Spartacus (28 page)

They awaited the Pirates of Sicily.

[iv]

And at length a bireme brought the envoy of those Pirates to treat with Kleon for the transport of the Free Legions across the Messine Straits. He was an Iberian, tall and scarred and lacking one hand; and Kleon sat and stared at him when the two Gauls brought him in. And the pirate stared also, and then gave a great cry, for he was Thoritos of the One Hand, once the leader of Kleon long before, the Greek his lieutenant in the pirate city that lay in the lee of the great White Isles.

They cried each other's names, and kissed. And then the eyes of the pirate went pityingly to Kleon's middle, as though to gaze on his mutilation: for he knew he had come to treat with a eunuch. And Kleon smiled his old smile as of old, if with less bitterness in it now.

‘So they did to me, Thoritos. But you still sail the seas.'

The Iberian flushed, that his gaze had been understood. ‘You've paid back that mutilation to the Masters, or the tales they tell of you lie.'

Kleon asked what tales they told, and the pirate answered that of all men who companioned the Gladiator, the Greek eunuch was known for cold-blooded cruelty, even as Spartacus for his incomprehensible clemency. Kleon said:

‘If I save the slave-army the name of rapine and cruelty, and take it upon myself, how better can I serve it? But this matter of the ships: how soon can you take the Free Legions to Sicily?'

So they fell to haggling on the great sum the Pirates demanded, more (as was known to Kleon) than Spartacus had in his treasury. From that great sum Thoritos would not move. Such he had been commissioned to demand: he was no more than a messenger. And, looking out on the flying scud of the Messine Strait, Kleon guessed that he spoke truly, and by some means the sum of gold must be raised.

‘Then that's agreed. Half the gold when your admiral brings the fleet for embarking; and the other half when we reach Sicily.'

But neither to this would Thoritos agree, demanding half of the gold at the moment, the other half when the fleet came. For to bring the fleet would mean great preparation, the abandonment of lucrative raids, danger from the Roman ships as never before. Kleon said: ‘And what surety have we that you'll indeed bring your fleet for the passage to Sicily?'

Thoritos smiled like a wolf, scratching at his face with the stump of the arm an ancient sea-fight had left him.

‘No surety.'

Kleon sent to Spartacus and told him the terms of the Pirates. Spartacus had the Pirate Thoritos brought before him; and the Pirate saluted the tall, lonely figure in the gilded armour. And something mocking and indifferent went from his eyes, looking in the eyes of Spartacus.

‘We've no surety to give but our word; even as we've no surety that once your slaves are in our ships they won't seize them, and take from us both our lives and treasure.'

Now, that thought had been in the mind of Kleon, for he knew the Pirates treacherous, holding faith by nothing but gain. And how, Sicily once attained, might it be defended for the New Republic except by a great fleet? But Spartacus shook his head.

‘That I swear we'll not do.'

The Pirate asked by what God he swore, and then Spartacus swore by the earth and the air (for he knew no other Gods), and by blood, for so Thoritos demanded. And the Pirate was paid his gold and went back to his bireme, and sailed into the haze of the Messine Straits; and a proclamation went through the slave camps of the amount of gold that had been paid, and the amount that must yet be raised.

Then the slaves stripped their women of gold, bracelets and brooches stolen in loot: and all gave up the gold they had treasured for the time when they should be citizens, and free, in Italy, or in their own lands. And Spartacus wore on his finger a ring Elpinice had given him, long before, and that also was flung in Kleon's scales, Kleon standing with two literati at the door of the house of Spartacus, while the slaves filed past and flung their gold in the scales against the sum for Sicily. When it came to the turn of the tribunes, Gershom been Sanballat flung in the scales a great rope of gold that Kleon had seen around the neck of the woman Judith. Titul the Iberian stripped from his ears the rings that Petronia had worn two years before. Castus and Gannicus each gave a great sum. But Spartacus had nothing but the ring, and Kleon himself, as he thought with a smile, sardonic still, but less bitter than once, nothing at all, as befitted a no-man.

Yet at length the sum was complete, the scales turning with the two talents brought by the Sicel maid Mella who served the Strategos. She had kept them in her breast against time of need: and the time had come. A laugh arose from the slaves as she threw them in the scales, and a shout as these scales turned: and she looked at the Strategos, and he at her, and the dark compassion was in his eyes. She went comforted into his house to set his meat. And the slaves dispersed.

Still the pirates delayed their coming.

[v]

Then a great rainstorm arose. Gershom ben Sanballat, at the Rhegine neck, sent news of the Roman lines closing down on the Peninsula, so that little traffic came now from Italy, and fewer merchants than of old tried to creep through when the news came how the slaves had been stripped of gold. The army of Crassus rolled inexorably down upon the Neck.

The storm passed. Days of late autumn sunshine came. Still the Pirates delayed. From roof-top and hill the slaves watched for the sails that never came, seeing in flecks of cloud the coming galleys, seeing in a fisherman's boat, far off, scudding before the breeze, the ships of Thoritos and his allies.

Yet they came not, day upon day. The birds went south from the Rhegine land; the sun went with them, sun and swallows in long wavering flights into the brightness of the Middle Seas while still the slave host peered across the Straits. Mornings came now in a cold white mist: one morning the slaves found hoar-frost on the roofs. And still the Pirates of Sicily delayed.

Then at last, no day, but in the dead of night, Thoritos sent news in a little boat across the Messine Straits. The envoys of Crassus the Lean had come to the Pirates, bringing great bribes from the Senate if they refused transport to the Spartacist army. The Pirates had agreed.

Thoritos, that he might not offend the Gods, sent back the sum that had been his share from the slaves' first payment. But this the rest of the Pirates refused to do.

The slave tribunes sought to keep secret the news, but it ran through the camp like a fire. What next? And now?

Where?

Whither?

Snow in Rhegium

[i]

WINTER came. It came that year with unexampled severity, so that many of the slaves, men of the south, Africa, and the Egyptians, men of warm lands and heat-grey skies, perished. Gershom of Kadesh found his legion thinning in the unceasing frosts, the keen winds that now rang down the Messine Straits; and himself began to cough blood of a night when he woke and heard near him the breathing of Judith. Winter. And next? Where? Whither?

They were hemmed in and trapped in Rhegium. For the legions of Crassus had now set to the building of a wall and fosse across the Peninsula, to hem in the Free Legions from the rest of Italy and starve them into submission. The Lean had had great hordes of slaves driven down from Calabria, a quota conscripted from every farm, bands brought from the mines of the north, even – so the irony of the chance – galley-loads brought from Sicily. Under the lash and the shouted commands of the Roman legionaries these slaves toiled in thousands raising the dyke against their fellows, trapped in Rhegium, where already provisions grew scarce.

But for a little, in this situation, the slave army knew an unwonted cohesion and unity of purpose. The slave hosts looked out on a world of winter that hated and feared them, they saw on every side the gibbet and cross did they break or divide. The mutterings of Gannicus ceased. Nightly he led slave raids on the dyke, once beating back the Roman guards and filling up the fosse for a great stretch.

The Romans retreated in disorder to the camp of Crassus. Then to Gannicus was brought a score of prisoners, one of them a tribune, captured by the dyke. The German looked at them and brooded in the glare of the torches, his crested helmet blown in the stinging wind. Then he laughed his great laugh and gave an order; and that night the Romans in Crassus' camp, preparing an assault to recapture the dyke, heard the sound of hammering and strange cries as the darkness waned to morning.

And when the light came they found the slaves had retired a mile away, to their own lines again; and high above the ruined dyke was reared a score of crosses on which hung the Romans whom Gannicus had captured. The tribune and one other lived when taken down; but by nightfall the others had died from the swellings of inflammation. And the Roman legions, who had thought the slave rebellion ended but for a play like firing a fox from a hole, stared south and felt little delight in the game they were here to play. Only Crassus smiled as he sat in his tent and planned the next step, the isolation of Rhegium by sea as by land.

And Gershom ben Sanballat, coughing blood at night, would think of the orange groves of Kadesh as he heard the sleep-breath of Judith beside him, and wonder in his dark, closed heart when the end would come. For he knew it would come, and yet – and yet – the Strategos had saved them before. Might he not again?

Such the hope that burgeoned through all the slave army, even while it shivered and food grew scarce. The Strategos would save them yet. And about that hope presently blossomed an insane flowering of rumour – of his power, his plans, how he had formed an alliance with the African princes, who were sailing to his aid, the legions in Iberia had revolted, Crassus would be summoned away to deal with them, the Pirates had been won over again, and were sailing back to transport the Free Legions to Sicily. . . .

Gershom knew these fancies but fancies, striding back at nightfall to the house on the sea-wall where Judith awaited him. For he had taken the woman to his bed again, in that wave of knowledge of a hostile world that had come on all the slaves, in a sudden loneliness such as he had known never before. Sometimes there came between them still the shadow of the dead child whom she had strangled in the Picene camp, he would see it in the lamplight as he watched her disrobe; and the Jew would groan, and she come to him, thinking an old wound ached, as it did, and look down on his tangled beard and tormented eyes, and ask what she might do. And Gershom would growl: ‘Sleep.'

But he thought of this son who might have prayed by his side in the Temple, bringing an offering there with him, where the sheen of the plumage of doves was blue in the blue-tiled courts; who might have made the last rites over him, dead; who might have known the winds of Levant, the cry of the Hasidim bands in salute; who might have endured the holy ceremony of circumcision, consecrating him to God. And to Gershom, who had never hated the Romans as Masters, knowing there would be slaves till the world ended, there came the cold Jewish fury in his heart as he looked at the broken woman who had murdered the fruit of her womb and his seed to save it from a Roman spear. If ever the Strategos led them against Rome again . . . !

Twice Spartacus rode out to see the great dyke with which the Romans had hemmed him in Rhegium. Castus went with him, riding wistfully beside him that second time. But Spartacus was far in his own thoughts as he halted his stallion. Wrapped in his abolla, he looked on that line of earthworks driving straight as a sword-cut across the Peninsula, the black earth piled high on the further side, the near side a deep dyke, swimming with liquid mud, defended with pointed stakes. Beyond, and on the parapets in the cold winter light, gleamed the helmets of the Roman sentries. On the wind came the smell of their camp, the smoke and stench of a camp of the time. A little Iberian, a leader of velites, one Titul, came riding to where the two slave-generals sat, and pointed to a group of Romans riding the further side of the fosse.

‘It is the Lean himself,' he said.

So, beyond bowshot of each other, Spartacus and Crassus looked on each other for the first time. In the wind Crassus' cloak was drawn tight about his mean body, his face, high and pinched, peered from under his peaked helmet, the face of a merchant, his tribunes said, cold and sharp, with clear eyes and the avaricious mouth.

‘It is the Gladiator himself,' a tribune murmured.

He was mounted on the great white stallion that all Italy knew well. His abolla shook out in the wind from the gilded armour that encased his body, a great body that fitly matched the great horse it bestrode. The Romans could see the blow of the uncut Thracian hair in the wind, for the slave wore no helmet. Crassus nodded.

‘We'll yet have him on the cross. Bring a sagittarius.'

So they brought an archer, and he bent a great bow, the wind in his favour, but the distance was too great. They saw the slave-general sit unmoved while three arrows were loosed. Then he turned about and rode back to his camp, and the Romans to theirs, while the stratus clouds thickened in the sky. And that night the frost began to loosen its grip on the Rhegine land.

[ii]

Next morning the snow began to fall, at first a fairy feathering of the greyed Italian sky. But as the day increased the wind rose, driving the snow ever thicker, in great gusts. Many of the slaves had never seen snow before. They ran out of doors, the women and children, and stared at it with astounded eyes and palms extended to the sailing flakes. The Negroes thought it salt and licked their hands, but it melted, leaving a cold, brittle taste. The Gaul and Teutone legions ceased their shivering. They knew this thing and were unafraid, and played great games in the piling drifts, rolling balls of the snow in effigies of Crassus and pelting these effigies with filth, rolling smaller balls with which they pelted the Eastern and African slaves, who stared astounded from their encampments at the antics of the Northern men. But these were remembering the long winter nights by the Baltic, forested dawns that came white in snow; and they hated Spartacus that he had led them to perish in this little Neck when they might have crossed the great mountains and by now have reached to their own lands.