Spartacus camped his men under Mutina. Then he summoned the city to surrender, but it refused, strongly walled, albeit it refused with caution and offered a gift of corn.
The winter night came down with a speed unknown to the slaves from the south. At its fall Spartacus sent for Ialo and with him left the camp, they passed through long lines of little fires, where the rain fell hissing in cooking-jars and hissing on the slaves’ wet hair and arms. The southern men shivered and sought to bind their wounds. A child wailed, lost, in the rain. Red eyes gleamed on the camp’s outskirts.
Then, in the midst of the Bithynians, they passed a boughshelter with a tribune’s pole and heard there the wail of a new-born child. Spartacus half halted at the sound. It came again and he smiled, and walked on.
The rain cleared. Beyond the camp they came to the verge of the Pass where Gnaeus Manlius had sought to reform his legions and stay the slave-army. Here the Romans, dead and wounded, lay in serried ranks, with piercing them the cuneus dead of the slave attack. Already robbers from the slave-army were at work. Ialo plucked at the Strategos’s cloak.
‘There’s no profit in coming here. We can spoil them tomorrow.’
‘Tomorrow we march at dawn.’
And then Ialo saw a dreadful thing, that the Strategos wept. He walked with unshielded face, weeping – suddenly weeping his dead, the lost and forlorn, the rejected, those born to stripes, his people who had died here so bravely, so aimlessly, for they hardly knew what, for a hope and belief so dim, yet in which they had followed him blindly. So Spartacus wept for his dead, the first and last time, with an anger and passion that frightened the slave who companioned him. And then it was there came that resolve that altered the face of history – a resolve newborn from sight of those heapings of torn men who lay so quiet under the coming of the stars.
They came in frost. As they walked back to the camp the Thracian Gladiator raised his head and saw in the north, shining, straining in their traces, the Seven Ploughing Oxen, following the Pole-star home. For a moment he looked at these, and then went into his tent, sitting there long with his head in his hands, none disturbing him, though Ialo and the Sicel maid kept watch.
But at midnight the camp sprang to life with the coming of a fresh host down the Pass. Castus and his spent cavalry had returned, bringing with them the remnants of that quarter legion of Bithynians left to guard the peak. Castus had dispersed the Second legion, taking no prisoners. He stood blood-splashed and exhausted in Spartacus’s tent, his young face weary, yet still eager-eyed for a word or a look from the Strategos.
‘Kleon?’
‘The eunuch has a wounded leg, but he lives.’
The Greek lay in his tent when Spartacus went to see him, following Castus, Ialo carrying a torch to light the way through the dark slave-lines. He lay and bit at his arm, for pain he could not endure. He turned a cold, bright glance on the Strategos and Castus.
‘The way’s open now then, Spartacus. And I – I’m saved for the cannibal pots.’
‘You’ve been saved for the sack of Rome.’
They stared at the Thracian. Then Kleon knew.
‘Rome? Then you’re to turn back?’
‘We go back to conquer Italy. It’s ours – our Legions made it. And we’ll march against the City itself.’
The Falling Star
[i]
THEY turned south, the winter at their heels. And turning, it seemed that new strength flowed up through their bodies from the touch of that southlands earth, even with the Gauls and Germans who at first had complained so bitterly. They crossed La Fata Pass again, down through Gallia Cisalpina and halted in Umbria, capturing a nameless city. There, in a fever of preparation, Spartacus set his tribunes to organize for that conquest of Rome that had come on him as an ultimate necessity the night he stumbled over the dead slaves on the battlefield of Mutina.
But now he saw himself neither as king nor dictator, a God drove him on, a God crowned with the knowledge that unless the Beast that squatted in the Seven Hills were killed, there would be no possible life ever again for men while the world endured. And, knowing he might fail, the Thracian knew also that he might not dare refuse that attempt with all the strength and all the force and all the cruelty the task might demand. And it seemed to him each morning of those hasting preparations that the slave-horde awoke in him, moved with his body, looked with his eyes, hungered with his hunger, tired with his tiredness, were shadowed with the hate of that same Shadow – the Wolf that looked north from the Tiber mouth.
Beating out bolts and grinding their swords, building great machines under Hiketas’ direction, the slave legions toiled like men possessed through that month of the hastening spring. The Strategos had made over to Gannicus and Gershom the administration of the legion laws and requisition of food and supplies. And Kleon the eunuch drew up a great Law, the Lex Servorum, to use in the time when the leaders of the slave-legions sat in the Senate. It dreamt, this Law, of a land of little farmsteads sleeping secure, of quiet towns with literati in the porticoes and freemen in the mills and booths, of the sea and the wind in the hair of Plato’s dream. Kleon read clauses from it in the night-watches to Hiketas and his sister, Gershom ben Sanballat sitting by, sardonic, combing at his curled beard.
‘In that time there’ll be no need of laws, far less of this cumbrous Lex,’ Hiketas affirmed. ‘If it were for this only that we march on Rome, do you think I’d have joined the Free Legions or would sweat now upon my catapults?’
‘Only by Law may the perfect State and citizen be created,’ Kleon affirmed.
‘Only by the will of Jehovah may such be done,’ said the Pharisee Jew. ‘And He makes no dispensation for Gentiles.’
‘Only by perfect freedom may life be perfect again,’ said Hiketas. ‘As once it was in the Golden Age, when there were neither Laws nor swords, Masters nor slaves—’
‘Nor talkers, eunuchs, or geometricians,’ growled Gershom ben Sanballat. ‘When do we march?’
‘In six days’ time,’ said Kleon. ‘If the war-machines of Hiketas are ready by then.’
‘They’ll be ready,’ affirmed Hiketas. ‘And with your Lex and my ballistics – who shall resist us?’
He went smiling away with the woman who loved him, his sister and mistress; and even Kleon, cold and indifferent in such matters, believed their love evil, though there were no Gods, no Laws but those men made themselves. Gershom ben Sanballat looked on the thing with the aversion of one who had looked overmuch on Gentile abominations to be vexed from aversion to hate. To Castus it was a matter of indifference – he hungered for a love that was still denied him, that of the Strategos himself. To Gannicus it was a matter of staring amaze and jesting filth.
Spartacus slept that last night in Umbria with a soundness of sleep he had little known for months. It was a fresh spring night, blowing from the hills the smell of the wakened earth. Ialo slept by the door of his room, and near dawn stirred at a sound. The Sicel maid Mella had entered the room and crept to where the Strategos lay. Ialo got softly to his feet and drew his gladius and came behind the girl. So he waited for her to raise her arm to stab.
But she made no effort to strike, and when the Thracian saw the look on her face he lowered the gladius, staring at her puzzled. Then he slipped back and made pretence to sleep again; and Mella went out and the dawn came in, and Spartacus awoke.
They brought him warmed wine and he sat and drank it in the chill of the morning. Then abruptly, and all around, the air was rent with the hoarse blowings of the bucinators, for the march was placed early in the dawn. The Bithynians were first to muster, the heroes of La Fata Pass, and march out southwards with Gershom of Kadesh at their head. Spartacus mounted on his great white stallion sat by the gate with Kleon and watched them march. In the baggage section of Gershom’s legion went a litter with Judith and the child born on the night of the battle of Mutina. The Strategos smiled at the Jew as he saluted.
‘We’ll find this child a palace to slee
p in at Rome.’
Gershom scowled. ‘It were better if we find a cow unquartered on the march. The mother’s milk has failed.’
Then the long Bithynian lines, the eastern and southern slaves, the Negro vulgares of the quarries had found great bales of red-dyed cotton and marched with their bodies swathed in the uncut web, their sword-hilts protruding from the folds, their thin-legged march raising a cloud of dust. So they went by, and then came the Gauls under Castus, with slung shields and heavy tramp, they marched because march they must. And Spartacus knew well that unless Rome was seized, as seized it must be, these would not long endure his command. Castus rode at their head and saluted, looking wistfully in the face of the Thracian. And Spartacus saluted and made no other sign.
Then came the Germans, with Gannicus also on horseback, a great roan the size of the Strategos’s stallion. He scarcely saluted, Gannicus, and went by, his wild-haired tribesmen tramping behind him. Kleon said, ‘I still doubt if our Sky-Republic can exist secure without the blood-offering of Gannicus.’
Spartacus said, ‘This sounds like a worship alien to that of – I forget the name of your God.’
‘He was no God, but a man, Plato, though men called him divine.’
‘Were there slaves in that city he dreamt?’
Kleon moved uneasily. ‘He lived in other times.’
‘Then his time will never be ours. For this is our proclamation as we march on Rome: that we come to free all slaves whatsoever, that in the new state we’ll make even the Masters will not be enslaved. We march with your Lex Servorum, but we do not march with your Plato.’
[ii]
On the borders of Sabani and Picenum they halted one night under the fringes of a great forest, a gnarled growth of trees from ancient times. Here the Gaulish velites of the Free Legions lay down to sleep, the main slave army ten stadia to the north. All that day, a great snake with crested head, that head the shining spears of the Bithynians, the army had wound south in the dust-wake of the velites. Shepherds fled from their horrea and watched it from afar, or, with the news that all slaves would henceforth be free, flocked to join it at its halting-places.
Brennus and his brother did not sleep that night, speaking of Gaul for long together, in a strange unease one with the other. Brennus said, ‘I would that we hadn’t turned back. There’s an aurochs follows me in dream at night, down through this ill road we take to the south. What can we do against the great City of the Masters?’
His brother grunted; but he also was sleepless. Presently they both rose and put on their abollae, and went through the lines of the sleeping velites and stood in the starlight at the edge of the forest, looking south.
As they did so, suddenly the sky rained fire. The long white arc of the heavens, a pallor, an immensity of stillness, was broken as though the stars were torn from their settings about the belt of Hercules. The two Gauls caught breath with fear.
The northern horizon flashed and winked. Then a great star fell and flamed over the forest, southwards, shedding a wan light on the countryside, rousing the velites so that they stared and covered their faces, those with Gods; and cursed, those without; and turned to sleep, those weary of both Gods and the godless. Brennus said, ‘I think that’s an ill thing to have seen. I’d have done better to go through the mountains alone than have looked on that, though all Rome awaits our looting.’ And he brushed the sweat from his brow with his withered left arm.
The camp of Spartacus had seen the great star as well. All Northern and Central Italy had seen it. Kleon sat with his Greek scribes in his tent, he was reading for their copying the military clauses of the Lex Servorum when that light winked and flashed across the night-stilled sky. He got up and watched it, cold and secure, unmoved by the threat of the sky. For the stars were bodies of fire circling about the earth at a little distance, and had no bearing on the fates of men. The literati with him muttered and swore, till Kleon turned his cold eyes upon them, and each sought his stylus and tablet.
It roused Gershom ben Sanballat in the bed of his Judith, he muttered in her arms and she soothed him, but terrified; and they watched together that bright thing torn from the sky and flung south over the Gentile lands, some sport of the alien Gentile Gods that had meaning for Gentiles – what meaning? And Judith whispered, ‘Sleep, sleep,’ with her breasts warm under the head of Gershom of Kadesh.
Spartacus saw it, with Ialo, on the limits of the camp, making the round of the sentinels. Ialo muttered in fear and the Thracian stared long after that gleam winked bluely to nothingness, south. And a sudden spasm of fear went by, leaving his iron resolution unshaken. ‘Our star leads us south to Rome,’ he said, and Ialo was comforted at that.
The long lines of the slave army stirred. Men rose on their elbows to stare, the Bithynian women moaned, here and there the sentries forgot their posts and forgathered and whispered. But the legions were too weary to pay great heed, excepting the southern men, who knew the Gods unsleeping and fearful, and the Gauls, thinking of the sad Gods of the woods and the ancient towers, the Gods of the verdant spring of Gaul who trailed the plague and death in their mists, death that was no resting at all, but only the beginning of lives without end – in the flow of water or a bright bird’s flight, unceasing, enduring, undying in the wheel of macabre Law.
Gannicus slept.
Castus turned on his bed and thought of Spartacus, and bit upon his wrists.
And the star fell and fell unendingly, lighting up the countryside till it stood above Rome, and the people came out, and the beggars stirred in the tenements, sleeping their hundreds in one room; and on Right Bank a wail arose from the pens of the slaves, recaptured, awaiting the block on the morrow. And they cried, ‘It’s the Gladiator coming!’
The lions in the Luda saw the star and howled.
The Senate sat in session over the news of Mutina, as yet unknown in the Forum. But the senators knew that the Thracian had turned, had armed and re-armoured in Umbria, and was marching south with Rome his objective. Could either consul do more than snap at him as a cur at a lion? What beast was there to set against the lion?
It was then they heard the howling of the lions in the Luda, and a lictor cried the news, and they crowded, old and young, heated with debate, to watch from a terrace that waning splendour above the City.
It seemed to wheel and wait, lighting the Seven Hills on which the Gladiator marched. Then it fell and flamed and vanished in the Tyrrhenian Sea.
The augurs searched till morning in the vitals of a slain sheep for meaning of that star. And at last, in the temple of Capitoline Jupiter, they slew a slave and looked in his entrails. And the augurs’ words were made known to the Senate, listening coldly, for they were the words of its own secret instructions returned to it.
‘The falling star is the Gladiator’s star. His march on the City will fail.’
That night Marcus Licinius Crassus Dives was chosen provincial praetor, to supersede both the consuls in the field, a small man, renowned for his greed and ability, wealthy with plunder from Sulla’s time, hungering for recognition of his military prowess. But even he, appalled with thought of facing the slave hosts with the demoralized legions, advised the Senate to summon Pompeius from Iberia.
Meantime, he set to fortifying Rome.
In Sicily the pirates saw the star as the galleys wheeled out towards dawn to sail raiding down the Messine straits. It fell and hissed in the sea as the morning came, flinging the water high in a great spout.
And relentlessly, southwards, brushing defenders from their path, the slave legions marched on Rome.
[iii]
They saw it at noon, from the Campagna, from the Sabine Hills, shining below them, Mons Cispius crowned with trees and the long-roofed Doric temples, Mons Oppius shelving tenement-laiden into the sunrise’s place, Mons Palatinus splendid with villas, fading into a sun-haze mist where the land fell down by Boarium to the Pons Aemilius. Aventine lay south, and north, high-crowned, the Capitoline Hill. Rome!
/> It was the first time most of the slave-host had seen it, the legendary City of the Masters. And at sight of its shining walls, and the wind that brought its reek a fierce drift across the Campagna, a strange sound rose from the legions of slaves – a growl like a wakened beast that ebbed and rolled into the rear ranks, where the Thracian had brought up the rearguard since dawn, fighting off the detachments of light cavalry which Crassus had sent to vex their march. Kleon stared at the City with cold, clear eyes if with trembling lips, his thoughts sharp on weak points for assailing, noting the cloud of cavalry gathered on the Clovus Suburanus and the hillsides deep-trenched by the guarding Tenth legion. In the air a lark sang, shrilly, sweetly, so that the Germans raised their matted heads to look, and even Gannicus forgot to look at the City, staring instead into the sun in an effort to see the little bird.
But that only a moment. From left to right flank, where Castus and Gershom had halted by the swaying machines of Hiketas, all stared at the City below them. Rome!
Now a cloud had been over the City but that went by, the sunlight came flowing by the Circus Flaminius in long waves catching the sheen of the Tiber and from there upflinging pellets of light, dazzling, into the eyes of the slaves. So for a time they were blinded, and covered their eyes. In its sunlight, terrible, they saw it afresh, the home of the Masters; and this time it was no cry of anger that rose from the slaves, but a sound like a vast, sighing moan.
Spartacus, helmeted, cloaked, mounted on his great white stallion, sat and stared at the City of the Masters, with a coolness at first like Kleon’s: but it changed with that flare of sunlight. The home of the Masters, the richest city on earth, where the Gods arose by night and closed the gates and sharpened the swords of war! Rome that had marched to uttermost Thrace, that drew in a long black stream from the shores of the furthest seas the fettered conquered to slavery, that knew no mercy, no peace, no truth, that loved pain and ruth as other men life, a squatting Beast in the glare of the sun. And the Thracian looked round at his halted host, at the men near by him, by his horse’s bridle, at their poor, starved, frightened, lustful faces, their hanging mouths and their wound-scarred limbs – and back again at the City – and back again at his legions: and something like an icy hand seized on his heart. These to conquer the City that was unconquered?
Spartacus Page 18
