Spartacus (32 page)

But now, looking on her with seeing eyes for the first time in many months, the Gladiator saw she was a child no longer, but a woman in her few years. Under the torn tunic her breasts pushed forth their buds, red and sweet, and her throat had lost gauntness, round and full; and he saw the cloud of her hair about her watching face, and the cloud of wonder that dimmed her eyes as she looked at him.

He drew her towards him, she came with a wondering sob, he forgot the Free Legions, his hands cupping those flowers of spring that had burgeoned in the summer heats, the curving buds of desire that awaited his coming. And the little Sicel maid sobbed again, as though a God held her; and Spartacus took her to his bed, and she wept, kissing him, shuddering to a wild ecstasy in his grasp. And all night she lay there, the God with her, and knew fulfilment and agony that merged in delight and so in sleep; and they slept together, his head on her breast, till the blowing of the bucinae roused them at dawn.

[iii]

But Scrofas gave them no rest. It seemed to him, cautious commander though he was, that this retreat into mountains had developed into headlong rout. Twice the slave army had wheeled so that, describing three-quarters of the arc of a circle, it again neared the outlet of the Petelian hills. Confident in his quarry as a panic-stricken beast, Scrofas pursued at its heels.

The heat grew ever more intense, so that Gauls and Teutones fainted in the strength of it, or straggled by the way and were cut down by Scrofas's velites. But the Eastern and African slaves rejoiced in the sun's geniality despite their footsore weariness. Marching through rugged defiles, they would lift their voices in long, wailing songs, long columns marching into the haze of evening. Spartacus would rein in the great white stallion and look down at his men march past, with a new twist of compassion in his heart, hearing the voice of the Slave, a thing that it seemed to Kleon also he would never forget.

They had not realized, the slave rank and file, that double-twist back through the Petelian mountains. But both Kleon and Gershom ben Sanballat knew of it; and now at length learned the reason from Spartacus.

Scrofas knew nothing of this reason. As the slave march quickened with each day, so he hastened his pursuit. Crassus lay still in Lucania, gathering reinforcement to follow slowly and meet the Gladiator when at length he was run to earth. But what if the Gladiator should emerge from the mountains, pass the camp of Licinius in the dark, and descend on Rome in a last desperate raid?

Sweat studded the plump yellow cheeks of Scrofas at the thought. He despatched his cavalry to overtake and attack the slaves.

They vanished into the bright, crystalline air of the afternoon. The mountains towered windless, the sky unclouded, dust rose and played like a spume about the feet of the smarting legionaries. Meantime, the Thracian legion of the Spartacists, having ambushed and dispersed the Roman cavalry to the rear of a narrow and nameless defile, marched back and garrisoned that defile and awaited the arrival of Scrofas.

Spartacus detached Gershom in command, while he himself waited in the rear with the Bithynians and the remnants of the Gaulish and German forces. The Jew had great rocks gathered in heaps about the ledges of the pass. Then he commanded the Thracians to lie down amid the rocks and await the signal of the horns.

Now it was a little after noon when Scrofas and his legions came to that pass that had no name, a low defile in the mountains of Petelia. As they climbed a wild shouting broke all around them, the rallying-cry of the slaves:

‘Libertas! Libertas!'

Scrofas's horse was killed under him by a rock. The mountains seemed vomiting rocks on the Roman march. Through the dust of their descent the Jew flung forward half his men.

Nothing might abide that charge. When the slave horns summoned the Thracians to retire, half the Roman force was in rout and disorder. Nevertheless, Scrofas, remounted, had the legionaries lashed into rank again, and sent forward his sagittarii in an effort to dislodge the slaves.

But the rocks defended them. Then Scrofas urged the wearied Fifteenth up against the slave position. Twice they attacked, but the second time more cautiously, for news had been brought to Scrofas that a path wound round the right-ward mountain whereby he might assail the slaves in the rear.

He despatched his Second legion on that mission. The sun wheeled towards evening. Then, in the pass behind the Thracian ambuscade, arose a wild sound of shouting and battle. Scrofas's Second legion had been trapped by the waiting Gladiator in the valley behind the pass.

It was the signal for Gershom ben Sanballat. His Thracians rose, freshened, and charged on the hesitant ranks of the Fifteenth legion. Scrofas saw that the day was lost, and fled through the hills till he came to the camp of Crassus.

All that night his routed legions straggled into the camp of the provincial praetor, waiting beyond the mountains and expecting to hear that the Spartacists had been trapped. But instead he heard of the slaves as victors in yet another battle, victors encamped on the battlefield and devouring the flesh of the dead Roman horses. And once again a wave of cold apprehension fell on Crassus.

The Gladiator was inconquerable. He might march from the mountains against Rome itself.

Crassus prepared to retreat.

The Stallion

[i]

THAT night, for the first time in that hot Italian summer, the rain began to fall, softly, a whisper and wisp in the darkness, shining white veils, translucent, through the slave-camp at the hither side of the battlefield. The slave host stirred to its coming with hungry lips, so slight its fall it might not dampen the fires, men lay with open mouths and uncovered bodies at that descent of the warm summer rain; and the wounded, groaning, stretched out their hands to it, raining mist from the summer night.

And the hills stirred, and the dying plants raised their heads, and the earth moved and put forth new smells, stirring to a fresh and unforeseen life, wakening and moving in the raining dark. And a little wind presently came with the rain, driving it east in the track of Scrofas's rout; and on that wind came some scent that caught in the throats of the slaves, so that they stirred to slurred speech, and a wild, strange laughter, and moments of brooding that passed into quick action, singing, and shouting, and declamation. Beyond the passes the great army of the Masters lay shielding Rome. The Masters?

Who were the Masters?

Who had bestridden Italy like a God these last two years, what army abided undefeated the attack of the Serpent standards? And the slaves wept and cursed with slobbering lips, tearing at the flesh of the dead horses, peering through the raining night into the unlighted east. The Masters—

T
HEY
T
HEMSELVES
W
ERE
T
HE
M
ASTERS
! These the slaves, the armies of the Republic they had beaten from battle to battle. The Masters –
these,
who fled whenever the Strategos turned upon them! And a wild pride came on the slaves, and they swore they would march no more through the mountains. Italy was theirs and lay waiting their taking. And they sharpened their swords and licked hungry lips, with the little wind in their faces that was kindling all the hills.

And the women of the slave army felt on their faces that same rain, in their hearts the same thoughts as their men. They had tramped the length and breadth of the Peninsula, it under their feet, it was theirs, T
HEIRS
, bought in the travail of the unending roads, in the travail of wounds and death and birth, the horde of children that had been born in the snow-smitten, sun-smitten camps of revolt. The Masters – they were the Masters, they who went ragged and hungry. And they looked on their children crawling out with little eager hands to grasp at the rain and laugh at its touch; and a fierce, weeping tenderness took the slave women. These should never endure what they had endured, to them sun and security and the citizen's name when the Free Legions went down on Rome.

It was said that the Strategos would retreat again, retreat through the mountains to a port, Brindisium, and there take ship from Italy. Retreat and leave this land they had conquered, where they marched unconquerable? Some had never heard of Brindisium, some thought it a great city that lay on the other side of the world, remoter than Mutina, even; and they made it one with the hate that grew on them, gathering and accumulating throughout the night, hate and a horror of the great army Crassus had brought up below the eastern mountains. Hate and no fear – as a man turns at last on a winter road on pursuing wolves and slays and slays, heedless of tearing fangs, with hate and rage for the beasts in his heart. So it was with the slaves: they prepared for battle.

And all that night the mad brother of Brennus wandered the lines of the slave camp stirring the slaves, crying that they be led against the Masters, that they hide and retreat no more. Were they not unconquerable? And he told of Brennus upon the cross, and called to their memories their dead nailed on trees, caught in the rear of retreat on retreat. And the Gauls shouted with anger, remembering the massacre by Lake Lucania; and even the Thracians, turning to sleep, swore battle with great oaths.

And all the slave-camp slept, men drunk with a nameless wine that stirred them awake in the hours of the dark to grind their teeth and catch closer their swords. They lay with their women in a hot unease and a wild tenderness that night; and the night drew on.

Kleon turned in his bed, the fever of the wet wind upon him. He peered out in the silence of the camp, his eyes on the light-less east. Crassus? They had defeated as great as him, they might do it again. And the Greek got up and lighted a torch and took from a box two rolls of writing, and looked at them with unseeing eyes –
The Republic
of Plato and his
Lex Servorum.
And desire came on him to read them again, but his eyes glazed after a little while, with weariness, and he put them away, and extinguished the torch, and lay down.

They must fight. There was no return to the mountains and a safe, easy road as the Strategos had planned, planned while he lured Scrofas into his trap. Fight, as men fought the rain and the sun, and the greedy earth that tore at their strength. Hate, as men hated the darkness and cold, the bitterness of pain and dearth and death. And he thought for a moment of his own past counsels, of caution, and now they shrivelled up: and he turned to sleep with a breaking heart.

And the rain washed on through the night.

Gershom of Kadesh heard it as he lay by the side of the woman Judith, so close again to childbed. And he combed at his beard with twitching fingers, thinking with a hate and a mounting rage of that Beast that waited beyond the defiles, that Beast that would tear and devour the unborn, that Beast they must murder ere it murdered them. Sleep now, but tomorrow. . . .

And Titul slept but little that night, dozing, the commander of the velites, at the far length of the utmost gorge, his eyes on the watchfires of Crassus's camp. And he thought of the Masters stretched in death, in torture, of himself a high-priest of Kokolkh, with reeking altars, in the city of Rome. And he licked thick lips and waited the morrow.

And the rain held on, in a light, sweet sheet, over Petelia and its hills till it reached the lowlands of Calabria and the vineyards of Lucania; and the earth stirred and wakened to its coming.

And Spartacus slept unmoving, the sleep of utter exhaustion.

[ii]

But about the coming of the day he awoke – awoke suddenly, his body heaving in anger. In the darkness of the tent his hands found the throat of the Sicel maid, who had slept by his side, and she also awoke with the torture of death in her throat, and cried his name. His hands loosed off in the darkness, he sighed and said, ‘I dreamt'; and they lay silent one by the other, till they could see the darkness thinning a little. And Mella slept again, but no sleep came to the Gladiator, watching that slow shine of the morning down the passes of Petelia.

The ashes of the dream were still in his mouth; but now the fire had died away. The fury had quietened from his heart. In the growing light he looked at the head on his breast, and wound his fingers in the hair of the Sicel maid; and soothed her as she wept in sleep, weeping, and knowing not that she wept. So Spartacus waited the dawn.

And when Mella again woke, that was still closer; and Spartacus told her how he had dreamt, he had thought her the Wolf of Rome.

‘And instead I'm the mate of the Serpent.'

He looked in her eyes and saw them clear, if sad: sad with that fugitive sadness that backgrounded all slave delight. But he saw her youth also, that had flowered, that he had taken, that had not gone wasted, he thought, for either. And he put her aside and went to the entrance of the tent, while she rose and set him meat and drink.

He had looked but seldom on the waking world with eyes that saw it, the lost Gladiator. They had looked below or beyond it all his life – in the days in Thrace on the chance of the hunt, in the slave-pits of Batiates, waking in chains, in the marchings of the great Free Legions to and fro across Italy. But now, unwonted, he looked on the breaking day: and something caught him rigid at the sight, and held him still, the play of colour in the sky.

Cold and pale and blue the sky and the world below. But now that pallor was fading, flushing blindly in red as he watched, on the heights the gold of the sun overflowing the red, in the sky the blue still streaked with blood. Quicker and more quickly came the day, stirring little whorls of mist on the mountain-heights of Petelia while the Gladiator watched. In those heights the night still abode, but the shadows drew back, with darkling spears, at the coming of the sun. On the ground a little mist moved off, slowly, leaving the earth, the rocks, the trees, the great gorges, sparkling with the wet of the over-night rains.

And then, as he stood and listened, far off in some deserted horreum he heard the crowing of a cock – loud, shrill and piercing against the coming of the day. Twice it crowed and then there was silence, except that audibly the slave-camp stirred from sleep at that shrill crowing up through the dawn.