‘We’ll march on Rome.’
At that Castus flushed and sprang to his feet. His voice rose in a sudden shrill scream which startled the sentries and the surrounding slaves, so that they gathered at a distance to watch and hear.
‘Rex Servorum! We know the plan of yourself and your eunuch bed-man, Spartacus. But we’ll be no part to it. You plan to march on Rome and betray us to the Masters, in return for their gold and a generalship in their legions. We’ll be no part to it. These are the Free Legions, not your legions, Spartacus. We march north, you’ll never see us again. You hear? Never again!’
A foam had gathered on the lips of the Gaul, and Kleon saw his eyes roll like those in the head of a mad dog. The council sat astounded. Then Gannicus stood up beside Castus.
‘So I say also. Attack Rome if you will. You do not do it with our legions.’
But Gershom ben Sanballat was now on his feet. ‘Your legions, you slave dogs? Where would either you or your legions be but for the Strategos? Lead your legions from Italy? You’ll lead them to the cross!’
Ialo had watched and heard. Now he went out secretly and summoned the Gladiator guard. They came running and surrounded the tent; and fear came in the heart of Gannicus at sight of them. He licked his lips, grown suddenly dry, bull-like in courage though he was.
Spartacus said again: ‘We march on Rome. There’s no other course open to the Free Legions if they’d survive at all. And the Gauls and Teutones march with us – with or without the tribunes who now lead them.’
He had not risen. He did not look up. But the blood quite went from Gannicus’s face, and even Kleon, cold and imperturbable, felt a sting of fear at that icy note in the voice of the Gladiator. None spoke. Then Gannicus looked round the Gladiator guard and licked his lips again.
‘You’re the Strategos. So be it, Spartacus.’
The Thracian looked at Castus. ‘And you?’
Castus stared back at him. Had he never understood, could he never understand? And perhaps in that moment, if but for a moment, the Thracian did. Some look came in his eyes that Castus read: and at that the foam gathered afresh on his lips. But he licked them clean. He said in a whisper, ‘You are the leader.’
‘We march to-morrow,’ Spartacus said. ‘Crassus is already on a level with us – our velites have sighted him on the right. But he camps to-night and knows nothing of our plan. Before he strikes camp tomorrow we’ll be on the road to Rome.’
[ii]
But a great weariness took the heart of the Gladiator that night. All the plans were made for the march on Rome, and tomorrow drew near – to-morrow, to-morrows without end. What though they marched on Rome and took it, and slew the Beast of the Tiber and ended the rule of the Masters for ever? What peace or ease or delight might he ever find in the midst of this bickering of slaves – be they slaves in fact or but slaves by memory? And he remembered suddenly, so seldom he remembered them now, they had grown thin shadows that came at nightfall, Elpinice and Crixus, his dead loves killed by the Masters – they with whom he had once found peace and understanding in long silences, they who could sit at meat with him and need no words to tell their love or their fear. And Spartacus groaned aloud, terrible in the darkness for the Thracian Ialo to hear.
He went and brought the Strategos wine, but Spartacus told him to go, such agony in his voice as Ialo had never heard. The little maid Mella came whispering to his side.
‘The Strategos is sick,’ he told her. ‘If Gannicus has had him poisoned –’
But the little Sicel maid saw more clearly than that, dimly though she knew the mind of her master. She said, ‘I’ll go to him,’ and so did, and knelt beside him. And Spartacus stirred in the darkness at her touch, and put out his hand on her shoulder, and hid his face, and groaned again. And to Ialo that was still more terrible as the hours went by and the night waned, to look in ever and again and see the Strategos still gripping the shoulders of the maid. She knelt unmoving, her fair hair falling on the dark head of the Strategos, neither sleeping with the sleeping world out-by, Ialo looked at them with weary eyes as the earth wheeled to morning. In the early hours there rose the sound of a great tramping in the eastern camps, but no horns blew, and the Thracian guard thought it but the return or despatch of velites. Then Mella came from the tent.
‘He’s sleeping now.’
So the Thracian saw that he did, and they covered him with a cloth and left him; and Mella lay down and slept also; and the noise of men stirring in the eastern camp died away.
Kleon heard it, in his tent by the southern entrance. Neither had he slept, all night rolling and unrolling the scrolls of that ponderous Lex Servorum he had drawn up long before in Picenum, when they turned back from the borders of Cisalpine Gaul to conquer Rome. He had taken the scroll from a chest, and he saw it already faded, the edges of it crinkled in little folds from its journeyings to and fro in the baggage of the Free Legions. And he read through the night and dreamed over its clauses, and dozed a little. And when the wind of the false dawn came stirring the air he stirred from sleep, and smiled wryly at the thought that his Lex should have sent him to sleep. He looked out from his tent and watched the breaking of the night; and heard, as did Ialo, that commotion in the east, and wondered that a body of velites of such number should leave at such hour. Then he lay down and slept again.
Gershom of Kadesh had heard the noise, awakened from sleep by the side of Judith. His was nearer the eastern camp than the tent of the Strategos or of Ialo. He rose and went to the entrance and looked out. But there was no shouting, an ordered tramp, and no attack on the camp. Also, a ground mist had come down and patched the place of the encampment so that he could see but little. He smelled at the air, at the smell of the dawn in it; and went back to the side of Judith, her warmth grateful, he put a hand over her heart and she turned to him in sleep; and he remembered the dead child of her womb and turned from her roughly, gruffly. Rome and tomorrow—
And the Thracians heard it, lying in their shelters, line on line around the tent of Spartacus, dreaming of the pits, the ergastula, some of Thrace and Greece, some of Styria, where the winds played now with the rising scents of spring and the huntsmen trapped the wild boar in greening thickets; and some, Scythians, dreamed of their plains, bright with tamarisks, and the neighing of wild horses at night; and some of women, or lust or wine, tears and fears that their lives had known. In a multitudinous stirring of dreams the Thracians heard the noise in the east, a steady trampling on the edge of dawn.
Titul the Iberian heard it. He lay with a Greek slavewoman who had been a bedwoman in Thurii, tall and white and comely. In her arms, her passionate abandon, he found a form of sacrifice to his haunting, shadowing God. And she would rise from his bed weary and bruised, so used that the day would shame her face at memory; yet still she would return to him, with a craving lust for that dark lust of life the Iberian knew. And, her white limbs in his grasp, a shuddering ecstasy would seize the lost tribesman.
Now he moved and listened, head alert, and freed himself from the woman’s arms, and stole like a cat from the shelter of boughs and sods whereunder they slept together. Velites moving at this hour?
The mist was passing. So was the sound of the marching feet. But Titul ran swiftly through the camp till he came to the Eastern Gate, running by the parapet verge of the slave entrenchments. He found the gate deserted, left over-night for the Gauls to guard; and he stopped and peered about him, his gladius in his hand. The light grew. The mists drew off. With their passing a strange sight was given to his eyes.
The Gauls and Teutones had lain the night in the north-east sectors of the camp. In the evening they had flung up little turfhouses, in the fashion of these northern folk, in little circles about each centurion, singing, and braiding their hair as the night came down, the Gaulish women white-breasted, half-nude in the flow of gold and flame from the lights of the fires, the naked children about their feet, a scene repeated a thousand times. Now—
Now their
camp stretched deserted under the early sun and the wheeling cry of the scavenger birds. But out to the northeast wound a track that vanished unpeopled over the horizon.
Castus and Gannicus had withdrawn their legions from the slave-army.
[iii]
No cavalry went with them, yet their march was unhindered by such bands of roving scouts as lately had vexed the flanks of the slave-army. They found all the country strangely deserted both that day and the next. Halting the first night, they flung up entrenchment against – not the Masters – but Spartacus and the slave legions that yet remained with him. Neither Castus nor Gannicus doubted but that he would pursue: not to attack, but to attempt winning over their forces.
At first, the morning they marched in secret from the camp, they had given out that they marched under the orders of Spartacus, they were to seize and hold a town in Picenum for him. But now they let it be known they were marching far to the north, marching from Italy, beyond the Mountains, seeking safety from the Gladiator and his legions, who had planned to betray them to the Masters in return for their own immunity.
Hearing this news, the Gauls held a council, the Germans of Gannicus withdrawing apart while Castus told his tale. Then a Gaul stood up, and they saw it was the brother of Brennus, the scarred slave whose ferocity towards the Masters had exceeded all bounds that even his fellows knew. Now he said bluntly: ‘Of this quarrel with the Gladiator we’re told only now. Why not before? If we’d desired to break away we’d have done it under a different leader from you, Castus. Perhaps under Crixus: he who trusted the Gladiator. And who may now believe that Spartacus would betray us?’
But another stood up to address them, the chief tribune of Castus. And he told how soon they would gain the great White Mountains and the world beyond them, honour and security in the stockaded cities and the hunters’ cotes, in Gaul with its kindly sun and fragrant rains, and the sleeping seas where never again the Masters would dare to sail. And the Gauls listened, and, as ever with them, were moved to tears with the beauty of words in the mouth of a poet: and they shouted that the matter be voted upon, in the fashion which the Greek Kleon had taught them.
And each Gaul took a little stone and flung it into one of two piles – one for return to Spartacus’s command, one for marching to Gaul with Castus as leader. And in a little while a murmur of laughter rose as they saw the size of the heaps of stones. For barely a hundred had flung their stones on the pile that voted return to Spartacus’s army.
But the brother of Brennus flung his spear into the centre of the great pile of stones so that the shaft stood upright, quivering. And he cried a phrase that troubled their minds, though they thought it the voice of a madman.
‘Vae victoribus!’
Yet he and the others who had voted for Spartacus marched with their fellows when the march was resumed, in the rear of the horse of their tribune, Castus, riding with bowed shoulders into the north.
Near evening of the second day they came through a low pass in low hills, and far below saw the glister of a wide sheet of water, bird-haunted, its shores fringed with villages. This was Lake Lucania, and the joint legions marched down on it, land hitherto untouched in the sway and flow of the slave wars across the Peninsula. They marched up the near side of the Lake, firing the villages, looting the granaries, and killing such of the Masters as had not fled at their first glimpse of the ragged slave standards, the hammered wild boar of Gannicus’s legion, the nodding Mother-Goddess of the Gauls. With the coming of night the slaves camped in the ruin of a little village. Great stores of wine had been found, and from these the Gauls and Teutones feasted, their fires wakeful over a great stretch of the countryside.
Castus, whose temperance had once been a subject for jest in his legion, sat and drank with Gannicus, his eyes red-rimmed with hate as he told of the shames and slights he had endured at the hands of the Thracian. And Gannicus remembered those things he himself had endured. And they cursed the Gladiator and his host till the curses slobbered foolishly on their lips. Around them rose the sound of merriment under a gibbous moon as the night went on. Then, presently, the noise and the watch-fires began to die, except where the brother of Brennus and his century of men kept the far gate of the village.
The Gaul did not sleep, staring out from the burned gateway over the stretch of water where the night-birds cried, where long grasses rustled and moved in the night-winds of spring; and all the earth sent forth a dry, growing smell that caught at his throat, so that he remembered himself young, a boy, with no tormented men with gouting wounds in his memory, haunting him: but only the woods and the millet patches of home, and play in the sun, and the grimed, laughing face of Brennus, whom he had tended and fought and loved, and the light dying from the forests where the aurochsen lowed. And in that chill hour on the morning’s edge the brother of Brennus wept, sternly; and when he raised his head from weeping listened, and called his fellows to listen.
It was the thunder of many feet at the legionaries’ trotting pace. Then the brother of Brennus saw by the mere of the Lake the glint of helmets, for the morning was near.
The army of Crassus was assailing the camp.
[iv]
There were nearly eighteen thousand men in the Gaulish and Teutone legions of the slave army. At first the shouting and the thrusting blades dazed the slaves new-wakened from sleep, in a light still dim by the shadowed lake. But they had lived too long their lives in the slave revolt to sleep apart from their arms, or not by this time to have learned the rallying-cries of their tribunes. So in this place and that a commander cried and his men came about him: and they faced a ring of spears and long swords to the gladius charge of the Romans. But Gannicus lay as one dead, they had to dash water many times in his face before he awoke: and then he muttered and raved so that the slave tribunes knew there was little help in him. They ran, each for their sector commands, now wilting under the full fury of the Roman charge.
Crassus himself, as the day broke, watched the reel and sway of the battle by the lake. He sat his horse on a little eminence, watching with bright, avaricious eyes. His velites had brought him on the second day news of the departure of the Gaul and Teutone legions from the slave army; and at first, thinking them detached by Spartacus, he had made no move against them. Then a straying Gaul was captured by the velites and brought to Crassus and put to the question, and the provincial praetor learned that the strategoi Gannicus and Castus had quarrelled with the Thracian, and planned to march through Italy and escape to their own lands.
Crassus saw these seceding slaves were in his hands. Yet he followed them cautiously, unsure of the quality of either Gannicus or Castus. And there was still the Gladiator to deal with, and in greater force. What if, as the Gaul slave had babbled through his breaking bones, the Slave himself should march on Rome while Crassus hunted the lesser vermin?
But it was a necessary risk, and Crassus took it, watching with cold, narrow eyes the burning of the villages by Lake Lucania. Now he sat and watched the roused slaves twice fling back his attack in a pelting wave of routed men.
Twice. But now Crassus raised his eyes and saw a low cloud of dust to the northwards that told him the Fourteenth and Seventh legions had encircled the Lake and were marching down to assail the slave camp from a fresh angle. The slaves also saw that dust-cloud and guessed its cause. Their tribunes – a barber, a farm-slave, a circus-sweeper they had once been – held a hasty council. Their decision was swift. They must strike camp and fight out in cuneus formation.
So, twice, as twice the Roman legions had assaulted their entrenchments, they attempted to do. But already a thousand or more of the slaves were dead. And some cried for Gannicus, till the rumour spread that he was dead; and men broke from the arrow-headed cuneus march, and faltered at sight of the Roman spears. Then Crassus gave the signal for his cavalry to charge the slave camp.
Barely a third of it reissued from the tangle of the slave entrenchments. But the charge had done its work. The slave base was des
troyed, and, like a wounded beast, the cuneus attempted to fight its way along the shore of the lake. By this time Castus had taken command of his legion, and was cool and quick, keeping the straying Gauls at the cuneus spearhead encouraged with shout and curse. He believed Gannicus dead, and, himself planless, fought with a fury in which there was little hope.
Behind, the depleted horse of Crassus returned again to the assault.
And now at length, for the bitterness of three defeats, the Fourteenth legion reaped its revenge. At the thrust of the slave cuneus the legion deployed in enclosing forfex: then, shields low, the small, dark legionaries closed in at a rapid run, on the shaken ranks of Castus.
The Gauls saw their leader a moment, young and fairheaded and desperate, hewing with his sword. Then a Roman sprang on his stirrup and seized him by the hair, and while Castus swung round and attempted to cut him down the Roman shortened his gladius and plunged it carefully into the neck of the Gaul. Then he withdrew the blade and, pushing aside Castus’ hair, again stabbed him, almost severing his head from his neck. So died Castus. Then the forfex closed on the head of the cuneus, and the Gaul formation fell to pieces.
Yet still they fought, in little wedges here and there. But the Romans drew off after a little, and their slingers and sagittarii shot their arrows and stones upon the slaves, so that the latter fell in great numbers. The women fought now by the side of their men, tall and white-breasted and desperate, a great Gaulish woman armed herself with a pilum and a Roman shield and killed four legionaries before she herself was cut down. Another, the mistress of the brother of Brennus, was young and swift, with her child in her arms, she ran through the turmoil of the battle and escaped through a segment of the Roman forfex. Almost she had reached the shelter of the village wall when a slinger killed her with a singing pellet that shivered her skull.
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