Strategos Spartacus, he saw T
HE
S
LAVE
himself.

Then that fancy passed, the last wisps of mist went quickly, the figure faded: and Manlius was aware of the slave army already in possession of the peaks of the Pass.

[iv]

All that morning and afternoon the Spartacists fought a rearguard defence and a van attack across La Fata Pass, Gnaeus Manlius retreating as the day rose, the Fourth and the Ninth legions fighting stubbornly, pressed by the Thracian van of the slave army. Behind, the Jew Gershom ben Sanballat and his Bithynians engaged the Second legion, which had marched around the mountain and come up through the mist expecting to find the Spartacists assailed by Manlius from the peak of the Pass.

Gershom rode to and fro as the sun wheeled to the third division of the day, directing the defence of the slave rear. The mist had passed completely and from this height the one-time leader of the Hasidim could see for long miles around the shine of the wintry Italian landscape. The shivering Bithynians fought with a fury more of cold than of valour, a bare score of the original Bithynians surviving. Some had died in Lucania, some under Papa, one withered nailed to a tree in Apulia, one at the moment lay recaptured in the slave-pits of Rome. Gershom had made a stout bodyguard of the survivors, and these gave their name to the legion that kept the peak while the main body of the slaves plodded and fought down across La Fata Pass to the plain beyond, and Mutina, shining white-walled in the afternoon.

Rain came after noon and pelted the retreating armies in flying showers, the Fourth and Ninth bore it with indifference, as did their pursuers, the Thracians. But at least a third of the slaves had not been vulgares, men of the fields and open, but slaves from the kitchens and bakehouses, the vats and baths and cubicles: and in these heights and rains they shivered in a uselessness which drove Kleon to a bitter scorn. He rode beside Spartacus and watched the shivering drift that passed, into the evening lour of the battle by Mutina; and suddenly proposed that the Germans drive these weaklings down on the Roman pila.